“The last six months have been all about cocktails at home as a response to city and venue closures,” said Bacardi Senior Director of Digital Marketing Chris Windebank. “We have been helping users discover their inner mixologist by showing recipes and tools online. People have been learning how to make cocktails as a way to upgrade the at-home celebrations, or reminisce about their favorite bar or a special get together.” 

In order to meet their objectives of delivering an enhanced digital experience, Bacardi hired EPAM, a software development and design company to improve brand consistency and perception, while accelerating time to marketing and delivering significant cost savings. 

EPAM streamlined Bacardi’s digital environment by implementing a digital platform for multiple brands, a DevOps automation platform resulting in 16 times greater website deployment capacity, and a 42% reduction in infrastructure costs. EPAM also got a handle on some 150 websites, allowing Bacardi brands to deliver distinctive experiences. And because in many countries liquor can’t be sold direct-to-consumer online, partners like Amazon and Instacart are part of the ecosystem.

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MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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A virtual Halloween meant a challenge to the Mars Wrigley division of global petcare and candy giant Mars. Shubham Mehrish, VP Digital Demand at Mars, explained why. “It was back in April or May that we started worrying about the longevity of the pandemic. Halloween is a big event for the Mars Wrigley business.” Product plans are set 18 months in advance; production lines are running by February — hence the imperative to sell online. “But we challenged ourselves. We said, ‘we can’t just solve for Halloween by putting everything online; it has to be something that enhances the experience.’”

The result was Treat Town, a highly complex app-or-browser virtual trick or treat experience. Users can sign up as candy givers or trick-or-treaters. The former design and decorate their virtual doors, the latter dress up their Halloween avatars. Points collected by knocking on doors can be exchanged for candy online, or for QR codes allowing in-store pick-up.

The experience was built on Acquia’s Drupal CMS. Other components include credit card processor Stripe, Microsoft’s PlayFab to tokenize the points, and Mapbox to allow geo-location of the virtual doors on a map. “All of these components have to scale together, and we had to be confident they would play nicely with each other,” said Mehrish.

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Roku is the world’s most popular connected-TV platform with the number of active accounts nearly at 40 million and expected to climb even higher, meaning channel owners have a golden opportunity to establish themselves and collect ad revenue. If you’re just getting started or looking for options for promoting your channel, what’s the best approach? Find out the pros and cons of various methods of creation and promotion in this comprehensive guide. 

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Beware, if you’re looking to run dynamic product ad (DPA) carousels in Instagram Stories, all of the products in the carousel will show the product name AND price of the product that appears in the first image, e-commerce marketing pro Pamela Lund noticed.

Why we care. This might be a minor issue in many cases — similar products with similar pricing — but it posed a problem in Lund’s case. She was looking to advertise high-priced products in order to build a retargeting list of higher value customers. That’s not going to work “if the wrong price + product name is displayed with a different product image,” she noted.

“Research suggests that chief marketing officers aren’t trusted by CEOs and have shorter tenures than C-suite peers, and some of this could be because many CEOs lack marketing experience.” Christine Parizo, content marketing writer.