Return on Intention

Usually the topic of integration in a marketing and business development context is based on the idea of integrating a cohesive message or marketing campaign through multiple channels or disciplines. The concept is to come up with the “Big Idea” that meets the strategic goals of the organization, and then deliver that big idea through all the relevant media channels like TV, radio, print and the web. This idea is for the most part sound, but its greatest problem does not lie in theory, but the ability to achieve this integration in a successful way.

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 easy to think that the world of traditional media is going away. There is no shortage of people screaming from their soap boxes that the internet will render all of this antiquated technology useless. Revolution is sexy. Unfortunately change rarely happens this way. Its usually a process of evolution. While the internet may seem to be a drastic fast changing technology, it might be a good idea to remember that the internet and the web took quite a few years to become what it is today.  In this world of twitter and iPhones its hard to believe that there are still many people in America that have never been on the internet. So while it seems that the world is changing to make the television and the ad model that so many companies have become accustomed to using a thing of the past, its nice to stop and take a look at some data on the subject.

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.

This week in a meeting a client asked for us to take over their adwords accounts. Their fear is that their bounce rate from those campaigns are too high.

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”.

Microsoft has been pushing out some new ads targeting the laptop buying market, which is just about everyone now that laptops are just as powerful as desktops. The ads premise is to show real people shopping for laptops on a fixed budget, and inevitably compare every possible PC manufacturers models sold at the Big Box store to their mac “equivalents.” As you may have guessed, the shoppers pick a PC that is “perfect” for them as well as within their budget, unlike the Mac. Back to the parking lot post-purchase, the Microsoft guy behind the camera gives them back the money they just spent on the laptop. So the question is, is this ad a good strategy or not for Microsoft? First take a look at this particular commercial (my favorite, and the one this post is based on) and see what you think.

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.

“Thank you for calling MegaCorp. All operators are busy assisting other callers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Do not hang up. Hanging up will increase your wait time as all call are answered in the order they are received. We are experiencing a high call volume right now, so please be patient.”

As of 1999, the above is the internationally recognized sign to cancel all your appointments for the next few hours and get a cup of coffee. Nothing makes you feel like a number more than being told to wait your turn in line. This is doubly so if you are calling a governmental agency. To the government, you are a number. In the US they give it to you at birth.

Customer service is becoming one of the most important parts of an organizations success. As the name implies, it is where you service your customer. If you can’t shine there then what else is there?

In this new world, you have to be on your game. There is too much competition and conversation going on not to. 20 years ago if a front line employee of yours fell asleep in your customer’s home, only a handful of people will hear about it. It would become a running joke over turkey and stuffing every year when the extended family gets together to drink—I mean, celebrate the holidays. Your company’s embarrassing botch will only be know by about 20 people. Fast forward to now, and if the same thing happens, it gets posted on YouTube and is watched by millions of people. How’s that for brand building?

A companies success lays in its reputation. Its part of the brand. If you perform well, then all goes well. If you fail and can’t recover, the word spreads. This isn’t new. This is word of mouth. The difference is now not only can you share your experiences with friends and family, you can also share it with 1,000,000 of your closest strangers.

Building a brand is done by ensuring that the customer’s expectations and experience match. If the customer expects good service and gets it, they remember you, prefer you and will do business with you again. If the customer expects bad services and gets it, at least they will remember who you are. The world as they know it is still intact. If your customers expect good service and your technician falls asleep on the couch you get a shocked customer. Shocked customers love to share their stories. The best stories in the world start with “You’re not going to believe this!” Those stories spread fast.

In the always-on world we now live in, everyone is sharing their story with the world. A world full of potential customers. This makes getting customer service right paramount. So why do most companies fail at it?

There is a problem with the system. The internet has not only made communicating with friends and expanding networks of people simple and easy, it has made us all impatient and time-starved. The world moves faster now that it did before but most customer service plans have not. If you had a problem 15 years ago, you would call the customer service line and wait to talk to someone. If you have a problem today, you still have to call the customer service line and wait. You also have the added complexity of navigating through a convoluted telephone system just to get in line to talk to a human being. In today’s super-charged world, this process takes too long.

We don’t want to sit on hold for any amount of time. Sitting on hold slows down our day. What do we do while we wait on hold? We complain to someone else. Someone who will hear us now. We’ll tweet it, or we’ll blog about it. We will make a video and post it online. By the time its our turn to talk to a customer service representative 10,000 people have heard of our problem. Then when we explain our problem to the customer service representative who schedules an appointment for a technician to come out and look at the problem. They tell us that the service tech will be there at some time within a 4 hour window. Now half of tomorrow is gone as we wait for the technician to show up. That’s decades in internet time. So we tweet about it again. We write another blog post. Now another few thousand people hear our story, and more often than not, one of them knows how to solve the problem.

GoldCorp opened its business up to the outside world and became one of the world’s largest and most successful gold mining operations. Linux was completed by a group of mostly anonymous programmers just to make a better operating system.  Wikipedia has more data than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was created by a bunch of amateurs. In the new web, we can solve our own problems, and most often its faster than waiting on hold for a customer service rep. We can and we do. Then we wonder where the companies that are supposed to be there for us are. The companies we gave money to. And then we stop wondering. Then we forget about those companies.

We have become tired of waiting for everything to be run up the chain of command for approval. We have become tired of waiting for a response to be vetted by legal. We want to know where the smiling salesman we bought from went, the one that made us feel like a person. We wonder when we became a number. We wonder why we talk to robots when you call the customer service line, then we wonder if it would be faster to cancel our business with that company and solve the problem ourselves.

We stop calling customer service. We complain online, we get our problems solved online and slowly the company that used to provide our services becomes less important. Most often, the company doesn’t even know there is a problem because we stopped telling them. It’s not that we stopped talking about it, we just don’t do it the way they want us to. We do it the way we want to. The fast way. Online.

Fortunately, when the internet closes a door it opens a window.

The tools and services we all use online to live our lives are open to everyone, even the people in charge of customer service. After the Comcast fiasco with the sleeping technician, Comcast got the message. They found out how poor their customer service had become. They found out in a very public and embarrassing way, but they did find out, and then set out to fix the problem using the very tools that were used to point out the problem in the first place. If you have a problem with Comcast service or equipment, just post your problem on Twitter. Comcast will see that post and contact you. For the user, nothing has changed. They still get to complain about their service if it goes wrong, but now instead of calling the 800 number and waiting 16 internet years to talk to a person the company that is responsible for the problem will contact you. You get to keep on living your life away from the sterile hold music and constant reminders of how important your call is to the company.

If I need to call my cell phone company, and there is a long wait, they don’t tell me to get in line. They tell me to leave my name and they will call me back. It may not seem like much, but being asked for your name is a lot better than assigning you a number. The rules of customer service are changing. It’s getting better for the consumer, and will be better for the companies that decide to hear the challenge, as they start to engage with their customers. Those that don’t will get left behind. It’s all free market. Evolve to add value by the customer’s definition and live. Resist the change, and go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, we won’t wait around for the answer. We have other things to do.

This post is part of the Cluetrainplus10 Project. This project is to celebrate the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger and what has happened in the 10 years sence it was published.  The Cluetrain Manifesto is 95 theses published to direct orginations into the new world the internet is creating. I choose “85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

There is quite a conversation going on right now in the marketing departments across America. There seems to be a new (well … sort of new) bright shiny object that seems to be causing some trouble. It’s called social media.
With Comcast and Zappos on Twitter and Nike on Facebook, social media is the place to be. Every day we hear about another traditional media source losing revenue or shutting down and more reports saying that advertising isn’t working the way it once did. From the other side of isle we hear the social media crowd saying that the new read/write web is the future. Social media or die, or so it goes.
Compounding the problem, there are rumblings that the top referring sites for many successful websites aren’t Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore. Now it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook. Something’s afoot. So, should all businesses rush to social media as a means to succeed, or is it all hype?
Given all this noise, it’s easy to see why so many marketers and business people are trying to figure out what a “FaceTube” is. How about advertising? We get that. Do it online? Get me some banner ads!
Social media is supposed to enable groups of people with similar interests to get together and … hang out. It seems to work great and brands want in on it. But even if the company manages to figure out the technology, then what? Well, they engage the group. Does that mean sell more stuff? Does that mean more “Top of Mind” awareness? It’s not clear, but people like it.
So it seems that customers want companies to get in on social media. Most companies seem to think they should, but they also don’t know why. The main reason is that while the internet is much more measurable than other marketing communication channels, it’s still hard to figure out if your Twitter account or YouTube video is closing sales. Many people have done amazing things for their business, brand recognition and bottom line using social media. So it stands to reason that it works and companies should do it. People like to do business with people like them, so getting involved and engaged with customers has to be a good thing, right?
Hold on a second. This conversation sounds familiar!
It seems that social media is widely regarded as “the right thing” for companies to do. There is some signs that it works but it’s hard to tie to direct sales. This sounds a lot like brand awareness advertising. We do it (or did it depending on who you are) because it was “the right thing” to do to be successful. It seemed to work, at least all the big successful companies did it, and it seemed to work. It’s just kind of hard to directly tie it to sales.
Is social media the “new” branding? Does it make a difference in this ROI driven world? What do you think?

Lately I have been talking to small business owners about how the web can increase their business. Every so often I get a response from someone in the room that goes something like this, “My website doesn’t do anything for my business.”

The peculiar thing about this statement is that it is most often said to avoid talking about the web and how a company could use it to reach business goals. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t this the wrong statement to make to get out of doing anything? If you website isn’t doing anything for your business, shouldn’t you fix it? I guess it would be more accurate to say “I don’t care about the Internet or what I could do with it.” Of course, saying that brings up many other issues, so perhaps it shouldn’t be said either. Would it make sense to say “I don’t care about customers.” From what I have seen, caring is the one thing that separates the entrepreneurs that make it from the ones that don’t.

So lets assume for a minutes that your website isn’t doing anything for your business. How do we fix that? First we find the problem.

Find the Problem

Install some tracking software. There is no excuse for not having this, Google is giving it away for free. Google analytics is a good place to start on getting information about your website.

Look at the Data

Now that you have some tracking software, what does it say? If it says you have no one coming to your website, then your first problem is to get your target market to know about your website. You can do this several ways and to get a start in the right direction you can download a free e-book on increasing traffic.

If you are getting traffic, but they don’t do anything, you have a different problem. Check for the following on your website and in your analytics:

1. Is my website easy to use?
2. Can people find what they are looking for?
3. Is it clear from the first page users come to where they are and what my business does?
4. Do I have a call to action, or do I ask explicitly for them to do something like sign up for a newsletter, or contact a sales person?
5. Does my call to action tell the user what they get out of it?

Start with this short list and if you have any doubts about any item on it, start to change your webiste a bit at a time and see what helps. Continue this and your website will start to effect your business. Chances are, if you do this, you won’t end up spending tons of money.