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.