Wheel of Marketing Misfortune

I loved this article by David Armano and his Wheel of Marketing Misfortune. It’s a fresh way to exhort everyone in the digital marketing business to just, you know, chill out a bit.

Read the whole thing here.

The long tail: digital myth or not?

The “long tail” has been a theory accepted as fact in the digital community. It described and explained what we believed in so well, and it all makes sense. In fact, to some of us it was a source of credibility for whatever it was we’re doing, selling, or referring to: the power of the individual, individual experiences, tailored and customized offerings in a distributed and digital world that makes all of that possible.

Now, some people are rocking the boat and saying that it was all a hoax. Not a surprise, really. Every theory has a counter-theory. Surprising is that it took this long.

http://tinyurl.com/3rg5gp

Found on Alan’s friendfeed

On PR 2.0 and killing version numbers

In our network, we also have a global PR agency. Recently,we have been working more closely with them, and it’s been a great experience that has given me insights about a totally different way to work on brands. In this collaboration, I’ve come to notice the changes that are going on in the PR world too. Obviously, the fact that everything has changed for traditional marketing communication because people have been empowered by digital technologies has also arrived in the PR world. In fact, the say they knew it before the old traditional agencies even started thinking about changing their ways.

And some of that is true. If we look at Al Ries’ book “The fall of advertising, the rise of PR” which was authored around 2000, we can see that the trend was there for many to see. And it is true, that in the type of brand work PR agencies do, they have always focused on the more immediate human opinion and context in which they can positively influence brand opinion. But the thing is: it’s not that PR agencies were rising by because their work got better, or their approach drastically different. Isn’t it more likely that traditional agencies, which were the main mass media opinion shapers for brands started sucking? Or to be fair: ad agencies were conveniently repressing the fact that mass media started bleeding its effectiveness to digital channels and 1:1 and social media interactions.

What will be interesting for me to observe is: will PR agencies make some of the mistakes that ad agencies made? Like: “Hey, here’s an idea, we’ll just start an interactive agency that can adapt our stuff online,” or will they be less prone to the “channel-adaptation” mistake? I think they might. Why? Well, since the PR guy’s job is to influence opinion of people in a way that is different to regular mass media communication (the staple of the ad agency), it has always been about word-of-mouth, even before the web. Think about it: if, on one side, you have an expert of influencer opinion and how to use it to influence others, and, on the other side, an expert on creating single-minded propositions for mass media: who has an advantage in a landscape where single-minded messages are being fragmented, spoofed, barely measureable, and generally ineffective and where everyone can have an opinion, influence product design, brands and author about everything on a free blog? Yes, it’s definitely the PR guy, not the ad guy. So this is where they have the leg up, but I think they’ve had this advantage rather unconsciously. Now that the web is mainstream, even traditional PR (even if it was more modern than the traditional ad business by design), has to think about PR 2.0 just like advertising has to think about advertising 2.0. And they do, and they might want to break some of the negative PR stereotypes as they go along.

Okay, you say, but digital agencies obviously knew before. Yes they did, and if we again look at Al Ries’ book, you will notice it doesn’t even go into any detail of the potential of how digital channels are changing peoples’ behavior. And here is my point: while some PR agencies had started working closer to the context of the people in order to influence human behavior than traditional ad agencies, most of them still did it in a traditional channel mindset. The reevaluation of what a traditional ad agency has to do, or if in fact, it is still advertising it needs to create, is also taking place consciously in the PR world now. In fact, the question is: if the word “advertising agency” is passé, is “public relations” also a bit yesteryear?

The funny thing is, as the process of redefining the ad agency and the PR agency is underway, look at the schools of thought out there on this topic:

• Markets are conversations, not messages
• it’s about listening not talking
• Engage people on their level, not as abstract consumers, insulting their intelligence
• and so on and so on…

Doesn’t that sound all too familiar? Isn’t everyone saying the same thing?

Yeah, again, nothing new to anyone who worked in a digital agency, in, say 1995. The only difference is: now everyone is talking about it and it’s mainstream, oh, and bandwidth is better. This is good, mind you, but it also let’s me beg EVERYONE who works in this industry, whether they are in ad agencies, PR agencies, media agencies, digital agencies and even marketing people: don’t we all say the same thing, no matter who said it first, or who put out the best “integrated” campaign? Can’t we just decide that communication is a people business, not a brand business and that therefore everything we do should start with people, not brands, or products or categories or marketing toolkits?

And for chrissakes, can’t we stop putting version numbers on our respective displines (advertising 2.0, web2.0, PR2.0 and media 2.0) just because we want to tell everyone that we finally got the fact that people are in control?

Acts, not ads!

PS: I will be off on a vacation, so there will be no posts for a while.. Cheers.

Stating the obvious: Online Social Media generate awareness, influences opinion.

Okay, sometimes I have to repeat stuff I’ve already said before, even if it is the equivalent of stating the obvious. I do this usually when I find a study with an air of scienctific credibility that supports something that is being talked about, but lacks the digits.

In this case, I stumbled upon an article in Adweek which states that a new study was release proving that some of the most desirable consumers use the opinions of others from blogs, and social media applications to make their purchasing decisions. In fact, 74% of people polled do this. Of course this means that the brand message and promise seems to be becoming less important than what other people say about the brand and customer experience they have had. Which in turn means, that mass media advertising is becoming less important. Thanks for the statistics, but as I said, it’s still a “duh-moment.”

Still, I like it when marketing people are quoted with something that is a Heureka moment to them. Here it is:

“This study indicates that there is a growing group of highly desirable consumers using social media to research companies,” said Ganim Nora Barnes, a senior fellow at SNCR, in a statement. This demo includes adults 25-55 with a college education, making over $100,000 a year. “These most savvy and sought-after consumers will not support companies with poor customer care reputations, and they will talk about all of this openly with others via multiple online vehicles. This research should serve as a wake-up call to companies: listen, respond, and improve.”

Yeah. Stop making advertising to generate awareness if you cannot listen, respond and improve. Otherwise you will get grilled and served with a slice of lemon on a nice “ineffective traditional advertising sampler platter.”

People are not the problem. Marketing warfare is.

What’s been frying my goat for a while lately (like 10 years or so) is looking at how we conduct our business in the agency landscape. We use military words like Briefing, Strategy, Tactics, Campaign, Target, Territory, Launch and Positioning everyday. I am wondering what good it does using this language of war. Everyone says that marketing is war. Is it? War against what?

Let’s ask Billy Bob, a traditional, gun-toting marketer who believes marketing is war:

Billy Bob: I tell you who we’re fightin’, buddy. It’s them dang evil-doer consumers. These folks are conspirin’ against us, leadin’ a lawless digital lifestyle, creat’n’ all this brand brouhaha for us marketers, destroying our brand values and shooting web2.0 flak right down from the blogosphere and what have you. If we don’t strike them with a big nice nuclear promotion, we be fixin’ to go down with our brand reputation. So, I am asking you: are you with us or with the consumers?

Personally, Billy Bob, I believe war is not an answer. We’ve been seeing this for a long time and we’ve been turning our faces away, hoping this Internet thing would just go away. Fact is, we’ve just made it a war because we see human behavior as something we need to manipulate and change, and we made it marketing’s job to manipulate that human behavior. Also of course, it is our job to build a ridgid brand fortress, that can defend itself against its enemies, the competition. Now that digital technologies have empowered people and changed the rules of the game, it isn’t as easy to manipulate people, and advertising just doesn’t seem to work anymore. And, for lack of a better idea, what’s our response? More troops for the trenches, bigger defense budgets, more artillery.

Because the Billy Bob Marketing budget for ineffective advertising, whether in “traditional” or “digital” channels, is steadily rising, no matter how inefficient. As a result, to stay within the militaristic metaphor we seem so used to, “consumers” soon become “casualties of war.” Well, I guess, you know, such is war. I mean, we tried to use our smart micro-segmentation bombs and even put 10% of our budget into our magic digital targeted media bullet, but you’re always gonna get some collateral damage, right? After all, this is why we call those casualties consumers: this way they remain abstract and we don’t have to connect with their actual life.

Seriously, this terminology, and more importantly, the warped thinking behind it isn’t appropriate anymore, and maybe never was. So if you’re asked by Billy Bob to support the troops in advertising and marketing , it’s just not black and white anymore. All I know is: I don’t wanna support the troops and their strategic goals of “increasing brand awareness” or “building brand preference” or “driving brand consideration” if all I get is an unhuman, purposeless advertising carpet bombing campaign. This marketing warfare myth has to go. The point is, you can’t work like that anymore.

Ok, sure. Let’s say we all agree. How would we go about everything if we stripped out all this militaristic lingo and the thinking behind it?

1. Don’t just think about positioning in “what is…”, think about “what if?”
2. Don’t start with the category, the product or the brand. Because, guess what, you will end up where you left off.
3. Instead, start with a purpose. A purpose, mind you, not a promise. A purpose needs a conviction, a reason for being and a fuel that amplifies it. Fuel comes from a human behavior that we want to enable.
4. Based on this purpose, think of acts that a brand can create to enable that human behavior in positive ways, instead of just cranking out ads.
5. Don’t think of creativity as idea generation for campaigns, think of creativity as ideas for experiences and valuable exchanges.
6. Don’t message at people, message for something they believe in.
7. Don’t call them consumers, call them people.

Peace out, y’all.

Unsure on how to make your Brand Research more effective again? Stick people into MRIs.

I recently read an article in Adage, written by Moshe Bar, Director at the NeuroCognition Lab at Harvard Medical school. As more and more people say that asking consumers to critique ads is, like, so yesterday (which I mostly agree with), Moshe comes out and puts his Ph.D. and scientific research to use for the Advertising folks. In fact, the last paragraph of said article ends:

[...] advertisers could go even further by better understanding the basic science of the human mind. Don’t you want to know how to better generate positive associations that will stick in memory? Or how context and attentions filter the perception of reality? Or the way that mood affects people’s desires? My guess is you do.

Ok. Duh. Yeah, who wouldn’t like to know? Especially when there are so many pseudo-scientific research methodologies that all promise the same. Looks like Mr. Bar isn’t just offering a new look at things to Brand Researchers, he is also pushing the right buttons for us a target audience (i.e. real science giving answers to difficult marketing questions).

So is this type of research really any different in terms of effectiveness to create compelling ads, or did Harvard’s research grant fund run dry as to have to go in cahoots with the lowly spheres of the communications industry? Is it that instead of a nice subjective and ineffective chat with your consumers around a table, you actually stick them into an MRI? That certainly is upping the ante (those things are huge and expensive after all), and I do believe it gives you answers to which emotions might be triggered. I am not a scientist, but when Mr. Bar says “If we scientists have behavioral methods that we believe could modify the associations elicited in post-traumatic stress, changing associations in a retailer’s reputations should be a walk in the park in comparison, using the exactly the same principles,” I kind of go “Mreep?”. I am not sure why, because I don’t have an MRI in our research lab, but let me try to guess.

First of all, likening post-traumatic stress to a emotional reactions to an ad seem kind of, well, like making a mousetrap the size of a house. It’s friggin ads, not memories of your tank Humvee being blown up in Iraq. While I do believe the article that, scientifically, the same principles apply in terms of being able to measure emotional triggers, even in ads, I wonder if the level of the response in those cases when you measure ads is equally as relevant as when deal with real issues like PTS. What I mean is, if you find out (as described in the article) that an ad containing sharp objects makes people nervous, and you use this insight as part of a creative brief, may we not, at some point be overdoing it? Does an ad message have to be as complicated as including deeply rooted human psychological and even phylogenetic insights? Maybe it can and maybe it is not as complicated. I just feel that continuing research on PTS is more important and different league than that of making ads. Currently brand research suffers from too many methodologies, not to little. Apart from that, there may be a bit of a problem with applicability and feasibility with this scientific approach for the purposes of brand research at this point. I am all for trying out research methodology as described in the arcticle is a good idea to gain more understanding in how we, as humans, work, and I do believe it will even have effects on how we think about communications. But for now, I know there are a number of really good and inexpensive tools (some even scientific) that allow us to observe human behavior instead of simply ineffectively asking people’s opinions. Those seem like a good way forward for now, and the kind of stuff done by researchers like Moshe Bar, as mind-bogglingly amazing it really is, operates at a more fundamental level: the kind of level that is established when scientist try to find out how we all function.

Facebook Case Studies

An interesting slideshow from Charlene Li from Forrester. For all those who were looking for cases when convincing or keeping clients from doing something on Facebook.

Facebook “Social Advertising” plans already generating backlash responses

It’s not surprising that right after Facebook announced that they would open up Facebook to more to advertising, taking advantage of the referral-based nature of the web, true web freaks are responding harshly.

To me, “Social Advertising” is an oxymoron at best.

If Advertisers can’t change their mindsets from mass media messaging to conversations, including their brand management and marketing process, they will never be able to join social networks with a meaningful conversation with their customers.

It’s time to realize that within the Customer Life Cycle, generating Awareness is more an more something people do among each other and by themselves. It works  not because, but despite all the mass media advertising out there. Advertisers so far are just reducing brand intimacy by trying to join the fray with their mindsets unchanged. And yes, Facebook is risking losing its credibility to its users, too.

What marketers should worry about way more, is to invest time in understanding human behavior, improve their products and start owning the brand experience people have with their products. If you provide meaningful experiences people will do the advertising for you. Duh.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-backlash-begins/#comment-1739221

Testing Tales: Using Testing to ensure the delivery of vacuous, uninspired mediocrity in brand communications

I have been quite frantic recently, so I apologize for not providing endless tirades on the future of advertising as usual. However, the good news is, I do have a tirade that has grown like a bacterial infection in my strategic tummy and it needs a good antibiotic rant.

My question these days is:
What is this whole obsession with communications testing??

Not a day goes by, it seems, without unique campaigns being shot down because a panel of a few consumers chose the one “they liked most.” Or to put it another way: bland, mediocre and sterile campaigns do get chosen because they were the ones with the least potential to upset anyone.

Now, I am not saying there are no good big ideas with effective campaigns out there anymore. Also, I am not saying that testing is a bad idea. However, there may be a trend that more and more marketing decision makers resort to testing as a way to make a decision instead of using it to improve the execution of an idea. And really, comms testing can just help you improve the execution of an idea, not serve as a tool to make a decision on whether your brand idea is a good one or not. So if you shoot down a campaign after communications testing, you really shoot it down because of its execution, not because of its idea. Why? Because recruits can’t tell the difference. They will rarely go: “Oh, well, I really liked the idea behind this one, but I think the execution is way to urban and sophisticated for me, so if you’d adjust the tone-of-voice to be a bit more down-to-earth on this one, I would definitely go for it.” If they did, you’d have to fire your recruiting agency for letting agency hacks get through the screening process.

Alas, people see and judge the execution first, then they intuitively understand the idea (often much later, when they had a true brand experience with the product in question instead of being subjected to a test being stared at through a one-way mirror). It’s friggin common sense and should be obvious without going into a segue about the Heisenbergian Uncertainty Principle.

But wait, that’s not all! Within this already zany approach, what is being tested is often just one type of brand communications: mass media communications. This essentially means: we will test a TV spot to make a decision on which brand idea will work the best (mistake #1) without bothering to test brand interactions in other channels (mistake #2). Now why would you test a brand idea through a piece of uni-directional communication with a medium with the least amount of brand interaction? I am too tired to hazard a guess.

Now where did this come from? Why don’t some markters believe in their brand/product ideas anymore, why is communications testing misused for something it can’t really deliver, and why is there a surge of this kind of activity? There are probably a couple of reasons, such as blindly following marketing processes made for yesteryear, or inefficient hierarchies and budget structures, but how about this: maybe it’s the fault of them dang Internet people.

“Huh?” you might proclaim. Well, we all now how hyped up the whole web thing is, and how marketers and agencies (traditional ones, especially) are struggling to understand it, use it, sell it, scrambling to “upgrade their website to web2.0,” generating a plethora of buzzwords like “participative brands” “viral marketing” “user generated content” “behavioral targeting” etc.

You can definitely say that digital technologies have re-written the rules of how people consume and discover, and that the interplay between human behavior and receptivity to marketing has been significantly altered.

Because of this, and because everyone is trying to figure out what to do with the changed media and communications landscape before you, your CMO sends you to a congress on digital marketing and you learn that the “consumer” and traditional advertising” is dead, and that in the brave new world of the Internet, the customer is an active participant, not a passive recipient of branding. So, you (or your digital agency du jour) start coming up with community ideas, widgets, social networking tools and a Second Life Presence for your Brand, with little brand or business strategy behind it. And, this is my point: you even let recruits decide which brand idea you should go with.

Bad idea. How can you be a strong brand if you let them decide what your brand idea is supposed to be?

Just to be clear: by all means let consumers participate in how you can improve brand experiences in all stages of the customer lifecycle from store layout, orientation, information architecture of your digital offering, additive services, hotlines and customer service. Also let them help you improve your product through product testing and observe their true behavior when they interact with your offering at all touchpoints.

However, it is foolish to believe that customer-centricity means allowing people to chose what you need to say in the first place. Customer-centricity and the lore of the empowered consumer cannot be a chicken-hearted way-out of Brand Management, just because we live in a time where the consumer has the last word. Because, so what? You still need to make sure your brand has the first word. People need strong brands to make decisions, not brands that ask them what to be.

Just imagine this: How would you like to go to your doctor and hear this after he examined you: “Well, it looks like you have cancer. Would you like to have your leg amputated or would you like chemo with a lower chance of success?” No matter what you would answer, you’d be tormented by the choice and wonder: “Why didn’t he just propose the best course of action, he’s the doctor!”

Now, this may be a bit drastic as an example, but still: if you ask people what your brand is supposed to say, you are losing the function it has: Guidance and room for identification in a sea of options and choices.

So, all in all, hardly a good way to proceed, I think.

What you really need to come up with effective communications for your brand idea is is brave belief in the idea itself because you believe in the product, your engineers, your employees and your company and because you know it serves your brand strategy and business objectives, and because you have a good idea how it will resonate with consumers in real life. Then you test whether or not you can improve the execution to make sure that the message gets through. This has always been true and is still true whether or not digital technologies have changed consumer behavior. In fact, it’s even more important today to have a strong stance on what a brand is.

Therefore, I believe it’s time for brand balls, because balls is what has been missing.

1. Today, authenticity and brand intimacy is not created through single-minded propositions, it is built through brand interaction, so observe human behavior instead of starting with the brand itself, the category or a marketing toolkit.
2. Being a marketer or agency professional following a marketing process can become quite abstract. Don’t forget you are a consumer yourself and use common sense. It works.
3. The only difference today to 15 years ago is that markets are conversations. Enable your brands to be listeners, but make sure you have a statement with which you can join a market conversation. You don’t want to be a moderator of market conversation, you want to be the driver.

Simple Web design principle: a reminder

I’ve been extremly busy recently, so there have been no posts in a while. I just came across these design principles which are obvious to any expert, but still they are a nice reminder to use as examples for those “digital communication platform discussions” with clients.
(via swissmiss)

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.