Who is in control of your brand?

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.

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:

• 9% of participants have iPhones
• 32% of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets
  • and half of those accessing social networks daily

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.

The last time I checked

About 3 months ago I did some work researching the viability of developing a mobile website for one of our key clients. We reviewed the potential traffic we could drive through search plus the total traffic already coming from mobiles.

From the research I found that about 25% of Australians had access to 3G (this doesn’t mean they use it) and this % had grown rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone. However, based on potential mobile paid search & our current mobile visitors we were able comfortably get 1-2% of our total website traffic to be mobile, pretty darn low. So we, and the client, decided to hold of on a mobile site and focus on other digital activities.

A profound Sensis research study

It’s 3 months later and Sensis have released a research report (pdf) by Sweeny Research that indicates that 26% of Australians have accessed the internet from their mobile – a pretty astounding number.So therefore all advertisers should start spending more on mobile…

So I dug a little further

So I jumped back into their 2008 report to see what the change was year-on-year and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t there… weird. At this point I got a bit skeptical and something else popped out at me – Yellow Pages (Sensis) just released an iPhone app of their directory – what a perfect time to release research that tells their advertisers to spend on mobile.

So maybe I’m skeptical, maybe it is finally the year of the mobile (which the mobile industry has been claiming for 3 yers now) or maybe not. I’m just questioning the background, approach and validity of the research. Maybe they should’ve asked “How many times have you accessed the internet via your mobile in the last 12 months?”.

My personal recent experience

In a recent campaign for another client, the media agency negotiated some bonus media with a big publisher, some mobile media. The publisher also offered to build a mobile site for the product, as there was no cost or risk to our client we couldn’t resist.

So we received a bunch of banner impressions and a really nice mobile site and we measured the results. This client has an ROI calculator that helps compare the performance of different media online, it calculates what the value of the media was to the business. So, if we calculated the value of the mobile site and the media provided by the publisher it would’ve been worth about $50 – not awesome at all.

What does this all mean?

Now I love and advocate mobile apps and advertising, particularly considering it’s potential growth with iPhone, Google Android and many others entering the market, and telcos rapidly reducing the cost of data. However, will it currently deliver a strong ROI? Is this the best place to spend $50k? That all depends on your marketing objectives, but for some of my clients I’d say no

In a recent report prepared by Sysomos and it indicates that we’re beating massive countries like Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, France, Indian & South Africa in terms of new user sign ups on Twitter.

Full report here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/appendix

JWT regularly release a great piece of research called the Anxiety Index. It’s a global study that creates an index for each country in a range of particular measures. The top level measure is how nervous/anxious each country is, and Australia is feeling good – at the moment.

The key takeaways for me are

1. Austrlaian’s are currently at ease (relatively)

This could be a result of not actually having a direct noticable impact yet, i.e. losing jobs, however, we know many large companies are continuing to cut back staff. So maybe we’re happier because the impact of the GFC took longer to hit our shores?

2. We’re happier in all areas, compared to the rest of the world

Unsurprisingly the economy and cost of living are our biggest concerns, but surprisingly we’re as anxious about Military Hositlities as the rest of the world.

3. Australia’s aren’t confident about the short term

With the exception of the property market we’re very anxious about the short term (next 6 months), especially unemployment, company failures & food prices – all pretty important measures.

What does this mean to marketers? What does this means to everyone else?

We’re on our way to financial recovery, but leaders need to keep in mind that the anxiety around the short term could undermine our stability as an economy. Marketers need to continue to ensure they’ll be employing people, reducing cost of their products and aren’t going out doing something random, lavish and risky.

What do you think about the research? What does it mean to marketers?

Full research report here: http://from.simontsmall.com/index.php/2009/08/05/research-australians-the-recession-the-environment/

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.

Some of the gang here at Visual Jazz have been building this amazing campaign over the last 12 months. It’s taken about 25-30 people lots of hours, passion and love.

The core of the campaign is a 24 hour interactive live the life on a submarine. You get given missions, learn about the lifestyle, drive the sub and all kinds of fun things. The artwork and finishing is just amazing, they’ve even built a 3D augmented version of the submarine.  An amazing way to explain the life of being on a sub.

• New Submariner Uniform for your DJ Games site avatar (plus the Submariner Award for your profile)
• Rewards Pack email (once you complete the site) containing awesome stuff
• A detailed insight into what life is like onboard a Collins Class Submarine in the RAN

Check it out at: http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/campaigns/submariners/

This list endeavours to rank all the lists on social media/marketing blogs in Australia.

Laurel Papworth discusses the importance of leaderboards in communities, what do you think ?

And one of Australia’s top bloggers, Darren Rowse, view’s on ‘top blog’ lists.

The problem with ‘Australian Blogs’ for marketers

Blog’s based in Australia don’t necessarily have an Australian readership. What we need is a ranking of the top blogs READ by Australians. Julian? Hitwise?