MAR
KET
ING
20
15
MARKETING
TRENDS
MARKETING
CONSUMER
DIGITAL
HEALTH
20
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MARKETING
TRENDS
Our fifth annual series of trends reports includes insights into the
big shifts that are changing marketing, healthcare, digital
experience, and consumer expectations. In this report, you’ll find
the top eight trends in marketing, each with clues into new
possibilities and examples of brands that got there first.
20
15
MARKETING
TRENDS
Abigail Schmelzer
Alex Brock
Andrea Evans
Angela Cua
Azul Ceballos
Campbell Hooper
Charles DiSantis

Chelsea Bailey
Duncan Arbour
Eduardo Menendez
Eric Davis
Fred Harrison
James Tomasino

Jeffrey Giermek
Jessie Brow n
Joe DeSalvo
John Mucha
Joy Hart
Julie Valka
Kathryn Bernish-Fisher
Kevin Nalty
Leigh Householder
Luke Hubblethw aite
Matt Groom
Mike Martins
Nick Bartlett

Nicole Sordell
Pavithra Selvam
Phil Storer
Richard Martin
Rick Summa
Sam Cannizzaro
Sarah Brow n
Sayeed Anw ar
Scott Raidel

Stefanie Jones
Zach Gerber

CORE
CONTRIBUTORS
At the core of our innovation
practice is a simple idea:

At the core of our innovation practice is a simple idea: Knowing how
people’s expectations are changing lets us capture new market
opportunities, take smart risks and spur innovation.

We start by uncovering clues. Clues are data points, great stories,
quotes and pictures that shift our understanding of what people want
right now. We find them in practices around the world and in the
technologies, brands, and experiences that doctors and patients
encounter in their every day lives.

Over time, those clues combine and connect to reveal trends, a new
kind of inspiration for creating experiences in the moments before our
customers realize they need them. And, months and years before our
competitors realize the same thing.

20
15
MARKETING
TRENDS

Focus Group Adjourned
*Poof* – Instant Advertising

Amuse Me, Dear Advertiser
Content Isn’t King, It’s the Kingdom
Humble Brands
Teaming Up
Right-sized Video
Local, Now More Local

We’re following eight trends that show how
marketers will earn attention and engagement in 2015.
THE
TRENDS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
1.
IN SHORT
The open secret of
high-stakes websites is
quickly becoming the
standard for message and
marketing testing.
THE RISE OF LIVE
MESSAGE TESTING

For decades advertisers have invested heavily in

getting every single detail of a campaign right before
launching it to the world. They used focus groups,
quant studies, intercepts and more.

Now big brands are increasingly borrowing a long-
trusted trick from startups: in-market testing of
incomplete products.

The approach randomly divides an audience into two
groups and offers each group a different option. Those
options could be large or small—from entirely different
homepages to a tweak in a banner ad headline. The
option that earns more of the desired behavior wins. At
least until the next test.
Companies whose conversion
rates have improved over the
previous 12 months are
performing on average 50%
more tests than those
companies whose conversion
rates have not improved.
—Econsultancy, 2014
50%
1.
FOCUS GROUP
ADJOURNED
#1 LESSON: NEVER TRUST YOUR GUT
1.
FOCUS GROUP
ADJOURNED

During President Obama’s two election
campaigns, he charged his digital team
with one big goal: turn the website’s
visitors into subscribers—scoring an email
address that would let the marketing
machine kick into high gear.

To maximize that desired behavior, they
broke every page into its component parts
to determine how each could be most
effective, changing images and wording
on buttons to test their hunches.
Had the team listened to those hunches,
to instinct, the sign-up rate would have
slipped to 70% of the baseline. Instead
the A/B testing brought it to 140%. In fact,
they estimated that a full 4 million of the
13 million addresses in the campaign’s
email list, and some $75 million in money
raised, resulted from these careful A/B
experiments.
1.
FOCUS GROUP
ADJOURNED
“Learn More” earned 18.6%
more signups than the
default of “Sign Up.”
CHOOSE EVERYTHING

The beauty of A/B testing is that it lets

marketers choose all of the above. Why limit
the options we give to consumers when they
can better choose what they want? If five
headlines appeal to the brand, data can rule
that final decision by running all five by our
audience, testing them live to see which earns
the most action.

This revolution in research is turning
traditional decision-making on its head. Taking
the call away from the HiPPO—”highest-paid
person’s opinion”—and giving it to the people
who pay us, our customers.
1.
FOCUS GROUP
ADJOURNED
140%
70%
WITH
TESTING
WITHOUT
TESTING
—Wired
2.
IN SHORT
The instant-advertising
era gained a head of
steam in 2014 and is set
to earn brand sharing for
years to come.

FROM IN THE CAN TO ON THE SPOT

Advertising typically takes months to produce. It starts
with a creative brief and concepts and ends with a very
choreographed placement in mass media. That’s why
even seemingly of-the-moment advertising like Walt
Disney’s famous post-Super Bowl “I’m Going to Disney
World!” commercials were created well in advance of
the big game. The spots themselves had to be to the
television stations days before kickoff.

Social media took a big step toward changing that
model. No longer did advertisers have to buy television
time or reserve print space to reach customers. That
middle man of mass advertising could be entirely
eliminated.

But it’s a new kind of collaboration between agency and
client that’s really made instant advertising possible.
2.
*POOF* – INSTANT
ADVERTISING
32%
26%
Laptop Smartphones
20%
Tablets
8 in 10
consumers use a second
screen while watching TV

—CEA, 2014
—CEA, 2014
SOCIAL MEDIA RESPONSE
2.
*POOF* – INSTANT
ADVERTISING
During live events, many brands have their agencies
at the ready to seize opportunity. Oreo’s famous
Twitter ad during the Super Bowl power outage took
just five minutes to conceive and produce because
creative and strategy teams were on site, working
together. It published quickly and was retweeted
more than 15,000 times in the first 14 hours because
client teams were on hand, ready to review and
approve just as quickly.

Nissan won over the Internet with a similar rapid
response, joining the worldwide excitement about the
new royals and reaching hundreds of thousands of
drivers doing it.
JOINING A NATIONAL
CONVERSATION
2.
*POOF* – INSTANT
ADVERTISING
The secret to instant advertising is context:
being part of a conversation or event people
are already excited about and are actively
looking online for people (and brands) that
feel the same way.


There may be no annual event for which the
fanboy excitement is more palpable than
Apple Live. It’s where the new iProducts are
revealed and the gossip leading up to it is
dwarfed only by the flurry of online
conversation during it. Samsung took big
advantage in 2014 by creating instant ads
that made fun of Apple's glitchy live video
stream and compared new iPhone features to
ones it had made standard years before.
Video: engadget.com/2014/09/10/samsung-notethedifference-apple-attack-ads/
3.
IN SHORT
The golden rule of content
marketing is coming to
advertising: Make things
people want instead of
making people want things.
WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT? SHAKIRA, OF COURSE.
3.
AMUSE ME, DEAR
ADVERTISER
The most shared ad of all
time was “The Force” for
Volkswagen. You
remember it—the cute kid
in the Darth Vader
costume who believed he
was opening the car door

with The Force, promoting
the remote start feature on
the new model.

It was the most shared
until the Dark Empire fell
to yogurt. Dannon bested
the spot with trackvertising
—a spot that is both a
music video and an ad.
They launched an Activia
spot, titled “La La La
(Brazil 2014)” featuring
Shakira, during the World
Cup.

At last count, it had been
shared 5,409,192 times
across Facebook, Twitter
and the blogosphere,
(beating out “The Force” at
5,254,667 shares). The
bigger spread is in the
number of views. “The
Force” earned 60 million.
“La La La” is at over 330
million and counting.

Kia recently launched
even more brand-centric

trackvertising with Maroon
5’s single “Animal,” and
with Lady Gaga’s track
“Applause.” H&M teamed
up with Beyonce, Fiat with
Arianna; and Evian with
Rizzle Kicks.
3.
AMUSE ME, DEAR
ADVERTISER
Shakira “La La La” Video
youtube.com/watch?v=7-7knsP2n5w
Volkswagen “The Force” Video
youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0
FINE PRINT GETS FUN

Every traveler is familiar with these words:
“Now we request your full attention as the
flight attendants demonstrate the safety
features of this aircraft.” We know they’re
required to do it, but the presentation that
follows is so boring that even its could-save-
your-life potential can’t make people tune in.

Delta decided to rethink that fine print and
make the required safety demonstration fun.
Not just for the sake of entertainment, but to
really earn people’s attention. Their new in-
flight videos include their charismatic
president, triplets, a few comedians, and even

a friendly alien we know as Alf.
3.
AMUSE ME, DEAR
ADVERTISER
Delta’s Safety Demonstration Video
youtube.com/watch?v=eduNjwNvcH4
MORE CHANNELS,
MORE OPPORTUNITIES

The fracturing of original programming is
creating even more opportunities for brands to
develop advertainment. Platforms like Hulu
offer brands much more than product
placement: from becoming part of the story
arc, to taking the characters off set, to develop
brand-centered original programming.

3.
AMUSE ME, DEAR
ADVERTISER
Kony 2012 Video:
youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc
DYK
Only one (Kony 2012) of the
most shared videos of all time
is not a music video.
4.
IN SHORT
Rumor is that you’re more
likely to climb Mount

Everest or survive a plane
crash than click on a
banner ad. So why do we
keep making them?
CLOSING THE ATTENTION GAP
4.
CONTENT ISN’T KING,
IT’S THE KINGDOM
Where do people go with their questions about life and
health? 90% of people turn to the Web first for
information about consumer products or services and
72% of people treat their health questions the same way.

But, only 13% of them choose our product websites for
answers. We do a little better with doctors: 82% are
asking Google for help every week and 21% get some of
their information from our product sites.

That attention gap has a lot to do with our current
approach to content. Our ads and websites are all about
the brand and not at all about our customers.
Consumers want more than those product messages—
and they’re finding it elsewhere.
Consumers are hit by
over 5 trillion impressions
a year, leaving
consumers feeling
bombarded by, what a
recent Microsoft study
called, “irrelevant

information overload.”
4.
CONTENT ISN’T KING,
IT’S THE KINGDOM
14%
2.8%
WE’RE LIVING IN AN ERA
OF BANNER BLINDNESS:
Only 14% can
remember the last
display ad they saw
and the product it
promoted.
Worse, only 2.8% say
the ad was relevant
to them.
-Infolinks, 2014
CONTENT FLIPS THE MODEL
4.
CONTENT ISN’T KING,
IT’S THE KINGDOM
More and more brands—
from American Express to
Merck—are using
content marketing to
fundamentally change that
model and earn more of
their time and attention.

They’re throwing away the

megaphone of push
marketing that interrupts
doctor and patient alike
with yet another
commercial message. And
replacing it with what
people are actively looking
for: compelling, authentic
stories that create real
meaning and provide real
value.

In the American Express
OPEN Forum that means
200 experts giving ~
2 million people per month
ideas, advice, and
connections that will grow
their small businesses and
increase their use of
American Express
products. For Merck it
means self-screeners,
personal planning tools
and deep content
designed to help people
living with chronic disease
stick with treatment and
lifestyle change. Or, said
another way: Be more

loyal customers.
4.
CONTENT ISN’T KING,
IT’S THE KINGDOM
OUR FIRST QUESTION TO ANSWER
IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST: HMDIS
4.
CONTENT ISN’T KING,
IT’S THE KINGDOM
When people first go online looking for healthcare answers, they have one big question: How Much
Does It Suck (HMDIS)? They want to know what to expect, what side effects might be possible, how
much will it cost, and when they might actually start to feel better.

They’ll return later with much more personal questions to understand if how they’re feeling is normal or if
there isn’t something more they could be doing. The healthcare brands that are making the deepest
connections are delivering three kinds of content to support them along their very personal journeys:

Information: What happens if
you don’t take your medicine,
facts about how the drug
works in your body, about
what life on therapy will be
like.
Inspiration: Disease makes
people feel isolated and
alone. Bring them inspiration
from people who are dealing
with the same decisions and
disease.
Innovation: Curate and

create apps, experiences, and
products that enable more
empowered patients and
physicians + better living with
diseases.