It’s hard to find a company that doesn’t offer biographies of current employees these days, and sometimes they seem indistinguishable.
There’s lots to like about the Atkins careers site, and the biographies in the careers section is one of them.
For example, they include ‘search for jobs like mine’ as an option within the biography. That’s a great call to action for those people inspired by the biography – and a nice use of the ‘voice’ of the employee.
Many B2B companies use case studies to help promote their skills and / or products.
Myknowledgemap is one of these; but note that they offer a filter to help visitors find case studies relevant to them (by sector and product). If there are a lot of case studies to go through, this would be very helpful.
SGS use a large hero image on a page… but then, after a while, or as the visitor interacts with the page (scrolls down, for instance) the main body of the content scrolls up, gradually covering most of the image. The image (and subsidiary navigation) can be revealed in full by clicking on the + sign.
A small thing, but it does put the focus on the text.
Note also that they have used a popup to good effect on the links at the foot of the page, displaying a teaser for the page. Clever…
If you advertise your brand online, then you’re familiar with the challenges in buying and selling premium online ad inventory for advertisers and publishers. Last year, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! and Yieldex started working on a standard API that would standardize buying and selling of premium inventory through programmatic technologies.
The group set a goal to shift more than 50% of inventory that was sold manually to programmatic trading. Ultimately, they hoped the shift would also cause a shift in how advertisers spend their budgets by moving offline advertising budget dollars to online advertising. On the publisher side, they hoped the standardization would enable premium publishers to use programmatic technologies without damaging the premium perception of their own properties.
This week, a big step was taken in finalizing the standard API when the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released OpenDirect API Specification Version 1.0 for public comment.
Public comment will be open through December 3, 2014, so now is the time to read the 102-page document and have your say. Once the public comment period closes, the IAB Digital Advertising Automation Task Force will review all comments received and make any necessary revisions before a final version will be released.
According to the IAB, the goal of OpenDirect is to make automated transactions more reliable, which would benefit publishers through improved efficiency, reliability, pricing, and delivery. Scott Cunningham, Vice President of Technology and Ad Operations for IAB explained, “This common set of API specifications sets the stage for direct programmatic ad sales and will allow buyers who want to access guaranteed inventory via automated processes to avoid multiple, costly, custom integrations.”
Furthermore, agencies will benefit once publishers adopt OpenDirect through improved access to more unique users. They’ll also benefit from increased efficiency because they’ll only have to integrate one API across multiple platforms rather than integrating multiple APIs. Furthermore, agencies will be able to book guaranteed delivery to advertisers and provide access to media offerings that aren’t available through exchanges.
It’s important to note that OpenDirect prioritizes advertisers:
“The API takes an advertiser first approach. Both advertisers and agencies must sign up with the publisher and receive credentials. Advertisers may perform their own buys or provide consent to have an agency perform buys on their behalf; for an agency to perform buys on behalf of an advertiser, the advertiser must provide consent. The process of signing up and providing consent is publisher defined.”
What do you think of OpenDirect? Do you think it will gain wider industry adoption when the final API is released after the public comment and revision period ends? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
Image: Dan Craggs
What keeps a CEO awake at night?
Obviously there are a lot of answers to that question, but reputation and recruitment are both high on the list of worries. And they are related… Damage to a company’s reputation doesn’t only have an effect on sales, it can weaken the employer brand; a weak employer brand can mean it becomes more difficult to recruit good candidates – and where a big issue for many companies is that of skills shortage, this can become a critical problem.
Some companies have the reputation of being great employers, and inevitably receive a lot of candidate applications. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, as some of those candidates, inevitably, won’t be a good fit for that company. Dealing with a vast pile of candidates for whom there isn’t a good job-match within the company is a potentially time-consuming and expensive problem – and not having enough applications from suitable candidates because of a poor reputation is another.
Managing your reputation as an employer – your employer brand – goes together with managing the application process. Get them both right, and you should end up with a manageable workflow, dealing with (mostly) suitable candidates. And if your reputation as a good employer matches the reality of the candidate experience – and the new joiner experience – then the marriage of candidate and job is likely to be a successful one.
It isn’t easy, and, like any marriage, is more likely to be successful with good communication. It is important to clearly communicate what your company can offer and what it cannot, in order to help people decide whether they are likely to be happy; and the experience that each and every candidate has is likely not only to affect your working relationship with the successful individual, but also to affect your reputation with all those who are unsuccessful.
There’s a lot to consider, because employer brand isn’t just about managing the application process… here are just a few of the many questions that could come up:
It’s not surprising that this is such a hot topic at the moment; these are difficult questions.
At the Employer Brand Management conference, to be held on 12 December at the Royal Mint in London, brand managers, business leaders and reputation experts will discuss employer brand, including topics on:
And there’s that CEO again…
Visit Transform Magazine to find out more about the conference.
Is your Chief Marketing Officer (or Chief Brand Officer – or whatever title you use to refer to the executive who is responsible for your company’s brands) agile? If your CMO isn’t agile, you’re losing money.
That’s according to a new research report, The Agile Enterprise, from Korn Ferry, a leadership and talent consulting firm. According to the firm’s research, companies with highly agile executives have 25% higher profit margins compared with their peer companies.
That 25% is not a figure that should be ignored! However, the research found that agility isn’t one size fits all. Depending on the executive’s industry, the company’s micro- and macro-environment, and the company’s goals, the executive’s agility might have to be stronger in one area than another.
Specifically, Korn Ferry measured five areas of agility: self-awareness, mental, people, change, and results. An executive who is leading a company through new product and brand launches needs to be particularly strong in mental agility. They need to be innovators who can seize new ideas and opportunities. An executive who is working through developing a new brand architecture following a merger or acquisition needs to have strong people agility to bring disparate teams together and make the new brand architecture work.
Given the fast-changing business world, agility is a requirement today, and company’s that can’t get out of their own way eventually pay the price. Remember, business is cyclical. Companies merge and grow bigger and bigger until finally, they break apart again. Having an agile CMO is critical to brand growth, but unless the company culture prioritizes agility, even the most agile CMO will achieve limited success.
In other words, hiring agile executives comes second. First, companies need to commit to developing the processes and systems that will enable all employees, including executives, to be agile. It ties back to lean operations strategies where decisions are made for the customer and those decisions are pushed down to the lowest possible level. Employees are empowered to make the right decisions for the customer on a daily basis, and they have the flexibility to do so.
Remember, an agile person or an agile work style won’t help a company or brand if that agile person can’t truly act in an agile way on a daily basis. If the barriers to agility aren’t removed, even the most agile person will be stopped in their tracks. The companies that understand this will reap the rewards.
Image: Steven Goodwin
