Who is in control of your brand?

Natalie Tran, of Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel Community Channel, takes on the science used in some advertising to make a product seem more awesome.

This episode kinda reminds me of Seinfeld.

Laziest blog post ever.

It’s been some weeks since my last blog post, all I can say for myself is within 2 months my team has doubled in size from 2 to 4 and two more are in the pipeline… So I’ve been busy. Oh, and I’ve started doing some posts at the Visual Jazz Blog.

Back to the point at hand: Can digital agencies LEAD planning & creative?

It’s no new debate, however, I think it’s still unclear how it will all fall. Two opposing articles on AdAge argue for and against the topic.

Jacques-Herve Roubert summarises his views nicely:

Perhaps the synergy and balance between exploitation and exploration is off kilter for digital agencies, but more and more we’re starting to see the agency structure itself change with new hires in technology and social media. And marketers are noticing:

• According to Media magazine, AKQA was named the lead agency for Nike India earlier this year.
• Precor named Ascentium its agency of record in October 2009. According to Forrester’s Q2 2009 Interactive Agency Wave, Ascentium “received the highest client satisfaction scores in this year’s review.” The assignment with Precor includes strategic planning and execution of all offline and online campaigns.
• McAfee hiring Tribal DDB as its agency of record in 2008. This assignment included all TV, print, outdoor, and digital.

Jacques-Herve’s post is in response to the opposing view earlier last year by Ana Andjelic

If digital agencies excel at exploration, traditional agencies thrive on exploitation. A traditional agency is risk-averse, accountable and systematic. It knows its business inside-out. It knows its clients’ businesses and executes campaigns reliably. Its people hang out with the CMOs. A typical traditional agency has decades of experience.

This, too, comes at a cost. A traditional agency, organized around exploitation, ends up doing the same thing over and over again. For every marketing challenge, their solution is “better creativity.” This is not surprising: If an agency spends all its time making sure that everything goes efficiently, that leaves it with little time to experiment. And then, even if it wanted to do things differently, it would be met with its own organizational inertia.

In my opinion they’ve both got valid points, however, having the name Jacques-Herve Roubert makes him sound just that little bit more intelligent.

In all seriousness, I’ve seen media, digital & traditional agencies all work in various magical and wonderful ways together, and sometimes pretty poorly, I believe some traditional agencies will adapt, some digital agencies will become more strategic, media agencies will continue to grow in size and more nimble strategic media agencies will appear on the scene. At the end of the day, the advertiser has a big say in who leads who, sometimes they’ll organise their agencies based on what’s right & logical, sometimes they’ll do it based on what they’ve done before.

I love OOH (outdoor) advertising & something I have not seen before, kinda cool…

Random fact: The posters are held on with bulldog clips. Talk about high tech!?

It’s sometimes hard to find valuable, insightful and new information online. If you’re into marketing like I am, these blogs should all be regular reads. Whether they’re an industry voice, thought provoking or factual, each of these blogs/news sites will help you stay at the forefront of marketing. (Some are organisations and some are individuals)

These are my top 14 marketing thought leaders:

• A Digital Perspective – Jye Smith on social media, marketing and the internet
• a shel of my former self – Blogging at the intersection of communications & technology
• acidlabs – Conversation. Collaboration. Community.
• Ad Age – CMO Strategy
• Chris Brogan – Solving business strategy challenges with social media
• Laurel Papworth – The business of being social
• Marketing Charts – Charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• Marketing Magazine
• Mumbrella – Everything under Australian media & marketing umbrella
• Servant of Chaos – A blog by Gavin Heaton
• Seth’s Blog – A blog by Seth Godin
• The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.
• Web strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – Social Media, Web Marketing
• Love Digital – A weekly interview podcast – digital marketing
• Come Together – Thoughts on community and conversation

Is there something you read regularly that you would add to this list? Or do you disagree with one of my recommendations? Post a comment.

After 2 weeks in my new role (working with exceptionally smart people), and reading this post my feelings/opinions around marketing have been reinforced. I’ve put together a series of posts to cover a range of topics.

Marketing at it’s core is simple and obvious, the world ISN’T changing dramatically, we’re just creates of habit and have become set in weird and wonderful ways. As a digital marketing strategist I’m proud to believe that mass / traditional media works. Buzz words like engagement, relationships, dialogue, feedback 3.0 are ways for people to talk around real outcomes and facts. Marketing is ALL ABOUT SALES, sure, engagement is great, but do we sell more product now or in the future?

The topics I’ll cover:

1. Buzz words, headlines and stupidity

2. People are people with core desires

3. Broadcast media works

4. Digital media is too accountable

5. Social media experts can’t exist

6. Marketing is inevitably about sales

7. Outcomes are key

These are issues that I deal with on a day-to-day basis as a Digital Marketing Strategist helping organisations connect with their audience. I felt the need to share them.

This article was originally posted at Digital Ministry.

I’d like everyone to pay 1 minute silence for the late Digsby Minnie, Digital Ministry’s fictional Facebook profile. The killer, Facebook terms and conditions.

This is a follow-up to Chris’s article last August on the limitations of Facebook for advertisers.

So, Facebook is a profit seeking organisation, no news here, it employs over 700 people (news to me too), and I’m sure some of them are pretty smart. Like Free-to-air TV, Facebook’s offering is effectively free for consumers, and they seek to generate revenue through alternative channels, like advertising.

Their challenge

Therefore FB’s product, in effect, is people, the people that use it. How it monetises this is the key challenge, one which many Web 2.0 companies are yet to crack. They do know, as a rule of thumb, that the more people they have spending more time in their product the greater the revenues will be, when they figure it out.

Entertaining the masses

And the 150,000,000 people using FB seem relatively happy, they’re uploading over 800,000,000 photos every month (5.3/person), 13,000,000 (8.6%)  are updating their status atleast once a day and they’ve all gotten over the ‘new layout’. So, they’re happy. (More stats here)

Spammers rejoice

Now businesses wanting to reach those 150M people have jumped on the web 2.0.socialmedia.conversational marketing bandwagon and started building databases, promoting events, creating profiles (like poor Digsby) and they’re getting some great value out of it.

The fine print

This is where FB are extremely smart. In the terms and conditions there are cerain details which most people seem to overlook, like the fact that businesses can’t setup groups, they’re only for having fun and community groups.

So why are they smart? Well they’re letting you break the rules, and watching what happens…  If it gets to a point where you’re getting lots of value, they pull back your features, or delete your profile.

They’re doing market research.

So FB needs to make money and they’re figuring out what will work by letting businesses trial applications for free… Events, groups, pages, polls, photos and analytics to name a few. Once they think you’re getting value out of anything, they see they’ve got a product to sell.

It’s in the best interests for everyone.

1. FB need to make money to survive

2. FB need to keep their user base happy (keep spammers out)

Without either of those being fullfilled FB will no longer exist, everyone losses.

Should they care about businesses?

Well not really unless you’re paying them lots of money. And how much would you be willing to pay to manage your 2000 strong member base on your group? Probably not enough to keep them afloat.

I believe they’re realising all kinds of value that they could be charging for and are weighing up the potential profitability of all of them.

But all the while keeping their massive user base happy.

Advertising features, based on cost and benefit:

1. Polls (now called Lexicon)
   They were free, but they changed how it works and you have to pay. (As the SMH reports)
2. Advertising
   It’s always been a paid service, however, advertising your page will give you added benefits, like telling your audience which of their friends is in the page.
3. Groups
   Businesses aren’t ‘allowed’ to setup groups, if you reach 1,000 users sending emails becomes more difficult. If a single profile users sends too many emails their profile gets deleted.
4. Pages
   Considered an advertising product, although it’s free, FB pages provide comprehensive stats on your user base, and works well with advertising. One major weakness is that it’s difficult to reach out to your members, emails aren’t allowed.
5. Events
   Still a free application anyone seems to be able to create an event. Like all aspects of FB it goes viral through the news feed. The added benefit is you can send emails to people attending the event. Only two limitations I can find are, you can only invite 100 people at a time, and have 300 pending invitations at any point in time. But keep any eye on the terms page, things may change.
6. Photos
   It’s one of the main reasons people come to FB. By tagging photos you’ll get exposure to the people you tag, and their friends.
7. Search Engine Ranking
   Until recently nothing inside FB would appear outside FB, which in the most part is why people use the site. Now it appears groups, pages & profile summaries now appear on Google. If you’re not logged in to FB and visit the link from Google you will see a highly limited version.
8. Application Platform
   A massive part of FB which, with photos and status updates, makes up the balance of the majority of user’s acivity. There are currently 140 applications created daily, it’s potentially a great way to reach your audience, but you’ve gotta be better than the 52,000 applications that exist. It’s currently free to build an application on the FB platform.

If you don’t want to pay Facebook to help you market your offering, creating engaging & entertaining content, it will spread like wildfire if it’s worthwhile for someone to forward on, and everything I’ve discussed above doesn’t matter. The problem for most of us is that we’re not  professional entertainers, we’re good at spending money to reach eyeballs.

This post may not win me any friends, but I’ve needed to get this off my chest for a long time.

Marketer of company X needs to reach their ‘target market’ with a message and influence them to buy/like their product.

So they have options, radio, magazines, newspaper, TV, direct marketing and other stuff.

With all of these media they try to reach as many of their demographic as possible, but there will always be wastage, i.e. you’ll reach people to don’t intend on reach.

EXAMPLE 1: Lets try TV as a channel

So Jane, the marketer, buys some ads on TV, and she’s targeting mothers so she places the ad during desperate house wives. Great, good TV show (Jane likes it) and channel 7 say it’s predicted to reach 100,000 people (its actually much higher) and the TV station ‘knows’ that 60% of them are mothers. So Jane reachs 60,000 mothers. Simple. Great. Sounds ridiculously awesome. And on the surface it is, but there are some MASSIVE assumptions in here.

The way they know 100,000 people watch the TV show and 60% of them are female is because the TV industry pays people to do surveys. They’ll have samples in each region i.e. Melbourne CBD. So 2000 people complete a survey, whether its digital or log book isn’t the point (although there are massive differences), and they find that of those people 50% watch desperate house wives, so they scale that % up, and based on Melbourne CBD’s population that equals 100,000 (it doesn’t but you get my drift).

So in terms of accountability there are some major flaws:

1. Its based on averages, based on surveys, so many assumptions

2. Just because some was ‘watching the show’ doesn’t mean they were there when the adverts were on, or were they playing with their laptop

3. And there could be 6 people sitting on the couch, who counts as a viewer?

So when channel 7 come back to you on Tuesday with your report saying you actually overshot your target and reached 65,000 mothers, you actually have NO IDEA.

They’re saying that more of the surveys said they were watching desperate house wives, and they saw the advert, and you’re assuming that the average is the same for all of Melbourne CBD…

EXAMPLE 2: So now let’s talk about the Internet

Let’s say in this instance that Jane buys some adverts on MSN Recipe Finder, they say you’re like to reach 100,000 people and of those 60% are mothers. Sounds fair and decent right?

Then they give you a report after the campaign that shows you overshot your target and reached 65,000 mothers. Fantastic! But wait, thats the same as TV, and Jane likes Desperate House Wives…

There’s one thing I didn’t mention, the report that MSN give Jane is ACTUAL count of the exact number of people (unique visitors) that they reached. Now there are some technical debates about ‘unique visitors’ but its neither here nor there in the scheme of things.

COMPARISON: Measurement TV vs Internet

Both TV and Internet delivered a report that said they reached 65,000 mothers. The only difference is that the TV stats are based on a small sample survey with the findings extrapolated out, whereas the Internet stats are based on things that actually hapenned.

WHY?

Every time you visit a website, download a file or view an image the activity is recorded. ACTUAL ACTIVITY NOT A SURVEY.

And the others?

Well radio, TV, Bus Shelters/Billboards (OOH), magazines and newspapers are all based on LESS complex systems than TV. Resulting in human error, forgetfulness and well its a boring survey.

SO WHY THE RANT?

Paul Fisher, IAB

Well, Paul Fisher, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Australia, is focused on increasing the ‘measureability’ of the Internet…. He’s the representative of the Internet as a marketing channel, and he’s out and about saying that its not accountable? WHAT THE? Sorry, but there are much more important issues here to deal with than this. (NB: It seems to be an international focus for the IAB, not just Australia)

There was a story in today’s DIGITAL MEDIA Journal, we also interviewed him on Love Digital a few months back, and he was harping on about the same thing… GRRR.

We can no longer hold our heads up high and say unique browser is the metric we use to measure. Let’s find a metric that works, that people believe in.

From my experience, my clients are overwhelmed by the accountability, to a point that it sometimes can be over-analysed and they end up going with something with less accountability but it ‘feels’ right. (It’s happened more than you’d think).

UPDATE: Paul was interviewed by Mumbrella today with a mention of education and training… That’s what I’m talking about, wonder if anything will happen?

I’d put it out there for Paul to respond or what do you think the IAB should be doing…?

This is the IAB’s mission, as stated on their homepage

1) To promote the standardisation of ad formats
2) To ensure timeliness and transparency of industry data
3) To educate the marketplace about the value of online advertising

I think they’re completely mising the mark with number 3… Contrastly, Free TV Australia are kicking arse at education with ThinkTV.com.au promoting the pants off TV. It certainly persuades me of the benefits of TV Advertising.

… So now you might see why Love Digital was formed. Through this we’re interviewing international and national gurus like Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe and loads more… With no support of the IAB… weird?

Am I the only one that thinks this? What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The lie of print advertising (followed by good news) (buzzmachine.com)
• IAB Canada Creates New Tripartite Industry Committee For Online Audience Measurement in Canada (newswire.ca)
• IAB Unveils New Workflow Improvement Initiatives (searchenginewatch.com)
• Why Only Stupid Marketers Use Age As A Demographic (socialmediatoday.com)
• The Inauguration as a tipping point for the death of broadcast television (inquisitr.com)

So I really like the freeview advert, don’t know why, but when I saw the Ford Fiesta advert tonight I couldn’t help but notice the similarities… Or is it just me???

Freeview Advert

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmdHvpM3h8]

Ford Fiesta Advert

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=87nDEUscky8]

Superb ad by Ogilvy Advertising London for the all-new Ford Fiesta, shot in Berlin, directed by Noah Harris. The music is by Pluxus, it’s called “Transient”.

UPDATE (10:47pm 26th Jan)

Tim from Mumbrella kindly directed me to this article from The Australian in December.

FORD is considering pulling advertising from free-to-air television because the $50 million-plus campaign for Freeview is too similar to a Ford Fiesta commercial the carmaker planned to launch here next month.