[Marketing Week] Bob Koigi: The battle of brands

Brands have been on a spending spree investing in novel solutions, offerings and strategic partnerships that are seeing them grow their global foothold, win more customers and outsmart each other.

The battle royale for world’s top brands keeps getting interesting. Amazon has upstaged Apple as the world’s most valuable tech brand a brand value of $299.3 billion. That value has grown 36 per cent since the pandemic and the e-commerce platform is now the world’s most valuable brand. This is according to brand valuation consultancy firm Brand Finance’s Global 500 2023 report.

One key area where Amazon has been making strides is in its renewable energy initiatives. As the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy globally, Amazon is committed to powering all its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.

In news making headlines in the advertising space this week, Redbox and advertising platform Crackle Connex, both Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment companies have announced they are now working with entertainment platform TikTok.

TikTok will provide Redbox with top content from the platform which will be featured on over 3,000 video screens on top of Redbox kiosks nationwide, and brands will have the opportunity to advertise alongside it.

At the same time, LegitScript, the player in merchant and product certification and monitoring in the e-commerce and payment sectors, has partnered with Meta to certify certain topical, non-ingestible CBD products and the websites that market them.

LegitScript offers the only certification program authorized by Meta to vet advertisers for eligible CBD products and websites. Effective immediately, Meta now recognizes LegitScript certification for CBD websites.

And, Repeated ad exposures might not be a new phenomenon, but it doesn’t make the experience any less annoying for viewers, 87% of whom agree that they see too many of the same ads, according to new research by MAGNA’s Media Trials unit in partnership with Nexxen, a global, unified advertising technology platform with a specialization in video and Connected TV

In mergers and acquisitions, Havas has made two strategic acquisitions to bolster its portfolio.

It has announced the acquisition of PivotRoots, one of India’s digital marketing and communications agencies. The network’s latest acquisition comes at a time when Havas Media India is experiencing a period of impressive growth and represents Havas’ commitment to positioning the network for expansion in this key market.

The company also recently acquired a majority stake (51%) in Uncommon Creative Studio, the most awarded and fastest growing independent creative company in the UK, reinforcing Havas’ longstanding commitment to investing in creativity to develop meaningful brands.

Appcast, the global player in programmatic recruitment advertising technology and services, has announced its acquisition of recruitment marketing pioneer, Bayard Advertising.

This strategic acquisition combines Appcast’s award-winning programmatic technology with Bayard's full-service recruitment marketing capabilities, significantly expanding Appcast’s offerings to optimize companies’ entire recruitment marketing processes.

In other news, German agency Serviceplan Munich has emerged top in the World Creative Rankings of 2023 by The Drum.

According to the research, the agency scooped more accolades that any other independent agency last year, in what the publication attributes to its Christmas campaign ‘The Wish’ for European supermarket Penny.

PR leaders remain confident about market conditions, and are increasingly exploring the potential of AI tools such as ChatGPT, according to the latest PRCA and ICCO Confidence Tracker.

73% of leaders say that they are ‘very confident’ or ‘quite confident’ about the future of their organisation, and 16% are ‘not very confident’ or ‘not confident at all’, compared with 83% and 16% respectively in the last Tracker published in February 2023.

ZoomInfo, the go-to-market platform to find, acquire, and grow customers, has launched its first integrated brand campaign, illustrating how ZoomInfo helps businesses across the globe unlock insights, engage customers, and win faster.

Bob Koigi is an editor at Marketing Report One

 

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