Direct is a Methodology, Digital a Platform

Direct marketing is a methodology all about relevance and the three dimensions of relevant communications. If we assume (and I do) that the three critical dimensions of relevance are: temporal, contextual and experiential, then digital marketing allows us - if we focus and listen well enough - to more easily hit two of the three in one communication. The breakthrough that will come in mobile marketing will allow us to hit all three at once...

To mis-quote Arthur C. Clarke - Any sufficiently advanced marketing technology employed brilliantly, is indistinguishable from magic.

Moving Pharma Spending Online

In spite of some high spots, pharmaceutical marketers have been reluctant to truly take the plunge into meaningful online marketing. Could this be changing? In their recent study, Cegedim Dendrite found that US direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketers plan to increase their online marketing spending this year and decrease spending on traditional media. Respondents generally said they planned to spend more this year on Web sites, search and e-mail marketing, and less on TV and radio. Tellingly however, Cegedim said that while respondents said they wanted to see more focus on emerging and targeted channels, and less on general mass media tactics, the industry seemed reluctant to actually reallocate budgets to make it happen.


More on the study here...

More on Free

Forrester’s George Colony in reply to the recent article in Wired in which Chris Anderson argued that the economics of web 2.0 will drive almost all content to be free, argues that the limitations of advertising and the continuing development of technologies to avoid it will ensure that this is not the case.

George makes 4 key points of refutation:

More and more people will be willing to pay for content with no or few ads

• Adblockers and the like will change the economics of the game
• Critical information will push out ads on the web – consider subscription models a la Bloomberg
• Human activity that requires deep concentration will abstain from advertising.
  

More here…

In The Series...

...Websites are dead.

More evidence from Japan where increasingly product packaging, print campaigns and direct mail pieces are urging you to search for given terms rather than have you type in a URL. Getting a consumer to a specific place on a big site is a big deal - and they just won't type anything after the /... Quid personal URLs?

Do We Still Need Agencies?

(Full disclosure; I work in one so yes)

In the growing world of customer generated media and customer generated content, what is the role for the traditional agencies (oh, and I include "digital" in the traditional category).

Those agencies that have or are willing to hire the right competencies can be signposts, Sherpas or translators. They can help derive meaning from the chaos by applying their understanding of consumer behaviour, attitudes and demographics to bring value to advertisers...

In an article in OMMA, Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer of Crayon says:

"There’s still a role for agencies as strategic consultants and as curators of all that consumer-generated stuff out there. “There’s a ton of consumer content created every day, from Tweets to branded items in virtual worlds. Agencies must help advertisers find and celebrate the best of what’s being made by consumers — in a way that supports both the brand and the person who created it."

They Know You Are A Dog

A new report conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides a first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies.

See more of it here...

Convers/ion

There is a word here somewhere. Somewhere between the high ground of conversational (influence) marketing and the battleground of conversion. I am working on it.

A suivre....

Optimization is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Optimization is all about listening – and doing it successfully means that you are deriving meaningful insights from what your customers are telling you (explicitly or implicitly). Every time I talk about on-site optimization I find myself talking about the measurable outcomes – better conversion rates mostly. But it’s more than this – creating an excellent, relevant experience for visitors to your site will have longer lasting effects, Lester Wunderman the father of Direct Marketing called this “building brands while driving sales”. One of the smarter guys I know in the site-side optimization field, Jonathan Mendez sums it up well:

“The benefits can be profound when you deliver a higher degree of relevance to people based upon what you know. What you're doing is creating a better experience. This has all kinds of quantitative value in improving media performance, conversion rate improvements, page views, etc. It also has amazing qualitative benefits that result from the positive emotions created when someone is having a good experience with your brand and business. We're trying hard to quantify these brand metrics for our clients -- and though challenging, they're real and tremendously undervalued.”

Visions

Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy said yesterday:

"The future of media will be almost exclusively digital "[enabling] almost all kinds of advertising.... In art history terms, we are at the dawn of the Renaissance after the Dark Ages."

More visions from various luminaries in this article from the Guardian...

Trending Up

Trendwatching.com has released it report on trends for 2008. Lots of good thought provoking ideas of how (already emerging/emerged) trends from premiumization to crowd-mining will develop over the next year...

The Channel Of Me & The Channel Of Us

Two consumer mega-trends have emerged, both powered by the maturation of technologies that allow consumers to filter, screen, delete, take, consume and share what and when they like. These trends are the channel of me and the channel of us. In the Channel of Me, the consumer has become an editor, a cameraman and a censor. It presents a new culture of both control and customization, it creates a new model where the user is at the center and brands revolve, and evolve, around her.
The Channel of Us leverages the forces of collaboration and influence that have emerged in the connected society. At its best, the brand becomes a part of the conversations that are occurring naturally in these groups in an open, honest, flexible relationship with both the community and the individual.

The era of influence marketing - where we need to develop constituencies and not simply customer databases has come to CRM...

Who Goes There?

Domodomain has launched a web analytics package that converts the visitor's IP address into a domain name. Domodomain transforms anonymous website clicks into actionable sales and marketing intelligence. The package can also provide playback of the visit and an intuitive analysis of the products and services in which the visitor appeared to show an interest.

More here...

Performance Marketing & Creative

In my industry, there is and has been a conflicted view of how metrics driven performance marketing effects the creative process. It's too restrictive, too limiting, what about the brand experience?... And yet, as Norman Guadagno, a colleague from a sister company Zaaz said in a recent post:

"When used properly, performance marketing doesn't serve as a threat to designers, usability experts, or anyone else in the organization. It provides the foundation of a holistic business strategy that leaves designers free to be creative, usability experts open to shape the experience and ultimately allows the company as a whole to monitor Web initiatives and make well-executed adjustments that benefit all parties. Performance marketing allows everyone to bring their "A game" to the table and clearly see the results of their efforts. "

The End Of Advertising As We Know It

A voluminous report from IBM gloomily predicts the end of the current advertising model. The core drivers of this according to IBM are:

• Attention is increasingly controlled by consumers as media consumption moves away from the TV and due to ad skipping/blocking technologies
• The rise of user generated content is enabling engagement marketing
• New channels and technologies are enabling measurement of advertising effectiveness for the first time
• The rise of exchanges is changing the way advertising is bought and sold

There is no doubt that allocation of ad spend against the evolved media consumption needs to change (and quickly). We spend 37% of our time as consumers watching TV - a whopping 32% of ad spend is allocated to that medium. On the other hand, we spend 29% of our time on the Internet, where the ad spend is around 8%... So much for engagement marketing, at least so far...

The Next 100 Years In Marketing Starts With A Press Release

Facebook and MySpace have both started to use profiles and community membership to target ads to their member base. Both are likely to suceed but for different reasons... MySpace's massive membership (growing at 5 million a month) and their innovative SelfServe system gives them enormous scale and a local footprint. Facebook is actively encouraging members to subscribe to a brand, so people who actually really like a brand can make a public endorsement of it and share it through their networks, brands can leverage the already established and trusted social relationships.
Here's an extract from the Facebook press release (the full release is here...):

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about. ...
Advertising messages will gain distribution through what Facebook has termed the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business’ Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

Facebook's CEO prefaced his recent remarks at the New York ad:tech conference by saying modestly "the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today."

Virgin Freebies

In the high stakes "engagement" game, Virgin Mobile's Sugar Mama program straightforwardly places a dollar value on the time a visitor spends watching and interacting with a sponsor's ad. And, unlike previous versions of this model the Sugar Mama approach is offering users something they already want - minutes - and it does so in a very clear and uncomplicated way. To get your credits, you need to go to the Virgin Mobile site and view ads from Ultramercial. In exchange you will get pre-paid credits to your wireless account. It appears to be working, Ultramercial has had over 450,000 customers subscribe to the program, which has given away over 15 million free minutes. The company says 1,000 new users sign up a day. The program has also found success with advertisers, with relationships as diverse as Dell, United Airlines, E-Trade, Fox and the History Chanel...

Web Analytics From Microsoft - Free!

Microsoft are working on a competitor to Google Analytics. The objective is to provide this free of charge. Whereas Google based their product on technology acquired when they purchased Urchin, Microsoft are basing their product on technology from the web analytics firm DeepMetrics acquired in May 2006. Code named Project Gatineau, the tool will indicate whether users came to a Web site via e-mail, paid search, banner campaigns, offline campaigns, or other means. Reports will then provide insight on how they left and what pages they requested.
The system also ties information to personal profile information gathered through the Live ID system (formerly known as Passport). Live ID stores data on users including sex, age, income and location. Still in beta - you can sign up here...

Coupon Mashing

Google maps has had a coupon feature for something over a year when the search giant combined Google Maps with Valpak.com's local merchants. Customers can download and print coupons to be redeemed at a store location or local business. Some recent activity (i.e. Google registering of coupon-specific domain names) may be indicative of a re-focusing on this activity. Transfer the same logic to the mobile version of Google maps and things become interesting...

The Killer Application

Looking for a killer for a Web 2.0 application? Scott Dorsey of ExactTarget has one for you:

This application will provide businesses with a communications epicenter that employees can use to send and receive any type of digital media, including text, documents, audio, and video—all for little or no cost. Always on, this application will be based on an open standard that allows all employees to connect with the members of their social network regardless of what network they belong to or what Internet-enabled device they use.

The above was part of a debate on the future of email in the Business Week Debate Room. read more here...

A Personal Favorite...

An example of really smart, strategic, creative and marketing technology minds coming together for one of my company's clients. The full site is here...