Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Deciduous marketing is a big barrier to authentic brand conversations

March 14th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Advertising, Public Relations, Social media

Deciduous TreeMarketing Communications is analogous to a conversation.

It is particularly true today.  The Internet has empowered consumers to challenge, advocate and interact with the companies of their choosing via readily available and inexpensive forms of mass media.

Marketing conversations were largely one dimensionl pre-Internet.  Regular and hopefully relevant messages were filtered via various marketing channels and disciplines to the end customer.  They were generally self serving:

Look at this new product!
Take up this offer on this new package!
Here’s what we think about this. Aren’t we smart/committed/interesting?

The conversations were intermittent and short lived – more often than not the communication existed to drive sales, acquire new customers or build a brand image.  Budgets and marketing finance decisions were similarly focused on near-term outcomes.  Business priorities  were identified at the beginning of the year and then in quarterly planning cycles.  Dollars, Pounds, Rupee, Dinar etc. would be allocated.

Most companies still manage their marketing programs in this way today.

At the end of the fiscal year, if the marketing department has done its ‘job’ properly, all of the dollars are spent.   Like a deciduous tree all of the leaves have fallen off and the tree remains bare for a period of time .

The conversation goes on hold.

This isn’t a problem if the company is continually talking about itself but if the company has been successful in initiating a conversation, then consumer’s will notice – unhappily.

Many well established marketing practices are no longer relevant or useful in the context of social media, including traditional approaches to budgeting.  Social media demands that brands commit fully to the online conversation – you can’t pull in and pull out when it suits you.

One way for companies to tackle this issue is to embed social media engagement (and related costs) inside standard business process.

Ford has a plan to have 2% of its workforce telling the story of their lives at Ford via social media.  This combined with a dedicated resource for social media strategy and measurement allows the company to engage in authentic conversation over the l0ng term.

Failure to identify the necessary resources for social media engagement is one of the main reasons why projects fail to get off the ground, in my experience.  Lack of resources is one issue but cultural and procedural structural barriers to the long term view are another.

Senior marketing professionals need to adjust their mindset, and that of their organisation, to the new dynamics of social media and continuous conversation.

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Ten reasons why Public Relations should play the central role in Social Media

September 26th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Social media

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The ongoing debate about who ‘owns social media’ continues apace. Here is my pitch for the PR industry, which I believe has a very strong claim.

Ultimately, all of the back and forth is irrelevant. The sector (or individuals) that gets closest to owning social media will be the one that delivers the most value over time.

Here are my thoughts…

  1. PR’s heritage isn’t selling. It seeks to influence and build relationships. This makes it more suited and better equipped to initiate, engage and hold a conversation.
  2. PR is expert in content creation. They can’t be blamed for trying to get involved with social media but what expertise do media buying agencies have in content creation? Content creation is a central component of marketing and specifically social media.
  3. The advertising industry is focused on promotions, launches and campaigns. I heard an advertising executive at a conference last year talk about their ability to ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ the community that they had successfully built for an FMCG client. This is a great illustration of the point.  This attitude shows a high degree of arrogance and a low degree of empathy.  The community would quickly see through this kind of approach to managing relationships. The advertising industry isn’t set up culturally or operationally (including its fee structure) to maintain an ongoing or continuous dialogue.
  4. The PR industry is subtle. The sector gets a lot of flack for spinning but subtlety is at the core of spin. Digital media requires subtlety, including the ability to understand context and respond accordingly.
  5. The PR industry is close to the business leaders. The C-suite calls on PR in a crisis and is reliant on PR when the organisation’s reputation is threatened. PR has a central role to play in educating the C-suite about the benefits of social media and is a trusted advisor on reputation management, unlike other marketing disciplines.
  6. The PR industry is something of a sole operator when compared with the other marketing disciplines. Communication often functions as a stand-alone department along side Marketing but is part of the mix. One of the key challenges for the social media strategists is that they are on the outside, they may have deep expertise in their field but few things operate in a vacuum and its clear that social media is most effective when  integrated with offline marketing efforts.
  7. Strategy is at the heart of good PR. It could be argued that PR has a been a little slow to come to the  (socialmedia) party. There are lots of reasons for this. PR’s approach is always circumspect, it has to add value when your dealing with corporate reputations otherwise its not worth doing. I think  this will play out well for the PR industry in the long term.
  8. The culture of the PR industry is to allow others to create content. i.e. journalists. The industry has been built on this fundamental characteristic. The key message is designed to assert as much control as possible over the process of content creation. The approach changes in the context of social media but I think this is one of the strongest arguments in PRs favour. PR has never had control of the message when it comes to the end result.
  9. Search. I think the PR industry has a long way to go in this space but that content is fundamental to search strategy – see point 2. Search seeks to ‘game a system’. The tool of the gaming is content, which has to be of the highest quality.
  10. Most (all?) organisations need to adapt culturally to engage their customers in authentic conversations. I genuinely believe that the businesses that most effectively listen to customers and is able to incorporate their insights into product development and services will be the most successful. This requires an organisational change and is not something that a snazzy social media program can deliver. This, for me, is PRs biggest opportunity as the function that advises and implements change management strategies. PR has a great opportunity to take the lead in making this change happen – the outbound social media campaigns will become the natural output and realisation of this cultural and organisational change in business.

As ever, keen to hear your thoughts and disagreements. Here is a good analysis of the debate from the AdAge.

 

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My highlights from today’s Future of Influence Summit #foi09

September 1st, 2009 by Daniel Young | 4 Comments | Filed in Public Relations, Social media, Technology

The ability to effectively filter information is a new ‘literacy’ that our society requires in order to sort the valuable information online from the crap.  This Crap Detection was one of the opening gambits provided by Howard Rheingold during today’s The Future of Influence Summit 2009.

Future of Influence

My firm – Burson-Marsteller – sponsored the Summit, which took place today in Sydney and San Francisco. The event is produced by The Insight Exchange and was chaired by Ross Dawson.

The Summit covered a wide range of topics relating to the somewhat nebulous concept of Influence.  It’s really hard to summarise the findings or conclusions from the event so I thought I would summarise my most interesting statements and perspectives.

The speaker list including Brian Solis, Richard Bell, Tim Burrowes and Duncan Riley:

  • There is a whole industry dedicated to ‘gaming Google’
  • We may trust people in one sphere but its hard to transfer that sense of reliability if them from one field to another
  • New tools are emerging that allow us to accurately measure Influence
  • A currency of influence is/ will emerge
  • Dell and Starbucks are two companies that have successfully listened to the feedback provided by their community and implemented it (i.e. made a change). One example of this in the context of Starbucks is the Raspberry Muffin, which was dropped but then brought back as a result of feedback provided by customers
  • Advertising and marketing industries are moving from audience measurement (readership, circulation) to influence measurement
  • We live in a confetti economy – high fragmentation of media and proliferation and distribution of source of information
  • Burson-Marsteller research with PR Week: 78% of American consumers say that advertising does not provide enough information for them to make a purchase. Approx. 60% of American consumer say that the media does not provide enough information…
  • Brian Solis categorised the social media community as an ‘ego-system’
  • Lessons are learnt in failure. Google refers to this as ‘failing wisely’
  • The Dell @DellOutlet Twitter concept succeeded partly as a result of very cheap products
  • The number of active Twitter uses is staggeringly low
  • Intel: Marketing industries should stop referring to ‘target audiences’ and start thinking about them as people
  • CBS: Economics dictate a high degree of consolidation in online media. Today’s tier one bloggers will become the trust agents of the future. We are in the adolescence of the new media industry. Power will return to marketers, as a result
  • 80% of online news content is consumer online via Fairfax properties in Australia. New media lacks credibility in this market.
  • Joe Talcott: The message is the message. Technology is the focus for communications today but technology will gradually retreat into the background and content will assume its rightful position as the most important aspect of communication
  • 80% of communication is non-verbal and 90% of conversations about brands still takes place offline

Lots of interesting thoughts and conversations here. No firm answers for a definition of influence or for a criteria or standard for measuring it.

There’s no doubt that this area of digital marketing will grow into the future, with organisations launching methods for measuring influence. I think there is a risk in using the degree to which people are inter-connected as a measure of influence.  There is also a danger in placing higher value on quant. measures of influence such as delicious tags because it assumes that the community that either has access to that content or access to the Web is somehow representative of the total, when this is not necesarily the case.

At the end of the day its very easy to ‘game the system’ and today’s Summit is yet more evidence that big business will invest heavily to excert influence online – at the cost of authenticity, trust and truthfulness in some cases. I believe that we place too much faith in the Web at our peril.

Trust in institutions has eroded; we need to protect and foster the trust that we have in each other.

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Google makes changes to search with Caffeine – how will it impact you?

August 11th, 2009 by Daniel Young | 5 Comments | Filed in Search, Technology

Google announced changes to its search algorithm yesterday. The changes will impact the way that your blog or website ranks.

The updates – named Caffeine – are described by Google as “a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“.

Thanks to my old colleague Ged Carroll and his RT for Stephen Waddington to this econsultancy.com article via Twitter.

Google describes the changes as “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google has opened up a web developer preview to collect feedback: www2.sandbox.google.com/

Google is inviting feedback: Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.

I ran a few searches against my name (daniel young) and found that:

  • My Facebook profile result goes from 5 in old Google to 2 with Caffeine
  • My FriendFeed profiles goes from 29 in old Google to 8 with Caffeine
  • My Twitter profile goes from 18 in old Google to 14 with Caffeine
  • This blog goes from 7 in old Google to 24 with Caffeine

Caffeine seems to be:

  1. Favouring the sites that are updated more frequently
  2. or, favouring social networks over other content
  3. or, both of the above – since they are inter-related

The jump in FriendFeed could be attributed to the Facebook acquisition and the increased importance on real-time properties is most likely a counter strategy to the launch of Bing and Facebook’s real-time search capabilities.

Take a look at the results in Caffeine when we use the search term ‘pr agency’:

My sites are fairly inconsequential but changes to the way that Google produces search results could result in lost business opportunities for organisations that have invested heavily in the Web or are reliant upon it.

The secrecy surrounding the Google algorithm is legendary but it seems odd that Google is asking the user community to tell it about the impact that the change is having on search results.

Does Google not have an obligation or duty to let organisations and individuals know what impact the changes will have on their web properties?

The changes aren’t objective – Google is making subjective decisions about the value of different types of content, sites, activity, formats and so on. These subjective judgements take on particular significance in the context of Google’s extraordinary market position – in excess of 90 per cent market share here in Australia.

This goes to the nub of an issue, which was explored in some detail at today’s AIMIA event in Sydney: ‘Advertiser’s Rights and Consumer Privacy‘.

The event focused on deceptive advertising techniques and unethical practice online.

Unfortunately for Google , it bears the brunt of much of the criticism due in part to its market dominance but also due to its lack of transparency.

The whole value chain came under scrutiny this morning – search engines (Yahoo!, Ask), aggregators, mobile carriers, social networks and digital advertising networks.

Speakers argued that there is a significant lack of accountability in the sector, which is characterised by very complex networks and inter-relationships.

Take two examples cited in today’s event, which featured Ben Edelman – an assistant professor at Harvard Business School:

1. Deceptive advertising tactics are widespread to the point of ubiquity within paid search. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” who publish information provided by others:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This means that online publishers are not responsible for the content they publish, no matter how misleading or deceptive it may be – resulting in many instances of dishonest and misleading search marketing tactics.

Search engines are, as a result, failing to take proactive action to clear out these deceptive practices.

2. Google and its partners inflate conversions to claim credit for traffic that advertisers would otherwise have received for free. Edelman outlines four examples of this here.

I don’t believe that Google is an evil enterprise but I am convinced that it has excessive market power and that this is not in the long term interests of our digital economy or the broader community. Perhaps it gets a hard time as a result of its market dominance but leaders in every field have a duty of care and obligation to do the right thing.

Google is pervasive yet untouchable. Mr. Edelman provided an example of this when he highlighted a laughable  and ironic complaints and claims process for Adwords.

The following is taken from Google Adwords Terms and Conditions for Australian customers:

10 Miscellaneous. The Agreement must be construed as if both parties jointly wrote it, governed by California law except for its conflicts of laws principles and adjudicated in Santa Clara County, California. The Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the subject matter hereof, and supersedes and replaces any other applicable agreements, terms and conditions applicable to the subject matter hereof. Any conflicting or additional terms contained in additional documents (e.g. reference to a purchase order number) or oral discussions are void. Each party shall not disclose the terms or conditions of these Terms to any third party, except to its professional advisors under a strict duty of confidentiality or as necessary to comply with a government law, rule or regulation.  Customer may grant approvals, permissions, extensions and consents by email, but any modifications by Customer to the Agreement must be made in a writing executed by both parties. Any notices to Google must be sent to Google Ireland Limited, AdWords Program, 1st & 2nd Floor, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, with a copy to Legal Department, via confirmed facsimile, with a copy sent via first class or air mail or overnight courier, and are deemed given upon receipt.  Notice to Customer may be effected by sending email to the email address specified in Customer’s account, or by posting a message to Customer’s account interface, and is deemed received when sent (for email) or no more than 15 days after having been posted (for messages in Customer’s account interface).

In short, please send an email to the Google engineers if you want to provide feedback on Caffeine, the new search algorithm (but don’t expect a reply), and submit notices regarding modifications to Adwords agreements by snail mail to their office in Dublin, Ireland.

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Australians likely to avoid or ignore adverts

June 29th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Media, Technology

Neil Shoebridge reported on research conducted by Ipsos Mackay today, which found that Australian consumers were finding new ways to avoid advertising.

The same story was also reported by B&T.

According to the B&T article:

  • Advertising is generally seen in a negative light
  • Consumers object to ill-considered timing and placement of ads – especially during a time of financial stress
  • Consumers feel that advertising is infiltrating their culture and everyday life

The advertising industry is hoping to leverage the Internet as a means of moving to advertising that is behaviourally targeted. This will be an enormous challenge for the industry given privacy concerns and the fact that consumers expect more regulation today, as the B&T article notes.

The findings are based on discussions with 16 groups of men and woman (older  than mid-twenties) in Australia.

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Google accesses consumer surfing behaviour and stakes a claim for a bigger share of marketing dollars

March 13th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Social media, Technology

I am a great fan of the World Advertising Research Council  (WARC) - its provides great content and the daily news alert is succinct yet highly relevant. Today’s issue picked up on the announcement by Google of a behavioural advertising system. The system will target ads at user based on analysis of their browsing history. This is an optout scheme that will exclude online behaviour relating to health, race, religion and finance.

In the same edition WARC reported on a 15% reduction in global advertising revenue – across the board i.e. digital and traditional media.  

The ‘measurability’ of digital marketing remains one of the key drivers for investment in the Web by marketers and this will continue to be the case while the industry matures and develops a method for measuring and tracking engagement and influence (i.e. qualitiative metrics).

The traditional media sector is obviously already suffering at the hands of digital. To the digital advertising sector – and particularly the massively dominant Google - the measurability of digitial advertising is a major strategic advantage. 

As competition for marketing budgets increase, I think we can expect to see companies like Google and others making more and more user data available in order to maximise their share of the total overall investment. At no cost and at the touch of a button, these organisations can enhance their strategic advantage over traditional media.  

There is a strong lobby arguing that this strategic advantage comes at the expense of consumer privacy but Google has been commended in parts for its approach.  

Could the launch of Google Voice be a strategy designed to overshadow media interest in targetted advertising.

The New York times provides a guide to Google’s privacy controls here. Industry standard story < there and an interesting counter view for Gawker here.

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MySpace launches demographic targeting capabilities at Ad:tech Sydney 2009

March 10th, 2009 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Blogging, Music, My Blogroll, Social media, Technology

I attended the ad:tech 09 conference at the Sydney Convention Centre today, which provided plenty of food for thought on a wide range of digital marketing issues.

The conference kicked off with two keynotes in the morning and then split into three tracks.

The presentations that I saw were very case study driven, which is nearly always the case with these types of conferences. Agencies and clients were happy to talk about the revolution that ‘is occurring’ or ‘has occurred’ and to report back on successful campaigns and projects but few were willing to tackle some of the more challenging topics and issues facing the industry. I saw four members of one panel swerve the question of: What is influence and how can it be measured?

This is a topic that I plan to come back to.

Fox Interactive Media announced ‘four new initiatives‘ to ensure that it ‘enables marketers in their fight to be more efficient and relevant’.

One of the four initiatives – MySpace Lifestages’ will allow marketers to target Australians in a range of lifestages, including:

  • When a MySpace user has graduated from Uni
  • Is engaged to be married
  • Is Pregnant
  • Has given birth
  • Has lost a job
  • Has entered a new job
  • Has had a birthday

MySpace will provide marketers with access to this data in real-time (its based on the users’ self expressed interests on their public MySpace profiles’.

Some facts about MySpace Australia:

  • More than 2.4million uniqe Australian visitors in Jan 2009 – according to Nielson Online
  • Australians spents 2.3million hours on MySpace during Jan 2009
  • 65% of MySpace Australia users are 18 years or over

The theme of brands engaging with consumers via existing social networks was a dominant one during day one of Ad:tech and its clear that huge value lies in the access that these social networks have to user data. Further, the value held in this data is the key to successful monetisation of social networks. The ability of social networks to harness information and present it in ways that are useful to marketing people will determine the future of social networking.

Users have – in the most part unwittingly – accepted this process by agreeing to the End User License Agreement, which is an essential step when signing up or becoming a member of a social network but one wonders how consumers will react in the long run when it becomes apparent to them that brands have access to this information and are using it to target them with offers and promotions. The onus is on the marketing industry to do this in a way that is truly engaging, entertaining or useful.

There were examples of some creative and engaging campaigns today.

I think there is an inherent danger for today’s popular social networks – the pressure to successfully monetize will increase over time (accelerating from now) resulting in them making more and more information available to marketers and potentially alienating their members. This may create the opportunity for new social networks to come in with promises not to share personal information with marketers.

Of course, there are other methods of monetizing social networks. This post by Laurel Papworth provides a comprehensive run down while Robert Andrews at The Guardian predicts a tough 2009.

Some more thoughts on day 1 from Ben Shepherd at Talking Digital here.

More from me from Ad:tech tomorrow.

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