In January, Dollar Shave Club began its bid to crack the UK market by launching a TV ad campaign. The mail-order razor company’s success stemmed from a brilliant YouTube video that went viral in 2012, generating growth that, four years later, led to a $1 billion buyout by Unilever.
Now part of a multinational conglomerate, Dollar Shave Club’s advertising is taking a more traditional media buying route. At a time when many other businesses are reducing their dependence and spending on traditional media, this move by content marketing’s poster child feels like a backward step.
The Media Buyer is No Longer King
Advertising used to be simpler. With only so many billboards, magazines, and TV ad breaks, much of a campaign’s success depended on securing the right media placement. This made media buying your biggest expense and the typical budget split between media and the production costs of the ad you wanted to place was 80:20.
If spending just 20% of your campaign budget on production seems low to the modern marketer, it’s because the content landscape has changed dramatically. According to former PepsiCo president, Brad Jakeman:
“20 years ago, brands created four pieces of content a year, each taking about four months to make, with a budget of $2 million. Nowadays, brands are pushing out more like 400-4,000 pieces of content… four months has changed to four days to four hours.”
With more emphasis on earned media and using data to discover cost-effective ways of reaching highly-targeted audiences, businesses today are pushing the media vs production ratio towards a more even split. The most innovative advertisers, who focus more on digital than TV, are now in the 55:45 range.
A major reason for this shift is that advertisers now have access to a vastly increased number of ways to reach specific customers. This requires a firehose of data-driven creative content that you can personalize, test, refresh and reuse across a range of channels. The more even split between media and production also demonstrates that creative content is no longer the add-on to a media buying strategy. The creative and the data now both inform and influence each other equally.
The traditional agency and media buyer model remain relevant for producing and launching big TV campaigns. But creating and managing dynamic, everyday ad content is often left to in-house marketing teams, who are typically under-resourced and lack the skills to produce successful content efficiently.
BONUS: What’s next in terms of figuring out what makes great ad creative? We’ve put together a free Cheat Sheet to help you ensure your creative drives better Facebook Ad Results. Get your hands on your free copy here.Fortunately, this gap in the market is being filled by the emergence of creative technology platforms like Shuttlerock….Continue reading
How you design your IT house can be as important as how architects design physical homes...getty
Where you decide to run your applications is as important as what you run. What does your workload placement strategy look like? Home architects are very careful about their design choices. Many of their decisions, such as the best locations for load-bearing walls, support beams and other infrastructure, have long-term consequences.
Where do they put windows and skylights will deliver optimal sunlight? How do they situate bedrooms and bathrooms? What is the right density of wood, concrete and other materials required to construct safe walls, roofs and floors? Those are just the broad strokes; architects plan thousands of minor details as well, often well before raw materials are purchased.
Like their home-building counterparts, IT systems architects carefully design technology systems. Which is why workload placement has emerged as a critical strategy for governing what applications and other resources run where.
IT has grown more complex, thanks to a proliferation of environments comprised of public and private clouds, on-premises infrastructure and edge devices. IT leaders who placed assets in these locations have constructed a multicloud house without planning for the long-term impact on their organization.
For example, while it may have initially made sense to build a key business application in a certain IT environment, perhaps performance began to lag as usage grew. Maybe the goalposts for security and compliance shifted, forcing you to rethink your choice.
Whatever architectural concerns arise, where you decide to put what in your IT house can be as important as how architects design physical homes. CIOs are thinking about this a great deal, as 92% of 233 IT decision makers Dell surveyed said that they have a formal strategy for deciding where to place workloads. Half of those executed this strategy in the past year.
The public cloud grew rapidly, as engineers learned how easily it enabled them to launch and test new applications. Soon IT teams notched quick wins, including flexibility as they lifted and shifted existing business applications to the cloud.
Then came the overcorrection. Emboldened by the prospect of saving money while fostering greater agility as they innovated, many CIOs declared a “cloud-first” strategy. Those who were initially more measured in their adoption of cloud technology saw their colleagues migrate their entire IT estate and followed suit.
As workloads got more complex it turned out that the public cloud-first stance was not always the best fit for the business. Hasty decisions had unanticipated ramifications, either in the form of escalating costs or failed migrations.
The reasons: Workloads are unique. Each application has its own set of business requirements and benefits. Just as the home architect must carefully weigh each design choice, CIOs must be intentional about where they put their software assets.
Variations on a multicloud
Let’s consider some examples where the right workload is tied to a business outcome. Cloud environments—public or private—make sense where you get huge bursts of data traffic. Cloud technologies enable you to quickly spin up compute resources and dial them down as requirements subside.
Retail ecommerce is a classic example. For brands selling clothing, footwear and other merchandise, holiday seasonality drives peaks and valleys to web and mobile sales. Large traffic spikes in October or November through Christmas subside, then stabilize.
Or think of a digital crossword puzzle published every weekend. With most people completing these on the weekend, traffic bursts Saturday and Sunday before slowing over the remaining 5 days.
For such use cases, a public cloud that provides massive scalability may yield the desired business outcome.
Conversely, so-called “steady state” use cases—in which applications’ compute needs fluctuate little if at all—often run better on-premises, either in traditional IT infrastructure or in a private cloud. Thousands of these applications run without much deviation across business lines.
Think traditional general ledger software in ERPs. Travel and expense utilities. Software that governs data backups. Applications, such as those that monitor anomalous network traffic, often run locally for security reasons.
Other applications with disparate patterns and needs are emerging. Applications requiring minimal latency—think Internet of Things software—are moving to the edge for faster processing and cost efficacy.
In Dell’s survey, 72% of IT decision makers said performance guided their decisions to place workload, followed by data protection and security at 63% and 58%, respectively. Venues include public clouds, data centers, colocation facilities and edge environments.
Workload types vary, but 39% of respondents said they had placed data protection workloads while 35% each said they had placed ERP and CRM systems.
Diverse workloads require fungible infrastructure
There are no absolutes in determining workload placement. Well, not in the way many IT leaders think. Every software asset will have different requirements, which will influence where you decide to place them.
Just as an architect decides how to situate walls, beams, rooms and other physical infrastructure, where an IT architect places assets matters. The wrong choices can have negative consequences.
These decisions aren’t easy nor should they be made lightly, as the ramifications of poor asset placement can impact your bottom line, make your business more vulnerable or prompt you to run afoul of compliance mandates.
All diverse workloads require a flexible infrastructure that enables enterprises to move their applications and other workloads to move seamlessly across clouds, on-premises and edge venues, based on their business requirements.
As-a-Service infrastructure, which includes on-premises equipment ordered on demand, can power these workloads to meet requirements for performance and availability, as well as your needs for simplicity, agility, and control. How will you lay the foundation for your IT assets?
On the placement of web server replicasL Qiu, VN Padmanabhan… – … IEEE INFOCOM 2001 …, 2001 – ieeexplore.ieee.org replica placement in detail. We develop several placement algorithms that use workloadinfor… To study the effect of overlooking some network links on the placement algorithms, we …
Network Slicing and Workload Placement in MegacitiesP Soumplis, P Kokkinos, D Lagos… – 2020 22nd …, 2020 – ieeexplore.ieee.org… ’ workload is appropriately offloaded. In our work, we examine mechanisms for the joint resourceallocation and the applications’ workload placement in … connections (links) between two …
Foggy: a platform for workload orchestration in a fog computing environmentD Santoro, D Zozin, D Pizzolli… – … on Cloud Computing …, 2017 – ieeexplore.ieee.org… Foggy orchestrates application workload, negotiates … negotiation, scheduling and workload placement taking into account … world situation in which the link between the Edge Cloudlets …
N Jain, A Bhatele, S White, T Gamblin… – SC’16: Proceedings of …, 2016 – ieeexplore.ieee.org Multi-job simulations and placement: Realistic workloads in HPC include several … on the links increase as we approach the root; thus, link bandwidth should be higher for the …
The Media Buyer is No Longer King
