The Future of Brands Conference 2023
Last month our Head of Client Strategy, Adam Hyslop, attended the Future of Brands conference. Adam reports: -
Future of Brands in London was a day packed with panels, covering all topics in relation to brands and industry leaders, with a focus on key pillars of excellence, courage, disruption and inclusion. Content was all emcompassing with major areas of focus on how to unlock value through multi-mix-modelling, audience & campaign measurement and, of course, substantial attention on how brands can harness data.
Here are some actionable highlights on the major talking points and what the future holds for advertisers.
Data & Technology
Data remains a topic where all brands continue to evolve and there are shared experiences on how the complexity and variety of data can pose challenges. However, data must be harnessed for continuous improvement, including identifying the right kind of data and conducting creative analysis to understand the creative contribution to a campaign's success, improve performance and drive conversions.
The rise of automation, programmatic and the role of AI are now having implications on consumers. This includes algorithms used to create systems that utilise customer historical data to provide helpful insight about customer behaviour. Generative AI can take these learnings and make the customer service process more efficient, timely and produce various types of content including text, audio, code, images and video.
In the future this can be harnessed for OOH; we will be able to include AI-Powered location intelligence, pattern travel analysis to understand the volume and segments of an audience and how best to communicate with them in different environments.
Growth of Retail Media
Global Retail Media - a retailer that has a digital store and the ability to sell ad space to brands - is expected to grow by 10% in 2023, making it the fastest growing media and the key advances around targeting capabilities is fuelling this.
However, the role of OOH as part of a 360 strategy remains strong, as OOH links online to offline. E-commerce is at the fore but real-world retail outlets and retail experiences remain a cornerstone for many brands as consumers want to try before they buy, especially higher priced goods, new products and brands. Advertisers are acknowledging the personalised demand power consumers have.
Brompton Bicycle provided a great success story combining both their online retail media and offline retail store strategy. Retail stores remain a key focus as consumers want to experience the weight and quality of the foldable bike before the buy. Stores boast a very high conversion for those that see the bike and trial in store.
Creativity
Creativity is still key and participants were encouraged by the keynote speaker, Sir John Hegarty, to make brands exciting. Hegarty argued marketers are custodians of people's stories and perhaps too often brands are reactive to cultural and awareness movements, without focussing on their own story and role in the world. Oatley drinks was referenced as a brand that created exciting and original work, taking its milk and creative crusade to the public with quirky and direct messaging on OOH as part of a 360 campaign.
In summary, to create a vision for the future, brands must focus on key areas:
Media measurement and marketing effectiveness are vital, particularly as marketing budgets face cost pressures. OOH can play a key role to reach mass audiences and drive to store for brands where retail stores remain key.
Brands need to be consistently relevant to attract consumers. Data and technology must be at the heart of the process to provide unique insight for a ‘people first’ approach.
As a sector, we should be interesting with our advertising, with big creative ideas. Hegarty argues that, despite the fragmentation of media, ‘the big idea’ remains the best way to market products and services to consumers.
