Television Advertising is Evolving; Marketing is Evolving With It

February 8, 2010

Respondents to an Association of National Advertisers/Forrester study of national advertisers said their TV ad spending will remain flat this year. Some of the other findings include:

  • A lack of confidence in TV ad effectiveness. Sixty-two percent of respondents think that TV ads have become less effective in the past two years driven largely by ad clutter
  • Renewed faith in the 30-second commercial. Only 19 percent of respondents believe that the 30-second spot will be dead in 10 years, down from 28 percent a year ago.
  • A desire for more targeted TV ads but reluctance to pay for them. Seventy-eight percent of respondents say they would be interested in the ability to target consumers more precisely, but only 59 percent would be willing to pay a premium for it.
  • Dissatisfaction with measurement. Nearly all advertisers who responded think that the TV industry needs new audience metrics beyond reach and frequency, and 82% of respondents would be interested in ratings for individual commercials.
  • High interest in branded entertainment and interactive media. Eighty percent of advertisers agree that branded entertainment will play much more of a role in TV advertising, and 38 percent plan to spend more on branded entertainment in 2010 as an alternative to the 30-second spot. Social media, web advertising and search are stealing budgets from TV and other media.

So what does this mean? Well, my amateur analysis says that TV as a standalone marketing channel is either faltering or is dead. However TV, and by extension all mass communications, is evolving into something new – a catalyst for conversations.

You just have to look at the Superbowl last night to see that the value of the conversations spawned by the very expensive 30 second spots, likely exceeds the value of the spot itself and, indeed, the traditional measurement associate with that spot will not account for this.

At com.motion I’ve seen, first hand, how social and traditional media can live with each other in perfect harmony, each media feeding the other. How advertising can spark conversation online. How an online community can earn traditional media coverage – and vice versa.

I used to be very bullish on social media. Now I’m bullish on integration and the people who can integrate marketing efforts in a smart, cohesive and measurable way, will win. That’s what I’m interested in right now.

via The Forrester Blog For Marketing Leadership Professionals by David Cooperstein

2 Comments | Advertising | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Trends and Predictions for 2010

January 11, 2010

While I agree that forecasting should be best left to the weathermen and women of the world, it is always fun to a) try one’s hand at predicting the next 12 months and b) to divine the trends from others’ predictions.

My own predictions can wait until tomorrow but here are the best posts I’ve read on trends for communications, technology and somewhere in between for 2010.

Fred Wilson, who as a VC has what we call “skin in the game”, focuses on the following areas:

  • Mobile
  • Mobile
  • Gaming
  • New forms of currency
  • The cloud and APIs
  • Education, energy and the environment

Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic have 10 predictions, in two parts (part one | part two) in AdAge:

  • Online display: Don’t be blinded by the shiny and new (formats).
  • Viral video will move from art to science.
  • Gaming gets more social and mobile.
  • Mobile takes a bite out of online.
  • Here I am. Over here! (Location based services)
  • Search evolves, but not everyone notices.
  • Brands will realize online video is not a panacea.
  • Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
  • Integration trend stimulated by privacy concerns.
  • Data integration enables insightful ‘tradigital’ learning.

The New York Times focuses on five areas:

  • Mobile
  • Location, location, location
  • Declining use of the landline
  • Web TV
  • Life streaming/cloud based storage

McKinsey Quarterly has five trends to shape business technology:

  • Convergence of IT and corporate finance
  • Increased tension around and scrutiny of IT budgets
  • Need to demonstrate hard business ROI from IT projects
  • Increased regulatory demand (SOX, Basel II etc)
  • Increased offshoring and outsourcing

Peter Himler, The Flack, has five trends for 2010 in public relations and communications:

  • The most successful public relations programs will combine traditional PR competencies with social media acumen
  • PR firms that are not fluent or have successful track records in social media will increasingly lose new business
  • The media will continue to fragment as journalists/bloggers grow their individual brands
  • Corporate communicators will wield increasing influence through their activity in social media channels.
  • And, like today, no one marketing discipline can lay outright claim to "owning" social media in 2010. The lines will continue to blur.

Trendwatching.com has 10 consumer trends it is tracking this year:

Finally, Who’s Blogging What has asked some of the leading thinkers in this space to answer five questions (and a bonus). Those questions are:

And as my bonus to you, my own seven trends (up and down) which were published in the latest issue of Marketing Mag will be published here tomorrow.

2 Comments | Social Media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Touchdown for Wind Mobile’s First Gust of Communication

December 18, 2009

As always, you can subscribe to Veritas Communications’s Touchdowns and Fumbles newsletter on the aptly named TouchdownsandFumbles.com.

———–

Today’s touchdown is brought to you courtesy of our two friends “customer centrism” and “integration”. Whenever a new player joins a mature market, they have two choices. One, play by the existing rules and hope to beat out the established players that way, or two, to disrupt the market and focus on something no one is or has done. Wind Mobile is clearly choosing the disruptive path in the wireless market. After announcing the new brand, but no products, the company set up a virtual “soapbox” to allow disgruntled Canadian wireless customers to air their grievances.

Through this massive online focus group, the company has been able to develop and refine its products to be incredibly customer centric. Whether or not input from Canadians had any impact on the final product is irrelevant – from a communications perspective, Wind can give the impression of being in tune with and listening to the voice of the consumer. Touchdown!

For the two-point conversion, Wind followed this up with a brilliant “hello world” creative ad which ran in the Globe and Mail (Canada’s pre-eminent national daily) containing the comments which most align with Wind’s policy and product – thanking those people by name who contributed to the soapbox discussion. Never mind the fact that “lailapalooza” or “cmisty” will likely not be the type to read the Globe and see the creative, the message comes over loud and clear to everyone – we listen to and value your opinion. This piece of integration was a fantastic play from a newcomer who needs to be disruptive in order to win in this market place.

image imageMore from Marketing Mag (thanks to @ThomasKenny for the link).

Update:

Our intrepid field reporter, @seanmcdonald, sent in these pictures of some statues which pay homage to those contributors to the Wind Mobile soapbox:photo

and that plaque reads:

photo ————

Want to know more about how to integrate user generated content into your online marketing strategy? Contact the com.motion team today.

Keep up to date with everything in the online marketing and social media space by subscribing to the com.motion RSS feed.

Leave a Comment » | Touchdowns and Fumbles | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Socialnomics – ROI of Social Media

November 26, 2009

Another one of those sharp snappy videos which contain a tonne of data that flashes before your eyes. This time on ROI in the social media space from Socialnomics.

Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky (another MDC Partners agency) puts it best when he states:

“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.” – Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky

I’m not a huge fan of some of the stats type videos that are put out there to scare brands into using social media for social media’s sake. Social media is right for many brands and I am hard pressed to find a brand which would not be enhanced by using social media in some way but in a world of scarce resources, you need to focus on getting a return from your marketing investment (ROMI) and sometimes, given the target demographic, this is not best achieved with social media.

It is great for stats to finally show that organizations that use social media can generate real, meaningful, measurable growth as opposed to the soft metrics of “engagement” and “conversation” – these are a means to an end, not the end goal. Once you can accept that a more engaged organization will grow faster and be more profitable, you can put these down as Key Performance Indicators for your campaigns – but not before.

1 Comment | measurement, strategy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Forrester Asks: What is the Future of Agencies

November 18, 2009

Forrester’s Sean Corcoran asks this rather existential question of us all:

“The agency model was built during a time when there were only a handful of channels in which they could push one way messages en masse. Does that model still work in a time when nearly a quarter of online US adults now create content online? Many more questions begin to arise as we open Pandora’s Box: Can one agency do it all? Are holding companies the answer? Can digital agencies compete with them and lead brands? Do marketers rely on agencies like they used to? Should marketers consolidate their agencies or de-centralize to dozens of agency partners? Are technology providers and crowd sourcing legitimate threats? Where is this all going?

via The Future of Agencies: What Do You Think?

image Where to start? Well, probably with the caveat that while everyone has an opinion and best guess on where things are going, no one knows for sure. What some people predict as being a revolution may turn into the status quo – after all, Forrester says that:

64% of marketers continue to allocate budgets across marketing disciplines based on historical spending

So this is just that, my best guess.

Secondly, the question seems to focus on the rise of the digital agency and presumes that “online” in general, and social media specifically, will impact on the client-agency dynamic. Just a note to say that while digital, online and social are all increasing in importance, we need to remember that we are not going to be recommending an online campaign for the sake of it (remember my “Foundation of all exceptional marketing programmes” post on the need to match the tactics to the audience).

However, if this new discipline of social media, which we have all embraced so heartily is to drive change, here’s what I see happening. Hint: it’s about integration.

No one marketing discipline has the right to “own” social media with the client. There are too many smart people working in the agency world for that to happen – and all of us can bring something new to the table. Strategic planners can derive great insight from the target which can feed into the overarching creative concepts. Advertising can bring scale to the campaign, reaching many with a large funnel, driven by insight. Media planners can ensure the right message gets to the right people through the right, and appropriate channels. Public Relations can support the core message and earn media which earns the consumer’s trust. Digital agencies can build sophisticated communities or destinations to aggregate, enhance and ignite conversations. Direct marketing can ensure no one gets left behind and provide online/offline integration. Point of Sale can reinforce messages to the consumer AND draw them into the funnel.

Even social media agencies/practices like com.motion can bring something to the table in the form of enabling and adding to the insight that drives the campaign. We can represent the end user by feeding in strategic recommendations and tactical executions which we know will tesellate with their interests and habits. We can manage the community and bring continuity to the micro-interactions stakeholders have with organizations online. We can earn online media from a rapidly fragmenting pool of key influencers

Yes, social media specialists have a role in social media marketing ;-)

So that’s it. Same same but different. The rise of social media and digital marketing means that we now have another channel to collaborate on and around with our agency partners. For the brand or marketing manager, it means that incumbent agencies should clear some room for one more seat at the table – if appropriate for the communications goals, objectives and strategy. This is a good thing. The more smart, passionate people who can contribute (constructively) to a campaign, the better.

It also means there is another, more important role up for grabs, transcending the digital/social media debate. It means there is a role for a marketing integrator to oversee how the supporting agencies collaborate.

What do you think? Where do you think the agency is going?

3 Comments | Agency Life | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Interesting take on marketing integration

November 3, 2009

Read the full article here: http://clivemaclean.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/forrester-research-identifies-significant-challenges-for-integrated-agencies/

I found it fascinating that according to the Forrester report (most) brand marketers:

A) aportion budget based on historical spending patterns

B) do not apply media modelling to predict how media choices and spending will impact their brand

C) find it hard to credit the correct marketing medium for a sale

On point C, I saw on Twitter that @fififofum said:

RT @spikejones: Just talked to a person in a Fortune 200 that said, “Sometimes WOM is not about ROI.” Amen, brother. Preach it.

Yes marketers have experimental budgets to experiment with on new and emerging mediums like word of mouth. But if you can’t even notionally assign any sales to your experiments, guess what? They get cut.

The purpose of a business is to make money. The purpose of the marketing department is to convince consumers they need to buy from the business.

Clearly measuring ROI is tough and, truth be told, many organizations don’t set their marketing up for success in this field. But it doesn’t mean we should stop trying to measure and apportion sales to activities like WOM.

1 Comment | PR | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Social Media Integration: Specialists or Generalists?

October 12, 2009

Todd Defren has an excellent piece of what I can only assume is link bait over on PR Squared. In his post, Todd outlines his vision of the “new agency” in which he seems to outline what he is, has and will be building at Shift Communications, the “all purpose” PR agency he co-founded and runs. He believes generalist practioners and counselors are the way to go. They are, Todd purports, more efficient and more, well, all-purpose. The virtues of a well-trained cadre of enlightened consultants who can work on any part of your business are legion, but give me specialists any time.

1. De facto/de jure. The work always finds the right people and gravitates to talent. If all your team are generalists, some will be slightly better than others. If the work always finds the best people, then these people, who start off slightly better than the rest of the team will be able to practice, develop and hone their skills, and suddenly the differential between their skills and the rest of the team’s has been magnified. Ipso facto, hey presto: specialists.

2. Put the client first. I am a communications consultant first and a social media d-bag second. I’m as comfortable discussing communications strategy in general as I am its application online and in the social media space. That said, do you want me leading a policy debate or healthcare account? No. Do I want a Public Affairs or Government Relations specialist conceiving an online execution? No. while the results may not suffer, do you want to take the risk that the execution distract from the core message? No. As a client, I would want people with vast experience of the myriad nuances and regulatory environments for my industry working on my business. Because there are specifics peculiar to each sub-section of our industry, and our clients’, you want specialists. The clue is in the nomenclature. In this case, generalists do the client a disservice: don’t try to shoehorn a client into your own philosophy.

3. Talent Development. Todd argues it is cheaper to hire a rock star and surround them with recent grads to form a department than it is to ingrain a specialism into the whole agency. I disagree. One of the benefits in having a core group of people who are knowledgeable and passionate about a common area is that they can become greater than the sum of their parts – using each other as sounding boards for ideas and insight. As one of four rock stars at com.motion (plus a double rock star senior associate), I think it’s cheaper to hire great people than many mediocre ones. One look at the talent pool in Toronto, one the cities with the most switched on and connected agency networks, will tell you it is nigh impossible to hire a great mid level consultant. That so called rock stars are over paid and over hyped (hope my boss doesn’t read this!) And that there are a tonne, literally a tonne, of junior level people claiming they have digital expertise because their prof told them to start a blog and they have obligatory Twitter/Facebook presences. Whats more, having a central talent pool can excite the surrounding agency – I cannot tell you how energizing it is to see professionals at the top of their game as it is as Veritas with the Marketing Public Relations (MPR) and Corporate Public Affairs (CPA) practice groups. Only specialists can help you achieve and more importantly sustain this sort of momentum.

4. One of Todd’s main criticisms is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Point taken but a true communications professional should be able to step outside of their specialty to develop a holistic strategy. My MPR colleagues have a high profile client who is happy to hear my recommendations to not get hot and heavy about social media. And based on their target demographics, I am happy to keep giving that advice as long as it makes sense from a business perspective AND a communications perspective.

Much of this post is born out of a frustration from seeing too many firms offering “tradigital” consulting to their clients. I’m all for a higher (much higher in some cases) base line of knowledge from consultants across all spheres of our business but for Todd to choose social media as the one area which everyone should be proficient in is…disappointing and kind of counterintuitive to his whole point. I deliberately tried not, in the points above, to focus too much on social media and online/digital/Internet communications. I’m not expected to be an Investor Relations consultant so why should I expect IR consultants to be be (workable) experts in my world? I guess this is a deeper philosophical question about whether social media and online is going to completely change the way we as an industry does business or whether social media is *just* a new channel for the marketing matrix to consider.

Ironically for some who accuses the specialist’s camp of drinking too much Kool-Aid, it is the generalists who are drinking the Kool-Aid if they think this is going to provoke a fundamental shift (no pun intended) in the communications business. Social media is not the first new channel to emerge for marketers to reach their audience and it surely won’t be the last.

Shift Communications seems to be more of a tech shop so I can certainly see how this core expertise tessellates very neatly with the social media/online space but I can’t help but think Todd is trying a bit too hard to make a specific point. Maybe a big new business pitch is coming up and he’s looking to do a bit of de-positioning for a competitor?

Another train of thought is that maybe it’s my own brand of myopia at work. I can understand that clients who like working with a small shop would ask for tradigital generalists but if a client is looking for first class partners (not suppliers) I can’t see the benefit or value in overlooking dedicated, passionate, knowledgeable specialists. I’ve worked as a hybrid, at FH, and my last two positions, at iStudio and now com.motion within Veritas Communications, have been as a specialist. I can’t even begin to tell you how much more I’ve enjoyed being a specialist.

My view is that specialists add exponentially more value for the client, to their employer and to the team they work within. This is true of all facets of Public Relations, not just social media.

Would you rather be a specialist or a generalist? Would you rather hire a specialist or a generalist? Comments are open!

Links added Oct 17.

9 Comments | PR | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Microsoft asks you to go through the looking glass

September 28, 2009

Last week I was sent an Advertising Age article on a new proof of concept product from Microsoft designed to help marketers understand the social media conversation around their brand, organization or clients. Code name: Looking Glass.

The idea is to use the powerful Sharepoint platform as a jumping off point for communicators and marketers to monitor and action relevant social media activity. The use of Sharepoint is, in my view, a crucially important part of the announcement as it allows for the integration with existing business systems – which will further mature the use and adoption of social media, moving it into the core business function as its use within the communications function increases. The communications function is doing an outstanding job of adjusting and adopting social media for its need, but this could take it to the next level as business people start to understand the core value of social media – the data.

From the Advertising Age piece:

clip_image001[4]The idea is to connect social-media-monitoring tools to the rest of a marketer’s organization — customer databases, work orders, customer-service centers and sales data. Looking Glass will pull in a variety of feeds from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr and work with third-party data sources as well (the folks behind it have already talked to some firms such as Meteor Solutions and Telligent). All of the data collected will connect into Microsoft’s enterprise platforms, such as Outlook and Sharepoint.

-snip-

What this also means for marketers is how all that social-media information they’re drowning in becomes more actionable.

Here’s how: A marketing manager can get an e-mail alert when there’s a sudden surge of chatter about his or her brand on Twitter or Facebook, along with the sentiment of that chatter and the influence level of those blogging. That information can then be connected to a customer-relationship-management system to decide whether customer service or PR should respond. Or a cable operator’s customer service rep could monitor Twitter for outage reports and send off a repair request straight from the tool. And Looking Glass will hook up to existing customer databases, so a pharmaceutical brand manager would be able to figure out if a person throwing a hissy fit on his blog is an influential doctor or current customer.

There is also a video overview which you can see below:

So why am I excited by this?

I’ve long said that integrating social media and all the data it can produce for you into business processes such as CRM and market research can elevate the communications and marketing disciplines within the organization. This product looks to start that migration in earnest.

1 Comment | Social Media | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

The Long and the Short of it

February 6, 2009

The always excellent finance and business video series Wallstrip has a great game called “Long; Short” where various interviewees give their thoughts on stuff using the time honoured trader’s choice of “long” (in for the long term) and “short” (sell now, buy later for a quick profit).

Here’s my long/short position on various things going around right now

Twitter – short. No business model (as yet) and I think businesses will find it hard to justify their presence and their employees presence on such a huge time suck. Another outlet for the PR function to monitor.

Blogging – long! Great content will win out.

Google – long. In a recession, detailed analytics will be paramount to proving value. As more and more content goes up onto the web and into Google’s index, more and more people will use the number one search engine meaning more and more click-throughs will be sold. Long on AdWords; long on Google.

I’m long on SEO for the same reason.

Podcasting – long. In a knowledge based economy, portable content of any kind will be a winner.

RSS – short. Well, I’m short RSS as we know it. I’m short on consumer adoption of RSS improving beyond a small to medium portion of the general population. However, I am long on RSS as a technology which continues to power the best Web sites and syndicate content all over the Web. I am long on RSS becoming the backbone of the Web.

Fleishman-Hillard – long! I read a ridiculous post a few weeks back on big PR agencies not taking digital seriously and spent way too much potentially billable time thinking about a response. The best way to put this is that FH has probably the most advanced digital capability out of all the big agencies and probably by a decent sized multiple. That said, the laser focus on clients has meant the organization is not blowing its own horns enough.

Social media “experts” – short! Find a social media expert and all you get is social media expertise. But…

Integration – long! Integration across all disciplines needs to be tighter. That doesn’t mean having the PR agency writing a news release about the ad campaign, but about a true multi-channel approach to marketing with consistent creative and channels that match up with the demographics.

Facebook - long. But it’s a tough one. It is tough to “long” a company that needs > $365mm in revenue ($1mm a day) to cover server/bandwidth costs alone. On the other hand, I love the idea of advertising along the social graph. I’m told by peers and colleagues that Facebook ads are getting a higher ROI than even AdWords campaigns – so if I’m long AdWords, how can I short Facebook? Plus, you have to hope that will the caliber or investors Facebook will turn a profit someday…

Email – long. With all the hype around Web 2.0 type technologies, it is sometimes hard to remember that Web 1.0 is still alive, kicking and producing tremendous ROI. Email ROI is about 46:1 on online advertising (down from 56:1 the previous year) but still represents an efficient, elegant way to dialogue directly with engaged (read: opted in) consumers. Definitely long.

Viral marketing – short. Well, short until people realise what they’re asking for. Viral is a result, not a tactic. In order to be viral, you need to be, literally, remarkable. Not enough agencies/consultants have the chops to really tell this to clients. It is a high risk, high reward game and until companies follow Diesel and Nike and Agent Provocateur down the path of creating remarkable content that people will want to share, I am short on “viral” marketing. Contradictorily, I would probably be long on word of mouth marketing if I knew more about it and its inner workings.

Online or digital marketing – short. It may surprise you to know that I am short on online/digital marketing. I work for an Internet communications agency and my work is all online and digital marketing. I’m short this because I think, eventually, “online and digital” marketing will just become “marketing”. The boundaries are starting to blur and will continue to blur as integration continues apace.

Keeping my English spelling – long.

Business Jargon – short. For me at least. I neither like nor understand baseball so why would I want to “touch base”?

What are you long/short on in today’s marketing world? What would you like my ill-considered, hastily assembled, snap-second judgement on for next time?

8 Comments | Long/Short, PR | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

Questions for your social media consultant

February 5, 2009

Dave Fleet has a post on the sort of questions you should ask a purported social media expert. As you can see from the comments, I didn’t really see eye-to-eye on everything he wrote. So in the spirit of constructive collaboration, here are four questions I’d like to ask a social media consultant – if I were a client.

How have you integrated social media with traditional online communications? In my mind, this is the most important thing to remember. Social media is just another channel, albeit an increasingly important one. I read so much about social media in isolation is the answer for everything. It is not, can not and never will be the answer – merely part of it.

How can I use some social media magic to freshen up my existing communications effort? Again, it’s all about integration and, as a consultant, going for the quick win. Plus it’s all about walking before you can run. Overreaching can be the catalyst for a major SNAFU.

What online assets do you think we can use for our social media efforts? So many organizations already have a lot of awesomely cool content/assets that could easily be re-purposed or promoted – they just need to be told about them.

Should we spend our social media dollars on external or internal communications? Internal stakeholders are just as important and just as hard to engage as external stakeholders. In a recession, spending money internally can be far more effective and efficient than externally.

Leave a Comment » | Social Media | Permalink
Posted by Ed Lee

« Previous Entries