Industry Insights
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ANA’s Takeaways from CES 2025
Pulse February 21, 2025The ANA recently attend the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show, which, for all intents and purposes, is now really the world's largest AI show. This overview highlights the top news and the best, most relevant technology for marketers showcased at the event.
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Editor Highlights: First-Party Data, the Future 100, and Job Trends
Pulse February 21, 2025Do you feel like it’s a challenge to keep up with the latest trends, best practices, and marketing strategies? You aren’t alone. Bimonthly, ANA’s Pulse will highlight content within ANA’s resources hub, from Industry Insights, Knowledge Partner contributions, ANA Magazine, case studies, Marketing 101, Tools and Playbooks, and more. This way, the hard work of finding actionable insights, marketing trends, and helpful guides is done for you.
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Why Programmatic DOOH Deserves a Place in Your Multichannel Strategy
Leading Edge February 21, 2025Programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is quickly becoming vital to modern marketing strategies, bridging the gap between digital precision and real-world engagement. With advancements in programmatic technology, DOOH now offers advertisers the ability to target specific locations, reach the right audiences, and deliver highly relevant messages in real time. This evolution allows brands to create a seamless consumer journey by integrating DOOH with other programmatic channels, like mobile and connected TV (CTV).
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Content Marketing and AI – Best Practices for 2025
Leading Edge February 20, 2025Content marketing has long been the cornerstone of successful digital marketing strategies. It involves the creation, publishing, and distributing of valuable and relevant information to attract, educate and retain customers.
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Creating Super Bowl Sized Growth with a TikTok Attention Span
Leading Edge February 20, 2025We live in an attention divergent society. From the short form social video to which we’ve become accustomed to the often second (or even third) screening it while watching TV, consumers have an abundance of content options. How do you break through with your commercial when people have too many options to pay attention to?
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The 2024 Multicultural Excellence Awards Showcase Marketing That Celebrates Hispanic Heroes
Pulse February 20, 2025The 2024 Multicultural Excellence Awards shined a spotlight on advertisers who shined their own spotlight on the many varieties of Hispanic heroism, highlighting the various ways in which members of this community make important and valuable differences in culture through actions that are undertaken, at times, on grand stages and, at others, only in the intimate contexts of domestic or local settings.
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Social and TV: The MVP Brands Left on the Bench This Super Bowl
Leading Edge February 19, 2025Here’s the problem upfront: Maximizing Super Bowl ROI.
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Synthetic Data Is the Gas for Your Marketing Mix Modeling Engine
Leading Edge February 19, 2025For those of you of the mind that Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is superior to last-touch (LTA) or multi-touch attribution (MTA) — and I’m confident in presuming that a significant cohort of MMM advocates are regular readers here — there is an emerging data paradigm that will boost the utility of MMM for brand marketers.
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Overcoming the Pitfalls of Today’s Marketing Measurement
Leading Edge February 18, 2025After talking to hundreds of marketers in the past year, it’s clear that brands have evolved their approach to measurement dramatically. Marketers are moving beyond proxy metrics like site visits, clicks and conversions, to deeper metrics that provide a better understanding of the value of their marketing activity. This is happening for a few reasons. E-commerce is mature which means measurement matures with it, with a focus on first party data in the past few years, brands have improved measurability at a customer level, and as customers continue to move into digital channels like CTV, more of the media spend is measurable, too.
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Mastering the Art of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
Leading Edge February 17, 2025Marketing mix modeling (MMM) has been on the table for data-driven marketers for decades. If you understand its potential, you know its importance. However, nuances are at play – and I would say it’s not quite getting its due in the marketer’s day-to-day. As someone deeply entrenched in data analytics, I’ve seen firsthand how MMM can illuminate the path forward or obscure it with false promises. To help clear the way, here’s a candid look at when to leverage MMM, when to hold back, and how to get the most out of it for the long term.
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6 AI and Customer Strategy Trends Brands Should Watch For
Leading Edge February 14, 2025AI-driven tools are set to revolutionize customer strategies by taking personalization to new levels, making user experiences faster, and driving more intuitive website design. In CMSWire’s 2024 State of Customer Digital Experience survey, 81 percent of business leaders stated digital customer experience (CX) as extremely or very important, underscoring how it has become more than a competitive edge — it’s a critical differentiator.
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Girl Power in Prime Time: The Super Bowl Ads That Resonated Most with Women
Leading Edge February 14, 2025Getting to watch the Super Bowl with my 11 and 8-year-old daughters was one of the joys of my weekend. Mind you, none in my family are football fans, but when you’re the CMO of a market research company, there are less offensive ways to blur your work-life balance.
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Being a Certified B Corporation Is No Easy Task – But Totally Worth It
Leading Edge February 13, 2025As cited by B Lab, over 8,000 companies worldwide are Certified B Corporation businesses, but fewer than 2 percent of advertising agencies in the U.S. and Canada have earned this status. Achieving B Corp Certification signals to the world that you think deeply about the impact your business has on employees, clients, communities, and even the planet.
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The 2024 Multicultural Excellence Awards Spotlighted Marketers Who Aided and Lent Visibility to the LGBTQ+ Community
Pulse February 13, 2025Members of the LGBTQ+ community often face circumstances that, at best, elide them from popular culture, or, at worst subject them to outright violence. Empathetic marketers recognize the injustice of such treatment and at times find opportunities to combat it. The 2024 Multicultural Excellence Awards took notice of such efforts undertaken in the past year and celebrated them.
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Why Super Bowl Ads’ Lack of Emotional Creativity Is No Laughing Matter
Leading Edge February 13, 2025Move over Budweiser’s cute young Clydesdale. The foal that starred in the beer brand’s Super Bowl ad “First Delivery” may have captured viewers’ hearts with his heroic, beer-carrying exploits at the Big Game, but it was not the only one-trick pony on the night.
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The Anti-Social Century and What It Means for Brands
Leading Edge February 12, 2025Over the weekend, I found myself reflecting on Derek Thompson's recent article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” which examines how we in the U.S. increasingly are choosing isolation over connection and solitude over community. It's a powerful lens that offers insight into the cultural moment we're in as well as what this behavioral shift means for brands navigating our evolving zeitgeist. (And, no, Derek Thompson and I are not related, though his insights feel closely aligned with my reflections!)
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You Can’t Be Serious About Gen AI without a Responsible AI Policy in Place
Leading Edge February 12, 2025Generative AI (gen AI) is a transformative technology with a ton of benefits. But it also introduces a range of challenges, including the potential for misuse. Without a responsible AI policy, organizations risk serious consequences, as highlighted by recent controversies involving the use of the technology.
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AI versus Ad Fraud: An Old Problem with New Solutions
Leading Edge February 11, 2025Ad fraud isn’t a new challenge, but it continues to evolve, driven by sophisticated tactics and increasingly automated schemes. With costs related to digital advertising fraud worldwide estimated to increase from $88 billion in 2023 to $172 billion in 2028, this is clearly not an issue that’s going away on its own. With the rise of AI, fraudsters have been exploiting advanced technologies to scale their operations – creating new risks for marketers and the ad tech ecosystem. Fortunately, AI also offers the tools needed to fight back, reshaping fraud prevention strategies to keep pace with these threats.
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What I Just Learned About Retail Media
Pulse February 11, 2025Retail media is hot. The ANA just held a members-only conference focused on retail media, hosted by Kroger Precision Marketing in Cincinnati. We learned so much.
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Innovation Insights from Atlanta-Based Brands at ANA Marketing Tech Conference
Pulse February 10, 2025At the recent ANA Marketing Technology Momentum conference, industry leaders shared transformative approaches to personalization and customer experience.
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