IN PRACTICE | The Cases Shaping Marketing Now What five award-winning campaigns reveal about the future of marketing. At first glance, these examples seem unrelated. Different countries. Different categories. Different audiences. Different objectives. Yet together they reveal something important: Marketing is moving beyond the message. Across this year’s highest-scoring Internationalist Award winners, the most innovative […]
The Big Idea Is Only as Strong as the System That Delivers It. Global brands have never invested more in creating big ideas. Brand platforms are centralized. Creative systems are increasingly sophisticated. Campaigns are built to travel across markets, formats, platforms, and channels. Strategy is aligned. Guidelines are documented. Master assets are approved. And yet, […]
Most organizations don’t struggle with a lack of ideas.They struggle with the discipline to turn those ideas into decisions. AI has amplified that gap. What begins as exploration too often becomes a permanent state—an ongoing series of pilots, tests, and initiatives that never quite reach production. Investment continues. Progress is reported. But meaningful outcomes remain […]
TRENDSETTERS | Martyn Etherington, CMO of BMC Software. There was something refreshingly grounded about speaking with Martyn Etherington recently. At a moment when much of the marketing conversation around AI feels dominated by acceleration, automation, and speculation, Martyn’s perspective was strikingly simple: the future may belong less to louder brands — and more to trusted […]
Some brands are still focused on visibility. Others are beginning to recognize that visibility alone is no longer enough. In an environment shaped by skepticism, overload, and constant exposure, marketing increasingly faces a different challenge: not simply getting attention, but demonstrating credibility, usefulness, transparency—or even self-awareness. This week’s examples from Shein, a Finnish bakery brand, […]
If transformation is now the default, the question is simple: now what? It’s easy to assume that marketing’s current challenges stem from complexity. More channels.More data.More expectations. But that may not be the real shift. The deeper change is structural. The conditions marketing operates within keep shifting. From Phase to Condition For years, transformation was […]
For years, purpose has been one of marketing’s most discussed—and often debated—ideas. But as expectations rise, the conversation is shifting. The question is no longer whether brands care.It’s whether that care is built into how they operate. The most effective partnerships between companies and nonprofits don’t sit alongside the business. They integrate capabilities, systems, and […]
It’s easy to look at the latest data and conclude that marketing has a performance problem. But that may not be the real issue. It may be a definition problem. Recent research from Boathouse suggests a growing disconnect inside organizations. CMOs are seen as more aligned with the business than ever before—more committed, more integrated, […]
The most dangerous moment for a great marketing idea is not when it is created. It is when it is scaled. A global idea is approved. The strategy is clear. The creative platform is strong. The brand team is aligned. Then the idea enters execution. It is adapted, resized, translated, rebuilt, localized, versioned, reviewed, approved, […]
Why the 50+ opportunity is still underestimated—and what’s beginning to change … The 50+ audience is described as the most valuable consumer segment in the market (Nielsen). And yet, it rarely shows up as the starting point for growth. Not in strategy. Not in creative. And not even in how success is measured. The issue isn’t visibility. […]
