by Andrew Harrison
It’s been a turbulent month for traditional media stocks. Even a globally strong, market leader such as WPP has seen shares fall to a ten-year low (on the back of a leaked internal email claiming a hiring freeze), while unfashionable ITV shares are trading at less than 30p. And some of the stronger performing mid-cap groups, such as Future, YouGov and Chime, are being marked down despite strong trading results. Worst of all worlds, for sentiment, seems to be a music business – just ask EMI, now being run by the somewhat ironically named Terra Firma.
The industry’s response over the past few weeks has been brutal. In TV, for example, ITV is to lay off 1,000 employees, and Channel 4 has announced plans to save £100m and drop its nascent radio business. In radio, GCap and Global Radio are to shed a further 80 staff in the merger of their sales teams; in newspapers, the Daily Mail & General Trust, News International and The Independent have all announced new sales structures, while the regional press – Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror and Midland News – all say they are planning organisational changes. Against this background, it’s no surprise that future-defining deals have either fallen through (like UBC Media Group’s sale of its commercial division) or are being pushed through shareholders on tough terms (like WPP’s acquisition of TNS).
According to the latest study by the IAB and its consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, internet advertising is “propping up” traditional media. Thank goodness something is. “Overall, we believe online will perform better than other media during the downturn but expect to see differences in performance across the various online segments” said a PwC media director, before PwC and Enders Analysis both promptly dropped growth figures for 2008 online advertising revenues.
This to me is the real story that’s not yet been reported. What will happen online tomorrow threatens to be just as brutal as what is happening offline today.
Here’s why. On the surface it looks as if digital growth remains strong: online revenues are up 21% in the first half of 2008. But that masks two truths. First, the overall digital growth rate is in serious decline – indeed it’s about half the growth rate of a year ago. Of course, we’d all rather be growing (especially at 21%) than declining – but it’s also true that digital revenues are not immune to the downturn. If the growth rate halves again in the next few months (and all the marketing signals are that it could), then internet growth rates will struggle to make double digits.
Still, not a bad problem to have – until you unpick the sector a bit. Which leads to the second truth: more than half the overall digital market is in search and about 90% of that is Google – so one company accounts for half the total digital economy (which is growing at a faster rate than the other half). Put another way, all the other thousands of websites in the UK aggregate up to less than Google alone.
So, for Google, it’s probably just a bump in the road. Search remains the web’s killer application and while it’s arguable that a prolonged recession is bound to reduce consumer traffic and searching as purchases decline, it’s equally arguable that search – with its robust ROI – will hold up well. But, for all the other thousands of sites on the web, life’s about to get much tougher because if there is structural weakness in offline display revenues today (and there is), then the same will be true for online display revenues tomorrow.
Search has grown exponentially because it attaches ads to consumers with an intention to purchase; but display online (or anywhere else) attaches ads to content – a much less direct relationship. Put another way, search is part of the process of purchase rather than the initial persuasion to do so. Rightly or wrongly, many advertisers give undue credit to the former (because it’s much more measurable and translates directly to sales). In turn, advertisers fail to give sufficient credit to the latter because it starts rather than finishes the process.
Unfortunately, especially in a downturn, it will not be easy to nudge advertisers towards a greater respect for the contribution display makes to the initial customer persuasion – so the result will be a tough time for both the online and offline display market.
But, in the digital space, we know the number of content sites seeking advertising is growing fast (certainly at a rate many multiples higher than the current 16% revenue growth), because very few sites are cementing a subscription model. So, inventory is growing, not contracting, as it should in a downturn, meaning prices will tumble.
Too many sites chasing too little ad revenue. Haven’t we been here before? When sites that have users but no revenue next go to the bank for an extension of their funding, we’ll see a second digital bust. It’s not as if the banks have any money to lend to businesses without revenues.
But, this time around, one thing’s for sure: you’ll still be able to search on Google for an updated ranking of the winners and losers.
2008. nov. 12.
2008. nov. 10.
2008. nov. 7.
Ads on Edge
Excellent presentation from the guys at The economist. Especially cutting marketing budgets in a recession is not a good thing:
- because marketing is part of the solution, not the problem
- because what you sacrifice now, you will pay for later
- because it can do serious damage to your brand
- because it is a golden opportunity to gain market share
- –> The biggest shift in a downturn is towards accountable media – this typically means a greater spend online.
Blogs Influence Consumer Purchases More than Social Networks
The number of those who read blogs at least once a month has grown 300% in the past four years, and what they read strongly influences their purchase decisions, playing a key role in ushering them to the point of actual purchase, according to a BuzzLogic-sponsored study, reports Retailer Daily.
“Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” a research study of more than 2,000 online consumers in the US, was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company.
The study aimed to uncover changing behavior around blog discovery and consumption, how blogs factor into consumer purchase decisions, and the nature of blog influence on buying behavior.
For example, frequent blog readers (those who read blogs more than once per month) - constituting 20% of blog readers - say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions more than content from social networking sites, the study found.
Below are additional findings released by BuzzLogic.
Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence
- Blogs influence purchases: One half (50%) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
- Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31% of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15%); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14%); travel (12%); automotive (11%); and health (10%).
- Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56%) say blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
Blogs’ Place in the Purchase Cycle
Blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision, according to the study: Among respondents who say they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52%) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.
Blog readers’ responses regarding blogs’ influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
- Decide on a product or service: 21%
- Refine choices: 19%
- Get support and answers: 19%
- Discover products and services: 17% Assure: 14%
- Inspire a purchase: 13%
- Execute a purchase: 7%
Blog Ads and Reader Trust
For frequent blog readers, ads on blogs are on par with sponsored search results, one of the most prevalent and successful forms of advertising on the web - and trust of blog advertising exceeds that around social networking site advertising.
Fully 25% of frequent readers say they trust ads on a blog they read; paid search links also account for 25% of their responses; and 19% say they trust ads on social networking sites.
The study also suggests ads on blogs spur various activities:
- 40% of blog readers have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; 50% of frequent blog readers say so.
- Top activities include the following: read product reviews online (17%); sought out more info on a product or service (16%); visited a manufacturer or retailer website (16%).
Changing Reader Patterns: The Power of Links
Frequent blog readers use blogs as the top online navigation tool to discover other blog content, ranking higher than general web search or blog search, the study also found:
- 38% of frequent readers said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content.
- 34% cited web search, and 11% said blog search engines were the top tool for discovering new blog content.
- For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39% of survey participants).
One in five general blog readers (defined as consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months) use blog links to discover new blogs.
Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6% of general readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.
Blogs are not consumed in isolation, but experienced as part of a connected conversation: Nearly half (49%) of blog readers and 71% of frequent readers read more than one blog per session.
“For a portion of web users, blogs rival search as a navigation tool, which has really interesting implications for advertisers,” said Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic. “Blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online. Being able to identify where this is taking place across the blogosphere gives us a window into user intent and a means to better target advertising to a qualified audience. This is great news for advertisers looking to maximize value in today’s environment.”
About the study: In August 2008, JupiterResearch designed and fielded a survey to online consumers selected randomly from the NPD Group US online consumer panel. A total of 2,210 persons responded to the survey. Respondents were asked approximately 40 closed-ended questions about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to media and entertainment, including 10 questions relating to blogs. The samples were balanced by a series of demographic and behavioral characteristics to ensure that they were representative of the online population. Demographic weighting variables included age, gender, household income, household education, household type, region, market size, race, Hispanic ethnicity, online tenure, connection speed, and student status.
2008. nov. 6.
Consumer Segments Likely to Spend Differently in Tough Economy
Though nearly all consumers are facing economic uncertainty, their responses to economic difficulties differ - but not along conventional demographic lines, according to Acxiom Corporation’s first Retail Consumer Dynamics Study (RCD), reports Retailer Daily.
The Acxiom study, an industry-specific analysis of consumer shopping behavior and attitudes, finds variations in how consumer segments perceive the economy and how that perception affects whether and how they will defer spending; the type of stores they will visit; and generally how they go about their daily shopping.
The study identifies nine consumer behavioral segments, placing those segments into three distinct groups that reflect consumers’ potential future behavior:
- Potential Rebounder (33% of consumers) - those likely to loosen up on spending sooner
- Status Quo (48%) - those not likely to change from current behavior
- Digging In (19%) - those tightening spending and retreating further
“Rather than thinking in simple terms of who is spending more versus who is spending less, this study allows us to see how consumers are making their decisions,” said Jie Cheng, vice-president of analytics and consumer insights at Acxiom.
Among the consumer segments that the study identifies:
1) Savvy Spenders (mostly married, affluent, young or mature, living in outer suburbs and rural communities) are more likely to spend sooner than other segments, given some improved circumstances.
Of the Savvy Spenders, 37% are shopping sales more often.
Savvy Spenders favor department stores for their combination of category offerings and brand/price options.
2) Those likely to shop more online are the Tight with Purpose; they are married and have children, and they’re upper middle income with professional or management careers.
3) The It’s My Life segment - mostly affluent young consumers maintaining a child-free city lifestyle - are not letting economic conditions change their shopping behavior. They shop in category-killer stores to benefit from the blend of brand selection and price.
“This challenging economy creates an exceptional opportunity for retailers and consumer product manufacturers to target direct messages to specific consumer segments in order to sustain and maximize a return on marketing investment,” said Jim Harold, industry executive for retail and consumer markets at Acxiom.
About the study: The Retail Consumer Dynamics study is based on an integrated data set combining consumer survey study findings with Acxiom’s consumer demographic, life stage and lifestyle information. The survey was conducted by BIGresearch, a consumer intelligence firm, and the analysis using 18,924 panel data points was performed by Acxiom.
Measuring social media
How do you build brands post-Google?
As the recession begins to bite, brands are finding that getting through to customers is tougher than ever.
Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.
This is partly because online media is growing at the expense of offline. A UK survey by Media Week showed that time spent for both live/realtime TV and teletext tv decreased by 1% and 2% respectively between 2006 and 2007, while internet usage by 50%; an IDC study of U.S. consumer online behavior found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).
It is partly because of the rise in ad avoidance strategies. DVRs owners (according to an IBM survey) watch at least 50% of television programming on replay, thus avoiding television advertising. It is partly because of a major decline in public trust in brands. People trust people more than they trust the media. In a 2006 survey of U.S. consumers, Forrester found that 83% of respondents trusted friends’ opinion, but only 75% trust product reviews in a newspaper, magazine or TV. (Groundswell, Charline Li and Josh Bernhoff).
The answer would seem to be to move the business online. More than half of the world’s Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen. The web also seems to offer promising growth for advertisers: Nielsen estimates that spending on online advertising will escalate at 19.2 per cent annually till 2012 and will surpass the TV advertising budget in the US in the next decade.
But advertising on the web poses challenges. Online banner click-throughs on Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have declined from 0.75% to 0.27% according to ad monitoring firm Eyeblaster.
Paid search ads now represent the lion’s share of online ad spending. Contextual search ads are great for selling specific factual propositions (flights to Malaga, hotels in Brussels) but they are less effective at communicating emotion. In a recent report from The Wharton School, marketing professor Patti Williams observes that it’s unclear how a company like Crest can leverage search advertising: “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand-building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”
A 2007 global Nielsen survey found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78 percent of the study’s respondents. And there are perhaps clues for advertisers in the shift of online consumers to social networking sites. In the UK, social networks overtook webmail by percentage of visits in 2007, with social networks accounting for 5.17% of all Internet visits compared to 4.98% for email services. Advertisers want to follow consumers but that’s difficult. When you are chatting to a friend the last thing you want is to be interrupted with a clumsy brand message. Privacy settings in most networks preclude direct marketing. Facebook recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual advertising.
So how do Brands engage with the consumer in a way that provokes conversation and endorsement? The most successful strategies for engagement with social media is for a brand do something which allows people to pass on a key message about your brand.
People can talk about you for three reasons:
1. You have given them useful information.
H&R Block set out to build awareness of their online tax return offering by creating content customised for channels. The budget was 5% of their annual digital spend only 0.5% of their total ad spend. They grew awareness 52%, and saw an 11% growth in tax services business, feeding net income which rose to $544m from an $86m loss the previous year.
Giant Food Stores increased monthly consumer website visits by 400% after lauching a “Super Shopping List”, which lets customers easily browse recipes, view weekly specials, and create a personal shopping list.Brand discussion goes beyond the product itself. The entire process and value system around which a product created is also a source of conversation.
2. You have entertained them.
The hugely popular Cadbury Dairy Milk campaign which featured a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” received 7m views online, more than 6,000 comments and boosted Cadbury revenues by 5% for that year. (Gorilla ad works its magic on sales of Cadbury bars ).
This jokey video from Philips Norelco Bodygroom raised the issue of persuading men to shave “below the neck” in the summer 2006. The video (cross-posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com) has been viewed 1.8m times, it boosted unaided awareness 8% and contributed to year-on-year growth of 17% for the DAP division (of which shavers represent 45%) to Q1 2007.
3. There is something in your product that they respond to.
Jeep’s “Have fun out there” website aggregates communities from where they already exist, such as Facebook and Flickr, to create its own uber-community where members drive the content.
The t-shirt company Threadless has used community as a mode to build its business by allowing members of the website to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. The top designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store with winning designers getting a cash prize and store merchandise. What started as a hobby in 2005 by founder Jake Nickell has been growing quickly with annual sales on track to hit $5 million in 2008.
The last is the best because it means that consumers have engaged with your brand and are doing your marketing for you. With the additional benefit that they are marketing to people who are inclined to believe their testimonials. It is also the hardest to achieve. New online measurement techniques (such as those used by Market Sentinel) offer the opportunity to chart how effective brand building in online by directly measuring response to creative campaigns, by gauging consumer engagement and by changing the creative to take account of live consumer responses. But how do you measure such responses. A consensus about this is only now beginning to emerge and we will deal with this in our next post.
As the recession begins to bite, brands are finding that getting through to customers is tougher than ever.
Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.
This is partly because online media is growing at the expense of offline. A UK survey by Media Week showed that time spent for both live/realtime TV and teletext tv decreased by 1% and 2% respectively between 2006 and 2007, while internet usage by 50%; an IDC study of U.S. consumer online behavior found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).
It is partly because of the rise in ad avoidance strategies. DVRs owners (according to an IBM survey) watch at least 50% of television programming on replay, thus avoiding television advertising. It is partly because of a major decline in public trust in brands. People trust people more than they trust the media. In a 2006 survey of U.S. consumers, Forrester found that 83% of respondents trusted friends’ opinion, but only 75% trust product reviews in a newspaper, magazine or TV. (Groundswell, Charline Li and Josh Bernhoff).
The answer would seem to be to move the business online. More than half of the world’s Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen. The web also seems to offer promising growth for advertisers: Nielsen estimates that spending on online advertising will escalate at 19.2 per cent annually till 2012 and will surpass the TV advertising budget in the US in the next decade.
But advertising on the web poses challenges. Online banner click-throughs on Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have declined from 0.75% to 0.27% according to ad monitoring firm Eyeblaster.
Paid search ads now represent the lion’s share of online ad spending. Contextual search ads are great for selling specific factual propositions (flights to Malaga, hotels in Brussels) but they are less effective at communicating emotion. In a recent report from The Wharton School, marketing professor Patti Williams observes that it’s unclear how a company like Crest can leverage search advertising: “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand-building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”
A 2007 global Nielsen survey found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78 percent of the study’s respondents. And there are perhaps clues for advertisers in the shift of online consumers to social networking sites. In the UK, social networks overtook webmail by percentage of visits in 2007, with social networks accounting for 5.17% of all Internet visits compared to 4.98% for email services. Advertisers want to follow consumers but that’s difficult. When you are chatting to a friend the last thing you want is to be interrupted with a clumsy brand message. Privacy settings in most networks preclude direct marketing. Facebook recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual advertising.
So how do Brands engage with the consumer in a way that provokes conversation and endorsement? The most successful strategies for engagement with social media is for a brand do something which allows people to pass on a key message about your brand.
People can talk about you for three reasons:
1. You have given them useful information.
H&R Block set out to build awareness of their online tax return offering by creating content customised for channels. The budget was 5% of their annual digital spend only 0.5% of their total ad spend. They grew awareness 52%, and saw an 11% growth in tax services business, feeding net income which rose to $544m from an $86m loss the previous year.
Giant Food Stores increased monthly consumer website visits by 400% after lauching a “Super Shopping List”, which lets customers easily browse recipes, view weekly specials, and create a personal shopping list.Brand discussion goes beyond the product itself. The entire process and value system around which a product created is also a source of conversation.
2. You have entertained them.
The hugely popular Cadbury Dairy Milk campaign which featured a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” received 7m views online, more than 6,000 comments and boosted Cadbury revenues by 5% for that year. (Gorilla ad works its magic on sales of Cadbury bars ).
This jokey video from Philips Norelco Bodygroom raised the issue of persuading men to shave “below the neck” in the summer 2006. The video (cross-posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com) has been viewed 1.8m times, it boosted unaided awareness 8% and contributed to year-on-year growth of 17% for the DAP division (of which shavers represent 45%) to Q1 2007.
3. There is something in your product that they respond to.
Jeep’s “Have fun out there” website aggregates communities from where they already exist, such as Facebook and Flickr, to create its own uber-community where members drive the content.
The t-shirt company Threadless has used community as a mode to build its business by allowing members of the website to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. The top designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store with winning designers getting a cash prize and store merchandise. What started as a hobby in 2005 by founder Jake Nickell has been growing quickly with annual sales on track to hit $5 million in 2008.
The last is the best because it means that consumers have engaged with your brand and are doing your marketing for you. With the additional benefit that they are marketing to people who are inclined to believe their testimonials. It is also the hardest to achieve. New online measurement techniques (such as those used by Market Sentinel) offer the opportunity to chart how effective brand building in online by directly measuring response to creative campaigns, by gauging consumer engagement and by changing the creative to take account of live consumer responses. But how do you measure such responses. A consensus about this is only now beginning to emerge and we will deal with this in our next post.
Measuring social media
podcast interview with David Armano
podcast interview with David Armano
David Armano of Critical Mass, author of an excellent blog on social media - what he calls micro interactions - gives us his perspective in a podcast interview (10 mins) on ways to measure in social media, and how to judge ROI.
2008. nov. 5.
Online Shines in UK as Old Media Ads Dim
Digital ads will weather the fiscal storm.
Advertisers in the UK are tightening their budgets and shifting their spending to more-effective and measurable methods. Online advertising will continue to benefit from this trend as marketers move away from traditional media in search of a more targeted audience.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK), in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), reported that total advertising spending in the UK was down 0.7%, coming to £8.9 billion ($17.4 billion) between January and June 2008. Online ad spending grew to £1.7 billion ($3.3 billion) in the first half of 2008, a 21% increase from the same period last year. Without online advertising, total ad spending would have been down 4.6%.
“Normally we would expect a rise in online ad spending associated with the end-of-year holidays,” said Karin von Abrams, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Any rise this year will be muted, thanks to continuing economic difficulties. But we still anticipate very solid full-year figures for 2008, and are interested to see that the IAB UK is predicting annual results for Internet ad spending that are similar to our own.”
In March eMarketer predicted that though the overall ad market would be affected by the financial sector’s woes, online ad spending would show double-digit growth through 2010. eMarketer estimates that spending will reach approximately £2.6 ($5.3 billion) in 2007 and £3.4 ($6.4 billion) in 2008.
“Internet use, and online activities such as e-commerce, video viewing and catching the latest news, are now firmly embedded in the lives of tens of millions of UK residents,” Ms. von Abrams said. “This isn’t going to change, and in fact most Web users are using online channels more than ever to keep on top of events, make their lives more efficient and help their money go further. This can only boost advertisers’ desire to put their messages in front of online consumers.”
For your free copy of the eMarketer whitepaper, Marketing NOW: Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn, written by eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey, please click here
Advertisers in the UK are tightening their budgets and shifting their spending to more-effective and measurable methods. Online advertising will continue to benefit from this trend as marketers move away from traditional media in search of a more targeted audience.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK), in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), reported that total advertising spending in the UK was down 0.7%, coming to £8.9 billion ($17.4 billion) between January and June 2008. Online ad spending grew to £1.7 billion ($3.3 billion) in the first half of 2008, a 21% increase from the same period last year. Without online advertising, total ad spending would have been down 4.6%.
“Normally we would expect a rise in online ad spending associated with the end-of-year holidays,” said Karin von Abrams, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Any rise this year will be muted, thanks to continuing economic difficulties. But we still anticipate very solid full-year figures for 2008, and are interested to see that the IAB UK is predicting annual results for Internet ad spending that are similar to our own.”
In March eMarketer predicted that though the overall ad market would be affected by the financial sector’s woes, online ad spending would show double-digit growth through 2010. eMarketer estimates that spending will reach approximately £2.6 ($5.3 billion) in 2007 and £3.4 ($6.4 billion) in 2008.
“Internet use, and online activities such as e-commerce, video viewing and catching the latest news, are now firmly embedded in the lives of tens of millions of UK residents,” Ms. von Abrams said. “This isn’t going to change, and in fact most Web users are using online channels more than ever to keep on top of events, make their lives more efficient and help their money go further. This can only boost advertisers’ desire to put their messages in front of online consumers.”
For your free copy of the eMarketer whitepaper, Marketing NOW: Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn, written by eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey, please click here
2008. nov. 4.
An interview with Brian Elliott, the CEO of Amsterdam Worldwide
The ReVISION made an interview with Brian Elliott, the CEO of Amsterdam Worldwide (formerly known as Strawberry Frog). The interview was conducted for the Hungarian Advertising and Marketing Conference.
(English with Hungarian subtitle)
2008. nov. 2.
Give Before You Get - by Heidi Skinner
“Make a Facebook Fan Page because it doesn’t cost anything. Create a YouTube Brand Channel to house your video assets - YouTube allows you to do it for free. Befriend 100 people on MySpace and create a Ning community because there are no fees…” If you’ve ever allowed yourself to say these things, please adjust your social media compass.
The expectation that social media tactics are free initiatives is a huge fallacy to both agencies and marketers. There are four reasons why a good influential marketing strategy should cost you money:
The expectation that social media tactics are free initiatives is a huge fallacy to both agencies and marketers. There are four reasons why a good influential marketing strategy should cost you money:
1. Focusing your scope costs money. Take the guess work out of social media by engaging a buzz monitoring tool. Before you decide on your brand’s approach, gain insight on the topics, tonality and volume of conversations around our brand before you get started. If not, you aren’t truly fishing where the fish are.
2. Creative development costs money. Don’t let your media planners decide on social placement without consulting the creative and technical teams – and vice versa. At Critical Mass, we’re changing the model to make sure the “how” and the “what” happen in tandem to make sure that we’re not hap-hazardly repurposing TV or traditional online media messaging. If content is the currency in this environment, we need invest in our message.
3. Getting people to talk to you costs money. Sites like Facebook and YouTube are so large that a great effort is needed to cut through the clutter. While standard banner buys aren’t the solution, a dedicated effort is needed to monitor and grow community-based conversations.
4. Tracking costs money. Because brand presence in social places has yet to be perfected, it’s imperative that we calculate risk, set benchmarks for both branding and quantitative study to be able to scale in the future.
Done correctly, influential marketing strategies aren’t cost-prohibitive, but we need to accept the fact that 100,000,000 new pieces of content are posted within the social sphere every week. To cut through the clutter, we need to start taking social media seriously. Be prepared to give before you get.
Feliratkozás:
Bejegyzések (Atom)