Master Class Roundtable: Growing Online Brand Advertising Dollars

This my favorite panel of Ad:tech because it included five marketers with a pragmatic view from the trenches on a hot topic.  As with many Ad:tech sessions, the panelists didn’t stay totally on topic, yet I liked it because the panelists shared real experiences and talked candidly about what specifically works and what doesn’t work for their brands.  I got some good, tangible takeaways and hope you will too.

Moderator: Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online
Panelists: Brian Kalma, Zappos
Scott Wilder, Intuit
Kevin Ranford,  1800flowers.com
Jeffrey Graham, New York Times
Andrew Markowitz, Kraft

Moderator Pete Blackshaw (a fellow P&G Alum and friend) opened this lively panel with this question: “If you had $5 where would you put them?”  The answers were surprising in that they didn’t always involve advertising or building interactive marketing tools.  Some would put the $5 into social networking tools or ecommerce but others would put it into the product itself or digital insights.  According to Brian Kalma, Zappos would put it into people.  At Zappos, there is the belief that service is the product, not shoes.  Zappos would invest in the service model: invest it in the right people, people they want speaking to customers.  Zappos wants to be comfortable with every employee engaging customers.  It’s about the experience.  It’s about service.  Zappos has a scalable model— the product is not the product, it’s their people.

Next came a lively debate over measurement and the consensus was that there has to be a fair balance between measurement of results and insight for strategy.  Marketing is an inexact science and you need to use intuition.  How many times have you seen analysis paralysis?  An overemphasis on analysis leaves a lot on the table.  Good marketers have to do the right amount of analysis, then rely on intuition.  The consensus was to focus on “What is the customer saying?”  Verbatims is where you really learn.  Intuit has its users as part of the development team.  Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, has an article in the Harvard Business Review about user contribution systems in which he discusses the question whether a user can help another user make a purchase decision and how companies can facilitate that.

Kevin Ranford of 1800flowers.com said you need to clearly and concisely present what users want so they’ll convert.  Andy Markowitz of Kraft maintains that the most common mistake is the type of message you put out there.  Brian Kalma of Zappos mentioned the power of a simple feature like “tell a friend” which gets used immensely and is also the highest converting piece of the zappos.com site.  Just try to create avenues for customers to evangelize you, and keep up a continuous dialogue.

The final question turned, of course, to the presidential campaign—everything at Ad:tech revolved around the campaign—which really retooled the mindset of what is possible online.  Jeff Graham of the New York Times said that Obama did what we’re all taking about.  Usually nobody gives up control, whereas you could go to the Obama site, download phone numbers, and call them yourself.  There were also links to offline activities: find a living room to watch the debate, advertise within video games.  A good balance on ROI vs. innovation.  Andy Markowitz reiterated the famous quote, “if you’re not first you’re last.”  Obama was first.  A big challenge for his team was, “you can’t win southern Ohio and southern West Virginia”.  Obama had a strategy: I need to mobilize this group of people.  He took the challenger mentality, always thinking about how to innovate.  Challengers are always more willing to innovate.  It starts with that the tactics do you use, with research informing the strategy as opposed to sorting out the tactics.  How does it ladder back to your strategy?  Obama’s team grabbed the bull by the horns and was rewarded with victory.

For Scott Wilder of Intuit, Obama’s tactics and the way they were implemented enforced his brand as approachable and authentic.  Jeffrey Graham of the New York Times said that until October the metrics of the campaign had nothing to do with donations or road signs.  They were about volunteers, it was all people-driven.  Most brands talk about the importance of social media but you might want to group social media into customer service.  It shows you what can happen if you put people, “consumers”, first.  At Intuit, social media is just a feature of their product.  In the 2009 desktop version of Quickbooks, community is in the workflow—you can ask a question of the community through the application’s own command menus.  Impressive.

A number of companies have proactively asked their marketers if they wanted to learn more about social media, and many said “yes”.  At Intuit there is a training program on opt-in marketing.  You need to feel comfortable with the medium to use it well.  The New York Times is being transformed by the degree of interaction between journalists and the public.  They have even gone so far as to write stories on Russia in Russian, get feedback from readers in Russia, and then write the story for the US audience based on that feedback. 

Finally, the discussion turned to managing authenticity.  For the Obama campaign authenticity is one of his brand characteristics.  You manage it by making sure you have the right people working those programs.  If you want to be authentic, you have to be authentic; you need a company culture that accepts mistakes and is OK with that.  It’s the way you educate your people.  Educate them then let them say whatever they want to say—just don’t be an idiot. 

Obviously this won’t work in all industries (of course pharma comes to mind), but it sounds like a good approach.  If you can embed this thinking in your company’s culture, you’re way ahead of the game. 

Great summary, Richard.  That was fun.

- Pete (moderator)

By Pete Blackshaw on 2008 11 07

Great recap and good discussion.

By Andy Markowitz on 2008 11 07

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