After Party: Here’s Who The Oscar Really Went To...

Forget the nominees and the winners. Silver Linings Playbook: Great movie and will have a huge secondary audience. Argo: The plane has left the runway. Beast Of The Southern Wild: Well, maybe you could drive a few more downloads. Django: You already have an installed base in Tarantino fans. The movies that benefitted most from the Academy Awards telecast and surrounding social media buzz are the ones that created the most curiosity. Therefore, they have created the most aftermarket value and deserve the most marketing investment in the days ahead.

So here are the Mark Papia After Party Oscars. The Marks, if you will. I have no categories. Let’s just file them all under “revenue.”

Les Mis: It’s all about timing. I don’t think the Oscar performance from the cast did a lot for getting Les Mis back into theaters or creating secondary market momentum. But Les Mis is long enough and still early enough in its lifecycle to warrant a limited engagement at theaters. If I was marketing Les Mis, I would dominate the review and ratings sites. There’s momentum here. No need to let the car companies take it. Because when I look on movie sites, I see a lot of car ads.

Life Of Pi: “What does it look like?” That has been the driving force behind this movie. It’s still relevant. I would create a campaign that drives awareness of Blu Ray and high-definition downloads. Maybe create an HD mobile ad. Use technology to highlight the technology in the aftermarket.

Lincoln: Daniel Day-Lewis had his wife on one arm and author Doris Kearns Goodwin on the other. I would promote the secondary market release of Lincoln on book review sites, high-end movie blogs (Film Comment) and position it as the history lesson and psychological study that it is.

Bond: The most tweeted name in post-Oscardom was Adele. The show didn’t just help Skyfall (already out for quite some time)... it’s Shirley Bassey-fueled extravaganza put the whole Bond catalog out there. So? Let’s get the catalog out there again. I’d create Bond social media destinations and advertise them, big, across all the movie review sites.

Having spent years working inside the Variety organization, I’ve been to many award shows in Hollywood and, interestingly enough, the After Party usually turns out to be the main event. Given recent developments in the digital market and digital’s dominance when it comes to certain aspects of movie marketing that will likely be the case with this year’s Academy Awards.

The 2013 Academy Awards: A Stage for "What If" Moments

Next Sunday the Academy Awards becomes a stage for the great “what if” moments of the year. What if Argo wins best picture without a director nomination? What if a young girl beats the big girls for best actress?

Pomp and circumstance aside, here’s another great “what if” scenario. What if you were an entertainment marketing executive that took a break from the business five years ago? I mean a real break. Like, off the grid. You took a five-year trek in the Himalayas. And you re-entered the business on Academy Awards night, 2013. I’m going to argue that in terms of movies and opening theatrical movies, not much has really changed. But after that, let's look at three things that would completely shock this poor man or woman:

1.  Viewer sentiment owns the product: The Internet and social media now completely rule everything that happens after the opening weekend. Two of the best picture nominees (Silver Linings, Zero Dark Thirty) rated 90 and above on Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes. Both of those movies don’t fit the Hollywood model at all. Both followed more of an arthouse build strategy.
2. What happens during the ceremony actually resonates. If someone makes an ass of themselves next Sunday night, it will still be talked about a week later. It will be documented a week later. If someone is off the chart charming or gorgeous, it will be all over YouTube for weeks. The actors matter off the stage these days. They prejudice the perception of the film, and as we said, perception is everything.
3. Your secondary market is digital: Whether you want to trot a Les Mis out to a wider amount of screens or if you want to amp up its presence in the secondary markets, digital marketing is option one, and probably option two. That’s because viewer sentiment lives on the review sites like Flixster, and Rotten Tomatoes and on the information sites like IMDB and Yahoo! Movies. If you want to be at the intersection of awareness and judgment, you need to be on these sites.

Other shockers: Billy Crystal is not the host. Ben Affleck has actually become an excellent director and that’s right, people flocked to a biopic about Abraham Lincoln. 

Introducing the Media Property of the Future

I’m about to say something that might be completely uncool. While everybody with access to a keyboard is tweeting and posting about Twitter and Facebook, I’m here to tell you that they are not the media properties of the future. Newspapers are the media property of the future.

Before you write me off as completely insane, hear me out. The key word here is media. I’ve been in print advertising, Internet advertising, advertising media, social media advertising and advertising research. I could say I’ve been in a lot of different media. But it’s time to consider the concept of onemedia. Not social, mobile, Internet, tablet and offline. One media! The properties that are most efficiently poised to embrace and feed this one media are, interestingly enough, newspapers.

Obviously the reason you would call me crazy is the plunge in newspaper print circulation. That’s one way that newspaper content is consumed, and yes, it is on the downturn. I’m going to give you three reasons that this is just a phase in the life of newspapers. These three reasons will show why I believe newspapers are the keystone of the future of media.

Content: One media will depend on two types of content: expert and user-generated. We all have enough user-generated content. But the complexities of global economics, the complete partisan nature of cable news and the ubiquitous nature of UGC are starting to show the need for something more. Everybody has a blog. But not everybody has expertise. Newspapers have the ability to combine both types of content.

Platform: Newspaper content can be served anywhere, anytime, anyplace. I can read the Los Angeles Times online, or in print, in the morning, check my New York Times alerts via mobile at the gym, and then check in with the Wall Street Journal on my tablet device as the market closes. I can comment on stories. I can share them. Look on your Facebook wall today and notice how many posts originate from a newspaper. Do I still sound like I’m crazy?

Commerce: Newspapers are just now starting to find creative and compelling ways to generate newfound, cross-channel revenue, from both local and national markets. Because they are the content, creative and expert engine, they are bringing multi-media programs to market that even include networking events, consumer based industry events (travel, cars. Etc) and other new-content products.

I doubt my thoughts are shared by a lot of Wall Street analysts. But I know they’re shared by a lot of brands, retailers and agencies. Print newspapers may not be preferred by all readers all the time but that doesn’t mean their content has been devalued in any way. It’s a new growth stage for newspapers.One media!

Can Flipboard Revolutionize The Publishing Business?

It just might be the coolest app in a world where cool shows up every minute. It’s so cool that I’ve had conversations lately in which seasoned professionals actually have hypothesized that Flipboard could be the basis for a huge digital content traffic spike, and a platform from which new content can grow. Can it revolutionize the publishing business? It doesn’t need to. Newspapers and magazines will take care of themselves (see my last blog post). And there’s never a silver bullet for a business that has been so radically changed, anyway. Yet, Flipboard is going to be a positive development for print. And here’s why:

Numbers: The last reliable report I heard regarding Flipboard numbers was in mid-December. At that time it was roughly 15 million. It shows the kind of exponential growth that will put it on a track to be a force for tablet devices. Yes, it’s loaded with cool factor. But this cool factor seems to have connected with an insane amount of people who are very thirsty for content. Engagement with the app has increased 10 fold: Users are set to flip more than four billion pages this month, up from the iPad’s monthly average of 650 million.

The Print Mix: Opinion, discovery and photos. Remember photos? Remember news photos? Well, they’re back. Flipboard is a master mix of everything that has been lost in the transition from print to digital. It has shaken the obsession that aggregators have had with blogs that lack expertise and replaced it with an uncanny knack for finding the best-of-the-best by surveying the quirky, newly legit and old establishment of content. And it has great photos!

Business Model: Flipboard is showing every sign of working with publishers to get good content to a tablet audience instead of making readers jump through hoops. Although it started with USA Today, it has had no problem incorporating local content. It has had no problem bringing international content in, as well. It has shown every sign of taking the best from newspapers and magazines to come up with a best-of-breed consumer product. The business model is open, so far.

Bottom line, Flipboard is creating excitement around content, and I can’t remember anything doing that in a long time. Print-to-digital has been a rough run for publishing. I expect digital-to-tablet to be a lot smoother!

From the desk of...

Sellers --

We had a great 2012. How great? I always measure sales team performance against the marketplace. I remember a lot of years in this business when everybody was a genius and everyone was successful mostly because it was hard not to be successful. There was just so much business to be had. But in 2012, it seems like accounts found more reasons to hang on to their money than to spend it. But we gave them reasons. The Internet and its audience gave them reasons. That added up to a great year.

Now we have a very similar playing field. Just because the clock is a week and a few days different than when you last seriously considered generating business, it doesn’t mean the world has changed. It would be nice if it did. But this year will continue to challenge any sales team because budgets are too tight, brand marketers' attitudes are too cautious, and consumer spending hasn’t dramatically recovered enough to change any of those things.

Yet, we need to grow the business. This can, and will, happen. Let’s approach this from a basic “get, keep, and grow” philosophy. “Get” is our business development effort. We will get more new business this year if we present the right advantages to our clients. Start as we always do with our audience. They are engaged, considering purchases, and still finding new ways to interact online. Continue with our ever-expanding ability to target key sections of that audience. You’ll end with an economically efficient way to advertise. Marketers must advertise. They can cut back for a while, but they can’t quit. That’s the basic internet “get” strategy for this year.

Then there are the clients we have already recently attracted. Maybe some of them are considering an even tighter budget for 2010; maybe some of them are on the fence about proportioning their budgets. We need to keep them through a consistent addition of targeting depth and technology. We need to continually show them new advertising technology and execution options. Enhanced targeting? Real-time bidding? These are some of the approaches that can keep a client interested in exploring a bigger budget.

The “keep” element of “get, keep, grow” is really close to a holding pattern. I’d say under 10 percent of our clients fit there. The “grow” strategy is our most important. We need to get into our best clients and find ways to get them to use more properties, consider bigger audience segments, test more products and in short, spend more money. I have rarely seen any client spend more money on Internet marketing and come away dissatisfied. Challenge them to grow. Challenge them to look at the audience that goes unaddressed.

A lot of sales has to do with attitude. Not a false aggression, but an attitude of confidence. Anyone that intelligently sells a quality internet product should have that confidence this year. It might not be a new year in terms of economic conditions. But it is a new start for a confident approach.

Closing The Loop On Today’s Multi Media Campaigns

It’s a buzz word older than Marshall McLuhan. Multi-media has had many lives in this business. But it has never lost its importance. Running campaigns across different media has been proven to be a huge boost since the days of Mad Men. I still don’t know why smart brands have failed to close the loop on them.

First, let me qualify. At Yahoo in 2001 -- as the chief architect of the wildly successful Pepsistuff.com promotion -- I loved seeing, up close and first hand, how a multi media ad campaign could bring life to CRM initiatives for top brands like Pepsi and Mountain Dew. In the name of customer relationship marketing, the team at PCNA used every ad opportunity – TV, digital, radio, print, outdoor, in-store, even the labels of its bottles -- to push traffic to a single online destination: pepsistuff.yahoo.com. There, consumers were enrolled in a point-based loyalty program and marketed to with kit gloves. Pepsistuff.com was a game-changing event during a somewhat-turbulent time in the history of the digital market.

Why am I thinking about this stuff now? Am I just getting old and feeling nostalgic? Nah! I’m thinking about it now because, today, multi media is still the goal. Not only are we seeing new and exciting ways to activate digital, broadcast, radio and print campaigns, but most of the creative we are seeing today, cross platform, is deeply integrated. TV ads are promoting YouTube partner channels, radio ads are pushing people to Facebook pages and print ads often spotlight websites, Twitter and Facebook pages and QR codes. Many researchers are also bringing more elaborate tools to the party to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of these multi media campaigns.

With multi media campaigns being activated at a feverish pace, with creative executions being integrated like never before and with research studies proving the efficacy of these programs what is left for marketers to do? Marketers need to cross promote every single ad, they need to drive consumers to a single online destination and they need to close the loop. Many marketers are already using their TV, radio and print ads to push consumers to their website or Facebook page but many are not. I am looking at a Rolex ad, under the banner Live For Greatness that features singer Diana Krall. The ads copy actually begins with the line “Her stories come from within.” Surprisingly, there is no link to “her stories.” How easy would it have been for Rolex to drive potential consumers to the Diana Krall Partner Channel on YouTube, or to the Diana Krall fan page on Facebook, or to cross promote with an event on Pandora. Opportunity lost.

Here are some examples of great multimedia campaigns that cross promote and drive consumers online where CRM programs can be launched or expanded upon. The new Best Western TV ad campaign where the creative is built around the screen of a tablet. The consumer is taken through the value of the online destination by following the point of a finger. The ad fades-to-black with the words “our lowest rates are always at BestWestern.com.” The newest Chase Ink ad is another good example where the TV creative prominently features a smart phone app in action. The TV commercial fades-to-black with the words “learn more at Chase.com/Ink.” Honda is doing a nice job pushing consumers to the web with their new Honda CRV “leaplist” campaign. Prominently featured is the all-important call to action: “Make your leaplist at leaplist.honda.com.”

Advertising Equals Sales Lift: Sometimes It Does...

As long as advertising has existed media people have sought guarantees that advertising equals sales lift. As you know, sometimes it does... and sometimes it doesn’t.

The recent excitement behind online video is bringing the topic center stage again. I would love to prove, without a doubt, that online video ads lead to sales lift. In fact, I would love to quantify that online advertising of any kind produce lift, but there are no guarantees in this world. There are always the uncontrolled factors of price competition, consumer distraction, and media diffraction. Lift is achievable, however.

Thinking it through... if a CPG campaign, or most any campaign for that matter, does achieve measurable lift, it results from a combination of six things:

1. Retail participation: It may be possible that single channel lift can result from online ads. Brands do control more of this in the e-commerce universe. But more often than not a brand needs to show retailers that they have a stake in this game. Trade promotions, co-op, and foot traffic drivers all play in here.

2. Multi-channel planning: I think this is the biggest change in CPG lift coordination. Marketing directors and VPs can aim for the proper percentage lift using a combination of Internet metrics from open rates, impressions, registration, and coupon redemptions. In so doing they can inform planning of their campaigns from inventory to fill rates.

3. Targeting and audience customization: Certain audience segments are going to be more valuable and more important to providing lift. Digital marketing is the most efficient way to accomplish that.

4. Sales and marketing coordination: Media companies must work closely with brands as they plan for major campaigns. On the brand side, any company that expects an ad or promotional campaign to result in substantial lift needs coordination on their side of the street. Nothing focuses sales and marketing teams like data. Media partners can provide data on customer trends, retail trends and shifting audience composition.

5. Media: Media pulls the product through. Yes, it can be the most important part of achieving lift. I don’t think Internet marketing on its own can drive lift. But it can be number one on the priority list.

6. Optimization: Here’s the nightmare if a CPG company is planning on even a one percent sales lift. What if it’s not working? Here digital marketing has no peer. It can be adjusted. None of the preceding five elements can.

When a client asks me for that sales lift guarantee, I always ask what that client’s goals are. Inevitably I’ll hear that they want a particular sales increase to coincide with their campaign. But unless I can control the other five elements, I can’t look that client in the eye and promise anything but the best audience. And that, by the way, is not a bad place to start.

Theories, postulates and hypotheses!

Dunbar’s Number! It is absolutely incredible to me how much this latest academic theory has been discussed and even more incredible how much it is being misunderstood. Basically, it says social media users can “entertain a maximum of 100 to 200 stable relationships” in a social network.

The misinterpretations and exaggerations of this “number” are worth any marketer’s attention. First, it is not a cap on any kind of social media marketing -- it is not a limitation to social media interaction or engagement in any way. And second, if every one of us does, in fact, have 150 close friends in us that’s a pretty impressive number.

Here’s some background for those unfamiliar with Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number first appeared on the scene in 2004… it was put forth by Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University College of London. Based on his studies of primates, brain size and other social cues, he hypothesized that the largest sustainable social network was 147 people. Dunbar’s Number was a big part of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point.

Its most recent appearance comes from a paper published a few weeks ago by the Cornell University Physics Department. That’s right, physics. Not marketing and not engineering. It studied six months of Twitter conversations involving 1.7 million individuals. “We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar's prediction,” says the Cornell group. “The ‘economy of attention’ is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar's theory. Inspired by this empirical evidence we propose a simple dynamical mechanism, based on finite priority queuing and time resources, that reproduces the observed social behavior.”

Dang. Are you telling me I’m wasting 1,100 or so people I’ve connected with on Facebook? What about my 900-plus connections on LinkedIn? Are they suggesting that all peer-to-peer influence is limited to 150 people?

No, they're not. Dunbar’s Number is great debate fodder -- a lot of fun over dinner and drinks. But let’s be clear about what it is and what it isn’t. It is an academic theory, and a scientific study. It is therefore somewhat limited in the real world. It doesn’t account for that social media event, such as Charlie Sheen’s moment in the cybersun and it doesn’t account for “super users.” As brands come to social media more for event-oriented marketing, and promotions that encourage short-term engagement, they are reaching an audience. A huge, engaged audience. The amount of friends each individual can influence and attract is secondary to that total audience. Dunbar is relegated to an anthropological study, not a marketing limitation.

Let’s play the other side of that card. Let’s accept Dunbar as cash money. Let’s accept that the best any member of a social media network can influence, or even stay in touch with, is 147 people. You would also, then, have to accept that every member of a social media network has the potential to add 147 impressions to any media buy. Does Dunbar’s Number mean social media impressions are worth 147 times their stated value?

As I said, great debate fodder. Here’s what I know.  Social media is being measured in exponential terms. I don’t really care if the right number is 14, 147, or 14,700. The right approach is exponential. Social media network members interact all over the media world, and very often the social network is the hub of their activity. Dunbar’s Number, right or wrong, centers the debate on how big the social network can be.

Most likely the right number changes with each person and with each reason for social interactions. I like the fact that Dunbar has us all talking numbers. Let’s not forget however, that there are people in those numbers -- a lot of people!

Merchants: A Most Vital Contributor To The Digital Ecosystem

As my plane lands in Minneapolis – home of Best Buy and Target Corporation – I have retail on my mind.

I have loved retail for as long as I can remember. I loved watching the guys at Best Buy merchandise home theaters back in the mid-80s when I was the Retail Editor of Thomson’s Consumer Electronics magazine. My love for retail only grew when I became publisher of Reed Business Information’s retail magazines Video Business and Video Software in the early-90s. Target’s entry into home video certainly had a profound effect on that business. The thing I love most about retail is how retailers innovate… and e-tailers are no different from their brick and mortar brethren.

As I have been traveling the country and talking to merchants the past few weeks I have grown excited to learn that merchants are, as usual, on the cutting edge of things. Merchants, from Target to Best Buy, from Sears to Gilt Group, from RueLaLa to Toys ‘R’ Us, are in many ways leading the charge when it comes to many things digital – including social, mobile, video, data and analytics, and audience and ad targeting. This is exciting to me for two reasons: First and foremost, merchants will be looking to innovate across the Internet during the third quarter and into the critical fall/holiday sales season as the economy continues to improve. Second, as merchants continue to realize success online around social, mobile, video and other digital opportunities, that success will be talked about and analyzed by marketers in every business under our sun.

Here are some things to watch for from our Merchant friends over the next several months…

In Social – Merchants will start communicating. Merchants will move beyond listening mode and begin to use information gathered from Google Alerts, Social Mention and HootSuite to make their ad campaigns more relevant and interesting to their customers.

In Mobile – Merchants will begin to mine data exclusively from mobile shoppers, and the mobile shopping experience, and use that information to fine-tune their mobile offerings. More mobile-specific, customer information will further enhance the mobile shopping experience.

In Video – Merchants will create much more sophisticated SEO campaigns. More specifically, they will take YouTube marketing and video optimization to the next level. And they will strive to not only rank well on YouTube result pages but also in Google’s main web results via universal search.

In Data and Analytics – Merchants will take advantage of enhanced site analytics programs. These programs will continue to improve the shopping experience for consumers. In addition, merchants, especially multichannel retailers, will do a better job tracking customer behavior across all touch points.

Audience and Ad Targeting – Merchants will rely, quite heavily, on audience-targeting ad technologies as a means to get the right ad, in front of the right person, at the right time.  Many will see audience targeting as a complement to more traditional targeting, while others find it to be an efficient and effective alternative.

Merchants are a most vital part of our digital ecosystem. Let’s not forget Pizza Hut sold the first pizza online in 1993 – a pepperoni and mushroom with extra cheese… and that was a full year before the Yahoo brand was born and 2 years before EBay was launched.

Setting Expectations In A World Of Infinite Possibilities!

Lewis Black has a very funny bit on his last standup special. Lots of funny bits actually, but I’m picking the one he does on expectations for my purposes here. “The economy is down, the housing market is down, and we all just need to lower our expectations,” he says. “In fact, we need to lower them about 25 percent.”

I’m not about to suggest we lower our expectations for digital marketing. The possibilities are still infinite. But I do want to address the concept of expectations especially in regard to social media. And it was more than a Lewis Black rant that got me going. I saw a Harvard Business Review study last week that showed 79% of the 2,100 companies surveyed are either using or planning to use social media channels, but only 12% of those firms feel that they are using them effectively. Forty-five percent say they’re “getting there.” Forty three percent say they’re ineffective.

Now to me those numbers are completely unacceptable. It means most companies have not moved beyond the grudging “have to be there, everybody else is” kind of attitude. As a business we need to take this conversion from “getting there” to “effective” seriously. For me these attitudes speak to a lack of clarity in social media goals. They speak to unmanaged expectations. We need to recast those in order to push the “getting there” companies over the hump. Let me put four ideas on the table:

1. Expect different results from a 30-60-and 90-day approach. Seems to me that big companies want immediate results from social media efforts. In some ways they should get short-term results. Let’s say a company redesigns its website, marketing and messaging to move customers toward social media. They should expect that within 30 days that a target number of people engage. But that’s where they stop. If the 30-day results don’t meet expectations, the initiative is deemed ineffective. Set expectations for 60 and 90 days, and correlate marketing activities behind it, and companies will have more realistic expectations.

2. Expect to move toward a CPG approach. I’m fascinated by the latest P&G approach. They have moved very quickly from branding and information-based community toward a couponing and e-commerce based approach. This ties directly into an overall CPG retail promotional approach. No different from the Budweiser, Pepsi, or Coke holiday themed attack plans we’ve seen for years. Promotions on social media will have different ROI and different conversion metrics. Again, all about expectations. But I doubt P&G still feels like it’s “getting there” on social media.

3. Expect specific behaviors from your community. Do you expect to be part of the conversation? Do you expect higher engagement? Expect both of these things and more. I would counsel companies to focus on customer segments here. Focus on the humanity. Expect good numbers, but expect to follow the humanity behind them.

4. Expect to revisit the community you create. And here’s the final point to make. The community you create becomes a community that must be maintained. Expect that you will have to maintain a community with offers and information. Social media depends on effort. It’s not a set and forget media.

If we really believe social media is the hub of all digital marketing and, perhaps, even all customer strategy, we might have no bigger challenge. I certainly believe -- and I expect all my clients will too!

Internet Advertising: Suffering A Sales Crisis.

As the head of a digital sales team, and a sales guy from back-in-the-day when print ruled my world, it’s hard for me to say it, but, here’s how I see it -- At a time when the Internet as a media has not taken advantage of a complete advertising breakdown in newspapers and magazines, we, as digital publishers, have largely failed. Think about it! We haven’t taken big share points. We haven’t converted that huge client to shift all their money to the Web. We haven’t had that defining moment, or tipping point, that shows the Internet as the dominant consumer attention getter.

What I hear too much about, and what is endemic to the problem here, is technology. There is no shortage of technology. The fact is, targeting technologies are ahead of most publishers' ability to use them and keep pace with them. Good technology does not equal a good sales effort and a poor sales effort will lead to a lack of customer and user satisfaction with the technology they use. That's what this industry is seeing right now. We have technologies that are very sophisticated and very complicated. But sales teams are providing only the features of the technology. The benefits and user advantages are on the back burner. When the benefits and advantages are presented, how to execute to ensure success is often not covered.

The core problem is in strategy. Technology providers talk about implementation and code. This is a great example of the devil being in the detail. Take, for example, the whole movement towards the use of remarketing pixels for targeting purposes. It would shock you how many companies talk to me about remarketing and fail to think about the look-back period that ties to that remarketing opportunity. My job is to convince marketers that remarketing is not, necessarily, the best use of the medium... and a remarketing opportunity is only as good as the analytics behind it. For instance, marketers who are not weighing remarketing bid prices for different look-back windows are probably leaving money on the table.

The next problem is tactics. Salespeople are the vehicle for tactics. If sellers don't know the ins-and-outs of technology, publishing platforms and reader preference research they will not know the proper tactics to suggest and then follow up on. Reaching the right audience, especially when we're talking about 162 million people, is not a “set and forget” process. This is not a ghost in the machine. There's a person in there.

Basic behavioral and audience targeting is a good technology to focus on. It is exactly where the consumer is; it is exactly where a good publisher has always been.  But let’s look at three improvements any sales team can make, and what I want to focus on at the Fox Audience Network:

• Sell the medium: As I alluded to earlier it is not technology we sell, it is a medium. Behavioral and audience targeting is fascinating, without a doubt. But unless a sales team can get a media planner to understand that it delivers a relevant and valuable audience it does no good. Save the technology discussions for beers after work. The internet delivers customers.
• Become a source of information: We try to keep clients up to speed on changes in our content, network composition and anything else that comes into our stream of research. If a sales team can maintain its status as a source of trusted information, it integrates with an agency or brand side client on an important level. That’s relationship selling. 
• Play as a team. Gone are the days when information is horded among sales silos. A team should have at least a reasonably consistent message about content, audience, and data. Every player gets to put his or her own spin on it, but don’t let each team member act like they keep a set of data behind a firewall. It's very important to play as a team when so many deals happen so quickly. 

I don’t by any means short sell technology. It has its place in any sales and marketing presentation. But I’m a cheerleader for the Internet as a medium that delivers customers.

Oooh, What a Lucky Man He Was…

As a group publisher at Cap Cities/ABC in the 1990s, I reported to, and often times sat across the desk from, an SVP who had a tattered and torn, black and white piece of paper taped to the wall just behind his desk. The paper read: “Luck travels in the wake of careful planning and hard work!” Many iMedia Connection readers are smiling right now, because for years the people who have worked for me at XGraph, and FOX Interactive, and Yahoo, and Reed, have heard me speak those very words.

I have always felt like a lucky man -- in no small part, because I always plan carefully and work hard. But today I am feeling particularly lucky. Today, I got my hands on the IBM Global C-Suite Study: From Stretched to Strengthened. A majority of the report deals with “The Digital Ocean” and the Chief Marketing Officer’s challenge to deal with it. “The Digital Ocean” is the vast, quantities of data that exist today and the challenge of intercepting it and interpreting it to find the meaningful parts. I have been talking about “The Digital Ocean” at XGraph for the past year. Very few CMOs are leveraging the data assets that exist today because of their inability to take charge of the volume, velocity and variety of the data. As a result, most CMOs still focus on markets rather than people and transactions rather than relationships.

According to the report, among the top sources of concern for CMOs today is (1) the Data Explosion, (2) Social Media and (3) Channel Growth, including expansion into Mobile and Tablets. That’s right -- the top three concerns that CMOs have today live expressly and exclusively within the digital marketing universe! And CMOs aren’t somewhat concerned about these issues they’re deeply concerned, with nearly 3 out of every 4 (71%) of CMOs saying they are “unprepared” for the Data Explosion. 68% and 65% of CMOs say they are “unprepared” to manage Social Media and Channel Growth opportunities, respectively. The CMOs also ranked Big Data, Social Media and Channel Growth as concerns that could be most disruptive. They concluded, Data, Social and Channel Growth were the areas most likely to cause the biggest impact-to-market over the next five years.

So why do I feel like a lucky man today? Over the next 24 months, CMOs will be looking to experts in Big Data, Social Media and new Channel Development to figure much of this stuff out. That makes people who have a specialty in each of these areas invaluable -- and lucky!

Social Media: A Huge Influencer But It's Not Advertising

I read a dangerous quote recently from a truly reliable source. It came from McKinsey Quarterly actually: “The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered the balance of power between companies and consumers. As consumers have become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about products."

Dang. Have we really come this far?

The article makes the case that consumers may have gone in this direction. But I need to take issue with the premise. I’m in the information-driven ad business. If I meet with you or your company I want you to know that the possible margin of error between your marketing our audience and your success is minimal. It would be easy for me to very simply say that knowledge is power as so many companies seem to be saying these days. It would be easy to say that advertising to the right audience segment would allow you to take a long lunch or even move on to the social media dominance McKinsey suggests. But it’s not the case. Social media is a huge purchase influencer and a huge reputation machine. But it’s not advertising.

Traditional company advertising has become more effective in my estimation since social media has come to the fore. There’s still an art and science to communicating the right image and the right message to the right audience. I don’t see major retailers like WalMart, or major CPGs like Coke or Pepsi or innovative car companies like VW using social media exclusively -- it’s part of an integrated advertising plan… it’s driven by advertising... it’s creative... and it’s verified by data.

It’s useful to know that consumers are “increasingly unaffected” by advertising. But it’s all the more reason to be more innovative. Because I would argue that the right consumers will always be affected by the right advertising.

Data Responsibility: It's Still Job One!

There’s a part of me that thinks Facebook’s mea culpa earlier this month was most admirable. You could, and should, give Mark Zuckerberg kudos for acting quickly to reverse some bad decisions on the “Like” program and the virtual takeover of shared data.

From a sales perspective, I continue to stress to clients that Internet targeting, as we know it in all its forms, can be very effectively executed without the amount of personal data that Facebook, MySpace and other sites collect and use. I don’t think a major CPG advertiser, for example, is limited by targeting “moms who use coupons and shop for groceries three times a week.” That kind of non-personal profiling gives any company access to a campaign that will achieve superior ROI. Can that CPG company do better with names, addresses, birthdays, and names of friends? I don’t think so. That CPG company would certainly be limited by targeting only “moms.” That’s a big universe that has been defined in a far more scientific fashion.

This business has reached a tipping point with consumers because of the Facebook overreach and the Google wifi data grab. It’s unfortunate, because I do believe that responsible use of personally identifiable information will help consumers become smarter and more economically efficient when it comes to couponing, financial services and even government operations. According to the Pew Internet Project, for example, 40% of adult internet users have gone online for raw data about government spending and activities. But the events of the past month will understandably put consumers on guard.

For brand advertisers, its time to keep the momentum when it comes to targeting. I’ve always said that if consumers saw one day of the Internet experience without any targeting technology, they would be so disappointed with the irrelevant content and advertising that they would want the targeting back in a hurry. That momentum for right now needs to be with behavioral targeting rather than a blind run to gather as much personal information as possible.

It’s also important right now to restore consumer confidence. Data breaches will be magnified now. Data responsibility, while using it for good business purposes, is still job one.

Privacy Concerns and The Web Experience

I was unhappy but not surprised last month that the coalition led by the Center for Digital Democracy has petitioned the FTC to be more aggressive about behavioral targeting and real-time bidding. All due respect to the people and organizations that intend to protect consumer privacy, but there is one main point that they have all wrong. Behavioral targeting via current ad technologies is not out to stalk anyone. It is not out to collect irrelevant and compromising information. It is not out to do anything but collect enough relevant behavioral and demographic information to improve the web experience.

Now, I know I have a prejudice here. Behavioral targeting is my business. Most people in this business understand its power. But sometimes I find it hard to articulate to prospects and even friends outside the business. But I put it to a friend who’s not in the business this way: Imagine a web experience without ad targeting. The news site you check in the morning would be filled with completely irrelevant products and messages. The pages you visit on blogs and more specific interest sites would have ads that don’t match the content. I think the general internet public would notice it quickly.

The problem with privacy on the Internet has much more to do with content than advertising. The progress we need to make as a business depends on content privacy. We need to know that medical information that might be entered via insurance companies and even within doctor and patient relationships is tightly locked. The college student that uses a central server for a term paper or independent research needs to be confident that he or she is calling the shots as to who sees it and when.

Here’s the key difference that we need to convey to clients. My company may have enough information to know that a customer is interested in a second mortgage. But we don’t know that they need that mortgage to pay some medical bills. That would be an invasion of privacy. We know that a customer is interested in home care for an elderly relative, but we don’t know anything about that elderly relative.

I see behavioral targeting as an Internet experience booster. The way I look at it, you only know as much about me as I want you to know. The Internet is no different.

Marketing Brawls and The Battle Of The *Business* Brands

I love to compete in business. I’ve been fortunate throughout my career to be with good companies and good teams, and most of the time I face quality competitors. I love to watch competitors outside of business. Love the Lakers, love the superstars that come to town and try to knock them off. Now lately I see some business competition that is decidedly gloves off. My concern is that the consumer doesn’t lose. Here’s what I’m talking about. During the fourth quarter of last year and into this year you saw DirecTV and the Dish Network go toe-to-toe. But here’s the problem. Sateliite programming needs work, it is getting work, and it is a limiting factor in customer satisfaction. So regardless of who gained marketshare, who won?

The key to marketing brawls is in the foundation of excellence. If you’re going to have it out in the marketplace make sure the consumer wins as a result. When Coke and Pepsi come back to their occasional taste test strategy everyone wins. Everyone drinks more cola because the product is appealing and solid at the base. The few hundredths of a percentage points gained in marketshare don’t matter as much as the fact that everyone is talking cola.

Now get ready for a really big brawl. The Wall Street Journal is coming after The New York Times. And the Times will come after The Journal. There’s a lot at stake here. The Times is getting ready to set up online pay walls while WSJ.com is based on subscriptions. The Journal is going to be a part of the Fox Business channel and it has an opportunity to damage the fortunes of Bloomberg’s brand. This will be fun to watch. Everybody has a good game so the strategy is sound. Hopefully the end result is people consuming more business news. It’s kind of like the Final Four of business news. But no “maybe next year” for the loser.

ABC -- Easy As... One, Two, Three

I like what the Audit Bureau of Circulations did this week. In fact, I like it a lot. As a mainly print entity the ABC was on the verge of irrelevance. Anyone in print publishing would either look forward to or rue the day when ABC quarterly statements showed up. It showed whether people were at least requesting your content, and at best, whether they were paying for it. I mean, what advertiser would advertise in a magazine that lacked a quality circulation?

As you can see that question has become a bit hollow in the digital world. As an industry we’ve come up with a lot of different ways of measuring readership and performance. Some of those methods are great, such as those driven by targeting technology. Some are not so great, like reach and frequency. But the ABC kind of back-to-basics measurements are needed right now. They’re needed because content sites that focus on one main property, like most newspapers and magazines, need to compete on fair grounds. The ABC has been working on some kind of audience subscription and measurement for about a year. It could have come back with something vague, which would have been organizational suicide. But it didn’t.

What it did was modify its definition of a digital magazine. Specifically: “a replica digital edition must include a print edition's full editorial content and advertising, but it no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine's circulation guarantee, or rate base.”

The board encouraged publishers planning new e-reader editions or mobile apps to seek ABC evaluation if they would like clarification on qualification and reporting of their digital editions. It also gave initial approval to create new U.S. reports that better reflect a newspaper's total audience across a range of products. So newspapers and magazines can add e-reader distribution, mobile app purchases, total paid and verified circulation from multiple newspaper products, including branded print editions associated with the flagship newspaper. These circulations will be detailed in the report and totaled with all circulation.

So digital content entities can show who’s paying, on what platform and who’s not paying. It’s up to the advertiser to decide the value attached. That sounds to me like a level playing field and one where the strongest content will win. As print publishing moves online, individuality will become more important. The New York Times will not survive on line as part of a network buy. Neither will WSJ.com, SI.com, or GQ.com. The ABC just did them, and themsleves, a big service.

"Drowning In Data?" I Don't Think So!

Shoe leather and a nice tie. That’s what media sales used to be all about. You worked real hard, traveled, presented yourself nicely, talked a nice line. That’s what sold print contracts or even some other media before sales and marketing made it a fact-based process. Now that fact-based approach is starting to show some interesting signs of reconsideration. I don’t think Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was bemoaning that her company was “drowning in data” a couple of weeks ago, but she did use that phrase. Now I see even the medical profession is having a bit of a problem with the amount of data it has gathered. According to The New York Times on March 8, “statistical tools simply haven’t kept up with the massive amounts of data researchers now have access to. In medical (and economic) research, scientists claim a “statistically significant” finding if there’s a less than 5% chance that an observed pattern (between coffee and liver disease, for example) occurred at random. In the new age of data, that rule causes problems.”

Wow. Do we have too much data for our own good?

The short answer is no. I can identify with Carol Bartz, who was actually referring to a WalMart promotion that generated millions of responses. We’ve hosted and executed several such campaigns, and I still maintain that there’s no bad data, only bad analysis. Let me use the following example to illustrate.

Let’s say a CPG company runs a banner campaign promoting a sweepstakes on 10 different websites. The campaign has a reach of 20 million unique users. Now let’s say one million of those unique users completes a registration form to enter the sweepstakes, complete with permission for the CPG company to contact them with future marketing messages and offers. The number can seem to be overwhelming in some ways because now your sweepstakes is harder to administrate. But this huge amount of data does three things for the relationship between content provider and client. They are:

1. Strengthens client relationship. When we execute a successful customer data based campaign, I can’t wait to see that client again. There are so many innovative things a sales team can do to follow up with a client that has found that the Internet is still a customer and targeting based gold mine.

2. Takes focus off CPM and CPA. When a content company and agency or brand discuss customer data, less relevant metrics like last click attribution and “who gets the lowest CPM” find their proper perspective.

3. Updates targeting capabilities. When a client sees its database grow, the content company has to point out that it just gained a new ability to target the customers it finds truly valuable.

Let’s go back to the CPG sweepstakes. The CPG company doesn’t have to follow up with the entire one million new data points – it can slice and dice. If its next promotion is aimed at large households, it can target women, head of household, more than six people. One CMO told me, at the IAB Annual last month in San Diego, that his CPG company now has five different mom targets because of the diversity in his product mix. Bottom line, when it comes to generating data, it’s all good. It certainly makes being a sales professional a lot easier.