Advertising Week Turns 20: Highlights from Advertising Week 2024

This week, I covered Advertising Week in New York. Advertising Week is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year. Advertising Week offers insights on many topics beyond advertising, including marketing, e-commerce, media, retail media, AI, Generative AI, technology, creativity, and beyond.

Smokey the Bear celebrated his 80th Birthday at Advertising Week.

The conference was held at the Penn District in New York City. Panels were held on different stages that were centered on the themes of scaling up, innovation, creativity, the marketplace, technology, media, great minds, podcasting, CMOs, excellence, and women’s empowerment.

There were many great exhibits as well. I enjoyed using Meta’s AI which turned me into Super Man and Iron Man.

Meta had great AI Ray Ban sunglasses that enabled me to use the internet for many tasks.

Attendees also had a chance to make their reels on Meta. 

Advertising Week looked back and looked to the future as well. The founder of Advertising Week Matt Scheckner, shared how he started the conference with an idea. He shared his story from the parade in Times Square in 2004 to today; describing how Advertising Week grew to have a presence with conferences across the globe. Matt Scheckner assembled a panel of leaders from business and entertainers On a panel he shared with Susie Essman of Curb your Enthusiasm, Tim Armstrong, Kim Kellehner, and Claudio Romo Edelman. The panelists shared their journeys and their keys to success: embracing change and growing.

There were many panels about using AI, Data, Storytelling, Global Marketing, public speaking, pitching deals, and selling advertising. Additional panel pictures can be found on Instagram.

I learned so much. If you are interested in trends in advertising, marketing, AI, and beyond, attend Advertising Week.

I want to thank the organizers of Advertising Week for having me as their guest. 

What is the hardest part of Product Marketing?

LinkedIn poll of my audience

Marketers need to develop and deploy a buyer-centric go-to-market strategy. It is time for marketers to ask better questions about buyers.

What is the role of a Product Marketer?

I covered the Product Marketing Community workshop to find out.

Workshop Topics included how to:

1. Build and execute go-to-market plans
2. Develop actionable buyer insights
3. Create effective Messaging and Content for buyers
4. Enable Sales and Product Teams

Businesses should identify their ideal customer.

Only certain target customers will buy due to internal and external factors.

To grow revenue, businesses need to develop and use better competitive insights. Developing these insights entails examining everything about the competition to identify: strengths, weaknesses, competitor priorities, growing, and under-served markets.

Product Marketing involves more than Marketing and Product Team support. Product Marketers serve Marketing, Sales, and Product teams. Each team has different needs and responsibilities. However, they all grow the business and serve customers.

Product Marketers serve as market experts and translators for teams from across the organization.

What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing is the discipline of bringing a product to market and nurturing its success. Businesses need to create and market products people want to buy. To do that, they need to use the Pragmatic Framework.

Product Marketers are taking on some Product Manager responsibilities

Product Marketing needs a separate brief.

Just as Marketing has a plan or brief, Product Marketing does.

SmartSheet.com Product Marketing Template

Here are nine things to address in a Product Marketing Brief.

1. What does your company do? Does your product offering align with your business goals?
2. What are the features of your product? Do others understand what you are building and why?
3. Does this Product address gaps in the Market? Include an overview of a Competitive, win-loss and, SWOT analysis.
4. Who is your ideal customer or target market? Include an overview of findings of demographic, psychographic, and buyer persona research. Does your product solve customer pain points?
5. How will you measure product success?
6. What are can go wrong? Can failure be anticipated and corrected?
7. What is the roadmap and schedule of the product? Who’s responsible and in charge?
8. Who needs to be included in the project and who needs to approve deliverables?
9. How will goals be tracked? How often will they be monitored? What insights are you trying to glean from the data?

Johnathan Hinz of Seismeic shares his insights on sales enablement and its role in marketing.

The lack of Sales and Marketing alignment is due in part to the inadequate amount of customer value mapping relating to the number of buyer types.

Product Marketers, what’s the hardest part of your job?

How do you know if you are successful?

Share your thoughts.

Insights from 2024 DMWF NA

Last week, I covered the Digital Marketing World Forum conference in New York. The conference was held at the Marriot Marquis in New York’s Times Square. The Digital Marketing World Forum or DMWF for short, covered a wide array of topics beyond just digital marketing, that covered AI, ecommerce, influencer marketing, and creativity just to name a few. 

DMWF also had interesting service providers in the Digital Marketing space. 

The conference was divided into two tracks. Track one consisted of topics that fell into the categories of: Covering Data, CRM & Insights // eCommerce & Omnichannel // AI & Marketing Automation // Digital Transformation & Leadership // Customer Experience, Email & Automation // Mobile Marketing & Advertising //.

Track two consisted of topics that fell into the categories of: Influencer, Affiliate & Creator Marketing // Content & Video Marketing // Social Media & Community Marketing // Digital Brand Strategy & Communications //.

There were so many amazing discussions. The topics that I found the most interesting were Building a successful Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy, and How to navigate changing social platforms.

In the Building a successful Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy panel,

Shayna Macklin, Director, Social / Brand + Music Partnerships & Fractional CMO, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. & Rainbow Apparel Co

Carly Schrager, Head of Marketing Automation Engagements, North America, Bluprintx

Michelle Gitter, Beauty Commerce & Measurement Insights Manager, Unilever

address the questions of:

• the power of implementing a full-funnel marketing strategy
• Moving away from a leaky funnel and delivering and building on brand perception, targeted content and communications to your consumers
• Reviewing the opportunities and risks when implementing a full-funnel marketing strategy
• How does the change in strategy impact your reach of message, insights and conversion of purchases

In the How to navigate changing social platforms panel,

https://fb.watch/uWyBOeuXQg/

Moderator: Dasha Shunina, Ambassador Community & Partnerships, Puzzle

David Johnston, Head of Social Media, U.S. Department of Defense

Lamarr Shand, Head of YouTube & Digital Video Strategy, Google

Cara Hedgepeth, Senior Social Media Community Advisor, AARP

address the questions of:

• Social strategies in 2024 and beyond
• Defining your customer profiles and adapting your game plan for your audiences, including B2B and B2C
• Using data and insights to define your social strategy and increase engagement
• Socials in different industries — when should you engage with your customer?

The DMWF was an amazing conference. If you are interested in Digital Marketing and all things Marketing, I suggest attending the DMWF.

I want to the thank the organizers of the Digital Marketing World Forum for having me as their guest.