First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

As stories go, that wasn’t very exciting. There is something missing. Lets try that story again and see if we can make it better.

Once upon a time in a kingdom far away, there was a mighty river. This river was the sole water source for the kingdom, and had been flowing for generations. One day the water stopped flowing, and the king summoned the bravest knight in the kingdom to the castle, Sir Steve the Noble. The King dispatched Sir Steve to go up the dry river bed to find out what had happened. Sir Steve traveled for days and nights until finally finding that a dam had been built by non other than the Duke of Darkness. The dam was guarded by hoards of the Dukes minions. Sir Steve, knowing that his chances for victory we’re slim, charged ahead into battle without hesitation. Sir Steve knew that without water, the kindly village people of the kingdom would suffer. With the faces of the village children pictured in his mind, Sir Steve battled through the minions until there was no one left standing except for himself, and the Duke. There, in the middle of the dam, an epic battle raged between the Noble knight and the evil Duke. Back an forth the swords flew, only to be stopped still with a clang as it landed on armor and shield. For hours the battle between the two men raged, until with the last of his strength, Sir Steve struck the fatal blow to the Duke of Darkness. With the villain gone, and the safety of the kingdom in hand, Sir Steve destroyed the dam and the kingdom lived happily ever after.

Ok, so I’m not much of epic story writer, but I think its clear the second attempt was much better than the first. Both stories have the same set up an the same conclusion, but the second allow the reader to become more emotionally invested in the outcome for two reasons. 1.) There was a villain; and 2.) Details about what the protagonist is thinking and feeling. The addition of the villain gives the audience something to focus its attention, and disdain on. A good protagonist is one that the audience can either identify with, or at least root for. The audience needs to get on the side of the stories lead, and in order to do that, you need to know why the protagonist is doing what he’s doing.

So much of marketing today is about story telling. The story could be  about the founding of an organization, or the triumph of a product. To get the idea across to the audience, its going to take more than the  just the facts. Look at the story your telling. Who is the protagonist, and what is the conflict? What is at stake, and who is the conflict with? Why should the user care, and how do you get them on the side of your protagonist? How much story is in your story?

The traditional view of value was utilitarian, or to put it another way, what I can do with a thing. This is what leads to bullet points of features on the sides of packaging, and cramming a clock onto every electronic appliance because “it can be done”. There are at least 5 clocks in my kitchen.   There are types of value to consider, like emotional and psychological. With current car designs, we can only get so many horse power out of the motor before the car itself cannot handle it. This creates a ceiling on what we do to further the power a car can provide, but the feeling you get driving your dream car provides value that has little to do with the limitation of our engineering.

Providing value is relative, so learning what type of value you provide has more  to do with your success  than your manufacturing capabilities. What need do you fulfill and/or what are the needs that your target market has? The value you provide is what matches you with your customers, not the industry you are in. This is why listening is such an important yet underrated part of business. Social media is a good tool for this, but often we find people trying to hard to talk (old sales and marketing stuff). Apple is notorious for not being involved directly in social media, but you can bet they listen, and its working for them.

What do you think?

A similar debate (again started by an advertising magazine article, only this time it was from AdWeek) reared its ugly head on the cross-posted podcast for Jaffe Juice / Six Pixels of Separation. It’s a very good listen, so I encourage you to check it out, but at the end of the show, much like the comment stream on the afore mentioned Ad Age article, there was no real resolution. From my perspective on both debates, what seems to really be the linch pin here is the lack of a standard vocabulary or lexicon to accurately describe this space. If you polled 100 people on what marketing was or meant you would undoubtedly find so many different responses you would wonder where everyone was the day they taught us that in school. Or did they? More on this in a further post, but for now lets get back to idea at hand.

One of the biggest computers of any industry is the ignorance of the market. When the market, or at least portion of it doesn’t know the definitions of all these words then it only makes sense that there will be confusion. Even if the industry gets it, so many people don’t that it all gets confused. Choosing an agency should not be done by what they are called but what they can do for you. Of course every business has different needs, but good agencies that assist in creating a solid strategy and excellent execution have a better chance to get a company where it wants to go than what it says on their business card. So if you don’t know what to call it, how do you find the right agency? Look for results. Ask the agencies on your short list about their past successes and how they reach their decisions. If you don’t have a short list, and don’t know where to start, find work that has achieved good results, call the business owner and ask them who they use. Forget the names and labels and go for results.

There is a prevailing myth that being “professional” means to be “boring”. Businesses suffer from this idea that doing something risky is risky. It’s been said before that the only risky thing to do is to play it safe, and the safe thing to do is be risky. To be noticed, do something worth noticing. To be remembered, do something memorable. Doing the same thing as your competition but “better” is usually not memorable. The “better” that many businesses are defining themselves by are usually things that doesn’t effect the customer or are completely missed by the customer  because they are not  knowledgeable enough in the industry to know whats better and what isn’t. If the customer can’t see it, or doesn’t understand it, they won’t remeber it.

Do something different. Give your brand some character. You are different than your competition, so look, act and be different. Don’t try to bury the personality of your brand in “professionalism”. Jingles are silly and corny, all the things a professional isn’t supposed to be. They also work. A rubber duck doesn’t have much to do with real estate, but customers remember it. Just ask Rick Miner from Duckin.com.  Have some fun. Be different. Be memorable.

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

The skills that it takes to make a good TV campaign and a good digital (web) campaign are very different. With TV you have writers, directors, production crews and a whole slew of technical knowledge on how to operate a camera, capture good audio and the best way to frame a shot that can take many years to learn and become effective at. In digital you have the same scenario with specialized knowledge about user experience, human computer interaction, markup and programming that isn’t found in other mediums. Because of these vast difference in technical knowledge its easy to see why there aren’t many professional service firms that can offer world class solutions in every medium. Even if you could find one, the overhead of that business would be huge just from employing such a vast labor pool that their fee structure would be out of reach for most business owners.

In years past, the concept of who should be the “lead” agency has seen a fair share of heated debate. Some say it should be the advertising guys because of their knowledge of consumers and generating the “Big Idea”. Some say it should be the PR folks because they understand how to communicate best. There has even been speculation from some of the largest advertising trade magazines that it should be the digital agencies because they have the audience and ability to track behavior better than any other discipline. At the end of the day its still not clear who the winner of this debate should be, or that there ever should or could be a clear winner. This argument does illustrate that, if nothing else, there is no agreed upon right answer.

Somewhere in the combination of the widely varying difference in skill sets from one media to another and the murky uncertainty as to who is best suited to try and work it all out, this makes creating a successful fully integrated campaign a problem of organization just as much as it is strategy. The responsibility of creating a successful endeavor falls upon the client. Over the next few years expect to see more movement as the disrupted industries of marketing and communication learn to deal with  the new digital world. It seems that on top of everything else that a client side marketing manager or CMO has on their plate a whole new level of technical complexity will now be required. This will result in either larger in house marketing staff on the client side, new planning positions on the client side to offset the need for a lead agency or a change in the agency world to take into account the new required disciplines.

I’m not sure how this will all work out, but perhaps a good idea is for both clients and agencies to ponder “what isn’t digital anymore.” Perhaps the digital agencies will go away as it becomes less of an ancillary discipline and is absorbed into business as usual, or perhaps the digital agencies will win out as they acquire the relevant knowledge traditional housed at the Advertising and PR firms. Can you hear it? Its the winds of change.

Its good to keep in mind that through all the innovation that have occurred in media, new media hasn’t killed old media. This seems to still hold true, at least according to the latest report on the 3 screens from Nielson. The report about the “3 screens” (1st screen – tv, 2nd screen – computer / internet, 3rd screen – mobile devices / phones) has a few nice tidbits of information that should have you stop and think before you call up your traditional media advertising agency and cancel your account.

While the report does show some growth for the digital channels (online video is up about 35%) and the new ( sort of ) time shifing technology (DVR usage is up about 21%) it also shows that 99% of video consumed in America was done on traditional TV.  The report also shows that the “older” demographics are increasing their consumption of all media types (I have a hard time classifying 35 year-olds as “older”). So basically you can reach nearly all demographics using online channels, but the kicker here is that you can still reach 99% of the video viewers on good old traditional un-time shifted TV.

Whats really going here is two trends that keep growing year over year: 1.) we are consuming more media, and 2.) we multi-task media. According to this report “Americans consume media at a record pace – 129 hrs of TV, 27 hrs of Internet, 3 hrs of mobile video each month”. According to these numbers, we spend just about as much time interacting with video content as we do sleeping every month. The growth numbers we see for the online and mobile channels are not coming out of people’s TV time, but are in addition too them. We are still a nation of TV watchers, but we also do it online and from our phones. This seems reasonable. When I got my iPhone I started to read my Google reader from it and checking my twitter feed resulting in my “usage” of those things to increase, but not at the expense of my other media habits.

The trend of multi-tasking media is not much of a surprise either. Working from home sometimes ( read  – all the time ) means digging through clients analytics looking for insight from the couch on my laptop while House is playing on TV. I just love his snarky humor. According to this report, its not just me.

Seth Goden called it out over a decade ago in “Permission Marketing” – while permission marketing is the goal, we will always have the need to interrupt people to get them to raise their hand to sign up.  The first part of any sales or marketing funnel is awareness, and that will always require the skills  we have learned over the years in traditional advertising. While the mediums may change, the ability to craft a relay a good story will always be needed. I predict that the future belongs to the agencies / groups / people who can add the skill sets of both the “old” and “new”. There may be a Revolution under foot… er, evolution.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.

Wasn’t that touching? Sheila got just the right laptop for her to do her film making. Or so everyone thinks.

Disclaimer: I am a Mac guy. I’m not a Mac guy because I think they make me look cool and hip. I am a Mac guy because I need real computer, not a Windows box that fails on me constantly. It is safe to say I have a serious Mac bias. I truly believe that there is no universe where buying a PC is ever a better idea than getting a Mac. This fact will not stop me from criticing this ad (you might be surprised at what I have to say) but this is important to note for a few reasons:

1. You should know I strongly dislike PC’s before we start
2. You should realize that having an opinion is the best way to critique an ad campaign, because people in the real world have opinions, and that has a lot to do with my critique
3. I will try to be as objective as possible, but you should expect me to get on my Mac soap box before the article is over. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want

Strategy

Microsoft is a software company, not a hardware company. Microsoft doesn’t care if you buy a Toshiba or an HP laptop. They only care that it is a Windows-based computer. That’s how they make money. This ad campaign would be too confusing if they had people comparing PC brands against each other. If you took two PC laptops from different brands that had the exact same specifications, the laptops will perform the same. They utilize the same hardware architecture. Macs however, do not. If you found a PC laptop and a Mac laptop that had the same specifications, the Mac would be faster. This is one of the reasons I like Macs, but for the purpose of this post, it is completely irrelevant. Why?

The Consumer

The average computer user doesn’t have the slightest idea how computers work. Almost all don’t even care. The vast majority doesn’t understand the differences in hardware architecture. To them, a computer is a computer. If the PC and the Mac laptop both have a 2.2 gig processor and 4 gigs of ram, then the consumer believes they are the same.

There are really only two games in town, PCs and Macs. I don’t think anyone goes into Best Buy to buy a laptop with Linux already installed, but if they do, your ad isn’t going to change their mind. These ads need to convince people not to buy the Mac. Because most of the computer buying population doesn’t really understand how computers work, you cannot advertise effectively with hard computing facts. It is also hard to convince people you have a better operating system. History shows that the Windows OS is full of security holes, and generally has a poor track record as operating systems go, except in sales. So what does Microsoft have left to advertise?

Microsoft’s advantage is that they are huge and hold the largest market share, but saying that makes people think of big faceless corporations. Not the image you want to send nowadays. Instead, Microsoft did something smart. They acknowledged what everyone else has been saying for years. Ask a Mac guy or a Linux guy why Microsoft has the largest share of the market when, in their opinion (and mine) PCs are such an inferior product. They will tell you either because they are cheaper to buy or because the market is ignorant. Bingo. There’s the ad strategy.

They may be on to something…

Most of the professionals in the world go to work everyday and sit behind a PC. They have probably never even seen a Mac desktop, and as we discussed above, they have no idea how computers work. All the average consumer knows is that most of the world uses PCs. That has to mean something, right?

Apples ads have been targeting the ways that Macs are better and blowing holes in the Windows perception, but Microsoft can’t battle that head one. They tried in a previous campaign and got a lot of flack for it. The “I’m a PC” campaign was seen by most as Microsoft responding to Apples ads like a 5 year kid with its arms crossed screaming “Nuh-uh!” The ads didn’t do much more than make Apple’s commercials more credible. This time around Microsoft ignored the Apples ads and embraced what everyone already knew. You can buy a PC for cheaper than you can buy a Mac. When you can’t tell computers, hardware and operating systems apart, what do you have left to base a purchase decision on? Price.

Microsoft has really gone down the right path here. I am a Mac guy, and I see these commercials and say “Yeah, PCs are cheaper for a reason.” These ads are never going to get the Mac folks to switch to PCs. Microsoft knows that. Microsoft isn’t even going to try to get people to switch. What Microsoft can and should be doing is giving the average consumer ammunition to justify their decision not to buy a Mac, and with these spots they’ve done it.

Congratulations Microsoft

Not only has Microsoft hit on a successful strategy, the execution was pretty spot on as well. The ads show people, people you can relate to buying a computer with their own money. Yes, the Microsoft guys gives them the money back, but these people have to buy a computer with their own money first, then pretend to be surprised when Microsoft gives them their money back. This setup is as close as you can get on TV to sharing the experience that Microsoft wants you to have. When the average consumer goes to the store to pick out a new computer, they can do exactly what the people on TV did. They can go look at the Macs, see there price, then go find a PC that seems equivalent for less. These spots have all the makings of an authentic and credible experience. My final judgment is that Microsoft hit a home run on these ads.

Now… The soap box.

Every company wants to get there customers to become rabid (loyal) fans. Microsoft is finally going down the right path to get there with ads like these. However, Mac got me first and I feel it my duty to point out a few things about these ads that are not being said.

I did some shopping

The laptop that Sheila got was a HP HDX 16t.  Lets find a “comparable” Mac.

The HP HDX  has a 16″ screen, 2.53GHz processor and 4 gigs of ram (you must have 64 Bit windows for this). Lets compare that to the 15″ Mac Book Pro which sports a 15.4″ screen, 2.53GHz processor and 4 gigs of ram.

Price of the HP HDX – $1,219.99 ( as configured above with the current $250 instant rebate – normally $1,469 )
Price of the Macbook Pro – $1,699.99

I guess Sheila could of got the Mac for under $2,000 like she wanted to in the commercial, but either way, this is a $480 difference. This makes the PC much cheaper. That’s great for the Video Editing Sheila, now let’s go get some software.

If Sheila only needs some basic software for video editing, then she could get Adobe Premier Elements 7 for $139.99. Then for audio, she could go with Adobe SoundBooth CS4 $199. So far that’s only about $340. But the Mac comes with iMovie, iDVD and Garage Band at no extra cost. Maybe Sheila needs professional software.

On the PC she could get the Adobe Production Premium that has Premier Pro, After Effects and Soundbooth for $1,699. If she got the Mac she could get Final Cut Studio with Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack for $1,299.

Now, let’s assume that Sheila will need to create production schedules, track expenses in a spreadsheet and use email to coordinate her shooting schedule. Looks like she will need some productivity software.

In the PC world she could get Microsoft Office 2007 Student Edition for $149.99. On a Mac she could get iWork 09 for $79.99.

Oops, almost forgot the anti-virus and anti-spyware stuff. The guy at Geek Squad recommended the Trend Micro stuff, but he said to get the expensive one. We’ll just grab AntiVirus + AntiSpyware 2009 for $39.99. I think we’re done, lets look at the totals.

Wow. It turns out the Mac would be cheaper after the software. Good thing HP has a $250 discount right now or this could have been expensive. I’ll get off my soap box now.