Most popular

    Digital Marketing

    Cashiers, Conversationalists and CMOs.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    There are two factions in online marketing these days: Cashiers and Conversationalists. 

    Cashiers

    Cashiers care about the sale. They have the small dashboard that tracks click-to-sale and spits out an ROI calculations. Cashiers can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see the new numbers. They are in to usability testing, shopping cart abandonment, media optimization and other measures but their interest and energy pretty much stops at the sale. The buck stops there.

    Conversationalists

    Conversationalists are a daintier.  They immerse themselves in the process.  They want to make friends.  (Like the kid with the runny nose in grade school, sometimes they just walk right up to you and ask “Do you want be my friend?”)  In my world, conversationalists are actually more likely to find truths and insights about their products and win in the long term.  All the pop marketing gurus today are into the conversation. They are not technologists, thank God, so they are easy to listen to and learn from but their failing is that they’re a little too caught up in the sausage making, not the sausage tasting.

    CMOs

    For a CMO it’s great to have both types of people on staff.  A Yin and Yang thing. Cashiers are imperative for sales now. Conversationalists care about future sales, and loyalty and sale predisposition. But it’s hard to take predisposition to the bank. Good CMOs have a brand plan in place that gives direction to the factions.  A brand plan is informed by the work and findings of both factions, but it drives them.  A brand plan helps Cashiers and Conversationalist organize “claim and proof” in a way that creates Return on Strategy near and long term. Peace!

    Digital Media Off the Rate Card.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    David Carr published an interesting piece in today’s New York Times about Nick Denton, his Gawker Media tech blog Gizmodo, and the lost next gen iPhone.  According to Carr, the blog post generated 3.6 million hits on Gizmodo – a site averaging 90,000 hits a day. 

     (Not too long ago, during the tough economy, Mr. Denton decided to pay his staff of writers based upon hits.  The more papers you sell, said the crusty old news man, the more money you make. When the pay-per-readers story hit the wire, Mr. Denton was vilified and some good writers left. Buh-bye, said he.)

    The writer who broke the lost iPhone story was well paid for her/his day’s work and Gizmodo’s brand made it to Ohf-rah (Oprah). Eastman Kodak, who serendipitously bought all the ads on Gizmodo for the day, reaped mad dividends in terms of reach. (What’s the opposite of “make good?”) 

    Mr. Denton’s maligned approach to paying writers for audience portends things to come in social media.  Media will be bought based on eyeballs.  And media will be bought based on transactions. When this equation makes it to traditional ad agencies you may even find the creative output changing. That is, some of the ads won’t be built for portfolios but for consumer interest and traffic. Social media will soon be monetized based upon consumer interest and sales, not the rate card. And it will be exciting to watch. Peace!

    Twisted Juice.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    2

    Mitch Joel and Jaffe Juice’s Joseph Jaffe squared off yesterday in a podcast that was a good deal of fun.  Each agreed they were good friends but that was about all they agreed upon — save for the obligatory strokefest at the end.  Mr. Jaffe is a principal at Crayon now owned by Powered and Mr. Joel is president of Twist Image a leading digital shop based in Toronto.  Both are published (books, blogs and pods) and practiced “duelists.”

    The discussion with which they played pong was “Is social media a discrete marketing practice?” Mr Jaffe says “yes,” Mr. Joel “no.” 

    The crux of the debate is this:  Social media needs to be well integrated into the marketing and digital practices of corporations. Today, it’s not.  Mr. Joel says there are smart companies doing so and he’s right.  Mr. Jaffe says those companies are the “exception not the rule” and he’s right. Powered is betting that specialized shops – best of breed social shops – will be better positioned to make waves and earn low hanging engagements.  Mr. Joel believes that cleanest most likely social successes will come from integrated digital shops, and in the long run that is probably more correct.  But his approach is less promotable and less newsworthy.   Social media is the haps today.  There is demand for it and a social marketing swell surrounding it. 

    Da Monies.

    So where is the money in social media?  Tweeting buy the pound? Friending by the hundred? In strategy?  Yep.  Where is the money in the integrated approach? The answer is tweeting by the pound and building websites – a more lucrative approach.  

    Win by Knockout?

    No. Both arguments are very compelling. Mr. Jaffe and Powered CMO Aaron Strout are loudly breaking new ground. (There are supposedly scores of quiet social media agencies in NYC alone.) Mr. Joel gets it for sure, and though his sound bite is not as powerful he will probably have higher margins this year. Were I a marketing director and these two pitching my business, I’m sure the last one to present would win the business.

    Facebook and Google Hit the Highway.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    1

    Steve Rubel is a “beyond the dashboard” digital commentator.  That’s what I love about him. He doesn’t spend his day looking through the rearview mirror, he looks ahead.  Check out this Paste from his stream today:

     “I believe business web sites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or for utility. Brands will shift more of their dollars and resources to creating robust presence where people already are and figure out how to activate employees en masse in a way that builds relationships and drives traffic back to their sites to complete transactions. Media companies will do the same – they will be “headless.”  Google and search will remain important for years to come. However, what we’re seeing is the beginning of big changes where social networking and Facebook will further disrupt advertising, media, one-to-one and one-to-many communications, not to mention search.”

    Beyond the Dasboard

    I like to look forward too — beyond the car dashboard as the metaphor goes.  And a car metaphor is appropriate when talking about Facebook, Google and social media.  Content is still king in my book. Mr  Rubel’s very believable notion that corporate websites will diminish in importance, save for transactions, is accurate. Today.  But I see Facebook, right now, as the highway.  The road that takes you somewhere.  It’s a highway filled with signs, and people and so much traffic that you can learn lots by being there, yet it’s still just a highway. Corporate websites are losing relevance because they have no pulse. They tend to be static. The action, the pulse, is on the highway. Google is the map and the directory and it’s fighting with the signs and the traffic.  (Check out Mr. Rubel’s post for some comparative traffic numbers showing Facebook overtaking Google by some measures.) 

    Content Still King

    As we settle down and as companies being to truly invest in bringing their brands and value proposition to life through their web presences, corporate websites will come back in importance.  All this talk about the conversation is great. But at some point the conversation has to stop so commerce can start. Corporate marketers will learn this soon enough.  That’s the future Yo.

    Datapalooza.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Yesterday, I was on a panel at OMMA Performance in NYC called “The dream of the Digital Dashboard.”  (OMMA stands for Online Media Marketing and Advertising.) The program, curated by Cory Treffiletti — president of Catalyst S+F, a great digital strategy shop — was quite good. (One of the speakers was from Tynt.com, check it out.)

    On my panel I mentioned that tactics-palooza has created the need for dashboards and one of my panel mates, Marc Kiven, repurposed the sound bite into datapalooza, which had some serious ballast with the audience.  Nice ear Marc. (Sorry, had to say that.)

    Datapalooza reminded me of a meeting I attended a while ago in which someone from AT&T network management said “We need to collect all this performance data, then do something smart with it.”  It’s a word string, I never forgot. Today digital marketers are so covered in data it has become harder and harder to do something smart.  One reason is interoperability.  Most reports capture time on site, links clicked, referrals, browser type, geography, device, bounce, last page visited — times a hundred. And even though we’re in the age of open standards I sense many of these data points remain in unique software homes…not portable to other behavioral data sources and feeds.

    This interoperability issue reminds me of voice mail.  Have you ever moved from one job to another and had to learn new voice mail prompts?  What a pain.  If we are to improve the performance of digital performance, the industry needs to think about some basic standards. Perhaps that will transform datapalooza into a more sonorous environment.  Peace!

    Google Buzzed?

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    “Fall forward fast” is a marketing maxim many have followed with great success. Be bold, be quick, correct as needed. It’s a fist-mover approach and it was good advice back in the day.  But the Internet has sped things up a bit don’t you think? Fast today is a lot faster than it was 4 years ago.

    Google Buzz was brought to market too fast. Is it correctable?  Sure.  Will Google take some heat? Sure. Will it recover, sure.  That said, I suspect there’s a little tainted blood in the Google bloodstream thanks to this effort and Google needs to take a breath.  When you launch a new service and the phrases “opt-out,” “disable,” “sorry,” “feedback” and “critics” become keywords of the coverage you have not done enough homework.  Google “google buzz”+”critics” and see what pops up.

    Facebook‘s Beacon advertising program wasn’t thoroughly vetted before launch nor was the Google Nexus One, released before back-end customer care issues could be properly handled.

    Overdogs.

    Did you watch the Superbowl? Which team did you root for?  The overdog or the Saints? Overdogs are leaders.  They, more than anyone, need to be careful when bringing new services to market. Take a breath. Do some reconnaissance. Let power users spank the brand a bit (“brand spanking” is a great overdog research methodology). Then launch. Too much Starbucks, as Zack de la Rocha might say, “can killa man.”  Peace!

    Creating a Social Media Monster?

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Mission Control is a well-produced 76 second video by PepsiCo’s Gatorade ‘splaining how Gatorade marketing monitors the web for comments, chatter and potential product improvements. The “war room” at mission control is filled with AT&T NOC (network operations center) -like people in front of multiple monitors — their fingers on the pulse of Gatorade enthusiasts.  Looks like they are a busy bunch.

    Interspersed with the mission control pictures are great shots of Kobe, Serena, etc., helping viewers work up a sweat…which is what Gatorade is and should always be about.

    Right now this vid is kind of inside baseball for the marketing, advertising and social community – plus I think it’s being used in and around Cannes to round up votes. It’s a great spend, by Gatorade as they “set the stage for digital leadership.” I’ve written before that every large corporation in America will have a social media dept. and I believe it.  Smart senior agency people have nodded in agreement yet told me that the truly creative ideas and productions that hit wire/less will still come from agencies.  That, too, I believe.

    After a while though, after all marketers have jumped on this listening bandwagon and consumers are conditioned to provide product input, message input and marketing input, it will begin to dull the strategic senses. It will turn the world into a place filled with screen-scratching marketing interns, when what we really want to do is listen to the influential “Posters.” (Google whatstheidea+posters.)

     

    Let’s watch out for that monster that we are creating. Peace!

    Worldwide Inventory

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    barcode

    Google built a business, quite well I might add, on perfecting search and search usability. They funded the business with advertising.  The brand play was not to be the world’s greatest advertising platform (something Yahoo and AOL didn’t understand), it was all about search. 

    Back in the day (last week, hee hee) Google search was all about the Web.  Finding things digital.  This week, it’s about seeing and searching for digital things in the physical world.  So mobile apps and navigation are the rage. Google hasn’t led the way here, Apple has, but Google wasn’t first in search either.

    What’s next?

    What’s next is search for physical things in the physical world. Call it worldwide inventory. What is worldwide inventory and how will it work?  Not sure, but this cantaloupe sized brain of mine says it may have to do with barcodes.  Now you can’t put a bar code on an $11,000 hip replacement in Mexico (You can’t?) but you can put one on a $12.00 case of Honest Tea with torn labels. The ability for mankind to find real things, in proximity, with their smart phones is what Google will be doing over the next decade. And that hip replacement or $6,000 valve bypass in China will be something worth searching  for. Stay with search Google — it will soon be atop Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

    Worldwide Inventory may sound like a Pearl Jam song but it’s an Eric Schmidt song.  Peace!

    To Free or Not to Free.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Plaxo, an online address book, started out as a free service and was pretty amazing.  As with most SaaS utilities, it had a lot of other features and functions, calling itself a social network, but what made it cool and famous was address book synching. The company recognized  many people had multiple address books on multiple devices (business and consumer) and getting those addresses from one to the other was a pain.  A cut and paste pain.  With a push of a button, Plaxo could capture and store in the cloud your email addresses and contact list just like magic, synching them with Outlook and/or Mac address books. The app hits 20 million users before being bought by Comcast for an undisclosed sum. Can you say exit strategy? It was the shizz back in 2007.

    In June 2009 the synching of address books with Outlook became a premium service. The moment of truth. Comcast said it needed the revenue to build out new features. Oy. And alas, as neat as Plaxo was, it stopped using me so I stopped using it.  If it got to the point where I couldn’t manage anymore, I’d have re-upped; but Microsoft had made importing and exporting addresses more usable and I (and the market) was on to newer things.

    The New York Times faces a similar dilemma on March 28th when its digital content moves to a subscription model.  The good news for them is they’re not a utility, though some may debate that.  A NYT reader who moves to Charlotte, NC and reads the Observer will not debate it.  The Times content is unique and worth the money.

    Plaxo, in my mind, needed to start out as a paid service. Hell, even at $3.00 a year. When you condition a market to think a product is free (Google NeXusOne are you listening) it is hard to come back.  This is the venture capital dilemma. This is the missing P in the market 4Ps. Buh-bye Plaxo. Peace.

    The Diffusion of Advertising

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Advertising ain’t what is used to was (a little Southernism I made up). Creation of big selling ideas by highly paid creatives and marketing people, broadcast to millions via TV, radio and print was the ad business.  Today, thanks to technology, the ad business is undergoing a diffusion like never before. Digital agencies, though not yet offered a seat at the big table, are new and important players.  Google is the most profitable advertising agency in the world and Facebook is hot on their trail.  And when I say “mobile advertising” does any one company come to mind?  That one is going to be huge…but it’s still to play out.

    Buy or Build?

    Big traditional ad agencies clearly see the need to offer digital, social and mobile but are asking themselves “Do we buy or build?” Right now they’re doing both: hiring someone smart in each discipline and using them to select cottage industry players who are truly immersed.  Better than last year, which was all “Go out and get me a subservient chicken.”  Or “Find me those nerds who built the US Weekly Facebook poll.”

    I’ve long thought that mid-size agencies were poised to win in this diffuse advertising world, but now I’m not so sure. True, they can more quickly parlay a powerful branding idea into a market-moving integrated campaign but the model may not be extensible.

    Bud Cadell is right when he says the old ad agency model is broken. It will take open minds, forward thinking, experience, software, an understanding of brand building, and lots of money to fix the process. I’m of the mind that the successful model is more likely to come out of MDC Partners than WPP.  It will be fun to watch though. Peace!

    1234Page 2 of 4
    © Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv