The Creativ Brief: Proving Your Value
What’s your value?
Whether you are entry level, a company executive, or client partner, people want to understand the value you bring. It’s the inescapable reality of capitalism.
A new partner or employee has an unknown value. The key to bringing on new employees or partners lies in aligning value to goals.
Are your deliverables or value propositions aligned with costs?
Do your clients/employer properly understand the value provided? Do they value it more or less?
Are your goals specific and measurable so both sides can judge success?
These are the questions I try to answer for our clients. Questions that employees should also seek to prove to their employers in order to advance in the workforce.
Conversions tied to lower funnel retail or digital campaigns make their value easy to understand.
Because awareness and consideration are difficult to tie to the dollar values associated with sales, upper funnel marketing like brand and PR are more difficult to value.
Value could exist, but better that it’s understood.
3 Stories Dominating Media and Tech Headlines
TikTok partners with Google? TikTok and Google are exploring a partnership that would integrate Google search prompts and results into TikTok’s own platform.
Why it matters: Google’s SVP stated that roughly 40% of young people “go to TikTok or Instagram rather than Google when looking for a place for lunch”.
With this integration, Google is seeking to stay relevant to the audience that uses TikTok’s discovery interface, while TikTok will benefit from Google indexing more TikTok content in Google searches.
Microsoft is purchasing Activision Blizzard Microsoft’s 69$ billion purchase of Activision Blizzard is steps away from crossing the finish line after clearing some final regulatory hurdles in the U.K.
Why it matters: In an alteration to the previous deal terms, Microsoft gained some brownie points from the U.K.’s antitrust regulator by granting cloud-streaming rights of current and future Activision Blizzard console and PC games over to Ubisoft. This provision bans Ubisoft from giving exclusive games to Microsoft. No vertical monopoly this time!
SAG-AFTRA authorizes strike against gaming companies. 98.32% of members voted in favor of authorizing a strike against 10 of the nation’s largest video game companies on Wednesday. The new SAG-AFTRA strikes expands the existing one raging against Hollywood studios.
Why it matters: Video game stunt, performance, and voice actors are pushing for higher wages and newly structured rules around the use of AI, similar to the concerns currently roiling traditional studios. Actors are wary of the threat generative AI poses in replicating actor’s voices, mimicking performances and creating artificial voices that could put them out of work.
Client Spotlight - American Advertising Federation LA
The American Advertising Federation (AAF) is a national organization representing 35,000 advertising professionals. Beyond hosting the Addy Awards and curating the Advertising Hall of Fame, they recently opened a Los Angeles chapter with leading local agencies to unify the Los Angeles advertising community.
We were honored to help launch their Los Angeles chapter with their press announcement in Adweek!
Stat of the Week - Digital Ad Spending
Chart by Miles Mahoney
Digital marketing investment is not spread equally.
The retail industry remains the biggest digital spender, investing 27%, more than one in four dollars, of total digital ad spending so far in 2023.
The next biggest consumer digital spenders were CPG, finance, and consumer tech brands.
Entertainment (5.7%), media (5.4%) and travel (2.6%) spent the least, indicating lower demand for these product categories.
One Fun Thing - Marketing Budgets
Cartoon by Marketoonist
The fuzzy nature of marketing value makes it the easiest department to cut.
That leads to companies continuously cutting marketing year over year.
The result is a general denigration of the brand which then negatively affects other aspects of the business.