ANA offers best marketing practices: connect; inspire; focus; organize; and build

WARC, 26 February 2014

PALM SPRINGS: Research led by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has helped identify five best-practice mandates for marketers, including: connect; inspire; focus; organize; and build.

These directives are the conclusions of a new Marketing2020 study the ANA recently conducted with New York-based marketing strategists EffectiveBrands.

Speaking to an audience of 1,000 delegates at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2014 Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Bob Liodice, ANA president/ceo, observed: "We have to engineer less and engage more so that we can engage in a level of purpose-based marketing that transforms our brands into something of a higher order."

(For a two-part account of the best-practice findings of the EffectiveBrands/ANA Marketing2020 program, please click here.)

He implored the audience of digital technologists and marketers to get out of their silos and bring the marketing organisation and ecosystem together in order to develop business acumen. "Create strategies that reach and benefit our consumers," he urged.

As for the methodology, he told delegates: "You build winning strategies with focus." That meant zeroing in on co-creative strategies with internal and external business partners.

"And then … marry that up with the KPIs and other metrics necessary to be able to build real time, and to change real time, those things which are not working [so] you get them to work even better," Liodice added.

The most challenging platform for the next-generation marketer – the organisational leader with an eye on 2020 – is the place where the future gets built.

Or, as the ANA's Liodice told the IAB delegates: "We have to build marketing capabilities that allow us to be able to grow, nurture, and develop."

"We cannot stay static," he declared. "Survey after survey says that the marketing capabilities necessary to succeed in the mobile and digital environment are lacking and we need more."

Warc will be reporting from future ANA events, including the upcoming ANA Brand Masters Conference, being held in Hollywood, FL, this week.

Data sourced from Warc

For more on theory and case studies on: http://expertresearchers.blogspot.com