30 Great Ideas in 60 Minutes
A session entitled, “Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That: 30 Great Ideas in 60 Minutes,” was one of ad:tech New York’s closing sessions, and it rewarded those who hung around with some fresh insights and a couple of good laughs.
Jeff Einstein recommended embracing your ignorance. Ignorance, he said. “is the greatest motivational force in the universe, and the most plentiful resource on the planet.”
He said he’d been selling his own ignorance for years, and that every night he goes to sleep a little more ignorant than when he woke up. Nobody is driving up the price of ignorance, and it is tragically undervalued.
Ignorance plus intent equals motivation and uncertainty plus faith equals inspiration. The key to success is to embrace your ignorance.
Maria Mandel of Ogilvy Interactive noted three themes from ad:tech New York:
1. we’re moving to all on demand. Consumers want it when they want it.
2. Entertainment. We need more creative advertising to connect to consumers.
3. Community: help consumers build community and then connect your brands to them
Mike Moran of IBM said we need to get projects going quickly and recognize that it probably won’t be perfect; so do it now, with plan B, C, and D ready. Measure, test, fix.
Mark Josephson, CMO of Canoodle: Be relevant.
Russ Novy, Webshots, said he feels really bad when he orders from a site, is asked for a special promotional code, and doesn’t have one. Why? His company gives a surprise 10 percent off to shoppers and finds that they tend to go back during a session and spend more money when they get the surprise.
The consensus: do more of what’s working; less of what’s not.
The advice I would add is: respect your customers. They’re very smart.
read more...Mobile Marketing Gaining Succes
181 million people in the U.S. have mobile phones. How do you reach them? It ain’t easy. Not yet. While a pair of interesting case studies were presented by Joe Barone (the Tazorac acne medication) and Tom Burgess (a mobile campaign for the television program Veronica Mars), the bottom line of this session moderated by Laura Marriott of the Mobile Marketing Association is that it’s still pretty much the wild, wild west out there.
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Become a Hero at Your Company… How to Leverage Your Existing Website to Generate Increased Profita
Yosi Heber, President of Oxford Hill Partners, shared his insights on how to improve the profitability of a website in a straightforward session. Heber brings his extensive consumer products experience to bear on the topic-- he was Brand Manager on Jell-O at Kraft, and later worked on Dannon where he created the kids’ yogurt category as well as Marshmallow Alphabets. He’s literally been there, done that. He’s developed a terrific proprietary methodology for reviewing websites that’s a great approach for evaluating effectiveness in terms of sales and profits. It’s a structured, disciplined approach that can yield concrete results.
According to Heber, ten years ago the Amex advertising budget spent 80% on TV. Now, TV is only 35%. As a brand manager at Kraft, Heber said there wasn’t much respect for profitability. Now, brand managers are rigorously evaluated on profitability. All companies have websites. Few have figured out how to make money with them. Many have invested millions, but their websites rarely generate positive ROI. Often, web operations have just become cost centers that lose money.
So how do you apply classical CPG strategic planning and marketing to create web-based strategy and solutions that unlock the power of a website and help generate new and incremental revenue? Enter Heber’s proprietary methodology, “EQ Pulse”. Companies need to think beyond a website as a positive customer “branding experience” to increase revenue and profit. EQ Pulse is an analytic tool (actually, more of a framework) which provides a total score of the overall capacity of a site to drive revenue. Heber outlined EQ Pulse’s Eight Strategic Revenue Drivers:
1. Potential Traffic and New Customer Acquisition
2. Home Page (Store Front) and Branding
3. Products & Merchandising
4. Navigation and Customer Experience
5. Entertainment Value & Stickiness
6. Customer Care & Trust
7. Call to Action/Revenue Maximization (Traffic Conversion)
8. Relationship Building & Customer Retention
Blogvertising Opportunities for Marketers
What are the risks and rewards of blog advertising? Traditional creative often fails to click. Worse, it can brand an advertiser as clueless.
Blog advertising, said Brian Clark, challenges the standard value of traditional advertising.
Shawn Gold described blogvertising as “word of mouth on steroids,” and a platform for early adopters.
Nick Denton said he was actually skeptical about the ability of advertising to affect word of mouth. The reason to advertise on blogs, he said, is to reach an audience that is “younger and richer.” Advertisers, he said, need young, rich, coastal people who are sexy, “not pensioners.”
Key quotes:
read more...Create a WOM Campaign in 5 Easy Steps
Five word of mouth heavy hitters explained how to create and measure the impact of a word of mouth campaign. They agreed that WOM can be unpredictable, but that it is an inexpensive and remarkably effective way to create customer evangelists.
The five steps to creating an effective WOM campaign:
* Finding the right people to talk about you (influencers & evangelists)
* Giving them something to talk about (viral email, samples, buzz, and more)
* Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other (blogs, discussions, tell-a-friend forms)
* Participating in the conversation
* Tracking and measuring results
Moderator, Andy Sernowitz, CEO, WOMMA
Panelists: Greg Stielestra, Sr Marketing Director, Zonfervan, David Neupert, CEO, M80, Jim Elliot, Cole & Weber
Key quotes:
Greg Stielestra: “Personal influence is the ONLY way to reach the apathetic.”
Jim Elliot: “No word of mouth campaign ever works exactly the way you think it will. You need to nurture WOM, you can’t control it. Let it go, let it find a life of its own.”
“Be worth talking about.”
“People don’t spread the word because they are paid to.”
Word of mouth, the panelists agreed, scares big companies.”
The action at this conference is definitely in the hallways and on the exhibit floor. Like this one, many sessions have been sparsely attended, despite good content.
read more...Creating a Bomb-Proof Brand Identity
On the web, everything moves faster. One misstep and you’re toast. This session focused on how to avoid major mistakes in brand identity on the web. Moderated by Laura Lang, President of Digitas, the panel included three online strategists. Scott Hornstein of Hornstein Associates, a consultant on marketing strategy, research and implementation; Mark Silva, founder of Real Branding, which does online brand strategy for blue-chip clients; and Seana Mulcahy, President of Brand Truth, a digital media and marketing consultancy.
read more...Website Fundamentals: Twelve Years Later
“You know all this, you’re just not doing it.” That’s how internet marketing strategy consultant Jim Sterne started out his highly entertaining session. He was right, on both counts. Sterne gave an entertaining “show and tell” of the history of the web complete with screenshots, starting with the “Paleozoic” period of FTP, Gopher, and newsgroups and moving on to Mosaic, Netscape, and into the current era. Remember when websites went from grey backgrounds to colored ones? Remember when Amazon claimed to have one million books online?
Sterne summarized his lesson in five points, and illustrated each with multiple historical examples and lots of juicy screenshots of websites with grey backgrounds. This was one of the most “how-to” sessions I’ve attended. No fluff, just the facts. With each point, he hammered home his mantra: think about it from the customers’ perspective.
read more...Consumer Genterated Media Measurement Gaining Ground
The panel entitled “Measuring Your Brand Buzz in Consumer Generated Media” moderated by Organic CEO Mark Kingdon along with panelists Jonathon Carson, president and CEO of Buzzmetrics, Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Intelliseek, Dave Balter, President of BuzzAgent and Karl Gneiting Brand Advertising and Strategy Group Verizon, focused on how consumer generated media has become an important source of brand information for marketers and how it can me measured to benefit marketing direction.
A key recommendation from all panelists was to relinquish control. Consumer generated media can not be controlled. However, it can be listened to and joined in a way that provides marketers rich detail about brand perception and a channel through which to directly communicate with consumers. Blackshaw referred to some the the negative consumer commentary as “nastygrams” and Kingdon noted that this sort of consumer backlash has been around forever but, today, it’s all happening much faster and has become harder to manage in advance.
read more...Brand vs. Stat
Tuesday, 11:45am, Trend Guy Meets Brand Guy. One’s a statmaster, the energetic and evangelistic Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer. One’s a brand steward, the marketing maven Kevin Coohan from ConAgra Foods. What hijinks ensue when they’re thrown together on stage with CBS Digital’s Larry Kramer keeping the dialogue flowing? What better place to find out than Ad:Tech.
My colleague who sat by me, Unicast’s Nina Kryuk, had kept a running commentary. My favorite: As Kevin was speaking, she said, “He’s not saying about what they’re doing online at all.” And it was true – it was pretty vague. But at least he touched on interactive marketing, unlike many other featured speakers at Ad:Tech. Kevin more than held his own.
read more...The Internet According to Kids and the 21st Century Woman
It was an awful lot to try and squeeze into one hour: Marketing to kids alone is the basis of conferences like Kid Power and Youth Marketing. To add marketing to women to the mix, and to have three people making presentations, meant that the best you could hope for beyond the topline information that trotted out the usual suspects - media fragmentation, marketing to kids takes authenticity, kids like customization, and moms and kids are spending less time watching television and more time online than ever before - was some lively Q&A and interesting take away factoids.
read more...Latest And Greatest Ad Metrics Discussed
The New Ad Measurement - The Latest Thinking panel started off slow, but once it got rolling I was so captivated I started sketching graphs in my notebook. At first, the discussion centered around Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines for measuring impressions which didn’t exactly impress as the latest thinking on ad measurement. Fortunately, there was more current and better thinking, expressed best by Young-Bean Sean of Atlas and David Smith of Mediasmith.
Smith said, “There are more advertisers not using the internet to an optimal level than those who are.” He goaded that we must continue to seek ways to bring together measurement of what happened with measurements for the potential of what can happen. He also said we need to better compare interactive measurements to TV and print. “We’ve been working on it for 10 years and haven’t found it.”
read more...Do-It-Yourself Advertising: Busy Selling Products
When you’re buying CPMs at $.50 cents, do you really want to get bogged down in meaningless metrics?” asked Blogads Founder Henry Copeland of the sparsely attended “Do-It-Yourself Advertising” session at Ad Tech, “Or do you want to get on with it and sell your product?”
The scariest part of blog advertising, said Farah Miller of Random House, “is the thought that the big guys will find out about it. You’re too busy selling your products to worry about meaningless metrics.”
It is said, Copeland noted, that there are more than 18 million bloggers. But >only 100,000 blog religiously every day, and only 10 to 20,000 blog about one subject and are therefore interesting to advertisers. Of those, there are now only about 1,000 bloggers making serious money from advertising. That number will rise soon.
The panel was moderated by Tig Tillinghast, publisher of MarketingVOX and panelists included Joel Bartlett, Marketing Director, PETA, Henry Copeland, Founder, Blogads, Philip Kaplan, Adbrite, Farah Miller, Random House.
read more...ad:tech Connect LIVE! Stripped Attendee Game Faces
In an effort to connect and re-connect those working within the industry and to add a bit of fun to the business like environment of ad:tech, an event called Connect LIVE, held in the East Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, aimed to get people to open up and let others truly get to know one another.
In the center of the Ballroom was the main event - The Hotseat. Twenty-five people sat in a circle surrounding one individual who, in the Hotseat was asked, by the moderator, ad:tech Chair Susan Bratton, questions designed to cut though the preponderance of industry fluff, exaggerated research findings and over-used industry platitudes. All attendees had to wear costumes or at least a hat which, based on the low turnout, appeared to be a bit off-putting to conference goers. For those who did attend, though, it was a very enjoyable experience in that people as people were highlighted rather than people highlighting their companies which, in this day of meaningless puffery, was a welcome sight. We learned that Intelliseek’s Pete Blackshaw hates his hybrid car and blogs about it. We learned that Target Marketing’s Jim Sterne doesn’t stare at cleavage. We learned that ad:tech Marketing Director Meredith Medland loves to dance in public.
Corny as it all may sound, it did set aside the usual formality of most conference sessions and brought together a bunch of industry people in a way that, well, just isn’t normally done at most business conferences.
read more...Marketing Effectiveness Programs: Top 10 Things To Avoid
Marketing Management Analytics COO Ed See and Chief Client Officer John Nardone led a session that was fundamentally about how to maximize your overall marketing expenditures and drive your bottom line. Analytics. Processes. Numbers. Go ahead, skip to the next post, or scroll to the bottom of this one for a takeaway factoid. I gotta give them credit, though, for doing their level best to make all of this palatable to the walkin’ around marketing folk, most of whom are not heavy into data and research.
So, without further ado, here’s the bottom line promised by the session title (my apologies for the post length, but hey—the session promises a Top 10, you deserve the goods!):
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