Nearly two-thirds (63%) of marketers still struggle to deliver to their customers. That’s because just data alone is not enough. Marketers need the right data and insights to understand what’s working and what’s not, and sometimes having too much of the wrong data – especially if it’s disconnected or siloed data – does more harm than good. When predicting customers’ next steps, they need the right insights.  

Siloed Data Leads to Fragmented Customer Experiences

Having the means to collect relevant data and insights should be a priority for marketers.  Martech tools have evolved considerably, but if your data lives across different tools, it is challenging to understand your audiences and map the right customer experience based on their preferences and behaviors. While data can indicate your customer’s affinities, insights will predict their journeys’ next steps so you can offer hyper-personalized experiences based on the changing demands. 

MoEngage’s report, , found that around 40% of the 2,000 North American marketers that were surveyed manage customer engagement operations by enabling marketing, email, social and mobile teams to operate as independent teams. These numbers indicate how various functions work in silos, resulting in scattered data with no focus on insights and often leading to disjointed customer experiences.

How do you manage customer engagement resources and operations?

Lack of Real-time Data: A Pressing Challenge for Marketers

For almost 34% of respondents across industries, organizational roles, and sizes, lack of real-time analytics is the biggest customer engagement challenge. This is because marketers depend on campaign-based metrics that offer short-term campaign performance without understanding which have engaged and which haven’t. Hence, marketers miss the mark on getting customer insights that predict customers’ probability to purchase, re-purchase or churn and quickly pivot.

Using the Right Martech Stack

Marketers leverage a host of Martech solutions to further their customer engagement goals today. For 23.1% of marketers in North America, a customer relationship management platform remains the most preferred solution. Almost 60% of marketers use a mix of customer data platforms, marketing automation platforms, and customer analytics platforms.

It is to be noted that while the other platforms help gain a fair understanding of customers, multichannel customer engagement platforms (CEPs) provide a microscopic, insights-driven, and holistic view. They allow you to build a unified customer profile and drive a personalized, for your customers. 

The Need for Insights-led Engagement

The above insights indicate how marketers fixate on a campaign-led approach. The engagement campaigns are based on a hunch of what customers are looking for, which may not always show the full picture. On the other hand, an insights-led engagement approach focuses on your customers first. It offers a more relevant experience for your customers by considering their behavior, buying patterns, preferred channel, time, and communication frequency to render real-time actionable insights that you can build off of as a marketer. Using a multichannel CEP, marketers can analyze data at scale across channels and predict to create customer-centric campaigns that are individualized preferences at that moment in time.

Your Checklist for Implementing an Insights-led Engagement Approach

Be More Customer-Centric
Prioritize engagement based on each individual’s unique journey to roll out data-driven customer-focused campaigns.

Eliminate Internal Data Siloes
Preserve data integrity and reduce cross-functional discrepancies to improve efficiency and productivity at the organization level.

Unify Data Across Multichannel CEPs
Integrate your Martech stack for a holistic view of customers and their journeys with multichannel CEPs.

Hyper-personalize Customer Experiences
Tailor content based on individual customer interests, previous purchases, preferred channels, and communication frequency.

Conclusion

A disconnected customer experience stems from platform capability limitations, siloed data, and depersonalized communication followed by a campaign-centric approach. An insights-led approach would allow marketers to be guided by insights to build an effective customer engagement strategy, putting customers first.

So, what’s stopping you? Start your insights-led customer engagement journey today. Learn how MoEngage can help by contacting us for a . 

���������t MoEngage
is an insights-led customer engagement platform trusted by more than 1,200 global consumer brands such as Ally Financial, McAfee, Flipkart, Domino’s, Nestle, Deutsche Telekom, OYO, and more. MoEngage empowers marketers and product owners with insights into customer behavior and the ability to act on those insights to engage customers across the web, mobile, email, social, and messaging channels. Consumer brands across 35 countries use MoEngage to power digital experiences for over 1 billion customers every month. With offices in ten countries, MoEngage is backed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, B Capital, Steadview Capital, Multiples Private Equity, Eight Roads, F-Prime Capital, Matrix Partners, Ventureast, and Helion Ventures.

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In a new Journal of Marketing article, our research team proposes that technological innovations such as digitization, platform markets, and the exponential expansion of the generation and collection of personal data are driving an evolution in consumption along two major dimensions. The first dimension is from a model of legal ownership, where consumers purchase and consume their own private goods, to a model of legal access, in which consumers purchase temporary access rights to goods and services owned and used by others. The second dimension is from consuming solid material goods to liquid experiential goods. The benefits of these consumption changes, from convenience to lower economic cost to greater sustainability to better preference matching, makes legal ownership of many physical private goods undesirable and unnecessary. But their commensurate reduction in psychological ownership—the feeling that a thing is “MINE”—may have profoundly negative consequences for consumers and firms.

Psychological ownership is distinct from legal ownership. It is, in many ways, a valuable asset. It satisfies important consumer motives and has value-enhancing consequences. The feeling that a good is MINE makes us like it more, strengthens attachments to the good, and increases how much we think it is worth. Downstream consequences to firms include increased consumer demand for goods and services offered by the firm, willingness to pay for goods, word of mouth, and loyalty. We argue that preserving psychological ownership in the technology-driven evolution of consumption underway should be a priority for marketers and firm strategy.

We propose that the consumption changes underway can have three effects on psychological ownership—threaten it, cause it to transfer to other targets, and create new opportunities to preserve it. Fractional ownership models and the impermanence and intangibility of access-based experiential goods stunt the development of psychological ownership for streamed, rented, and cloud-based goods. In many cases, this results in a loss of psychological ownership, but sometimes it will transfer to the brands (e.g., Disney, Uber, MyChart) and devices through which goods and services are accessed (e.g., smartphones) or transfer to the community of consumers who use them (e.g., Facebook groups, followers, and forums). The greater choice and new channels for self-expression provided by this evolution of consumption, however, also offer new opportunities for consumers to feel as much psychological ownership for these access-based experiential goods and services they consume as they would for more traditional privately owned material goods.

We organize these consumption changes and their effects on psychological ownership in a framework that is examined across three macro marketing trends: (1) the growth of the sharing economy; (2) the digitization of goods and service; and (3) the expansion of personal data. Exemplary cases explored include ride sharing, the digitization of music, and the expansion of health and wellness data. Each case illustrates why each of these trends is eroding psychological ownership, how it is being transformed, and new opportunities being created for firms to recapture and preserve it—whether in goods and services, intermediary devices like a phone, or at the brand level.

This psychological ownership framework generates future research opportunities and actionable marketing strategies for firms seeking to preserve the value-enhancing consequences of psychological ownership and navigate cases where it is a liability. It highlights many ways in which psychological ownership will continue to be a valuable lens through which to view, understand, forecast, and manage the consumer experience.

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From: Carey Morewedge, Ashwani Monga, Robert Palmatier, Suzanne Shu, and Deborah Small, “,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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There’s a in New York City covered in lost gloves: fingerless biker gloves, work gloves, winter mittens, rubber-tipped, fur-trimmed, leather, suede, knit. It reminds employees walking by that they’re designing products for all the different hands that would occupy these gloves.

is the 29-year-old brand that’s ubiquitous on wedding registries and in Bed, Bath & Beyond. The company is the poster child for universal design, the concept of creating products that are accessible to anyone, regardless of age, size or ability. Oxo’s origin story is steeped in empathy—the founder noticed his wife’s arthritic hands struggling to use a metal vegetable peeler—and the wall of gloves hearkens back to this founding principle. It urges you to have some perspective; put yourself in someone else’s … gloves.

Empathy has given the Oxo brand its edge, and there’s reason to believe that many marketers could benefit from stopping to ask, “How would this make the consumer feel?” Research shows that this simple action breeds increased creativity, which is a welcome addition to the relatively cold data collected on consumers.

“A large part of putting the customer at the center is remembering that they are a human being, and not just an end user of your products or services,” says Mary Beech, principal at MRB Brand Consulting and former CMO of Kate Spade. “What you are creating, marketing and ultimately selling is but one piece of your customer’s life as a human on Earth. One very small piece. And if we aren’t keeping in mind their full journey, including their emotional, mental, social and physical needs—as well as the challenges and joys they are facing—we cannot do our jobs well.”

But to truly benefit from empathetic thinking, marketers need to get out of their own way. It’s all too easy to think of yourself as the end user, which breeds bias. The best empathetic practices aren’t all that different from choosing the perfect birthday gift for a loved one: Think less about what you would want and more about how it would make the recipient feel.

Mental Agility

“There just wasn’t a great understanding of how to think about consumers,” says Kelly Herd, a professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut. Of course, the end user should be kept in mind when designing a product, but Herd wanted to determine whether thinking empathetically would produce unique results.

She and Ravi Mehta, a professor of business administration at the University of Illinois, ran five studies to test the effects of empathy on design, resulting in an article . The co-authors found that when study subjects were prompted to imagine a user’s feelings, they produced more creative and original—but still practical—ideas, compared with when subjects were simply asked to design something for a particular audience. Three of the studies included college undergraduates—Herd says that these participants were mostly business students—and two of the studies used Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing marketplace.

In one of the tests, participants were told that Frito-Lay was running a crowdsourcing campaign for new potato chip flavors for pregnant women. Half of the group was given the basic assignment in an objective way, but the other half was given an empathetic prompt to take a few minutes to imagine how the customer would feel while eating the chips. The latter group’s flavor ideas—sushi, margarita and pickles and ice cream—were deemed more creative than the former’s by a panel of mothers-to-be.

The other studies yielded similar results, suggesting that adopting a feelings-imagination approach, versus an objective-imagination approach, enhances cognitive flexibility in the participants and boosts originality. Herd and Mehta also controlled for whether the effect holds for positive or negative feelings. It does.

While they found that empathy breeds mental agility—sparking creativity and originality—the researchers also discovered that the effects can last.

“It would hold that if you prime people to think about how a child would feel when using a toy you create, and then you are asked to think of some other creative thing, it would transfer,” Herd says. “The reason it works is because thinking about others’ feelings makes you more cognitively flexible, it makes you more mentally agile, and so that mental agility transfers into other things that might happen.”

The studies were similar to work done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, where researchers designed the , which stands for Age Gain Now Empathy System. The suit is worn by product developers, designers, marketers and others to better understand the physical challenges related to aging. The wearer feels the estimated motor, visual clarity, flexibility, dexterity and strength of a person in their mid-70s. The intention is for the wearer to empathize with the struggles of an aging population, and thus design with the goal of easing the stressors.

Although she and Mehta’s study tested the effects of empathy on design, Herd maintains that marketers would see the same benefits. “My co-author and I have talked a lot about whether we wanted to test this with marketing professionals and see how it holds,” she says. “We’ve been very clear in the paper that we think this would hold for marketing professionals. It’s possible it could even help more for people who are experts and tend to be very fixated in their own thinking.”

There’s just one small thing that can get in the way of empathy: marketer bias.

An April 2015 paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research, “,” found that when marketing managers were prompted to think empathetically, they were more likely to say that customers’ preferences were the same as their own—even ignoring the provided market research on the customers.

But it’s not all bad news: The researchers were able to negate the egocentric effect when study participants were simply made aware of their bias.

“The job of a marketer isn’t to say, ‘Hey, what would I want if I were the customer?’ It’s knowing you have a bias,” says Brian Carroll, founder and CEO of Markempa, a consulting and training company for empathy-based marketing.

In the story of his own path to empathic marketing, Carroll likes to reference about collections agency CFS2. Owner Bill Bartmann (now deceased) told CBS he made about 200% more than his competitors by being empathetic: Instead of hiring debt collectors, he hired people with customer care experience. Employees were rewarded for how many free services they provided—even helping to fill out job applications and schedule interviews—with the goal of getting the debtors back on their feet.

In his own work, Carroll has tried to help marketers recognize their bias, employing systems such as empathy-mapping and customer story interviews. “I’m not just interviewing about what appeals to someone, I want to hear the story of their journey,” he says. “When you listen to someone share a story, they don’t [just] share the facts, they’re sharing emotional content and context.”

Marketers do try to capture consumers’ emotions, and sometimes it can work brilliantly—other times, it can backfire. It’s not dissimilar to the way an ad taking an insincere social stance can feel hollow. Belinda Parmar, CEO of The Empathy Business and the founder of The Truth ���������t Tech, calls this phenomenon “empathy-washing.” Parmar argues that empathy needs to start from the inside of an organization before consumers will feel it.

“The marketing cannot just change—the leadership style has to change, the way of working, the language of the business has to become more human,” she says. “Millennials are demanding empathy, as they will sacrifice meaning for money. To keep great talent, a business has to nurture empathy in the way they speak to each other, give each other feedback in an empathic way and have some of those honest conversations.”

A Good Grip on Empathy

It’s easy to forget about Oxo. Its products become part of the household, easy to use and unflashy. They don’t release major ad campaigns and mostly let the products speak for themselves. But the brand hasn’t forgotten about you. In fact, it’s all they think about: How does using this gadget make you feel?

Consider the measuring cup. The classic glass or plastic version requires users to pour in the ingredient, bend down to check the level, add more or remove, bend down, repeat. It’s not a terribly onerous exercise for many people, but designers at Oxo watched this stoop-and-repeat and saw a better way. Enter the , which allows users to check their measurement levels from above.

“You watch someone do something and you’re like, ‘Why did they keep doing that? Why do they have to tilt their arm that way? That looks uncomfortable,’” says Karen Schnelwar, VP of global brand strategy and marketing at Oxo. “Humans have an amazing ability to compensate for difficult situations subconsciously. …When that measuring cup comes into play and you get to retain your posture and your dignity and your composure, everything changes in a way that you never thought you were compensating for before.”

There’s empathy to the product design, and Schnelwar says the marketing team’s job is to communicate this empathy. Often, this simply means writing functional explanations of what the product does.

The company did release a a year ago. The almost two-minute spot features users of varying ages and abilities, and the voiceover says, “Love inspires everything that we do—how we work and what we create.” It covers Oxo’s origin story and design process, but it focuses mostly on its products in use. In fact, most of the company’s videos on YouTube are short, simple clips that highlight how an individual product works. No narration, just a little text and light-hearted music as video shows the product in use.

Schnelwar says that the Oxo marketing team does its job well when it’s able to communicate the craft and empathy of the products, of which there are approximately 2,500. They try to connect the dots across the brand portfolio to show how Oxo provides a consistent experience and what role the products play in users’ everyday lives.

“When you ask about how we get empathy into our communications, part of it is because we’re always communicating about our tools that have empathy baked into the inspiration and the design for the brand in general,” she says. “With all of the user testing and how the product teams observe people doing tasks—sometimes that becomes the inspiration for what we’re going to create next.”

Part of the brand’s empathetic communications strategy is being straightforward. In its product videos and on its packaging, Oxo gets to the point: You don’t have time to read a small novel about a whisk, do you? And in any case, you can physically feel the benefit in your hands. “We try to demonstrate that thoughtfulness without having to say we’re thoughtful,” Schnelwar says. “You want to demonstrate it so that people can internalize it and see how it would affect their everyday positively, rather than have to take up a layer of messaging by talking about how thoughtful we are, about how much better everyone’s life would be. We’d rather demonstrate it one campaign at a time, one piece of communication at a time. Let people discover it and fall in love with us on their own terms.”

But the reliance on letting the products tell the empathetic brand story presents a bit of a challenge for Oxo: You can’t touch its products on the web. Rather than be yet another thumbnail lost in a forest of products on Amazon, the brand took a step back and used its guiding brand principles to reach customers. It chose to name its products in a clear and concise manner, sometimes with a little wink. For example, Oxo’s : The name spells out exactly what it is, and that it’s better—with the added splash of wordplay.

Companies can’t maintain their brand font on Amazon’s search results pages, but Oxo saw an opportunity to provide some short, descriptive text on the thumbnails within product pages. “If you scroll down on Amazon—they call them A-plus pages where you can communicate with photography and with messages—we try to make those kind of an oasis of calm in a sea of e-commerce chaos,” Schnelwar says. If the products are intended to make every day better, why not have empathy for the shopping experience as well?

How to Become an Empathetic Marketer

There’s never a bad time to use empathy in the creative process, but Herd recommends using it as a problem-solving tool. For example, thinking empathetically can be an add-on to using AI, introducing a human component to what can otherwise feel like a very mechanic system. In addition to moving the brainstorming team out of fixation, it can also move ideation out of the funnel and into journey-mapping. As a professor, Herd tells her students to think about how a person may feel when they’re going through a particular experience: What would be some of the positives or negatives?

In Herd and Mehta’s study, the participants were asked to imagine how someone may feel when using the products, or to visualize a person interacting with the items. “It’s as simple as saying, ‘Think about how this person would use the product and then think about how this person would feel when using the product,” Herd says. To take from the Journal of Marketing Research, an additional prompt may be to remind the brainstorming team of their biases.

Mary Beech, who spoke about empathetic marketing in a , says that once this shift in mindset happens, it’s hard to look back. She says some of the most empathetic brands don’t simply consider the consumer when they engage with the brand, but the user is seen as a whole person.

“I am a long-distance runner, marathons specifically, and I routinely feel seen and treated with empathy by the brands I associate with in that aspect of my life,” Beech says. “Not all, but most. As a marathon runner, my needs and experiences are specific and shared by other marathon runners. But the best brands and companies acknowledge that most people who run marathons do not do this full time. It is an aspect of their life, not the aspect of their life. I feel the most empathy from brands who treat me as a full human who happens to run marathons.”

Marketing technology can make a consumer seem more like a dataset than an actual human, and Beech recommends that marketers remember that a consumer’s experience with your brand doesn’t happen in a vacuum. “My demographic and socioeconomic data combined with my search and purchase history on the web tells a story,” Beech says. “But it is not my full story. It is not the most compelling story of me, but it gives a direction. Data can and should be a tool in the toolbox of the storyteller, and it should be part of creating a great story. But it still needs the magic of the human touch.”

And to Parmar’s point, a company also can’t separate internal and external empathy. So in addition to practicing empathy in the ideation process, marketers need to practice empathy with their colleagues.

“Often, unempathic behaviors toward customers or unempathic language in marketing is as a result of poor internal culture and low engagement internally,” she says. When Parmar works as an “empathy-in-residence” at companies, she works to be part of the organization’s culture to nudge it to a more empathic state. “The best and fastest way to change the levels of empathy in a company is to change the meetings and make them more empathic to make everyone feel like they belong,” she says.

But like any feel-good practice (and plenty of marketers have cautioned that empathy can be more of a buzzword than a real strategy), measuring for whether it’s working can be tricky. Parmar says that the answer isn’t in traditional metrics, but suggests looking at the “empathy quotient,” or what Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma calls “.”

“We need to measure campaigns by how much they motivate and move people emotionally,” Parmar says. “How much a campaign helps people feel that they belong, and how much it helps people build identities.”

If that still feels a bit wishy-washy, Carroll has his own proud figures from taking a more empathetic approach. He trained his team at a previous job to understand people’s deeper motivations when they chose to download a report, rather than using that communication to convince the consumer to talk with a sales representative. After six months of focusing on answering questions, Carroll says that the team had 303% more sales opportunities.

The brands and marketers that engage empathetically with consumers are the unique and creative problem-solvers. Perhaps you never gave much thought to standing with a hot kettle, making your morning cup of coffee—at least until Oxo came up with its . Now you’re grateful for getting those three minutes back in your morning. An empathetic strategy isn’t always necessary—sometimes a customer simply wants to know when they can expect a package—but it can be wielded to overcome tricky brand and communication challenges.

“Empathy isn’t the only answer,” Carroll says. “I view it as a superpower to take what you do in marketing and make it way better because you’re actually orienting to what matters to your customer. … Empathy builds connection, connection can build trust and then trust ultimately is the precursor for what needs to exist for someone to say ‘yes’ or to ultimately buy.”

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Marketers across functions and industries are often charged with delivering events. These help to drive some combination of professional development, reputation, relationships, engagement, leads and revenue. Live events can also provide the forum for a unique customer experience.

According to a , customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020.

How do marketers design events to deliver authentic, relevant, positive and valuable experiences?

The following insights—which I’ve organized into 12 truths and one lie—are garnered from my own career, in which I’ve spent decades serving as organizer, exhibitor and attendee.

1. The Experience Window is Wide

Don’t box yourself into the time frame of the agenda. Expand your experience thinking to include a lead-in and follow-up. How do you seed and fuel a great experience in advance and reinforce it post-event? This creates opportunities for content, logistics and networking. But beware of overpromotion: Use this opportunity to make it easy for your attendees to prepare for, absorb and capitalize on the experience you are creating for them.

2. Everyone Counts

You’re creating the experience for attendees, but you can’t do this without your speakers, sponsors, staff, volunteers and vendors. They’re in the room experiencing the event from their unique and often expert perspectives, which can translate into testimonials, referrals, social media engagement and potential business. Don’t leave out these essential constituents but avoid diluting your message. You can deliver a great support-system experience without sacrificing your primary audience experience.

3. Turnkey is for Turkeys

Sometimes a template can impede continuous improvement and differentiation. People attend events to experience something new. Even if it’s a regular occurrence, your event and audience deserve positive change. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, but remember not to rest on your road-worn laurels.

4. Energy Powers Experiences

When it shines, the program moves. When it doesn’t, crank up the generator. Setting the tone from beginning to end is a must. Dynamic speakers, enthusiastic greeters, engaged staff and a lively environment—including energetic sights and sounds—can turn even a modest part of the program into a feel-good experience. Don’t go overboard, though. “Fake” is easy to spot and becomes a detractor.

5. Small Stuff is Worth Sweating

Mapping out every detail can seem tedious, but it pays off. Some of the greatest moments of truth in a live event are the in-between spaces that often get overlooked in the design—it’s where the most unexpected things go wrong. But beware of losing the forest in the trees; you don’t want to forget to experience your own event.

6. The Best-Laid Plans Change

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to be flexible in the moment. Watch for signs that you need to course-correct and be ready to adapt quickly. Don’t panic; it never helps the experience. Build some give-and-take into your design, be present and be decisive. Often you’re the only one who notices when something is amiss, so don’t make things worse by over-apologizing or explaining.

7. Gamification Plays Well

Knowledgeable, inspirational speakers and practical takeaways are table stakes. No one needs that tip. But delivering with flair is unfortunately still a bit of a unicorn. Sometimes you need something different to deliver a memorable experience. Interactive, competitive gamification can steal home. Make it uncomplicated, fun and relevant.

8. Automation and AI Cut to the Chase

Personalization, convenience and data are increasingly essential components of customer experience. AI-based technologies provide tremendous shortcuts and enhancements to deliver timely, tailored information and resources. But don’t lose the soul and potential of the interaction; enable the technology before it enables you.

9. Networking is Awkward

Small talk seems frivolous, and no one wants to get cornered into a sales pitch. But it’s also one of the main reasons people attend live events, and part of designing a great experience is to provide a forum for people to connect. Be overt; tell them it’s networking. Get creative, draw them in and facilitate. You’ll never get everyone talking, but if you focus on willing participants, they’ll love you for it.

10. You Can’t Fake the Feels

Visceral is memorable. Incorporate shared moments that get people out of their chairs and comfort zones. The best experiences I’ve had involved music, tears, laughter, dancing, inspiration and even puppies. But trying too hard or being too silly can make you lose authenticity or make people uncomfortable. Epic is possible, but not guaranteed.

11. FOMO Sells

We’ve focused on designing and delivering experience through events, but it’s a longer game than that. You’re not just aiming to make people happy in the moment, you want them to rave about it later and attend again. This list of tips—wrapped around your relevant, valuable content—can create FOMO (fear of missing out). When you deliver a truly differentiated experience, people will share it and others will wish they were there.

12. People Love to Give Advice

Seek feedback before, during and especially after the event, and make providing it easy. Don’t just rely on a survey, ask attendees in person. This gives your audience a sense of ownership and ultimately turns your event into a co-creation with your customer. The truth hurts sometimes, and although you can’t please everyone, it always makes you better. Remember that requesting feedback creates an expectation that you’ll use it, so be sure they know you listened.

The Lie: You Control the Event Experience

Experience design is all about caring, not control. If you care how people feel, why they show up, who they meet and what they take away, everybody wins.

Your audience knows that you’re human and that you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to care enough to try. Experience design for events sets the stage for exceptional delivery with real people in real time. Caring is the single most important thing you can do. Prepare to deliver, co-create and be present. In my experience, attendees will feel it.

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Creating meaningful, relevant experiences for users is at the core of any UX designer’s mission. The product being sold must meet the consumer’s needs, but the overall experience should be accessible, efficient and pleasurable, too. But far too often, organizations are losing valuable customers by putting little care or effort into their UX design. Desktop websites can be cumbersome and overwhelming, or mobile apps can be unresponsive or display poorly on devices.

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, users are five times more likely to abandon the task, according to a study by Adobe. And 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience, according to a report from UX School. Information overload, unlabeled links, a lack of calls to action and slow load times are some of the many off-putting elements of bad UX design that keep users away. Marketers should take note by prioritizing performance, seamlessly integrating user data and favoring simplicity in design.

First impressions count; users’ brains are wired to make judgements about visuals within seconds. If you’re not doing enough to instantly grab their attention, they’ve already moved on to a competitor. In fact, 79% of users who don’t find what they’re looking for on one website will move on to others, according to a study from Google, conducted by Sterling Research and SmithGeiger. Poor user experience design can taint your credibility, but good design can generate leads and build brand recognition.

What’s your next move?

Illustration by Roger Schillerstrom

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The dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” films thrash around places we humans regard as generally dinosaur-free: laboratories, city streets, theme parks, portable toilets. The potential horror of coming face-to-face with a velociraptor has carried the franchise from the 1993 original through its latest—2018’s “”—the series’ fifth.

In anticipation of the release of “Fallen Kingdom,” Universal Pictures and Facebook teamed up with digital agency to offer viewers the opportunity to share the screen with their own terrifying prehistoric beast. What resulted was an immersive experience that was promoted when viewers first witnessed the film’s trailer during the 2018 Super Bowl. The resulting campaign—directing users to a Facebook filter that inserted a raptor into photos and video—was nominated for a .

Augmented reality, or AR, is when graphics, images and other digital objects are placed into the world as visible through your mobile phone’s camera. In the case of , users logged into Facebook and enabled access to their camera, then touched the screen where they wanted a raptor to appear. This particular raptor depicted Blue, a menacing character from 2015’s “Jurassic World.” In the AR view, she is seen scanning the room and heard shrieking a deafening cry. Users could adjust her size or move her around their displayed environment.

The most recognizable example of AR’s use is arguably , a mobile game in which players locate hidden Pokemon on a map based on their geographical location, then use their phone’s camera to view and “capture” the creatures.

From day one, The Mill was hit with heavy technical limitations. In order to ensure all dino-fanatics could make use of the AR filter, they had to limit the technology to two megabytes of data—not all users had the luxury of owning the latest phones. This required implementing a few shortcuts.

“We started by developing seamlessly looping motions and movements that express what we wanted to tell, story-wise,” says Pierce Gibson, creative director at The Mill. “Our artists compressed and compiled a look we were all happy with. It all feels very seamless in terms of what you get on screen.”

Pierce says it was imperative that they work with footage from the actual films so that Blue would appear as recognizable as possible. “We wanted to do something very specifically appropriate to the story of the film coming out,” he says. “The dinosaur [we animated] isn’t just some random dinosaur. It’s a specific character with distinct characteristics, and I think fans would recognize whether or not we were hitting the mark in bringing that specific thing to life.”

Once Blue was properly implemented—and wasn’t appearing inside walls or below the floor—Gibson says the team at The Mill began user testing. “The question is, how do people want to experience the encounter with this raptor?” he says. “As we all collectively tested, we realized that it’s really fun when Blue seems docile and friendly, then there’s this ‘gotcha’ moment where she jumps out and screams at you.”

These moments—occurring sporadically once Blue is situated in the frame—contributed to what senior producer Hayley Underwood-Norton dubs, “viral-ability.” On Jurassic World’s official Facebook page, users posted photos of Blue terrorizing the towns where they live or lurking behind unsuspecting family members at home. Videos show users jumping and shouting when Blue roars. “People were putting their pets or kids [in photos] and having fake interactions with Blue. It was really neat to see,” Underwood-Norton says.

The Mill doesn’t have access to many analytics as to the success of the campaign, but it noted that the Facebook filter has been used more than 1 million times to date. Universal was impressed with The Mill’s work and contracted them to create another AR experience tied to the film’s DVD release—the agency constructed cut-outs of Blue for Walmart stores to prop next to their DVD displays. When users scanned these images, the dinosaur leapt to life on their phones.

Take a look at for “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” for a glimpse into how augmented reality can translate into explosive real-world marketing.

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Three new buildings sit nestled against a hillside, centered around a small lagoon and surrounded by plants. One building, the , is considered one of the greenest on Earth, awarded four of the highest green building certifications and producing its own renewable energy on-site. The second, the , is a former public works building, which now prioritizes the health and well-being of its staff and features photovoltaic solar panels on its roof. The third building, the , is a children’s learning facility constructed from non-toxic materials that hints at the green possibilities for modular structures.

They make an impressive trio, as eye-pleasing as they are eco-friendly. They appear not on the California coast, but tucked into the Pittsburgh landscape, emblematic of an ongoing rebranding of a city once described by American author James Parton as “hell with the lid taken off.”

Today the former steel capital of America has become a leader in sustainability. It’s not a surprise to Pittsburghers, though, who kayak its rivers and work in its LEED-certified buildings.

But for those outside of the city, this new image hasn’t always been as obvious. Pittsburgh has been a success story among Rust Belt cities that struggled after the industrial decline of the 1980s, as it now touts its prowess in technology, education and medicine. Yet how can a city rebrand itself as a green metropolis when one of its most beloved icons, the Pittsburgh Steelers, harkens directly to its gritty past? The answer isn’t to launch a massive campaign, but to tell a story that resonates with locals and impresses outsiders.

“There is a sort of common sense of place, which is wonderful,” says Bill Flanagan, a broadcast journalist and chief corporate relations officer at the . “There’s enough collaboration … that we seem to be staying on message and marketing. A big part of that is just delivering a message that resonates.”

Urban branding is an opportunity to convey the city’s image to the world, giving it a competitive advantage regionally and internationally. A found that “without a brand, cities will be less able to shape the powerful image that leads to sustainable urban development.”

Pittsburgh isn’t trying to change its history, but it is trying to help the audience see its sustainable future. The three buildings previously mentioned are part of , an institution that opened in 1893 and has helped bond the city’s past and future. The new, ultra-green facilities sit behind the original building, were designed and built primarily by Pittsburghers and other Pennsylvanians and are worthy of the world’s attention.

Perhaps the most internationally recognized example of Pittsburgh’s new story came in 2017, after President Donald Trump, in reference to pulling out of the Paris Agreement climate pact, said, “.” : “As the mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy and future.”

Yet Pittsburgh’s rebrand—its storytelling strategy—has been more focused on inclusion than retorts. City stakeholders are working to reach beyond the young people lured in by tech jobs and captured by its livability, to include longtime residents who feel pushed out or to outlying suburbanites who rely on jobs in the fossil fuels industry. But Pittsburgh is no stranger to competing forces: While it was once a leader in steel production, the region was also home to conservationist Rachel Carson, author of the landmark environmental science book Silent Spring. There’s room for both stories in its history books.

The city’s enthusiasm to rebrand by telling an inclusive, green story was evident when 10 leaders, representing public and private stakeholders, quickly agreed to participate in an interview with Marketing News. Assembled at Phipps Conservatory, with the trio of internationally recognized green buildings as a backdrop, the group discussed the progress Pittsburgh has made in its sustainability efforts. What was perhaps more telling was that they spent less time hyping what they’ve accomplished and more time mulling over how to meet new challenges.

Attracting Visitors

Ten years ago, Pittsburgh played host to world leaders at the 2009 G-20 Summit—but the location choice baffled some. “They literally laughed at the White House press room,” recalls Flanagan. The White House cited Pittsburgh’s ability to rebound economically from a struggling Rust Belt city and, as Flanagan puts it, the region saw an opportunity to milk its moment in the spotlight.

“We’re going to have thousands of reporters in town—do we just try to spin it and tell this wonderful story about Pittsburgh?” Flanagan says. “We made a conscious decision very early on in the process: We are going to just be completely honest. We’re going to talk about the things we do well and [that] we’re proud of, and we’re going to talk about all the work we have left to do.”

The bet was that being honest would give the city more credibility. Flanagan says they tracked about 7,000 stories written about Pittsburgh after the G-20, most of which were positive and articulated the city’s transformation.

The city tries to be authentic by showing rather than telling. CMO Tom Loftus points to 2005 as one of the first times the rest of the world, or at least the nation, started to take note of Pittsburgh as a green locale. That summer, the city hosted the CITGO Bassmaster Classic, placing its rivers in front of television audiences.

“It really launched Pittsburgh as a green and friendly city and got that image out of people’s minds of the smoky industrial city that it used to be,” Loftus says. “ESPN was showing people fishing on the rivers in Pittsburgh and pulling up big bass. That’s something that you can’t put in a brochure or put in a video and try to promote.”

The city continues to ride a media wave of acknowledgements. In addition to the international focus from the 2009 G-20 Summit and President Trump’s comments, The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Pittsburgh as the in the U.S. in 2018, behind Honolulu, per its criteria of healthcare, culture and environment, education, infrastructure and stability. in 2017 and 2018.

But Pittsburgh has also had to battle less savory rankings, such as receiving all F’s on the .

“We have so many shoulders to stand on and so much to celebrate; at the same time, we’re not there yet,” says Scott Bricker, executive director of BikePGH. “We still have some pretty bad air quality and some things that are wrong. I think the story is more about [how] we’re trying and we’re making the right investments and we’re leaning into this effort to change the story, to make the region more green or the city more green and sustainable. … It’s not, ‘Come here and experience the most green city on Earth.’ We can’t do that because it wouldn’t resonate with people.”

Although there’s room for improvement, the city appeals to sustainability-seeking visitors with its existing buildings and activities. For instance, the became the largest LEED Gold Certified convention center in the world when completed in 2003. It’s now the highest-rated LEED Platinum Certified convention center in the U.S. Or take the , a series of events and activities for the approximately 2,000 interns from 35 states and 25 countries based in the city during the summer. It’s part of an effort led by the Allegheny Conference to convince the interns to stay and make Pittsburgh their home, and many of the activities are designed to showcase the quality of the region, including its outdoor spaces.

“People are taking note of Pittsburgh,” Loftus says. “From a marketing standpoint, we adopted the branding ‘Pittsburgh. Mighty. Beautiful.’ to keep on letting people know that you’ll be surprised by our beauty as soon as you come through the Fort Pitt Tunnels or come across Mount Washington. You’re not going to believe how beautiful it is. And it’s not just us, it’s people that are visiting that are telling us that.”

Bill Campbell, vice president of marketing and communications at Chatham University, says that for a city of Pittsburgh’s size—its metropolitan population of 2.3 million makes it 27th-largest in the U.S.—it has an outsized number of cultural, educational and environmental qualities and amenities at its disposal. His own university is a pioneer in the green educational space with the . Campbell says a visitor coming through the city and immediately encountering facilities like the convention center and Phipps Conservatory is presented with a very green picture of Pittsburgh. “These things illustrate what matters to the city,” he says.

Another piece of marketing collateral that hyped the city to outsiders came from the city’s pitch to become home to Amazon’s second headquarters. The video looked at Pittsburgh’s past and present, and the narrator acknowledged, “You’ve probably heard something about Pittsburgh,” before the scenes of steel mills gave way to images of green spaces and self-driving cars. It was a nod to the better-known titans of the city—steel, the three rivers, Fred Rogers—and a nudge to consider what else it has to offer.

A Leader in Sustainability

As Pittsburgh has worked to rebrand as a sustainable region, it’s sought to position itself as a leader in the field. This includes individuals like Richard Piacentini, president and CEO of Phipps Conservatory, who has led the award-winning green efforts at the center—although he was sure to note that the commendations aren’t the point: “If we think it’s right, we’re going to do it even if it doesn’t get us points.”

Piacentini can rattle off the efficient qualities of the various facilities at Phipps: how natural light is bounced in the offices to reduce the need for artificial lighting; what a challenge it is to locate carpet free of so-called Red List building materials; how all water is captured, treated and reused on-site.

One of Pittsburgh’s more successful rebrands has been as a leader in education, which has also helped the city up its sustainability game. Piacentini says local universities—namely the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University—were included in designing the Center for Sustainable Landscapes. “[A] lot of times, people build green buildings and nobody knows if they work,” Piacentini says. “We offered that building to both universities to say, ‘We’ll let you put sensors all throughout the building and you can use it as a lab for your students.’ They’ve both written, I think, six research papers based on that building.”

University involvement can provide unbiased messaging to the public, removing any presumed spin that could leak to news from the government or other organizations. of city mayors, policy and funding experts suggested that the seal of approval from respected third-party, non-governmental organizations such as universities can boost the credibility of a project, particularly when trust in government and politicians is low.

“The more people you have at the table—organizations, government, foundations—that’s actually what creates the believability and credibility,” Campbell says. “As an external or internal marketer, you want to point to that because it says this is a group effort.”

Mayor Peduto has also worked to be a leader in city-led sustainability efforts. In 2018, he announced the creation of , a strategic plan to address city challenges through initiatives for clean air and water, livable housing and economic opportunity. The plan was developed in conjunction with the , whose member cities make up a global network intended to offer help and educational resources to others. The city also released its in 2018, which includes a goal of 80% greenhouse gas reductions from 2003 levels by 2050. The Natural Resources Defense Council called it a “bold, comprehensive strategy for change.”

The city has been particularly drawn to positioning itself as a leader among cities with a similar size and shared past: mid-sized, post-industrial towns.

“We’ve been intentional about who we play with,” says Grant Ervin, the city’s chief resilience officer. “Just yesterday, we signed an agreement with the city of Aarhus, Denmark. … We create this relationship with people who are challenged with the same things that we are, which is a post-industrial economy.” Ervin rattles off a list of Pittsburgh’s collaborative cities: Glasgow, Scotland; Dortmund, Germany; and Gelsenkirchen, Germany. This network of cities with backgrounds similar to Pittsburgh are working on issues related to climate change, equity, energy and mobility. “We’re more comfortable with St. Louis, Tulsa [Oklahoma] and Cincinnati because they’re dealing with the same size, scale and challenges that we have, so the lessons that we can learn are transferable and scalable,” he says.

Bringing Residents into the Story

In , a web resource on place branding, researcher Dalila Brosto said cities are successful in their branding when their residents find it believable. Brosto, a knowledge and innovation adviser at the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, researched city branding to promote sustainable development, finding that the best outcomes depend on cooperation between the residents and governments.

“We need to make sure that the conversation includes everybody, that there is a pathway for everybody to see themselves as part of the story,” says Joylette Portlock, executive director of .

Part of the story of Pittsburgh’s modern renaissance is that plans for inclusion didn’t always keep pace with change. The result has been some negative press for the region, tripping up its progressive brand story. A City Lab article from April, “,” focused on the Lower Hill District, a region of the city that once saw the construction of a highway and the now-demolished Civic Arena displace about 8,000 people—mostly low-income black renters. New redevelopment plans for the Lower Hill aim to be green and more inclusive, but the affordable housing crisis in the city continues. In recent years, Pittsburgh has seen an influx of tech companies, whose young employees have priced out longtime residents in some neighborhoods.

“We’re still grappling with a lot of issues that we need to overcome to get to a more sustainable place,” Portlock says. “It’s important for people to understand that sustainability—we’re not just talking about eco-friendliness. In order to think about a society that can sustain itself, it’s not enough to just think about how we use natural resources, although that is a very important piece. It’s also about, how do we care for each other and how do we generate economic prosperity for all? The sustainable solutions for Pittsburgh, for this region, are going to come from looking at the intersection of those things and not making the trade-offs that may have led to some of our social and economic issues in the past.”

One way the city has worked to communicate its commitment to all residents—not some—has been through deliberative forums. These public meetings differ from more traditional New England-style town halls and aim to engage differences in the community as positive resources. These forums consist of small group discussions, rather than main speakers with audience respondents. The city has also begun to provide food and childcare at the community forums, as well as language services.

“It has been really important, the work that the city’s done and others to pull out that inequities are still a problem here,” Portlock says. “But that is also part of this story of the transition, that we’re not there yet. Part of where that story is now is a much more intentional approach … to figure out how to make sure the tables are inclusive.”

Many of the city’s green updates are particularly appealing to younger generations looking to ditch their cars in favor of bikes or otherwise reduce their energy footprints. This newer, greener story can feel at odds with the rest of the region, though: Of the 2.3 million people who live in the metro area, only about 300,000 reside in the city itself. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, is made up of 130 municipalities. Getting everyone on board with a new, sustainable vision can be tricky.

“People outside the immediate city or maybe the immediate urban core of Allegheny County, to see themselves in this narrative also is a challenge,” BikePGH’s Bricker says. “They can’t see themselves in this story. They come to the city potentially on weekends or for work and they don’t understand these investments and they have a very visceral, negative reaction to it. We’re challenged with [determining] how to reach these folks who have an outsized effect on the change that we are trying to create here, even though they really don’t live in the city.”

It may not always be that if you build it, they will come. Instead, Pittsburgh has tried to stretch its sustainable practices outward. For example, Chatham’s Eden Hall campus, home of its Falk School of Sustainability, is about a 35-minute drive from its main campus in the city.

“We found that the partners that are there at first were skeptical,” Chatham’s Campbell says. “But as time has gone on, [they] have become big supporters and partners and now we have great relationships with the township. The township has a sustainability officer that they’ve put in place. The good of Pittsburgh going out where it’s applicable in other areas is important, because to just sit there and say it from the city defeats the purpose.”

The Ongoing Story

It’s impossible to talk about the story of Pittsburgh without also mentioning one of its greatest challenges: population loss. The city lost a sizeable chunk of its population, which once stood at 676,000 in 1950, when the Rust Belt lost its manufacturing prowess. Population figures have continued to slide, but recent U.S. Census estimates suggest the number is beginning to stabilize. Somehow, even these losses are viewed as an opportunity by city stakeholders to further Pittsburgh’s story. With fewer people in the region, the residents have taken up the mantle to get things done themselves.

“There are a lot of cities where you can’t see the fruits of your labor,” says Anna Siefken, executive director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. Herself a recent transplant to the city, she’s been impressed with residents’ willingness to roll up their sleeves and involve themselves in the city’s narrative. “In Pittsburgh, you have a very direct connection to something that you can work on. You see a problem and it’s very entrepreneurial, which is a part of the DNA.”

Piacentini agrees: “Pittsburgh is all about innovation. Something that I’ve noticed since I’ve been here is you can’t tell someone in Pittsburgh, ‘You can’t do that.’ They’re going to find a way.”

The industries in the city have changed, and it’s certainly become greener, but the working spirit has continued to be part of the city’s story—one that’s still being told and aims to be inclusive of everyone who helped and continues to build it.

“One of the reasons that we have such a strong sense of place is because the people who live here and are happiest here are invested, are integrated into their communities in a way that you don’t see in a lot of other places,” Portlock says. “That’s a strength. But it makes it harder in some ways to tell the story, because for those who are already integrated it’s obvious—you don’t need to explain it. But for people coming here, that’s a story that we need to get better at telling.”

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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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These were the headlines that brought Iceland into the international consciousness in the spring of 2010. Although the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull was less explosive than other notable eruptions such as Mount St. Helens in 1980, the ash it spewed eight miles into the sky complicated life for more than the 800 Icelanders who evacuated its perimeter. 

Air traffic came to a standstill at the crossroads of Europe and North America for seven days. Media told stories of floods, air pollution, lightning storms and possible climate disruption. Rather than the glossy images of cavernous glaciers, mossy fjords or the Aurora Borealis, would-be tourists saw towers of ash and bursts of lava. Just more than a month out from the tourism season, the island nation’s summer could go one of two ways: The international coverage could either pique the interest of travelers far and wide, or the tourism industry could take a serious hit.

Within a week of the eruption, the country’s tourism organization, , put out a request for proposal. The challenge was twofold: reverse the negative perception surrounding Iceland as a tourist destination for the summer and get people to book vacations immediately. The chosen comrades in arms: London-based global branding agency the  and Iceland’s largest advertising agency, .

“In Iceland, they have a phrase, ‘Keen is the eye of the guest.’ That means you don’t see what you walk past every day. It was a very enlightened move for Iceland to appoint a partner from overseas, but they saw the benefit of a fresh perspective,” says George Bryant, strategy partner at the Brooklyn Brothers.

The perspective that Brooklyn Brothers brought was to embrace nontraditional strategy. “Traditionally, we recognize tourism as some of the poorest marketing,” says Bryant. “It often feels like propaganda: ‘Come here; the sky is always blue.’” Compounded by the fact that Iceland’s budget was small compared to its competitors, such as the U.S. and Scandinavia, Bryant says the marketing plan had to defy conventional thinking.

“We started with a fact,” Bryant says. A survey of tourists revealed that 80% of visitors to Iceland would recommend it as a destination, making it the most recommended of any European destination. Realizing the power of word of mouth, the agency turned its aim on fans of Iceland to spread the island’s message. Why not let those inspired by Iceland share their stories?

“We look at ‘Inspired by Iceland’ as an unfolding story, and each year is a chapter,” Bryant says of the testimonial campaign that galvanized Iceland’s rebranding. Although 2010 marked the first chapter of Iceland’s renewed tourism campaign, the rising action of its story began two years earlier.

Economic Collapse and Marketing Consolidation

Prior to 2008, says Hlynur Guðjónsson, Iceland’s counsel general and trade commissioner for North America, “What we were lacking was some vehicle to give us awareness.” Then, in the span of seven weeks from October 4, 2008, more than 600 articles were written about the island—equivalent to roughly two decades’ worth of content, Guðjónsson estimates. The subject: the international financial crisis. When Iceland’s three largest banks collapsed and its currency, the krona, depreciated by more than 30%, it provided a vehicle, unlikely or not. “After the downturn, suddenly Iceland became a value destination,” Guðjónsson says. 

With multiple marketing offices abroad, however, Iceland’s tourism messaging was mixed among markets, and 2009 saw a 1.6% decrease in foreign visitors—the first drop since 2002—followed by another decrease in 2010, that time 1.1%. The government of Iceland conducted an audit of its international tourism marketing operations in 2008 and deemed them too disjointed. The Trade Council of Iceland, Invest in Iceland and the marketing efforts of the Icelandic Tourist Board were consolidated under one organization, Promote Iceland. More than 100 companies gathered with the government of Iceland and the city of Reykjavik to form a public-private marketing initiative with the unified goals of increasing off-season tourism, getting tourists to travel farther in Iceland and stay longer.

The design target for these goals would be called “the enlightened tourist,” says Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir, director of tourism and creative industries at Promote Iceland. “We identify that person to have education and income above average. It’s a person who will travel independently, likes to book on her own—a person who has an interest in culture, is open to taking a vacation out of season, seeks adventure and is ready to share the stories of the country.”

​Perhaps the most important trait is the last. “According to Google, 92% of tourists use online tools when choosing their next destinations, 62% of whom use a search engine as their primary source of inspiration,” says José Filipe Torres, CEO of nation- and place-branding agency . “The search is the consequence. The cause can be social media, a conversion or something published offline.”

22 Million Testimonials

Iceland’s social push began with a national call for chatter. On June 3, 2010, schools, parliament and shops closed as President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson kicked off “Iceland Hour” with a request for the people of Iceland and its friends abroad to share a story of positivity about the country. The address was broadcast on live TV and live-streamed via the internet. Participants could compose their own stories and share them through their own social channels, or they could submit them through the Inspired by Iceland site and use prepackaged content, such as Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini’s music video for “Jungle Drum,” featuring a montage of people dancing in tourist destinations across the country. Within one week, they answered with 1.5 million stories. 

“It created a buoyancy in Iceland,” Bryant says. At the beginning of the initiative, more than 80% of the hits “Iceland” turned up on Google were negative stories of natural disaster and financial distress. Ten weeks after Iceland Hour, close to 22 million stories of positivity—from riding Icelandic horses to welcoming locals to “magic” landscapes—had been shared via image, video, post and comment on Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube. On the Inspired by Iceland website, visitors could see an interactive map of Iceland with pins dropped around the island geolocating each story. Even celebrities contributed. Submissions from Bjork and Eric Clapton were filmed and circulated through the site and social channels while Yoko Ono endorsed the campaign from her blog and Twitter account.

“The digital country is the new platform that very few countries are looking at with the care, focus and investment they should,” says Torres. “Whatever you find on the first page of a Google search is the ultimate measurement of the first impression someone may have about your country. The country with the best brand—not the biggest budget—and the best positioning wins.” According to Bloom’s digital country index, which measures brand appeal, Iceland ranks 29 out of the top 50 countries in the world for tourism, ahead of the U.K., Switzerland and Argentina, among others.

The summer of 2011 proved the reach of the campaign; the island saw 565,600 foreign tourists, 77,000 more than the previous year and equivalent to a 16.6% increase. “It became the most successful summer in Iceland’s history,” Bryant says. The campaign grew as well, focusing on video aimed at promoting Iceland as a year-round destination. 

Though strong summers were beneficial for the tourism industry, Eyjafjallajökull proved the vulnerability of single-season reliance. “The tourism industry is very sensitive to any issue, like the eruption of 2010,” Pálsdóttir says. “When Promote Iceland took over, we put a lot of effort into increasing awareness of the culture and the people, and that’s why we’ve been getting Icelanders involved to tell the stories.”

Fans of Iceland had proven with their testimonials that they were not just leisure-seekers. “They’re people who love stories and experiences,” Bryant says. “They don’t just want to go to Disneyland and get the mug. They want a story to take home. They want to live it.” Iceland invited these enlightened visitors to tour the country like an islander. They called the campaign “Honorary Icelander.”

Upon deplaning, tourists arriving in the winter of 2011 received an official Icelandic passport and became honorary citizens. They were taken in by more than 1,000 Icelanders, including the president and his wife. They were brought into recording studios for live musical performances. They picked wild mussels with Icelandic families. They relaxed in hot tubs alongside locals. “The president said, ‘Come to my house, and I’ll make you pancakes and we’ll go on a nature walk,’” Bryant says. A British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award-winning documentarian was commissioned to document the most successful winter the tourism industry ever fielded.

Just fewer than 673,000 foreign tourists visited Iceland in 2012, nearly a 19% increase that shattered the previous year’s record-breaking numbers. In 2013, following a marketing campaign to rename Iceland—the winner, out of 10,000 entries, renamed it the island of Aweland for a day—134,000 more foreign tourists traveled to the island than the year before, a 20% increase, making for three straight years of double-digit growth. Contributing to that surge were strong performances in the winter months, starting with a 27% increase in visitors in January 2013, a 43% increase the subsequent February, a still greater 46% increase in March and bookended with a 26% increase in November and a 49% increase in December.

Continuing the trend in 2014, just shy of a million foreigners visited the island, a 23.6% increase from the year before. The winter months again saw the biggest gains with increases between 26% and 40%. At the end of that year, the tourism industry accounted for 28% of foreign exchange earnings, a 9% increase from 2010. With seasonality effectively mitigated, a third pillar of Iceland’s rebranding had yet to be tackled: getting tourists to travel farther.

Enticing the Enlightened Tourist

The supremacy of digital had thus far proven a true guiding light, so 2015’s chapter opened with another web-based campaign. “We set up a human competitor to Google,” Bryant says of the “Ask Guðmundur” series. Seven ambassadors from each of the regions of Iceland—all citizens really named Guðmundur, or the female Guðmunda—were recruited to answer questions from fans such as, “‘Game of Thrones’ is partly shot in Iceland. Any of it shot in the North of Iceland?” and “Are Akureri’s red traffic lights really heart-shaped?” (They are.) And, “Why are there always three sheeps [sic]? I mean, literally: always!” Curious tourists submitted their questions from spring to fall using the hashtag #AskGudmundur on Facebook and Twitter. More than 200 video responses were recorded.

The Guðmundur campaign, much like its predecessors, relied on volunteers, not paid actors. “Citizens are the best ambassadors,” Torres says. “People want to feel the culture and learn.”  

The endearing quirkiness of the campaign has been carried through, setting a new brand aesthetic for “Inspired by Iceland.” Acknowledging that enlightened tourists want to understand customs, respect nature and behave in a culturally conscious manner, and that sustainability is central to Iceland’s brand, the focus has shifted again in 2016 with the launch of “Iceland Academy,” a video series allowing viewers to earn badges for completing different courses about how to visit Iceland responsibly, safely and in a culturally appropriate way. Each “term” has four “classes,” and viewers who complete all the classes can win a “field trip” to Iceland to apply what they’ve learned. The series is led by eight experts, this year referred to as “tutors.”

While the production value has certainly gone up with scripted scenes and a departure from the home-video aesthetic of the Guðmundur campaign, the videos still have an artistic quality á la Wes Anderson with a bouncy harpsichord soundtrack, dynamic text (in hip typefaces) and characters with just enough idiosyncrasy to make them intriguing. “Iceland has an amazing Scandinavian aesthetic,” Bryant says. “It has amazing design cues and taste, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s a wit and a humor and self-deprecation. It’s a very humble country, which is why it’s so welcoming.”

“Iceland Academy” has garnered nearly 3 million views since its launch in February 2016, and more than 7,000 people have completed courses online. Thus far, viewers have been able to earn badges for avoiding hot tub awkwardness, staying safe in Iceland, travelling responsibly in Iceland and understanding winter sports on the island. Soon, they’ll have the opportunity to prove they know how to eat like an Icelander, drive in Iceland, navigate Iceland’s festivals, capture the Northern Lights and travel farther.

In half a decade, Iceland has reinvented itself, bringing its tourism industry from the brink to a new apex every year. The strategy of “Inspired by Iceland” has evolved with the needs of the country, Bryant says, and rather than fighting the attention brought on by early trials and tribulations, it has ridden the wave

of adversity, says Torres. What’s next for the island will likely reflect new goals, new interests brought by Promote Iceland and changes in international tourism. In Torres’ estimation, Iceland has found the sweet spot for destination marketing, a perfect mix of luck and authenticity, putting it right on trend with the market. “Iceland said, ‘This is who we are, and this is what Iceland is all about,’” Torres says. “Consumers want something exotic, different and not massive. Iceland is a different planet. [Tourists] want to live that experience.”

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Steve Jobs seized the moment with iTunes and the 99-cent song. But even downloads have been unable to check the sales decline of music products. Streaming has overtaken the music industry as the engine of growth. Streaming is not another product. It is a business model that uses digital technologies to sell music as a service, meaning access without ownership that is available on-demand and paid for by use or by subscription. The two biggest services are Pandora, a personalized radio service, and Spotify, offering a catalog of music.

Service-based offerings are not new, but technology has made it possible for such offerings to make inroads into categories that have long been exclusively product-centric. Digital disruption does not reward traditional centers of power. It re-channels the flow of industry revenues. Unless incumbent brands give up old ways of operating, new sources of value and growth will elude them because the new flow of revenue will not renew existing streams or automatically redirect new streams to incumbents. Consumers can get the benefits they want in new ways. The old ways aren’t coming back.

As it will in all categories, digital disruption is forcing the music industry to remake itself. There are four critical lessons brands can learn from the digital transformation of the music industry.

1. Look to Experiences for Value and Growth

In music, this is seen in the booming opportunity to build value from live concert experiences. Music festivals have become a worldwide cultural phenomenon, to the point that observers now worry about “.” Clubs, live streaming, awards shows and house concerts are part of this, too. Live music is buoying an interrelated ecosystem of auxiliary revenue streams such as food, transportation, lodging, clothing and other merchandise.

The service-based business model of live concerts offers value and growth that premium music products can no longer command. Historically, music ticket prices have risen faster than inflation. This continues, even as the value of recorded music products is falling. In 2015, the average live music ticket price hit an all-time high. Technological innovation in virtual and augmented reality will add even more value to live experiences.

Brands in all categories can include an experiential layer, even for low-involvement products that are purchased habitually. This could entail things like personal curation or concierges, instruction, insider access, collaboration or technology enhancements. Brands must look at the future differently and think about how to use experiences to build more value.

2. Relationships Win Out Over Branding

This is obvious in music, where the shared experience has always been powerful. But music is not the only thing that people want to share. People rely on social guideposts for everything. Digital disruption brings relationships to the forefront in all categories.

In fact, building closer, stronger relationships with customers is critical for brands that want to compete for experiences. In the world of digital platforms, it’s all about winning the competition for relationships, which is why Amazon has a soup-to-nuts ecosystem of customer engagement. Amazon uses brands to build its own relationship with customers. No brand is safe unless it secures its own relationships.

3. Small Brands Have a Bigger Opportunity in a Marketplace Upended by Digital

The prevailing narrative about digital is that it is winner-take-all. Indeed, this has been borne out many times. Network effects are the reason. They create natural monopolies. The more people in a network, the more value it has to people. So people migrate to the biggest networks, which makes them even bigger and thus even more valuable, which in turn, attracts even more people. Pretty soon, almost everybody is in one network.

But network effects matter only when networks are essential to the value of the brand, which is not the case for most brands. Music demonstrates this because digital disruption has opened up the industry rather than narrowing it down.

More artists, not fewer, can get a share of the business nowadays. In 2000, the top 100 tours commanded almost 90% of annual concert revenues. In 2014, this figure was halved to 44%. Certainly, the biggest artists still command the lion’s share of revenues from music product sales and streaming. But artists are more likely nowadays to see more types of opportunities to build a steady, long-term career, rather than having just one long shot at success.

The transformation of categories by digital has shaken loose a lot of new opportunities for brands and companies willing and able to pursue value and growth in new places.

4. Brands Must Get Outside of the Data

Streaming services and other digital music platforms use algorithms to classify people’s tastes and then predict what people might like to hear. Such algorithms are not unique to music. Recommendation engines, to mention one example, are commonplace.  

One criticism of algorithms is that they lock people into echo chambers of existing tastes, thereby shutting people off from new or different things. In fact, this is exactly what digital delivery and distribution platforms are trying to achieve. To survive, brands need to get outside of the data.

This is the paradox of the digital era. Old-timey analog or non-digital connections have become more, not less, important. Analog is critical to mastering digital. Brands want to drive algorithms, not be driven over by them. The good news is that brands have many options for doing this, some of which are already familiar, like traditional media, sponsorships, partnerships, placements, apps, tie-ins, opinion leaders and personal solicitations. Digital makes these more important, not less, as it ushers in an era of algorithms. Brands must find ways to escape the commoditizing pull of algorithmic modeling.

The music industry is learning as it goes. The marketplace of music as a service is a work in progress, but it is the future. Brands in all categories must rethink their propositions and business models. Music offers some lessons and guidance, but brands must approach the digital future with a willingness to experiment and a commitment to reinvention. As every musician can attest, perfection takes lots of practice. That is perhaps the biggest lesson that music has to teach brands.

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