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    JetBlue and the Wounded Traveler.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    An article in yesterday’s New York Times, the headline for which read “JetBlue  Asks Fliers To Keep Spreading The Word,” discusses JetBlue’s brand new social media campaign – a core component of its marketing strategy.  From Firstborn (agency) in NYC, the work offers video snippets of real customers talking, unscripted, of their great experiences. Unscripted is better. The goal is for people to see these videos and weigh in about their positive experiences. 

    Here’s an experience a friend of mine had yesterday on JetBlue, flying from NY to California.  Here are his unscripted words:

    “I had a 22 hour trip to California.  Ask me about sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it in great detail (as I usually do).   Murphy’s Law is officially renamed as M***h’s Law (name redacted).  Oh, by the way, if you happen to find my luggage, please let JetBlue know where it is, since they don’t know where it is.”

    This gentleman sent the email to 21 friends.  That’s word of mouth. Sounds like he might be pissed, no?  Do you think JetBlue wants to give him a social platform to share his experience?  While his wound is still raw?  Doubt it.  They’d be better off giving him a coupon for a companion ticket and a hearty apology.

     

    There’s nothing more ornery than a wounded travel passenger.  This is one business where giving a mouthpiece to a customer may do more harm than good. Pick your creative tactics carefully people.  Peace! 

    Travel Marketing Application.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Being a marketing consultant is fun.  Sometimes companies call you in to solve their problems, other times you come up with ideas and schemes that solve problems they may not know they have. 

    Travel

    I met with a friend the other day at an online travel company.  His company has some smart technology that allows travelers to search the travel search engines for the best rates. (Search the search? Yep.)  Beyond the algorithm, this company’s stable of writers and curators create the added-value; their ability to impart good destination knowledge, advice and tips is a differentiator.

    Gaming

    Separately, I read today that some schools are using video games to teach students about business.  Students create their own personas and play the game of “business life.”  Their decisions result in real consequences and learning, e.g., don’t wear jeans to an interview.  Handfuls of smart marketers have been using games in training and sales for a while now, but we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. 

    The Marketing Mashup

    Combining the travel company business insight (good content build loyalty) with the gaming/training phenomenon yields an idea that can provide the travel site with improved traffic, loyalty, advertising value and engagement.  Build a simple game tailored to first time visitors to specific countries. Rather than a just creating a FAQs page, bring the country to life using decisions made on the virtual ground.  Experience is a great teacher…and good teachers are remembered. Peace!

    The Diffusion of Advertising

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    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!

    Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA).  There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about. 

    Intent.

    Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008.  Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style. 

    Unanonymous

    I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation.  Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations.  And surprisingly, it’s not that scary.  They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall.  All the rest were spot on. 

    Facebook

    Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal.  There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to.  It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.   

    Others

    Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success. 

     Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

    The Ascent of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

    Television

    The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

    The Web

    Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

    Social Media

    Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

    A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

    Marketing Disorganizations.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    A new study published by McKinsey suggests that the quality of brand management is eroding around the world. One data point suggest over half (55%) of corporations polled are seeking to improve brand management. The culprits are globalization, staffing inefficiency, the increased use of digital media, matrix organization structures (many, rather than one boss) and the perceived need to put more specialists on brand teams.

    In a separate study, the CMO Council published this: 41% of client companies said they were working in a “moribund organizational culture“.  So brand management needs to be fixed.  

    How about the agency side?

    The CMO study suggested 35% of brand companies are unhappy with the integration and alignment of the agency networks with which they worked — so, agencies aren’t faring much better organizationally. At the 4A’s Jay Chiat Account Planner Awards this past year, there was some grousing that clients are fed up with having as many as four strategic planners in a meeting when all the agencies are brought together: one from the AOR, one from direct, one from digital, one from promotion. Add to that all the specialty services agencies must now provide and you can see the garden is growing out of control.

    It’s for this reason that mid-size shops have a leg up in delivering inline communication programs. (Not offline or online.) Mid-size shops have the ability to share and play together better — and they have better oversight.

    It may be counterintuitive but organizational innovation (and efficiency) is most likely to come from mid-size shops (read KBS Partners, Crispin, Straw Frog) than from the big boys and girls. And when that happens, the marketing companies will hopefully follow suit and better integrate. Peace!

    Google is an Advertising Company.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’ve written before about Google’s “culture of technological obesity” saying I think the company is taking on too much outside of its core mission.  Phones, productivity apps, the list goes on and on. The reality is — the dirty little secret no employee will readily admit — is Google is an advertising company.  (Google Doubleclick.)  Eric Schmidt and his peeps know this but it doesn’t play well at cocktail parties. The technology badge is what they wear most proudly.

    Of the $6.78B in revenue announced this quarter, the lion’s share was ad generated.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google.  I’m not a hater. They need to succeed.  Google really is changing the world for the better. But they will Divest or Trivest at some point.  The company is a 3-ring business circus.  And because one of the rings — most profitable ring – is advertising, and because Google hasn’t been putting all of its efforts into providing innovation in advertising, it will lose market share. Ad revenue will still grow, but Google will lose market share. My bet is Facebook and Twitter will take share. Facebook is already doing it and Twitter has just begun.

     Advertising is about search, yes, but also about referral and context and point of sale (POS).  Twitter may have a leg up by combining all four.  To all the developers at Chirp…advertising still is da monies!  Peace!

    Is Resonance the Grail?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    My first encounter with metrics was when a friend at Ogilvy Direct (now OgilvyOne) explained how Vanguard Funds tracked ads to resulting investments.  Each ad had a unique code that found its way through the process and when money was deposited it generated an advertising-to-sales ratio. Ad creative, size, media could all be calculated.  This approach is why direct marketing, nee direct response, nee direct mail agencies were the digital agencies of the day in the 70s and 80s.

    In the 90s banner ads were the haps.  They were new and measurable and web advertising was ready to kill traditional. But as click-through rates diminished sales people told you banner were awareness builders. Display ads started to get bigger and richer and CTRs increased again. Then search became the new “new” and SEM/SEO shops multiplied like rabbits.  Search though, is a half nasty business — with a good deal of practitioners hacking their way to the top. (Are these the people who always talk about authenticity?)

    Resonance.

    Today social media is the haps. And social companies are finally taking monetization seriously.  Twitter’s resonance concept is a great start. Twitter’s Promoted Tweets measure nine factors to determine resonance, which is used to determine whether an ad stays or goes and what to charge. According to the New York Times, three of those factors are “number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.” Some say social media is not about selling, it’s about engagement. That’s like saying you go to a singles bar to make friends. It’s only a 5% true. Resonance tied to sales is coming. Who ever cracks that code will be the David Ogilvy of the decade.  Peace it up!

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