Ryan Stoner's Blog

As a strategist, my goal has always been to know my customer and extract what “must haves” matters to them. This means: Search for real audience insights and opportunities to ensure all is known about the customer, brand, category, project, et cetera. Understand what makes this opportunity different, special or competitive (capitalizing on competitor weaknesses.) Once those insights have been identified turn the ideas around them into solutions: Marrying insights to a genuine product or brand truths and help to explain and clarify the logic of where we are going and why it matters in order to encourage customers to tell stories about us. Any savvy business person knows that identifying the target audience for a marketing message means more potential leads, conversions, and sales. In years past, this might have been tackled through demographic studies or charts of buying trends, but these hands-off approaches to best customer identification and development simply no longer ...

What a difference a year makes. As we look back on marketing campaigns over the past year, there has been a huge rise of more instances of interactive marketing as brands look beyond audience reach to bring higher engagement into their campaigns. There is a growing focus on attention as a qualitative measure of success. Numerous companies are pursuing routes that involve interactive marketing because it’s a great way to capture attention and drive audiences to take action. In this overly saturated media world attention is a scarce resource and marketers who simply seek to drive a click risk alienating the consumers they are seeking to attract. We’ve become immune to the flashing colors on the side of the article we’re reading and close pop-up ads without even looking what they’re about. With the continued use of social media and the increasing use of second screens interactive content will become even more vital for marketers. Brands should be focused on develo...