Category: Interactive Marketing

Jack Myers – JackMyersMediaBusinessReport.com – ADVERTISING DEPRESSION: It’s Here and It’s Sustained. Down 2.4% for 2008; -6.7% for 2009; and -2.3% for 2010

Sobering news from a forecasting guru, but a glimmer of light for interactive and digital spending, especially search.

“The brunt of the 6.9 percent fall-off in 2009 ad spend will be felt by newspapers (-15.0%), Yellow Pages (-14.0%), consumer magazines (-13.0%), radio (-12.0%), local television (-10.5%), business-to-business and custom publishing (-9.0%), and broadcast network television (-4.0%). Even online media will feel the pain, with projected overall growth of a meager 2.7 percent. Online display ads are forecast to grow only one percent, with search engine marketing increasing 8.0% and online video, search engine, widget advertising increasing at a 25.0% rate to $1.5 billion. Online growth will pick up again in 2010 with overall 8.5% increases.”

Link

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage

Lenovo’s “Customer of the Year” — Constantine von Hoffman (for threatening to tell people we delivered a ThinkPad to him ahead of schedule) — has posted his annual list of the top marketing boners, blunders, bloopers, etc.. I strongly recommend a full visit, my favorite is Vista toilet paper and Lolita brand beds.

1 Ford features “Space Oddity” — a song about astronaut suicide — in new car campaign.

2 Framingham State College uses the word blah 137 times in a 312-word fundraising letter.

3 Disney (multiple entries): Bans kids from DisneyWorld restaurant; Changes “It’s A Small World” to “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”; and Sells “High School Musical” panties for tween girls with the phrase “Dive In” on them.

4 Woolworths (UK) launches Lolita brand of beds for young girl

See the rest below ….

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage.

General Mills’ Pssst… is a Weak Stab at Branded Community | paulgillin.com

Paul Gillin takes General Mills to task for its branded community. Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?

“I just signed up for General Mills’ Pssst… membership club because I was interested in seeing how a big consumer products company assimilates all that we’ve learned about online communities and applies it to a super-brand site (plus, I love Lucky Charms!). It’s still early, but this site is off to a very weak start.

Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration with GlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.

Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution. I would not have launched the site in its current condition:

General Mills’ Pssst… is a Weak Stab at Branded Community | paulgillin.com.

Dour Marketer — what’s first? Get your ruler.

One has to start somewhere in getting one’s act together in a down economy, so I suggest the first thing to get in order is online metrics. You must measure the heck out of what you do. Hunches are for people who can afford to be sloppy.

If you are a dour marketer in a small or medium business, online metrics means Google Analytics because it is free. Deal with it, learn it, read the book, become a disciple of Avinash. Sure, when your moving $50 million in ad spend a year though an ecommerce engine generating $500 million in revenue, then you can worry yourself with industrial strength measurement systems like Omniture (which in full disclosure we use). But before you get all revved up to go do something because action is better than inaction, get yourself to Amazon and buy these two books:

  • Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is the best analytics blogger out there. He works at Google. His blog, Occam’s Razor has been in my blogroll since, well, since it started.
  • Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics: Brian Clifton. I don’t know Brian, but I do known enough about Google Analytics to know it can be a very powerful tool in the right hands.

Good buddy and thrifty marketer Mark Cahill turned me onto Google Analytics and it runs in the background of this blog. I want to underscore – I am a retarded web analytics person; the true practitioners I know like Jim Hazen, Ranjit Kulkarni, Esteban Panzeri, are extremely insightful, well trained and inspired in their mastery of the tools and the strange world of first party cookies, EVARs, tags and conjoint analysis.

There are a ton of good metrics resources — if, as I suspect, you are a protean dour marketer and wearing several hats — or, at the very least, interested in learning all aspects of digital from SEM to SEO to WOM to SMM, then you won’t have the time to become a metrics ninja. But it is the first step on the road to enlightenment as everything needs to get “tagged” at some point.

Next post, I’ll expand the reading list to include more titles.

MediaPost – Facebook, MySpace Aren’t Making the Marketing Cut –

From colleague Gary Milner, further dour sentiment towards Facebook and Myspace as marketing vehicles (see my earlier pointer to P&G’s new CMO saying essentially the same thing — marketers aren’t that capitvated by advertising next to photos of frat boys doing keg stands).

“However, more than half (55%) of the 180 responding chief marketers–representing brands with revenues ranging from $250 million to more than $10 billion–indicated low current interest in actually incorporating the networking sites into their plans.

“One-third said they’re “not interested at all” in getting Facebook and MySpace into their plans, and 22% said they’re “not too interested,” while 35% are very or somewhat interested.”

Mediapost

The Dour Marketer

The Scots have a word for the mood I’ve been in lately — heck the mood the entire world has been in the past couple months — and that is “dour” – which I’ve heard pronounced “dow-er” but think is more accurately spoken as “dew-ar” which is appropriate since a Dewars on the rocks with a twist is about the best recourse I can recommend for someone feeling battered these days by the dour news coming from the world’s markets.

With those markets off 40% from their highs in the fall of 2007, marketers are also feeling very dour right now, and despite feeble exhortations that now is the time to double down and crush the competition, all signs are in place for a major flattening and decline in global marketing programs from advertising to PR. It is an article of faith that one of the first expense items to get whacked in a downturn is marketing and other corporate services perceived as “soft” and nice-to-have versus essential to make payroll and keep the lights on.

Some marketing activities will survive and continue through these hard times, and I believe it will be the newest techniques and tactics which endure thanks to the simple fact that they can be measured so well. These are the days when every dollar or Euro spent on marketing has to defend itself from that king tyrant Le ROI.

I was talking to my friend John Bell yesterday. We were talking about how far the world has shifted since August when his firm, OgilvyPR’s Digital Influence Project helped my team run the Olympic athlete blogging program. That was the high water mark for Lenovo’s online brand efforts in 2008, and now, a mere three months later, I listened to myself declare to John that the next 12 months are going to be a dour test for this new wave of conversational/social/engaged/word-of-mouth/collaborative marketing that me and a gazillion other optimistic theorists have been blogging and tweeting and opining at one conference or council meeting for the past three years.

Fast forward to February 2009 and imagine yourself telling a CFO or someone in finance that you need cash to improve “brand reputation” through a “conversational marketing program” involving blogs, wikis, vlogs, photo sharing, tagging, twittering, and crowdsourcing. I guarantee the response will be something on the lines of “how many buggy whips will it sell?” I don’t think Social Media Marketing is ever going to go away – I am a huge fan – indeed I think it could be the tactic that actually thrives through this shitty economy, but only if practiced at extremely low cost and with some evidence that it can drive revenue.

So, henceforth, let me commit to a mini-series here on Churbuck.com on how to market online through a downturn. There are three groups who will be pissed off by what I have to say. I will say “sorry in advance:

  1. Agencies: Sorry, but these are the times when you better learn how to do-it-yourself. It’s like when I was 28 and bought my first house. I did the sheet rock, not Ned the Nailbanger.
  2. Vendors: Sorry. That $150,000 a year “reputation monitoring” system you want me to buy? Nevermind, time for DIY. That social media technical platform that offer single-sign on seamless interoperability between the company’s forums, blogs, and wiki? No license fees for me, it’s all got to be open sourced, in the cloud, and as close to free as possible.
  3. Consultants: Sorry. Consultants won’t be hosed – CFOs prefer contractors to full time employees during hard times – but theorists and strategists are a dime-a-dozen right now and these are the days when actions and direct revenue improvement are going to speak louder than the torrent of theory and drivel that has been skipping like a broken record or a scratched CD for the past year or more.

I will go out on a limb here and say this: any organization can extend its marketing reach for an initial investment of $0 by doing two basic things. The only cost will be time. The only risk will be reputation. I’ve complained about “101” level marketing advice being parroted over and over again by the analysts and consultants, well, here’s my contribution in the form of a simple action plan to do two essential things in the new marketing environment that won’t require a visit to your finance department.

  1. Open a blog. WordPress.com. Stop. Go no further. Go there. Open a blog. Go battle with your PR and legal teams and before you visit them do a quick Google search for “corporate blog policy” and print out one of the many policies held up as classics by the experts. Do a search and replace and put your organization’s name in the appropriate places. Get permission. Start blogging. Cost: zero.
  2. Monitor what other blogs say about your organization. Google Blog Search. Technorati. An RSS reader. Google Reader. Bloglines. Whatever. Learn them. Set up RSS search feeds on your brand names and start reading. “Engaging” with bloggers? Google search on the topic. There’s more advice out there than a herd of consultants could impart for a fee in a year. Cost: zero.

That’s enough dourness for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Next post – how to turn this stuff into sales and look really smart.

P&G marketing chief questions value of Facebook – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic

Tip of the hat to Francois Gossieaux who tweeted a link to this Brand Republic piece:

“Procter & Gamble’s head of marketing, Ted McConnell, has said companies should not advertise on Facebook, saying social networks have no right to monetise their customer’s conversations.”

P&G marketing chief questions value of Facebook – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic.

I don’t view it as a matter of “rights” as much as intrusion factor and ROI/benefits. While it may be au courant to put a social network into one’s media plan, and while it may be noble but ultimately misguided to establish a brand outpost inside of a social network (be it a SecondLife island or a fan page in Facebook or MySpace), in the end it comes down to the old question: does it convert? Socially pushing soap — which Proctor & Gamble does — is different than socially pushing tech which because of its complexity requires more aftersale support between the brand and the end user.

That said, I think any advertiser who rolls into a conversational medium and starts shouting “Buy” is going to get their hats handed to them fairly quickly. Those who inveigle their way in gradually, and who don’t hijack the medium with the 2008 equivalent of pop-ups, lead gen registration walls, or blicking epilepsy inducing display ads, and who study the anthropological subtleties of the natives may find, if they are clever, that they actually don’t have to pay for the attention. Dunno, just a theory. But I, like Mr, McConnell, remain chary of advertising next to someone posting a picture of a keg stand or their sick guinea pig than I do running the message on PC Magazine or PC World.

RexBlog.com: Why “mountain stage” is a better marketing-planning metaphor than “hunker down”

Bob Carrigan at IDG introduced me to Rex Hammock. Good, indeed great blogger. This post confirms it:

“Athletes often choose times of stress to mount attacks: strong runners and bicycle racers may increase their pace on hills or under other challenging conditions,” the authors write. “In a similar vein, proactive marketing includes both the sensing of the existence of the opportunity (a tough hill and fatigued opponents) and an aggressive response (possessing the necessary strength or nerve) to the opportunity.”

A warning, however: The research indicates that it is only when companies are prepared for recessions (like cyclists who train for hills) who benefit. Thus, Apple with its pre-existing marketing and advertising savvy and a mountain of cash, is likely to benefit during this recession, as it has in previous ones, rather than another company whose marketing is inept, even in less challenging times.

Bottomline: “Hunkering down” is not the metaphor you want as your guide when planning your marketing efforts for the coming months — especially if your marketing has been working and your competitor seems to be huffing and puffing already. Hunker down wherever you can — say, executive compensation — but use a recession to raise your visibility, not hide.

RexBlog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog » Blog Archive » Why “mountain stage” is a better marketing-planning metaphor than “hunker down”.

The blight known as Vibrant Media

Sorry publishers, but a sure sign that you suck is when you start running those deceptive double-underlined Vibrant Media/IntelliText ads on your articles. Forbes.com had the wisdom to crush these long ago (after an tribute to slain Moscow bureau chief Paul Klebnikov carried a double underlined link to a life insurance advertiser). I just went to PC Magazine to read a perfectly decently article about PC vendors and crapware/bloatware, and lo, hover over the wrong thing and this black hole sort of appears (like the second coming of the popup from hell) and obscures the text. Do I really need to see the word “laptop” emphasized and see this black chasm until the unit renders?

Want to know why Engadget and Gizmodo and TechCrunch and GigaOm are eating the lunch of the tech press? Because of crappy shenanigans like Vibrant’s. Or rather, lack of. update: and kudos to sites like CNET that also forego the linky-badness.

Geez PC Mag. Maintain your dignity. I have told our teams NOT to run these types of intrusive tactics out of respect to our customers and readers. I may have to do the same with our agency when it comes to running on sites that permit this stuff.