Archive for the 'advertising' Category

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Advertising losing effectiveness

Published on January 22, 2007 in ROI, advertising and business. 0 Comments

Spike has a great article on MarketingProfs on the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising – regardless of how great it may be. The marketing methods to improves sales are shifting so quickly that most firms do not know how to react. There has to be a shift from pure brand-focused advertising to community-driven action.

Marketing Evolution Carnival #1 – January 2, 2007

Published on January 1, 2007 in advertising, branding, business, design, management, marketing, marketing (r)evolution and strategy. 3 Comments

Marketing (r)evolution Carnival

Welcome to the January 2, 2007 edition of Marketing (r)evolution Carnival brought to you by Nick Rice @ Strategic Design.

This Carnival is an aggregation of some of the best thoughts on the future of advertising, branding, marketing and strategy. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

Advertising

Valeria Maltoni presents Where’s the Benefit to me? posted at Conversation Agent, saying, “Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to the conversation.”

Chris Houchens presents Users First posted at Shotgun Marketing BLOG, saying, “Your customers are what “monetize” a business. Stop developing short term strategies that kill long term gains.”

Murad Ali presents Three (3) Easy Ways to Optimize Your Blog posted at The New Marketing World.

Branding

Jack Yoest presents Rocky Balboa: Courage, Integrity, Faith, Victory The Movie posted at Reasoned Audacity, saying, “Your Business Blogger was in Philly recently and wondered about the Rocky statue that was briefly at the top of the 72 steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since September, the statue is now at the base of the steps. So I decided to ask the man who might know, Sylvester Stallone. Why? I asked him. Rocky Sly says, It’s better where it is — at the base of the steps. At the top was the completion — the end — but it’s not the completion that counts — it’s the journey. The Effort; The Passion.”

Kevin Skarritt presents Jingle all the Way posted at Nuts and Bolts of Brand.

Marketing

C.B. Whittemore presents Shelly Lazarus on the Future of Advertising & Marketing posted at Flooring The Consumer.

David Maister presents I Can’t Believe This Worked on Me! posted at Passion, People and Principles, saying, “We all love to believe that we are very rational in our own buying, but there are times when marketing and selling approaches that we would like to believe don’t work on us, well, they actually do.”

Kevin Skarritt presents Control Freak! posted at Nuts and Bolts of Brand.

Matthew Paulson presents The Problem with Quixtar & Amway. posted at Getting Green.

Charles H. Green presents Bad Marketing 101: Trust Me! posted at Trust Matters, saying, “What are the two most trust-destroying words you can say? “Trust me!”"

Mike Sansone presents Is del.icio.us a Marketing Tool? posted at Converstations.

Strategy

Andy Nulman presents Theory 2-Intimate Goes Big posted at Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise, saying, “Happy to be at the carnival, and wondering if the rights to the cotton candy concession are still available.”

Tim Peter presents What Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will buy in 2007 and why… » thinks posted at Tim Peter thinks…, saying, “This is from about a week ago, but I think it takes a broad look at media 2.0 in 2007. Enjoy!”

Tim Peter presents What’s the least you can do? » thinks posted at Tim Peter thinks…, saying, “This is an another post that you might also find useful. Enjoy.”

Matthew Paulson presents Gold: A Bad Investment posted at Getting Green.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Marketing (r)evolution Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: marketing (r)evolution carnival, blog carnival, marketing, advertising, strategy, branding

Marketing Evolution Carnival Submission

Published on December 20, 2006 in advertising, branding, marketing, marketing (r)evolution, social media and strategy. 0 Comments

Ok readers, I’ve set up a new Blog Carnival. It’s called the Marketing Evolution Carnival.

Please submit your blog posts related to the future of marketing, strategy, branding and creativity. Carnivals are a great way to expose your content to a broad audience. On Jan 2 or 3 I’ll post all of the submissions on this blog with links to each article. So I’ll need your post submissions by Dec. 30th.

So find your best marketing/branding/strategy 2.0 writing and submit them for the Carnival. After that, I’ll do all of the work and let you know when it’s live.

Best ROI for marketing dollars

Published on November 29, 2006 in advertising, branding and marketing. 1 Comment

According to the latest DMA Power of Direct report, email marketing tops all marketing efforts from an ROI point of view. As of right now, email marketing will give you the biggest bang for your buck with a return of $57.25 for every $1.00 you spend. Compare that to $7.09 for print catalogs and $22.52 for non-email internet marketing.

Yet for most organizations, email marketing gets little funding compared to traditional advertising and print materials. Unless you’re in the catalog business, those other mediums offer little in regards to measuring a return on your investment. And with markets collapsing and prices falling, businesses are looking for every dollar to show a measurable return – and a quick return at that.

In 2006, marketers will spend only $400M on email marketing. Compare that to spending $20B for print catalogs. Those #’s are radically different, but you have to dig in a little deeper to understand them. Let’s compare the two.

From a cost point of view, print is a nightmare. The time is takes to layout and design a 75 page catalog is huge. It is an all consuming task for your designers to get the artwork ready for the next catalog. They spend months preparing. And once the files are ready to go to the printer, you have exorbitant printing and distribution costs. Hopefully you sleep well at night knowing that as soon as each page is printed, it’s potentially out of date due to pricing or technical product changes.

From a personalization point of view, catalogs fail miserably. About the only level of personalization on a catalog is the little promo code or coupon that prints with the shipping address. Other than that, everyone gets the same book.

On the other hand, people love to keep catalogs around for a long time. Some catalogs are so powerful; people keep them out on their coffee tables to impress friends. They’re easy to take with you on a trip or share with a friend. They are a great way to build a brand because you can tell more of your story. You’re not locked into a small window within Microsoft Outlook.

While print catalogs have a lower ROI than emails, it is predicted to increase by 2007 while email ROI is predicted to drop.

Email and internet marketing are infinitely more measurable and customizable than print. But they are the newest kids on the block and lots of organizations still do not know how to handle them properly. Don’t mistake the ease of email marketing with simplicity. It’s still take a lot of work to manage lists and create offers that appeal to your target audience without being seen as a spammer. And there are technical barriers like server blocks and email filters that have to be worked through as well. With catalogs it’s pretty easy, drop it in the mail and it arrives. Hopefully calls start coming into your order center. With email, you can see exactly who opened it, how long they spent reading it, which links they clicked on, and whether they forwarded it to a friend. Unfortunately spammers are making a bad name for the entire market.

So, I wouldn’t stop what you’re doing just yet. If you have a booming catalog business, start to think about augmenting that with a email component. And if you’ve dabbled with email, try to get more serious about it by taking advantage of the variable data and trackable nature of the medium. Email is a great way to communicate with your audience; you just have to respect their time and inbox.

Like all good marketing initiatives offer value first and your customers will respond.

technorati tags > email, marketing, print, advertising, ROI, internet, measure

Creativity or a slow death?

Published on November 24, 2006 in ROI, advertising, business, design, management and strategy. 0 Comments

Submitted to Hugh as a mini-manifesto…

I read somewhere that the best test for creativity in business was simply to ask “are you creative?” So I tried it. And for the majority of people it seemingly proved true. The people that we all see as creative (designers, PowerPoint gurus, out of the box thinkers) said yes; and the planners, project managers, sales people said no. So I naively believed it to be true.

Watching my two year old daughter run around and play reminds me that we’re all creative. We all have boundless imaginations. We always have. Unfortunately our educational system has progressively worked that aspect our being out of our nature. No educational system on the planet puts as much emphasis on creativity as they do logic. Think about the number of math and science classes you took versus the arts and humanities. Not that logic is bad. In fact, it’s a critical element of life. I just believe that we are over-balanced on logic compared to creativity.

I believe the lack of creativity is slowly killing business. That lack is driving everything to a commodity price-driven market. It’s creating an environment that puts cost cutting before customer satisfaction. Without creative thinking how will the engineering team discover the next breakthrough product? How will the marketing team develop messaging that stands above a crowded market place.

Creativity isn’t solely the realm of designers and ad agencies. It shouldn’t be associated with art. It does not equal wild and crazy. It doesn’t equal foolishness. And being “creative” not a job title.

When you hear “out of the box thinking”; that’s the call to creativity. It’s your management team asking you to come up with a new approach. It’s daring to think differently. It’s not copying the competition. And after all, when you boil it down isn’t creative thinking what we’re paid to do? If everyone has the same view, the same ideas, the same approach, and the same results why are we all still here?

To succeed in business is to be creative in your role. Growth demands creativity. It will separate you from the competition. As humans we’re trained to only notice what’s different in our environment. Therefore, standing out is the best way to raise awareness.The lack of creativity across the board is not only hurting your brand, it’s ultimately hurting your profitability. And it’s hurting your employees.

Creativity isn’t a special gift – we’re all born with it. It never leaves, it’s just hiding behind years of logic. I challenge you to find time to let the two year old inside of you come out and play. Your employees, customers, and shareholders will thank you.

technorati tags > creativity, gaping void, business, marketing, growth, strategies

Physician, heal thyself…

Published on September 14, 2006 in advertising, business, entrepreneur and strategy. 0 Comments

After eleven years in business, my firm just brought in our first management consultant. We’ve been growing steadily for the last few years, but have too much of our revenue coming from a single client (an all too common occurance in agencies btw). We know that and are taking a proactive approach to solving that. And part of that approach is me – Mr. New Business Development. I’m the first employee with a dedicated % of time going towards finding new accounts. So far we have grown entirely from referral business. Not too shabby for an ~$8M company. It says a lot about our CEO and the quality of work and service we deliver.

Currently we position ourselves like 99% of the marketing communication firms out there. Which is: we do good work, we have a proven process to ensure good work, we provide great customer service, and we generate a positive ROI/value for our clients. Everybody says that, whether it’s true or not. Most importantly, those are reasons clients STAY, not reasons to BECOME a client.

Try this simple test for positioning; what’s the answer when a client asks point blank “why should I choose you over so and so?” If you have a hard time answering or the answer is one of the statements in the paragraph above; your positioning stinks.

The funny part of this is how painful the process is to go through when you try to do it to yourself. We’ve hit the same dead end many many times over the last 18 months when we’ve tried to hone our own message and value prop. We do this very well for our clients – even they would say so. It just proves that you cannot operate on yourself. You need an external, non-biased, honest point of view to take a true look at your systems, your competition, your offerings, and your value.

Like all consulting engagements, a few bombs were dropped, a few people were irritated, a few gems were exposed. And like normal, it will take a little while to digest the entire experience.

It is a very good exercise for me personally. It gave me a different view of how I am potentially received by my clients. As a consultant, there are times to be brutally honest and times to keep comments to yourself. You cannot alienate your client along the way. Expectations need to be set up front (and agreed upon in writing), long before you come onsite. It’s a big step for business (especially small business owners) to admit they need help. You aren’t there to stroke egos, but you cannot call their baby ugly all day either.

When it’s all said and done, we should have a clear vision for where we are headed, who specifically we’ll target, and how we will position ourselves better than the competition in that space. We should have a plan to grow profitably. And there’s not much sweeter in business than profitable growth – it’s the best way to get rid of issues!

technorati tags > marketing, management, consultant, profit, company, growth

Marcom Vocabulary

Published on September 6, 2006 in advertising, branding and design. 0 Comments

Had to pass on a great marketing communications primer from Ernie Mosteller. Being on the same page with regards to vocabulary is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your projects come in on strategy, time, and budget. Ernie does a great job of boiling down the basics…

Brand.
Your brand is your personality, as determined by how the world sees you. How you want to be seen can affect how the world sees you, but it doesn’t define it. The world gets to define its own take on you. Lots of things go into what the world sees of you. Your brand = (what you want it to be) + 2(X) what the world says it is. The world’s actual view of you is at least twice as important as your desired view of you. As the world’s view of you becomes more negative, X gets larger. As it becomes more positive, X shrinks.

Design.
Design is not your brand. But it can affect your brand. Design is the clothes you wear in order to attempt to affect the world’s perception of your personality. It may also be the car you drive, or the house you live in. It’s your outward, visual, projection to the world. It may or may not have anything at all to do with who you really are — though good design is always based on what’s inside. Design can, and should, touch everything you do that the world sees. Which, basically, is everything.

Advertising.
Advertising is not your brand. Advertising is what you say about yourself in order to attempt to affect the world’s perception of your personality. What you say can also be defined as: how you act in public. Which is, everywhere. What you say about yourself is greatly affected by how you say it, because how you say it determines whether people will hear and/or listen. Whispering in the middle of an NFL stadium doesn’t have the same effect as shouting in church. If I were you, I wouldn’t do either. Advertising, by the way, is no longer defined as the placement of a pre-determined message in a purchased medium. Advertising is any piece of communications with an agenda.

Public Relations.
PR is not your brand. PR is an active attempt to get other people to say something positive about you, without directly paying them to do so. Because this definition is so broad, and so clearly goes light years beyond churning out a press release, you can safely assume that I believe PR is pretty much anything, and is an integral, specialized component of quality advertising. PR is also the component you need to turn to for crisis management, assuming you’re managing the crisis honestly. Because almost anything else has a real chance of making things worse.

Collateral.
Collateral is not your brand. Collateral is reference material for people who have already expressed an interest in your brand. Whether it’s a business card or brochure, collateral has almost no ability to create interest in you. Its function is to enhance interest, and provide information, for those who have already decided (if even in a small way) to check you out. Most websites function as collateral, though they are capable of a lot more.

Concept.
A concept is no longer simply a storyboard, or a headline/visual relationship. A concept is an idea designed to encourage a specific action from the person who interacts with it. A concept could be an event, a direct mail piece, a Super Bowl commercial, a You Tube video, a boy band, or a newspaper ad. The key to making a concept work is to focus your attention on the desired action from the viewer, and simplify that action to its most basic element. A concept doesn’t sell a car. A salesman sells a car. But the right concept can get someone to talk to a salesman. Or click a link. Or remember the car you have for sale, the next time they think about buying one. Good concepts surprise people. Great concepts hold their attention. Effective concepts are very specific, and very simplistic, about what they want to achieve.

technorati tags > ernie mosteller, marketing, communication, vocabulary

What it takes to win

Published on September 3, 2006 in advertising, business, management and strategy. 0 Comments

My firm recently lost a big deal. We were one of three agencies to bid on a year long integrated media & advertising contract worth well into the six figures. Now this isn’t a sob story or anything close, we win and lose bids all the time. But it did get me to thinking about was what it takes to win an advertising contract as a small agency (which is pretty much a constant thought as a business developer).

All three firms are small agencies (significantly less than 50 people – but more than 10). And we had a little bit of an inside track in that we have a personal relationship with the decision maker that no one else does to our knowledge. That relationship offered some advice on what the first agency presented to her. It was all about what the decision maker liked and what she expected to see but didn’t. And like normal, we learned about the first firm too late to change our presentation.

But here’s the rub. During the initial meetings, our executive made it very clear that she was looking for ideas and visionary direction. She even twice mentioned that she didn’t want to have our best designers put a lot of time into concepts. During our initial internal brainstorming sessions, I fought to present two concepts to our client. These weren’t two different look and feels as much as they were a proposed identity mark and a website mockup. We decided it would be best to show that we could generate quality ideas that met all of the goals of the project and that we would save the other mediums (radio & TV) until after we won the bid. That way we wouldn’t waste a lot of time on scripts and storyboards because those are always subject to heavy revisions.

Apparently the firm that was awarded the project came up with full storyboards for at least two TV spots and a couple of radio script ideas. They presented the exact opposite mediums as we did. In fact, to my knowledge they didn’t do any work on the brand identity itself. Now I’m not saying we’re right and they’re wrong – especially since they won the business. But it is funny how an executive (with a lot of advertising experience) was swayed by storyboards and scripts. I think part of it’s due to the fact that business execs don’t view script writing and story board illustrations as requiring as much effort as graphic design, video, or web work. It’s easy to look at a story board sketch and know that it’s not the final deliverable. When you do website concepts, even though they are probably Photoshop files, they look just like the final website. A lot of executives that I’ve seen can’t grasp the void between polished mock ups and the final deliverable. They do not understand the level of effort required from a programming, testing, and troubleshooting point of view. They only see the surface. And for some reason they don’t seem to think that the time copywriters and illustrators put into sketches cost as much to the agency.

I think a lot of it stems from each firms internal DNA. We are basically an interactive firm with a long history of film/video. While the other agency is group of ex-ad agency guys that spun off and started their own firm. Traditional ad agencies are solely focused on coming up with a break-through idea. If they can sell the idea to their client, they find the right production team to execute it. Interactive firms, on the other hand, do most of their production in-house. They come up with the idea and produce the deliverables themselves. A lot also depends on the size of the project. We would have done a lot more if the project was seven or eight figures instead of six.

So looking back, what would I do differently? I would probably leverage our relationship more to truly find out what would have impressed her and her team. We did what we do naturally. We focused on the deliverables that made the most sense to us. We were looking at the foundation (brand identity and website) and the other firm was looking at the paint and carpet. We focused on long term branding and information delivery while they focused on short term awareness. Both are important. In the end, I think both firms missed opportunities. If we can find a way to work together, the client will get the best of both worlds. That’s the best way to win – meet the business objectives and keep client satisfaction high.

technorati tags > advertising, branding, strategy, business, development