Tag Archives: media

3 September, 2019 · 1:55 pm

Alexa, What’s My Marketing Strategy For Voice?

Image result for voice activated[As appeared in Media Post’s Marketing Insider]

The architect Louis Sullivan coined the maxim that “form follows function.” In the case of marketing channels, you could reverse that to say function follows form. How you use an axe differs from how you use a shovel because of what the form allows you to do. Similarly, the best use of a billboard is different from the best use of a banner ad because of what the form allows you to do. In order for brands to find success with voice, they have to consider the strengths and constraints of the form.

It may disappoint some marketers to learn that “receive promotions and special offers” is not a popular use case for people interacting with voice-enabled tech. In fact, according to Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report: Q1 2019,” top responses for how smart speaker owners use their devices include searching for real-time information, getting the latest news, making calls and sending messages. If you observe how most people interact with voice channels, it’s initiated as a request or command. This form leads away from using voice for marketing-as-promotion and toward marketing-as-a-service. It’s a medium better built for informing, supporting and responding rather than advertising. With that strategic perspective, brand leaders should look past their advertising teams for inspiration and instead tap into the insights gleaned from service-centric programs like customer service and customer loyalty groups. 

Tapping into the service aspects of marketing will suggest the most likely opportunities to shape positive experiences via voice. There’s a lot of information there that can point to effective brand applications for voice. For example:

  • Does my product/service require set-up?  Can voice instructions walk customers through it?
  • What are my most frequent complaints/issues?  Can voice provide an easier way to resolve them?
  • How, where and when are people using the product/service?  Does that context suggest ways voice could enhance/extend those use situations?

Once you find where voice can add value, it’s imperative that customers know what’s available to them. Brands can enable access to voice-enabled devices through existing communication methods. Product packaging, owner’s manuals, brand apps, and welcome emails are all channels through which companies can promote that they are “voice-friendly.” If done effectively, it should be apparent to consumers where to go and what to say to take advantage of a brand’s voice features.

The new reality is that brand-driven monologues are quickly being replaced by customer-initiated dialogues. Voice can best drive brand value by expanding ways to serve and enhance the customer experience. Those who try to shoehorn this technology into an existing promotional strategy might find silence on the other end.

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Filed under Artificial Intelligence, Channel Strategy, Digital Marketing, Market Strategy, media

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11 October, 2017 · 4:19 pm

The Biggest Agency Gap? Surprise, It’s Not Digital

(This article was originally published in HuffPost and AW360)

The refrain for digital transformation is as necessary as it is clichéd. For all the talk of our digital present and future, marketers still have a lot of road to travel to move from systems developed to deliver broad-based campaigns to systems built to deliver millions of individual communications in real-time.

But there’s an even larger gap than that to fill for marketers, and particularly for the agencies that serve them. That’s the gap between marketing and marketing communications. Agencies tend to conflate the two to the extent that they don’t know the difference. But marketing is far more than messaging. The traditional 4P’s of Marketing have been updated with more letters since they were coined in the 1960s, but even the original version has 3 more Ps than Promotion.

As agencies build their data capabilities, they almost exclusively focus on how to better deliver messaging. That includes better targeting of the message, more effective media channel selections, and more compelling message content. But that data should be applied to more than messaging. It should be informing pricing decisions. It should uncover shopping preferences. It should indicate product opportunities or shortcomings. The data is there to inform those decisions, but the framework is not.

It’s not surprising of course, because that’s not where agencies are used to playing. Pricing, distribution and product development aren’t part of their historical job description. The Cannes and One Show award categories have expanded to embrace all kinds of new media forms, but I don’t recall anyone being celebrated for best dynamic pricing implementation.

Agencies need to provide this more holistic marketing perspective to their clients. The barrage of studies related to shorter CMO tenure indicate that their clients are too often seen as lacking the internal credibility to impact the foundational business of the company. Agencies reinforce this CMO shortcoming by pushing to add experts or tools focused on improved messaging. Agencies could be a far greater asset to their senior clients by tying these resources to other critical parts of the full marketing mix. A true Marketing partner looks at questions differently than a Communications partner. For example,

 

 

Marketing is more than communications, and agencies should be about more than messaging.

#AgencyVoices

Photo © iStock, taken from original post

 

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29 May, 2015 · 4:06 pm

The Two Most Important Words in Marketing

if-then*The most dramatic advances in human development over the past century can be summed up in two words: “if then.” That phrase sums up all the power unleashed by the age of computing. Fueled by Moore’s law, the path from the Babbage Machine curiosity of 1822 to IBM’s Watson is an exponential acceleration in the if/then processes we can manipulate in a given time. The algorithm, or the ability to perform complex tasks with a cascade of simpler If/Then actions, has yielded stunning advances in machinery, medicine, communications and artificial intelligence that are redefining our lives on several levels.

It may seem a stretch to tie those lofty heights to the earthier world of marketing. Yet it’s as true for marketing as it is for any human endeavor that future advances lie in more fully harnessing the force of If/Then. We see the early effects in the rise of programmatic media. Programmatic advertising allows marketers to perform instantaneous if/then decisions across millions of potential customers and thousands of destinations. It is now a question of when, not if, all media will be programmatic. As significant as that is, media purchase and delivery is not the full extent of its impact.

With only a small degree of oversimplification, all marketing can be translated into the If/Then processes. In fact, it harnesses the two areas that are currently most at the tip of every CMO’s tongue: Data and Content. That’s because Data feeds the If, and Content provides the Then. Data signals the people and the context around them that spur an adept marketer to act. Content is the action the marketer takes to react to that signal. So if Home Depot sees a suburban homeowner within a mile of their store on a warm April day, then it forwards Spring planting tips and an offer from their Gardening Center. The response generates data that sets up the follow-on If/Then. If the Spring planting tips led to a purchase, then gauge their interest in a Loyalty program for the summer ahead. The effectiveness of the marketing correlates with the depth and breadth of If/Then branches the marketer can meaningfully define.

The Art vs. Science group might argue that applying the If/Then paradigm to its logical extreme overlooks the human factor that underlies the best marketing. In that view, the most successful brands, the ones that inspire deep-seated passion and loyalty like Harley Davidson and Nike, exist in an emotional territory above the mechanical abilities of If/Then algorithms. And of course, they’d be wrong. If/Then unleashes creativity rather than constrains it. It’s true that you’ll get mechanical transactional marketing if all you feed into the If is mechanical transactional data. But if you feed individual interests and passions into the Ifs, you uncover ways to forge even more meaningful human connections. Imagine how much more value a marketer could deliver to a runner who just had a child, or who’s on a business trip away from their regular running route, then it could to just a runner who is due for a new pair of shoes. The If/Then approach allows marketers to deliver on that kind of potential at a scale and sophistication that evades today’s most intimate marketer.

* this topic was inspired by a discussion with Baba Shetty, a brilliant thinker on various topics including commercial media

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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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