Monthly Archives: July 2010

What is the opposite of UX?

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Thanks to the Web, more and more we are hearing the acronym UX (User Experience) in marketing discussions, referring to how one experiences and navigates a website, game or other interactive property. In the print world, UX was tied solely to art direction — things like reading from top to bottom, left to right, or where an eye fixates first on a page.  But with so much to see, read and do on a webpage the science of UX has become legion.

Metrics and Tools

So what’s the opposite of user experience?  When users experience a website and engage with a company via the web, what do we call the resulting intelligence?  What’s the short hand term? Mostly it’s called metrics: hits, clicks, time on site, referring site, bounce, etc. Over and above metrics, thanks to social media monitoring and measurement tools from Radian Six and (freebie company) Social Mention, are more behavioral quantitative views: sentiment, passion and affinity.

Indirect Benefits

In her new book Open Leadership, Charlene Li talks about some harder-to-measure things that engagement and dialogue can accomplish for a brand, referred to as “indirect benefits.” When a non-employee in a brand community answers a help question it reduces customer care cost and gives that helper a sense of brand accomplishment – both direct and indirect benefit.

All of these inbound forms of market intelligence or user intelligence are valuable. Business changing valuable.  So what shall we call the opposite of UX? What a company experiences when mining intelligence.  It needs a name. Involvement tracking? User forensics?  What is your top-of-mind thought? Peace?

Talent is an Idea!

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MDC Partners is a marketing services holding company with a brand strategy.  That’s right, they have an idea. IPG doesn’t, though back in the day one might have assigned them “entrepreneurship.” WPP, Publicis, and Omnicom don’t have ideas, though perhaps at one point Omnicom might have owned “creative.”  At holding companies the powers that be feel brand strategies are not really needed.

MDC Partners owns talent. “Where great talent lives” is their idea. For some, that might be a platitude or poesy but for Miles Nadal, CEO, it’s a real strategy.  As a practice, MDC does not own a majority stake in its companies, it owns 49%.  This insures that great talent will stick around.  Their hands-off approach also insures that the talent stays great.  Though I only know Mr. Nadal through his actions and deeds his focus is solely on the leaders he hires, not their output.  Any person who has been around this business knows managing people is easier than managing work output.  Talent is what drives great marketing.  The talent to see what sells, the talent to package it, and the talent to promote it has driven the business since soap suds.  Never mind if that talent is traditional, digital, mobile or whatever’s next. (What could possibly be next?)

 MDC Partners stock grew last year while every other holding company’s tanked. Campaigns come and go and talent comes and goes, but in the marketing world “talent” is a powerful idea. Peace!

Google’s Big Decision

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Google, the most successful, exciting brand in technology and consumerdom is at a crossroads. Its culture of technological obesity (sitting on a lot of tech calories) has it on the verge of creating a social networking property intended to wrest control of that category from Facebook.  Eric Schmidt is a very smart man.  He made many investors lots of money as CTO at Sun Microsystems, leading he team that developed Java software among other things. He saw what happened to Sun after his departure when innovation lagged and he doesn’t want that to happen to Google, the company for which he is now CEO.

Search

Fall forward fast is sound business advice but its best done when following a focused mission. Google’s mission (We deliver the world’s information in one click) is not what social networking is all about. As the Web gets bigger and more tangled — like kudzu in Georgia – it will be harder, not easier, to find the stuff we want. Owning search is still huge and will become more so.  Worldwide pricing. Finding people. Finding the right content. Finding geolocated mobile phones. Finding video. Audio bits. This (and then some) is what Google and its next gen technologists need to be developing. Why are they focusing on Facebook?  Search me. Peace!

I Smell a Twitter Revolution.

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Twitter’s soon-to-be-launched service @earlybird will transform marketing. @earlybird is a promotional service that posts participating companies’ specials and deals on a wide variety of products and services — a cut of each sale going to Twitter. It will generate billions in incremental sales for sponsoring companies and serious revenue basis points for Twitter. Such a deal!   

No doubt they will find a way to organize these deals by category, e.g., restaurants, technology, consumer packaged goods and, more importantly, geography.  Think of it as  Woot.com but offering thousands of deals a day.  Someone commented about the service in The New York Times, thinking that it would gum up their twitter feed — deals flying across the screen every minute, but the beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow @earlybird (I hope) you just have to visit the tweet stream. 

Twitter will transform commerce well beyond coupons and customer service. And this 140 character promotional vehicle is just the beginning. The idea to have an idea.  I can smell marketers lining up. And small local businesses?  They’ll have an absolute  field day with this thing.  Oh the possibilities. Can’t wait. Peace!

R/GA Creating the Law?

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R/GA is a bold leader in the digital marketing area. As all advertising and marketing shops move toward the middle — toward the strategy — only one digital shop aspires to be the agency of record: R/GA. Most digital shops rue the fact that they don’t get a seat at the big table, R/GA wants the table.  And they make quite a case.  Their entrée is the “platform.”  

In a video by Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer (thankfully, he’s not goofily titled), he says advertising needs to move “from metaphors that romance a brand to seductive demonstrations of a brand platform.”  Agreed. Were he to have substituted the word “strategy” we’d be in perfect agreement.  The word platform, you see, is a euphemism for website (and other digital stuff residing on the website). Brand strategy is hard to put a price tag on and websites and digital assets are easy estimate. 

Mr. Law is correct campaigns come and go. He’s right that tactics need to feed the brand strategy. He’s right that utility and community are the source of sales growth and retention. And he’s certainly not being disingenuous in suggesting that something needs to hold and tie all the brand building work together. So I’m going to cut him some slack and not argue the noun platform and favor a more verb-like version of the word. 

In the video Mr. Law refers to one of R/GA’s most famous successes Nike+.  “Nike+ is a platform fueled by campaigns” he says.  Nike+ was first a product and it’s growing into a branded utility. Is it growing into a platform? You tell me. 

These guys are the real deal. And as good marketers they are trying to create a new language for the marketing world.  As I said, bold.  

It Takes a Recession.

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Earlier this year I attended an “integration” meeting.  In the room with the client were representatives from its many roster shops: the AOR, consumer promotions, public relations, trade, digital and media.  Advertising creative was presented so, clearly, lots of work had been done before integration was undertaken.  Our team assignment was to brainstorm the target psyche and ways to translate the AOR’s creative to our various disciplines.  

This is new world stuff here. The lead agency who sponsored the session even agreed they had not done anything like this before – asking each participating shop to provide feedback as to the process.  Prior to the meeting we shared an experiential assignment and, so, had common ground upon which to share (and bond). In addition to clients, the disciplines represented in the room were creative, account planning, account management and media.  The latter had a few minutes to walk us through target consumer media habits. 

I liked it.  Lots of really smart people sharing from across disciplines; no one afraid to speak up. This is progress people! We all got along.  No darts tossed.  Lot’s of good, dedicated people caring about the assignment rather than their agencies and asses.  It was quite harmonious. The “go dos” after the meeting were to be compiled by the lead agency, and turned over to all attendees to move forward. Not perfect but a very good start at integration. It takes a recession. Peace!  

Schooled in Marketing by an Educator.

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In a TED video I watched yesterday on the state of education, Sir Ken Robinson mentioned something pretty profound. He said most people are often “good at something they don’t really like doing.”  His point being, that mom-ism, “If you do something you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”  His broader point was students today are broadcast to, not engaged, and that’s why education is in such a sorry state.

Broadcast Selling.

I was mowing the lawn last night and thinking about this as it relates to advertising and marketing.  With media exploding into more and more, always-on devices (ding-a-ling, Good Will on the phone), and those devices containing advertising, the bombardment of selling is growing exponentially.  Moreover, that selling is being done by more craft-less people, creating the advertising equivalent of fast food — poorly constructed and not good for you. (Ads by SEO kids, videos by moms.) 

How to sell.

As a young ‘un in the ad business I drafted an article for Adweek that suggested people read ads to be: educated, entertained or to see something they’ve never seen before.  I think this still applies. We are so inundated with selling messages today we shut down.  Ingest too many antibiotics and you become immune.  Hear the word “quality” too many times and you become similarly immune. 

Our Job

Our job as marketers is not to say the same things with new messaging devices, it’s to educate, entertain and present the artful unseen. (In the 70’s my dad Fred Poppe used to call this “engagement.”)  Engagement starts with getting someone to let down their message defenses. My ramble.  My peace!  Happy 4th.

Brand Planning Starts with the “Is-Does.”

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Noah Brier once asked me “How do you define a brand plan?”  Everyone, he suggested, has a different view of what a brand plan is.  My ability to answer in a few words with a simple explanation impressed (I think). A brand plan is really just an organizing principle. In order to create a good brand plan, one must first get the Is-Does right.  What a brand IS and what it DOES. The Is-Does is one of the easiest and at the same time hardest exercises known to marketers. For instance, is the iPhone a phone?

Technology companies have a terrible time with the Is-Does. Here’s an Is-Does example from a website:

A global provider of digital advertising technology solutions that optimize the use of media, creative and data for enhanced performance.

Try explaining that to your great aunt.  

A video on the same website, presumably created by someone with agency chops, refers to the company this way “A global leader in digital advertising campaign management.” Much better, no? 

What Makes a Good Is-Does?

The litmus of a good Is-Does is its ability to be played back by consumers. Ask a consumer what your brand Is and what it Does and they should be in the neighborhood.  If they have to use a competing brand to define you, that’s not good.  And here’s a tip, don’t put words like “solution provider” in the Is-Does or use marketing poesy or made-up concepts.

If you have some really bad Is-Does examples (usually found on the boiler plate of press releases or the first sentence of the About section of a website) please post in the comments.

 My Is-Does? Marketing Consultant (Is) that helps companies find powerful, sales driving brand strategies (Does).  What is your company’s Is-Does? Peace!