Job satisfaction, product launches and why your digital wallet is costing you money.

Welcome to Paragon Workplace Solutions The Creative Digest, your weekly update on the world of marketing and the creative workplace.

Each week, we'll share key insights, reports and research to keep you in-the-know on the latest marketing news, trends and updates.Where does authentic marketing come from?

Laura Chamberlain, a professor at Warwick Business School and founder of self-development consultancy Think Talk Thrive, argues that authenticity should always start with the marketers and not marketing. She provides useful starting points for finding your authenticity – such as understanding your unique skills and how you adapt to different contexts.

How do you find happiness?

In two special articles from Forbes, there may be two routes to employee happiness – the Chief Happiness Officer, to help tackle low job satisfaction and enhance employee experience (like Google, TikTok and Coca-Cola) or ten habits that individual employees can practice on their own – from exercising self-compassion to practicing kindness.

Dream-like ads.

Honda is collaborating with Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab to create a Dream Generator film experience to promote its all-electric Prologue SUV. The AI ads asks consumers to answer a few questions before generating custom, creative films that feature the SUV. The generator will be accessed through call-to-action banners on Amazon, rolling out to Amazon devices. In a different take on marketing personalisation, the ads personalise their creative to the individual consumer – based around jungles, cloud worlds, outer space, and even dinosaurs.?

What does Meridian mean for you?

Google has announced the launch of Meridian, an open-source marketing mix model – aiming to deliver ‘privacy-durable measurement’. Cookies are on track to be removed, and the new model aims to introduce new attribution methods. General availability of the model for marketers and data scientists is in planning – how might your organisation embrace it?

Omnichannel struggles.

According to Storyblok’s ‘The State of CMS 2024’ report, marketers are struggling to manage the ‘complex content requirements’ needed for an omnichannel marketing approach. Businesses across the UK, US, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden reported challenges with their content marketing strategies – hampered by multiple content management systems in use across their organisations and no centralised functions. Reasons behind using more than one CMS included the need for omnichannel capabilities.

Spend, spend, spend.

Consumers who use digital wallets spend 31% more than non-users, according to a PYMNTS and AWS survey of 2,501 US respondents. The boost was notable for restaurant sales (33% more), followed by retail (17% up). A correlation was also found between digital wallet users being more financially well-off – 55% of consumers using wallets are making more than $100,000 annually. The study also found 80% of Gen Z use digital wallets, followed by 66% of millennials.

Liquid Death on staying alive.

Founder Mike Cessario shares his ten tips on how to launch a product successfully on the Uncensored CMO podcast – and how he achieved the valuation of $1.4bn within five years. The water brand may merely be canned spring water, but they created a story worth talking about, learning from previous failure, and using an outside advantage.

Logan Paul and KSI lessons.

It was hard to escape the Prime drink madness a few months ago, and now Forbes is deconstructing the influencer marketing lessons that can be learned from the experience. Going beyond simple sponsorships of posts, manufacturers and influencers are now collaborating to create new brands – and the influencers come with pre-existing networks. YouTube personalities Logan Paul and KSI positioned themselves as co-creators of the hydration drink – going as far as taste-testing and providing creative input. Read the case study of how Prime was put on track to surpass $1.2bn in annual sales within two years of launch.

CRE exposure in visuals.

Exposure to commercial real estate (CRE) comes with asset quality risks and even bank failure for financial institutions – Visual Capitalist has now produced an infographic on the US banks with the highest exposure to CRE based on analysis from UBS. The chart shows exposure is led by Bank OZK, Home BancShares, Inc., Pacific Premier Bancorp, Inc., and International Bancshares Corporation. There is approximately $5.7 trillion in CRE debt outstanding, and US banks hold around half of this total on their balance sheets.

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