Four Ps

Anyone with a Business or Marketing degree has likely heard of the following framework from the illustrious marketing professor Philip Kotler.

Marketing is the combination of the 4Ps: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place.

While many can agree with it, when we think of Marketing in most companies and business circles, we tend to focus on a subset of one P: Promotion.

If you reacted to the previous sentence by thinking, “Yeah, that’s kind of true,” you may be interested in taking a few minutes to think if your Marketing team is doing everything it’s supposed to do in your company.

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Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #4

In October of last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on controversial marketing hot-takes. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the fourth and last one. To make it even more entertaining, I've decided to use sports quotes to illustrate my point. "𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘳𝘶𝘯 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘤…

Interesting Things You May Not Know About Super Bowl Advertising

(written in February 2023, updated February 2024)

Advertising during the Super Bowl is a privilege for any advertising professional, not only because of the one hundred million people tuning in every year — making it the most watched program in the US — but also because of the incredible amount of resources it takes to buy a spot, develop an ad, and execute a campaign correctly.

Between 2018 and 2022, I’ve had the privilege of leading Paid Media for Anheuser Busch, the biggest in-game advertiser. Since this is the first year in a while I don’t have to worry about putting out fires and negotiating last-minute requests related to running 4-8 ads in the Super Bowl, I thought it would be fun sharing some of what I’ve learned. 

Here are ten lesser-known things about Super Bowl advertising and some of my tips from experience. 

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Adjust And Double-down:
A Marketing Investment Roadmap For Uncertain Times

We are navigating uncertain times.” How often have you heard some variation of this phrase in the last three years? It’s been used to explain everything from layoffs to schedule changes to service disruptions, and — while it may be true — it’s getting exhausting. I think it’s fair to say that we’re all looking for more “certain times.”

Perhaps more certainty and predictability lie in the future, but they remain to be seen. Right now, everyone (especially those in marketing) needs to focus on navigating uncertainty.

Adjust Investment Strategies for Uncertain Times 

In the past year, we have seen the tide shift from a general policy of “grow at all costs” to “show profitability.” This means that companies’ investment strategy needs to focus on protecting the bottom line, and if the correction is not done gradually over time, the marketing budget is the most exposed to cuts and pullbacks.

This is usually because of two reasons:

  • A structural adjustment like laying off part of your staff comes with expensive severance packages and therefore requires time to show an impact on the bottom line.
  • Because companies that need to prioritize revenue and profits in the short term are often willing to forgo a medium to long-term impact for immediate relief, favoring sales costs that can bring immediate revenue vs. marketing expenditures that bring both short, medium, and long-term benefits. 

This is the reason why companies that are seeing a softening demand (i.e., topline decline) or are anticipating a market contraction, tend to cut media and marketing budgets before reducing sales costs. 

The problem is that if this pullback is done too abruptly, inbound demand will soften to the point where your sales efforts become less effective and will therefore worsen the company’s need to cut costs to maintain margins. Moreover, if your disinvestment strategy is more drastic than your competitors, the market share loss will make a later recovery 2-3x more expensive than the initial savings. 

At this point, people may be tempted to suggest that to prevent this tricky situation, companies should have been more conservative in bolstering costs during a growth period. Still, we need to remember that limiting spend in a moment of growth also presents the opportunity cost of losing “fair” market share with respect to the market and competition.

Since we can’t go back in time, let’s discuss how companies can navigate a worsening financial outlook and how marketing and finance departments can partner together to adjust their investment strategy to manage the current environment. 

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Adapt or Become Extinct: The Marketing Status Quo Will Soon Be Irrelevant

For the past ten years working in digital marketing, the world has been divided into Branding and Performance Marketing. Branding is full of large budgets and not much accountability for their results. Performance Marketing (or Direct Response) has ugly creatives but gets beautiful, carefully documented returns. Advertising has not always been lik…