The Future of MarCom and Media: Mad Men Meets Silicon Valley?
“The truth is, advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world — one where code is on par with content. The 21st-century ad isn’t something to be looked at, it’s something to be used… …”Consumers” are now “Users.” So are “Marketers” now “Developers”?”
“…having someone who at least can help a creative team understanding how the software should look is very helpful. “I think having somebody like that, even if they are not the ones coding the app, helps bridge the gap between the technical and the creative…”
Source: AdAge – Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies
Business Value = Subscribers * Demographics
Business Value = Eyeballs + relevance * intent
Last week’s talk of the town among media in crowd and digerati was that spending on Online Marketing in the UK finally has taken pole position from Offline Advertising.
Make no mistake: this is significant. (Remember this is BBC territory!)
For years eyeballs, attention and now -as predicted and long overdue- budget weight have shifted from TV, Radio and Print to Interactive Media, culminating in this milestone.
Why this change from spending budget on Offline Advertising to investing in Online Marketing Strategies?
And why this plea to repurpose the inner workings of agencies (and ASAP at that)?
Well, to answer the first question, here’s a list of activities people in general are currently undertaking (online) instead of massively tuning in on prime-time (or, indeed, instead of buying and reading newspapers) like they used to:
- Checking news anytime, online, for free;
- Discovering and consuming online content, via “Social Distribution”, for free;
- Shopping online, any time they like;
- Spending days on end playing videogames;
- Spending evenings (cocooning with friends or family) watching TiVo or DVD’s;
- Leaving comments and reviewing products on that very same e-commerce site;
- Discussing and reviewing artists, movies, products and brands on niche online communities;
- Logging in daily to update their status in social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook (or even several times a day – thanks to mobile flat-rate data plans and apt mobile devices and smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and the Nokia N series, to name but a few).
Okay, I’m bound to have missed many, many more, yet even the online media consumption / activities I’ve inevitably missed, share core characteristics with the ones mentioned above, which, when indentified and aligned next to each other, should underline my statement that agencies need some unadulterated tech DNA should they hope to help their clients connect online with their audience.
“Creatives need to be specialists in the spaces where consumers live that are defined by new technology.”
“If agencies are to continue to offer the highest value to their clients, and realize the full potential of new media on behalf of their clients, they need to make sure every department is as technology literate as consumers” -Simon Mainwaring
So, why the need for new fresh Silicon Valley Blood for agencies in this post-Madison Avenue MarCom ecosystem? Well, for starters, all the activities mentioned above:
- are On Demand;
- are personalized;
- are ubiquitous;
- are interactive (vs. passive content consumption);
- put the user in control;
-And… they’ve become a habit.
Habits slowly but steadily ingraining themselves in modern culture on a global scale.
All of these activities have replaced, or are in the process of replacing, the habit of, say, going home after school or work, watching the same mass orientated, one-size-fits-all TV shows like the rest of the populous, within timeslots deemed fit by a few network coordinators, all the while zapping away the interruption marketed ads…
(On a side note, what has also been replaced is blindly following the opinion of a select few elitists, or opinion leaders, so you will. You don’t need (trust?) one or more reporters from the New York Times to tell you that The Dark Knight or District 9 are movies worth an evening out to the multiplex, what book is a must-read or which restaurant should be on your shortlist, as even more so than usual, nowadays people are forming their own opinion by reading online peer reviews or discussing their customer care experience online, no holds barred.
Internet killed the middleman.
And the platforms facilitating this have a reach of millions and sometimes even billions, globally.
This continuous two-way online dialogue is another reason why the one-way message sending, branding specialists need to acquire interactive skill- and mindsets…)
It’s The Internet, Stupid
“Why doesn’t the traditional model work online? In short, the web is too fragmented (millions of videos, millions of web sites), too loosely coupled (countless hyperlinks, embed codes, APIs), and too nascent (too few revenue models, too little clarity about the future) to fit comfortably into a media conglomerate as they exist today.”
“The challenge is that the scarce resources are different: while the media business continues to rely on “talent,” today’s talent may be writing code rather than screenplays. Distribution still creates value, but it can mean a quickly passed link on Twitter or Facebook instead of an 8 p.m. slot on a broadcast network”.
Source: Giga Om – New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company
But these factors are not the only causes for this disruptive re-allocating of budget.
Sure, everyone agrees that you should “fish where the fish are”, but the main reason that budgets are finally being freed up from political unwillingness or irrational conservatism, is that in these times of crises, true accountability in marketing and advertising has finally become key.
There’s no need for (hiding behind) second guessing or causality in MarCom anymore: Plausible effective advertising maybe was “fine” yesterday, today proven effectiveness by conversion is vast becoming the golden standard.
The current recession has acted as a catalyst for this silk media revolution, merely accelerating the inevitable.
Now the marketer finally knows which half of her marketing euro, dollar, yen or what have you, is wasted on naught and which half is an investment; generating leads or spurring your core hyper targeted audience into action. All in real-time, if necessary, meaning you can act real-time.
“It’s to no fault that many account teams have no concept of what web development entails in terms of budget and time. Too many times there are promises made that cannot be fulfilled. Having a cross functional, technically savvy professional on hand to lay out accurate budget and time frames in real time ensures that the client is not mislead by a traditional account person reliant on third party estimates.”
It’s no longer about the clever award winning Creative Director and his team of witty art-director/copywriter duo’s.
This also means that the sole focus in marketing and advertising isn’t about “sending content” anymore, but it’s about the underlying technologies that facilitate dialogue between brand and stakeholders, and empowers them both.
It’s about, for example, creating branded tools that might prove useful in everyday mundane tasks for the user: Apps-as-a-Brand-Utility. Eyeballs. Attention.
“Code” and “(meta)data” have earned their rightful place next to “design” and “gut-feeling”, thus switching the demand from pure creative output to actionable insights based on real-time data; apps and open platforms for effective communication, feedback and co-creation. All of this fundamentally challenging the very raison d’être and modus operandi of traditional agencies.
“Various models have evolved over the years but the successful ones have at their core a few talented individuals who “get it” when it comes to the nuts and bolts of technology, the subtleties of strategic brand building and the figures that justify an ROI…
…the more multidisciplinary people an agency can employ without forcing generalists into specialized silos, the better equipped they’ll be to provide true integration.”
As it is becoming increasingly clear that consumers are changing their daily work-, leisure- and decision-making(!) systematic from Analogue- to Digital based; brands/advertisers and traditional MarCom specialists will have to adapt & change their Tech know-how (what vs. why), their thought patterns (creative top-down factories vs. embracing digital natives and co-creating), and their priorities (branding vs. true empirical accountability) to match this new reality or ultimately end up like that frog in the slow-boiling pan.
The long-term solution however, is not going to be purely a technological one, but rather an anthropological and sociological one; the real challenge lies in the cultural change and organizational restructuring needed to save traditional agencies from the same dark fate (or worse) as the music industry and newspaper & magazine publishers. Out with the old…
[Yes, the very fact that it’s 2009 and I’m posting this rant as being new(s), means that somehow there’s still a need for summaries and musings like this, however obvious and stale it might seem to fellow digital natives and digerati in-crowd alike. Yet, I believe that this needs to be heard and echoed. I’m merely trying to add a drip in the quite -possible very pretentious- hope all the accumulated drips will eventually flood the ivory tower of cognitive dissonance that some board rooms and CEO’s (across all traditional agencies and entertainment outlets) dwell in.]
Read more thoughts about Apps-as-a-Brand-Utility, the future of advertising, “Creative Technologists” and the ideal DNA composition for successful marketers and agencies in the 21st Century in this excellent article by Allison Mooney on Advertising Age.
Spreading a Viral: Honda Demonstrates Content Integration on Vimeo
Honda recently did a take-over on Vimeo.com which was much talked about by marketing insiders.
Instead of posting or explaining the concept here, I’d like to suggest you’d first take a look over on the site and experience it for yourself -especially if you’re a creative/interactive professional and haven’t seen it already.
[Performance warning: close down any other browser tabs/windows or any other application that has a direct net connection right now, I know I suffered from some serious lag the first time.]
Apart from the novelty(?) factor of this kind of creative content-integration, I’m not quite sure where the real added value for Honda and its customers lies in this particular case.
I’ll get back to that thought in a moment though; first I’d like to point to a section on the page that caught my attention. It clearly depicts how a viral starts spreading (see the 2 images below):
Honda Insight - Vimeo Take over Stats
The table contains the statistics of said video on a daily basis, i.e.: how many times it was watched, “liked” and how many comments were made on the page itself, all in relation to each other and non-cumulative (note that the numbers are displayed on a per day basis!).
Clearly, the usual exponential viral mechanisms are at work here, which is fascinating in of itself, yet I believe that despite these pretty impressive numbers this mini-campaign as is will not enjoy a widespread viewer base and live up to its true potential, mainly because of the following 4 reasons:
- The content isn’t “spreadable”;
- A lack of a clear call to action;
- The quality of the content itself and
- There’s no follow-up.
The content isn’t spreadable, technically speaking:
Notice how I didn’t embed the video right here as I usually would, instead referring you to Vimeo, because there was no other way you could undergo it the way it was meant to be experienced.
In other words: people will first have to go to the Vimeo page and have a true broadband internet connection(!) to experience it smoothly and in full effect; detach the video from the context of this page and it becomes just another (attempt at a) cool viral. Pure branding, zero capitalization of the ensuing conversations.
Nowadays it’s more effective to take a channel-neutral and/or federated content approach to reach out to your audience on the net, and part of that means making your content spreadable through widgets, embeddable video’s, etc.. The Vimeo video is embeddable of course, but the page -and thus the experience- is not.
There’s no call to action:
The concept itself doesn’t trigger the visitor to do anything: You just sit and watch, just like on TV…
The creative team apparently embraced the technological and creative possibilities that the internet offers in marrying video with a webpage, yet somehow failed to capitalize on the buzz that it generated and thus at the opportunity to generate leads.
Honda’s rich media take over is no interactive advertising but more akin to an online guerrilla advert, which could have been done offline, possibly generating more buzz and brand-awareness outside the digerati niche.
Then again, it was created by Wieden & Kennedy (Amsterdam), a traditional agency with it’s roots firmly grounded in offline advertising campaigns.
The quality of the content isn’t worth spreading:
If it’s aimed at the Marketing/Tech/Creative niche: they’re already accustomed to these “Breaking-The-4th-Wall” take-over actions by now on YouTube or dedicated viral mini-sites, and this example isn’t remarkable.
If it’s not aimed at said niche, then one has to wonder why on earth it was posted on a niche social video site like Vimeo.com in the first place…
Adding all the numbers together from the stats image above, there are over a 1.750 likes, 300+ comments and 177.000 views generated in less than two weeks(!), pointing to a cult hit and/or people watching it more than once (it’s not clear whether Vimeo filters out non-unique views/cookies).
On the other hand, the numbers in the table don’t depict all mentions of the video across the Social Media space, and it was only posted a few days ago, so this is just merely the tip of the iceberg. Here’s hoping that Honda’s campaign team has access to social media monitoring tools from Radian6 or TrackUr and have activated their BackType Alerts to keep a clear overview.
All in all, in terms of buzz and people interacting with the page this is no bad example of content integration at all, it’s just a shame there’s no apparent follow-up or integration in, say, a 360˚campaign for maximum effect.
Now of course at this very moment we have no idea what Honda’s campaign objective was in the first place: It could be a proof of concept, trying it out for a small fee, with little risk, before scaling it up on YouTube allowing the numbers game to come into play, leading to massive exposure and off course more ways for the community and consumers/prospects to interact with the brand.
As I’m a firm believer in the merits of content-integration instead of plain display bannering, for me personally it will be very interesting to see how this plays out and if Honda will release an evaluation on their company blog or industry titles like Ad Age or ReadWriteWeb.
E-mailing Brand Equity or Inversed Strategy?
There’s an interesting e-mailing debate on the Signal vs. Noise blog. Now I mostly agree with some of the business philosophy of mister Fried and co., and I’ve got a deep respect for what they’ve achieved and the way they did it, but the idea of trying out new e-mail designs First before applying a design overhaul to the website based thereon is inane.
Though I can sympathize with the “Process-Breaking-Possible-Mind-Freeing” idea behind the post, there are two obvious pitfalls Jamie (the author) is unaware of, both stemming from a misguided thought pattern.
1. Conversion and Marketing Strategy
The author is putting Form over Function, Tactic above Strategy and Outcome before Process.
There’s a good reason why
“…emails have their conceptual birth in another medium altogether: a Catalog, an Advertisement, or the Website.”
And why
“The concept and strategy was already finalized before it goes to (the web designer). At that point it was all about production.”
Please read the whole 37Signals post and the discussion here for some more context.
Strategy ultimately leads to Production and not the other way around, for all the obvious reasons.
That being said, let’s try to break down the raison d’être of E-mail Marketing once more, starting off with a fundamental question: Strategy and communication plan aside,
Why send out an e-mailing in the first place?
Your sending out an e-mailing to stimulate your reader base to take action (on your website), be it either:
- Reading the latest news (gaining you the required eyeballs for advertising revenue);
- Signing up for a service;
- Filling in a survey;
- Updating their profile (both offering more accurate targeting = opportunity to add more relevancy);
- Buying a product;
- Booking a ticket or
- Simply just showing your appreciation for them being such loyal customers…
Whatever your primary motives may be, you’re mainly sending out that mail to communicate to your (potential) customers in order to generate higher conversion rates.
Make them click! That’s your core Sub-Goal*.
Your sole priority lies there, design details such as shadow and rounded corners are superfluous and should be geared towards supporting you in reaching that goal, not detract from it. Your main objective is not to go against all logical and proven processes by designing a fancy e-mail template as a way of alpha-testing a possible future website redesign.
It’s the message and the call-to-actions therein that count, and though it doesn’t hurt to have a neatly designed mailing, it’s a waste of your efforts if you spend too much time on art instead of investing it in sensible e-Copywriting. In other words: “Substance Over Style, please m’am”.
The only exception here is when you’re Crowdsourcing your website re-design and have a dedicated address list of people that are aching to be part of the drive testing(process) or if your regular subscribers have given you Permission to do so. If such is the case, don’t forget to add a feedback button in there as well…
This approach allows you to obtain valuable feedback because people are consciously paying attention to the careful alterations you make to your template, whereas in all other cases some people are bound to take notice of the gradual changes somewhere down the line and probably think you don’t have a clue about what your doing…
[* Note that I said "sub goal" deliberately, because an e-mailing is a part of your communication plan and thus should support your overall Marketing Strategy. Seeing a pattern here?]
2. Consistent Authentic Branding
The second pitfall was correctly pointed out by a comment in the thread from none other than Seth Godin himself. 37Signals has a reputation of having a very unique and dare I say intimate bond with their customers/users.
Part of their reputation, appeal and charm lies in the passionate and practical way they look at how to improve a business process and how to get rid of excess weight, so to speak. And more often than not, the sluggish corporate way of doing business is at the receiving end of their rants and riffs.
Unless your target audience is expecting it from you, suddenly adding a standard Corporate styled e-mailing in the communication mix isn’t going to strengthen that relationship. On the contrary; you’re actually running a huge risk of erecting an invisible wall between yourself and your clientele.
Other than that, this operation could turn out to be a “me-too” approach for 37Signals: Since they’d be stopping with communicating in a personal (and their very own Getting Real) way, the receivers might unconsciously end up getting a change of attitude towards them; leading to a loss of sympathy over time, which ultimately leads to less loyalty and brand connection. Stay authentic, be consistent.
Have I already mentioned that the suggested Inversed Strategy approach isn’t conversion centred?
When I’m subscribing to a newsletter I expect (nay, want!) a clean and simple, (mobile device friendly!) swiftly-loading mail in my inbox, communicating a focused, relevant and -in this particular case- personal message. That’s the way I got charmed by & connected with your brand in the first place.
It’d be a waste to ruin the expectations and experience of your target audience and clients by giving in to a (misguided) personal desire for creative freedom.
If it’s more creative freedom you want, it’d be much wiser to start thinking about rearranging your career, instead of rearranging a proven process or something as fragile as your E-mailing Brand Equity.
