A full-service marketing, creative branding and digital communications agency specializing in strategic content creation.

A Full Service Branding and Digital Agency | Lewis

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Last year, Lewis joined forces with our client, the **Kentucky Bourbon Trail®**, to pull off something truly historic—**a global, 24-hour toast to Kentucky Bourbon**! On September 17, 2024, in celebration of their 25th anniversary, we hosted a livestream toast at the top of every hour for an entire day. Bourbon fans from across six continents and 32 countries joined in, raising a glass from wherever they were in the world. 

This year, the World Bourbon Toast™ is going even bigger—and we’re thrilled to be part of it again. On September 14, we’ll host the **World’s Biggest Toast** to Kentucky Bourbon at the world’s biggest food, Bourbon, and music festival, **Bourbon & Beyond** in Louisville, KY. Again, we’ll be streaming live throughout the day, sharing interviews, festival moments, and behind-the-scenes coverage, all building up to one exciting toast from the main stage.

And just like last year, this celebration isn’t just for people in the crowd. Wherever you are, you can be part of the moment. All you have to do is raise your glass, snap a photo or video, and **Toast & Post** with **#WorldBourbonToast**, tagging the **Kentucky Bourbon Trail®** <a href="https://www.facebook.com/kybourbontrail" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
 Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/kentuckybourbontrail/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
 Instagram</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@KentuckyBourbonTrail" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
 YouTube</a> accounts. Tune into the livestream and celebrate alongside thousands of Bourbon lovers from all over the world. Together, we’re about to make Bourbon history—again. Get all the details at <a href="https://www.WorldBourbonToast.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
 WorldBourbonToast.com</a>.

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The World Bourbon Toast™ Is Back—and Bigger Than Ever 

This year, digital media has really had to stay on their toes — poised and ready to jump at any second. With all the consumer privacy regulation changes, and now, the real slime of the earth deciding to take ad fraud to a whole new level, there’s a lot to keep an eye on.

A [recent profile of ad fraud](https://www.trafficguard.ai/news/digital-ad-fraud-a-profile-on-north-america#:~:text=The%20recent%20profile%20of%20ad,at%20%2444%20million%20per%20day) in North America by TrafficGuard and Juniper Research estimates that within the next five years, advertisers will be losing $100 million a day due to ad fraud. That represents an increase of 125 percent since 2018. They’re also predicting that by 2023, 1 in 5 ad transactions will be derived from fraud. That sounds bad. But until everyone is clear on exactly what ad fraud means, we can’t move on to the solutions. So, here we go.

The simplest way to explain it is this: Ad fraud is when you pay for ads to appear somewhere online, and you think they did — because the reports say so. But no one saw your ad. The data was skewed from fake clicks from bots or click farms.

Even worse, from the vantage point of the brand or agency paying to run the ads, ad fraud is difficult to detect. Before we explain how we’re working to mitigate the risks of ad fraud for our clients (and ourselves), we want to make sure you’re up to speed on all the basic ways ad fraud can happen.

Common Types of Ad Fraud

Unfortunately, the slime balls behind ad fraud are no dummies, and they’ve managed to create multiple pathways to stealing your marketing dollars. The list of digital mediums where ad fraud rears its ugly head continues to grow, but there are several common pathways you’ll want to keep tabs on to start.

Click fraud

This is the most common, simplest type of advertising fraud. Fake traffic is generated through either an automated clicking platform or through click farms. A sign of this would be a higher than usual click-throughs that don’t lead to a sale.

Domain spoofing

Basically, this is impersonating a website. By building a domain and design that appears to be the intended site where your ad would run, the people running these sites can receive payment for your ads, but those ads will never be seen. This is also a common identity theft tactic.

Ad stacking

This happens a lot with programmatic ad placements. It’s when a publisher sells multiple ads on a website, but they’re all stacked on top of each other blocking those behind the top ad. The ads gain fake impressions, even though they’re not really being seen by users.

Pixel stuffing

Similar to ad stacking, only the ads are placed within pixels on the webpage, and they are not visible to potential customers. You end up paying for impressions when there’s zero chance of the ad actually being seen.

Location-based ad fraud

Location is super important to industries such as retail, quick-serve restaurants, the automotive space, and many others. These businesses rely on potential customers being close in proximity to their business. So, in order to take advantage of that, fraudsters fake the geolocations on mobile devices to place them around a specific location, causing brands to deliver ads to people in their target locations who aren’t actually there. With fraudsters taking advantage of all of these weak spots — and this is just a few — it can start to feel like the situation is getting more and more dire, but is it? We believe there are ways around the fake data.

The Ad Fraud Situation Is Bad, But It’s Also Manageable

The amount of digital ad fraud has grown to represent billions of dollars, and naturally, many marketers are now asking, “_Is this still an efficient and effective channel for my brand?_”

Yes, yes it is. As long as you know what you’re doing. While the numbers are concerning on the surface, the amount by which a specific brand experiences ad fraud with their campaigns will vary drastically, and ultimately lies in the hands of whoever manages their media. All programmatic buys are not created equal, and anyone that's running and optimizing a campaign strictly based on their Demand Side Platform’s (DSP) algorithm without strategic oversight is contributing to these crazy high fraud stats. In layman’s terms, allowing a DSP to completely automate the way you’re running ads, taking a set-it and forget-it approach is a risky move.

Back when programmatic media was popularized... Years ago, when programmatic buying was the new and shiny object, many of us were attracted to the idea that we could hit KPIs with the platform algorithm doing all of the heavy lifting. We would push long-tail impression volume to get the largest sample to then prospect from for conversions. Never mind that many of those conversions weren’t actions taken by real humans. And by the way, we paid for those fake events.

Smart media teams today should avoid that approach alone. While algorithms are still a close friend, we can’t put all of our trust in their judgment. In order to avoid fraud and maintain a level of brand safety, we also tap into premium publisher white lists, private marketplace deals (PMPs), walled garden inventory (i.e. Google FLoC products) and first-party data from site tags and customer databases. Our cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) aren't going to be dirt cheap, but the value of what we're delivering is higher and more qualified.

The fact is that fraud exists, and it is undoubtedly present with the campaigns we run. However, we’ve found an approach to buying and reporting programmatic media that involves multiple checks to minimize bot traffic and wasted ad dollars. Here it is:

How To Minimize and Prevent Ad Fraud AND Have Successful Digital Ad Buys:

- Use analytics to examine the traffic our campaigns are driving. Check that the geography of the session matches the targeting, and look for suspicious patterns as related to site traffic, bounce rates, time and user path once on the site.
- Run every programmatic buy through a third-party ad server to get unbiased confirmation that the impressions reported by your DSP match with what you believe was purchased. If they don't, negotiate a makegood.
- Pay an additional CPM to layer filters from [Double Verify](https://doubleverify.com/), [Integral Ad Science](https://integralads.com/), MOAT, etc on top of programmatic buys.
- Apply proprietary exclusion lists and exclusion lists from DSP to avoid known domains for fraud.
- Review site transparency reports from campaigns on a regular basis. This is done in order to confirm that ads are running in brand-safe environments, and it will allow you to proactively identify any suspicious domains so that you can add those to your already existing exclusion lists.
- Always Push to optimize digital campaigns to the most specific KPIs (not just CTR) where possible. While bots can still trick conversion tracking, if you're an agency or marketing partner, when you’re layering actual data from the brand over your reports, you will be able to validate what you’re doing as legitimate.

While the full picture of ad fraud will continue to evolve as the fraudsters learn from their mistakes and find ways around our fixes, the dangers still lie mostly in unmonitored programmatic media buys. So keep your eyes open, and keep reading articles like these to stay ahead of what’s coming. No one hates losing advertising dollars more than we do, so [let us know if we can help](mailto:newbiz@lewiscommunications.com) shed more light on any fraudulent media concerns you may have.

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Ad fraud (and how to mitigate it.)

Whether we’re talking about a big university or a small college, a public college or a faith-based organization, the Big Ten Conference, or the ACC — all of these higher education institutions have one thing in common — every one of them relies on enrollment to survive. 2020 posed new challenges to overcome for the higher education category. Since the pandemic hit, many students have delayed enrollment. The [National Student Clearinghouse Research Center](https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/) reports **overall enrollment as being down 3.3 percent. Freshman enrollment is down 13 percent, and community college freshman enrollment is seeing a 19 percent decline**.

When enrollment is down, faculty and board members start to wriggle in their seats. Meetings about the future feel different and less anticipatory. And the need for a tangible plan becomes imminent, regardless of the available budget allocated for recruiting or marketing. Not every school has a ton of money lying around to put towards marketing. Which begs the question, what do universities and colleges do when they absolutely have to get more students enrolled without a big budget at their disposal?

What we can tell you from first-hand experience is that, regardless of your budget, you have enough to make a positive impact. You just have to be focused about how you use the money you have. That starts with nailing down the opportunities that will create the most value.

Just like in our personal lives, it’s hard to explain to other people who you are when you aren’t sure yourself. The same concept applies to higher education brands. So, what are the important blocks that build a college or university’s brand identity?

⇢ Digital user experience
⇢ Messaging
⇢ Imagery
⇢ Colors
⇢ Logos
⇢ Mascot
⇢ Merchandise

All of these things are what help students, alums, staff, and faculty build and show pride in the institution they’ve chosen to be a part of. For instance, if the people who have already committed to your school don’t feel connected to your message, colors, mascot, or merchandise, they won’t wear their school t-shirt or plant a bumper sticker on their car. They may not even recommend the school to their circle of friends — prospective students. That’s a problem...but a very fixable one. Your school simply needs to get to the core of who you’re representing.

We had the opportunity to help [Bethel University](https://www.bethelu.edu/) find its own true brand identity. The goal was to dig deeper into who they are as a university and explain it to the public in a clearer, more impactful way. Learning more about their students and faculty was the first place we wanted to start because they ARE Bethel University. The insights we gleaned from those key interviews helped shape the new positioning of Bethel: **Become You**.

Why, “Become You”? We learned that Bethel’s student-base and prospective students consisted of many first-generation college students coming into their college experience from a different vantage point than many other schools. Our approach was intentional — creating a narrative that communicated partnership. Bethel’s faculty would be there, walking alongside students in those formative years of college as they figure out who or what they want to become.

The new Bethel message needed to be felt across every arm of their brand. Students enter a college or a university with excitement and anticipation. They want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, and we wanted to help Bethel give them that. So we promoted "Become You" through as many tactics and mediums as the budget would allow.

We redesigned their logo and mascot, chose new fonts and colors, and helped their team create modern merchandise their students, alum, and faculty could wear proudly. We also designed a billboard with the new positioning displayed. But all of those changes are only part of the bigger puzzle. There were more holes to fill in order to get enrollment up...one in particular: their website was losing prospective students.

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Sometimes you’re too close to the problem to see the solution yourself. Bethel needed help to evaluate and identify the possible pain points for prospective students hindering them from enrolling. They have three colleges, and right away, we realized that those colleges being separated into their own websites was an issue. Those siloed pages needed to be integrated into one, united, modernized Bethel University brand website.

After an in-depth brand audit, we also discovered the potential for an even broader footprint for prospective students in the Middle Tennessee area. Our media team put a strategy together to meet potential students on the platforms they were already engaging with and utilized an omnichannel approach, both online and off to put Bethel on the radar of potential new grads all over the state. With a plan to get the word out, next, we needed to redesign and rebuild the website where prospective students would visit to formulate their opinion about Bethel.

Long before a student ever steps foot onto your campus, they will visit your institution’s website. New grads may have heard of your college or university, but it’s unlikely that they’ve ever seen the campus or had a chance to get a feel for what it would be like to be a student there.

Your website will be their first impression. What they experience when they land there will impact how they ultimately decide on whether or not your school will be on their list to visit — which puts them just a few steps away from enrolling. What message will your website send to these new grads? Is your image dated? Is it reflective of the education system you’ve worked so hard to build? Does your messaging accurately represent the ways you empower and educate students who attend classes there every day? Is it easy for prospective students and their families to navigate? If not, you can change that. But don’t start reaching out to web developers just yet. There are a few critical steps to take before you start rebuilding a website.

Rebuilding a website can almost be trickier to navigate than building one from scratch because determining which content is still relevant and migrating that content takes time. We highly recommend an agency partner to help guide you through the process. There are a lot of decisions to make that will directly affect the success or failure of the new site and any paid efforts made to direct prospects there.

Here are some of the big questions to ask yourself before you get started:

- Have you clearly defined your target audience?
- Do you have the right CMS for the type of content your website will host?
- Are there new brand guidelines in place? Fonts? Color pallets? Design standards?
- What is the main goal for your new website? What features should exist in order to meet that goal?
- Do you have a clear path for how users will navigate the site that ladders up to the goal?

After we helped answer these questions for Bethel, we were able to take their 16 separate websites and combine them to develop one fresh, cohesive website centered around personalized features to drive applications and interest in the NEW Bethel. While the website was under construction, we created two temporary landing pages for all digital ads to direct to as part of a data capture campaign to drive enrollment by offering interested students opportunities to learn more.

Bethel’s website became a one-stop resource for all types of students. We added a feature called, “[I Am](https://www.bethelu.edu/i-am)” to tie back to their new mantra, “Become you” which allowed users to select how they identify — as a prospective student, parent, etc. The resulting content was intuitively customized based on their selection. The results were exciting.

Here’s what a Bethel alum, Chris K., had to say about the new site:

>“This site represents the Bethel that I know and love. It makes me a very proud alum. #BecomeYou”

How a newly branded website drove enrollment

The first step to any higher education application process happens online. That’s a fact. With enrollments down since the pandemic, higher education can’t afford to have any hurdles in the way of potential applications on their website.

That’s why the key pages that drive enrollment were our focus for Bethel. Those key pages have all seen incredible growth.

⇨ “Learn More” for the Traditional campus saw a 70 percent increase in submission.

⇨ “Learn More” on the College of Professional Studies increased by 30 percent.

⇨ 300 leads generated for the College of Arts and Sciences and College of Health Sciences (Nearly 10 percent of current undergraduate enrollment).

⇨ “I Am” page visits are up 706 percent

⇨ The “Application” page is up 1,547 percent.

⇨ “Admissions” page viewership is up by 84 percent.

The project started with rebranding and messaging, then it evolved into lead generation and paid media that all tied back to the new Bethel that exists online on their website. Their site now simply reflects who they always were as a University, and the culmination of all of these efforts has paid off.

Any budget is enough to create more pride in your brand

The website rebuild was just one piece of the puzzle we needed to solve to get enrollment up for Bethel, and, like so many small Universities, they didn’t have boatloads of cash to do it. They had to stay focused on the goal and which tactics would best support it.

“Become you” has implanted itself much deeper than simply on their website. Today, their President and leadership team regularly refer back to this positioning, reminding their faculty and students that Bethel is a place where it’s ok not to know who or what you want to be yet. It’s a place to learn exactly that.

Any strides you can make towards creating a brand that your students, alumni, faculty, and staff feel pride in will be money well spent. Your website is important, but only because your people are excited to send others there. Your t-shirt designs may not seem like they deserve much time or energy invested, but if no one wants to wear them, that’s a statement that means more than you might like to admit. Change happens over time. But it starts by staying focused on tangible tactics.

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Case Study: How a rebrand improves higher ed enrollment.

Did we just use the “R” word? The National Bureau of Economic Research isn’t yet ready to declare one, but there’s no doubt that both businesses and consumers have the possibility on their minds. 
Is that kind of anticipation changing consumer behavior? More importantly, should it be changing yours?
As a financial marketing professional, you are tasked with stretching every dollar of your marketing funds in the best of circumstances. At the cusp of a possible recession, the temptation is certainly there to pull back. But, our view is that it’s also the most powerful and cost-effective time to build a deeper relationship with your customer base. 
In the course of our own experience with financial institutions, we’ve identified three steps you can take to maximize the impact of your marketing dollar during uncertain times:

1. Make sure you’re talking to the right people.

Audience Intelligence can eliminate waste and focus your marketing dollars where they can do the most good. We offer our clients an array of proven tools they can use to systematize and optimize the impact of their marketing spend.
How well do you know your audience—today? Be sure you have an updated plan to study the demographic data in your specific market. How has it shifted in the past few years? Where are people living and working today? Have commuter and traffic patterns shifted as workers return to the office part-time, if at all? 
Develop a way to measure and quantify not just the demographics of your community, but the personality traits, beliefs, and fears of those engaging with your brand and website. 
There’s never been a more important time to truly understand—and measure—who you serve, holistically. Develop a measurement plan to reach those in your community with the greatest chance to choose you, and prioritize investing in helping them do so.

2. Develop messaging that can speak to more than one segment.

That kind of efficiency in your marketing spend can yield both short-term and long-term rewards. 
We helped one of our clients, a regional credit union, identify a <a href="https://www.lewiscommunications.com/work/humanize-the-brand-gain-market-share" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">messaging strategy</a> that proved to be deeply meaningful for both older customers and Gen Z, by focusing on their commonly held values and beliefs. 
When the credit union first came to us with their marketing challenge, the ask seemed contradictory. How could we grow traditional deposit investments and continue to reach an older core demographic, while also reaching new, young movers to the area that were arriving post-COVID and for the first time, developing their own financial identity?
Fortunately, we were able to dive into their data and leverage our deep understanding of the customer base. As a result our team was able to concept a campaign featuring these youthful consumers in scenarios that aligned with the values of the older audience. 
The result was a campaign featuring messaging that looked and felt “young,” while speaking to the key similarities in values between younger and older segments. This particular client was able to generate a 22% increase in web traffic for those interested in home purchase in key geographies, and a 117% increase in new deposit value (88% funded by new members).
How can you achieve the same sort of efficiencies for your financial institution? The answers lie in your customer data, and implementing the right tools to help you identify them. 
One of the things we offer our clients are tools that look closely at consumers’ financial behaviors, core beliefs, values and what keeps them up at night. Tracking and trending not just new customer data, but understanding how consumer beliefs are impacted by what is happening around them, can help you develop and curate your own regional identity that feels far less ‘corporate’ than big-box competitors. 
The kind of insights delivered by our tools in turn aid creative teams in developing the kind of powerful, memorable messaging that will resonate with your customer.

3. Be consistent with your efforts.

Turning off the faucet costs a lot more than you think. Because when your marketing efforts resume, you’ll be coming from even further behind and will have to expend more effort and money to return to your desired growth path. 
As tactics are turned on and off, consumers lose confidence that your brand can meet their needs, and they can become more confused in what differentiates you from your competitor. This, in turn, can lead to a slow deterioration of awareness and preference in your market, and can undercut your financial goals of building growth and trust.
In recessionary times, as consumers settle in for more “entrenched” strategies and become less trusting of new entrants into their market, there is substantial risk when your institution delivers an inconsistent brand message. 
Even with consistent product-level market investments, share of search (the bread and butter of new account creation) can continue to decline without a robust, consistent awareness effort, leading to a slow erosion of market position and again, requiring a greater investment to return to baseline levels.
It can be tempting to ‘declare victory’ after reaching a significant milestone or KPI—or to focus on specific promotional efforts that offer more of a quick ‘provable’ than a core brand identity. But there is a real cost to failing to invest in your brand over the long-term, especially in tough economic times. 
The wolf is at the door. No, actually, he’s in the App Store on your customer’s smartphone. The same disruptions that have faced other industries across the American economy are now facing financial markets, with new, digital-exclusive entrants competing for a share of your consumers’ minds and wallets. If there were ever a time for customers to understand your complete brand proposition, it is now.
Creating an on-off approach towards brand presence and identity has not just a cost in the hearts and minds of your community, but it portends a slower, more expensive ramp-up to re-entry.

Economic headwinds create challenges—but they also create opportunity.

A recession has a funny way of giving consumers a laser-focus on what’s truly important in their lives. Changing economic conditions offer new opportunities for you to reduce their worries, and introduce yourself to people who are suddenly thinking about financial situations in new ways.
They may look to increase savings goals, or might be moving to accommodate new jobs. What new services or programs could you offer to demonstrate that you are thinking about their needs?

What about YOUR concerns?

Economic downturns also place new pressure on financial institutions. Everyone in our industry is keeping the blood pressure medicine handy these days. Given the recent challenges presented from the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-collapse-crisis-timeline-724f6458?gclid=CjwKCAjwrdmhBhBBEiwA4Hx5gzzogfmegXW_oGXfpAEdmkoU7MtN1RCRxzS5qhA9l23dHPhYy0SmIxoCGgQQAvD_BwE&amp;mod=&amp;psid=WSJ_DSA_GOO_ACQ_NA&amp;gclsrc=aw.ds&amp;ef_id=X9K1UgAAAISPJ1LS:20230412225008:s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Silicon Valley Bank collapse</a>, investor pressures, and accountability for growth and marketing investment, financial institutions are hardly immune to concerns about economic downturns. 
It can sometimes feel that these pressures are at cross-purposes—how do you manage to meet consumer demand and ease the financial burdens of your customer base, while intelligently facing your own institution’s challenges? 
As costs to acquire new customers rise along with interest rates, brands that can establish a clear position on who they serve, develop efficient messaging strategies and measure their effectiveness, and can measure the value of their brand investment will be well-positioned to build confidence—and gain market share—in their communities during this period of economic uncertainty.
This article was published in the Summer 2023 issue of <a href="https://thefinancialbrand.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Financial Brand</a>'s digital magazine, <a href="https://magazine.tfbinsights.com/view/12598618/82-83/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">INSIGHTS</a>.

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Three steps you can take to stretch your marketing budget during a recession.

Marketing will ad value during a pandemic

While the world is sitting at home, trying to figure out what to do with itself amid and post-COVID-19, brands have disappeared from advertisements on TV, streaming services, social media, podcasts, billboards, and beyond. Some believe it’s insensitive to advertise right now. And others, frankly, aren’t sure advertising dollars will be money well-spent. We get it. But we have to disagree. How does the old proverb go? Strike while the iron is hot? Well, the iron is hot! And the competition is low. It makes sense that brands are looking ahead at the remaining fiscal year and starting to panic. It’s understandable that many are considering substantially reducing their annual marketing budgets not knowing what the next 6 to 9 months holds. But there’s a strong case for pushing forward with a strategic media and advertising presence. Your brand should not go dark. And here’s why:

People are consuming more media and there Is less ad competition

During what would normally be a jam-packed media frenzy due to the upcoming elections and sports seasons, as we mentioned in part 1 of this series, ad-spend is at an all-time low. In fact, ad spending is projected to be [reduced](https://www.emarketer.com/content/how-coronavirus-affects-global-ad-spending) by up to $40 billion for the 2020 fiscal year between Q2 and Q4. Meanwhile, TV, digital, and social channels are currently being more heavily consumed than usual. People are stuck at home with their devices and desperate for a distraction. Even though there may never be a better time to spend money on media, many brands are hesitant during a time of crisis. Yes, of course, you will need to be careful about the positioning of your media messages. But bottom line, your brand should be out there.

“_We have clients that, in the initial couple weeks in March, wanted to get off the air and are now slowly coming back on and readjusting,” said one agency executive_. - [Digiday](https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/tv-advertisings-watershed-moment-it-is-finally-becoming-more-like-digital/).

History says, keep on advertising

Harvard Business School and leading media industry experts, Kantar Media, have both published studies showing how brands that advertise strategically during times of crisis and establish a brand position, create positive long-term growth and recognition, especially smaller brands typically facing steep competition.
Brands that continued to invest in advertising during the financial recession of 2007 and 2008 were able to recover, Kantar’s [study](https://adage.com/article/agency-news/kantar-study-shows-consumers-expect-brands-be-helpful-during-coronavirus-pandemic/2246361/) shows, and their consumer perception ultimately grew stronger over the next 10 years.
Harvard Business School’s studies provided a longer reaching perspective and considered all major economic downturns dating back to the Great Depression in 1929. The common denominator of brands who survived and excelled? Those brands continued to advertise during a crisis or [recession](https://hbr.org/2010/03/roaring-out-of-recession).

_It may seem like a paradox, but recessionary periods actually provide fertile grounds for marketers to grow their brand’s market share if they’re prepared to think long-term_. - Marketing Week



New windows of opportunity for brands

So, we know history says to keep marketing. And the competition is low. But what should brands do with that information? First things first, keep consistent communication with your consumers. Dropping off in communication will only hurt the relationship you’ve been working hard to build with them. The more present your message is, the faster your brand will recover. While media behaviors continue to change, new opportunities are created to reach people that you might not have considered in your marketing mix before.

- Check in on where your customers are spending their time. Adapt your online and social media strategies as the pandemic progresses in each market.
- Adopt an investor mindset. Be aggressive in your approach to adjust marketing spend, and continually track performance in order to readjust and reallocate your money quickly. A shift to online is obvious and inevitable, and companies will need to be both committed and creative about how to use the digital channels available to them.

A study published by the [World Economic Forum](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/04/covid19-media-consumption-generation-pandemic-entertainment/) broke down which platforms these four generations are consuming media on today:

- Gen Z Years 8-23: Online Videos, Video Games, Music Streaming, Online TV Streaming
- Millennials Years 25-39: Online Videos, Online TV Streaming, Broadcast TV, Music Streaming
- Gen X Years 40-54: Broadcast TV, Online TV Streaming, Online Videos, Online Press
- Boomer Years 55-75: Broadcast TV, Online TV Streaming, Radio, Online Press

The survival of your brand during and after this pandemic hinges on being present where your consumers are and keeping your message in front of them. Whether your customers are 13 years old and posting videos to [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/en/) all day or retired and fearfully glued to local news, not putting your brand’s message in front of them while their gobbling media up would be a mistake. Especially while prices are down.

In part 3 of this series, we will walk you through how to realistically plan for the uncertainties looming in Q3 and Q4 while sports and politics (hopefully) resume in the “new normal.”

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Advertising during and after COVID-19 — Part 2

Being a challenger isn’t about the size of your budget. It’s about the size of your ambition and the cleverness of your strategies.

The Challenger Brand Ethos

Challenger brands lack the advantage of vast resources or market dominance – they’re the underdogs of the industry. But what they lack in strength, they make up for in agility and innovation. These brands compete by challenging the status quo, disrupting their markets, and looking for angles to outsmart rather than outspend their competitors.

Brand Evaluation Metrics: Quality, Selectability, Resources, and Differentiation

To navigate this challenge, it’s crucial to step back and evaluate your brand from multiple angles. This isn’t just about how your brand is perceived, but also understanding your capabilities.
<ul><li dir="ltr">How does your product or service quality measure up against competitors?</li><li dir="ltr">Are you easy for customers to select?</li><li dir="ltr">Do you have sufficient resources to meet marketing goals?</li><li dir="ltr">How distinctive is your brand positioning?</li></ul>

Approaches for Common Brand Challenges

Depending on where your gaps are, here are strategic pointers for each scenario:



If your product feels like it’s blending into the background, it’s time to spice things up. Advocate for enhancing the quality of your organization’s products or services. This might mean investing in better materials, technology, staff, or highlighting the unique aspects of a product or service that are not well-associated with your brand today.

Make it easier for customers to choose your brand by enhancing your visibility. Improve your online presence, optimize your SEO strategies, and ensure your unique selling propositions (USPs) are front and center where your potential customers are looking.
If selectability varies across your organization, take the lead in developing collaborations across your organization to gather data that points to areas that already have access and those that aren’t ready to convert leads.

If you’re operating with a lean team or low budget, focus your efforts on high-impact marketing activities. Re-prioritize and automate tools to handle repetitive tasks where possible, so your team can focus on the efforts that have the biggest impact on reaching your organization’s goals.

We often hear marketing leaders struggle to identify the value of investing in branding. 
<ul><li dir="ltr">Use large data analysis that spans industries to point to the value of investing in brand-building:<ul><li dir="ltr"><a href="https://indd.adobe.com/view/b6033624-f784-4869-a0eb-6b6e14fcb43c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kantar’s analysis</a> of 170,000 consumers across 17 years of corporate financial and quantitative research has found strong brands not only have higher market shares but they also recover from market fluctuations more quickly. </li><li dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.nielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024-Nielsen-Annual-Marketing-Report.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Neilsen analysis</a> found that a 1-point gain in brand metrics, such as awareness and consideration, drives a 1% increase in sales. In contrast, a brand loses an average of 2% of future revenue for every quarter it stops advertising.</li><li dir="ltr">Peter Field and Les Binet’s analysis published in The Long and Short of It reviewed more than 700 brands in more than 100 profit and non-profit categories and found brand campaigns support market share growth more strongly over the short and long term than direct response campaigns.</li></ul></li><li dir="ltr">Forge relationships with your finance, sales, and operations teams to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate together, such as:<ul><li dir="ltr">Immediate impact KPIs<ul><li dir="ltr">Brand interest</li><li dir="ltr">Lead volume</li><li dir="ltr">Quality of leads</li></ul></li><li dir="ltr">Long-term impact KPIs<ul><li dir="ltr">Perception of brand </li><li dir="ltr">Perception rank</li><li dir="ltr">Willingness to use</li><li dir="ltr">Key business metrics, such as sales and market share growth</li></ul></li></ul></li></ul>

A brand that’s distinctive drives recall when someone is ready to look for your products or services. Distinction is best achieved by both aligning with your target audience’s values and presenting your brand in a way that’s not easily confused for your competitors. 
Many brands struggle not only with how to present their brand, but also what to say. We have found staff and customer interviews, as well as focus group research, to be an effective way to inform how to distinctly speak about your organization to your target audiences.
But it’s not only important to select what to say. It’s incredibly important how you say it. High-quality creative can be a powerful element to set your brand apart from competitors.
<a href="https://indd.adobe.com/view/b6033624-f784-4869-a0eb-6b6e14fcb43c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kantar analysis</a> found brand distinction was the biggest factor common among the world’s leading brands.

WRAP UP

Embracing your status as a challenger means adopting a mindset where challenges are reframed as opportunities. Focus on what will move the needle for your brand, say no to everything else, and prepare to disrupt the status quo. 
If you have questions or need guidance in navigating your market, Lewis would be happy to assist. Reach out to <a href="mailto:hello@lewiscommunications.com">hello@lewiscommunications.com</a> to set up a free initial consultation call.

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Navigating the Waters as a Challenger Brand: A Marketing Specialist’s Guide

Nobody wants to keep chasing the next big thing. Chasing is like fishing, and people say they like to fish, but what they really like to do is catch. Not only can investing in influencer marketing feel like chasing the next trend, but it can also feel unreliable and unvetted, quite the opposite of more definitive alternatives like measurable ad spends.
Yet, here’s the truth: The returns look awfully good. Here at Lewis, some of our most notable successes in the past year have been due to the monetary gains clients have realized through influencer marketing. Ultimately, as vague and unvetted as investing in influencer marketing may seem, it’s no different from anything else: The good stuff is always good because somebody didn’t half-ass it. 
Every successful project relies on people who are willing to get their hands dirty and do the work. As it relates to influencers, the work looks like hours of careful research and observation. It’s valuable time spent combing through the online communities relevant to a client’s brand and marketplace. It’s also learning where their target audiences gather online, how they interact with one another and, most importantly, who the leaders are. Find the leaders, and you’ve found the influencers.

Everything Old Is New Again

Influencers can be just about anyone, from powerful monarchs influencing their subjects through public speeches and informal endorsements to <a href="https://www.coca-colacompany.com/faqs/did-coca-cola-invent-santa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Santa, who was an early influencer for Coca-Cola</a>. And technically, Mother Teresa was an influencer for the Catholic faith.
So why are audiences — a brand’s potential customers — influenced by strangers? 
Trust in consumerism isn’t reliant on whether or not the user knows or has ever met the influencer. Instead, trust is a consequence of relatability. If a consumer relates to an influencer, that relatability has built-in trust that comes with relevant and meaningful connections shared by like-minded people. 
This helps explain why, according to Content Marketing Institute, 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands — even if they don’t personally know them. The connection between influencers and consumers is as powerful as the data suggests:
71% — According to the <a href="https://www.nielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/2021-Nielsen-Trust-In-Advertising-Sell-Sheet.pdf">2021 Nielsen Trust in Advertising study</a>, 71% of consumers trust advertising, opinions and product placements from influencers.
80% — According to first-quarter 2022 norms from<a href="https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/getting-closer-influencers-help-brands-build-more-personal-consumer-connections/"> research measuring the effectiveness of influencer ads</a> in nearly 200 campaigns, an average of 80% of influencer ad viewers were able to recall seeing the brand featured in the ads. 
76% — Seventy-six percent of brands are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2022, according to Aspire 2022 State of Influencer Marketing.

Return on Investment: What’s Possible

Most of the observations we’ve noted so far — the trust factor, the persuasive power of being relatable, and how what’s old is new again — are at work in the influencer-centric campaigns we’ve created for our clients. 
Teasing out these factors and allowing the relationships between influencers and their followers to work organically — and without heavy-handed intrusion from our company or the brand — is a critical part of our standard and process at Lewis. 
Sure, we’ll provide the brand messaging and assist influencers with products for giveaways or an exclusive promotional code, but we don’t dictate the style or means by which the message is delivered. Our success in the influencer marketing space is partly due to this commitment to take a step back, and let relationships between influencers and their followers reach critical inflection points that result in relatability and, ultimately, trust. 
Once trust is established, the user journey that spans from engagement to making a purchase (or taking action in a number of other ways) are natural next steps. We know this because we’ve experienced it. Lewis started small. Early on, we paired influencers with clients who’s products or services were natural fixtures within online spaces where active users and thriving social groups and communities were abundant.
And after experiencing some initial success, we expanded our use of influencers over time, gaining increasingly favorable returns on behalf of our clients. To date, on average, each influencer we’ve partnered with reaches and engages more prospective customers at higher rates than brand posts. This considerable gain is rooted in: 
the cost-effectiveness of dollars spent;
And the quality of the reach.
As it relates to the “quality of the reach,” you might look at it this way: This approach is the exact opposite of the salesperson's “cold call.” The type of people reached by influencers are ripe for action, because these relationships existed before our clients partnered with influencers. As such, “influencer reach” becomes a warm call, where resulting engagement is high and taking action is likely. 
This bears out in measurable ways. For one of our clients, earlier this year, we gave each influencer we work with a promo code to reach their respective audiences. Within this 4-month effort, these influencers generated nearly $5 million in total revenue for our client, and 41% of them were new customers who had never previously made a purchase from the brand. As for return-on-investment during this period? Incoming revenue realized against costs was 48:1.

What’s the Secret Sauce?

What is the secret sauce? Well, we sort of gave that away in the beginning. It’s best captured by a familiar quote <a href="https://www.lewiscommunications.com/blog/is-your-content-working-or-just-sitting-there-filling-space">we’ve used before</a>: 
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” — Thomas Edison 
A good marketing strategy will prioritize the time and work required to learn the nuances of online spaces where target audiences spend their time. And they’ll do what’s needed to become exceedingly familiar with the influencers who hold court there. It’s about immersion. 
And, just like most things, it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. For instance, we’re usually looking for influencers with a respectable number of followers. And, yes, it’s true that “respectable” is indeed a vague way to describe the size of an influencer’s following, but the vagueness is instructional. 
Depending on the situation (the brand, industry, competitors and the client’s unique goals), you’ll want to judge the number of followers a social influencer has against other influencers in the same space. Plus, based on a client’s single, overarching goal (example: leads, pageviews or online sales), we’ll determine whether the size of an influencer's audience is more or less important than the level of engagement an influencer typically commands. 
We’re also mindful of how influencer marketing fits into a client’s larger goals and marketing strategy. This is not a tactic we trot out on its own. Rather, it’s part of a multipronged attack. If traditional media can be analogous to air strikes, then influencers represent a unit within our boots-on-the-ground campaign. Each effort supports the other. 
And influencer marketing is no different. They need the support of frequency, where those receiving influencer messages are also intersecting with messaging from other sources, whether it’s targeted online ads, sponsored or social organic posts and a robust offering of supporting content like a client website that’s layered with useful information and easy-to-find places of action. 
We’ll end where we started: There may be a looming sense of vague ambiguity that a brand feels when investing in influencer marketing for the first time. These feelings are usually paired with these questions: How do we find the right influencer? How do we even know what characteristics make an influencer right to promote our company or product? How can we be confident the influencers we choose will be the right match for our niche product or unusual idea?
Any approach to influencer marketing that’s not fully vetted and well-researched can quickly turn into a dose of guesswork with a pinch of wishful thinking thrown in. Investing in influencer marketing and choosing the right influencers for the job is science when a brand’s marketing arm is committed to doing the work.

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Why are influencers so effective at selling your product?

As consumers embrace a diverse array of streaming content providers, broadcast television, once a one-stop-shop for dominant advertising reach, continues to decline. The pandemic provided a final shot in the arm for table stakes network viewing, as audiences leaned into local news and spent more time in general watching television. However, as life, for the most part, has resumed and connected TV’s adoption curve is nearly vertical, the average daily percentage of U.S. households that watched linear TV in the Fall of 2021 was the <a href="https://www.samba.tv/resources/q3-2021-state-of-viewership-future-planning">lowest of any quarter</a> in the past two years. 
These trends have a domino effect on how viewership is measured and, in turn, how advertising agencies choose to make TV buys and how their assessment of viewer metrics influences those buys. As such, we’ve created a quick Q&amp;A to offer our clients and partners a general lay of the land. Questions provide answers from how these external factors will influence our strategy to our approach to execution moving forward.

How will viewer metrics change based on the diverse ways (cable, satellite, streamers) people consume content via television?

Using an impression-based model will be critical for gauging advertising opportunities within the TV landscape. Largely fueled by two industry milestones, this shift is well underway. First and foremost, the pandemic fast-tracked consumption trends for most viewers, resulting in unprecedented growth in streaming viewership – well ahead of industry forecasts. Secondly, it was announced that Broadband Only (BBO) homes — television homes that can only receive video programming through a broadband internet connection — would now be incorporated into Nielsen Local Universe Estimates. This change took effect in January 2021 for <a href="https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/dvglossary-2018.pdf">Return Path Data</a> (RPD+) markets and will roll out for Local People Meter (LPM) and Set Meter markets in January 2022.
RPD+ markets are smaller markets that make up 23% of the country’s TV Households. LPM markets include the 25 top cities in the country, representing 50% of U.S. TV Households, while Set Meter markets are mid-to-large size markets representing 27% of the total U.S. TV Households.

What are BBO households?

Television homes that can only receive video programming through broadband internet, known as BBO households, have surged in popularity recently and now comprise a whopping 25% of all TV households. That’s up from just 18% in 2018. Rather than relying on the traditional means of Over-The-Air or cable/satellite provider viewing, more people choose to stream their content exclusively. BBO homes access their programming using popular streaming services, including DirecTV Stream, Fubo TV, Hulu Live, and YouTube TV. These providers offer nationally available and live local programming.

How will these changes impact programming ratings and impressions?

With the addition of BBO Households, Universe Estimates will increase. And while broadcast TV stations will see an increase in impressions, they’ll experience a decrease in ratings, which are based on a percentage of Universe Estimates. With TV Households expected to increase by an average of 13% year-over-year, these changes will impact each market’s TV Household numbers differently. For instance, depending on location, we may see shifts from 3% (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale) to 39% (Juneau).

How will these changes impact the way we make TV buys?

The majority of TV stations currently sell inventory using a ratings-based model. In these scenarios, orders are transacted using Gross Rating Points (GRPs) as the common currency for fulfillment. GRPs are a measure of impact and are expressed as the percentage of the target market reached, multiplied by exposure frequency, e.g., 60% of target market x 3 ad spots = 180 GRPs.

Now that Nielsen will measure BBO homes, the total number of TV Households will increase. This will subsequently increase PUT (People Using Television). As a result, stations are forecasting a substantial decline in GRPs across most existing orders. This means that orders guaranteed on a GRP basis may experience significant under-delivery. What’s historically been considered an effective reach and frequency threshold, based on the market targeted, may need to be reevaluated.

Is there any concern about duplicate reporting with live, local streaming?

This new measurement will include impressions from live, local streaming platforms if the household passes the tuning test (5-plus minutes of streaming local content). Nielsen is only including BBO impressions that are placed through a linear feed, which eliminates impression duplication. With the inclusion of these new homes, it’s not possible to determine the exact number of impressions coming from streamed local content versus broadcast-only. Ad impressions placed directly through Hulu or other platforms will be captured in Nielsen’s Digital Ads Rating service.

How do we at Lewis Communications plan to adjust our approach to TV buying based on these emerging trends and changes?

The inclusion of BBO households allows us to shift from GRP to impression-based buying. By utilizing impression-based buying, we can ensure a more comparable unit of measurement across multiple media tactics as new platforms and audiences evolve. 
As we work to transition into this new TV buying approach, our Channel Engagement team at Lewis will continue to review Nielsen and other industry resources on the topic of BBO household inclusion and impression-based buying. Most critically, the success of our buys hinges on the understanding that these changes will not affect markets equally. And, as a result, we’ll continue to analyze individual markets based on how each is impacted, especially within the geographies highly targeted by our clients. 
Currently, Lewis adheres to strict buying guidelines. We’re committed to these guidelines because each ensures effective and cost-efficient buys for our clients. While our unit of measurement will shift, the integrity of our buys will remain intact. Our team will continue to strategically craft buys based on strong daypart mixes and brand-appropriate programming to reach our target audiences.

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Q&A: Understanding impression-based TV buys.

The game is changing. Apple is journeying toward greater consumer privacy, and many other tech giants are following their lead. Marketers must begin to play by a new set of rules. What does this mean for you and your company? How can you win in this new era? 
 You’ll need to adapt, and Lewis is here to help.

The Rundown

This fall, Apple released its highly-anticipated iOS15 update on iPhone. This update saw various changes that will have echoing ramifications for advertisers. iOS15 provided enhanced privacy controls for users, limiting advertisers’ ability to track, target, and measure their marketing effectiveness with Apple users. iOS15 is going to change a lot, especially with how it impacts email marketing. 
First, and arguably most importantly, Apple introduced its Mail Privacy Protection feature. This new wrinkle effectively stops marketers from tracking email opens in Apple Mail. . Instead, it will appear as though a user has opened your email, even if they haven’t. Using <a href="https://www.litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-may-2021/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">research provided by Litmus</a>, we estimate that almost 50% of all email users will be impacted by Mail Privacy Protection. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but for this segment, the once-heralded open rates are now irrelevant and unreliable.
	Secondly, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will make it more challenging to personalize and optimize emails. Apple’s iOS15 will hide IP addresses when an email is opened. Because of this, it will be impossible to discern a user’s geographical location. Email geo-segmentation strategies will essentially be rendered useless. Additionally, Mail Privacy Protection will impact efforts that involve send-time optimizations. Typically, a marketer will ensure that emails are sent at times targeted users are most likely to open. However, Mail Privacy Protection makes it harder to discern when emails are genuinely being opened, making it difficult to test and optimize send times. 	Thirdly, Apple introduced the Hide My Email feature. This addition allows users to generate a unique, randomized, and Apple-encoded email address they can use for signups, opt-ins, and more. This randomized address will receive emails before passing them along to a user’s personal address. The user will still receive your emails, but only an apple-encoded address will be visible to the sender. As such, your CRM database may become more cryptic. So with all of these disruptive changes, what can you do about it?

How You Can Win

These changes with iOS15 are significant. But with big change comes big opportunity. To win, you’ll need to adapt. We’re here to help. 	First, understand that for a large portion of your audience, email open rates are now unreliable. The importance this metric once held is now shifting toward other KPIs. You’ll need to do the same. We strongly suggest paying closer attention to qualified site traffic, conversions, and revenue. Now the truest indicator of engagement, these KPIs will grow in relative importance and function as a compass, guiding your efforts. 	Additionally, we suggest investing in your brand’s ability to collect zero-party data. Doing so means sourcing data directly from users themselves. Ask users the polling questions that provide a better profile of the audience you’re targeting. Ask their name, interests, etcetera. We recommend baking value into these questions for your users; you want to reward them for answering. This will help you garner information at scale, and personalize your content to create more meaningful experiences.

Conclusion

The changes we see with iOS15 are big. Hot on the heels of <a href="https://www.lewiscommunications.com/blog/what-advertisers-and-consumers-need-to-know-about-apples-latest-update-ios-14" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iOS14</a>, this update is a clear signal that Apple intends to double down on increasing consumer privacy. We anticipate that other tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Android will make similar privacy steps. With Apple leading the way, this space is inching towards increasingly greater consumer privacy. We expect this direction to continue, and we are excited to do the same. Every day the game is changing; we’re here to help you win.

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iOS15 privacy controls: Apple’s walled garden is growing.

With over 100 million monthly active users, TikTok has taken the world by storm. It’s a space where people from all walks of life can show up as their authentic selves, and its rise to popularity came at exactly the right time. Amidst a global pandemic, TikTok fulfilled an entertainment and social void for people around the globe.

The influencer game has been altered forever by the emergence of TikTok — there’s a source of connection from brands to people in a way that’s never really existed before. Livestream has become mainstream with a massive opportunity for brands to build global communities at scale through earned (and paid) media on TikTok.

How is TikTok Different from Other Social Platforms?

TikTok is more of a content platform than it is social media. You may have to throw out the old social media strategy you’ve been using for years. It won’t apply to TikTok. Instead of traditional ads, you’ll need to learn to make TikToks.

The TikTok community is active and attentive, with users spending an average of 85 minutes a day in the app. That opens up a big opportunity for brands to see high engagement with paid ads. Engagement with branded content on TikTok regularly outperforms engagement rates on other platforms.

A common misconception is that only Gen Z uses TikTok, however, while their community does skew younger, the spread among ages ranging from 13 to 44 is fairly even. The audience is also unique, allowing advertisers to reach new audiences that aren't using other platforms. **Nearly half of the TikTok audience does not use Instagram**.

If you’re evaluating paid advertising options, a great place to start is TikTok’s In-Feed Auction Ads that appear in the For You feed. Since the key to scaling on TikTok is creativity, it's important to think outside the box of what works best on other media channels. 

**Here are a few best practices for TikTok Auction Ads**:

→ Design for sound-on and talk directly to the camera. Utilize dialogue, music, and sound effects. 100% of Auction Ads have sound on and 33% of videos with the highest VTR address viewers directly.

→ Get the message out early and with urgency. Showcase the heart of the matter in the 3-5 second window. 63% of videos with the highest CTR highlight the key message within the first 3s and 50% of videos with the highest CTR contain a compelling CTA.

→ Capitalize on popular trends and appeal to emotion. Get familiar with what the audience cares about and is partaking in. 21% of videos with the highest VTR leverage popular trends/effects/music and 47% of videos with the highest VTR are emotionally appealing.

→ Shoot and edit natively for TikTok. Ads shot vertically have a 25% increase of 6s VTR and 40% of videos with the highest CTR are edited the TikTok way with crisp cuts, zooms, and overlays.

Brands should approach TikTok as a creator, not as a marketer. Rather than strictly following a defined set of brand guidelines, the TikTok community pushes brands to be authentic. When ads match the look, feel, and sound of TikToks, they will live up to the users' expectations. That creativity and positivity can then translate into better performance.

The goal is to co-create with the community. Partnering with a creator is a great way to get a head start when you’re breaking into TikTok. Co-creating with the community lets “them” — your audience — take control of your brand. How, you ask?

How to Create TikToks, Not Ads

- Enable the stories of others through your brand. The level of co-creation between brands and users is higher than ever. From TikTok’s infancy, brands have realized the audience on this platform is different, and smartly, have sought a more authentic connection with their customers. TikTok presents the unique opportunity to foster authentic relationships with your stakeholders. Brands should always be listening for a chance to join the conversation, ready to respond quickly to take advantage of opportunities. Do you have that listener/watcher on staff? If TikTok is part of your social strategy, maybe you should...
- Be authentic. Brands are not people, but brands do have to create a human connection to people. What people expect from their friends, they expect from brands — humility, determination, and optimism. 79% of people turn to social media to find out what’s going on in the world. People will often look to brands to help give them a perspective on a hot button topic or even to get a boost to their own self-image. Trusted brands become trusted friends on TikTok.
There’s a second piece to being authentic: you don’t want to come across too calculated. Some of the best-performing content you’ll ever create on TikTok will be on a whim. You can spend countless hours creating a piece of content for it to perform alright. There’s no way to really know how something is going to perform until you post it. Experiment with content and create similar content when it performs well. Test, test, test.
- Stick with it. Be proud of what you’re creating and continue to post content that aims to spark joy, inform, and educate. Don’t try to go viral with every video. Instead, put out an authentic platform filled with content that reflects your brand ideals. If you do that, you’ll grow an engaged audience in no time, with moments of viral content. An engaged audience wants to watch you grow and cheers you on every step of the way.

A great example of all three of these things combined is a campaign started by DSW last year. DSW ran the [#TooManyShoes campaign](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/dsws-debut-hashtag-challenge-on-tiktok-racks-up-732m-views/582322/), encouraging users to create videos with #TooManyShoes to show the inside of their closets. 770,000 users participated, and videos with the hashtag were viewed more than 1.3 billion times. WHY?? They just felt like it was a fun thing to do.

**Here’s what they did**:
DSW brought in five influencers to promote the challenge and inspire others to join, including Brittany Xavier (@brittany.xavier), Janina (@official_janina), Bria Jones (@heybriajones), Rodney Lee (@kidrl), Everett Williams (@iameverettwilliams).

Then they worked with hip-hop singer [Devmo](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXRb2TmaWgk5JXmhIAave3Q) and recording artist Julian Xtra on an original song for people to use in their videos. In case you didn’t know, TikTok is super-centered around music. It actually started out as a lip-syncing contest app called [Musical.ly](https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/12/10/18129126/tiktok-app-musically-meme-cringe). TikTok users had several opportunities to win things in this challenge.
- A full closet of shoes
- 10 gift cards valued at $500 each.

Based on those 1.3 billion views and the fact that about 61 percent of millennials (18-34) [report that influencers have at one point impacted their consumer decisions](https://econsultancy.com/reports/influencer-marketing-2020/), this was a smart move by DSW. It’s only the beginning.


A New Outlook Towards Social Media

TikTok’s algorithm democratizes creativity among creators and makes it easy to step in as a new creator. The number of followers you have doesn’t matter because the algorithm sends your videos out, despite your history of likes and followers. As users engage with your content, it continues to get pushed out to more users.

The TikTok algorithm serves you content you want to consume in a feed of content called For You. It caters to your unique preference based on the content you already engage with. That’s very different from Instagram — on Instagram users first see the content posted by whoever they follow in their feed. They have to leave that feed to seek out content from other users they don’t follow. The TikTok algorithm puts higher priority on feeding you content you’d like — no matter who posts it — and less focus on the content of the other creators you follow.

TikTok brings the opportunity to access global rising talent (potential influencers) on a new level. This phenomenon applies to every genre of entertainment. Talent isn’t determined like other traditional social platforms. The girl next door may be more talented than celebrities on the app. TikTok is knocking down barriers to entry — creators can go from zero followers to millions seemingly overnight. Now is a great time for brands to think about how they can ride this wave of new talent.

Connecting Commerce with Human Creators

TikTok continues to remove the roadblocks of a traditional media gatekeeper. People react to seeing other people like them in content and in creators. The content they connect with most ends up being content that reminds them of themselves — it’s relatable. And because TikTok serves up preferential content by design, you have to know your audience well in order to get your content in front of them

Social platforms continue to release new features for consumers to purchase products without ever leaving the app. Brands have a real opportunity to start to take advantage of the new and rapidly improving social shopping experience alongside content that’s relatable. Here’s an example.

[Walmart partnered with TikTok](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/09/walmart-to-host-a-new-live-stream-shopping-event-on-tiktok-following-successful-pilot/) to host a shoppable live stream experience that grew their following by 25 percent. Users were able to shop while interacting with their favorite TikTok creators. In addition to being educated and entertained, viewers were able to participate in a seamless shopping experience where they could tap on a product and check out during or after the livestream.

The traditional purchasing funnel has evolved, and because of e-commerce and social commerce, the funnel is much shorter than it used to be. So, what really drives consumers to make a purchase now-a-days? The bottom line [is emotion](https://medium.com/lewiscommunications/how-to-read-a-consumers-subconscious-mind-1a6a49ddc21f). It’s the story of how your company was built or how your product has impacted its users — consumers want to be moved. The goal of earned media on TikTok is to make a great product, and then leverage the content that average consumers create using your product.

How to Find the right TikTok Influencer For Your Brand

We’ve said it already and we’ll say it again: When brands are looking for creators to work with, the key is finding an authentic fit. As influencer marketing evolves, brands have less control, and the creator has more power. Long gone are the days of detailed pitch decks and strict talking points. Now, creators tell brands what works best with their audience. So, finding exactly the right TikToker for your brand takes patience and a willingness to be open-minded.

Thankfully, TikTok makes it easy to find and connect with one by providing a library of content creators in the TikTok Creator Marketplace, or TCM. TCM facilitates quick and effective introductions, tracks real-time data, and allows the content to be promoted with specified targeting and a clickable CTA. Stick to these 3 points, and you’ll be on your way to finding your person.

- Find a Niche. The single most important shift in the behavior of social media users occurred over the past year. Social media today is more interesting and interactive than it has ever been. Users want a voice for an individual thing. On TikTok, there are over 600 million voices that all focus on a very specific niche. Creators can build communities around their niches, and that’s what they become known for. They are the go-to for one specific aspect of a distinct thing. ANYthing. Whether it’s how to make the world’s tallest ice cream cone or the funniest meme about millennials. What’s your brand’s niche? If you don’t know, maybe hop on TikTok and start looking...
- Focus on the perfect fit, not the largest following. If a creator wouldn’t use your product organically, you shouldn’t partner with them for a sponsored collaboration. The users of TikTok will sniff out inauthenticity immediately. They know when creators are just in it for the money. If a creator uses your products organically simply because they want to, they would be a great addition to your influencer list. Even if they don’t have a crazy following, if their content is good and relates well to their audience’s interests, TikTok will serve it up to other users with similar interests.
- Be open and realistic about budget. Navigating how to build a TikTok audience is an entirely different ball game for large brands versus small businesses. It’s easier for corporate brands to get earned media on TikTok due to their size, which is part of the reason creators expect to be paid more by large brands.

Creators are more likely to accept an unpaid collaboration from small businesses that don’t have marketing budgets. But beware — creators will go public in a heartbeat if you mistreat them, undersell them, or treat them as a campaign rather than a human.

TikTok is For Brands Who Are Comfortable Being Real

TikTok is not for every brand. TikTok is the social platform to connect with consumers in a real, unfiltered way. If you need your brand’s message crafted perfectly and there’s no margin for creative interpretation, the kinds of influencers and viewers that thrive on TikTok may not be the right fit for your brand. But on the flip side, if you have a strong point of view, odds are, there’s a niche group of creators on TikTok who share that view. And they carry some serious weight within their TikTok community. As a brand, the first step is to just show up authentically on TikTok. That’s it, that’s all it takes.

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Will your brand benefit from TikTok?

Let’s face it: Every healthcare provider organization depends on nurses. They serve as the patient advocate and the face of your hospital or practice. Great nursing care means a great patient experience. Poor nursing care means poor outcomes, higher turnover, and can have a costly impact on reimbursement, reputation, and ranking.

Patients value great nursing care more than anything else you offer. Patients and their loved ones will tell their friends which facilities they trust and recommend when they are at their most vulnerable — and which they will not. Well-respected nurses — and plenty of them — equates to a successful healthcare organization.

We’ve identified three core elements of nurse retention you can start building into your strategy immediately. But first, we need to talk about the impact of nursing turnover and costs associated.

There is a legitimate financial risk to losing and replacing talented nurses in today’s climate. Firstly, they occupy a substantial portion of your payroll. In fact, the clinical nursing staff makes up a [reported 40 percent](https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nurse-staffing/nurse-staffing-crisis/) of health systems’ operational staffing costs. And in 2018, they started leaving their jobs — and the profession — at an alarming rate that’s only risen since the pandemic.

Bedside RN turnover reached 17.2 percent in 2018, with an average vacancy rate of 8 percent. Between 2014 and 2018, the average hospital turned over 87.8 percent of its entire workforce.

Every time a nurse leaves, it’s costly. Take hospitals for example — each nurse turnover costs them at least $40,000. According to a 2019 National Health Care Retention AMP RN [Staffing Report](https://pdf4pro.com/view/2019-national-health-care-retention-amp-rn-staffing-report-5bab3b.html), the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is $52,100, resulting in the average hospital losing $4.4M – $6.9M per year. PER YEAR. But you’re losing more than just money…

Losing nurses means your existing staff has to do more work to carry the load. The organization’s morale will suffer, and you risk burning out the nurses you still have. Your patients will notice –– and all of those things will cost you.

Poor patient experience is one of the top reasons people don’t return to a hospital or health system. That poor patient experience often stems from low employee morale. Low employee morale quickly turns into high turnover, and a shortage of nurses means no quick hiring solutions. The costs will compound over time, and that will be detrimental to the success of your healthcare organization.

Just imagine what you could be doing with an additional $4.4M – $6.9M in the budget each year.

There’s no question, nurse retention is one of the biggest problems facing the healthcare system today. The demand for nurses is only increasing. The [projected job growth rate](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm) is 12 percent by 2028, which is much faster than almost any other occupation. The average age of RNs today is 50, and nurses from the baby boomer generation will [leave a gap of 260,000 nurses](https://www.myamericannurse.com/tripping-over-the-welcome-mat-why-new-nurses-dont-stay-and-what-the-evidence-says-we-can-do-about-it/) or more by 2025. Meanwhile, the new nursing graduates entering to replace them expect very different things.

According to an [AMN Healthcare 2023 study](chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.amnhealthcare.com/siteassets/amn-insights/surveys/amn-healthcare-rnsurvey-2023.pdf) of 18,226 US registered nurses in 2023, 37% of Gen Z nurses say they are likely to leave nursing due to the pandemic, an increase since 2021. New nurses are leaving not just your hospitals and clinics, but the profession, at a staggering rate. Recent nursing labor studies suggest that as many as [1 in 3 new RNs will leave](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3762080/) the profession within their first two years of practice. If they stay in the profession, it is harder than ever to earn their loyalty.

In a 2022 report, McKinsey & Company estimated a gap of 200,000 to 450,000 nurses nationwide by 2025. The most effective way to approach a deepening shortage of nurses is to hold onto the great nurses you already have.

Nurse retention will have more than one significant ramification if it’s not addressed head-on. Amidst a shortage of nurses on staff, the nurses you do have are likely being overworked and underappreciated.

Reports completed by the [American Nurses Foundation](https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/work-environment/health-safety/disaster-preparedness/coronavirus/what-you-need-to-know/mental-health-and-wellness-survey-2/) in December of 2020 say that exhaustion continues to be a top issue for nurses across the country. Your organization must develop a strategy in order to avoid exhausting your nurses. The alternative is losing them.

3 Core Elements of a Nursing Retention Strategy

People crave recognition. They want to be seen and appreciated. Nurses are just people, and they’ve chosen an extremely selfless profession. As their current employer, you can stand out from the competition (other hospitals, practices, and health systems) by searching for simple ways to improve morale.

1. Find out why your nurses are leaving
- Ask them why 
Surveying your staff in a confidential way will be an important first step. Let them know you are listening. If you are not regularly conducting surveys of your team engagement and budget is a concern, consider taking advantage of the [free surveys](https://clinician.health/) from the American Medical Association (AMA). These were developed as part of the AMA’s efforts to support resilience across the medical profession. They’ve had more than 60 organizations use their surveys in 2020 and have proven to shed light on how organization benchmarks stand up against national results. If you can dedicate a portion of your budget to consistently surveying your staff with more personalized questions than what AMA offers for free, ask your agency partner if they can help. A more personalized survey experience can be extremely effective.
- Determine priority needs
Surveys are step one, but don’t stop there. Work to identify which groups have the highest need for intervention. In one series of employee focus groups we conducted for an academic medical center, we found employees were often growing restless 18-24 months on the job, which helped the team focus on developing a customized retention strategy for those employees.
- Make changes
Remember that your work doesn’t stop with a survey or focus group; it must be followed up with tangible changes that address the key issues you identify. Show your staff that you’re serious about their well-being, and it will yield results. As an example, one academic medical center included signs and newsletters stating what improvements they made that came from employee suggestions. Those suggestions included lighted bike paths, water fountains that were water bottle friendly, upgraded nursing lockers, and a tuition forgiveness grant for nurses who stayed with the hospital for at least 4 years.

2. Create partnerships to provide added benefits, support, or perks
- Think outside the box
Pay raises and system changes (such as charting optimizations) are often the most impactful changes a practice or health system can take on, but finding supplemental ways to make your nurses’ lives easier can go a long way too. Initiate partners in your community to provide tangible support. For instance, at the onset of COVID-19, we helped to initiate a partnership between USA Health System and Shipt, a grocery delivery service. The pairing led to more than 900 USA Health employees taking advantage of an annual Shipt membership offer at no cost to the employee or the health system. Consider if there might be a partner in your community who would be interested in supporting your staff.

3. Communicate appreciation in a more impactful way
- Don’t just say “thank you”
Saying “thank you”..._again_... can elicit more eye-rolls when the message is not communicated correctly. The words “thank you” and real appreciation are not the same thing. Use opportunities like Nurses Week (May 6-12) to rally the community again or remind nurses of the lives they’re impacting — it’s the acknowledgment of the hard parts of their jobs that can act as the biggest source of encouragement. But don’t stick to publicized appreciation weeks. Make appreciation a part of your routine. Use real patient stories to show your incredible nurses how much they mean to their patients.

Billboards have also proven effective in this area. We developed solutions for an Idaho-based community health system to help them show appreciation to their staff amidst the pandemic in 2020 on their commute into work.

- Utilize the power of peer praise
Who is communicating the “thank you” message can make a big difference: Nurses routinely report a desire to receive more feedback from their direct supervisors. How can you partner with nursing staff leadership to equip those supervisors to celebrate the great work their staff is doing?

Building a plan around nurse retention cannot wait

The pandemic expedited the already growing need for nurses. And because nurses are such a valuable commodity to every health system, they can come and go without much risk to their own career paths. With the predicted need for an additional 1.1 million nurses in 2022, you cannot afford to lose the nurses you’ve invested in already.

The burden falls on the employers to create an environment of consistent communication, appreciation, and acknowledgment, as well as tangible reasons to stay.

The first step in the right direction is to find out if and why your nurses are unhappy and therefore, more likely to leave. You probably already have some hints. But in order to move forward and avoid creating an even bigger staffing hill to climb, you need real feedback from your current nursing staff. Make it anonymous. And take it seriously.

Medical researchers don’t look to uncover groundbreaking insights so that they can say they learned something. They do it so those insights can be applied. The results? Life-changing medications, procedures, and treatment plans that impact millions of lives today.

Information is only as useful as the actions taken from the learnings. Whatever you learn from your surveys — take action on it.

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Can’t afford to wait: Nurse retention needs to be addressed.

Brand marketing and performance marketing used to live in separate lanes—one built long-term affinity, the other drove short-term action. But more often than not, marketers no longer have that luxury. Time, budget—and perhaps most importantly—audiences don’t experience brands in silos, and our marketing shouldn’t either. **We have to win the day every day**.

At Lewis, we believe in brand-level work. We believe in setting the stage for action long before action takes place. We love big brand ideas—bold, beautiful campaigns that stop you in your tracks and stay with you long after. There’s absolutely still a place for those epic impressions. But in today’s world, they can’t be the only ones doing the heavy lifting.

That’s why we embrace a **brandformance** mindset—where brand marketing and performance marketing are no longer separate disciplines, but parts of a unified, modern approach to growth.

Scalable systems are required for brands to be on every day and be everywhere, driving market share and revenue growth at every point throughout the customer journey. Every impression—whether a social post, a pre-roll ad, an email, a search-sponsored ad, or a banner—is a brand impression. And fleeting as they are, those touchpoints can be just as powerful at building memory and shaping perception as the once-a-year, beautifully crafted anthem video.

Marketers can’t afford to divide efforts. **In an attention-scarce world, everything we put out has to work harder, do more, and deliver both impact and results**.

We’ve created a proprietary, scalable system that fuses the power of performance with the soul of brand. Because we believe growth isn’t just a metric—it’s a mindset. And when brand and performance work together, growth isn’t just possible. It’s beautiful.