There’s no denying that customer experience (CX) has looked very different in 2020. However, there’s still a question of how this strange year might affect expectations for CX moving forward.

We are surrounded by photographs pretty much every waking minute that we are using any type of communication device these days. In the realm of social media, photographs, and video content rule the platforms. Let’s dive a bit further into the subject of taking photos for social media. (Well, I’m not sure that I would be considered a photography legend, but I certainly have had and I am having a wonderful career in this visual world that we live in.) I am the Managing Director of the Content Creation Studio at PriceWeber. I work in photography, advertising, and social media pretty much every day of my life. I am going to share five tips for taking great photographs for social media.

Open banking is oftentimes perceived as a trend taking place in Europe but that is lacking adoption in the United States. The reality is that it is very much a part of the financial services landscape in the U.S., but its proliferation is driven by a different source than in Europe. Due to European regulators predicting a boom in open banking, the EU drafted PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) while the U.K. released their version known as OBI (Open Banking Implementation) in order to get in front of the phenomenon with regulations and guidelines.

A casual reader looking at spirit sales numbers for 2020 might think it’s a pretty good year. After all, in July, Nielsen indicated a 52-week rolling sales increase of 5.1%. But those numbers do not tell the whole story. Overrepresentation in sales increases by the larger, high-awareness brands and well-known value brands, and stocking up (or hoarding) has potentially skewed the figures for months to come. Of greater concern is that off-premise stock-ups and at-home consumption may lead to spirit brands feeling more like commodities than before. Another concern is that the worst on-premise closures since Prohibition are straining the sales and brand value of many spirit brands. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll look at four strategies brands can use for their spirits marketing and how to overcome the effect of critical on-premise losses.

Podcast advertising has recently become a hot topic among brands and media planners. In today’s Plain Talk, we’ll discuss why the medium is growing. We’ll share some reasons it might be time to consider adding podcasts to your media strategy. Finally, we’ll touch on some of the best practices for podcast advertising if you do.

While most of the world is in quarantine and practicing social distancing, one social media platform has continued to maintain a rapid growth in downloads, especially in the U.S. According to Sensor Tower’s report, 2019’s second most downloaded app worldwide, TikTok, saw an 18% increase in downloads, tallying the number to 2 million between March 16 and 22, compared to the previous week at 1.7 million.

If you’ve been in the banking business for a while like me, you can attest to the fact that for decades, pundits have declared virtually every recession, economic downturn or national crisis to be the death knell of community banks, and in 2020, the financial emergency caused by the global pandemic is no different.

In this edition of our Plain Talk series, we’ll examine brand trust and corporate social responsibility and discuss how the two are interacting during the current COVID-19 global crisis. We’re exploring the ways smart brands continue to communicate and build trust with consumers from a physical distance.

Community and regional banks facing competition from the bigger money center banks need to know how they can compete effectively and win. If they try to fight the same way as the giants, they will get overpowered and definitely overspent. But if they think like a smaller bank, they’re nimble and responsive enough to compete successfully. So, how do smaller banks prevail? They think like David.

As marketing professionals with years of experience, we’ve all learned to trust, to some degree, that little voice inside our heads that tells us when we may have stumbled across an idea that could be genius. Intuition. Inspiration. The gap in time and space where the magic happens. Creatives in our industry thrive on honing their intuition to drive new ideas and break new creative ground. But in today’s highly fragmented and diverse customer universe, many brands find out the hard way that real insight must guide intuition. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll noodle some cautionary instances where a well-written research and insight development plan could have saved brands a lot of money and heartache on controversial ads and promotions.