The conference area in the Hudson Yards shopping mall felt depleted on the fourth and final day of Advertising Week, presumably due to exhaustion from the first three days of one of the greatest live events since the pandemic began in the Spring of 2020. Those that remained, on the other hand, spent the day donning little bouquets of flowers from TikTok’s lounge and learning about the latest advertising trends.
Injecting authenticity and personality into brand efforts, particularly by using celebrities, influencers, and individuals who can represent more than their face and dig into who they are, was one of the day’s themes that repeated through multiple sessions.
Here are some highlights from the final day of Advertising Week New York’s in-person comeback.
DE&I in advertising on a multi-dimensional scale
Brands have been focusing on diversity in their advertising and vocalizing support for underprivileged communities more than ever before in the last year. Despite this, the session “Lessons in Authentic DE&I: Thoughtfully Impacting Branding and Advertising from the Inside Out” began by asking why there is still so much work to be done in this area.
Part of the problem, according to the panelists, is the failing to see people as multi-dimensional individuals.
People are not homogeneous groups that reflect the total population. As a result, representation cannot be one-dimensional or oversimplify people’s identities. Focus on the transgender community or the non-binary community instead than the LGBTQ+ community, according to Jamie Tredwell, managing director of brand partnerships at Pride Media.
“It’s as if we pretend that only certain kinds of individuals exist, and that only certain kinds of variety can be reflected in our art.” That is what the media is burdened with,” said Nikki Darden, Citi’s head of global marketing integration, DEI brand strategy, and international brand engagement.
Taking it a step further and focusing on personality
The panel I moderated today was titled “WWE Experiences a Pop Culture Takeover,” and I spoke with Claudine Lilien, WWE’s svp and head of global sales and alliances, as well as WWE Superstar team The Street Profits, Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford.
The WWE is different from other sports organizations in that it emphasizes entertainment inside the game — as its name implies — and as a result, the WWE Superstars are skilled actors, not simply athletes. As a result, many of them, such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena, go on to become blockbuster movie stars. However, when Lilien joined the WWE in April of this year, she was entrusted with figuring out how to break through the ring identities and humanize the characters with their personal hobbies and families.
By focusing on Ford’s marriage to WWE Superstar Bianca Belair and showing the couple buying Snickers for a house party, The Street Profits has been used to carry out this plan. The reason these personalized methods to advertising succeed, according to Ford, is that it helps to continue the character tale he and other WWE celebrities tell during wrestling matches by making the larger-than-life personas approachable people.
According to Lilien, this works for businesses because they can find athletes who can advocate for their brands as fans and consumers of their partners, rather than merely slapping their name on the product. Other companies, like as the video game World of Tanks, continue to rely heavily on the Superstar image — the extravagant, passionate, and over-the-top characters — to sell themselves to audiences that expect it.
Is it true that revealing the gentler side of a WWE villain (also known as a heel) devalues that persona?
Scale is less important than having a built-in audience.
Brad Mondo and Hyram Yarbro, two YouTubers turned entrepreneurs, spoke later in the afternoon in a session titled “Building a Brand and Leveraging Social Media.” They talked about how they became marketers in the process of developing their haircare and skincare brands, and how they were tasked with pushing their products to their millions of subscribers.
They both agreed that one advantage of making a product in front of all of their followers was the ability to use them as an informal focus group, which resulted in positive sales performance in some circumstances.
Mondo, the CEO of XMondo, said he utilized social media to select which hair colors he should manufacture for his first launch, and that the colors he chose, pink, blue, and purple, are still the best-performing hair colors in his collection to this day.
“You have this very unique relationship with your audience, and you effectively have the market research aspect of the brand building done for you because you can tap into so much of what people are saying, what they’re looking for, and what they want from a product,” Yarbro explained. “It’s a fantastic resource.”
