A forecast by the National Retail Federation predicts a 4% increase in holiday spending in 2017, bringing up spending to an estimated $682 billion. In terms of occasions to spend, friendsgivings and ugly sweater parties are just a few of the trendy occasions to get together with friends and family in addition to traditional holiday events this time of year.

Engaging microinfluencers for successful pharma brand management.

With the evolution of "friendship" in the digital age, our expectations on friendship have dramatically shifted. Quotes on friendship from Mark Twain and Socrates have been replaced with such modern sentiment as, "True friendship is when you walk into someone's house and your Wi-Fi connects automatically." Is a friend someone that I can count on to like my posts, tag me in pictures, share a recipe I will like?

Segmentation of the U.S. Hispanic population has evolved through the years as Hispanic marketing has gone from a novel idea to a lifeline among brands in desperate pursuit of new markets. Once driven primarily by language (Spanish-dominant to English-dominant), segmentation became more granular, looking closer at acculturation levels (less acculturated to more acculturated) to craft a more relevant marketing message.

Because Hispanic audiences are bilingual, and engage with content in both English and Spanish, advertisers need to make sure that they are prepared. Here are a few of my favorite Hispanic marketing campaigns, and an analysis of what made them successful.

Is the ability to do direct to consumer(DTC) prescription drug advertising in trouble? In Congress and at the state level, numerous proposals are in play to make DTC advertising harder to do. These range from ending the tax deductibility of advertising to requiring full disclosure on marketing expenses by drug companies. Of course, these threats have been going on for years and to date nothing has happened to make DTC harder to do.

Congratulations on your integrated marketing plan, your omnichannel marketing strategy, your paid-earned-shared-owned media strategy - you've now completed the bare minimum of what customers expect.

A Pew study found only 49% of Xers think their generation is unique as opposed to 58% of Boomers and 61% of Millennials. I shared this fact with a Gen X colleague who replied with a shrug, "Eh, I guess we're just more laid back about stuff." His response epitomized our most famous label, that of a Slacker. We've been through a lot. You tend to roll with the punches too, when there's much larger and louder generations in front and behind you.

The days of in-person sales calls and free lunch seminars from pharma reps have been waning for some time now. An annual study from CMI/Compas showed that primary care physicians are more likely to turn down in-person sales meetings than ever before - with more than 48% of now limiting sales rep visits. With increasingly digital-savvy doctors who are time-crunched and mobile, it's high time for CMOs and brand marketers to reconsider what digital options are at their fingertips to reach healthcare professionals with their messages.

Here's a telling anecdote from DMS West earlier this month: the ubiquitous rise of the Customer Data Platform (CDP). A morning panel included four companies which, when pressed, self-identified as a CDP despite their official branding as tag managers, SSPs, marketing clouds, data management platforms (DMP) and CRM platforms. And for all the scrambling confusion around whether to assume the CDP moniker, morning and afternoon segments were unanimous in their rejection of the label "DMP" to describe their activities.