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Technology makes lives both easier and more difficult. A survey from Gartner shows that many in marketing are feeling apprehensive about technology. Nearly nine out of 10 marketers said they were concerned about impending layoffs, and 87% were worried that technology, including generative AI, could replace jobs. The concerns about technology aren’t just from the hype surrounding gen AI—61% of those surveyed said they have encountered technology or process changes in the previous 12 months.
Other surveys Gartner has done in the past year seem to validate these concerns. A survey of 822 business executives between September and November found 26% of marketing leaders plan to cut their departments this year because of generative AI. The company also surveyed 405 leaders in marketing tech last spring, and 63% reported that marketing doesn’t have the technical skills to use some of the technologies at their disposal. Half of the marketers Gartner surveyed said martech is complicated and difficult to use.
Iliyana Hadjistoyanova, director, advisory in Gartner’s marketing practice, wrote that all of these findings should be a red flag for CMOs. So much uncertainty, fear and expectation can lead to quick burnout, regardless of work.
“By developing robust talent plans that incorporate the use of GenAI and work to increase skill preparedness, CMOs can mitigate its impacts on employees’ wellbeing, leading to overall engagement and retention,” Hadjistoyanova wrote. “These actionable steps must address role transition and fit-for-purpose employee learning, as well as cover technology and process changes related to GenAI adoption.”
After all, the technology opportunities presented by generative AI really can transform a marketer’s job and make prototyping, production, design, personalization and dissemination easier. But generative AI cannot do it alone. People with ideas, creativity and perspectives are needed to make the technology work to its full potential, but it’s incumbent on leaders to make sure employees know that.
NOW TRENDING Gucci billboard in San Francisco. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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Luxury brand sales are likely to continue to slow down in 2024, continuing the trend seen in 2023 when there was an 8% decrease in luxury goods revenues in the Americas, writes Forbes senior contributor Pamela N. Danziger. Bain and Company analysts expect “relatively soft” performance for the sector this year, with low-to-mid single-digit growth. The luxury goods market is perpetually volatile, with year-over-year growth rates since 2000 all over the map, Danziger reports. According to a state of luxury survey conducted by Unity Marketing and the Affluent Consumer Research Company, from mid-December to mid-February, 48% of luxury goods executives believed conditions in the market are worse today than a year ago.
Danziger suggests luxury brands use targeted and personalized digital marketing to get in front of new consumers. Luxury consumers look at brand quality, authenticity and craftsmanship first, so messaging that conveys why these products are worthy of purchase could move more consumers toward buying them, and potentially toward becoming new brand loyalists.
BRANDS + MESSAGING Products from Beyoncé’s Cécred hair care brand.
Cécred
Queen Bey is getting into more than just country music nowadays. Beyoncé just launched Cécred, a new hair care line inspired by the singer’s early days in her mother’s beauty salon, where Beyoncé saw her mother mix products made for different hair types to get new results. Cécred is the newest entrant to the array of celebrity-backed personal care brands, which include Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. Forbes contributor Clara Ludmir writes that Rihanna and Gomez were both able to resonate with target audiences—Fenty Beauty is high quality makeup with 40 foundation shades, while Rare Beauty is a mission-driven brand from a likable star.
Will Cécred see the same kind of success? A study last month from NIQ found that, put together, celebrity beauty brands racked up $1.1 billion in sales in the 52 weeks ending November 4. These brands grew much faster than the beauty category in the same time frame: 57.8% growth for celebrity brands and 11.1% category growth. NIQ found that authenticity and connections between the celebrities and their target audience were critical.
STREAMING (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
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Nearly a third of the most popular English-language live action shows, docuseries and animated programs on Netflix so far this year are adaptations of existing works, reported Forbes’ Mary Whitfill Roeloffs. They get their inspiration from novels, toys, video games or other works, and run the gamut from thriller Fool Me Once, based on a Harlan Coben novel; to You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, based on a Stanford University study; to Masters of the Universe: Revelation, based on 1980s-era He-Man toys. But this isn’t just a phenomenon on Netflix: Many top-grossing box office movies are adaptations or continuations of series. The last time a year’s No. 1 film wasn’t an IP or franchise work was 1998, when the history-inspired blockbuster Titanic dominated screens.
LEGAL MATTERS
R. Lance Hill, screenwriter for the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie Road House, sued MGM Studios and Amazon this week, accusing them of copyright infringement and violating their agreement with the Screen Actors Guild in their remake of the movie, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal. In his suit, Hill says that in 2021, he requested the copyright of the screenplay revert to him on Nov. 11, 2023. Amazon, he said, refused to acknowledge that date. The company also scrambled to finish up its remake a day before the copyright was set to revert, the lawsuit said, using AI to replicate actors’ voices because of the then-ongoing SAG-AFTRA union strike. The movie was finished in January, and is set to premiere next month. While copyright lawsuits are nothing new, this is the first high-profile litigation over the use of AI to replicate actors’ voices—which was a key issue in last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike. Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to Forbes’ requests for comment.
ON MESSAGE
Seth Matlins On The Evolution Of Creativity And Creative: With Pranav Yadav Managing Director of Forbes CMO Network Seth Matlins interviews Founder and Global CEO of Neuro-Insight Pranav Yadav.
Forbes
The brain receives countless messages each day, and marketers want to find the ones that stick with people and help get their messages across in a lasting way. Seth Matlins, managing director of Forbes CMO Network, spoke with Pranav Yadav, founder and global CEO of Neuro-Insight, to determine how the brain receives and responds to creative messages, as well as what works and what doesn’t. This is a portion of his interview, which is available in full on video here . This transcript has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
Matlins: How does a marketer tap into a subconscious need? How do we identify subconscious needs—or are they just kind of common to all of us as humans?
Yadav: It’s an age-old question. …The past 5,000 years of philosophy and the past hundred years of neuroscience tell you that 90% of all decision making takes place in the subconscious. And the reason why it exists is because if we were to actually evaluate every single thing in our life through our conscious selves, we would have an information overload and we would not be able to operate. So I’m sitting on this chair, I obviously have to make sure I look at the camera and I’m close enough to the mic as I do this, but if I was actually consciously thinking about these things as I was doing that, I couldn’t really answer your question. So the subconscious allows us to actually perform most of our lives and act in ways making us feel like we’re in control of the situation, when it is actually doing it for us.
How does a marketer tap into a subconscious need? By immersing themselves in the lives of the people whose subconscious needs they’re looking to actually tap into. Because at the end of the day, our subconscious is informed by the myths, the stories, the songs and the rituals that we experience. …It’s obvious to me why we happen to cling on to the most superficial things that we see people do, rather than actually tap into their deep subconscious, because we’re actually so far away from their myths, their stories, their experience, their songs and the rituals that they have in their homes.
You just talked about the ready appeal, at least from a marketing perspective, of attaching to the superficial. How should our audience think about the difference between the subconscious and the superficial?
The subconscious by definition is sub, below, your conscious awareness. There are things that exist within all of us that may not be readily accessible or witnessed. The superficial is the idea, ‘Well, everybody’s on TikTok doing this dance. I need to be on TikTok doing the same version of this dance with the celebrity that endorses my product.’ That is a superficial answer. The subconscious way of thinking about this is: There is something that’s happening in the world that is making us so empty, that despite the nature of the song, we have people who want to dance and want to dance in such a way, and receive love from people. And how do we address that need? Because when we’re able to address that need, we don’t necessarily need to do it through this kind of dance, or that kind of celebrity, but we can address that need.
From the architecture of our brains, what makes for work [product] that works most efficiently and effectively from a structural perspective?
We consume stories. We don’t really consume things individually as facts or ideas. You cannot actually consume any idea in isolation. It has to be wrapped around in a story. That’s the basic premise that our ancestors understood, and that’s why you have epics, like the Greek epics or the Indian epics like the Mahabharata, where the core ideas or even the Biblical stories are wrapped around this massive story for you to even remember the one core idea.
Is that story always about us individually?
No, it is a story that could be about somebody else altogether, but you need to have seen it, experienced it, imagined it for you to be able to relate and empathize with it. Because as we talk about the architecture of an ad or a story, or what makes it effective, basically as you consume the story, your brain evaluates it for personal relevance. Personal relevance for things that you have either experienced yourself or seen other people go through. Then you look at it for emotional intensity. Is it actually engaging me emotionally? It is not about the nature of emotion, but is it causing an emotional dimension to me? Three, the prefrontal cortex reflects whether you want to lean into the situation or lean out of the situation.
These are the three factors that kind of combine together and give the brain enough signals. If there’s enough in the story that I relate to, or engage with, or just visually am delighted by, by leaning into this beautiful-looking thing, for me to actually give it access to the gold that exists in the brain. The gold in the brain, the most scarce resource, is memory. We are nothing but constructs of our memory. If that story allows for that doorway of memory to be open and for you to create a memory, then, and only then, you’ve created successful work if that memory is for either a key message or a branding idea. You can create a story that opens the doorway to memory, and actually create memory for that moment of that story. But if your brand is not present at the moment that you’ve created memory, you’ve created entertainment. The distinction that you have between “creative” and “ad” is the ad has the additional responsibility to actually put forth this idea of either equities of a brand, behavior change, product information, or just the generic movement of the brand, on top of just it being a creative piece. And that distinction is essentially qualified by whether there is memory for brand or not.
[Your pieces of] advice for the marketers, client side, agency side and the audience that they should be considering as they develop creative: Is one of them [to] figure out how to make the brand central to the narrative from go?
I would not even say central. A part of the narrative. Because the story actually can be about some other deep truth. And as long as you are a part of that truth, I feel like you’ve done way more work than you would’ve done otherwise. …One of my [pieces of] advice would be: Find the story. Find the deep-rooted cultural subconscious insight into behavior and tell a story around it. As long as you’re part of that fabric, you’ve done a better job than most.
FACTS + COMMENTS
A new report from Antenna Research found streaming subscription growth slowed in 2023, which also saw the largest number of cancellations in the last five years.
140.5 million: Subscribers who canceled a streaming service
40%: The share of canceled subscribers that eventually re-subscribed during the year
‘They must shift their focus to managing their subscribers’: Antenna’s advice to streaming services in its report
QUIZ
Pop icon Madonna has been fighting ageism for years, and she recently filmed an ad for a Brazilian company touting her lasting appeal and career. What kind of company is the ad for?
A. A bank
B. A grocery chain
C. A construction company
D. A furniture manufacturer
See if you got the answer right here.
