CMO Samuel Day explains how the marketing team took a long-term view and was committed to getting things right, even when it meant not seeing a return on their efforts as quickly as they might want to.

Instagram's algorithm will now make recycled TikTok videos less discoverable on its platform. See what fresh content these brands are posting on Reels.

Creativity is a valuable and sought-after skill in our ever changing, uncertain and unpredictable world. But I hear so many people telling me they are

Kraft Heinz Canada conducts an anonymous social experiment, asking people to #DrawKetchup. Interestingly, most of the participants drew a Heinz ketchup bottle.

We've compiled some of the most creative and effective examples of GIFs and looping videos by prominent brands.

A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination. A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination.

Here's an interesting way to re-think about how you talk about and write about your jobs. Ask yourself things like, "what was I nervous about before I started?" and " If you had to convince someone NOT to apply, how would you?" This article on what horror movies can teach us about job postings is a great read.

Good visual identity is about more than engaging colors and pretty creative. It needs to enhance your message and brand. That means getting beyond colors and fonts you like or are fashionable. Instead, think about the visuals as a way to invite people to learn more bout your employer brand.

Why is an employer brand important? I am a total employer brand nerd. I talk about employer branding.I wrote an essay on how this is the time in which your employer brand is truly revealed. It is during a crisis that we see that we were putting our faith in pretty words to attract talent, or if we were portraying our organization in a meaningfully different way. I'm hoping its a little more inspirational than the this little description makes it sound.

If you are looking for ideas on how to improve your employer brand marketing, here is a laundry list of great projects to consider. Allow me to point out that they list "improving your search rankings" and that isn't a project I hear EB'ers talk about much. Do you spend any thought/time at all to making your job postings pop up higher on job boards and Google? Maybe you should.

And here's a creative example of how to show your product off during lockdown.

I highly recommend this list of 14 rules of identity by Jasmine Bina, who is one of my absolute favorite thinkers in the space

Apropos of nothing, I really liked this list of the 50 ideas that changed their life. Reading it will make you smarter.

How the creative director of Spotify uses data. This is a great video, but I suggest you watch to see ways Spotify could have used data in the aggregate to tell a big boring story. But instead, it found unique slices of the data to say something interesting, about themselves, about their listeners and about the world.

Second, Strategy+Business has a list of best business summer reading books, spanning from high level concepts around what humanity means, to building better experiments at work.

Author and employer branding expert James Ellis shares his 16 top employer branding book recommendations to take your branding to the next level.

Need some ideas as to what kind of content you should build? Look to your own social media metrics.

Call me old fashioned, but I still love a good blog. And is there a cheaper way to manage a platform on which you can tell deep sharable stories that support your employer brand? I didn’t think so. Here are 5 brand-driven to make sure your blog isn’t boring.

Everything changed six months ago. And so we adjusted. But has it felt like we’ve built for a new future, or just build enough to “get through this?” I would bet most of you would see it as the latter. Which is too bad. Because it may never come back. It may never come back in the same way. So rather than wait until we can “go back to the way it was,” this is your time to reinvent from the ground up. It is time to take the chaos all around us (and it isn’t any less chaotic, we’ve just built a callus to things lately) and build the “next normal,” not the new one.

Ready to get deep? To jump off the really high platform? Here we go. Instead of thinking about your video strategy in a “let’s make a video about the London team” way in which you try and take enough footage that shows what you’re trying to say kind of way, what if you really began to think about telling real stories. Google has some examples of hardcore marketing storytelling told via sequential videos. My money says we’re going to be spending a LOT of time thinking about building these kinds of videos in the next year or two.

Speaking of text, let’s talk job postings. (Yay!) There are a number of schools of thought on how to write better job postings. Personally, I lean towards a structured/modular approach (goal: ensure every job posting is a B+), but there are creative approaches and strategic approaches. Jacynta Clayton offers some great ideas on how to build a more creating posting (rhyming?! Genius).

As mentioned earlier, it does feel like so many companies have the same pillars and recruitment messaging. To be fair, so many companies are structured the same and have the exact same perks and org chart, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising. Which is why I loved this article equating a company’s branding elements to ingredients in a basket on TV cooking show Chopped. The chefs get the same ingredients, so the skill is in how you bring them together and build something far bigger/better than its components.

If you’re looking for a good book, take a look at Brain Surfing by Heather LeFevre. Imagine if a very smart brand strategist decided to take an eat, pray, love style trip to meet the world’s most interesting brand strategists. Good stuff.

Podcast recommendation: Sweathead. It skews very agency-heavy/strategy director-heavy, and the quality of the podcast seems to hinge on the guest, but I have heard some really interesting episodes lately. I recommend The interviews with Ryan Ford, Blake Desormeaux, and Jenny Chang.

Your job posts and ads may be a candidate’s introduction to your company, so you want to be sure they both differentiate you and set the right expectations upfront. But if you’re finding that they just aren’t bringing in the kind of candidates that you’d hoped for, it may be time to get creative.Need some creativity in your job posts? (I checked and yes. yes you do.) Here are some crazy job posting ideas (an Animal Crossing office… sure!) not in a “here are great ideas to steal,” way, but more in a “share this with people who push back on changing "Duties and Responsibilities” to “Things you’ll do all day.” They need to know what the ceiling for creativity really is these days.

Five research-backed strategies to broaden your worldview — even when your world is shrinking.

Guilty pleasure: lusting over amazing visual branding work. I’ve been following Fabien Barral’s blog and work for more than two decades, which he highlights some of the best old fashioned intricate rococo and seemingly curlicue-fetish design work I’ve ever seen. If you like ornate letterpress work, this is a goldmine.

In my own day job, I an running into that age old issue: we don’t have enough employer-brand-style photos. I’d love to take some more, but… y'know: COVID. I’m not going to hire a crew to go to employee’s dining rooms or anything. Another industry struggling with this issue is (surprisingly) architectural photographers. Buildings are pretty and all, but they need people in them to tell the story. So how do you do that in the age of COVID? Some interesting perspective here.