In 1990, the Canon EOS Rebel camera ad featuring tennis star Andre Agassi boldly told us, “Image is Everything!” Back then, it certainly was something, but was image more important than it is today? You needn’t look any further than your friend’s and family’s social media pages to realize that the “ideal self” is still alive and kicking in 2022. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll juxtapose concepts that center on the concept of real self vs. ideal self in advertising and what we think that means for the future of brand relationships.

Consumers, investors, employees, policymakers, and business partners are becoming more interested in learning the benefits of ESG, driving its importance and complexity for companies and institutional investors. While it’s predominantly linked in its most formal executions with publicly traded corporations, there is value to smaller private companies and brands to enhance or grow a halo effect if done properly, with purpose and authenticity from all involved. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’re not giving advice on developing an ESG initiative. Instead, we’re focusing on 11 ideas to boost your ESG branding by leveraging your practices.

During the two years of the pandemic, we were forced to stay home and not travel. Business was anything but “business as usual.” Overnight, The B2B world had to grow new synapses to reach, educate, and sell to new and existing clients remotely. While phone and Zoom calls picked up much of the slack for B2B marketers, digital marketing was also forced to evolve significantly. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll outline the three biggest industry changes that will “stick,” how they affect your B2B digital marketing strategy, and what you need to do about them.

For many years brands, and not surprisingly, the advertising industry shared the opinion that it was between difficult and impossible to bring the services that a traditional marketing agency provides “in-house” to the client company. There was pretty good evidence that this was the third rail of advertising. Many large companies tried to build in-house agencies only to shut them down or struggle as the quality of their marketing mysteriously slumped. However, today there are some pretty compelling success stories for in-house agencies (IHAs). So, we thought rather than ignore this truth, we would have a closer look. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll help you examine what conditions might be necessary to succeed in in-house marketing. We’ll explore what you gain and lose and whether in-housing might be for you.

As marketers, we continue to seek an understanding of how our brands can consistently produce awesome search engine result page (SERP) rankings on Google. That’s a heavy lift without having some understanding of the engine that’s under the massive hood of the search hotrod that is Google. This edition of Plain Talk will share what you need to know about Google algorithm update history. Use this information to gain a meaningful understanding of Google search algorithms and how they impact your brand.

Influencer marketing is here to stay. Let me repeat this one more time for the people in the back. Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere. We all probably thought that influencer marketing was a fad at one time. We saw social media influencers first start on Facebook promoting products, then came the thousands of long-form reviews and unboxing videos on YouTube, followed by the birth of Instagram, where a new group of influencers took flight. Most recently, TikTok arrived with its explosion of short-form videos that made the social influencer landscape an entirely different ballgame. In today’s Plain Talk, we will explore the world of social commerce and the role influencer marketing plays in “helping” us find our next purchase.

Community is a multifaceted word. There are hundreds of touchpoints where your firm can connect with and do good for your local communities. Every day the phone rings or something arrives in the mail with a new suggestion on how your firm can help and give back to your community. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll review the best way to approach corporate citizenship for law firms and how community engagement can help your firm grow.

At the foundation of any successful customer experience strategy is a clear understanding of the various ways prospects and customers interact with your brand, how they prefer to interact with your brand, and how you can ensure a smooth path to purchase and a competitive advantage. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll approach the best way to improve your business performance through enhanced customer experience, beginning with a CX audit.

Your brand is the aggregate of what you say it is and what regular people on the street, or probably more correctly, the internet, say it is. In fact, there has never been a time when consumers had more power over what a brand “means” than right now. Consumers scrutinize and comment on everything about a company and its brands these days. Beyond a product’s execution against its functional claims or qualities, everything from supply chain ethics to senior-management retreat activities to the diverse hiring practices of your company is public and affects your brand’s image. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll discuss your increased brand exposure and why brand honesty is more important than ever.

Over the past year, the hype around the metaverse has accelerated at a dizzying pace. With all the talk, speculation ran wild about what this means for various industries. In this article, we will look at what it means for the financial services industry. In today’s edition of Compound Interest, we will review what’s happening in the metaverse now and what’s to come for the industry. We’ll also look at some of the more practical applications in metaverse banking that banks and credit unions can build a strategy around sooner rather than later.