The number one complaint coming from Tinder users isn’t that they run out of matches or that it’s too hard to use. The number one complaint heard is that when they match and meet up with another user, they are not representative of what their profile showcased. Either they used an old photo, or hid the fact that they gained a little weight or lost a few teeth since their profile photo was taken. And this is a genuine complaint – it’s disappointing when people come to expect one thing and are presented with an entirely different reality.

It’s not authentic, not genuine and it slightly annoying. It’s no less annoying or inauthentic when marketers do it.

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It’s not uncommon to hear one of your friends divulge that they totally wept over the latest World Vision PSA or that they got a little choked up seeing that animal rescue special with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. I mean, you’d have to be a straight-up robot to have watched those adverts with a poker face (no disrespect to robots). A little more surprising, maybe, is the admission that said friend burst into tears over a dog food commercial, passing it off as too many glasses of wine.

But oh, my friend, it’s not all that accidental.

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When you’re looking to capture the millennial market — those same kids who grew up in the mid-90s to mid-oughties — you would do well to remember that the demographic was raised on the internet.

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Canada has just come out of the longest election we have had in two centuries and our friends to the South are just warming up for a year of debates and polls before voting next November. If the onslaught of political ads and speeches that has inundated all forms of communication channels has proven anything, it’s that marketing is a fundamental piece of the puzzle to running a successful political campaign, and it might not have always been that way.

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There’s a reason we wear jewelry, accessorize with funky hats, or pick out specific outfits before going out into our day — we’re telling the world who we are before having to say anything. In a word, it’s communication.

When your brand pushes out content, it’s not just to have something to say, it’s to communicate exactly what — or perhaps who — you’re all about.

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We’ve all seen them, those ads proclaiming that they can get rid of hair loss, where the list of potential side effects sound terrible. Or the ones where they promote that this one pill is the cure for erectile dysfunction, only it turns your hair a flaming red. These types of advertisements, known as direct-to-consumers, have been in the spotlight, with many wondering if their side effects outweigh the benefits, much like the drugs they promote.

Direct-to-consumer or business-to-consumer (B2C) advertising for healthcare products has been legal in the United States since 1985, and currently they are only legal in the US and New Zealand, of all places. Twenty-two out of 27 EU nations do not support information to patient advertising, which is what these ads do: give information directly to the consumer rather than to the medical professionals. This is like auto parts manufactures advertising tiny screws that hold a piston together directly to the consumer rather than to the mechanic that will know even if the consumer needs that specific part and what a piston even is! Marketing pharmaceuticals in the United States is a multi-billion dollar business and that number is only expected to rise in the next decade.

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Creating film marketing plans and film marketing strategies is a challenging task since there are so many movies being released every single day. Additionally, because box office sales have fallen 5% in the past year, and there has been a decrease in overall ticket sales, developing strong film marketing strategies has never been more important.

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There are many female millennials travelling, consuming goal-driven media, experiencing career freedom, and closely relating to any of the characters in the HBO series GIRLS. But there’s an even bigger percentage of them who are connected by one thing — they’re moms.

Of the 1.5 million women who have become mothers in the past year, more than 85 per cent of them are millennials. Loosely defined as anyone born between 1980 and the early 2000s, millennials are now starting to outnumber the baby boomers as the largest living demographic. In point: they’re now the world’s largest consumer group.

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In the past, it was the drive-in. Archie Andrews loaded up his jalopy with first date memory-making tricks, picked up Veronica Lodge (or Betty Cooper, depending on the weekend), and took her to see a motion picture — a MOVIE, that is. There, the happy teen couple watched moving pictures, made out in the backseat (to the chagrin of Mr. Lodge/Cooper), and filled up on 50-cent hot dogs and extra-large sodas when the intermission commercials came on.

But grabbing teens’ attention via moving pictures didn’t stop in the frosted malt’s heyday. In fact, it’s growing more than ever.

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