SKIP AD IN 5: The ad-blocker’s guide to brand planning

by Faisal Ahmed, Gordon Torr

The Chief Marketing Officer has never had it so good. Or so bad. Just as data, technology and real-time insights have made it possible to connect, measure and adjust brand messaging at every point of the customer journey, ad-skipping is teaching the same customers to ignore it – and ad-blocking is enabling them to avoid it entirely.The CMO’s paradox won’t be resolved by the traditional tools of brand planning, nor by doubling down on digital surveillance and manipulation.Now a digital maverick and a seasoned creative director have combined their experience and knowledge of the world’s biggest brands to put forward a radical alternative.Outlined in five brief chapters, their phenomenological model reveals that the fastest growing businesses are succeeding by removing the physical, emotional and informational friction that currently intervenes between buyers and sellers – in some cases by facilitating purchase and delivery – but increasingly by removing the kind of brand noise that is turning the expected customer response of attraction very suddenly to repulsion.The ad-blocker’s guide to brand planning is timely, important – and unskippable.About the Faisal Ahmed is a digital trailblazer who continues to defy categorisation. He has advised video game companies, Premier League football clubs, pharmaceutical corporates and the UK government, among many others. Faisal co-authored the definitive guide to digital marketing in healthcare, and is leading the fight for greater diversity in UK and global advertising. Gordon Torr is a former global creative director of J. Walter Thompson, a part-time brand planner, a part-time novelist, an international conference speaker and the author of Managing Creative People.

244 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2018

About the author

Faisal Ahmed has been working in Marketing since 1998 he started his career with Amazon.co.uk and worked on many new initiatives, stores and marketplace there. Faisal has launched many firsts in digital throughout his career working in retail, football, video games, government and healthcare