Marketing strategy.

Generating ideas on the creative side of an agency is almost always a team sport.  Copywriters and art directors get together and brainstorm.  Often creative directors and designers are invited to join the fun.  (It really is fun . . . the laughter from those conference rooms can get pretty annoying to the rest of us.)  On big assignments, multiple teams will be given the same challenge.

It's a little harder to get a whole team together for ideas on the account side.  Our Account Managers are expected to be solely responsible for the marketing strategy for their client.

Over the years, we've developed a way to spread this responsibility -- although not the final accountability.  As our agency has grown, we've added an Account Director level to the organizational chart.  The Director provides feedback on the AM's plans before they are presented to the client -- and is especially involved in developing strategy for new clients. 

We also keep all of our senior executives involved in our twice-a-week Strategy Council meetings where we review plans or brainstorm new strategies when new challenges come up.  We intentionally cross-pollinate these meetings with Account Managers who have worked through similar challenges.

And every week our Account Managers, Account Executives and Business Development team meets.  At almost every meeting, an AM will present a case study or the equivalent of a quarterly client presentation, to spread the word about what's working now throughout the company.

Making sure that knowledge is retained, that good strategy is used and new ideas are generated by an expert team is one of the great benefits of using an agency.  Otherwise you'd be sitting alone in your office bouncing ideas off the ceiling instead of collaborating with your off-site agency team.

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Creative accounting.

I've worked in advertising and I've worked in direct marketing, and direct is better.

Seriously.  In direct marketing, we keep score.  That makes it all more fun.  When we keep score, we can often figure out what we did right and what we did wrong.  Then we can tweak what we do the next time and improve our score.

The only way to keep score in advertising is with awards. 

The Cannes Lions Advertising Festival is going on this week.  It's make or break for a lot of people right now.  I admit, I wouldn't mind a little field trip to the south of France.  But if it meant how good I felt about myself as a marketer for a full year, that might take a bit of the joy out of it.

I have no objection to competition.  I just like to compete every single time we run a campaign.  Besides, the people who judge our work are much more important than the judges at Cannes.  Our judges are the people who buy the products and services we sell.

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Targeted marketing and advertising budgets.

The June 10 Wall Street Journal had an article about how six cable companies have developed new technology that will help advertisers better target TV watchers.

I think this is great news -- both as a marketer and as a TV watcher.  If I'm going to spend money on TV as a marketing medium, I want to know that the people who will see my commercial are actually likely to buy my product.  And if I'm going to spend any time in front of the tube, I'd prefer to see more relevant ads than the ones I'm watching now.

Here's what the Journal suggests is the downside:

Something that may concern programmers -- and damp enthusiasm: Because targeted advertising theoretically offers more bang for the marketing buck, advertisers may end up reducing their overall cable spend.

I honestly hope this doesn't damp enthusiasm.  If it does, it's short-sighted on the part of the programmers.

First of all, marketers ought to pay more for a targeted audience on a CPM basis.  This is how it's been done in direct marketing forever.  Smaller, more exclusive lists -- whether mail or email -- cost more per name.  On a cost-per-impression basis, direct mail could never compete with broadcast.  It's not about the costs so much as it's about the return on investment and the net profit you make from a campaign.

But, second, 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. 

Wouldn't this be a win-win-win for cable companies, advertisers and the cable TV audience?

Even as I write this, I know it won't happen.  There's just too much fear and greed locking us into the current system.  But I can dream.

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Creative that takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

If you're someone who has to judge creative work before it hits the streets in its final form, I have a couple of hints for you.

1. The idea you hate most may work hardest. We have a saying around here that no one is soothed into buying a product.  Now that's one of those generalizations that can be easily disproven. Trying to agitate someone into taking a spa vacation would certainly be the wrong approach. However, if something surprises or jars you, it may also get your prospect's attention and response.

2. The idea that scares you may be the breakthrough you're looking for. A little controversy can be a wonderful thing. It gets you noticed. Those who agree with you see your brand as something they identify with even more powerfully. Those who disagree probably wouldn't have bought your product anyway. And their complaints could even get your brand some free publicity. People like brands that actually stand for something.

3. The idea that strikes you as perfect as soon as you see it may be exactly wrong. Some of those perfect concepts look just like your previous campaign -- or worse, just like your competition. The obvious is often boring. The joke everyone has already heard is worse than not funny, it makes you look like you're not paying attention.

You wouldn’t hire a consulting firm to put together a focus group with just one person in it.  If you find yourself beginning to function like a “focus group of one,” it’s time to pause and take a deep breath.  You don't need to make an immediate, emotional decision. You're the one with the veto power, so go ahead and sleep on it before giving your final opinion.

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Customer churn.

One of my favorite marketing challenges is helping our clients find new customers.  But in an economic downturn we can't forget the enormous problem of losing current customers.

Formerly loyal customers can be tempted away by a competitor's lower prices. They may even decide to forego your product or service altogether, if the value proposition isn't clear to them anymore.  It's no good to continue to fill the bucket with new customers, when current customers are leaving through a hole in the bottom.

Patching that hole should be one of your top priorities.  And the first step is a detailed analysis of your customer file to answer questions like:

  • How do we identify which customers are most likely to leave?
  • What events seem to trigger the loss of a customer?
  • Is there anything that can be done to prevent the triggering event?
  • What can we do after the trigger is pulled to keep the customer with us?

Answer these questions and you have the beginning of a churn strategy.  Put it in place now -- and keep it going, even when times are good.

Here's another, counter-intuitive question that your analysis could help with:  Which customers do we want to fire?

Everyone knows the Pareto Principle, that 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your customers.  A parallel truth -- call it the Spyro Principle -- is that 90% of your problems are caused by 2% of your customers.

That may be a blog post for another day.

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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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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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