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.

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?

With the American economy ( and much of the worlds ) slowing down, advertisers are most likely going to look for alternative and hopefully cheaper ways of attracting customers. One possible method for doing so is through Pay-Per-Click search marketing.

In general, Pay-Per-Click advertising has been considered a cheaper, or at least more measurable means of advertising compared to traditional media. In many respects this is true; however, a fully integrated campaign utilizing multiple media channels always produces the best results. Given the slowing of the market, I expect that we will see companies move to more measurable means of advertising as a way to try and get the most bang for their buck. 

As more companies move into the Pay-Per-Click model and more keywords are receiving bids, it should be safe to say that the cost for bids will go up to get the same results that current advertisers do. This could have some big impacts on smaller fixed budget adervertisers, but there are some ways to combat the rising prices.

1. Make sure your site is coded to help your page score. Having good markup and well written copy will increase your page score with the large search engines. Page rankings play into the cost of your adwords showing up. If two companies bid approximately the same amount for a keyword, the one with the highest page rank will get the higher position.

2. Geo-Target your ads. By reducing the size of the market you could reduce the size of your competition. Geo target your campaigns so you can lower some of the areas bid prices and save some money.

3. Bid on more specific phrases and words. If you are bidding on keywords for computer repair, it might make more sense to split your campaign into “MAC computer repair” and “PC computer repair”. The more specific your words and phrases, the less competition you will have for those words and phrases so you can bid lower.

Remember to keep and eye on your analytics, and if you don’t have any analytics installed on your site, whether you are advertising online or not, contact me immediately.  Watch closely how your ads are performing and pull what ever isn’t working and throw the money into what is.