Happy summer!

I hope your Memorial Day celebration was full of fun and kicked off summer with just the right amount of verve.

I read in last week's New York Times that tourism marketers are nervous about getting your travel dollars and are changing tactics to be a little more hard-hitting.

Hacker Group's early roots are in travel and tourism.  Little things like calls to action and urgency drivers are not news to us.  We've been using them for twenty-plus years.  It's kind of a kick to see What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas morph into Do Vegas right now! 

Panama City Beach, Florida, is throwing a “Summer white sale.”  Orlando has added Say yes to special values to its Say yes to Orlando campaign.

One of the lessons my Mom taught me (and one that's served me well as a direct marketer) is that it never hurts to ask.  It looks like some tourism marketers are starting to ask.  I'll bet they're also starting to get better results.

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Why media trumps copy.

Whenever anything goes wrong with the results of a marketing test, you can count on me (as the copywriter) to say, It must have been the list.  Or, if it wasn't a mailing or email, Must have been poor audience targeting.

It's a joke to deflect blame from my bulletproof creative work.  Like all jokes, it's based on truth. 

You can bring the gospel to the infidels, but you can't make them believe.  You can make a great offer to someone who doesn't need your product, but you can't make her buy.

But wait.  There's more.

Better targeting also helps me, as the writer, more directly.  I need to get into the head of my target audience -- and having a clearer picture of that group can only make that easier.  So, who reads Beagles Unlimited Magazine?  (I wonder if the editors call it BUM?)  Who watches the Food Network?  Who searches for information on vacations in Croatia?

That's why we all count on our friends in the media department.  They make me look good.

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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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Sweat equity.

If a commercial gives you goosebumps, are you more likely to buy the product?  If your palms sweat, does it mean you're going to reach for your wallet?

Disney thinks so -- and I'll bet they're right, if they're talking about entertainment advertising.  Nothing is worse than going to a movie that doesn't arouse your emotions.  Most of us figure that if the trailer doesn't do anything for us, the movie certainly won't.

And other products?  What about a considered purchase, like a computer printer?  Or an impulse buy, like a Diet Coke at the local mini-mart?  How about something somewhere in between, like shoes?

The International Herald Tribune says Disney will be doing research on the biometric responses (heart rate and skin conductivity, i.e., how much they sweat) of people watching commercials.  This is important because TV is not a rational medium, it's an emotional medium, according to Duane Varan, the head of this new laboratory. We can get to a deeper layer of what's motivating people by seeing how they behave, observing them in experimental settings and seeing how their body reacts.

Apparently NBC did similar experiments several months ago, according to The New York Times.  It's not all that new.  I heard about these kinds of experiments back in the '80s, when I was taking advertising classes in college.

Varan's premise is very interesting to me.  Is TV really any more emotional than radio or search engine marketing?  People aren't either rational OR emotional.  It's hard to believe that media can be one or the other. 

Marketers often use TV in an emotional way -- and much of that has to do with the limitations of the 30-second spot.  Emotions are definitely communicated much more quickly than reasons.
They're working awfully hard at Disney to get to some pretty esoteric information.  It'll be interesting to see if this new lab gets any more helpful data than all the other experimenters before them.

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Outcomes

A nice article in Strategy + Business, a Booz Allen Hamilton publication, lays out the recent history of marketing measurement in a straightforward, unbiased way.  I admit to being very biased toward metrics that are about outcomes rather than inputs.

Christopher Vollmer, the article's author, says marketers are demanding outcome metrics -- and I say, yay!

Every time I see something about a new way to get at people's demographics, I get a little more frustrated.  It's not about how many 25-44 year-old women will see your ad.  It's mostly about how much you spend on your ad and how much money you make from it. 

If you spent $10 to send a certified letter to the right buyer and they spent $10,000 to buy something it cost you $1,000 to make, you wouldn't care if the target was male or female -- as long as you knew they were predisposed to buy your product.

Knowing which person to send your $10 letter to or which group of people are most likely to become one of your buyers may involve demographics -- pregnancy tests are sold to women of childbearing years -- but not always.  And not always as a first cut of who might be most interested.

Inputs are meaningful, of course, but the first focus must be on how you will measure results.  If you don't start with the outcomes, you'll never know what worked.

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Food for thought.

What is it about fast food that makes people think corporations ought to sacrifice profits for creativity? 

I talked about Wendy's decision to (finally) pull their ads featuring a guy in a red wig a couple of months ago in The Madison Avenue Journal.  Now The New York Times is questioning whether Applebee's should have pulled its quirky talking apple and replaced it with a tried and true approach:

Early tests showed mixed results — some people loved the apple’s attitude, though others found it off-putting — but the real problem was that the fruit in question failed to give the company’s bottom line an immediate lift.

They go on and on about how this was an opportunity to make Applebee's cool.  (Yeah.  Good luck with that.) 

Hidden at the bottom of the NY Times inverted pyramid is the stat that should have been the lead -- the good news for Applebee's now that they've gone back to selling food:

The chain . . . reported a 0.5 percent increase in same-store sales for the first quarter. Among company-owned stores (and excluding franchisees), the increase was 2.1 percent.

“The first quarter release is our first positive same-store sales in two years,” Ms. Scott of Applebee’s said. “It’s safe to say this campaign is working for us, so we’re going to stick with it.”

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