Manhattan Marketing Maven

I Miss Jerry

I miss Jerry Lewis. Labor Day isn’t the same without him not only because he’s an incredible comic but also because he was the original social media marketer.  His 44 year run left us with four enduring lessons.

Create Own-able, Original Content. The schmaltz, the cheesiness, the kids in wheel chairs, the has-been performers singing long-forgotten big-band songs, the B rolls of guys in white coats holding test tubes, the drum rolls and the tote boards that conjure up the ghost of Ed McMahon, the lame local anchors and the tear-wrenching appeals all signal led Labor Day and MDA. Jerry consistently used original content to claim significant year-round mind space and to drive a singular and differentiated brand message.  There are thousands of charities and thousands of celebrity do-gooders, but there was only one Jerry and his kids.

Make it Personal. We all genuinely knew Jerry. He’d been a part of our lives since the 1950s. There was a great national catharsis each year as the telethon kicks off that focuses on Jerry. It was partly a morbid health-watch to see which diseases and which side effects of treatments Jerry himself will display each year.

But even before he created a Facebook page or a Twitter account Jerry was engaging us by leveraging his comedy antics and by singing those signature songs – “Smile”, “What the World Needs Now” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Jerry understood, maybe better than anyone that people buy people. He used emotion, humor, shtick, flattery and frank talk to connect with different audience segments.

Persistent Positioning. Jerry and MDA staked out the same position and for 44 years they delivered on it and raised more than $1.4 billion to fight muscular diseases. MDA owned Labor Day. There was nothing better and nothing more reliable and more comforting than watching Jerry, on The Love Network.  The predictable and familiar parade of firefighters, convenience store owners, letter carriers, realtors, oil companies, Harley Davidson executives and other random sponsors presenting those over-sized checks at random moments during the Labor Day weekend were signature moments.  Jerry knew that you position yourself, plant your flag and stick to it. Fads come and go but audiences crave the familiar.

Network Your Networks. Jerry and MDA put together an incredibly potent series of partnerships and alliances that consistently deliver results. The lesson is -- connect the dots. Use your networks to extend your reach, frequency and engagement with your customer base. Don’t be bashful about mashing things together or cross-pollinating ideas among your allies.

Happy Labor Day.  

 

3 Convenient Illusions

If you watch Mad Men regularly and filter out all the illegal and non-PC stuff, it becomes pretty clear that not much has changed in Adland in sixty years. Agencies are run pretty much the way they are depicted on TV. Evidently the great management and technology revolutions sidestepped Madison Avenue. 

If you doubt me ask how many Six Sigma black belts work in your agency or describe which consultants re-engineered your studio or production departments. And while there has been significant increases in financial controls and cutbacks, ad agencies are notorious for lack of predictable and consistent business processes, spotty project management and the inability to forecast and deliver profit and productivity gains reliably.

Never ones to miss a fad, agency executives have embraced a number of new concepts in an attempt to demonstrate to prospective clients and employees how forward thinking and innovative they really are. These “innovations” are comfortable and convenient illusions that help agency managers sleep at night. But they’ve had little or no impact on either the chronically broken agency business model or the productivity, creativity or profitability of agencies. The dream makers need their own illusions, too.

Consider these 3 concepts that have gained widespread conversation and adoption if not, business traction among ad agencies. 

Creative Technologists. Like unicorns, these mythic hard-to-find creatures are part creative, part techie and part wizard. Having one suggests that an agency is able to generate breakthrough tech savvy ideas that become global memes, give traditional campaigns smart digital executions or enable agencies to make applets, apps, widgets and viral or video memes that are as cool and shareable as those created by Google or Intel. 

What isn’t clear is how these new hybrid players are accepted (or not) by traditionally run and managed agencies who barely understand the need for interaction and engagement much less complex, two-way digital, mobile or social technologies. Frequently embedded in creative departments with the idea that they will form a triad with copywriters and art directors, most practitioners are frustrated by the lack of baseline technical knowledge, among their peers and co-workers, the reluctance to give a pure digital guy a seat at the ideation table or the inability to prioritize digital thinking and organically connect digital assets to core creative concepts. 

In the last few years, agencies have acquired people with these titles to keep up with first movers and to demonstrate their technology prowess in credentials meetings. The breakout creative executions that have resulted across the industry are concentrated in a handful of agencies and can be counted on one hand. 

Project Management. For decades account guys managed client relationships and projects. As the digital era dawned and technical production became more complicated, agencies added project managers charged with managing timelines, budgets and project QA. Unfortunately while many agencies embraced the position in the hope to better control timelines and budgets, results have been mixed. There is no consensus on the job description, the tool set, the degree of authority or responsibility granted or the technical competences required. 

People were recruited fresh out of school, from traffic departments, and among failed account guys. Some nag and pester creatives. Others hide behind endless revisions of Excel spreadsheets, hot lists or MS Project Gantt charts. Still others send out the invitations for and attend every meeting but contribute only carbon monoxide. To a great extent, agencies faked themselves out. 

PMs add a layer of expense and friction, lengthen the production process and gain very little either in terms of quality assurance or staff productivity. Now everybody can claim to have project management as a core agency discipline. But very few agencies can quantify their impact on process improvements, staff efficiency or in added margins. 

Digital Integration. Fifteen years ago when digital agencies emerged from primordial bits and bytes, technology was new and alien. It had to be carefully scrutinized and considered before being bolted onto agencies. As the Web grew many people in shops of many sizes and configurations mastered web technologies. Agencies allied with and acquired digital capabilities to reduce competitive pressure, defend brand stewardship, while grabbing a bigger slice of client retainers and provide through the line media neutral communications in service to client commercial goals. 

This momentum has continually built up year after year. As consumer behavior shifts toward a digitally centric lifestyle no agency wants to be left out or appear to be a dinosaur.  To compensate many traditional agencies hired marquee Chief Digital Officers away from digital-only shops and put them out on the conference circuit and on countless pitch teams in search of street cred and new business. 

What they didn’t count on was the culture clash. Ad agencies with their longstanding Mad Men ways are the polar opposite of digital shops which tend to be younger, flatter, leaner and meaner operating on start-up hours, sensibilities and business models. Imagine how many of these well-paid digital evangelists found themselves surrounded by entrenched senior managers who talk the talk but had no genuine appetite to walk the walk. And even those who do have difficulty framing up and selling-in digital communications either to their own account and creative leadership or to clients still heavily reliant on TV and print. 

The digital revolution is far from over. The lion’s share of media dollars and creative assets still go TV in spite of massive shifts in media usage and Facebook’s 1 billion members. The next battleground will be mobile and social. And true to form agencies are figuring out how to buy or rent these capabilities to remain credible and competitive in the market even while the people who actually know how to do these things are terminally frustrated and defecting from advertising agencies to specialty shops and start-ups in a re-run of the late 1990s.

10 Things That Won't Happen in 2012

As the year winds down, allow me exercise my older, crankier, opinionated and contrarian side in looking at the year ahead. Here are 10 things that won’t happen in 2012 in no particular order. 

Mobile Ads Will Explode.  Consumers still either resent them or can’t exactly figure out how to use them. Brands can’t efficiently buy them or measure ROI or engagement value. Look for the bulk of ads to remain embedded in games and in apps. 

Facebook Will Grow Exponentially. The focus will shift from 800+ million users to the quality of the experience and the virility of sharing. Brands will figure out how to get more of their messages through the EdgeRank filter and how to prompt brand advocates posting original brand-oriented messages and/or passing along posts crafted by brands. What is said, by whom and to whom, will replace the fan count as a measure of brand page success. 

QR Codes Will Blossom.  Too many different or not enough code readers, no technical standards, low consumer penetration and poor customer experience will doom this technology. Magazines and others will continue to use them as a badge or signal that they are tech forward, but few consumers will buy that act. Even if you build it; they will not come. 

Groupon Copycat Competitors Will Succeed. The bloom is off this rose both in terms of local merchant satisfaction and the inability to scale and customize the product or the deal for national brands. The business model was set up for onesies at the local level. It cannot easily accommodate brands with thousands of stores or franchisees. 

Retailers resent the 50/50 revenue share. And they aren’t seeing enough upsell to justify the steep price cut used as a buying lure. Plus, they doubt whether coupon redeemers will become repeat or regular customers.  Gross volume will drop. There will be a shakeout among the me-too and also-ran players. Social networks, payment vendors like PayPal and major online merchants like Amazon and eBay will emerge as Groupon killers. 

Appetites for Apps Will Grow. With 1 million available apps and more than 100 million downloads from iTunes alone, nobody needs any more apps. The number of apps downloaded and used once or less is ridiculous. Consumers will edit their apps into two buckets; useful time savers and entertaining time wasters. Anything else will go by the wayside. New variations and new competitors will emerge. Some will gear content and user experience to reflect different expectations and behaviors for geared specific devices like iPhone, Android, iPad or other tablet formats. But if an app doesn’t help or doesn’t distract it’s a goner. 

Banners Will Die. In spite of being widely ignored, brands will continue to pump dollars into banners primarily because they can. Banners, like billboards, are a media format every marketer understands and one that media agencies love to buy. And even though the metrics prove that banner blindness is endemic and that there is no positive ROI for using banners to build awareness, marketers will spend against them to demonstrate their commitment (to their bosses) to the digital medium. 

Mobile Payments Will Reach 50 Million Subscribers. In spite of the incredible utility of mobile payments, the lack of technical standards, limits on smart phone penetration, competing technical and processing systems and tentative uptake by consumers and retailers will retard the growth of this channel. Mobile payments will not take off with a hockey stick curve like Google+ did. Instead we will witness a fog of uncertainty and doubt as the competing interests fight it out, make confusing claims and build daisy chains of retailers and allies. When the battle is settled and a single standard approaches, mobile payments will generally replace credit cards, wallets and checking/debit accounts. 

Email Saturation Will Occur. Everyone uses it. Most of us opt-in. Retailers rely on it. Email is the ubiquitous reliable retail channel that consistently delivers personalized offers. Email will become even more segmented, more targeted, more tied to expressed preferences and purchase histories and more integrated into social networks, search and loyalty channels. SPAM has pretty much been controlled. The email workhorse will continue to perform as expected and measured. 

TV Budgets Will Migrate to Digital. Not! TV remains the only way to simultaneously accumulate mass audiences and quickly tap into the mainstream culture. Digital channels complement, enhance and supplement TV. In some segments, TV viewing takes place on digital devices and is tweeted or posted in real-time.  But marketers aren’t seriously reallocating media dollars anytime soon because they are committed to both the reach and the content that TV provides. 

Zuckerberg will Give Up Social Engineering. The debut of Timelines is proof positive that Zuck & Company have a vision, an agenda, a platform and the willingness to impose their perspective about how we should think about and share our lives. Maybe he thinks that since he invented Facebook and convinced us all to use it, that he has the right to shape the form and content of how we express ourselves. Don’t expect user-centric design or functionality from Facebook. Expect them to re-design and impose their vision whenever they like and present it as innovation and improvement. If things run true to form, each new iteration will provoke considerable user push back and privacy concerns. 

 

Lessons from the Disruptive Dr. Ross

Dr. Robert Ross, one of the great marketing characters of our time passed this week at age 92. Dr Ross (nee Rosen) was a self-made man, a showman, a huckster and a visionary who took on the medical establishment… and won. I had the opportunity to work with him on the launch of Ross University Medical School, the first for-profit medical school.

Robert Ross was bigger than life. Physically big with a Foghorn Leghorn gait and distinctive voice, he was a cross between P.T. Barnum, a courtly uncle and Don Quixote. A natural people person, he could charm a humorless eastern bloc bureaucrat, a Washington lobbyist or a young account guy. He had friends in every sector of our society and all around the world.

He knew how to manipulate the system and he did things that others thought were down right crazy like importing men’s suits from Romania or hawking an herbal concoction to reduce snoring. He saw the opportunities of globalization and constructed 3-way deals that no one thought was possible. And he successfully made a frontal assault on the entrenched medical establishment that was dead set against an off-shore for-profit medical school. His legacy is the thousands of fully trained, credentialed and certified doctors and residents now at work across the US.  

He taught me that there’s nothing more powerful than a disruptive idea wielded by a disrupting personality. Brands that make noise and even brands that polarize get disproportionate amounts of attention and affection than brands that play it safe and follow the category leader. It’s a lesson that we often forget in the monkey-see monkey-do world of digital marketing.

2011 Economic Outloook

Allow me to get a jump on the year-end economic pundits. Digital marketing strategies in 2011 will be played out against a background of macro-trends in the US culture and the economy: Here is my pessimistic, common sense short term forecast for macro-economic activity affecting brands and marketers.

1. People are searching for things that are real and reliable. They are looking for something/someone to believe in. Skepticism rules. Brands must be authentic, genuine and real to get an honest opening for interaction.
2. Time seems to be moving faster and faster with attendant growing stress levels. We're on a merry-go-round and we can't control the speed. Brands that provide simple and proven solutions or comfort and direction will have an advantage.
3. The economy will be in shambles for the next 18 months. Europe’s troubles will catch up with us. Fundamentals have changed; but the implications aren't yet clear. Caution will rule most sectors. Downward price pressure will continue into the foreseeable future.
4. Everyone is nervous and worried even if they are keeping a stiff upper lip. Unemployment will not be fixed anytime soon. People will watch their spending very carefully. Firms will cherry-pick, prune and selectively upgrade their staffs.
5. Consumers will indulge themselves in idiosyncratic ways; often by splurging on things big and small. Positioning your brand as an affordable or permissible indulgence will resonate.
6. There will be ferocious competition for attention, mind share, actions, downloads, opt-ins, usage and any form of customer engagement. Copy-cat tactics won’t work and even novel ideas will work only once.
7. Consumers will realize the limits of technology as they embrace smaller, faster, more complex devices. Cost and bandwidth are the gating factors. Early adopters will lead the way but overall uptake will be tepid in spite of spectacular brand wins.
8. Toys will not make life easier or make people happier.
9. A significant segment, especially at the high end, will continue to chase the newest, coolest, stuff.
10. Everyone will have boat loads of data even though they are not be sure how to read it, measure it, apply it he or keep it secure. Privacy will become a contentious issue on a broad scale.
11. Clients will only want to spend what they absolutely have to. All kinds of inventive measurement approaches will be employed to justify spending.
12. There is a growing popular sensation that things are much more screwed up than we’ve acknowledged. The new Congress will exacerbate this feeling and few solutions to economic issues will emerge from Washington. Brands are resigned to finding ways to muddle through, hoping that unforeseen forces won’t dislodge, displace or dis-intermediate them.

 

 

Sales Funnel Dies

The sales funnel, the oldest, most illustrated and beloved marketing paradigm passed away today of old age. Originally, constructed to approximate the rational buying sequence for B2C and B2B customers, the Funnel leaves no immediate heirs. 

Shopping was never really linear. Prospects take multi-directional, multi-dimensional and idiosyncratic paths to surface needs, identify buying criteria, list potential solutions and fall in love and purchase. Easy digital access to product information, testimonials, video demonstrations, user-generated or professional reviews, peer opinions and comparative pricing tools creates a more dynamic, unpredictable and emotional landscape than the Funnel ever portrayed. 

The implications for marketers and merchants are that marketing strategy, messaging and media must shift. The number of inflection points has multiplied. Rather than aim messages or media units at a particular point in a reasonably predictable cycle, marketers now have to array their brands in ways to cover a much larger, expanding and morphing digital Main Street or mall and interact rather than interrupt. 

A shift in consumer behavior to digital channels was documented in a recent study of more than 2000 US shoppers, titled “2010 New Shopper Journeys Survey,”  conducted by Carat and Microsoft Advertising 

The two big take-aways are

1. Brands have to engage customers across 3 or more screens. During a buying cycle and use each channel and each digital meme to its best advantage. Brands will meet customers in several settings during the purchase time frame so that specific aspects of the brand story and value proposition can be parsed through specific digital assets. 

2. It’s Not Over with a Purchase. Customers almost instinctively use digital and social media to share and validate their purchases, review and recommend products, comment on customer service and plan subsequent shopping expeditions. In the survey, 48% of responders recommended a brand by name and 30% recommended a retailer. And while this fundamental behavior has always been true, technology accelerates the speed and scale to increase the impact on future sales.  

The Funnel is dead. Customer behavior is in-flux. The search for a new paradigm has begun.

 

 

 

 

 

16 Predictions for 2010

The dawn of a new year is an opportunity to look ahead and guess what will happen next. Some of these predictions might seem obvious, some reflect by own perspective or pet peeves and others just might catch you by surprise.  Thanks to Sherie Anderson who helped with research and front line analysis.

These 16 predictions and prognostications are offered with wishes for happiness and health in 2010. 

The Recession Won’t Go Away.  2010 will be as challenging financially as 2009.  Credit and employment will be tight. Every expense will be scrutinized and delayed if possible. Temps will trump full time players and everyone in every sector will be looking for a deal. Downward price pressure, enforced by bean counters eager to save their own jobs, will rule the marketing sector and probably the entire economy. Emphasis on new customer acquisition will change slightly to retention because it’s cheaper and has a much greater ROI impact, though since so few marketers are good at retention, expect more propaganda than productivity. 

Traditional big ad spenders – banks, automotive, retail, airlines and CPG – will spend cautiously, flap their lips about CRM, experiment with social media and find a hundred new ways to package and promote discounts and deals. B2B marketers will hunker down and stick to stuff that works with an occasional foray into social or mobile media to establish bragging rights behind a steady beat of plain vanilla efforts on the CRM front. 

Facebook Will Flourish or Flounder.  Everything turns on their ability to maintain momentum, avoid more ham-fisted privacy flaps and show marketers how to engage and interact with members in ways that don’t feel like advertising. MySpace, with 70 million users, and Friendster have considerable reach and assets even though they’ve been eclipsed by Facebook’s fast march and PR blitz. But frankly no one really knows why Facebook has stormed ahead and in the absence of a sustainable formula, that growth and popularity could disappear as quickly as it come about. There are no doubts that Murdock’s minions and many others are gunning to get back in the game not to mention non-US communities and vertical communities which have begun to show substantial growth.  

Look for a horse race in terms of new applications, new features or new functions and new ways to integrate or manage Facebook and other social media accounts into common work and life flows.  People want to participate but are having difficulty managing different accounts or dealing with the time suck that social media quickly become. A bunch of tools, possibly modeled after TweetDeck, will emerge to organize, manage and connect different social media applications. Along with the tools, expect best practices to evolve for linking your profiles and friendships to achieve specific goals like finding a job, finding a love partner, generating leads or seeding vertical conversations. 

More brands will use social media as standing research panels by asking questions, soliciting opinions or conducting polls and surveys. Some gut checks and qualitative research will move online because you can gather a carefully composed crowd quickly and cheaply and can target advocates, neutrals and competitive users easily. Expect an explosion in A/B testing and even product development testing to take place online and on social media platforms. 

Social Monitoring & Reputation Management Will Grow. In the same vein, everyone will license a data-mining tool like Radian6 and collect the “sentiment” in social media. Interpreting this data will be tricky because the software was built on assumptions and filters that may or may not reflect users reality. But acquiring a tool to mine social media will be the must-have new toy among marketing and IT types in 2012. 

Individuals will soon start agitating for similar tools to monitor their presence, their reputations and their vulnerabilities online. Partly privacy or security driven and partly vanity driven, people are beginning to understand and worry about how they are presented and/or exposed online. The combination of identity theft and phishing threats plus the need to present an appropriate image to potential employers and/or partners will create a need to check what’s online, align what is searchable with who you want to be and  fix or delete the stuff you are unhappy with. 

Sort People In.  The explosion of social media reveals an underlying psychological reality – people want to believe, want to belong and want to be connected. We are social creatures and we want to believe that our lives have meaning, that our actions matter and that we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves. Brands who understand this articulated need and can respond to it or channel it will attract followers, fans, advocates and customers. Brands who can speak passionately about things customers care about can do amazing things. 

Marketers Will Refine Applications for Social Media. Fans sign-up to get deals according to the RazorFish FEED analysis. What isn’t clear is exactly how brands can enter the conversation and display their wares without offending the sensibility of “friends” and others seeking just to connect and communicate. People don’t click on the ads in social networks and they resent brand messages that are artificially shoehorned into their conversation streams. There have to be ways to do it beyond offering to turn on new friends to a discount, but few have been reported. 

Beyond collecting friends, the value of conversations for intelligence gathering, creating content or managing customer service issues is still in its infancy. 95 out of 100 Twitter members never tweet. Looking at pictures seems to be the most popular online activity. And we are beginning to understand dramatic differences in Web and social media usage by gender. Social media is as much about voyeurism and feeling part of things as much as it is about actual participation. Marketers will use all these trends as launching points for campaigns next year. 

Brands will experiment across social media platforms. Some will create major gaffes others will generate viral attention that just might pay off in terms of awareness, preference or sell through. Now that the social channel has been firmly established marketers are eager to understand whom it connects them to and how to use it to achieve business results. The social network that helps brands figure this out and builds creative guidelines and media packages that agencies and clients can understand and sell up the food chain will win massive cash investments. 

Apps Will Shake Out. There are 100,000+ smart phone apps. Most are novelties or crap. Those with scalability, utility and genuine value will be talked about and heavily downloaded. The rest will rot. Given the large number of developers and easy accessibility to APIs, look for a steady stream of ideas that range from even more varied and refined fart sounds to very useful personal utilities to emerge as winners. 

Brands will create endless numbers of apps seeking either first mover advantage or virility. Both will be very hard to achieve. Very few people have sustained needs for single brand or product applications so look for mash-ups and aggregations to appear to super serve vertical needs. Imagine a single app with all the known diabetes drugs on it or an app that searches the net for all the shoes in your size reflecting your style and price preferences. 

Mobile Media Will Putter Along. Strangled by the technology, policies and pricing of the big telecommunications carriers, mobile media will not break out in 2010. Instead a few more brands will attempt to manage the Rube Goldberg-like configurations necessary to mount a mobile campaign that connects online and offline media and/or distributes coupons or discount codes. At this point mobile media is too much effort for too little pay-off for both marketers and consumers. Look for lifestyle brands to try the hardest but don’t expect inter-carrier compatibility, micro-payments, location-based campaigns, trigger promotions, live event interactions or other phone-based utilities to come into being at any scale in the next 365 days. 

We Will Feel the Need for Speed. The Web has gone mobile and increased smart phone penetration will create monstrous demand for mobile bandwidth. WiMax and other bandwidth solutions will soar as we demand more, faster access to sites on the go. This will also require more memory, more agile devices and will require marketers to optimize sites for mobile access and usage. I’d invest in mobile-enabling software because 2010 will see a great shift from static sites to those configured and designed for mobile use. In a year no one will look at sites that break up, look bad or load unevenly on iPhones, Blackberrys or Droids and everyone will expect to view videos, listen to music and quickly search and download data from everywhere.

Search Will Get More Specific. As people demand specific answers not just websites, search will become more refined even as it expands to include video, images and social media postings. Anticipate that vertical search engines will begin to deliver faster, better more accurate results that begin to challenge Google and siphon off search dollars in selected industries. Look for advances in data mining and in the way search engines process huge volumes of information. AI and natural language advances will begin to make themselves known, though the hype will continue to outpace the results. Keep your eye on Wolfram Alpha, which is breaking new ground and lighting a fire under search experts in many ways. Don’t be surprised if someone emerges out of nowhere with a completely different approach to generating search results that turns the market on its head. 

Analytics and Integration Will be Endlessly Discussed.  But no real progress will be made because both topics are directly related to organizational design and politics. Both topics are intensely threatening to the status quo. These topics are perennial strawmen for all manner of gurus, executives and advertising specialists to debate. In reality there is little real appetite for attacking either subject among marketers or ad agencies, though both devote massive amounts of lip service to the cause. 2010 will produce some new products and some new evangelists; another round of sound and fury signifying nothing. 

Email is Old Reliable. E-mail continues to reign as the most accepted and effective digital marketing medium. Privacy, opt-in, deliverability, formatting and creative best practices have bred widespread consumer acceptance accompanied by decent sustained click-thru rates and purchase ratios. Widely understood and widely used, there is research indicating that heavy social media users are equally heavy e-mail users, even though social media has begun to replace e-mail for personal communications among some (mostly younger) consumer segments. E-mail opt-ins routinely grow as do the full range of responses and interactions from consumers. E-mail lists are becoming more available and easier to merge/purge or match back.  Expect the e-mail barrage to continue with increasingly sophisticated segmentation and personalization. 

Grab Your Video Camera. Video is the meme of choice online. It seems that everyone has and uses his video camera to upload all kinds of content online. In 2010, if you can’t be found on YouTube and its competitors you will be invisible. Look for considerable competition among sites vying to rank second. Watch vertical video sites attempt to increase their visibility, if not their utility or viewership. Video will move between and among channels. A YouTube video can easily appear on TMZ or Access Hollywood and visa versa. News organizations and reality shows will mine online video routinely. 

Also look for new ways to emerge to tell stories in video. There appears to be a very broad tolerance for homemade videos and video with very modest production values. Videos will get shorter and be better tagged. Many will be clickable and some brands will try to create (or re-create) a branded online serial aimed at their psycho-demographic target. The Holy Grail is still the video that achieves altitude and is virally passed to zillions around the world. 

Syndication Trumps Destination. Expect brands to seek out syndication opportunities to distribute fully produced videos and to peel off segments and share them with a wide array of sites both to intercept audiences and to improve search disposition. Content and the distribution of content will act like media luring in new customers and validating existing clients. Brands will re-purpose, de-construct and mash-up assets like videos, images, copy blocks, polls, quizzes, white papers and other key assets and seek out venues to distribute them elsewhere on the web with link-backs to corporate and branded sites. This will tactic will simultaneously increase the trolling area for prospects and customers and positively impact on natural search results. 

Get in the Search Game. Natural search has nothing on Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft for mystery, suspense, competitiveness and unpredictability. In fact the best practitioners are the same guys. Search is the most intriguing marketing game by far where brand strategy meets technical prowess influenced by intuition and aggression.

The semantic web, policed by Google, is still the Wild West where fortunes are made and lost in a nanosecond and where skillful manipulation rules the day. But the business impact of search is not frivolous. Given the widespread use of search and its relationship to brand awareness, preference and purchase, mastering the semantic arts, understanding the need for careful tagging and operationalizing the “taxonomy is destiny” mantra is critical for every brand. 

Brands Demand Orchestration. Going to market is no longer a matter of crafting messages and buying media. Brands need to craft communications strategies that take into account the channels, the media and the target mentality then plan, design, parse and orchestrate the messages over time, geography and channels in the face of competitive activity and increasing noise-to-signal ratios.   We live in an always-on 24/7 mass media culture where the number and variety of stimuli is too many to count and where everyone has set their personal filters to filter out the vast majority of messages, offers and ideas. Technology has enabled both the flow and the filtration, so marketers have to have a keen sense of the environment and the audience mindset in order to identify, reach, engage and persuade customers. This is an act of composition and orchestration that is fundamentally different than before and which requires a much broader view of audiences, media and creative assets. 

Deeper Data Dives. It is finally occurring to brand marketers that a broad range of things can be predicted with accuracy on the basis of data and behavioral modeling. The recession has forced consideration of these “black arts” heretofore practiced only by direct marketers and data wonks that have developed a science around CRM and behavioral targeting. The types, quality and richness of consumer and B2B data collected legally and in compliance with privacy laws is staggering. Used for good by skilled data guys, these terabytes can dramatically improve customer engagement and satisfaction. Look for more brands to try deeper data dives in 2012 yielding better business results, though the number of true believers will remain the same.

The Marketing Job Market Sucks -- But Don't Panic

Advertising and marketing have been devastated and decimated in the continuing recession. Nielsen reports ad spending is down 15.4% the first half of 2009 compared to last year. Everyone has a bunch of friends out,looking and anxious.  Every agency and marketing organization has shed jobs and many will continue to pare down staff and freelance slots.

Jerry Bernhart, ace DM recruiter, surveyed 418 unemployed executives during the first week of September and found that searches are taking longer than before and that marketers' were out of work almost twice as long as the national average 28 weeks versus 15.5 weeks. 

More than half of unemployed ad folks reported looking for a new gig for 7 to more than 10 months. And as you might imagine, the higher the rank and the salary sought; the longer the search. A third of those seeking $200K plus salaries reported being "on the beach" for 10 months or more. There is plenty of reason to worry.

But, says my friend Kimberly Bishop, one of Businessweek's top 100 recruiters,don't panic and don't do crazy, desperate things that can sabotage your search. She cautions candidates to “differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd but not by being obnoxious or by being a jerk.” 

Kim’s Top 5 search killers are: 

1. Don’t force yourself on someone’s calendar. Don’t invite yourself using Outlook. Don’t pressure an assistant. Don’t show up unannounced. Don’t make threats or demands. Don’t send gifts, novelties or packages. Don’t beg. 

2. Don’t pretend you have a relationship with a recruiter. Don’t drop executive names. Don’t say you are a distant cousin. Don’t masquerade as someone else to get through the phone screener. Don’t pretend someone the recruiter knows referred you. Don’t pretend to be a survey-taker or a customer service representative. 

3. Don’t spin or spill a sob story. Don’t discuss your conditions, your medications, your mortgage, the state of your relationships, your immigration status or your creditors. Don’t suggest that there will be dire consequences if you don’t get an interview. Don’t whine. 

4. Don’t go over the top. Don’t send over-the-top letters, videos or creative presentations comparing your career to famous actors, professional athletes, national political figures or Nobel Prize winners. Don’t exaggerate or claim credit for others’ work. Don’t brag.  Don’t use profanity. Don’t sing, recite, rap or whistle. Don’t make up heroic or mythical stories. Don’t denigrate co-workers or former employers. Don’t share information or materials that are proprietary to former employers. 

5. Don’t ignore the basics. Craft a perfect resume. Prepare for the interview.  Anticipate the questions.  Have your elevator pitch ready.  Cite examples of how your experience matches the job description.

There are lots of good reasons to freak out. But it's a waste of time and energy. It's not productive. Marketing continues. Firms need entry-level, mid-career and senior experts to help them. The smart players know they can gain share by advertising and marketing when competitors hesitate. 

There is an enormous pool of good will, advice and potential contacts in your network. Don't be bashful. Use what's available to you and never let them see you sweat. Good luck. 

 

 

 

It's Time to Celebrate Jerry's Kids

Along with the French, I love Jerry Lewis.

The schmaltz, the cheesiness, the has-been performers singing long-forgotten big-band songs, the B rolls of guys in white coats holding test tubes, the drum rolls and the tote boards that will conjure up the ghost of Ed McMahon, the lame local anchors and the tear-wrenching appeals all signal Labor Day to me.

I imagine a great national catharsis focuses on Jerry and his kids as I participate in the morbid health-watch to see which diseases and which side effects of treatments Jerry himself will display each year. Jerry and MDA have staked out a position and for 30+ years they have delivered on it and raised zillions to fight muscular diseases. There's nothing better and nothing more reliable and nothing more comforting than watching Jerry and his shtick on the Love Network including the parade of firefighters, convenience store owners, oil companies and other random sponsors presenting those over-sized checks at random moments during the Labor Day weekend.

So this year don't just sit there -- dial the number or type in the URL on your screen and help Jerry!

Happy Labor Day.   

Measuring Marketing Magic

Marketing remains one of the elusive frontiers for performance management. For years marketing performance measurement (MPM) vendors have been working both sides of the aisle -- the CFO and the CMO -- in an attempt to define and measure marketing's magic and graft onto the marketing department the same fiscal discipline imposed throughout the corporate structure.   

For the last eight years VisionEdge Marketing has been surveying MPM issues and their 2009 report entitled, "Closing the Gap Between Marketing and Business" concludes that 

1. Marketing still has a long way to go to align with the business it supports and measure performance
2. Marketing departments still lack the skills to run themselves like a business
3. When  the marketing department measures; its not measuring the right customer-centric stuff.

You can get a 20% discount on the full report by clicking here.

These are sobering conclusions especially in a recession when every dime of marketing spend is under intense scrutiny by corporate and brand bean counters looking to hold back every marginal idea and expense. It also reinforces the stereotype of marketing guys as frisky kids masquerading as grown-ups in charge of the fun factory and accountable to no one. 

In practical terms, it seems obvious, at least to me, that the 23 month average CMO tenure documents the fact that CMOs are not playing the game as CEOs and CFOs see it. Few have invested in dedicated marketing operations people, essentially a COO for the marketing department, and even fewer have bought MPM packages or vendor services. And while a CMO's ears glaze over with the first mention of so-called "best practices" nobody is really happy with what gets measured or how they figure out how money spent by marketing impacts on the objectives of the business. 

What has caught on are dashboards. There are lots of them ranging from simple graphs to dramatic colorful eye-candy. But these devices are more show-and-tell than useful gauges of business success. Intended to be a "connection between marketing and business which facilitate fact-based strategic decisions", they are more CYA than FYI. The proof of this is that in spite of the dashboards, few top decision-makers see a clear correlation between money spent on marketing and advertising and sales or profitability goals. Herein lies the challenge -- connect the dots convincingly with enough data and intellectual rigor to withstand questions from the finance folks. 

What gets counted is political. Marketing guys count inputs. Finance guys want them to count outputs. There is also a bias toward counting the sexy acquisition programs rather than the under-loved and lower key retention programs which have a much more predictable impact on sales and customer satisfaction.

Since these are not new issues, I quizzed VisionEdge co-founder Laura Patterson , a serial entrepreneur who learned her marketing and measurement stripes in 14 years of service as a marketing executive at Motorola. Laura believes that CMOs need to build-into their consciousness and their tables of organization "a culture of accountability that's native to marketing." Rather than fear measurement marketers have to think about what they are trying to accomplish and craft measurement methods at the same time they craft big ideas.

Laura argues that this orientation starts with looking at the marketing activities that drive business value rather than simply measuring activity. If marketing programs are tasked to find, sell and retain customers, measurement must demonstrate how they did it or didn't do it and take a stab at explaining why. In her experience CFOs are less interested in exactly hitting the numbers than in marketing guys thinking and planning for results using a disciplined process which includes advance planning and post-campaign measurement. Among her clients, Laura reports a huge shift in perception when marketers create a process and set performance targets at the same time that they develop messaging and campaigns.

For top management, in Laura's view, measuring performance versus plan is table stakes for efficient operations and control. Marketers have to plan for expected results measured in business terms -- leads, revenues, share or market, margin contribution or repeat customers. Measuring the efficiency of the production process or the cost-per calculations of media efficiency are secondary. 

Bottom Line: The C Suite yearns for CMOs to tun the marketing department like a business. The 2009 Survey shows we're not even close.