For International Women's Day, we sat down with a group of women at VI to talk about what it means to be a woman in 2022. These creative, badass marketers shared the challenges they face, the women that inspire them, their favorite things about womanhood, their best advice to young women, and more. 

There’s a simple rule about consistency in advertising design: Each execution should have a similar look so that your campaign becomes recognizable, benefitting from the frequency of each impression with your target audience. Consistency results in familiarity, which leads to trust. We marketers know it and live it. That is, until it comes to the voice of the brand. Then, consistency hardly exists for most of them.

Brand voice is just as crucial to marketing communications as design, yet most people fail to define how their brands are represented in the written or spoken word.

Pause for a moment and listen to what’s going on in your office or home. You recognize the voices without even seeing who’s talking. The same should be true for your brand. Your prospects and customers should be able to get far more than words from how you ‘speak.’

Your brand voice represents your style and attitude.

The personality and tone of your ad copy, social media posts and website copy should become synonymous with your brand.

There is ever-increasing demand these days that marketing produces a provable ROI (return on investment). And rightfully so. Marketing is indeed an investment that should pay off. And since we can better measure the effects of our marketing activities each day, it’s right to expect proof of success from our marketing spend. We provided a simple formula in our blog about how to track marketing results.

The modern marketer believes that marketing is so much more difficult today than ever before. There’s no captive audience watching one of four networks during primetime. There’s no printed circular that bumps your sales each Wednesday. No radio remote- broadcast from your store where people flock to meet the deejay and maybe get a free t-shirt. No e-mail blast that overloads your website. Man, it’s hard… until you start listening to your prospect.

How do you compete in an oversaturated social ad space? In the era of binge-watching and short attentions spans, marketers are challenged with creating content that is to-the-point, adaptive to the platform and personalized. We need to reach audiences with familiar content, reliable content and consumable content.

I wrote my last blog about snackable videos, so I’ll be sticking with the food theme as I take a minute to dive further into consumable content. To make content consumable, we can’t simply dump content on a user and expect the results to be long-lasting. We need to do more than just engage. We need to maintain engagement. So we must create supportive content that is easily accessible and encourages continued relationships. Enter the age-old solution of storytelling.

Never go to the grocery market hungry. If you do, you'll come home with much more than you went for, and with some items that you would never buy. That’s because when you’re hungry, everything sounds good, right? And you’re not finished shopping until you’ve grabbed a few of the impulse items at the checkout stand. It’s too easy to grab the Kit Kat and throw it in your cart.

When we discuss targeting capabilities of various digital platforms, clients often use the term ‘creepy.’ People can be a bit uneasy with the realization that they are being targeted with ads based on their own actions, purchases and self-reported information.

A few months ago, eMarketer reported that U.S. adults now spend an average of 12 hours and seven minutes with media each day. This is a double-edge sword for marketers. We know that people are highly engaged with media, but where do you start in reaching them effectively?

“Snackable” 6-second ads have been popping up in the digital space, as well as traditional media, for the past year. And now, industry leaders are saying 2018 is “go-time” for these short videos. As attention spans dwindle and the need for on-the-go information rises, these bite-size videos are giving the consumer what they seek and enticing them for more.

The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics ratings may be down from the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, but NBC won primetime viewing. Audiences watched, advertisers bought time and NBC offered more ways to watch and experience the games with social media and VR technology. 

You’ve landed a television interview - you should be excited (unless of course it’s 60-minutes knocking on your door).

Assuming your interview is for positive purposes, the presence of a camera still provides a unique dynamic, and there are factors that need to be considered before doing an interview with broadcast media. In preparing for a broadcast interview, here are simple and specific steps you can take to make your television appearance a successful one.

In the early part of my career, healthcare marketing was dominated by hospitals. There was always discussion about whether or not to concentrate on this industry as an advertising agency. Hospitals tended to market in multi-year spurts. Then, there would be a common belief in healthcare that doctors are what drive patients to specific hospitals, so it was useless to advertise. It could be very lucrative to be an expert healthcare marketer, and then the money would disappear. Today, 9.9% of total ad expenditures in the United States are related to healthcare, driven by big pharma.