Category: Advertising

Episode 196

 

There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that  video must be part of the mix. 

 

There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help.  

 

Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from. 

Let’s go to  Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.

 

Chapter Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:12 – Welcome Nikki

00:09:05 – Video on platforms like TikTok

00:23:37 – PSA

00:24:26 – Reporting to stakeholders

00:29:59 – Ad campaign optimization

00:35:05 – Contacting Nikki

 

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Episode 184

You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with:

The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers. 

CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite’s questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.

There’s the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won’t need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who’ve poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.

 Because our field doesn’t have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn’t  uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How’s that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.

My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he’s been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy  MightyHive which became Media.Monks. 

He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company’s educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets 

To me, he’s something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better. 

I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.

Timestamp/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

0:03:25 Welcome Myles

0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy

0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future

0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can

0:24:53 Tech debt we’ve brought on ourselves

0:31:50 PSA

0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies

0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al

0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings

0:52:32 Best reaction is educating ourselves

1:00:00 How to reach out to Myles

 

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People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show

Myles Younger on LinkedIn

Myles works at Uof.Digital (check out their newsletters)

Salesforce ‘no software’ campaign

Benito Mussolini

Tower of Babel

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

My guest, after receiving a degree in psychology, worked as a barista at Starbucks and a local high-end hotel. In a conversation about career paths with the hotel’s HR manager, she heard about the British Columbia Institute of Technology‘s two-year co-op and classroom-based marketing communications programme. She enrolled.  Her first co-op internship was with a start-up automotive marketing company, where she was supposed to shadow their Pay-Per-Click campaign manager. After her first week, the supervisor resigned, and an executive asked her to take over, and right after getting her marcomm certificate she worked there full-time,  growing out their PPC team. That led to working as a PPC expert at an agency, and within three and a half years she rose to a director-level position there.

In 2021 she went on her own, founding Good AF Consulting which focuses on helping find and fix issues within a brand’s PPC and SEO efforts. Wanting to exercise her passion for sharing time and knowledge with new marketers, she has also gone back to BCIT but as an instructor in the very marketing programme she graduated from. In addition to teaching, she mentors new marketers, writes and works hard to leave the industry in a better state than the way she found it. 

Please welcome someone who’s been named to  PPC Hero’s list of the Top 25 people in PPC, Amalia Fowler.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Amalia on Twitter
• Amalia on Linkedin 

• Her series of LinkedIn articles on Audits: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6988649570272452608/ and https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amaliafowler_googleads-activity-6990785436600201217-kKsB

• Her newsletter for empathetic managers, The Wholehearted Manager 

Episode Reboot.