The Ad Age Nextgen Marketing Summit is an annual gathering where emerging marketing leaders and senior practitioners exchange ideas on where the discipline is heading. If you attend expecting a clean consensus on what works, you will leave disappointed. What you get instead is a useful cross-section of the tensions currently running through the industry:…
Referral program ROI is one of those metrics that looks clean on a dashboard and gets complicated the moment you interrogate it. The surface calculation is simple enough: divide the revenue generated by referred customers by the total cost of running the program. What sits beneath that fraction, though, is where most programs either earn…
Experiential campaigns put people inside a brand rather than in front of it. Done well, they create the kind of memory and emotional association that no banner ad or sponsored post can replicate. Done poorly, they are expensive theatre that impresses the marketing team and no one else. The difference between the two has very…
Impact is a partnership management platform that helps brands recruit, track, and pay partners across affiliate, influencer, and commerce channels from a single interface. It is one of the more capable tools in this category, but like any platform, what you get out of it depends almost entirely on what you put in strategically before…
An impact brand is a business that has built its identity around a clear and credible social or environmental purpose, where that purpose is structurally integrated into strategy, not bolted on as a communications layer. The distinction matters because most brands that claim impact status are doing the latter. They have a purpose statement, a…
The Pizza Hut rebrand is a calculated bet on nostalgia over novelty. After years of chasing fast-casual trends and losing ground to Domino’s on delivery, Pizza Hut has moved back toward its roots: the red roof, the dine-in experience, and the cultural memory of a brand that genuinely meant something to a generation of consumers….
Brand ambassadorship is the practice of giving real people, whether employees, customers, or public figures, a sanctioned role in representing your brand to the world. Done well, it extends reach and builds trust in ways that paid media cannot replicate. Done poorly, it creates liability, dilutes your positioning, and hands control of your message to…
Omnicom acquisitions have followed a consistent logic for decades: buy capability, buy scale, buy market access. The IPG deal, the smaller specialist pickups, the data and technology plays , each one tells you something about where the holding company believes the industry is heading, and more importantly, where the money is moving. For senior marketers,…
An affiliate program is a performance-based partnership model where you pay third parties, typically publishers, content creators, or niche sites, a commission for driving measurable actions: sales, leads, sign-ups. Done well, it extends your distribution without the fixed cost of a sales team. Done poorly, it becomes a channel full of coupon sites clipping margin…
Convergence strategy is the deliberate alignment of multiple marketing channels, messages, and moments so they reinforce each other rather than operate in isolation. Done well, it creates a compounding effect where each touchpoint amplifies the next, making your marketing more efficient without necessarily spending more. Most marketing organisations are not doing this. They are running…
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