Category: Interactive Marketing

FTC Regulates Social-Media Endorsements, Blogger Payola – Advertising Age – Digital

FTC guidelines have been released on blogola — I’ll digest the FTC regs later today and opine later — this stuff was anticipated all spring and now extends to celeb tweets.  I’ll be interested what this does to disclosure statements – our Lenovo  Blogger Advisory Council is accepting systems from us for review, but no ownership of those systems, just review units that need to be recovered. Should we push the disclosure to the council members or ask them to publish their own, even if there is no payments, but obviously a material connection. I’ll look it over during the Twins-Tigers game tonight.

From AdAge

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on blogger payola.

The agency, which protects consumers from fraud or deceptive business practices, voted 4 to 0 to update its rules governing endorsements, and the new guidelines require bloggers to clearly disclose any “material connection” to an advertiser, including payments for an endorsement or free product.

via FTC Regulates Social-Media Endorsements, Blogger Payola – Advertising Age – Digital.

Join The Mercury Brief

Join The Mercury Brief.

Former colleague Bob Page — Olympic buddy and excellent global communicator — has an interesting project at The Mercury Brief — think of it as an anthology of great communicators.

Why I Hate Social Media – Advertising Age – DigitalNext

Matt Jones at Jack Morton says what need to be said — it’s not the plumbing, but the water in the pipes when it comes to social marketing.

“At the risk of being branded a heretic or perhaps just being shown the door by my agency HR director, I have to say it: I hate social media. Why? Because it’s just media. And since when was media ever interesting?”

via Why I Hate Social Media – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

Tradigital

David Armano at Dachis (still in stealthy mode with ex-Forrester analyst Peter Kim) and the author of the Logic & Emotion blog coined a winner when he describes stuff like web banners and paid search as “tradigital” tactics. Brilliant. Close to two decades of digital marketing, the banner ad is nearly 15 years old, and now it is time to segregate the traditional from the new. I was in a pitch from a major business site last week and found myself citing “tradigital” tactics – not scoffing at them, they still have a big place in demand generation for ecommerce – but grasping at the next big thing in digital marketing, which I suppose some marketing futurists are going to label “social commerce.”

Tradigital hit a saturation point of sorts in 2007-2008 – especially in bare knuckles segments such as commodity paid search on generic keywords like “digital camera” and “cheap laptop” where the battle to recruit traffic is fierce. Click-through yields always head south over time in a tactic, never up; and after a few years search campaigns have started to show diminishing returns as more cash is stuffed into keyword arbitrage but less of the traffic converts, driving expense-to-revenue ratios lower. Blended tradigital and the rise of new metric and analytics approaches has given a new life to old tactics – retargeting/remarketing, look-alike modeling, behavioral techniques, follow-along, campaign stacking … it’s awesome to watch tradigital get revived by analytic ninjas.

Given that the only successful path in digital is perpetual beta, innovation seeking is a core component of a digital marketers’ job description these days, with the race to get into a new tactic, master it, and add it to the arsenal driven by the inevitable fade-away of the tried and true. Has any digital ad unit held its own over time? I’d argue email/spam will always have legs – why else does it continue to appear in nearly every marketing plan? – and display advertising is a “buttress” tactic that run in context with keyword buys will help the search terms convert a bit better than they would in the absence of banners. There are tradigital extensions that try to teach old dogs new tricks, such as Tumri multivariate ads and some of the intrusive page takeover units that live on like bad boomerangs.

The next wave of digital – the things I am keeping an eye on include:

  • RSS fed display: We messed around with this stuff during the Olympics, driving some banner content off of blogs into fixed ad units on the Federated Media network.
  • WOM catalysts: how do you arm fans with coupons to lay on their friends? Ecoupons – single use spot offers are coming into their own. The current model of ecoupon codes is messy and cumbersome.
  • Detection of desire: watch social media monitoring turn from detection of the next Jeff Jarvis to detection of people in love with products and brands. See WOM catalyst. I see an even cooler thing coming, but I want to keep it to myself for now.
  • Facebook apps: I’m not a believer in soc-net advertising and buy into the P&G marketing dude’s opinion that people are on those properties to connect with friends, not shop or peruse. But, there’s got to be some creativity in marketing apps for FB. I dunno. I’m grateful I have smart Facebook people on our teams. Someone is going to crack Facebook, not me.
  • Payperpost: I hate it, but even with the FTC coming down on blogola, it’s gonna thrive. Read the comments of the defenders – people are hurting for cash in this economy and this is easy cash. It sucks, but ethics are a luxury that don’t pay people’s bills. All you can do is boycott dipshit marketers who pay for it and leave the bloggers alone.
  • More dynamic multivariate units. Tumri is pretty awesome. This is display advertising that can teach you something.
  • Cable TV: GoogleTV delivered for us in beta. Now the cable industry is looking at a response.

Anyway, enough sci-fi. The next biggie is going to be an utterly huge rethinking of the shopping experience. Think about it. Web 2.0 brought content management systems to the people. We can all manage a site/blog without big tools. We can measure with free analytics. We can promote with free megaphones like Twitter. But what about commerce? Of all the user experiences, ecomm remains stuck in a bad model. eBay makes anybody a merchant – but I’m thinking we need a massive rethink on shopping engine flow and get to commerce 2.0.

Bloggers Be Warned: FTC May Monitor What You Say – Advertising Age – News

via Bloggers Be Warned: FTC May Monitor What You Say – Advertising Age – News.

AdAge reports this old news (which has been sent to me by enough people that I have to comment)

“Thinking about letting a big-name blogger test-drive your new hybrid in the hope he’ll post a glowing review about it, or maybe sending some beverage products to an influencer, hoping she’ll spread the word?

“You might have to think twice, if the Federal Trade Commission follows through with its proposed plan to start regulating viral marketing and blogs.”

Libertarian sensibilities and First Amendment misgivings aside, I’d support a truth-in-blogging disclosure policy. I’m sickened by the ongoing”twilight of objectivity” as the  traditional press fades away, and the online replacements — from review sites gamed by business owners, to payola agencies that build buzz for a fee — aren’t stepping in with any kind of ethical compass.

Those who play it straight will have no problem. I just want to make sure when I see someone raving about a product or service that I know the terms on how they came to try it. If they bought it themselves, all the better. If they took a test drive or loaner — then tell me. If they cashed a check for the “review” — they better disclose or I hope both them and the writers of the check get whacked for the deception.

Out of the box empathy in marketing

At some point last fall, some smart and brave person at Hyundai made the brilliant decision to look ahead into the future a few months and realize that consumers would place a new car nearly last on their list of life’s necessities come January. By being the first automaker to promise a money-back guarantee should the buyer lose their job, Hyundai accomplished several brilliant marketing moves.

1. They established empathy with their customers.

2. They beat their competition who thought “employee pricing” — letting consumers buy at the same price as insiders — represented empathy. The competition has followed suit and looks like followers.

3. They tapped into the zeitgeist without resorting to the unimaginative marketing message most brands follow these days which is lower total cost of ownership — the aftersale expense which few consumers want to depress themselves with in the elation of acquiring something new. Do you want to talk about depreciation, mean-time-between-failure, and service costs? Meet my accountant.

Marketers have diminished options in a down economy if they cling to their old campaign playbooks. Those playbooks are what I call megaphone tactics. Yell a lot in the right places with the right people by your side and good things will happen.  This is good for selling cigarettes, booze, and hairspray circa the Mad Men Era of the 1960s.

First to go overboard — sports sponsorships. Read Bill Simmons’ great obituary on the NBA “The No Benjamins Association” on ESPN and look at the NASCAR cars rolling around the ovals with white hoods where the sponsor’s logo used to go.

“Here’s a little game to play during your next NBA outing: Look around for how many suites are dark. (You’ll notice them specifically in the corners or behind the baskets.) A dark suite means either that nobody bought it or that somebody did buy it for the season, then made the decision, “Screw it, let’s save the $1,200 [or whatever the number is] on food and drink and not give tonight’s suite tickets to anyone.”

Sports marketing has been whacked. Corporate home rentals for the Masters in Augusta is off 20% this year and woe to the recipient of government bailout money who buys a hospitality box in a baseball stadium this spring.

Second to go overboard: feel-good branding. Those “eagles-on-proud-wings-standing-on-a-rock-spire-in-Utah” ads are done.  If it doesn’t have a solid call to action (please buy our crap now, please), then it’s not running. Just for grins, next time you’re on the mid-town tunnel approach to Manhattan or on any prime billboard region, count up how many are paid and how many are public service announcements.

Third to die: print ads. Sorry, read the remaining headlines while you can, this is the season when dead-tree publishing gets slammed. Business rags are seeing ad counts down 33% year on year. I won’t echo-chamber the terrible news of newspaper bankruptcies in Seattle, Denver, etc. …. The print puppy died and daddy isn’t bringing home a new one.

So, I could wring my hands and be all dour, but no. Instead I want to point out that for those marketers who still have money to put in market, they seem to cling to last year’s playbook, just tuning the message around the advertising equivalent of a slasher flick to say everything must go, go, go at prices too insane to believe. I see it in the airline spam: Lufthansa offering off the wall fares to Paris —  $200 roundtrips to Europe.

What is happening at places like Hyundai is a realization that the rules have changed. Consumers are sitting on their wallets and will continue to. The question marketing needs to consider is not how to align to a corporate strategy built around volumes and market share — cascading strategy based on sales yields little more than direct marketing and demand generation tactics which do nothing to distinguish the company from its competition.

Standing apart from the competition is the heart of the whole branding thing. Differentiating on price is a fool’s game and leads to the whole slasher flick thing. Tossing the brand overboard in a down market strikes me as the equivalent of eating next season’s seed corn.

My modest proposal? If your marketing budget has tanked, and is down 50 percent from last year, the last thing you want to do is spread yourself thin trying to cover last year’s tactics.  This is the time to take a flyer, to do something innovative, to take a risk and consider the high risk tactic that was dreamed about in good times. This is not the time to fall back on classic Four-P marketing. Of those four p’s — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — I recommend.

Product: not the time to roll out a premium luxe model. Nor is it time to start reducing features around the product.  Example — this is not the time to reduce warranty terms, replace stainless steel screws with plastic screws, or cut any corners. The customers are more vigilant than ever. I saw an amazing presentation by the marketing reporter at Businessweek at Google last week and he showed how peanut butter makers are screwing us out of an ounce not by making the jar smaller. Oh no. They use a concave dent on the bottom of the jar (called a “punt” for you oenophiles) to reduce the volume. This is dickheaded and will come back to bite people.

Price: See my screed on taking the marketing message down to the gutter. Anyone can cut a price.  Smart brands like Hyundai go a step further and say “we feel your pain and fear and will do something about it.”

Place: I would not recommend buying the naming rights to a baseball stadium. I would slam the brakes on all traditional media and go 101% online.  Call me digital, but there it is. The traditional media has lost its mass audience effect big time. Media has exploded and fragmented into a million niches. The only way to accurately chase the audience is with a ninja digital team.  I am serious about this. This  Deprecession is the catalyst that is killing the generational gulf between digital immigrants and digital natives. You stand up and wave a traditional campaign, media plan and I guarantee your days are numbered.

Promotion: This is where the opportunity to put on the thinking caps is. No, no viral. No UGC on YouTube. I’m talking killing the notion of the campaign — as Charlene Li said yesterday on a panel, “campaigns are designed to end” — and move to an organic, ongoing, pervasive conversational model with the crowd. This is not social media marketing hand wringing — 99% of the self-annointed gurus couldn’t run a valid social plan if they were paid to do it. This is 180 degree flip from one-way blah-blah message marketing, expensive research and focus groups, and dumb people saying “I know half my advertising works, just not ….”

Promotions need to die and be replaced with full marketing empathy. This is the time to design a product with the customers, the time to listen to their feedback, give them something in a novel way, and break the model being chased by the competition. This is the time to break out with no questions asked service, with golden-rule customer service, with beyond the pale actions that will define the organization and make it beloved, not loathed. This isn’t about freebies, giveaways and concessions. It’s about constant listening and response. ComCast, JetBlue, these are the listeners and doers.

Anyway, enough dour ranting. Bottom line — this recession is the opportunity to kill off the tried and true and invent something new. Even if you decide to only risk a small portion of your seed corn this year, do it, and do it with every expectation of failing, but do it knowing that the customers will notice and maybe even like you for it.

I recommend a re-reading of Doc Searls’ seminal definition of conversational marketing, it’s worth the time.

Digital Governance in a Global Org

I spent part of past Wednesday at the the New York Googleplex with some fellow digital marketers and  agency people as part of Google’s Global Advisory Council.  I consider the content and conversations as unbloggable/off-the-record, but wanted to share  one excellent line from Scott McLaren at General Motors, who in the course of presenting how GM was able to centralize search marketing said:

“Centralize the science and localize the art.”

That brilliant insight goes into my collection of business koans along with McKinsey’s Dick Foster’s line:  “Loosen control without losing control” and that anonymous jazzman who told another musician “If you don’t know what to do, then don’t do anything.”

What Scott summarized in that one-liner, is probably familiar to anyone in a global digital marketing role who has tried to evangelize a unified (credit to Carol Kruse at Coca-Cola for recommending “unified” over “centralized”) approach to planning, spending and executing a marketing discipline across many oceans and borders.

Decentralization is the rule in a massive global organization, a throw-back to the Roman Empire when the edges of the empire were too far away from the center of power in Rome and the Emperor had to divide c0ntrol between four Caesars. When I was at International Data Group in 2005 I felt the 1970s edict by owner and founder Pat McGovern that decentralization was the way the company would be organized and run was out of date and a worn out necessity born from a pre-fax/pre-email era, one that ignored the economies of scale of consolidating 300 websites onto a unified analytics and content management system.

Information Technology tends to consolidate and unify. The oldest story in the IT playbook is the hub, the router, the server, the data center.  All discussions of mesh architectures and complex matrixed “edge” computing models have been speculative structures, but in the end, the men in white coats want the users to be on dumb diskless workstations, working in unity off of one central processor. But – IT aside — money likes to be decentralized. If you want “feet on the street” to take accountability for sales targets, then you have to push fiscal responsibility down to the regional and country level — otherwise there will be no accountability or insights into local markets.

Back to McLaren’s statement and why I think search engine marketing must be centralized.

  • The auction model punishes organizations that have two or more people bidding on the same brand terms.  This is classic Three Stooges behavior. Search bids are science. Not art.
  • Analytical conformity. What’s the dashboard by which activities are going to be measured? How do you value search interactions and analyze search against other media in market? Can you compare the effects of a television campaign to searches? The answer is yes …. if you have a well controlled environment and are reasonably assured that your results are not being skewed by dealers, channel partners, or affiliates bidding on your branded terms against you. Analytics are science — not art.
  • Expertise. Most, if not all major search budgets are managed by search speciality agencies. They have to.  Search campaigns are complex, rigorous organisms that require deep, repeatable expertise. An agency accustomed to running complex global search for multiple clients will generally beat the efforts of a single internal operator or team of search operators. Dispersing SEM expertise regionally makes utterly no sense.

What else can be centralized in global digital marketing?

  • Display advertising, for the most part, can be negotiated, bought, trafficked, executed and measured centrally.
  • Display advertising should have a 15 or 20% set aside for local sites and local trafficking. There is art to display media plans, and local teams have the best insight into what local sites have local readership. That said — supporting many countries with many display media agencies is insane as non-working dollars explode and working dollars decline.

What can’t be centralized?

  • Display creative needs to be locally verified. Holiday promotions tend to drive ecommerce discounting and only a local team can declare St. Patrick’s Day over Golden Week.
  • Social media relations. Bloggers, forums, high profile users — all should be related to on a local, face to face basis. Local meetups and in-person relations are vital to any community efforts.

More later, but it was good to hear two very global, very capable marketers confirm the issues I’ve seen the past three years.  Digital marketing needs to be unified around IT, analytics, and discounted volume negotiations but localized around creative and customer/blogger relations.

Technology | ExecTweets

Technology | ExecTweets.

Twitter, Federated Media and Microsoft have launched an interesting aggregator of business people who use Twitter. I’ll play with it for a while — many of the people listed are already in Tweet Deck, but ExecTweets acts as a squelch knob, surfacing the exec level noise above the few hundred people I follow elsewhere. Not sure if a web-aggregator makes sense as I tend to like a client like Twhirl of Tweetdeck minimized and available.

update: I looked at my Twitter page and saw my first twitter-ad, courtesy of Federated calling attention to ExecTweets. Federated struck again today with a Marchmadness app for AT&T.

Digital Agency Report Cards 2008: Adweek

via Digital Agency Report Cards 2008.

My Google Alert sent in the annual rankings by AdWeek of the various agencies. Lenovo’s agency of record is Ogilvy. I’m happy to see Lenovo was cited as a high point in their 2008 ranking.

“OgilvyInteractive is trying to figure out social media. It’s established some bona fides. For Lenovo, it showed benefits of electronics giant’s products by putting them in the hands of athletes at the Summer Olympics to blog for a Lenovo site. The “Voices of the Olympic Games” program generated 1,500 postings by 100 athletes. But, social media can bite back.”

Couple things to clarify. OgilvyPR’s 360 Digital Influence Project – Rohit Bhargava, Kaitlyn Wilkins, John Bell — did the heavy lifting with blogger recruitment and management during the Olympics. Neo@Ogilvy – Nicole Estebanell’s team — led the media selection and execution of in-market dollars.

The project was conceived on the client side by me, executed by Lenovo’s Alan White, Esteban Panzeri and Tim Supples and supported by Lenovo’s comms team, especially Bob Page.  Ogilvy did a magnificent job rallying around us under impossible deadlines to make this program happy. Sidenote: the Voices project was a finalist in PRWeek’s annual awards for best use of digital, but alas, lost out to an Ikea and milk moustache campaign