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How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know made waves when it was first released. The now-ubiquitous book by Byron Sharp is based on empirical research covering market share, brand equity, price promotions and advertising. Sharp challenges many traditionally held marketing beliefs – from the value of loyalty and the effectiveness of targeting to the importance of reach.

Sharp’s evidence-based marketing research continues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, the world’s largest marketing research centre, where he and his team work with some of the biggest international brands, from P&G and Unilever to PepsiCo and McDonald’s…

As the business world continues to adapt to political and pandemic pressures, content marketers have to shift their strategies and communications on a dime to stay relevant.

Here are some of the biggest creative, cultural and societal trends to watch in 2021:

The iOS portion of the Canadian mobile advertising industry, estimated at $5.9 billion in 2019, is substantially underwritten by a 36-character ID. The simplicity of the Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA) belies its utility — use cases from retargeting, to frequency capping to attribution all have critical dependencies on this identifier.

Apple threw the mobile marketing industry into turmoil when they announced in June of last year that the IDFA would be placed under a permissioning model, the Ads Tracking Transparency framework (ATT). In a step unusual for Apple, the initial September 2020 release was pushed back to “early Spring” of this year. Rumors of further delays have circled, potentially in response to lagging developer adoption and threats of new tracking vectors developed in mainland China.

Why should asking users for permission cause so much chaos?

Volume-based buying power has been the main value proposition of the media agency for the last 50 plus years, and with this, media accountability has been rightly focused on volume-based metrics. However, in the last ten years the industry has witnessed the rise of biddable media trading, replacing a relatively simple media ecosystem. This biddable media system is a complex universe of technology and data, with many objectives, KPIs, buy types, formats, and dynamic auction-based pricing. With this, the value proposition of a media agency has shifted to one of digital capability as a key differentiator. And so digital media accountability must now move away from volume-based metrics to account for this change in dynamic.

The need for a new approach is made obvious by one ghastly phenomenon – advertisers waste up to 60% of their digital media investments due to ineffective governance…

As we turn the corner on COVID, where is your growth going to come from? Is it going to come from your existing clients organically? Are you going to be able to win market share from your competitors? Or can you find a “greenfield” opportunity to reach out to customers who may never have heard of your brand? If you’re interested in the third option, then you need to look at the newcomer opportunity.

The ethnic opportunity in Canada is already the size of the population of Quebec. But that snapshot of time is changing rapidly. Over the next three years, the Government will be welcoming 1.2 million permanent residents to our shores. You can add to that the 640,000 international students that grace our colleges and universities on an annual basis…

PC Optimum has landed a top-10 spot in The Most Influential Brands study for the first time. The Loblaw’s loyalty program is the only Canadian brand in the top 10.

“It is very difficult for local brands to obtain and retain a top 10 ranking, and so when we do see a Canadian brand in the top 10, it is really special,” said Steve Levy, COO at Ipsos, at a virtual event on February 2^nd.

Levy said a series of “sincere and caring” emails to members from Galen Weston during the pandemic helped strengthen trust in the brand. PC Optimum is also more than a rewards program and is tied to health and wellness, he added.

Now in its tenth year, The Most Influential Brands study is conducted by the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA) and Ipsos, in partnership with Publicis and the Globe Media Group. It evaluates 100 brands on five dimensions: trustworthiness, presence, being leading edge, corporate citizenship and engagement. This year, a sixth dimension was added to reflect the help and caring brands showed during COVID.