Dear Reader,
My husband and I got rid of old stuff we had pushed to the back of our closets
If you’re like me, you can always postpone sorting through the things you’ve accumulated.
Why?
Because maybe it will be useful one day but, for most of this stuff, someday never comes.
When I was young, I got around decluttering by hiding stuff under my bed and on the bottom of my closet. This tactic worked until my mother needed something that had disappeared into my room and she went looking for it.
Table of Contents | Volume 11, Issue 21
- Marketing Lesson of The Week – Memorial Day Kicks Off The Summer Season
- AI Generates – Coke Wants To Teach The World AI
- Marketing Reads – Summer Reading
- Mark Your Calendar
Living in a miniscule New York City apartment means having space for everything is a constant challenge. So we excel at finding places to hide things we can’t bear to part with.
No matter what you do, stuff accumulates. At the time you saved it, it seemed important but you just have to get rid of it. As one of my neighbors advised, take a photo and then toss it.
It’s not what’s gone that matters but what’s left and how well it’s organized. This provides a sense of order and space to think.
Actionable Marketing Lesson
The principle of organizing and decluttering applies to your marketing, especially as we near the mid-year milestone.
Take the time to examine what you did last year during this period. Did you make any changes to your marketing and promotions? If so, document your process and add comments to remember what you did later.
Given the exponential growth of AI, are your past results still an effective measure for comparison? If not, what will you use in their place?
If you change your analyses, document what you did. Create an audit trail for others.
Also, audit your content marketing, at least your summer content. What needs small improvements? What major pieces of content do you need to create? Given the varied consumption of content, do you need other formats like audio or video?
Recommended Reading
Marketing Lesson of The Week
► Memorial Day Kicks Off The Summer Season
Mother Nature doesn’t seem to have gotten the text that this coming weekend is Memorial Day Weekend. It marks the start of the summer season in the US that lasts through Labor Day.
For many New York City residents, it’s the beginning of the weekly summer migration to weekend homes. Those who prefer the ocean’s sandy beaches head for the Hamptons, Fire Island and the Jersey Shore while those who prefer nature’s country greenery head north of the city to the Hudson Valley, Catskills and Berkshires in Western Massachusetts.
Weekenders stock up on their favorite food and treats. They pack their bags and vehicles as if they’ll never see civilization again. The shops in these vacation towns stock up to meet the needs of the summer crowds because they spend liberally to create memories to keep them warm during the cold winter months.
I love staying in the city during the summer. Beyond the outdoor spaces and beaches around the city, there is a wide variety of free and paid events including music, dance, art, theater and food offered by different festivals and organizations. Each event offers potential marketing sponsorships and other promotional opportunities.
For the summer, the restaurant at the Limelight has tarted up its outdoor area with a fresh coat of turquoise paint to attract diners and selfie snappers.
From a marketing perspective, Casamigos Cantina, a new brand of tequila, has taken advantage of this outdoor area to promote and establish its brand. Around the corner and down the street, the tequila brand is prominently displayed in the nearby liquor store window.
Recommended Reading
► Memorial Day Marketing
This weekend kicks off the summer period filled with marketing opportunities:
- Memorial Day
- Father’s Day
- Fourth of July
- Back-to-School
- Labor Day
Actionable Marketing Tips
Depending on your business and target audience, assess your promotional plans.
Product offering:
- Have your products and services changed since last summer? Does your audience want new products or services? Can you offer related services or items or training that can be created using your existing employees or cost-effectively be outsourced? Examine key metrics to confirm your results.
- What are your competitors doing for summer? Think beyond your direct competitors to include major players like Amazon and Walmart.
Promotional themes:
- Can you use the same promotions, offers and content you did last year? Check how they performed in terms of key analytics before you answer.
- Do the colors, music/sounds and/or wording need to be spruced up? Can you use AI to help speed up your processes?
Pricing:
- What products and services are your customers buying this year? How do these trends differ from last year?
- Are your prospects concerned about inflation and the amount they’re spending? Can you modify your pricing by offering larger or smaller quantities to retain buyers?
- Are there new segments of customers or products you should pay attention to? Does it make sense to modify your offering over the long-term?
- Have your costs increased since last year? Can you find ways to offset them or offer alternative options?
Place:
- How can you adapt your product, service and content offering to meet your customers’ summer plans? For example, some New York City specialty food stores ship to the Hamptons.
- Are there co-marketing opportunities you can tap into?
Recommended Reading
AI Generates
► AI Generates: Coke Wants To Teach The World AI
This spring, Coke became the first major global brand to use AI to develop its advertising. In early March 2023, Coke launched its global “Masterpiece” campaign. Set in a museum gallery where an art class is sketching, the ad creates a fantasy where works of art come alive to help a tired, uninspired student by giving him a bottle of Coke.
Created by Electric Theatre Collective and Blitzworks, the commercial uses live-action images, digital effects and AI to allow one work of art to reach out and grab a bottle of Coke from an iconic Andy Warhol work and to hand it to another work of art. It ties together diverse artwork from different genres, geographies and generations.
“‘Masterpiece’ is not a story in which Coke appears… Coke is the story,” said Pratik Thakar, Global Head of Creative Strategy and Integrated Content for Coca‑Cola.
Actionable AI Marketing Lessons
- Using AI speeds up the creation and production processes for commercials and other branded assets. Coke learned from their “Masterpiece” commercial.
- Work with your legal team or counsel to ensure that you have permission to use existing assets like these well-known pieces of art. For example, Coke worked with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to use Warhol’s image of a Coca Cola bottle.
Recommended Reading
► Coke Provides An AI Platform For Fans And Creatives
Coke created a contest focused on co-creation using AI entitled “Create Real Magic”. It lasted 11 days ending March 31, 2023. Coke gave their global audience use of their custom digital sandbox powered by OpenAI’s GPT and DALL-E, and access to branded elements and advertising assets so they could create and submit their original ads for Coke.
Beyond experimenting with AI’s creative powers, the winners will have their ads showcased on billboards in New York City’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus, an amazing boon to any creative’s portfolio.
To kickstart the crowdsourced contest. Coke selected AI artists, Chris Branch, Ean Hwa Huag, Paul Parsons and Emma Sofija, to create 350 pieces of brand-inspired art on their platform.
Despite a slow start as people learned to use the AI tool, Coke received a total of 120,000 creative works from its fans.
See “Create Real Magic”Contest Explainer video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPGDMj1QUBE
Actionable Marketing Tips
- Give your community the tools and incentives they need to create quality user-generated content.
Recommended Reading
► What Does Coke’s AI Contest and Campaign Mean For Your Marketing?
Coke’s AI-generated creative campaign reveals that major brands are starting to examine how to use this new technology. Many major brands allocate budget to test the latest media, technology and cultural changes. By contrast, smaller businesses can’t compete unless their employees monitor what’s happening and can test these trends with limited if any budget.
In the process, the “Create Real Magic” campaign taps into the power of its brand trust, fans and user-generated content. Coke added a new twist to these marketing approaches by providing branded assets and AI tools for participants to generate branded images.
The “Create Real Magic” contest deepens Coke’s relationship with its global audience because they reimagine the brand’s assets in new ways influenced by their cultural and life experiences. As a result, Coke’s customers truly become part of the brand.
Recommended Reading
Actionable Marketing Tips
- Engage your audience to discover how they view your brand. You don’t need a Coke size to talk to a few of your customers. As you do, find out what stories they tell about your brand, products and business.
- Figure out which elements of your marketing and branding strategy to focus on. Like adding audio and video options for content consumption, determine where, when and how your customers want to engage with your brand and products.
Recommended Reading
Marketing Reads
► Summer Reading
When I was in grade school, summer translated to long library lending. This meant that I could take out big, thick books without worrying about whether I could finish them in a month.
At Bertelsmann, summer translated to promoting beach reads, especially mysteries and other easy-to-consume books. For many years, I always carried a mystery book whenever I went to the beach. I particularly liked Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series set in Chicago.
This summer, I decided to take a break from my usual dose of marketing reading. I plan to focus on reading fiction to feel the power of how authors put words together.
Also, I want to examine how different writers structure and move their story forward so I can improve my writing.
Why?
Because writers read all the time.
Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar
► CX Connect– June 13–15, Online via Zoom
CX Connect will feature three days of thought-provoking presentations from the leading experts in customer experience.
► The Conversation Design Conference – July 24th – 25th in London, UK
bringing together the leading thinkers and doers in Conversation Design
Organized by VUX World.
► Marketing AI Conference – July 26 – 28 in Cleveland, OH
Register now with the promo code: RAIMOND100 for $100 off of the purchase price.
► Voice and AI – September 5th to 7th in Washington, DC
► Content Marketing World 2023 – September 26 – 28 in Washington, DC
► MarketingProfs B2B Forum – October 4 – 6 in Boston, MA
► Are you hosting an event that you’d like us to add to the Marketing Calendar? If so, let us know by using our Contact Form with the Subject Line: Event For AMG Newsletter Calendar.
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Heidi
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