Category Archives: Innovation

24 August, 2011 · 6:06 pm

Paid-Owned-Earned is Not-Quite-Right

Like straw fedora hats, there are some trends you like that you know won’t last. Paid Owned and Earned is the fedora hat of marketing and media circles right now. It is stylish and current, and probably destined to last only a few seasons. It’s served a useful purpose in getting people beyond the old media labels that defined channels by their mode of delivery — television, print, online, OOH, etc. But it falls short of its own intent, which is to define media by how it connects with people rather than by what it looks like.

Paid Owned and Earned uses a financial nomenclature to separate media. As such, it represents the view of the producer not the consumer. Paid Owned and Earned may mean something to the company paying the bill. But does a person really care how a message was funded? Do people react differently to a message knowing that it is “owned” rather than “paid?” Of course not. These terms also lead to odd categorizations. Is a Facebook page owned or paid? A company doesn’t have to pay for a Facebook page, and they control the content, but they don’t own it either.

When I hear the savviest media people I know talk about Paid Owned and Earned, they are really using those words to mean something else. They are trying to describe the nature of how the marketing meets the consumer.

Here’s a more useful way to think about Paid Owned and Earned. First of all, we should start with idea that all marketing is some form of content. The content can be an app, a webpage, a 30-second TV spot, or a shelf talker.  If you think about all marketing as content, then you can think of media as the way that the content connects to the right person. In this model, there are three types of media:

1) Brand-t0-Person

The brand seeks out a person (or type of person) and puts the content in front of them. Ideally, it is content that the person welcomes, but they weren’t intending to find it. They went to ESPN, Huffington Post, or drove down the highway and the content came to them.

2) Person-to-Brand

The person seeks out the brand for the content they provide. They intentionally went to find it. They visited a website, downloaded an app, or searched for it. They found the  content instead of the content finding them.

3) Person-to-Person

 A person shares the content with another person. The brand is not directly involved in the exchange of content.

These categories are a more consumer-centered way of connecting with media. They are also more useful in understanding the role your media is playing in the marketplace.  It helps you think more clearly about how to allocate your media, construct a media plan, and measure its effectiveness. The only problem is that the labels aren’t as pithy as Paid Owned and Earned. How about some suggestions?

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21 June, 2011 · 3:44 pm

Digital Marketing is Dead – Long Live Digital Marketing

The marketing services community is undergoing yet another spin as the world’s cultural and functional landscape grows ever more digital.  On one side, so-called traditional agencies continue striving to prove that they get digital with all the subtlety of an American Idol audition. On the other side, digital agencies are equally eager to show they can take center stage after years of playing support roles. Both sides fear irrelevance as the “digital” label becomes as redundant to marketing as the word “hard” is to “rock.” When almost every communication medium is technically being created or transmitted digitally, what does it mean to be digital?

You can see the challenge of this realization in how larger agencies are repositioning themselves and their digital arms. Large legacy agencies that excitedly established separate digital arms 8-10 years ago, like Tribal DDB or G2, are now figuring out how to reel them back in. What was seen as innovative then is now seen as damning evidence that your mother company doesn’t understand the digital space. Digital agencies are dealing with different ramifications of the same issue. If all marketing is becoming digital, and some agencies like Weiden and Goodby show themselves to be as creative in the digital arena as they were in  broadcast, are digital agencies starting to look too specialized to drive big brand ideas?

For marketers trying to sort this all out, it’s best to avoid the labels of traditional and digital. They may have been helpful for understanding what these places did in the past, but they are not helpful for what they can do for a brand now. The world may be going digital, but that does not mean that digital agencies are the best choice for marketers going forward. Too many digital agencies got that title because of their expertise with a particular toolset – websites, mobile apps or social community management. The current rise of digital goes beyond the toolset. It is the influence on our culture and expectations where digital is now having the most impact. People who’ve never redeemed a GroupOn or tweeted a word are thinking and behaving differently because of the impact the digital world is having on everything we do. In that sense, being digital is no longer about a toolset, it is about a mindset.

Marketers looking for a partner who can help then succeed in the modern marketplace want an agency with a digital mindset regardless of their historical toolset. In a marketing sense, a digital mindset means:

Invitations vs. Performances

When you think of your potential customers in terms of an audience, you think in terms of performing for them. It’s your show, and they are there to enjoy it.  You’re looking for feedback, but only of a limited kind — applause, cheers, laughter, boos.  If you think of  your customers as participants in your brand, you think in terms of inviting them to join with what you’re doing. Sometimes you’ll both be in the audience together, sharing common interests. Sometimes you’ll both be on stage, sharing new product ideas. In these and every situation in between, an invitation-mentality reflects the digital sensibility of marketing with people instead of to them.

2.1 vs. Ta Da

A traditional mindset sees success as an event, whereas a digital mindset sees it more as a process. The traditional campaign mentality treats each new effort as one-time attempt to get it right. You work on pulling work together for six months or so, then unveil it to the world like a movie or a book launch. The digital mentality sees a world that is more iterative. In the digital experience, you don’t expect to get everything right in your first version. You build it as best you can, and you expect to have to issue new versions to address issues or opportunities you did not foresee, or that may not have been there when you started.  No success is expected to continue without continual refinement and improvement. A traditional mindset tends to see the world in discrete episodes. A digital mindset sees the world more as real-time stream.

Speed Skating vs Figure Skating

Figure skating and speed skating both involve competitions on ice, but success takes different paths. In figure skating, you are the best in the world to the extent that you can convince an influential panel of judges that you are the best. In many ways, it is equivalent to how agencies used to get ranked. If you won a lot of awards from judges who thought you were good, that meant you were good. In speed skating, you are the best if you go faster than anybody else. Digital agencies love measuring. They’re hungry to prove what’s working. They don’t only use data at the end to build the case study, they use it in the beginning to shape the work. Marketing will always constitute some measure of both art and science, but digital agencies look for inspiration from them both.

Architects vs. Authors

If  I ask  who wrote “The Great Gatsby,” many could tell me it was F. Scott Fitzgerald. If I ask  who built the Empire State Building, the answer is both less well-known and less clear. An author takes satisfaction in literally crafting every word of their work. Owning the idea in the literary world means owning both the overarching concept and each detail of its execution. You rarely see books credited to more than one author. The traditional mindset has a similar instinct around enshrining the auteur. Architects, on the other hand,  know that their craft requires collaboration across many fields. They put forward the vision, but recognize the critical need for fellow engineers, builders, interior designers, and a host of others to make the idea come to life. The architect parallels the digital mindset that naturally looks to partnership as the operative model.

Digital marketing is entering a new phase where is less about mastering the technology and more about mastering the cultural dynamic. The tools will constantly be changing, so the toolset becomes less relevant. The digital mindset is what will drive marketing into the next phase.

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23 February, 2011 · 4:44 pm

The Blessing of an Elusive Attention Span

Virginia Heffernan wrote a terrific piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine in late November 2010. Entitled “The Attention Span Myth,” she questioned the idea that the human attention span is in danger of eroding against the onslaught of technology and media. She spent a good part of the article arguing against enshrining  a long attention span as a morally and intellectually superior quality. But I found this particular paragraph the most powerful:

Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn’t there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult “span” in the brain makes certain cultural objects more compelling than others? So a kid loves the drums but can hardly get through a chapter of the “The Sun Also Rises”; and another aces algebra but can’t even understand how Call of Duty is played. The actions of these children may dismay or please adults, but anyone who has ever been bored by one practice and absorbed by another can explain the kids’ choices more persuasively than does the dominant model, which ignores the content of activities in favor of a wonky span thought vaguely to be in the brain.

This insightful point puts the constant barrage of statistics on texting, video, and cross-media consumption into a very different light.  The point is that the cause and effect are essentially backwards. The always-on twitter-sized mediaverse is not creating our restless attention spans. Rather, our restless attention spans are creating the mediaverse. The reason that kids are texting their friends in history class isn’t because they are so different from the kids of 50 years ago, it is because they can. Quite simply, there were fewer options to being bored a generation ago. Back then, you could doodle, pass notes, or daydream. But if The Beaver and Cindy Brady could have gossiped with their friends instead of listening to a lecture on the Magna Carta, you can bet they would’ve done it. If good ol’ Dad in the worn leather chair could have checked out the sports scores when Ed Sullivan rolled out the trained dog act, you can bet he would’ve done it too.

In marketing circles, there are many who decry the media clutter as the enemy of effective communications. They protest that those fragile attention spans are making their jobs harder. With a bewildering number of choices at people’s disposal involving not only what types of media they consume, but when and how they consume it, it’s harder than ever to put across a marketing message. It was so much easier when people just stayed glued to their television sets. For this very reason, good marketers ought to be rejoicing. You used to be able to get away with being boring and expected as long as you had a big media budget. Now, the game is changing from who can command the airwaves to who can command attention. The winners will be those who can be the most interesting, entertaining, and engaging. That is a great thing for marketers. The harder it is for a company to connect with its current and potential customers, the more valuable those who can do it well become. Advertising people who used to complain about having to crank out formulaic commercials can revel in the challenge of making something that people will actually enjoy. I can’t speak for all my colleagues, but if smarts and creativity are increasingly the best ways to win, I can’t wait to play.

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14 September, 2010 · 9:59 pm

All Media is Now Earned Media

Reach is increasingly hard to buy.

As marketers try to sort the trends between traditional and non-traditional, online and offline, global and hyperlocal, at least one trend is clear. All media is morphing into earned media.

Earned media was typically used to distinguish from paid media.  Tools like PR and grassroots marketing that depended on some viral element to reach a large audience were put in the Earned category, and things like TV, radio, and print were put in the Paid category.  They were like apples and oranges. The common wisdom held that there was a clear trade-off between these categories. Earned media was cheaper to execute, but provided little or no control over what kind or how many people you would reach. Paid media was expensive, but provided guaranteed reach and frequency numbers that ensured the message was delivered.  The categories and the trade-off are both evaporating.

Technology and the explosion of choices have undermined guaranteed delivery.  New channels like YouTube are obvious examples of a choice medium where the viewership is entirely dependent on the nature of the content. You may get 10 views or 1 million views, but it’s impossible to predict. For every Annoying Orange, there are hundreds of thousands of unwatched puppet skits. But the even the so-called mass media are becoming increasingly choice-driven.  For example,  Morpace research estimates that almost 50% of TV viewing is via DVR, online, or other on-demand alternatives.  So even if marketers try to attach themselves to a hit show, their viewers increasingly time-shift and fast-forward past the advertising that is neither relevant nor interesting to them. The previous control over who and when your message would be seen is rapidly ebbing away.  The reach of a marketing message is increasingly dependent on the inherent value of its content regardless of the channel. That’s what we mean when we say all media is now Earned media.

Less obvious but equally true is that the low-cost perception of Earned media is also fading away.  A good press release or a publicity stunt just doesn’t go as far as it used to. The rise of social media has created more avenues for memes to rise and take hold, but also a flood of information that hastens their decline.  The competition for time and attention is more intense than ever.  So the chances of rising above the noise are less. And even if your idea does breakthrough,  it’s lifespan is much shorter because of the constant flood new work competing for the same attention spans. So even if the distribution costs of some new Earned media channels are lower (e.g. Facebook page vs. TV buy), the development costs in terms of the quality of the ideas, the frequency of the ideas, and the work required to populate those ideas with key constituencies is rising.

There are at least two implication for marketers. One is that they have to think of their messaging in terms of content. It must follow the basic principles by which we earn peoples’  interest in its own right or it will be ignored or skipped over.  This is true regardless of its form or distribution channel. The second is that they have to refresh their marketing efforts more frequently if they expect to maintain any consistent share of mind with their target.

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8 September, 2010 · 10:41 am

I Hate Focus Groups and You Should Too

Focus groups are the most  abused form of research in marketing.

I would go so far as to say that more harm than good has been done with focus groups. Because they are relatively easy to set-up and conduct, people overlook their inherent limitations in order to get comfort from having done some form of research before making a risky decision. It allows people to check the box next to research. But in many cases, it would have been better to do no research at all than to have only done focus groups. Here are several of the factors that make focus groups a less than ideal research tool:

Selection Bias: Most research is built on the assumption that you are tapping into a random sample of your desired target market.  Focus groups tend to have a persistent selection bias that negates that assumption.  In our time-starved society, few people are willing to go out of their way and give 2-3 hours of their time to discuss something they don’t care that much about for $50. Those that do tend to either have time on their hands, are eager to share an opinion, or really want the money. In some cases, that may be fine. In most cases, it introduces a type of person whose motivations are different from the target audience you want to understand.

Sample Size: The biggest abuse of focus groups is treating them like a quantitative study. Too often, someone will  conduct a series of focus groups, and form a conclusion about an idea based on the percentage of people who liked it. From a statistical perspective, this is unfounded. Five rounds of focus groups will involve about 20-25 people. Even if you assume a random sample of people, at this number the relative reliability of the results could be in the area of +/- 30%. So if 2/3rds of the people you talk to in focus groups give it a positive rating, it is equally likely that 2/3rds of your overall target actually dislikes the idea.

Rational Bias: Another well-known bias with focus groups is our desire to look smart.  Said another way, we tend to make up rational reasons for why we like or don’t like things, even when we don’t have any.  So when you sit people down in a room, walk them through an idea, and then ask them to comment, you are likely to get an artificial response. People don’t like to admit that they like or dislike things based on what may seem frivolous reasons to others. They won’t admit to wanting to look cool or be popular, even though we know that drives a lot of human behavior. So the answers you tend to get in focus groups downplay the emotional human elements that are central to our motivations.

Environmental Factors: There are a host of environmental factors around focus groups that color what you get out of them.  For one, you are often exposing them to an idea outside of its context or in a less tangible form.  For example, asking people if they think they’d notice a new package design after you’ve forced them to look at a picture of a package is not likely to get you a reaction anything close to glancing past a three-dimensional package in the middle of a supermarket aisle.

Group Dynamics:   Most of us like to get along with others, so there is a hesitancy to disagree openly with another person in the group. Some people tend to be more comfortable talking than others. When you combine those factors together, you tend to get people who unintentionally dominate a group. More extroverted people comment first, and that sets a bench line for other people’s response. Good moderators can help draw out people, but they are fighting a basic human characteristic. So group reactions tend to move toward consensus rather than diversity.

Lack of a Hypothesis: Good research should have some ingoing hypothesis that you are trying to prove or disprove.  For example, the hypothesis may be as simple as “current users prefer this new package design to the old one.” The format and questions in the research are then built around getting a solid read on that hypothesis.  All too often in focus groups, this discipline falls by the wayside. People will just want to do some focus groups to get a general reaction to an idea. Without a hypothesis, people just look at the collection of comments and try to discern possible patterns in them after that fact. The problem with this is that focus groups always generate a number of positive and negative comments. So you can construct any number of theories to explain what may be a random pattern of responses.

So when is it a good idea to use focus groups? For the reasons cited above, they are not good at projecting how meaningful or universal a particular reaction might be.  There are two situations when they are useful.  One is as a starting point. If you are early in your learning process,  and don’t even know what issues may be relevant, focus groups can help you get an initial lay of the land.  The other situation is when you want to better understand the reasons behind a specific reaction.  Suppose your team is working on a new interface design for a website. It’s a radical new design that you’re concerned might confuse novice users. A focus group would not necessarily give you an accurate sense of how many people found your interface confusing. But it could help you better understand what was causing the confusion for those users who were confused by it. In other words, if focus groups are not a reliable tool for finding the answer, they can be useful for understanding the reasons behind it.

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16 August, 2010 · 2:05 pm

Ten Things Your Agency Doesn’t Want You to Know: #4

You have the wrong people in your agency meetings.

It is a truth of life that people often make the mistake of assuming that just because they consume a lot of something, they are expert at how to make it. People who drink a lot of fine wine will talk about terroir and tasting notes even if their palettes couldn’t distinguish between Merlot and pine tar. The same can be said about movies, driving and advertising. People have been surrounded by advertising all their lives, so they naturally and erroneously assume they know a lot about it. The result is that there’s an implicit and harmful assumption that everyone’s opinion is valid. The CFO weighs in, the summer intern gets a vote, and various other unqualified personnel are encouraged to participate in the evaluation of the work “as part of their development.” It’s hard to believe that a company would let a first-year finance associate tweak the firm’s capital structure, or the HR director play with the supply chain, yet often have no qualms doing the equivalent thing to their marketing. If you want your marketing programs to be better, than have your most qualified marketers work on them. You should demand the same level of expertise and experience in your marketing decisions as you do in your other business decisions.

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28 June, 2010 · 11:26 am

Getting It: Charmin vs. Cottonelle

One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make when attempting to use social media is focusing on the channel first. Many of them have been trained that success comes from tapping into what’s hot whether that be celebrities, television shows,  or urban slang.  So they go into social media by trying to figure out  the hot place to be.  First they went rushing into Second Life, then MySpace, then Facebook, and now iPhone apps.

That mentality misses the point of social media: it is not to intercept people on their way to what interests them,  it is to engage people so you are what interests them.  The first task is not to assess the popularity of something unrelated to who you are, it’s about finding something rooted in who you are as a brand that other people find interesting. And that’s where the real challenge lies.  Before you pick any social media channel, you need to figure out what makes you interesting to somebody. Sure, it’s easy to figure out why people would want to talk to you if you’re Nike, BMW, or Maxim. Who doesn’t want to talk about sports, cars or sex?

It’s a little harder when you’re a less naturally conversational product.  Even if it’s something people use a lot of, it doesn’t mean they want to have a conversation about it.  If you make socks, table salt or toilet paper, is there anything that could make a normal person seek you out?

It turns out there is, if you are smart about it. For proof, consider what Procter & Gamble has done with their Charmin toilet paper. By owning public restrooms, they found a reason for people to talk about them and with them.  In 2002, the brand team started Potty Palooza, a portable set-up of high-end public toilets that traveled around the country to concerts, festivals, and other events.  It became an attraction in its own right, and the subject of considerable buzz. They built on that momentum with the installation of luxurious public restrooms in key venues like Times Square. Most recently  they extended their idea into the sponsorship of a mobile app, SitorSquat, that maps out public washrooms around the world.  These efforts have helped strengthen Charmin’s place as the most popular toilet paper brand, and even to have its premium line cited as a leading economic indicator. They found a way to make  people want to talk about a toilet paper brand. They started by finding something inherently interesting about the brand, and then played it out in various channels where it fit.

They did not pick a channel and then shoehorn something into it. For an example of that, you can look at Cottonelle’s Facebook page. Here’s the mission of their page in their own words:

“The Cottonelle® Brand Facebook page is intended to provide a place for fans to discuss Cottonelle® products and promotions.”

There’s  no reason to go there unless you have some pre-existing connection to the brand. I can’t say what motivated this effort, but it seems like someone simply decided Cottenelle needed to be on Facebook.  They do a nice enough job trying to keep some kind of conversation going, but you can feel the strain like small talk between people who arrived too early for an office party.  It’s hard to have a meaningful conversation without something interesting to talk about.

(credit to Bill Hague of Magid Research for related insights)

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30 March, 2010 · 10:19 am

Ten Things Your Agency Prefers You Don’t Know: #9

There is no reason for an agency of record.

With the possible exception of a media agency, the agency of record status is of no benefit to marketers. A little historical context is useful to understand the situation. Back when ad agencies did everything for their clients, including buying their media space, the agency of record designation had a legal and business purpose. It meant that a newspaper, magazine, or TV station knew that an agency was authorized to make purchases on behalf of its client. It was in keeping with the technical definition of agent in commercial law: someone authorized to negotiate and enter contracts with a third-party on behalf of the principal. An agent provided clients the convenience of not having to deal directly with hundreds of media contracts associated with a large marketing campaign. For large marketers making frequent purchases of many types of media, this role still makes sense for their chosen media agency.

But after media agencies spun off into standalone entities, the other types of agencies worked to hold on to this title. There were now creative agencies of record, promotional agencies of record, or interactive agencies of record. These designation exist to this day, but solely for the benefit of the agencies. They are the basis for long-term contracts and associated retainers that make holding companies more attractive to their investors.  In short, they provide the assurance of a more reliable revenue stream, and create a barrier to entry to competing agencies. It is a sort of corporate engagement ring jammed onto the finger of a client to ward away other suitors.

But there’s no reason for marketers to wear that ring.  These agencies don’t play the business role of agent. As with production for example, pre-production estimate approvals and other mechanisms effectively make marketers a first-party to any contracts or external agreements. In fact, an agency of record can be a detriment to marketers because it hampers their ability to seek out ideas from whoever they like.  Forrester just predicted the demise of the interactive agency of record, but why stop there? It’s true that marketers may prefer the convenience of working on an ongoing basis with a single organization that understands their business and their way of working.  There may also be some efficiencies in having multiple projects run through a single provider.  Some marketers may find their agencies so valuable that they want to ensure they have a long-term relationship. But that should be a matter of choice and not a contractual obligation. Most marketers have to earn their customers loyalty every day.  So should their agencies.

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26 February, 2010 · 1:07 pm

Earning Interest

There is a simple way to sum up all the trends around social media, viral marketing, mobile apps and other developments in marketing — we are shifting from a world in which attention is bought to one in which attention must be earned.

I recall attending an AOL conference back in the day when AOL was bigger than the Web. One panelist whose name sadly escapes me, shared some amazingly prescient wisdom over a technical discussion of how to deal with the limits of dial-up internet access. He said “I think our biggest bandwidth problem is going to be people’s attention span.” That sums up the marketer’s challenge better than anything else I can think of.

The number one question all marketers should ask themselves before launching any program is “why would this be of interest to anyone in my target?” Interest can take many forms, so not everything has to work in the same way.  A great Superbowl ad and a great customer service experience can both engage people. Our basic human motivations provide multiple ways to attract our attention. Here are five broad categories that we look at to help design marketing programs that earn interest:

  • Passion – We all have passions that bring pleasure to our lives. It may be for fashion, the Green Bay Packers,  or Broadway musicals. Whether carnal or intellectual, we seek out avenues that allow us to feed and  indulge our passions.
  • Curiosity – We are naturally attracted to mysteries and riddles. There are few things in this world more seductive than an unopened package. Once something piques our curiosity, it’s like an itch we have to scratch.
  • Entertainment – As YouTube empirically proves every day, we seem to have a bottomless desire to be entertained. Whether it’s through humor, drama or pure spectacle, there are few better ways to endear yourself to someone than to entertain them.
  • Interaction – It is deep within our species to want to connect with others of our kind. Shared experiences give us more satisfaction than solitary endeavors. Bars and online forums both owe their existence to our inherent desire to interact with others.
  • Utility – We all feel like our lives should be easier. So we embrace tools that fulfill the promise of saving time, money, or effort. 

Successful marketers are those who can earn the interest of their target. Marketing plans sometimes still refer to “paid media” (advertising) and “earned media” (PR). It’s all earned media now.

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11 November, 2009 · 1:54 pm

Social Media is Hard Work

woman working outOne of the signs that you’re with people who don’t entirely understand the effective use of social media is when the conversation turns into a lengthy discussion about what tools to use. Should we ditch our blog and go entirely to Twitter? What’s the best video site? What’s a better monitoring tool Radian6 or Spiral16?

Making the tools the primary topic of discussion reflects the habits of the broadcast media world.   A 1993 media plan started by weighing the advantages of TV vs. print vs. radio vs. out-of-home.  After that was decided, the messages and programs were then crafted for the channels.  

Social media is more about fitting the tool to the task than the task to the tool. To fulfill its promise, social media requires companies to engage with customers and prospects on a non-trivial level. It requires reaching out to people for their support and ideas. It requires responding to them when they respond to you.  It requires keeping up on conversations that are happening in multiple places.  It is not that the tools are unimportant, it’s just that the success of social media efforts depends less on the tools and more on the effort behind them.  It’s a bit like working out.  Assessing whether spinning, swimming, or Tae Bo is the better method for getting in shape is less important than doing any one of them vigorously and consistently.

In the broadcast world, if you forced me to choose between having the best message placement (e.g. the best programs, the best locations, etc.) or the best messengers, I would probably pick the placement. In the social media world, if you forced me to choose between the best tools and best messengers, I would definitely pick the messengers.

The most important step in planning a social media program is understanding who you want to engage and why they would benefit from engaging with you. When it comes time to pick the tools, there are numerous sources to guide you (with the practical, experienced guidance of Jason Falls’ team at Social Media Explorer being high among them). But your ultimate success will depend more on the commitment you put into it than the specific tool you use.

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