Stephen Johnson, from Draft FCB has just launched an interesting initiative to save 140,000 lives from Malaria. The initiative turns traditional TV & telephone fund raising on it’s head relying on individuals to pass it on.
You can donate through their website, or install a widget on your blog, forum, facebook page to encourage your mates to help raise funds.
Some good research from Nielsen came out recently as you may have read in B&T and Digital Media that argues the value of online advertising in terms of recall, recommendation & purchase influence.
The research also revealed intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%.
Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1% while prompted awareness increased by 3.5%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%.
1. How does this compare to TV, print & radio? (using the same benchmarks & research approach)
Without context these numbers might be under or over valued as it could smash or be smashed by these other channels? It would be good to put them side by side to see how they interact. And what’s the impact when multiple touch points occur, say TV & Online, does it improve, reduce, increase, change the impact of the communication?
2. More importantly can marketers drop their addiction to clicks?
Clicks, performance & data are both the power and the Achilles heel of digital media. Thanks to many publishers, like Google, you can buy a visitor to your website. This is great because it reduces the risk, it’s not so great because the value of the exposure to media (banner, search result, edm, etc) is missed, all the focus is on the click.
I recommend clients establish an ROI (return on investment) calculator, where you add up all the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor. (I’ve explained how to create an ROI calculator here)
One piece of the ROI puzzle should be exposure, it may not be as valuable, but it has to be considered.
This kind of research helps us understand the value, however, we (marketers) need to assign value to it first, both rationally and in our guts.
An ROI (Return on investment) calculator can help you evaluate the performance of your communications spend. Not many of my clients have thought about it, and it’s an important place to start when getting into digital marketing.
The basic premise is that you can add up all of the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor.
The numbers themselves are not particularly meaningful and are arguable, however, the value is when you COMPARE one campaign to another.
The Apple Co. ran two campaigns at separate times of the year. The goal of an apple company is to sell apples on their website (who’d have thought).
Campaign 1 achieved 10,000 visitors to the website, 200 orders, 12 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $13k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.27.
Campaign 2 achieved 9,000 visitors, 400 orders, 50 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $24k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.49.
Now you can more easily compare the performance of each campaign. Campaign 1 returned $0.27 and campaign 2 returned $0.49, so campaign 2 was nearly twice as effective.
Step 1. Create the measures
- Visit to your website
- Subscription to email database
- Enquiry
- Online order (or booking, or request)
- New facebook friends
Step 2. Assign values to the measures
For example, a visitor might be $0.10 and an order might be $50. (Or the value of the order might actually be the sale value, or profit margin. Google Analytics can report on this, read their blog here).
Step 3. Track & add the values
Collect all the data, how many visits, orders, enquiries etc and multiply them by the value you assigned in step 2. For example, 500 orders would be 500 X $50 = $2500. (Based on example above). Then add all of these values together, this is your Outcome Value.
Step 4. Divide that value by the cost
If your final outcome value is $2500, then divide that by the media spend, assume it was $4000, that would be $2500 divided by $4000 = $0.62.
Step 5. Compare campaigns
As I mentioned earlier, the ROI value you come up with is kinda meaningless, unless you compare it to other campaigns.
Step 6. Get sophisticated
If you want to take it to the next level, you should have different calculators for different campaign objectives. For example the above is very sales focused, however, your objective might actually be awareness of a new product or service. Have an ‘awareness’ calculator would put more value on the reach & visitors, less on the orders. Then you can fairly compare awareness campaigns separately to conversion campaigns.
Also, you can apply this methodology to each piece of activity, for example, you could compare the ROI of search to the ROI of banner, EDMs or Social Media.
Here’s a template
This template should get you well on your way: http://www.box.net/shared/i6x105jfil
Priscilla from MySpace just dropped off these invites to the FREE MySpace Music launch concert on St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. They’re clearly banking a lot on their music offering with some serious headlines. For MySpace’s sake I hope they put more focus on their music offering as it’s their only real strong offering, and what they were built on.
Although, all that considered, I don’t totally get how they’re launching MySpace Music? Haven’t they been doing music for years?
Are you going?
Yesterday Toyota announced that they’d selected 5 advertising agencies to pitch for their social media activity where the community would determine the winners, the two best performing agencies would get more work in 2010.
B&T Today revealed last week that Toyota is running the social media pitch, pitting eight agencies against each other with four agencies then to go head to head with their ideas in the public domain. Following on from this, the two best will produce further work in the new year.
Background
Having worked on the digital account for Holden (held by Visual Jazz) for some time now, I’ve been keeping a close eye on who’s doing what. Interestingly enough, Toyota have recently been putting a lot of effort into Facebook – in particular – buying advertising and growing their fan base.
Toyota
They have also developed an application, called ‘Toyota Promise Forest‘, aligned with the Prius. The concept looks good, one of the best in Australia, however, it doesn’t work – and it hasn’t for quite some time. You’ll see when you use the app that YOUR NAME is TIMOTHY and the friends aren’t my friends, and you can’t actually use the app.
Now we assumed, when we first found the application, that it was new and being repaired, however, it’s been a couple of months now, and still it’s not working.
It makes me wonder why Toyota are ramping up their social media when their current efforts are so broken? That aside, how can you have 5 campaigns in market and effectively measure the performance of each activity separately? Would you run 5 TVCs at once to see which one works best?
Ford
I’ve also heard rumblings that Ford have also just selected an agency to roll out a social media strategy. Whilst at the same time they’ve developed ‘MyFord‘ a social media hub for their brand, however, it’s kinda broken…
Others
Lots of the other auto’s are in the space, but nothing noteworthy at this stage.
Summary: the Australian auto category will be an interesting one to watch in the coming 6-12 months
Started by channel101.com this 5 minute episode TV series is hilarious, well acted, directed & written, I wish I’d discovered it sooner. Good work Channel101!
Who are Channel 101?
The Unavoidable Future of Entertainment
Channel 101 is a monthly screening of 5-minute TV shows. It is a living, autonomous, un-televised TV network, that has been running since 2003. Here, you’ll find exclusive content including behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes, and original 101-based features. For good measure, we’ll put the Prime Time shows up here too.
Completely off topic, however, hilarious, Amstrong & Miller reenact the life of two WWII RAF pilots, with attitude. Each one is under 2 mins and worth your lunch break. They’ve produced a range of similarly witty clips – check out related videos on YouTube.
My favourite quote from the first episode is “That’s so unfair, that’s like massively disrespecting your trousers.” Got a fav?
This swell article on SMH yesterday arvo enlightens us on the fact that Australians no longer only use mobiles for phone calls & texting, lots of us are using it for email, web browsing and entertainment. These kinds of reports are critical to my job as it helps make or break business cases on where clients should invest their money.
Some interesting results in the research report got my attention including:
However, skepticism started to creep in as the second stat seemed a little out of kilter with general social networking site usage in Australia…. So I dug a little deeper into the research report. One of the first places I usually look (and I’m no researcher) is who they surveyed – sometimes this skews the results – and in this case there was an issue.
The decision to implement the survey online and to promote the survey via mobile banner ads has some implications in terms of disseminating the results to the wider population.
SOME IMPLICATIONS?
I’d say a little more than SOME IMPLICATIONS – considering the survey is about mobile usage.
If you do a survey of people who are clicking on mobile banner ads it’s pretty stupid to ask them if they use mobile internet and applications – THEY JUST CLICKED ON A BANNER AD.
If AIMIA or the research agency can clarify the number of people that responded via mobile devices the report might be of some value – maybe not.
Footnote: I’m a digital advocate, believe in all things online/mobile/social, but flawed research reports make it difficult for me to judge the potential value of the research & therefore difficult to recommend it to my clients.
UPDATE: 13th October
Marisa from mNet has clarified the issues that I raised in this post in the comments below. Until I’ve reviewed the report in further detail assume that the research is sound. My question is why they didn’t clarify this important fact in the report.
