Applicants will have the chance to roll the dice, advance to Go, and win an internship at Bozell.

Applications for the 2020 Summer Bozell Internship are NOW CLOSED. If you have any questions, please email Laura at lspaulding@bozell.com.

Jackie handles the x’s and o’s. She leads strategy for every account, builds relationships with clients and drives new business initiatives. She’s Coach Phil Jackson to our Chicago Bulls. Before joining us at Bozell, Jackie gleaned invaluable business and digital advertising experience as president and chief operating officer of 42, a digital agency in Lincoln, Neb.; a digital project manager at Bailey Lauerman; and a project executive at MediaCom Interaction.

The Peyton Manning Omaha Timeline…

If You’re From Omaha

How to make a loyalty program work for your company.

Loyalty programs have been in our marketing toolbox for many years. They are now commonplace among retailers, credit cards issuers, hotels and more. According to the most recent survey from Colliquy, the average household belongs to 18 loyalty programs, but they actively participate in only eight. And $48 billion worth of consumer loyalty reward points are dispensed each year, yet one-third of those are never cashed.

Rewards have evolved from being a nice little extra to an entitlement. Consumers expect more in exchange for giving you their personal data. They are more savvy than ever, and seek brands that bolster their overall value proposition with a sophisticated and differentiated rewards program. At the same time, changing demographics means consumers have shifted away from the desire for possessions, and have moved onto the desire for experiences. So how do you make your loyalty program as successful as possible? Here are a few tips.

Develop a strong value position.
Differentiation starts with the positioning of your program. Many programs don’t have one – hence why so many look and act the same. Avoid “-er” thinking, like “our program is bigger/better/faster/easier/etc.” These words have ceased to have meaning. Everything works now. These are the table stakes.

Make tiers attainable.
Lots of airlines, hotels and department stores offer reward programs with silver, gold and platinum tiers. The higher the tier, the better the perks. This is great aspirational marketing, but the shrewd consumer will ask, “Can I achieve that tier ranking at my spending level?” Make it easy for the consumer to run the math and see what it takes to advance, while offering spending options to get there.

Consider experiential rewards.
These can enhance differentiation, reinforce your brand value and support the customer experience with your brand. Masters of this have been American Express with its Gold Card Events and Front-Of-The-Line opportunities (e.g., advance ticket access, complimentary tickets), and Visa with its Signature Events, such as Finish Line Suite access at the Kentucky Derby. Just be creative in your thinking.

Avoid expiration exasperation.
Make sure you are very clear with policies on expiration of rewards. Communicate those clearly and routinely to members to make sure they know how to get the most value from your program.

Look beyond the dollar.
Reward points and percentage rebates are ubiquitous and often taken for granted. Non-monetary awards can be perceived as a greater value. Such perks might include free movie tickets, concert tickets, complimentary Wi-Fi or free hotel nights.

Technology enables, but imagination wins.
Consumers rely on a host of mobile apps and digital services to do their comparison-shopping, pricing, and even purchasing. From smartphones to smarter transaction processing to smart mobile wallets, while these technologies offer great opportunity for marketing, it is their creative and imaginative application that will win out in the end with today’s savvy consumer.

Companies that master the art and science of how customer behavior is changing are the ones that will thrive as customer loyalty programs evolve. These companies will build a connected alliance of customers, partners and vendors – all enabled by technology, and all working toward profitable, sustainable, mutually beneficial relationships. As a marketer, your choice is to lead, follow or get out of the way.

How mobile videos are taking over the Internet and continuing to expand.

It is the year 2013. You would have to be living under a rock to not know that online video is big, and only getting bigger. The average Internet user views more than 180 YouTube videos a month (totaling 17 percent of U.S. Internet traffic). Netflix, the Internet’s other streaming video favorite, consumes nearly a third (32 percent) of the bandwidth used in the United States. As impressive as it is that YouTube and Netflix make up half of our Internet usage, when you add in all the other players, you hit a staggering 90 percent of Internet traffic is viewing video content.

One of the immediate takeaways from a statistic like this is that people are not only watching a lot of videos, but those videos are likely lengthy, as well. This is actually quite true, with the average YouTube video weighing in between three and four minutes long. With no practical length restriction on YouTube, both publishers and viewers are used to freedom and flexibility. However, you still need a great youtube video marketing company to get your videos seen. Interestingly, and as a stark differentiator, in 2013, two new hot video services have been introduced. Both impose hard – and quite short – time limits on the videos shared on their services. These two services are Vine and Instagram.

VINE

Vine is a mobile app that allows users to record and share six-second-long looping videos.  Accessible from all major mobile platforms, the Twitter-owned service became highly acclaimed
in early 2013. As of August 2013, the service had 40 million registered users.

Six seconds of video may not seem like much, but Vine’s rapidly expanding user-base is proving to be very creative. Stop motion animation is popular on the service and allows for a surprising amount of expressiveness. Even brands are exploring Vine, including Urban Outfitters, USA Today, GE and Walgreens. Rather than attempt to repackage existing content, they create new content that acts as a supplement to their primary information outlets and other social media properties.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram, the popular and Facebook-owned platform, known for its square and filter-treated photos, rolled out an update this summer that enabled its user-base to upload and share videos. The videos are capped to a maximum length of 15 seconds (perhaps not so coincidentally, 15 seconds is also the standard pre-roll length). Like photos taken via the app, a variety of visual filters can be applied to your video.

With an already-established user-base of 130 million, and potential tie-ins to Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, it makes sense that the incumbent would have the leg up on Vine – which they do. By June 2013, twice as many of the top 100 brands were engaging their users with Instagram video rather than Vine, including Ford, MTV, Disney and GE (it is engaging on both platforms).

The world of Internet video continues to grow. Facebook, for example, is also supposed to roll out a new ad format (a 15-second-long, auto-playing, muted video) for its newsfeed section, meaning we might see easy options for promoting Instagram content as ads, which could also further encourage brands to invest their time and resources into the Facebook ecosystem. But, with both Facebook and Twitter now having a stake in social video sharing, it will be interesting to see how users align themselves when the dust settles. Question is, will your company be there when it does?

How nonprofits should approach their branding and marketing.

Branding is as important for a nonprofit enterprise, and perhaps even more so, because nonprofits generally operate with extremely limited marketing budgets and must work harder to stand out.

While you believe that your cause is so noble that everyone will drop what they’re doing to pay attention, it’s probably not the case. Nonprofits are not just competing with other nonprofits for donations, but rather with all other marketers as well, including those with very large budgets. Geico spent a reported $1.1 billion on advertising in 2012. Chances are, your budget’s not even close. But you still need to communicate.

Act like a brand. Like any other advertiser, first you have to determine your brand. What is it you stand for? What’s your purpose, what do you do, what don’t you do, for whom,  and who would miss you if you were gone? Be painfully honest with yourself – and your stakeholders – and don’t believe your own BS. This is hard work, where most of the internal battles occur – or should occur. Because, if you don’t have internal support for a focused brand message, you may end up wasting your preciously limited resources.

The next battle is to look at what you’ve done in the past for marketing and promotion. Are you doing the same things you’ve always done, just because you’ve always done them? Are you more worried about disrupting the status quo than making a difference? How will you stand out unless you stand up? Often, nonprofits continue marketing to an aging audience base that is quite literally dying off. If you need to reverse a trend, doing more of what you’ve been doing in the past is usually a bad idea. One of the best brand vehicles to come along for nonprofits is social media. This may seem obvious, but few organizations take full advantage. It should be the center of your marketing, not an add-on or peripheral tool. If you have passionate advocates for your cause, rally them, and encourage them to spread the word. (And if you don’t, maybe you need to reconsider your cause.)

But somebody has to be in charge of this effort. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that social media
is free. It takes a carefully planned, coordinated effort to be effective. You should have someone (or a team, or a marketing partner) dedicated to monitoring, responding and creating a fresh stream of content. It takes time – and that time rarely comes free. But the returns can far outstrip the investment.

Branding is more than a logo, a color scheme or an ad campaign. It’s the decisions you make and the way your organization behaves. Let your brand be your guide.

Make the most of the mountains of data available to your company.

As consumers not only share more of their lives across social channels, but also drive millions of daily purchases and engage in trackable activity, we’re able to look into our customers’ lives like never before. But data collection is much more than simply aggregating numbers. For marketers, this data-driven world should theoretically open the door to opportunities – but we are learning it is creating just as many challenges.

In our last issue of Thinking, we talked about the importance of small businesses leveraging data to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. We also mentioned how looking at the sheer volume and different types of data can be overwhelming without a clear focus. So we’ve provided three quick tips to help keep the data-driven marketer sane.

COLLECT INSIGHTS, NOT DATA
A recent  study  indicated that more than 70 percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) feel they “lack true insight” and are underprepared to manage the explosion of data. Additionally, a 2011 CMO Council report found that CMOs are overwhelmed and under pressure to make sense of the endless volumes of data. Together, these reports suggest that CMOs are struggling to be able to convert data into consumer insight that can ultimately drive business performance.

Marketers are missing the opportunity for an end-to-end understanding of how to collect the right data, understand it, and then turn it into a growth-driven plan. Spend more time learning which data truly moves your business forward. The haystacks of data will continue to get bigger and bigger, but it’s essential you find the needles that are important to you and your business.

STAY ON STRATEGY
In this age of data, there is a serious risk of focusing all the attention on analysis and looking for that one metric that will reveal a silver bullet. CMOs face a real challenge of letting data divert their attention from focusing on the overall business strategy.

Juggling time, resources and budget between channel management and measurability has become a growing challenge for marketers. To be a successful data-driven marketer, you must remain focused on the strategy. It requires strategic thinking, prioritization and resources that ensure that smart plans are developed.  Despite the complexity and difficulty, the organizations that can figure this out will simply have a competitive advantage, and, for that reason, it’s worth the effort.

FIND THE RIGHT PARTNERS
The CMO Survey reported that companies will spend between six and 10 percent more of their marketing budget on data over the next three years. Yet, when asked to report the percentage of projects in which their companies used that data, CMOs reported only a 30 percent usage rate. This enormous gap between investment and utilization means that most organizations are strictly focused on collecting data, not insights. But, as we know, it’s difficult to manage all of the new tasks that data is creating, so this leads to opportunities to find partners that can help not only juggle these tasks, but also help you understand the insights from it.

This may mean partnering with an outside consultant or agency, but the key is to help find a translator for all of this information. These partners are critical to extracting actionable insights from the noise, and identify the right driving forces behind a great campaign performance.

Mutual of Omaha’s epic journey toward building its social following.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom celebrated its 50th anniversary in January 2013 and was revitalizing as Web-available episodes (webisodes) in the fall. While many already adore the brand from watching the show when they were younger, Wild Kingdom wanted to build engagement on Facebook and Twitter in order to connect with a younger generation. We helped them do so in three waves.

1. King of the Meme

With the challenge at hand being to attract people who are interested in the topics relevant to Wild Kingdom, such as wild animals, the first effort was on Facebook with the King of the Meme contest. It consisted of offering several wild animal photos and inviting fans to add their own captions. Every week, for five weeks, the captioned photos were voted on and the photo with the most votes received a $100 Visa gift card. People who participated in the contest were asked to encourage their friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote and also submit their own captions. At the conclusion of this first contest, Facebook following increased by 239% and Twitter by 11,060%.

2. Wild at 50 Sweepstakes

The second effort to increase engagement was a sweepstakes on Facebook where fans could enter to win a $500 Visa gift card simply by liking the Wild Kingdom Facebook page and entering their email addresses. It was promoted through videos that paired Wild Kingdom footage of animals in their natural habitat with character voiceovers that captured the animals’ perspectives. The videos lived on YouTube in an attempt to drive new audience members to the Wild Kingdom TV Channel where the new webisodes would live, as well. The sweepstakes increased Facebook following by 259% and Twitter by 260%.

3. Wild Guide

The third and final wave was heavily involved, taking place March through the beginning of August – it was the search for a new Wild Guide to host the upcoming webisodes. The search began with a reveal video, announcing that Wild Kingdom was seeking a new Wild Guide, and it was followed by a video explaining the Wild Guide role. Anyone could enter the contest and fans and followers were encouraged to do so. As people began entering the contest, they shared their videos with

others, even beyond the Wild Kingdom social space. Once the contest closed and semi-finalists were selected, public voting determined three finalists and another Facebook sweepstakes encouraged fans and followers to share who they voted for. The three finalists continued to share their excitement while Wild Kingdom held live chat sessions on Facebook with each of them, shared interesting facts about them all, and leaked behind the scenes photos and videos from their screen tests. By the conclusion of the new Wild Guide process, Facebook following was up a total of 1,083% and Twitter 79,020%.

Throughout the entire process, each month was closely evaluated to see what kinds of conversation were most successful, and subsequent conversation was framed around that. In addition, rewards, such as a branded T-shirt or a thermal mug, were offered to highly engaged fans and followers to say thank you. In terms of engagement levels, Wild Kingdom experienced an average of 25% engagement (where competitors usually see 4% or less). Also, the goal of reaching a younger audience had been achieved, as the number of 18- to 24-year-old Facebook fans is now almost as large as the 45- to 54-year-old audience. Thus, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom successfully built a new audience in social media that is ready for, and excited about, the upcoming webisodes.