GumGum brought the island vibes to POSSIBLE this year! Whether it was cooling down with our water station (shoutout to Bevi!), perusing the GumGum Amenity Shop with day and night essentials in our survival kits, getting a hand massage, or sipping on a cool espresso martini during our happy hour – the memories we made will last a lifetime.
I also got the exciting opportunity to deliver a keynote address all about GumGum's vision for the future of effective advertising: The Mindset Era. Check out the top highlights below:
The Cookie Foundation is Crumbling Around Us
We are in one of the most significant stages of development for our industry - the phasing out of cookies. And, even with Google’s recent delay for cookie deprecation to 2025, the clock is still ticking for marketers and we need to start making choices.
Your gender, how much you make, your browsing history, what you’ve purchased - we have used all of this data to build a foundation that is crumbling around us. As an industry, we have become way too focused on the two-dimensional signals that cookies have provided. But, as humans, we are not binary. That is not our reality. This reliance has dulled our creativity. It has dulled our sensitivity to what consumers need, what they’re actually feeling and what they’re actually doing. And it has created a mismatch between brands and consumers.
The cookie conversation has distracted us from confronting this mismatch problem for 20 years. It's time we enter a new phase. It's time we look beyond and say goodbye to the past of identity, that era of leveraging this binary paradigm where consumers are seen as paper dolls, and start to really invest in wanting to understand who we are as humans and the complex lives we live.
Prioritizing Consumer Needs and Understanding Our Multidimensionality
Consumer mindset is fleeting as we all bounce from one screen to the next in micro-moments. Our mindset is changing constantly depending on the moment, the mood and any given situation. Just like all of us, our consumers are making choices every day – choices that we can’t predict. Because of this, we need to focus on our multidimensionality.
I'm in my 40’s, I identify as a male, a CEO, do well, have a background in finance, but also over the last several weeks, I’ve also been obsessed with Coachella because I love music festivals. I'm right now planning a fishing trip in Wisconsin off the Mississippi with my father-in-law and have way too many points at Sephora where I’m a VIP Rouge member. I’m not just this or that, I’m many things and different things at different moments – we all are.
Mindset is fleeting and is changing constantly depending on the moment, the mood, and any given situation.
All of this is to say that we cannot anticipate what our consumers can't even anticipate. The Mindset Era believes that there is a better way, a more effective way to really connect, but connecting on its own isn't enough. We need to vibe and really understand a consumer’s current need and frame of mind.
And we finally have the technology to leverage this moment in our industry as an opportunity to meet consumers where they are going and let them know we're there for them. This is the premise of what I call the new era of advertising, The Mindset Era.
The Mindset Era is Here Now
And so, as we look at the future, the identity cookie era has been all about binary labels and using the past to predict and influence the future. But the future of effective advertising is rooted in mindset and The Mindset Era is here now.
The new generation of AI-powered advanced contextual intelligence means we can look at computer vision and natural language processing machine learning to tell us what's in a visual like an image and video and tell us what's happening. It can analyze a string of words – written or audio – to tell us what's going on in a specific context and what the mood is. And we get to serve ads based on the content that someone is engaging with at a specific moment based on these signals.
The Mindset Era is authentic. It is multi-dimensional. It is powerful. And it is focused on building that relationship and the optimal match between the brand and the consumer.
I wholeheartedly predict that it will unleash an era of creativity and dynamism in our industry to the likes that we have never seen before. This is where we are going and the brands who win will be the ones that are not only ready for it, but are excited for it.
So I ask all of you to come meet me there. Let's make magic happen and let's bring back the amazingness that is advertising to each and every one of us and to all consumers.
