What started as a weekend experiment is now a fully-fledged AI voice assistant on Hearst’s recipe site Delish, helping home cooks follow recipes hands-free.
Hearst’s senior director of AI initiatives, Alexandria Redmon wanted a personal chef assistant — something she could talk to while cooking, without smearing her phone with batter. Using OpenAI’s GPT large language model (Hearst has a content licensing deal with OpenAI), Redmon built the prototype in a few days. It’s aimed at helping to solve everyday kitchen problems: running multiple cooking timers, managing ingredient swaps, and navigating recipes hands-free.
Redmon teamed up with Delish editorial director Joanna Saltz and director of product Ashley Szwec. They spent five months developing the “Cooking Coach” voice assistant, which rolled out across the Delish site this month. It’s trained only on Delish’s content of over 30,000 recipes on the 10-year-old site.
It’s the first AI product for Delish (Hearst’s Good Housekeeping publication developed an AI-powered gift guide last year).
A pop-up on the site invites users to enable their microphone, unlocking access to the Cooking Coach assistant. Once activated, the voice tool helps users choose and follow Delish recipes (“I’m looking for chicken tacos that take less than an hour”). It can also suggest ingredient swaps, adjust serving sizes, set multiple timers and answer questions about cooking techniques and terminology — all in multiple languages. (It took a while to finesse — the original Cooking Coach voice had a “Scottish brogue,” Saltz noted.)
Publishers are ramping up generative AI products — from chatbots to search assistants — to keep readers on their websites for longer, and surface more of their own content on the platforms they own and operate. The push comes as AI products and search engines increasingly siphon off users’ attention, by serving up quick, simplified answers that bypass publishers altogether.
“User expectations are shifting from reading content to relying on AI tools that help them complete tasks step by step. Publishers need to meet that shift by building interactive, utility-driven experiences. Tools like this are one way to do that,” said Josh Jaffe, AI and media consultant and former president of media at the publisher Ingenio.
As Google adds more generative AI summarizations to its search engine, some lifestyle publishers are finding it a uniquely challenging time to keep traffic stable amid declining search referral traffic. Google’s AI-generated summaries can generate full recipes for users, putting recipe sites particularly at risk. Delish has seen “a little bit of an impact” on its traffic from these Google AI features, Saltz said. But she’s not worried.
“Coming out with innovations that are different and interesting and fun and make cooking easier? I think it’s going to ensure that we’re relevant for a long time,” she said.
Voice assistants are getting smarter with the help of generative AI technology. Amazon is courting news publishers for potential AI licensing partnerships to feed quality content into a smarter version of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant product, Axios reported last December. The New York Times’ announcement of its recent AI licensing deal with Amazon hints at having its content power the new Alexa+.
Redmon declined to comment on whether Hearst was in talks with Amazon about making its content and AI voice initiatives available through Alexa, though she said she can see the value of device-specific integrations.
“Instead of limiting myself to just folks that have Alexa… I at least wanted to be able to prove out what could be done,” said Redmon. “And so making it a mobile-optimized web app was a way to reach basically everybody in this space at launch.”
The Delish team is tracking engagement metrics to gauge the success of the Cooking Coach product. The Delish team can also track chat logs with Cooking Coach to see how users are interacting with recipe discovery, Szwec added. The team plans to expand features that are popular with users down the line, she said.
“It’s not groundbreaking tech, but it’s a smart start,” Jaffe said. “A next-level version would integrate predictive personalization and contextual tips based on user behavior, turning it into a true personal sous chef. That’s the kind of AI-native product publishers need to be building now if they want to stay competitive.”
Meanwhile, the Delish team is exploring using AI technology to improve the search function on its site. For example, using natural language search to give users a way to find recipes that exclude certain ingredients or use terms like “vegetarian,” even if those terms aren’t in the title of the recipe. They are also looking at developing photo-based search, where a user can take a picture of items in their pantry and ask the cooking assistant what to make.
“This is just the beginning,” said Ronak Patel, gm of the lifestyle group at Hearst Magazines.
Jaffe believes that people will only prefer a publisher’s AI experience over a generic ChatGPT result if the UX, tone and content stand out. “That is where publishers still have an edge,” he added.
There’s a reason why there isn’t sports photography for chess – it’s all about movement, fury and kinetics. Whether it be through blasts of snow or ferocious blurs, the constant movement of athletes is celebrated in Max Manavi-Huber’s extremely stylish photography for brands such as Nike, Atomic and Salomon. Whether it’s for running shoes, skis or hiking gear, Max’s photos turn campaigns into what looks like screengrabs from blistering music videos – think along the lines of the voguish runners of Darude’s Sandstorm. “While I never sought out to focus my photography on sports, it happened naturally as movement and the outdoors is such a big part of my life,” says Max.
Playing with natural light and shutter speeds to create suspense and dramatic shapes, Max transports the viewer into an alternate world, a paranormal event in which sharp flashes of adrenaline junkies are caught defying the laws of physics on camera. As a student of graphic design at university, Max became attuned to white space, movement patterns and human geometry – all of which are experimented with in these breathtaking campaigns. “I constantly strive for unique perspectives and ways I can get really close or put myself in uncomfortable places to create distinctive visuals,” says Max. “I try to not repeat myself too often.”
When it comes to enterprise SEO, you need more than just the basics. You need tools that scale, provide deep insights, and plug seamlessly into your WordPress ecosystem.
Enterprise businesses require a scalable, credible, and reliable website. While many organizations invest in expensive platforms that consume a significant portion of their budget and come with limited support, WordPress offers a powerful alternative without the hefty annual software fees.
The latest version of WordPress (6.8) has been downloaded over 28 million times. There are also over 59,000 plugins and 13,000 free themes.
This is a testament to the core WordPress development team’s ability to improve the platform and meet modern business needs.
Let me break down the best WordPress SEO tools as I see them that will help your enterprise site boost rankings, improve core web vitals, and gain visibility in even the most competitive markets.
WordPress plugins and tools can assist in optimizing your site and improve site security, performance, and speed.
But, with so many different plugins and tools in the market today, how do you choose the right ones that will improve your site’s visibility?
To help you avoid an SEO disaster, let’s take a look at the top WordPress tools and plugins for search optimization of enterprise brands.
Made popular by over 3 million users, AIOSEO offers a comprehensive toolkit and setup wizard for you to establish SEO settings for your website quickly.
The checklist includes features like meta tag generators, titles, descriptions, rich snippets, schema markup, and XML sitemaps.
For tech-savvy users, AIOSEO gives you complete control of robots.txt, local SEO, RSS videos, and video and photo optimizations. It also allows enterprises to assign user roles to employees or contractors.
BrightEdge provides AI-powered data-driven solutions to help you manage your SEO and content performance to convert more users into customers.
You can leverage BrightEdge throughout every stage of content optimization: discovering your target audience’s search demand, creating impactful content, and measuring results to scale.
With powerful data insights like share of voice, opportunity forecasting, and ContentIQ, your content is more likely to capture your audience’s attention and boost SEO efforts.
This is especially effective for sites with complex structures or multiple departments contributing content.
Semrush allows you to find all the organic keywords and search terms that your website can rank.
It also provides a competitive analysis of how your competitors rank, so you know how to gain an edge over their SEO strategy.
Our enterprise clients using Semrush reduced keyword blind spots by ~64% after refining their strategy using the Keyword Magic Tool.
With Semrush’s Writing Assistant Tool, you can also improve your existing WordPress content with targeted focus keywords to help you make the top 10 results.
I, however, like their backlink tracking capabilities the best.
In our work across dozens of enterprise WordPress deployments, Yoast SEO lets you easily update descriptions, titles, and social media images throughout your website.
With a user-friendly platform, Yoast SEO automatically creates an XML sitemap to make it easier for search engines to crawl your website and import data from other plugins.
You also have complete control of your site breadcrumbs and premium loading times. (While Yoast is the gold standard, I would also highly consider RankMath.)
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps optimize your website, analyze industry content, and study your customers’ top keywords to help you improve.
With Ahrefs, you can track your ranking progress and learn from your competitors’ content to deliver a high-ranking website that builds authority.
Additionally, Ahrefs offers enterprise-level support with unique features, including multiple user seats, personalized customer support, daily updates, and more, to help your business grow globally.
With over 240,000 websites using NitroPack, it’s a popular performance plugin.
NitroPack helps increase your speed score by 60% and improves your core web vitals, which can provide a better experience to users.
Enterprise teams we work with prioritize core web vitals for performance and SEO.
One client we worked with in the energy sector saw a 42% boost in mobile conversions after optimizing core web vitals with NitroPack.
It offers advanced features such as caching, a built-in CDN, and HTML optimization on a user-friendly platform.
Instead of relying on SEO assumptions, MonsterInsights provides you with all the insights you need to improve search rankings by connecting Google Analytics to your WordPress site.
MonsterInsights shows you top content, how users interact on your site, and connects ecommerce SEO.
Also, MonsterInsights provides over 100 data points to help you make better marketing decisions through real-time analytics.
In my recent experience, DemandSphere has been a valuable tool for managing SEO at scale, especially when working with enterprise clients across multiple regions or business units.
Its AI-powered insights helped me surface priority keywords and content gaps, especially across large or multi-regional sites.
In one case, we used its predictive models to reorganize a content roadmap, which led to measurable improvements in mid-funnel visibility.
One of the features I find especially useful is the ability to segment data by market or product line, which helps clarify where to focus our efforts.
Here are a few reasons why WordPress is great for enterprises:
Since WordPress is open-source software, your business has access to an endless pool of designers, developers, and specialized agencies, along with a massive community that is always ready to collaborate, innovate, and troubleshoot together.
With millions of WordPress websites live, the user community allows you to leverage best practices and implement them within your own system, instead of relying on inconsistent customer service or a limited FAQ page from closed-off systems.
WordPress includes several built-in features that help you better optimize your site, and has many plugins that can support SEO (some mentioned above).
Is WordPress enterprise-ready?
Combined with powerful plugins and themes, WordPress’s content management system is more than ready to handle the needs of a complex enterprise website.
With WordPress, you can scale your website with flexible infrastructure and reliable SEO features.
We’ve implemented this setup across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and legal, each with its own unique technical and SEO requirements.
WordPress is one of the best platforms for SEO. Not only does the system provide SEO features, but the available plugins also make it easy for your website to start building authority and boost its overall rankings.
Continue optimizing and adapting to maintain long-term growth. The key is to keep your SEO strategy evolving to keep up with the changes in the industry.
More Resources:
Featured Image: hasan as’ari/Shutterstock
WPP has been named Creative Company of the Year at Cannes Lions for the second consecutive year.
The annual award is calculated based on which holding company’s member agencies earn the most points for shortlisted and awarded entries. WPP agencies collected 168 Lions, including one Titanium Lion, 10 Grand Prix (including the Glass Lion for Change), 23 Gold, 53 Silver, and 81 Bronze.
WPP’s win comes as the company sharpens its focus on its media division and AI tools amid a slumping share price.
The recognition also comes as its longtime chief executive (CEO), Mark Read, attends his final Cannes Lions as boss before stepping down in December.
In a statement, Read said: “Our success at Cannes Lions is a tribute to the extraordinary talent and passion of our people worldwide, and to the clients who entrust us with their brands.”
He added: “Winning Creative Company of the Year is always a huge honour. However, celebrating this achievement with our brilliant people at my last Cannes as CEO makes it doubly special.”
WPP’s top-winning campaigns included Ogilvy’s “Make Love Last” for Viatris, which won the Grand Prix in Pharma. The agency’s “Vaseline Verified” for Unilever also won a Titanium Lion and two Grand Prix (Social & Creator, Health & Wellness).
Elsewhere, DAVID’s “Haaland Payback Time” for Supercell was awarded a Grand Prix in Entertainment Lion for Sport, while VML’s “Preserved Promos” for Ziploc took home the Grand Prix in Creative Commerce.
Mindshare and Dove’s “Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era” won the Grand Prix for Media, and AKQA’s “Sounds Right” for UN Live and Spotify was the winner of the Innovation Grand Prix.
VML and OpenMind’s “Phone Break” for KitKat won the first Grand Prix for the Czech Republic in Outdoor.
Finally, Ogilvy U.K. helped Dove score another Grand Prix for its “Real Beauty: Self-Esteem Project,” which won the Glass Lion for Change.
Rob Reilly, WPP’s global chief creative officer (CCO), said: “In a world increasingly shaped by AI, authentic human creativity with integrity commands a growing premium,” adding: “This year’s winners from across WPP brilliantly showcase how our agencies are owning innovation and technology, not to replace creativity, but to amplify it.”
The award bookends a bumpy first half of the year for the U.K.-based ad network.
WPP kicked off the year by ceding its crown as the world’s largest ad network by revenue to French rival Publicis Groupe. By Spring, an unpopular return-to-office mandate drew over 16,000 signatures of protest. This was followed by an unspecified number of layoffs at its media arm, Group M, renamed WPP Media shortly after.
The search for Read’s successor is on, with both external and internal candidates suggested by industry sources as contenders for the job.
In the other special Cannes Lions categories, Omnicom’s DDB won Network of the Year, and Publicis Conseil was named Agency of the Year.
OMD Worldwide won Media Network of the Year.
Available through the NVIDIA app, Project G-Assist is the graphics card giant’s AI assistant for GeForce RTX PCs. It’s designed to help optimise and control systems through voice or text commands, and its highly customisable, allowing users to create their own plug-ins. Now NVIDIA is giving an extra incentive to do just that, holding a virtual Hackathon to get people inspired.
Anyone can enter, and one developer will win a GeForce RTX 5090 laptop, while two runners up will bag new 5000 series graphics cards (see our pick of the best graphics cards for video editing and our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 FE review).
(Image credit: Nvidia)
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Google’s Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes recently addressed a common question in search marketing: how technical do SEO professionals need to be?
In a Search Off the Record podcast, they offered guidance on which technical skills are helpful in SEO and discussed the long-standing friction between developers and SEO professionals.
Splitt noted:
“I think in order to optimize a system or work with a system so deeply like SEOs do, you have to understand some of the characteristics of the system.”
However, he clarified that strong coding skills aren’t a requirement for doing effective SEO work.
Splitt, who regularly speaks at both developer and SEO events, acknowledged that the relationship between these groups can sometimes be difficult.
Splitt says:
“Even if you go to a developer event and talk about SEO, it is a strained relationship you’re entering.”
He added that developers often approach SEO conversations with skepticism, even when they come from someone with a developer background.
This disconnect can cause real-world problems.
Illyes shared an example of a large agency that added a calendar plugin across multiple websites, unintentionally generating “100 million URLs.” Google began crawling all of them, creating a major crawl budget issue.
Rather than recommending that SEO professionals learn to code, Splitt advises understanding how web technologies function.
Splitt states:
“You should understand what is a header, how does HTTPS conceptually work, what’s the certificate, how does that influence how the connection works.”
He also advised being familiar with the differences between web protocols, such as HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1.
While SEO pros don’t need to write in programming languages like C, C++, or JavaScript, having some awareness of how JavaScript affects page rendering can be helpful.
Google also pointed out that SEO is a broad discipline, and the amount of technical knowledge needed can vary depending on your focus.
Splitt gave the example of international SEO. He initially said these specialists might not need technical expertise, but later clarified that internationalization often includes technical components too.
“SEO is such a broad field. There are people who are amazing at taking content international… they specialize on a much higher layer as in like the content and the structure and language and localization in different markets.”
Still, he emphasized that people working in more technical roles, or in generalist positions, should aim to understand development concepts.
Here’s what the discussion means for SEO professionals:
As websites become more complex and JavaScript frameworks continue to grow, technical literacy will likely become more important.
Google’s message is clear: SEOs don’t need to become developers, but having a working understanding of how websites function can make you far more effective.
For companies, closing the communication gap between development and marketing remains a key area of opportunity.
Listen to the full podcast episode below:
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) is a waste of time and money. This isn’t a controversial statement anymore. Few disagree except for MTA vendors, and even they have quietly hedged their bets, introducing media mix modeling (MMM) and incrementality testing. Wise.
Yet brands continue to fall into the MTA trap. I’ve watched too many marketing teams realize that last-click or platform attribution is leading them astray, only to be sold the seductive promise of MTA.
Whether it’s pitched hard by a vendor or by a CMO looking to justify their existence for a 12-month project under the guise of getting our house in order, the outcome is predictably the same: no meaningful changes are made that make a marketing program more profitable.
Multi-touch attribution vendors tell a compelling story that sounds almost too good to be true — because it is.
Data-driven credit distribution across all touchpoints based on sophisticated statistical modeling and comprehensive customer journey analysis across every touchpoint. Finally, you’ll move beyond crude last-click attribution to elegant, nuanced measurement that captures the full complexity of modern customer journeys.
Still click-obsessed: Despite all the sophisticated modeling and data-drivenness, MTA systems heavily weight clicked interactions because they’re the most trackable and reliable data points. You end up with a marginally better-than-last-click attribution wrapped in significantly more complexity and cost.
Built on dying data: iOS 14.5+ and other tech changes, cookie deprecation and evolving privacy regulations systematically destroy the data foundation MTA requires.
Same optimization mistakes: Even with a theoretically perfect MTA, every touchpoint tracked and accounted for, you’ll still optimize toward attributed performance rather than actual incremental impact. The fundamental flaw remains unchanged.
MTA may tell you that someone:
It cannot tell you which of your ads influenced that purchase decision or whether the customer would have bought anyway.
Dig deeper: What your attribution model isn’t telling you
Beyond the technological limitations, human psychology keeps brands trapped in the MTA cycle.
Brands invest so much time, effort and energy (not to mention money) in making MTA work that admitting defeat becomes challenging. The more resources invested, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when the evidence clearly shows it’s not delivering value.
Because MTA isn’t all that different from last-click or platform attribution, it’s easier to get organizational buy-in. Marketing teams comfortable with attribution-based reporting find MTA safer than other measurement methodologies.
For years, marketing teams have justified their budgets (and value to the organization) via attribution-based reporting. Changing the measurement philosophy feels risky. Sticking with the same approach in a more sophisticated package feels safer, despite leading to the same fundamental problems.
Dig deeper: How attribution masks what’s actually driving growth
Attribution isn’t entirely worthless. You need to know its role. Attribution provides a real-time signal for operational decision-making, but don’t take it at face value for strategic budget allocation.
The solution is straightforward: augment attribution with learnings from incrementality testing and/or well-built MMM. Apply multipliers, coefficients or adjustment factors — call them whatever you want — to bring attributed numbers closer to causal reality.
For example, through testing, bottom-funnel tactics drive many conversions that would happen regardless of ads and end up with a multiplier of less than 1. Mid- and upper-funnel tactics that do not receive appropriate click credit end up with multipliers greater than 1 to account for the halo effect not captured in attribution.
While these adjustments don’t maintain perfect accuracy over long periods or through large-scale campaign changes, they provide a more realistic, real-time picture of actual contribution than raw attribution data.
Dig deeper: The smarter approach to marketing measurement
I recently walked a brand through my perspective after they’d invested heavily in building an MTA system but were questioning whether to continue. As we dug into the details, it became clear that their model showed only about 10% of conversions involved multiple touchpoints. That wasn’t true, but it was all their attribution system could see. In the end, their sophisticated MTA setup was effectively delivering the same results as last-click attribution. No better insights. No better decisions. No added value.
My core issue with how MTA vendors talk about triangulation is combining MTA, MMM and incrementality testing. While I agree with some concept elements, the “M” and “T” are useless. Instead of layering complexity, brands should anchor their multipliers directly on simpler click-based or platform attribution.
We like attribution because it gives us a single number to grade our marketing efforts. However, there is no perfect way to measure marketing effectiveness, and there never will be. Instead, we need to use a series of tools to better understand what’s working and what’s not and how to adjust our strategy and budget to drive more growth or profit.
While I’ve seen attribution (of any flavor) lead brands astray when used in a silo, brands leveraging consistent incrementality testing and MMM are making better decisions. Thankfully, there is no shortage of vendors at every price point, not to mention open-source tooling, that are making better measurement more accessible.
Multi-touch attribution overpromises and underdelivers. The sooner marketing leaders accept that attribution cannot solve the fundamental question of incremental impact, the sooner they can invest in measurement approaches that deliver insights that, when acted on, drive better business outcomes and allow them to build marketing programs that are no longer cost centers, but profit centers.
Dig deeper: Why causal AI is the answer for smarter marketing
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
There’s a playfulness to Elya Akateva’s posters, and the way they bend the the flatness of digital type design; they burst expectations of what graphic design should look like. “Posters are my primary and beloved medium,” says Elya. “I treat them as containers for thought rather than announcements.” Challenging the authority of language through what some may call ‘low-brow’ digital typography, Elya’s posters become terrains of fascinating shapes that are defined by their digitality. Perfect angles, hard lines, computerised gradient and bevel effects are all used to inspire curiosity and humour. Letters and meanings are sometimes dissolved into an amusing, textureless languor – other times they mutate into a formidable physicality.
“I like structures that break and accidentally reassemble into something new and systems that glitch into poetry,” says Elya. In one poster, Elya incorporates a hilariously frank ‘Untitled’ text box, toying with the idea of the digital default, systematic fonts, automatic leading – Elya forces the viewer to recognise that she is always working from the starting point, smashing it and glueing it back together to create new bodies of forward-thinking graphic design. “In my work, letters are not neutral carriers of meaning but active participants,” says Elya. “I see language as a system that can be broken apart and reassembled – liberated from its original function.” From patchwork orgies of shapes, created from manipulated line and selection tools, to experimentations in minimalism and geometric mischief – Elya’s posters contain the thoughts of a well needed prankster.
If your brand doesn’t resonate on a deep level with your target audience, then pouring time and energy into aesthetics and clever messaging is a waste of resources.
Real brand power is based on your brand’s identity: knowing who you are as a company, and how your ideal customer experiences life in relation to your offering.
Search Engine Journal’s Editor-in-Chief Katie Morton sits down with Mordy Oberstein, founder of Unify Brand Marketing, to go deeper on how to build a brand with a solid foundation.
Watch the video or read the full transcript below.
Katie Morton: Hello, everybody. It is I, Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, and I’m here today with Mordy Oberstein, who is the founder of Unify Brand Marketing.
So, Mordy, what are we going to talk about today?
Mordy Oberstein: Hi there, everybody. Last time we spoke about what brand marketing is fundamentally and how to approach it. Today, I’m gonna talk about how to actually develop a brand and run through that process.
We’re gonna try to be jargon-free about what brand development actually looks like and what the stages are, and how they should all flow one into the other.
Katie: That sounds great. OK, so what’s the first concept?
Mordy: OK, this is where I think brands get really messed up. If you feel like you’ve lost traction, like you don’t have direction or you’re all over the place – whatever it is – most problems come down to this issue, which is… (I’m not going to say the jargon word) but it comes down to: Who are you?
And this is where you’re doing therapy for your brand. You’re trying to figure out who you are in a real, deep way. Kind of what we talked about last time – about building some meaning for yourself. You need to think about: Who are you? Where do you want to be? How do you want to be seen? How are you seen? How do you want to be seen going forward?
This is the part where it gets a little bit scary. I’m going to ask you: What scares you? Because this is where brands kind of feel like, “Maybe we’re going to pigeonhole ourselves.” But you’re not.
I’m not going to use the identity word – wait, I said identity – used jargon. Darn it!
This is where you kind of feel like maybe we’re going to pigeonhole ourselves if we have too much of a pigeonhole kind of audience. Don’t. It’s scary, but you have to do it.
This is where brands get off the rails. You have to understand who you are in a real way, because who you are rolls right into who you’re for.
Mordy: If I was dating my wife back in the day and my wife didn’t like sports at all, I’d be like, “Oh, my wife’s not for me. I’m a sports nut,” which is not true. That’s not how dating actually works.
Knowing who you are rolls right into: Who are you for?
Once you know who you are, the next step is: Who’s actually interested in you? Who’s your core audience? And this is a direct outcome of who you are, which is why it’s important.
The next stage in brand development – once you know who you are and who you’re for (that doesn’t mean you have to be only for them, but they’re your core) – is what problems does that audience have?
And by problems, I don’t mean USPs (which I know is a jargon word, but I’m going to use it so we know what we’re talking about). I’m not talking about pain points.
I’m talking about: What’s going on in their lives as it generally relates to your product or service?
Let me give you an example: Minivans. Why do I always use minivans? If I was making minivans, I would want to know: What’s the context? What’s the life situation of the parent or guardian driving and schlepping these kids around? What’s happening in their lives around the product?
It’s not a pain point. It’s not a USP. It’s what’s happening in the life of your audience, as it relates to generally speaking about the product/service, whatever you do.
Now that you know that, the next step in brand development is: How do you fit those needs?
This is where your “USP stuff” kind of comes in. And by the way, everything here should align from who you are to your audience, to what their problems are, to how do you fit those needs (because you know who you are now, obviously)?
Mordy: Because of who you are, how do you now solve those problems that your audience or people or consumers are dealing with in their lives? Now, once you know that, stage five would be, how do you actually communicate that? Or rather, what’s important about that to communicate?
We now know who we are. We now know who we’re for. We now know what the problems and the life situation is of the people we’re for. And we know how we solve and deal with those situations with who we are as a product, as a service, as an offering.
What’s important to tell the audience about who we are and how we solve their problems?
Don’t try to refine it here. Don’t try to have it snappy and snippy. Nothing catchy. No taglines. Just what’s important conceptually as a framework to communicate to your audience.
What’s conceptually important – what should the audience understand?
And the last step is to refine that. It’s not going to come in one shot. It’ll take multiple iterations to do it. It’s not going to be perfect, and you’ll never be 100% happy with it. It’s better that it’s honest and genuine than it is perfect.
If we want to zoom out and use the jargon, we just ran through:
Katie: I like it.
Mordy: No jargon, I almost got through it!
Katie: I think it speaks to our audience to use a little bit of jargon in there. And speaking of that, I’m sure a lot of people you talk to and a lot of people in the Search Engine Journal universe are SaaS, software as a service.
I like the minivan example because it’s easy to wrap your head around. It’s an obvious life circumstance. You just say that word ‘minivan’ and it’s giving you a picture of being married with a bunch of kids, driving them around. You say one word, and it paints this whole picture. With SaaS, it’s so different.
And what would it be like, as a thought exercise to go through this, if you invent a software that’s a rabbit food feeding timer?
Mordy: Okay. A set that feeds your rabbit on a timer.
Katie: Something that’s life-oriented, right? Like, think about our universe, which is really kind of abstract, right? In terms of people’s day-to-day. And they’re really using software, probably in a professional sense, and probably not in their home life for the most part, let’s say like a marketing software or, you know, ads like PPC.
Mordy: I consult for a marketing software, so I’m not going to use a marketing software because I’m biased. Let’s say I use like a video editor tool – does that work?
Katie: Yeah, that works.
Mordy: All right, cool.
Mordy: First of all, the most important thing is where I think brands get everything wrong. It’s not like one stage, and you go from stage one, which is brand identity to messaging refinement, which is, what, stage six?
Don’t think of it as a line. I did one, and now I go to the next one, then I go to the next one. Think of it like you’re stacking a building. You’re building a building.
The foundation is a brand identity, and then you build the next floor, the next floor, the next – and the top floor, the roof is the refinement that everybody can see from the helicopter.
But they’re not—if you imagine they’re in a helicopter looking down on this roof – they can’t see all of the other layers, but you can. And you have to start with brand identity.
And this – particularly for a SaaS tool – because SaaS, it’s really easy to get stuck in being a utility. “We’re just a utility.”
The problem with being a utility is that there’s no actual connection. And as soon as somebody else finds another utility that’s better, cheaper, or whatever, they’ll move. There’s no loyalty, which is literally what I did… I used another tool. I found it a little bit cumbersome. The pricing wasn’t super clear, so I moved to this one.
Now, I don’t love this one, by the way. If something else came along, I would totally move to the other one.
There’s no identity. I don’t know what separates CapCut from the other one I was using.
I don’t use Camtasia anymore only because I have an old license. I don’t want to pay for a new one. So if I’m going to pay for a new one, I find it a little bit cumbersome.
I have no actual loyalty to any of these platforms because I don’t know who they are and what makes them different.
You know why I don’t know who they are and what makes them different? Because they don’t know who they are.
Katie: If they worked on connecting with you as a brand and developed that emotional bond, you’d be more likely to stick with them, even if something better came out, a better feature.
Mordy: Because it’d be more for me. Right. They have to ask themselves – and I can’t do this for them – I don’t even know anything about it other than the tool. Someone recommended it to me and I use it.
They have to figure out: Why are you doing this? Why do you want to do this outside of making money? Why do you find this meaningful?
“Oh, because…” Let’s just say, “Because we help. Because we are into the idea of being able to do X, Y, and Z.”
Oh, okay, CapCut. Let’s just say their big thing is (because I use this part of their tool, so I like it—they automatically remove my background and put a new one):
“We’re all about people who don’t have a professional setup feeling like they have a professional setup.”
That’s just really important because we see the value in that. “We want to democratize video content,” etc. That would be an actual brand identity.
So now I know who I’m for. I’m not for a professional. I’m a big brand, I have a whole studio, I’m Coca-Cola, I have a whole in-house studio on site. [I’m not for them.] I’m for this audience.
Now, what are their problems, and what’s going on with them, and what’s happening with them?
Now it’s kind of easier to see.
“I really want to create professional-level content, but I don’t have the skills to do it.” I’m also not an idiot, either. So I kind of know what it’s supposed to look like. I kind of know what it’s supposed to be. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the technical know-how. I don’t want to pay anybody to do it.
These are my problems. How do you come in and solve that?
Katie: So it’s like the entire market proposition is tied into that.
Mordy: But they only realize to talk to me about my problems, and how they solve my problems, once they figure out who they were first.
But everybody skips that step. Everyone goes right to the roof—because that’s the only thing you can see.
Katie: That’s fascinating, Mordy. Brick by brick – you’ve got to stack it up before you get to the helicopter view.
Mordy: Gotcha. It’ll all come crumbling down at a certain point. The messaging won’t work. It’ll all fall apart. That sounds really doomsday-ish.
Katie: It does. But I do think that I will be checking out CapCut’s branding – to see what are they doing over there?
All I know is their little logo that I see frequently at the end of some of my favorite creators.
Mordy: So that’s good branding. It’s not great branding, but better than nothing.
Katie: Exactly. Better than nothing.
Well, Mordy, this has been very enlightening, and I want to thank you for coming on and sharing with me today.
What’s next?
Mordy: I was going to shout “brand!” from the rooftops. That was so like a dad joke.
Next time, we’re going to dive deeper into Stage One, which is building brand identity, and what that actually looks like, and how you do it.
Katie: That’d be fantastic. All right, everybody, thanks for joining us. And check us out: searchenginejournal.com.
Mordy, what’s your website?…
Mordy: Oh, I should know this – good branding! unifybrandmarketing.com.
Katie: Awesome. All right. See you next time, everybody.
Katie & Mordy: Bye!
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Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
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Amid the AI hype, increasingly fragmented media marketplace and economic headwinds, marketers this year came to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity looking for answers.
For Carly Carson, PMG’s head of integrated media, this year’s festival served as a temperature check for an industry in flux. As the book closes on another Cannes Lions, Carson has pocketed three takeaways.
Tune into the full episode for more from Carson on how PMG is navigating the industry’s shifting tides and what Cannes talking points mean for the second half of the year’s ad dollars.
https://digiday.com/?p=581432
