Spyro Kourtis

on July 26, 2010

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

3 reasons to start investing in mobile marketing now

I’m currently championing mobile marketing with our clients – and I have several good reasons for doing so, even though early results may not immediately justify my enthusiasm.

Did I say that? I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone to ignore results before!

However, in this case I believe our short-term thinking is likely to get in the way of our long-term profitability. In other words, we may be killing a good idea too soon.

One of our clients invested in a mobile campaign, and while they got a very low cost per call, the close rate wasn’t what they were hoping for. They knew that mail beat mobile in overall cost per sale – and they were ready to abandon their mobile program.

My counsel is to hang on. Don’t bail on this program yet. Here are three reasons why:

1. The medium isn’t fully developed. As people become more accustomed to mobile advertising, it’s a given that they won’t respond as frequently. Every new medium has a curiosity factor. The audience wonders, “Hmm. What’ll happen if I click this?” Once they figure that out, they stop clicking as frequently.

When they stop clicking as frequently, they’ll likely click only when they are truly interested in the product. The quality of response will go up and the cost per sale will go down.

2. You can “own” the space for your product. While marketers lament that mobile doesn’t really scale, the good news is that you can have a huge impact for a small cost – if you start right now. Last year the whole spend on mobile display advertising was about $250 million. This year it’s looking like $313 million. But by 2015 it’s predicted to be $1.2 billion.

This makes jumping in right now a very smart defensive move.

3. Pioneers get the benefit of early learning. If you wait until the mobile medium is mature, you’ll likely be playing catch-up for a very long time. Think of how many things – especially in the digital space – are relatively easy to understand and learn early on and then grow in complexity until it starts to feel like you need a Ph.D. in the specialty in order to succeed.

So that means test everything and keep testing. Test what you’ve already tested – because how people use their mobile devices will continue to change rapidly. Don’t focus in on the winners too soon. Keep it broad.

This is what will lead to long-term success in mobile marketing.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on March 26, 2010

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Measurement isn't everything

If someone in this blog says “measurement isn’t everything,” you may be expecting the next phrase to be “it’s the only thing.” Or maybe that’s just me. I grew up in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi’s famous quotes were tattooed inside our eyelids.

I mean it. Measuring your campaigns isn’t everything. But it’s the way you’ll know whether everything else is done right. If you run track or swim, a stopwatch won’t make you better at what you do. It just tells you whether you’re doing better or worse than in the past. The data you get from your stopwatch can tell you whether your coach is giving you helpful advice – if , of course, you’re following the advice.

Lots of people in marketing and advertising dislike being measured.

• They say it impinges on their creativity.
• They say measurement is single-dimensional and branding is so much more than just selling things.
• They say measurement stifles risk-taking.

There is some truth in each of those statements.

When you have a particular goal in mind, to be successful, you need to become fairly single-minded about reaching that goal. For example, if you want to lose weight, you can’t be as “creative” in your eating habits as you might want to be. If you want a promotion, your goal stifles your ability to be as lackadaisical at work as you might want to be. So, yes, goals and measurement may have an impact on your freedom.

Yes, branding is about more than just selling. But selling the product is the single biggest brand impact possible. No matter how many lovely commercials you may see about a Lexus, owning a Lexus will have the highest impact on your brand perception.

And measurement may indeed stifle risk-taking. Marketers who measure results are more likely to slip into the tried-and-true than those who value creativity above all else. On the other hand, success brings more possibility for experimentation than failure. Too many failures and you’re out of time and budget. If you know what works and do it, you live to try again another day.

So, measurement isn’t everything in marketing. But it sure influences a lot of things.

 

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Suzanne Harrison

on January 7, 2010

category: integrated marketing

Senior Business Development Manager

How do you measure success?

Over the past year, I’ve spoken with marketing leaders from a number of companies who are grappling with just what yardstick to use when measuring their return on marketing dollars spent. In these economically challenging times, there’s an ever-greater focus on accountability. What to measure — and how to measure — are at the top of the list of questions to be answered.

Of course, you need to have a strong grasp of your sales cycle and all the conversion points along the way. You need to understand your cost per lead and cost per sale. You also need to know the lifetime value of your customer in order to make the wisest marketing choices. These are basics. The other question — the one that has surprised me time and time again from clients recently — is what costs should be included when figuring ROI.

Many companies who have advertised their products and services have traditionally measured their ROI against media alone. If they spent several thousand dollars to place a TV spot on a number of stations, it’s likely they only measured the results against the cost of the ad time. Never mind that they spent a lot of money in creating and producing an ad, in researching their target market, or in trafficking the spots. In the midst of one conversation with the marketing director of a major fast food chain, he looked up in surprise and said, “Well, I guess I should include my salary…and my team’s salaries as well!”

He’s right. If you truly want to understand—and repeat—your success, you need to be honest with and include all marketing costs when measuring your return. Know your real benchmarks. That’s the only way you can truly measure one campaign against another.

 

 

Comments:

3/8/2010 at 2:39 p.m.
Cost allocation is an art
agree w/your comments, but cost allocation is always an art. say you spend $x to acquire a new patron. the lifetime value of that patron will be impacted by future marketing (including offers). determining how to evaluate the success of the acquisition program when so many factors can impact it after the first visit presents a real challenge
>>brian flynn, seattle WA

Carolyn Hansen

on December 2, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Is advertising effective? Does it work on you?

Here’s a great way to NOT prove the effectiveness of advertising: Ask people if they think it works on them.

An Adweek Media/Harris poll discovered that very few people admit that advertising sways them.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.  (That was sarcasm!)

Seriously. Mumble-something years ago, when I was an advertising major in college, they taught us that people never confess to being swayed by advertising. If someone disses the profession, they said, ask them what toothpaste they use – and then ask how they found out about its wonderfulness.

This is the kind of survey that discovers that 95% of all adults consider themselves better-than-average drivers.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on September 16, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

What do you think of Facebook Lite?

I stumbled across an article called “Business Implications of Facebook Lite” that gave me pause. 

I’ve taken a peek at the “lite” version – and found that I kind of enjoy the only somewhat more cluttered look. You get the usual ad on your news feed, but on your profile there’s only one ad, where you’d normally get three. Here’s what the author thinks:

While users may consider this an advantage, the advertisers will now have more competition for fewer appearances. Depending on how many users are on Lite, this may make advertising rates increase on Facebook.

I wonder if advertisers might not also find this advantageous. After all, isn’t clutter also a problem? Normally, buying your way out of clutter would be ridiculously expensive – or impossible. You could sponsor a full TV show and eliminate the competition, but that’s awfully pricey. Anything less than full sponsorship would be logistically difficult. A direct marketer can’t prevent other email or direct mail from coming into a prospect’s inbox.

I hope that it works out for Facebook – and gets adopted by other media, as well. It’s not that I don’t like advertising. I just think it could be more effective in smaller doses.

What do you think?

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on August 18, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Mobile marketing and segmentation

Read a helpful Marketing Sherpa article on mobile marketing that interviews Jeff Hasen, CMO of HipCricket.

My favorite bit is this:

Strategy #4. Segment audience by behavior, not by phone

When building campaigns, Hasen and his team focus more on an audience’s mobile habits than the types of phones it is using.

"The reason why our campaigns have great results is because they’re tapping into the activities and interests of the masses, as opposed to asking people to do something they’ve never done before."

Yay! Finally, someone who doesn’t pick the easy way, but the right way. Certainly, it takes a lot less effort to put all BlackBerry users in one bucket and all iPhone users in another. It uses a lot less mental energy to stereotype based on age or skin color, too – but it’s not a terribly helpful way to go through life.

Basing your campaigns on what people do with their mobile devices means keeping track of a lot more data – but it makes sense and will be much more successful.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on June 19, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

It's a candy mint AND a breath mint.

Just read another article about the poor, beleaguered banner ad in Mediaweek.

The Online Publisher’s Association and comScore want us to know that banners are about more than clicks. This follows efforts by the IAB and Microsoft to do the same thing.

True, these guys are a little biased. But, even though I’m a direct marketer and all about the click, I can’t help but hope they win.

I want the banner ad to survive – and I want it to be more than just an annoying flashing dealio that I have alter my screen size to hide. I’m not able to read with these things blinking at me!

Not everything is about an instant response. Banners could, in theory, do an excellent job of brand building. (Just remember . . . some of us will boycott ads that flash like disco lights.) They can also sell right now. This has always been true of, for example, newspaper ads – some of them extol the virtues of a product and some of them have coupons. Heck, the classified section couldn’t be more direct. It’s true of television commercials. We have branded ones and direct spots.

Both have a place. Both are important. The issue seems to be definitions and goals. Mixed or fuzzy goals lead to disappointment.

So let’s click our Certs and end the argument.

 

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on June 1, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Counting clicks.

Isn’t it odd that, whenever you have firsthand knowledge about something you read in a newspaper, you realize the article is full of inaccuracies? I say this as someone whose college major was Journalism (about 500 years ago) – so I sympathize with news writers. It’s never easy to pull together every stakeholder’s perspective and have a coherent outcome.

I was still surprised, and a little appalled, at yesterday’s New York Times article called “Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.”

The premise was that – suddenly – advertising could be measured. Ads could be objectively compared. Marketers – as never before – would know what worked.

I realize I’m in the direct marketing biz, so I have a better idea than most that this is not revolutionary news. That, in fact, this has been going on for about 100 years (literally) – and the Internet has only made measuring results both easier and more complicated. But this article is in the Media & Advertising section. Shouldn’t the editor of this page be a little better informed?
How about the people they quote? Shouldn’t they have a clue? Here’s what the featured spokesperson of this new era says:

“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. [Darren] Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”

Seriously? Never had numbers before?  I’ve been measuring the results of advertising since before Mr. Herman could ride a bike. (Yes. I’ve already admitted that I’m very old.) Others have been doing it for even longer.

It’s true that back then I didn’t know what time of day my responders wrote their checks or filled out their BRCs. But I certainly knew what the response was to different offers. I wasn’t doing TV commercials 27 years ago – but even back in those days, DRTV professionals knew what time of day and what day of the week was most effective to advertise.

To read in the Times that big agency holding companies are just now ”starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five years,” makes me shake my head. Many agencies – most of them from direct marketing – already have sophisticated data practices. We don’t need to hire laid-off spreadsheet readers from Citigroup or Bank of America. We have really smart data analysts on the team.

One more NYT quote:

Getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.

I’d like to suggest that the follow-up article can be about those battles between creatives and . . . let’s call them the “suits”! That’s something we’ve never seen before on Madison Avenue. (Back off. Old people get to be sarcastic, too.)

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on April 6, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Don't fail in new media.

If you’re getting started in new and emerging media, I’m going to recommend checking out Brian Gilbert’s new audio conference on April 22, sponsored by The Competitive Advantage.

Brian is our VP of Integrated Marketing, as well as a contributing writer for The Competitive Advantage. Of course, you can also get insight into his expertise by reading his contributions on this blog.

I hope you’ll attend!

 

Comments:

5/5/2009 at 10:50 a.m.
Update: webinar canceled
Brian's webinar had to be canceled. Stay tuned. We hope it will be offered in the future.
>>Carolyn, Seattle WA

Carolyn Hansen

on March 2, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Shifting marketing budgets from offline to online.

It’s easy to use this forum to poke at what others do. Making fun is fun -- and I indulge that guilty pleasure here often enough.

So, please note: I just read a recent interview that made me want to stand up and cheer. And I am telling you about it here, hoping this kinder, gentler post will provide contrast to those meaner, snarkier ones I usually write.

Beverly Thorne, SVP at Century 21, was interviewed by eMarketer about why and how she shifted budget from TV to digital.

It took some time and patience, but she and her team were able to measure her advertising’s ROI. She says:

We used both internal metrics and tools and external third-party measures. We made media investments in 2008, and each week and each month we measured what came from them in terms of leads generated. The most important metric we have is an internal proprietary tool which tells us what kind of leads are being generated.

This sounds like a lot of work, including building proprietary tools and waiting week after week for the analysis to be done. But here’s the payoff:

From December 2007 to December 2008, we improved the efficiency of our lead generation by reducing our cost per lead over 60%. At the same time, we multiplied our number of leads by over 235%.

I congratulate Ms. Thorne for pulling it off.

 

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Spyro Kourtis

on February 18, 2009

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

Sandwich Board Agency of the Year

I wrote a guest column published in Adweek’s online edition yesterday that’s gotten some interesting reaction.

I suggest that awarding a "Digital Agency of the Year" is an anachronism, because we’re now at the point where every marketer needs digital tools and the digital world needs all marketing tools.

Some people agree, some don’t. A few miss the point (and must not have read the part about how, as a direct marketer, I love digital). 

One commenter says that online is an ecosystem unto itself. I couldn’t disagree more. People are online and offline. What happens in one "ecosystem" influences the other. And I have the numbers to prove it.

Another commenter made some very good points:

The old models help, but don’t have all the answers anymore. The problem with traditional marketers is that they keep coming up with command and control campaigns. Even the idea of media is different today.

Although I may not have articulated it the same way, I think we actually agree. I believe all agencies may, in fact, start looking more like digital agencies than traditional agencies in the next few months or years -- and that’s exactly why a Digital Agency of the Year award could look like a put-down, rather than a compliment.

One person who didn’t add her comment on the site emailed me with this:

THANK YOU! Having a "Digital Agency of the Year" now is like having a "Cable Agency of the Year" in 1980-something! Totally ridiculous and shortsighted. Your closing paragraphs say it all. Great article.

She’s clearly one of the best minds in marketing.

The conversation continues on Brian Morrissey’s blog. Take a look and see what you think.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on January 21, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Campaign-specific SEM.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about her small business and found out she knew absolutely nothing about search-engine marketing. She’d never heard of Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter.

As I thought about it, I realized that SEM can be overlooked by some of the bigger players, too.

So here’s a reminder. Put it on your to-do list. Whenever you run a direct marketing campaign -- particularly on TV or radio -- run a related SEM campaign.

For example, if you’re on the air saying, "Ask for your free Such-and-Such booklet," buy "Such-and-Such booklet" as a keyword on the search engines, as well as anything that sounds remotely like "Such-and Such." (Would that be "Such-and-So"? Note to self: pick more interesting names.)

Your SEM campaign won’t cost much, because you’ll probably get only a few clicks, but just about every click-through will be highly qualified.

And don’t forget to create a campaign-related landing page to capture your leads’ contact information! It doesn’t have to be complicated, but you’ll lose those precious qualified leads if you send them to your home page.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on January 7, 2009

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Doing more with your database.

If the new theme of 2009 is "doing more with less," as Carolyn said yesterday, a great place to look is your own database.

Customer acquisition is even more expensive in a downturn, so taking good care of the customers you have should be a very high priority. VERY high. You know your competitors will be luring them with the best deals possible. But you have an advantage. You know them. Idea # 1: Determine their preferences and cater to them.

You can also easily focus on the most profitable customers and -- here’s Idea #2 -- fire the customers who cost more than they're worth.

Of course the really fun part -- if you're a data geek like me -- is figuring out what to do with the mass of customers in the middle.

Idea #3: What has the customer bought from you and what should they buy next? Send them an email offer.

Idea #4: Are there trigger events that suggest a customer communication is in order? For example, if a re-order is smaller than usual, should you make another offer to get the amount up again? If it’s larger than usual, should you give them a special thank-you offer?

Idea #5: If it's hard to know what your customers want from you, why not ask? A customer survey can give you a ton of useful information -- about particular people and about your customers in general. Just make sure you keep track of the information in your database -- and use it.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on December 18, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

An apples-to-apples approach.

Traditional direct marketers look at costs with an exacting eye.  All costs are included.  This is the only honest way to approach measurement, budgeting and goal-setting.  And most importantly, it’s the only way you can effectively optimize your spend across channels to maximize your return.

 

However, even in direct marketing, standards can slip.  We’ve run into many DRTV marketers that only count media against the cost-per-sale goal, because the creative costs may be amortized over a long campaign.  It’s appropriate to optimize your buys and placements based upon media-only analysis, but too many marketers forget to allocate the production costs when comparing DRTV results to other channels, such as online or mail.  Let’s face it - creative production can be cheap or it can be very expensive.  Creative ideas can succeed or fail miserably.  The only fair thing is to include creative fees and production costs in the analysis to create an objective ROI analysis.

 

Are the metrics for your multi-channel campaigns comparing apples to apples? Here are a few questions to ask the next time you get campaign results:

• For TV and radio advertising:  Are you including production costs, or is this just media?  If this is a direct response campaign, have you included call center costs?
• For print campaigns:  Is creative included in the costs?  If you’re making a special offer, are fulfillment costs included?
• For SEM campaigns:  Is this what Google (or Microsoft or Yahoo!) says your cost-per-click is, or have you also added in agency costs?
• For banner campaigns:  Did you include Web development costs associated with this campaign?
• For email campaigns:  Have we considered creative production costs?  What about fulfillment costs for responders?
• For social media campaigns:  Are there any sales we can directly attribute to this effort?

Cost accounting is not a mystery.  Measuring the inputs to your campaign should be relatively straightforward. Demand accountability and a fair measuring stick. Your company will benefit from the fact-based decision-making it allows.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on December 11, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

What green means.

I started talking about the Good and Green Conference in yesterday’s post. You might wonder why I went.

Hacker Group launched an internal green initiative a year and a half ago and we started the Green Marketing Coalition this past spring. The Coalition looks at marketing practices to see how we can make them more environmentally friendly. This is not as glamorous as being the marketer for a flashy green product, but we felt that, since our industry uses a lot of natural resources, it was important to do our part to reduce our environmental impact.

One of the most interesting conclusions I heard at the conference last week was that the idea of "green-ness" is often a negative to consumers. They assume a green product is worse than the regular version. If it’s a cleaning product, it doesn’t clean as well. If it’s a light bulb, it costs a lot of money, turns on slowly and casts an eerie shade of . . . well, green on the room.

The challenge given to the group was to make better products. Make the green product the "cool" one. As the happy owner of a four-year-old Prius, I confess that idea works for me. I made no sacrifices when I got that car.

The good news for my company is that’s what we did with our own green initiative. We offered our clients something we called internally "green in a box." We did the research and the legwork. We found the vendors and sought out the recycled paper. We already had the tightest list processing and most sophisticated marketing database systems in the business -- so that kind of waste has never been an issue for us.

And to get our clients on board, we absorbed some of the costs. So the result for the client was a more environmentally friendly way to market their products and services, without making a sacrifice.

Eventually, it’s not "green marketing" anymore. It’s marketing.

 

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Spyro Kourtis

on November 10, 2008

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

Vindication! Sort of.

Back on June 16, I posted a piece about better targeting for cable television advertisers in response to a Wall Street Journal article. The article’s writer was concerned about tighter targets meaning less advertising dollars going to cable. I thought this was short-sighted. If I may quote myself here:

I see this as an opportunity for cable companies to keep their audience -- the audience that’s turning to the Internet for entertainment -- and perhaps turn the cable medium into something different from broadcast TV.  Perhaps, with targeted audiences and higher prices, cable companies can provide more entertainment with fewer commercials than the big networks.  The argument for higher prices would get marketers both a tighter audience and more attention.  Without ten or twelve other commercials in every pod, your ad will stand out more.

Now The New York Times has a piece about Hulu, one of the new online video sites. Apparently, Hulu sees it my way.

In the place of the long commercial pods that TV viewers have become accustomed to, only one ad is shown during each segment break on Hulu. Fewer ads make the ones on the site more memorable, Hulu executives say, allowing the site to charge higher prices for the ad units.

Hulu isn’t cable TV, so my idea about this happening off the Internet didn’t happen (yet). But I have to say, I think they’re brilliant.

“The notion that less is more is absolutely playing out on Hulu,” Jason Kilar, the chief executive of the site, said. “This is benefiting advertisers as much as it is benefiting users.”

As I said before, win-win-win.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on October 16, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Should you go all-in with digital marketing?

Economic uncertainty can bring opportunities for brave souls.  Many business advisors are telling marketers that -- while cost-cutting is important -- cutting marketing budgets too much can be deadly. Considering the marketing mix becomes crucial when there’s little room for error.

Here’s data from an August survey done by Epsilon:

To offsest budget cuts, CMOs are shifting to more targeted and measurable marketing strategies. When asked how their firm determines target market for each channel, 50% said they use data-driven marketing techniques: 31% stated they use sophisticated modeling tools to analyze existing customer data (behavioral, preference and demographic) and 19% said that they analyze past purchase behavior. In contrast, 28% said they made “rough estimates based on past experience.”

Of course, as a direct marketer, I think CMOs ought to put accountable marketing strategies high on the list -- in good times and bad.  It’s just smart.
But in the same survey, "social computing" was "the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix."  The definition of "social computing" in this survey includes word-of-mouth, social networking sites and viral advertising.  At least two of those three -- word-of-mouth and viral -- are more of a crap shoot than something to build your marketing plan around. 
Maybe I’m overstating.  To express interest in a channel isn’t necessarily a commitment.  But it is surprising to me that mobile marketing -- a much more serious contender as an accountable marketing channel -- was only cited by 29% as worth a look (with 22% already dipping their toe in).

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on July 22, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

More light reading about behavioral targeting.

The continuing off-target discussion about behavioral targeting is a real frustration to me. 

In MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider, there’s an interview with comScore’s vice president of product management, Steve Dennen.  He’s touting a new product that purports to help advertisers better target their audiences online.

How is this done?  By segmenting groups based on how much content they consume online.  He says:

We have taken our 120+ content categories we report on — news, sports, health, finance, etc. — and segmented the audience into heavy, medium and light users.

Dennen says we should "think about it as site-level behavioral targeting."

As Charlie Brown might say . . . Ack!

Sure, I guess that’s a behavior.  But why is it worth targeting?  It’s like saying I’m a better target for a particular product if I’m a "heavy user" of Oprah reruns rather than someone who catches an episode once a month.

Back when I was a girl, heavy users meant people who bought a lot of the thing you were selling . . . pickles or brandy or sunglasses or whatever.  Not people who were addicted to the latest sports scores -- which means next to nothing in terms of what they might be likely to buy, except maybe baseball tickets.

Let me quote Dennen again: 

If you think about an electronics manufacturer or camera manufacturer, they would use the heavy and light segments differently. Let’s say they have a pretty high-end camera coming out and need to target that online. They can look at the photography category and the heavy viewers of that and base their planning decisions on using that segment. Whereas maybe they conversely are coming out with a lower end or family fun camera. That is going to be more of the casual camera audience. And in that case they would look at light photography content consumers.

I can think of all sorts of ways that example doesn’t work.  The professional photographer and the casual photographer easily could both be light users of online photography content.  The month before my husband’s birthday, I might be a heavy content viewer of photography sites looking for the right "family fun camera" for him.  The pro might know just what she wants and need only half an hour to confirm her opinions and another few minutes of price shopping.  More than the amount of time, it’s the content of the content we look at that would differentiate us.  You don’t need the heavy/medium/light distinction to figure that out.  And that’s why, online, Google is so hard to beat.

 

 

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Spyro Kourtis

on July 17, 2008

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

Believing the hype about marketing ROI.

It’s not funny . . . but I had to laugh.  According to a study by Aegis Group’s Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) reported in Ad Age, nine in 10 financial executives don’t use return-on-investment metrics to set marketing budgets.  Why?  They don’t believe the numbers.

That’s not the funny or sad or even surprising part.  The shocking thing is that only 14% of marketers had confidence in their own forecasts. 

It sounds to me like both groups are pretty much in alignment.  The numbers suck and everyone knows it.

The headline in Ad Age says "Survey Finds CFOs Skeptical of Their Own Firms’ ROI Claims."  But is that the big idea?  ROI claims are rarely audited, so it’s no wonder they don’t meet CFO standards.  The news is that marketers in those companies are making ROI claims they don’t believe in or -- I’m betting -- even understand.

That discouraging piece of information isn’t the fault or responsibility of the CFO.  It’s an enormous credibility problem for the CMO.

 

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Jon Bell

on June 3, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Senior Copywriter

Au contraire, Mr. Contrarian.

I just read a blog post by someone more curmudgeonly than I am.  The post is even called ''A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing.''  Delightful!  Wish I'd thought of that title.

I'm so cranky, I found something in this post I had to disagree with (although much of it made a lot of sense).  Let me quote Mr. Hoffman at length:

It’s hard to imagine a medium that could be more intrusive, wasteful, and inefficient than direct mail. But display is it.

The latest best figures I can find show that the response (click-through) rates on display ads on the web are less than two in a thousand. This is ridiculously small. It is almost 10 times smaller than direct mail. And remember, with direct mail in order to interact you have to tear off a post card, find a pen, fill out a card, walk to the mailbox and drop it in. With display ads, all you need to do is move your finger.

How can it be that display ads are so ineffective? Simple. We all trained our eyes to ignore banners ten years ago. Just like we trained our eyes to ignore small space newspaper ads.

When it became evident that display was a lousy response medium, those selling it to us changed their tune. Now it’s a branding medium. To this I can only say – yeah, right.

I, on the other hand can think of about a dozen media that are more intrusive, wasteful and inefficient than direct mail.  I mean just about all of them!

TV commercials aren't intrusive?  Then why do so many of us invest hundreds of dollars on VCRs, DVRs, TiVos and whatever else we can do to avoid them? 

They're efficient?  Come ON.  Are you serious?  Why -- on those occasions when I must watch live TV -- am I watching diaper commercials?  My diaper-buying days are long over.  No diaper direct mail is coming my way.  I also don’t eat fast food, nor do I plan to buy a car in the next several years.  Just about the only commercials that make any sense for me are the ones for TV programs like the one I'm watching now.

I can't disagree that we've trained our eyes to ignore banners.  I do disagree that we ignore small newspaper ads.  We now ignore newspapers, but we never ignored the ads.  I've sold many a used car through the classifieds, back in the day.  But, if I were selling one today, I'd go to Craigslist.  People still look at classifieds . . . but the newspaper is now online.

Let me also say that I agree with Mr. Hoffman's main premise, that most of us are passive when it comes to the Web.  I just don't think that's a big problem.  If all of us were active participants all the time . . . well, it makes me tired to think about it.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on June 2, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Grossly Irrelevant.

Why are online media plans based on gross impressions?

It continually frustrates me that impressions is considered a key metric by many marketers.

For one thing, you have no idea if you've made any kind of impression.  Back in the day before VCRs and DVRs and TiVo, when you ran a TV commercial, you could pretty much count on having some impact on the subconscious.  Unless, of course, your target audience took the opportunity to either go to the bathroom or go to the kitchen to make a sandwich.

Online?  Unless your rich media banner is truly obnoxious and takes over the screen, you know that viewers have trained themselves not to look. You’re largely invisible to them. They adjust their screen size so they don't see your brightly blinking ads.  They look past your leaderboards. They regularly delete your email without opening it.

Any marketer worth his or her salt would never base the success of a direct marketing campaign on impressions.  It’s like a batter basing his performance on how many pitches he’s faced – not how many hits or RBI’s he’s scored.  Certainly, the first step is knowing the size of your target market and how many of them you can reach in each medium.  But that's the first step, not the ultimate goal. 

I'd feel better about calling it reach or audience.  Impressions implies some kind of impact -- when nine times out of ten there's no impression made at all.

So let's stop talking about impressions and start talking about how we can reasonably measure real results.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on May 20, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

First things first.

Email may not be as sexy as advertising on Facebook or launching a mobile marketing campaign but, for most of us, it's the bread and butter of online marketing.

Email is also more complicated than it looks.  Sure, my Mom can send an email to me and my sister -- but that doesn't make what e-marketers do any less complex.  When I was seven years old, I could write a thank-you note to my Grandma and Grandpa.  That doesn't mean I could do the job of our copywriters.  There's a little more to it than pressing a send button.

Each of our clients has their own unique email best practices.  We have our own list, as well, that we push our clients to adhere to. 

In an article published earlier this month, Alterian said only 5% of 700 emarketers surveyed qualified as expert users.  After taking their quiz, it's easy to see that the questions are biased toward organizations that use Alterian's product (no real surprise there… so I take the results with more than a grain of salt – a full shaker perhaps), but it got me thinking.  These results still indicate that many marketers have a way to go before really benefiting from the power of email marketing.

Granted, there’s a ton of factors that come into play when determining the appropriate level of investment and resources companies should put behind email marketing.  I wouldn’t expect a small B2B services company operate at the same level of an e-commerce powerhouse like REI, Amazon or New Egg.  However, I continually encounter more and more companies that could get phenomenal returns from email, and yet they appear to have no interest or aptitude in making it work for them as a channel.  

From my experience, the two major roadblocks marketers face are content creation (“OK team, who’s got the time to manage this…”) and technology hurdles (integrating CRM feeds, list management, etc.).   There are a ton of ESP’s (email service providers) out there that can solve the technology portion and make that a non-issue (as long as you can keep your own IT teams out of the conversation).   As for the resources to manage it, I would be willing to place a wager that if executive management knew what the potential return from email marketing was vs. more traditional channels, they would find a way to staff the resources appropriately.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that every company needs to hire a dedicated team member to manage the channel… but too many companies are treating it as an afterthought… and that’s a shame.

Email can be tough, but it's not rocket science.  Before worrying about the next advertising venue, let's make sure we're taking full advantage of the ones we already know are viable.

 

 

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Brian Gilbert

on April 22, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Why is ''integrated marketing'' important?

Marketing Charts says "integrated marketing communications" is the number one priority of senior marketers. They surveyed 157 members of the Association of National Advertisers.

That's nice. But it looks like it may be putting the cart before the horse. The number two concern is "marketing accountability." And number six (!) is "advertising creative that achieves business results."

Dang. Integration is more important than getting results. Excuse me?

Don't get me wrong. I believe in integration. It's my job title, for Pete's sake. But if you can have cave men in one commercial and a gecko in another and make it all work for your brand – by which I mean "achieve business results" and ultimately grow revenue and profit – that's fine with me.

If your creative isn't achieving business results, why the heck do you care if it's integrated with anything else? If you don't have accountability, how do you know integrated marketing even works?

It makes me wonder… Do most firms in the U.S. run their business without a scorecard and disciplined approach? I don't think so. So is it just the marketing departments within them that tend to operate differently? Has marketing become a haven for people that love "creative" and "cool campaigns," but forget why they have a job and how their company makes money?

This study is another example of people drawing conclusions without having a clue about the big picture.

"The rapidly evolving marketing landscape demands an integrated approach," said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA. "The survey findings confirm that integrated marketing is one of the foundational pillars the ANA believes are critical to create a transformed marketing environment."

Come on. "Transformed marketing environment"? We’re all grownups here. Business is competitive. Frankly, business is cut-throat. Every CEO expects employees to show up every day and play to win. If they aren't, they shouldn’t be there if you ask me. Marketing shouldn't be held to a different standard than their colleagues in Sales or Manufacturing.

If you're not measuring everything against your business results and holding people (and your creative) accountable, how can you expect to win? Heck, are you even competing?

 

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Brian Gilbert

on April 3, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Does recession mean more budget for online?

We've seen it in the past. Direct marketing spending holds up, even when the economy tanks. When you have the numbers to back you up, it's easier to justify spending on direct -- even when you can see the cost-per-sale go up.

Six or eight months ago, before the word "recession" had been spoken aloud, the outlook for online marketing was hot. Now it's gotten even hotter.

Just so I don't sound completely self-serving here, let me put on my contrarian hat.

I love online marketing as much as the next guy . . . but you can't rely on it to be your whole media plan. At least not yet.

National marketers simply won't get the scale necessary via that single channel. You need the aggregate impact of all medium – broadcast, print or even direct mail, etc. – to hit the growth numbers and new customers most companies need.

Search. Banner. House email campaigns. They all can deliver phenomenal results and ROI, but there are only so many people to market to – finite searchers for your product on the major search engines, finite opt-in email addresses of prospects or customers. No matter how much more you wish there were – there aren’t. There’s no way your CEO is going to be content to grow sales by this channel alone. If you need to sell to crowds of people, you probably need more than the Internet can give you by itself.

Chances are, it’s likely much of your other marketing efforts – PR, TV, Mail, Print, and Events – that are driving your search and online activity.

The crux of the discussion (and a heated one at that) shouldn't focus solely upon giving credit to the channel where the response came through … but how should you attribute the credit appropriately to all the channels that influenced that sale.

Go ahead, put more eggs in your online basket – it will surely pay dividends in the future . . . but don't abandon other media just yet.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on March 19, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Addressing age issues online

Burst Media published survey results saying that "few respondents 55 years and older say Internet content is primarily focused on people their age."

We probably don't need a survey to tell us that. After all, except for financial planning services and long-term care insurance, little in this life seems specifically aimed at people over 55. (I exaggerate. But only a little.)

What bugs me, as someone who . . . has acquaintances . . . friends . . . even siblings . . . in that particular age group, is that very few sites seemed designed to be friendly to an older audience. (Okay. I confess I'm getting closer to that age every year. So are you, if you're lucky.)

I don't have the data, but I'm pretty sure there aren't that many Web designers over age 55. You don't have to be 55 to need reading glasses. I've had LASIK surgery, and I still find that some sites should offer a magnifying glass.

If your product or service is something someone over 50 would be interested in buying, design your ads and your Web site to appeal to them. Don't hide the information they're looking for.

So much Internet content is "ageless," in that it appeals to people across all demographic lines. That only a handful of people over 55 think this content is aimed at them is -- in my opinion -- more about how Web sites generally look than it is about the content.

 

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Spyro Kourtis

on March 12, 2008

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

Free is the new . . . marketing problem

It seems like everything is being offered free -- and I'm starting to get worried.

It started in 1984 with "information wants to be free" -- which, according to Wikipedia, was said by a computer hacker first. The guy actually said that the right information in the right context is extremely valuable, but our means of disseminating information is getting cheaper. Regardless of what he meant, the rallying cry was taken up by Internet users everywhere.

·	The Wall Street Journal is openly struggling with how to charge for its articles on the Internet.
·	Radiohead is practically giving its music away. (I talked about this in another context in The Madison AvenueJournal.)
·	The subscription offers I get in the mail are getting so cheap they're practically disappearing. Apparently, Inc. magazine is sending out a pay-what-you-want subscription letter.

This may or may not be a terrible thing. For example, Radiohead can go back to music business as usual anytime they want -- and they may have increased their audience by the stunt of giving it away.

I like free (or cheap) as much as the next marketer. But, in my experience, that works best when it's a buy-my-product-get-something-else-free idea. Aren't we damaging the whole value proposition for our clients when we offer the product itself for free?

Maybe we need to start charging to get access to this blog.

 

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Brian Gilbert

on March 11, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Targeting technology

The New York Times published an article last week about how Alaska Airlines is now able to personalize ads on the Internet using behavioral targeting. As a Seattleite and frequent Alaska Airlines customer, I’ve always been impressed with the innovations that they have brought to market. They were early adopters of personalized mileage plan statements via email and are continuously improving their website to provide a world-class online experience. It’s apparent they are innovating again.

In the article, it is described how they will be taking data from the pages and destinations you visit on Alaska's own site -- but didn’t buy a ticket -- and will tag you as someone interested in that specific destination (Hawaii, for example). Then, as you are seen on other sites on the internet (the NY Times for example), they will serve you ads that present you special offers to that destination you were researching (such as "Hawaii for as low as $250, learn more"). It sounds incredibly sophisticated and is the perfect application for behavioral targeting technology.

I am very curious how concerns – and potential legislation – regarding online privacy will shape the future of behavioral targeting.

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

Mr. Gould of Alaska Airlines is quick to admit that data drives online marketing, and does not mince words when asked about his view of other marketing professionals who are more focused on tag lines or catchy videos."I think they're very afraid of getting into the data," he said. "It's either overwhelming, or it will tell them something other than what they actually believe."

I like his style. I wonder what the data will tell Mr. Gould.

I'm sure he's telling his team, "Please be sure your tray table is stowed and your seatbelt is securely fastened… we’re in for an exciting ride."
 

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Spyro Kourtis

on March 4, 2008

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

What's your social media IQ?

Last week, Brandweek published an article saying ad agencies "don't get" social media.

I'm all for jumping on big, dumb ad agencies. You've seen me do it right here in this blog.

But who really does get social media as an advertising channel? Even the social media owners trip up -- as Facebook did when they decided to publish details about what you buy online to your friends. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea right up until the point where it blew up.

I may be completely wrong about this -- and I'm certainly out of step with what the marketers in the Brandweek article are saying -- but I'm not convinced social media make sense as a primary advertising vehicle. To my mind, this is more aligned with the public relations function.

The marketers surveyed for this article are hoping for more than MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn or anyone else like them can give. Here's a quote from Brandweek:

Nearly 50% of marketers said social-media efforts needed to be handled at an executive level with "significant" resources. Another 30% agreed social media is a "revolutionary opportunity."

The executive level. Wow. I suppose so . . . in the same way that customer service is handled at the executive level, since social media is all about communicating with customers and prospects. But I don't think handled is quite the right word for that.

The Internet in all its power definitely is a revolutionary opportunity. I question whether the segment called "social media" is a big opportunity for most marketers.
 

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Brian Gilbert

on February 19, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

What's the return on the cost of getting ROI data?

It's all about ROI nowadays ... and everybody and their (big) brother appear to be getting on the bandwagon.

This is from last Monday's (February 11) Wall Street Journal:

A new media research company, TRA — for "True ROI Accountability for Media" — is taking another crack at the problem. It merges data from people's cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases, such as the information stores gather from frequent-shopper cards. For instance, a company could see whether households that watched an ad for its toothpaste later bought that brand of toothpaste.

Here's how TRA itself explains the technology:

TRA's engine which was developed over a ten-year period, and exclusively licensed to TRA, has the ability to cross-tabulate second by second advertising audience data from television digital set boxes ("DSTBs") in over 1,000,000 homes with other media touchpoints and actual household product purchasing data in the same 1,000,000 homes, and then providing advertisers with real-time online access to Web-based dashboard research reports of the processed data. This permits the advertisers and their agencies to reallocate their advertising, shifting money from advertising with lower sales per dollar, to advertising producing higher sales per dollar, so as to increase the advertising ROI. TRA's customers can generate media research reports from diverse databases, employing TRA's proprietary validated algorithms.

Did you get all that?

The desperation in this chasing after some way to measure ROI makes me a little sad. It's the holy grail of CMOs with big TV ad budgets — an online dashboard to justify their case when they are battling their colleagues from online and direct marketing for budgets. "Don't cut my $100 million media budget, look here ... my panel research shows that people bought our product as a result of my ad! I project an ROI on this ad campaign of 34:1. Of course that's the media cost only, excluding our agency fees, $750K in production expenses, the location shoot in Key West that my team had to personally oversee, the power lunch at Oceana ..."

Ummm, there's so much wrong with that picture. It's trying to isolate the buying decision for a TV spot ad amongst thousands of other variables ... I'm sorry, I still don't buy it. Trying to make the link from ad viewing to purchasing behavior is much different from measuring brand awareness and recall.

It's why Hacker Group says we'll only work in measurable media. Of course, for us, television actually is measurable — because we make an offer that requires people to raise their hand and be counted in order to receive it. There's no "black box" mojo about it — it's a direct and measurable link.

It strikes me that the money and energy taken to get at that ROI data would be better spent learning how your target market goes about purchasing your product and engineering creative ways to measure your marketing's effectiveness through breakthrough creative and innovative measurable offers — across all media — online, TV, point-of-sale, call center, direct ...
 

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Tara Scot

on January 29, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Web Developer

Junk or spam?

If you have multiple email accounts, you know that some of them label unasked for mail as "junk" and others as "spam." In my Outlook email at work, I look in the junk email folder and a few of the dozens of items are tagged as SUSPECTED SPAM. In Hotmail, they give me a Junk folder too.

In Gmail, they just set up a Spam folder — no refinements. It's spam or it's in your inbox.

Then you have the legitimate email that comes to your inbox when you'd rather it hadn't. Here's what Return Path says in a DM News article last week:

56.4% of consumers say they receive high volumes of junk e-mail from marketers, when junk is defined as "e-mail from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me."

Great. Another definition of junk, i.e., all the mail that gets through the filters.

Wait a minute. That's the old, old definition of junk mail — "the crap in my mailbox that isn't interesting to me."

I think marketers can fix that. Let's make our email interesting.
 

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Spyro Kourtis

on January 15, 2008

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

What demographic data really means

Here's a piece of news from a recent Wall Street Journal. In an article about television media data analysts, they report a brilliant insight:

One evolving theory: that advertisers should pay more attention to people's viewing patterns than to their demographics, such as whether they are a twentysomething or a male. Fans of the NBC Universal show "Heroes," for example, whether they are 18-year-old men or 54-year-old women, generally tend to watch the show the same way — often clicking through ads, she says. The same has been true so far for NBC's "The Biggest Loser." That's a shift from previous years, when TV networks and advertisers were focused on reaching coveted demographics like viewers aged 18 to 34.

Direct marketers have been saying for, I don't know, forever, that behavior is really all that counts and demographics don't matter much at all, except as an interesting side note. In the beginning of things like Nielsen ratings and Starch scores, advertisers cared about demographics because age and gender were all they really could know about their audience. And even that was an inferred generalization. Because purchase behavior couldn't be directly measured in their mediated world, they quantified what they could quantify, not what really mattered.

If you ask someone in the creative department of an advertising agency why they care so much about demographics, they'd probably say it gives them a better mental picture of who they're trying to reach. With that image in mind, they can create more relevant messaging. I think that's probably a legitimate use of the relatively squishy data.

But if you ask someone in media, I bet they'd say they're looking for viewers aged 18 to 34 because that's who buys the product. These media folks honestly believe they're going through a targeting exercise that will generate less advertising waste.

It's all about behavior, baby. And the general advertising world is only beginning to figure out what that means.
 

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Brian Gilbert

on December 4, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

What in the world are you measuring?

Recently EmailStatCenter.com released results from an August survey that indicate that email marketing "professionals ranked click through rate and deliverability as the most important metrics to track."

Third on the list was conversion rate and measuring ROI was fourth in importance on the list. Revenue was sixth out of eight options. Yikes! Can you believe this?

It's as if most email marketing pros are more concerned with getting people to click on emails than they are whether their campaigns are actually performing their most important function – DELIVERING REVENUE! Wake up people! Isn't that the function of marketing – to help drive sales? Feed the beast.

As an e-marketing professional, I have to be grateful for my roots and passion for direct marketing. These survey answers would be comparable to stating that measuring the performance of a direct mail campaign is most importantly gauged by whether the mail entered the USPS stream successfully and a consumer opened the envelope. Ummm, last time I checked, I'd get bounced out of the room (and out of a job) if I suggested that ROI and revenue were in the middle of the pack of key metrics.

I am picturing conversations out there…

“Sorry, boss. I know we're not hitting our revenue target for the quarter and profit is down, but I got 18,000 click-thru's to my blog and 7,200 downloads of my widget – isn't that fantastic?”

“No, Spam boy, it isn't. We're in the business of making money, not measuring clicks. Figure it out.”

Perhaps I'm being unfair.

It's hard to know whether every email sent had a revenue component. I guess a newsletter email without a transactional offer might not have a revenue goal. Yeah, that might explain some of it.

Or alternatively, this could be an indication that while many companies have figured out how to launch email campaigns, they struggle with the technology that can actually link email activity into site or commerce behavior.

Or this could point to a structural problem organizations haven't fixed yet. Perhaps email marketers can't make the leap to measuring performance by revenue and ROI because ecommerce revenue is the domain of the “web team” and not marketing – similar to the “over the transom” mentality we see every day between Marketing and Sales departments. “Not my job.” Do you say that? I hope not.

Who knows . . . I'm still baffled by these results – and I'm grasping at straws to justify the results.

At least the responders to the study were honest in their answers. They rank Strategy/Planning as very high on the list of challenges these marketers face.

Wow. I couldn't have said it better myself.
 

Comments:

12/8/2007 at 11:39 a.m.
You Gotta Wanna
You’re right Brian, it is alarming when no none wants to connect the dots on ROI for email marketing campaigns. I have found that there are two reasons why people don’t do things: 1. They don’t know how. 2. They Don’t want to. Maybe it is their reliance on CRM systems that may deliver leads but don’t close the loop and produce a sales results. Let’s face it, when it comes to accountability, many people don’t want to take the risk. Jim Lenskold’s book on ROI is still the best out there but someone has to read it to make an attempt. We formed the Sales Lead Management Association www.salesleadmgmtassn.com just for the reason of bringing a spot light on the failure to manage leads even while companies spend millions on CRM systems. Keep up the pressure Brian, maybe someone will listen: ROI counts and always will. Jim Obermayer Sales Lead Management Association
>>James Obermayer, Orange CA

Jürgen Stephan

on November 19, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Executive Director, New Business Development

Long Live the ROI!

Marketing folks used to be the big spenders in the company and always got the evil eye from the CFO. Not any longer! These days, marketing spending is getting more and more measurable, and is driving the company's top line and making cost effective choices at the same time.

The online revolution has brought upon us precise ways of measurement from the early buying cycle of prospects to the final stages of buying – the old AIDA model comes to mind, i.e. attention, interest, demand, action. The closer alignment of campaign management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management systems (CRM) has provided powerful tools for marketers to attract new customers and retain old ones before they walk off to the competitor. The marketing lead pipeline and sales lead pipeline are becoming increasingly correlated.

Both consumer and B2B marketers have come up with pretty sophisticated systems and models of how to track the continuum from prospect to customer status for pre-, during, and post-sale scenarios and know how much money to spend along the way.

The essence of direct (response) marketing has lived and maintained that concept for many years: spending money during acquisition / lead generation phase wisely, building up a prospect database to nurture over time, and leveraging a customer marketing database that spawns cross sell and up sell activities.

Many marketers are achieving uplifts in performance by 10-20% or more, while utilizing both offline and online marketing activities in an integrated manner. Take this scenario for example: I get an e-mail from a company x about a product or service y that is followed by a direct mail piece,
which is consistent with the message and has some relevant calls to action, I might just pick up the phone or go on the landing page the company x has set up for me. Oh look, they even have my name on there – they must be pretty serious! At least they're professional. Maybe I'm not ready this time, but perhaps at one of the next e-mail rounds I will be. If I fit company x's profile I will eventually buy.

These days it's not unreasonable for the CFO to ask the head of Marketing for a 10:1 return on investment, i.e. sales achieved over marketing spending. Depending on business category and average selling price that number may fluctuate. Regardless, it's good to familiarize yourself on the new tools and sharpen some older marketing tools for maximum effectiveness.

Vive Le ROI!
 

Comments:

12/8/2007 at 11:47 a.m.
ROI
You and Brian Gilbert must have gone to lunch together and discussed the miserable state of ROI measurement. I mentioned in Brian’s Bog that “You Gotta Wanna,” and regardless of how many seminars there are on ROI probably only 10% of the marketing mangers (and maybe less agencies), have the courage to measure what they manage. We’re getting some articles on the Resources Section of the Sales Lead Management Association that addresses this. I hope we have more contributions in the coming months
>>James Obermayer, Orange CA

Brian Gilbert

on November 7, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

Please behave.

Behavioral targeting is the new watchword of Web and mobile marketing. The buzz has now hit the 100 decibel level and I'm starting to go a little deaf.

Direct marketers have been talking about behavioral targeting probably before most of us were born. What we meant was buying behavior. If someone had responded to a direct marketing offer — in just about any way, shape or form — they had the behavior we were looking for.

Because of my DM DNA, that's still my bias.

Behavioral targeting now means something quite different. If someone visits a marketer's web site selling cell phones but doesn't convert to a customer, that's their "behavior." With the targeting available now, a savvy direct marketer can now serve relevant banner ads to this individual as they are "encountered" on the Web — even if they're not on a cell phone or technology site.

That's a very non-direct-marketing way of looking at behavior — and something that wasn't possible before the advent of this technology. And here's why: general agencies were never really interested in changing behavior. Their focus has been to change awareness and attitudes.

I'm okay with that — but I still find the new definition of behavioral targeting a little disconcerting based on my DM roots.
 

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Tara Scot

on October 23, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Web Developer

Will the voices please shut up, I'm trying to talk about email here!

I have a confession to make. As an employee of a direct marketing agency, it's an ugly one...

I check my home mailbox less than once a week. Sometimes I just go get my Netflix movies and leave the rest of the mail behind. I won't go into the reasons why, let's just assume the voices tell me to do it that way, and move on.

So I suck at getting my mail. But I check my email at least every 10 minutes. I get email on my phone. I get email at my desk. I walk down the hallways and people ask "Hey, did you get my email?" If my husband has a honey-do item for me, he sends me an email. If my friends or family want to schedule a get-together, they send me an email. If you want to get my attention, send me an email.

The point is that for me, and others of my ilk (read: geeks), email marketing is much more effective than print advertising. But the question remains, how do you get my attention? If you're not my boss, a client, or my husband, how do you get me to spend even 10 seconds of my ridiculously frenetic day focusing on your message?

Obviously, you need to make it a targeted, relevant (and therefore interesting) message. I'm a mom. I'm a musician. I'm a geek-gadget lover, and a somewhat OCD collector of kitchen containers. Send me something about that and I'm yours (along with some of my money). Targeting, or list strategy, is a necessity for a successful email. It's also a subject I'll leave to the experts. I'm going to talk about the next most important thing: The email itself.

Six things I've learned about email:

1. Get to the point. You have about 1.5 seconds before my finger, which is hovering ominously above the "delete" button, crashes down on it and relegates your email to the black hole that is my recycle bin.
2. Make it funny. If you can make me laugh, I will read it all. Even if I don't want what you're selling, I will most likely forward your email to at least one of my friends. Maybe they'll throw money at you.
3. Don't get too fancy. Email technology is in its embryonic stage compared to other web technologies. If you want to make sure people see your message how you intend, keep it simple. Don't attempt any cool web tricks. Hell, don’t even attempt lame ones. At best maybe (and I repeat maybe) try a clickable link.
4. Keep the identity, message and call to action above the fold.
5. Don't bet on pretty pictures. Over 75% of email clients have images turned off when the user first loads the email. Your message and identity must be in simple text first, and graphics as a backup. In this example, Apple didn't get the memo *:



6. Hold no hope for improvement in the future. Microsoft's latest version of Outlook (2007) now uses Word's HTML engine (and all its limitations) to display emails rather than Internet Explorer's. Yet another thing I need to ask Bill about over lunch some day...

Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes, my bills are often late.

* Source: www.campaignmonitor.com
 


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Spyro Kourtis

on October 17, 2007

category: integrated marketing

President and CEO

No more silos.

The lines are blurring — and that means it's an exciting time to be a marketer.

At the DMA, I look around and see some organizations still living in the 20th century and others who have definitely moved on. What's interesting is that the companies from an earlier era are great at defining who they are — they're list vendors or print vendors or even digital marketing providers.

It's the ones who can't define themselves so easily who have the jump on the rest.

That's because the biggest marketing hits nowadays are not as much about the medium you see them in, as about the idea they convey. It doesn't matter if you see a marketing message on Dancing with the Stars or on YouTube. It's the impact of the idea.

Shelly Lazarus, chairman and CEO of Ogilvy Worldwide, discussed this in her DMA keynote address. Listening to her, it really hit home for me how important it is that the ideas come first. Then you look for the media that are most appropriate for the idea.

She gave the example of the Dove Real Beauty campaign and how it started as a dialog on the Internet. When Dove learned that only 2 percent of women thought they were beautiful, they posed the question of what was real beauty. Then they developed a web site where women participated. That led to media attention, including interest from Oprah. A video was made — not a commercial, a YouTube video — and millions watched. The rest is history.

The lines are blurred, the walls are down. This is good news. Life is more interesting.
 

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Carolyn Hansen

on October 9, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Do you google yourself?

Of course you do. You learn such interesting things. For example, I'm a real estate agent in Minnesota. I'm also a lawyer in the state of New York. Best of all, I teach Spanish at the University of South Carolina. I vacation in Mexico quite a bit, but I had no idea I was so fluent in the language. These fascinating search results come from having a relatively common name.

Hacker is not a common name. I googled our company the other day. Lo and behold, another direct marketer had bought Hacker Group as a key word! A competitor, I guess. Frankly, I hadn't heard of his organization. You'd think we'd be near the end of any long tail of direct marketing terms. I looked up a few of our competitors -- ones I recognize -- and no one seems to have done the same to them.

It's an interesting idea. A little dangerous, I suppose, if you're paying for clicks and someone from the company notices. (This one got at least two clicks from me -- I had to check him out, after all.)

Since most of the other references on Google's first page of results have the adjective "notorious" in front of hacker group, I’ve decided to take this as a gesture of respect and a sincere form of flattery.
 

Comments:

10/11/2007 at 5:13 p.m.
Cool job you've got there, Dave!
Or should I say, "Woof!" You know, there's something very entertaining about the search experience. You juxtapose two things, the Dave Fisher we know here at Hacker and someone who writes about dogs all day and it makes us smile. But it also subtly points out the dangers of "contextual" advertising online, when the advertiser doesn't control the context. Maybe that's a subject for another blog post!
>>Carolyn Hansen, Seattle WA10/11/2007 at 1:47 p.m.
Googled myself
Very interesting blog Carolyn, I had no idea there was another Hacker Group. I could come up with some crazy Superman theory about the bizzaro world and them being exact but opposite copies of all of us, but I'll spare you and just share my most interesting Google twin. Apparently Dave Fisher is a field writer for Beagles Unlimited Magazine. I had no idea I was so prominent in such a ... specific field.
>>Dave Fisher, Bellevue WA

Paul Ford

on October 2, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Senior Copywriter

How the medium changes the message

Earlier, Brian Gilbert talked about non-addressable direct response media in this space.

That got me thinking about the creative work for campaigns across multiple media. I don’t think it’s necessarily a cut-and-paste idea for your creative team. The creative concept and tone ought to be different with non-addressable media than they are with mail – mainly because you’re talking one-to-many, rather than one-to-one.

There’s no personalization, of course. So that could have an impact on response. On the other hand, having your brand visible in a wider space could have a very positive impact on response in all media. So, as Brian said, it’s definitely something to consider.
 

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Brian Gilbert

on September 25, 2007

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

If it doesn't have an address, is it still direct?

In direct, we’re used to thinking about mail and email. But other media can be measured – and that’s why they’re great opportunities for direct response marketers.

Direct response TV may not be right for your product. However, if you’re marketing a consumer product at a decent price point, you can’t dismiss TV out of hand. Is there a niche audience that particular programs or channels target that’s right for you? Radio can be less expensive than TV, and possibly more targeted. Print ads can have a toll-free phone number call to action – or a web address. And there are a number of alternative media, including free-standing inserts in the Sunday supplements, card decks and coupon mailings that may look like national media but can be bought for a specific geography.

One thing to remember is that the cost-per-thousand reached in non-addressable media will almost always be much lower than with direct mail. And you’ll be able to reach far more people than with email or even mail. It all depends on your goals and your ROI target.

So don’t get caught with a half-baked media plan. Think outside the mailbox.
 

Comments:

9/26/2007 at 8:24 p.m.
Great whitepapers!
Reading through your whitepapers I learned a lot about direct marketing - especially from a business-to-business standpoint. Also liked the one about evaluating market strategies. Very informative information about direct marketing!
>>James Whitesand, San Jose CA