Advertising Week New York has officially ended but the wealth of insights shared during the four-day event is still accessible and available to watch on-demand until November, 30.

We’ve compiled some of our favorite content from the week below, including sessions on moving from talk to action with inclusive marketing, betting on culture as opposed to ads, maximizing CTV reach and more. Next month, on November 23, the event will continue with a return to global events, starting with the digital-only Latin America Advertising Week.

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Diversity, Equity And Inclusion: Perspectives On Authenticity

Anjelica Ortega Kempis, senior enterprise account executive at GlobalWebIndex led a discussion about data being used as “unique and beautifully diverse as the people it represents” and what that means for businesses. Kempis offered an overview of a diversifying population, identity at the intersection and the necessity of a mindset shift.

Key Takeaways:

• Americans are becoming older, more urbanized, more open-minded to diversity and inclusion (D&I), and are recognizing that identity goes beyond race.
• Americans’ connection with their heritage is changing and intersectionality shapes how Americans experience the world, therefore a mindset shift toward greater D&I is necessary.
• Social justice and D&I are driving consumers’ demands of brands as 33 percent of consumers want brands to support D&I, 31 percent want brands to be respectful and 28 percent want brands to be inclusive.

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Inclusive Marketing: Moving From Talk To Action

Imani Ellis, the founder of CultureCon and The Creative Collective NYC, hosted a discussion with Barry Wade, managing director of cultural partnerships and identity at OMD, and God-is Rivera, director of culture and community at Twitter, that addresses inclusive marketing and how marketers can break the cycle of “talk without action.”

Key Takeaways:

• The responsibility to create more inclusive marketing lies with all of the players within the advertising ecosystem.
• Brands, agencies and platforms are doing more to better represent and connect with consumers from historically excluded communities.
• There are actions everyone can take to hold ourselves accountable to ensure this effort is long-lasting and creates meaningful change.

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Bet On Culture, Not Ads With Triller CEO, Mahi De Silva

Marketing Dive reporter Peter Adams spoke with chief executive officer of TrillerNet Mahi de Silva about how Triller is owning sustained cultural moments, its acquisition of Verzus founded by Timbaland and Swizz Beats, Triller TV, and how the creator economy is shaping the future of marketing.

Key Takeaways:

• As government pressure mounts, companies are increasingly turning to Triller for its unique method of empowering creators to create culture, not ads.
• In order to create a cultural phenomenon through content, brands must recognize that tastemakers need a platform upon which to thrive creatively and to use short-form content as a gateway to more long-form experiences (where the monetization ought to be).
• A creator-friendly ecosystem matters for brands and marketers.
• Cross-media brand activations are the future of content.

Is Precision Possible? Making CTV Measure Up

Beau Ordermann, head of advanced TV sales and strategy at Yahoo, hosted a panel with Lisa Herdman, senior vice president and executive director of strategic investments at RPA, and Ken Norcross, senior director of data strategy at Vizio, about how the pandemic elevated connected TV (CTV) from an emerging channel to a leading one. The trio discussed how advances in CTV planning, data and measurement have helped advertisers utilize the medium to maximize reach.

Key Takeaways:

• Develop a best-in-class, full-funnel CTV strategy to reach your audience, regardless of category.
• The consumer experience is influenced by lots of media touchpoints across various devices and formats. That coupled with data showing that CTV helps drive lift when combined with other digital channels point to the importance of an omnichannel approach.
• The biggest needs or issues in the industry, according to Herdman, include the intersection of privacy and how that affects contextual targetability and, as a more immediate innovation, the industry’s collective ability to predict inventory for certain target groups.
• According to Norcross, the most exciting innovations Vizio is bringing to advertisers are its innovation team’s improvement on interactivity with the TV and the mobile device, in addition to unique content with brands tailored specifically to certain segments of Vizio’s audience.

Building Brand And Business Value Through Multicultural Community Engagement

Seraj Bharwani, chief strategy officer at AcuityAds Inc., and Ariela Nerubay, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Curacao, discussed culturally relevant marketing, Curacao’s role in the Hispanic community, building brand trust and privacy. The two shared strategic business advantages that derive from strong customer relationships that nurture future growth opportunities—such as Curacao’s partnership with AcuityAds—and help the brand resonate with a diverse, multicultural community.

Key Takeaways:

• Broadly, it takes authentic engagement and participation in the community to establish trust. More specifically, Curacao has offered their “neighbors” access to items through their stores and has taken chances on them by offering financial guidance and lines of credit to immigrant families and underserved communities who need that jumpstart in life. The most important element in building trust has been the direct assistance program in partnership with Hispanic and multi-cultural non-profits where Curacao donates furniture and appliances to the most impoverished families in the community.
• Curacao wrote the playbook on how to attract Hispanic audiences through focusing on building relationships with community. Here, trust is the key factor. Doing so has secured a lifetime value with its customers. 
• Curacao has multiple rules that keep its customers returning for 20 years or more, such as one that limits the prices and interest customers pay to those offered by competitors.
• Curacao nurtures its relationships by incorporating community center elements into its stores, for example by playing music the locals enjoy, by offering creative kid zones for little ones and cooking classes or education seminars for older children.
• The brand views the data it collects on customers as an asset that provides it with insights needed to help better serve those customers on their own terms; such as how well a customer pays, when they shop and whether they’d rather shop in-person or online. 

As industry standards change and increasing regulatory scrutiny forces media publishers and advertisers to adapt, organizations are either expressing a lack of concern over the death of cookies or busy implementing tools to activate their data in a post-cookie world. 

Many of the latter have adopted Snowflake, a leader in cross-cloud computing and one of the fastest-growing software companies. Snowflake aims to improve the efficacy of advertising by empowering organizations to collaborate with any data set across any cloud and essentially allows entire industries to share data and drive innovation.

During an Advertising New York panel about building a future-proof, privacy-first advertising strategy, Bill Stratton—Snowflake global head of media and advertising industry—shared why businesses are adopting Snowflake to securely share, protect, and activate their data to promote growth in a cookie-less climate; how data enrichment, identity, measurement, activation and analytics data partners connect in near-real time; and how leaders leverage the Media Data Cloud to future proof their data foundation, protect consumer data and drive advertising growth.

According to Snowflake chief executive officer Frank Slootman, privacy laws are preventing new players like Disney from enriching and weaponizing their data for advertising purposes and competing with Google, Facebook and world governments. Snowflake seeks to overcome such constraints and allow companies to enrich and share data by engaging its data cleanroom capabilities while maintaining compliance.

We’re in the golden age of content and consumers have more programming to choose from than ever before, offering new levels of personalization and relevancy. Advertisers are able to develop new approaches to measure marketing performance and reimagine their marketing strategies altogether. 

However, the industry is in a unique position. Though the element of security and privacy is becoming stronger, there’s now a greater demand for data collaboration and transparency. Privacy legislation such as GDPR is on the rise yet advertisers and publishers are expected to leverage data matching and enable a single view of the consumer or measure media campaigns across multiple platforms. 

Traditionally, privacy and data collaboration have opposed one another. Enter: Privacy Sandboxes, the industry’s initial approach to providing anonymity to user data while allowing advertisers to use behavioral targeting where only the tech platform governed the rules of how data operated. While a step in the right direction, this measure lacked the level of true, two-way transparency advertisers sought.

Snowflake has sought to provide any company with the technological means to essentially design their own Privacy Sandbox for any purpose—without having to store the data in a silo or be sent to several different platforms. 

For marketers to get the most out of Snowflake’s offerings, they must invest in a future-proof data strategy to drive advertising growth while taking a proactive approach towards privacy. Further, Statton implored advertisers to recognize that future-proof data strategy mandates the capacity to maintain strict data governance while accessing all relevant data from a single source and sharing it with ecosystem partners. 

Snowflake’s Media Data Cloud provides advertisers and media publishers the means to recognize and accomplish adaptive goals by allowing them to leverage Snowflake’s platform capabilities, tailored solutions and an increasing amount of data natively available. Through this, advertisers can plan campaigns, collaborate with partners and measure effectiveness in a governed and secure environment. 

The Media Data Cloud also offers identity and enrichment services that enable businesses to execute without managing fragile, complex and expensive pipelines. In turn, those businesses can accelerate advertising growth, increase subscriber acquisition and retention and deliver differentiated advertising technology solutions.

This week the industry convenes at New York’s Hudson Yards for Advertising Week New York, which has returned to host live in-person events. On-demand videos online will also be offered and altogether the event will feature more than 200 hybrid sessions and 500 speakers.

At a panel today led by Alon Leibovich, co-founder and chief executive officer at BrandTotal, Leibovich shares the metrics that exist for optimizing the top and middle of the funnel, including how top challenger and leading brands are using these tools to strengthen their social media advertising strategies.

Holding a Master’s in organizational behavioral psychology, Leibovich likens marketers’ inaction toward optimizing every stage of the buyer’s journey to the feeling dogs exhibited during psychologist Martin Seligman’s experiment on learned helplessness, which is defined as behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control.

In accepting that they can’t understand what tactics their competitors are using at any particular moment, marketers have struggled to clearly understand how their messaging, positioning and ads are truly resonating with consumers.

Despite the advent of social media, which has enabled a two-way street and instant feedback, marketers are stuck in the frame of mind when TV and after-the-fact campaign metrics were their only option.

To evolve beyond siloed measurement that only compares your current top and middle of the funnel efforts to your previous efforts, Leibovich suggests following these three steps.

Step 1: Measure and Benchmark

First and foremost, keep tabs on what your direct competitors are doing while also comparing yourself to the industry average. Leibovich emphasizes the importance of ongoing measurement to assess your and competitors’ share of voice, media mix, ad formats, the volume of messages being used and campaign themes.

This includes tracking and predicting pre-click buying intent during the awareness and consideration stages. If, for example, you’re a luxury brand attempting to persuade consumers to pay more than the category index for your goods or services, look to other luxury brands to see how they’re achieving that success. Leibovich cites Lululemon in the apparel category and Ray-Ban in eyewear as standouts.

Step 2: Look At Creative Critically

Social comprises four key components—the copy, the visuals, the theme and the call-to-action. As Leibovich notes, these are levers brands should be adjusting based on what their competitors are doing. He suggests marketers apply the same level of precision and science to creative as they apply to media.

By finding the right balance between data and creative “spark,” brands can optimize their impact and drive creative strategies to elicit the type of engagement that leads to a higher conversion rate.

Step 3: Metrics

Lastly, Leibovich said to measure engagement rate and positive consumer net sentiment to correlate top- and mid-funnel activity with bottom-funnel purchase metrics. At BrandTotal, he noted, social share of voice and engagement rate are two metrics that have a bottom-of-the-funnel correlation.

When Gillette received backlash for its ‘The Best Men Can Be’ campaign, competitors including Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s capitalized on that moment and experienced positive net sentiment while Gillette’s was overwhelmingly negative.

Final Thoughts

Implementing the aforementioned strategy will also require brands to understand which brands are doing better than the industry benchmark currently—their brand or one of their competitors. If a competitor is over-indexing in engagement rate, that should serve as an alert to understand by how much they exceed the benchmark and spur a deep dive on their creative. Then comes time for changing and optimizing your creative because as Leibovich noted, all marketing is performance marketing.

“There’s no dichotomy between brand marketing and performance marketing. It’s up to us to make all marketing performance marketing. This is how it should be,” said Leibovich.