Sweeney — a strategic-creative marketing agency that focuses on helping organizations build brand, engage customers and achieve growth — is seeking a talented integrated marketing specialist to join its dynamic team. The integrated marketing specialist will work with the agency team to provide digital and traditional marketing and public relations support for the agency’s B2B and B2C accounts.
Illustration by Katharina Brenner [Source: AIGA Eye on Design] Needless to say, there’s a lot we’d all like to leave behind as we head into the new year. While most are much heavier and more significant than my personal design trend observations, I consider the happenings of the creative industry a welcome distraction.
As 2020 comes to a close, I think a majority of people would agree it won’t be hard to say goodbye when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. But with every experience good or bad, there are lessons to be learned and this year had plenty of them.
Last month, I spotted a woolly bear caterpillar climbing up the side of my house. Beyond being fascinated by his lovely coat of fur and the undulating wave motion that produced his forward movement, I was mostly curious about what he was doing and where he was going.
They grew up with Cabbage Patch Kids, graduated to Caboodles, and now those kids-turned-adult consumers are the focus of brands hoping a boomerang effect brings the nostalgia-seekers back to buy again. Nostalgia marketing is having a real moment in 2020, and it’s not hard to understand why. During times of unrest and uncertainty, we tend to fall back on what’s familiar -- in this case, products and brands that once brought us joy and take us us back to a simpler time. And we’re seeing this trend in a number of industries.
As the marketing industry continues to find new and engaging ways to place ads in front of consumers, I would like to offer a truth about modern advertising. For all the promise of authenticity, transparency and noninvasiveness that “inbound” and “digital” marketers vowed to deliver in Y2K, the truth is far from the pledge.
It’s finally mid-November and time for the fun-loving spirit of the holidays! Oh, but how could I forget? It’s still 2020 and we have yet to deliver a vaccine for the Coronavirus. This means the holidays will be a little different this year!
Customer behavior – consumer and business – has changed significantly since the start of 2020 and will likely continue doing so until a cure for COVID-19, climate change and bad presidential elections is found. For marketers, the real challenge is not so much how to deal with those changes, as it is how to figure out which behaviors are temporary, and which are permanent.
Of course, consumers have changed their news consumption habits during the pandemic. But how? We dug deep into the research to find out. We are consuming more news online. According to Comscore, when evaluating non-weather news sites, “total visits during the pandemic peaked during the week of April 13-19, 2020 with 8.5 billion total visits.
Early on in the pandemic, a MindShare study reported media consumption of COVID-19 content declined fairly quickly. Consumers felt the onset of pandemic fatigue, spending less time reading, listening or watching COVID-19 content. Now, as we approach the second wave of the global pandemic and head into winter in many parts of the country, pandemic fatigue is bound to continue.
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