Archive for the 'Corporate Marketing 101' Category
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Skateboarding for the Overclass
To continue this week’s theme of pondering the high quotient of deluded posers in the marketing trade, meet Adam Roe, whose Lunchbox “shopper marketing” agency just got bought by the venerable social engineering conglomerate JWT.
Like our friend, the grimacing but allegedly always laughing Bob Knorpp, Mr. Roe presents himself as ultra-hip and creative and just about as funny as the day is long.
Meanwhile, here is Mr. Roe’s client list.
And here is Roe’s soulful explanation of the meaning of his latest sellout:
We are now all closely measured by sales, which makes the role of shopper solutions ever more critical, yet the sale starts long before the customer ever gets to the shelf and often long before it gets to us. By joining forces, JWT and Lunchbox offer brands, retailers and shoppers an unstoppable solution from start to finish. [Source: Advertising Age]
Yes, this is all about simultaneously serving the needs of both “brands” and shoppers. Sure. Never mind that Roe refers to the latter as “it” in this very statement, as he also undoubtedly does when practicing his craft.
Monday, July 18th, 2011
Delusion is as Delusion Does
The gent at left is Bob Knorpp, “president of the Cool Beans Group, a marketing strategy consultancy based in New York. He likes laughing even more than breathing.”
Discussion question: Why is the marketing world so full of men who look and talk like this, while serving a function in the society that would embarrass most PropDep overseers? Is it a simple case of spending too much time around dishonesty? Or is it some form of attempted psychological compensation?
In any event, compare Mr. Knorpp’s whimsical self-presentation with the way he talks about you and me:
There’s still an irresistible urge to build an audience at scale. We feel we need to get our message in front of as many people as possible, so we we put all of our efforts into generating followers and likes and +1s. Then once we build this mass audience, we communicate with it and many times sell against it. And we keep being confronted by the fact that this audience is still too small, compared with the larger audiences of traditional and digital ad spending. Thus we dismiss these micro audiences, or at the most, treat them as quaint test projects.
Yet as those direct-marketing models that we were working with two decades ago proved, there’s real value hiding within the smaller subsets of any aggregate audience — a value we are simply not tapping.
There is a place and a time for reaching an audience at scale. Paid media and mass reach are still very effective methods of spreading a message. But in the case of many of our social efforts, this mass philosophy is actually damaging the relationship with our community leaders. So while the metrics may show increased interaction, the value of the engagements may actually be lessening.
A community is an organic thing. It is much different than a customer file. It is a place where our customers might be interacting with each other as much as with us. So we need models and programs that recognize this intangible as a valuable asset.
What do you think happens to an advocate whose voice is suddenly drowned out? We can’t always say with statistical certainty, but common sense tells us he or she may stop talking. The advocate is no longer special. We’ve destroyed her bully pulpit. So off she goes.
The ironic thing is that it’s not hard to identify an influential advocate in an existing, functioning community. There are third-party modeling tools to be sure, but an active community manager can provide you with a list within a few days. And we can still grow the community to scale by targeting these folks — and probably do so for less effort and money spent. It may not happen as quickly, but it will happen more intelligently, scaling the influence of your advocates right alongside your follower counts, and building a community that is engaged rather than simply wondering why they are there.
We may or may not get to a model one day for the social spaces that is as effective at targeting loyalists as Ward’s model was in the direct space. But there is no doubt that most of us are not properly valuing the advantages of working with smaller, more engaged audiences. Until we consider how our mass approaches are affecting this advocate value, we will fail to realize the full benefits of [Facebook marketing] programs and miss the path to profitability that is present in these more engaged connections. [Source: Advertising Age]
Scratch a hippie, find a profit-seeking social engineer.
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
Vehicle Wrap!
Ever wonder how they get all that intricate propaganda onto the sides of cars and buses? It’s called “wrap advertising.”
So, it’s a huge piece of high-tech plastic glued to the body of the automobile (or train, if your town has any).
Ah, the wonders of our age of appropriate technology! Cars, those 3,000 pound machines that sit idle 95 percent of the time while burning up what remains of the planet’s petroleum stock, covered in plastic sales pitches! Who says the market doesn’t solve all problems?
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Facebook’s Clients
After a proper stretch of pretending otherwise in order to attract the sheep into the fold, mega-creep Mark Zuckerberg has recently been admitting what Facebook really is: “Our business is advertising.”
Now that it has the mutton piled high, the disguise is increasingly off.
The latest edition of Advertising Age, for example, reports:
Facebook [is] forming a 12-member client council that will give the social network input on advertising and marketing, it announced today at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
An invitation-only group, the client council will consist of agency leaders as well as Facebook’s biggest global clients, said Facebook VP-Global Ad Sales Carolyn Everson during her Cannes keynote. The members will rotate yearly in order to give different companies a chance to participate and influence Facebook’s various ad offerings, such as the latest “comments” ad unit, which was created in its first collaboration with an advertising agency.
Two of the first 12 members of the inaugural council are Nick Brien, CEO of McCann Worldgroup, and Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s head of integrated marketing and communications. “The invites are going to go out next week and we’ll have it locked up in the next 14 days,” Ms. Everson said. The first meeting is planned for the Association of National Advertisers’ confab in October.
“What I’m really interested in is hearing the aggregated interests of other advertisers and see how we can move social-media advertising forward,” said Ms. Clark, who joined Coca-Cola in 2008 after a stint at AT&T. She also has something very particular in mind — reviewing social-media metrics in order to reach consensus on how success is measured in that space. “Comparing myself to myself is fine, but having the context of other advertisers would be great,” Ms. Clark said. “I’d like to see Facebook come out with an accepted benchmark.”
You could say Coca-Cola has earned its place on the council — a top advertiser on Facebook, the company has more than 31 million “likes” on its page.
Facebook wants to know what it can do to improve advertising on its platform by showing major clients its ad products as they are developed. “I would expect an actual dialogue where we bring our engineering team and our marketing team in and get feedback directly,” Ms. Everson said. “It’s important to get kickback from the market. I’m interested in having us solve our clients’ problems and how to help make their business more social at the core.”
“Our clients,” of course, are corporate capitalists. Facebook users? They’re the raw material.
The good news? People might be tiring of the whole banal trick.
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Market Totalitarianism Update
The usual news, per Advertising Age:
Bluefin Labs is exploring the relationships between listener and speaker, orator and audience, marketer and audience, and mass media and audience by looking at about 3 billion social-media comments a month and, from that, filtering and mapping about 13.7 million comments that pertained to TV and/or commercials.
That mapping of social-media conversations to TV shows and commercials is called the TV genome; Bluefin was founded at MIT as a result of language-acquisition research MIT Researcher Deb Roy did on how his child had learned to talk.
“Mass media has a tremendous benefit in that it reaches many people at the same time, but one of the drawbacks is the feedback loop from audience back to speaker and communicator is essentially broken, or at least you lose much of it,” said Tom Thai, VP-marketing and business development at Bluefin. The idea behind Bluefin is to offer a deeper look at the audience feedback, beyond numbers of viewers and demography. Put simply: It is focused on taking the conversations and chatter that happen in social media and tying them back to the stimulus that caused that conversation on TV — either shows or ads.
The challenge in all of this: help machines understand the semantic layer, or the what the conversation is about. As he describes it, the first input is TV, the second input is social media. The space in the middle is the semantic barrier.
Bluefin itself:
Today, the Bluefin technology platform has a view into over 3 billion public-facing social media comments each month, tied to a continuously growing video fingerprint archive of over 200,000 distinct airings of TV shows and commercials. Bluefin currently ingests and performs video fingerprinting of close to 50 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks, with plans to achieve full coverage of the national TV market.
Thus, for marketers and TV content producers, Bluefin’s technology solves a problem that has eluded the TV industry for more than 60 years: how to close the audience feedback loop of TV mass media.
Bluefin is currently running exclusive private pilots with several Fortune 100 global brands, leading ad agencies, and TV networks.
Such was the publicly subsidized cutting edge of social science in the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Your grandchildren, should any ever come to exist, will be amazed, and furious.
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Why the Internet?
The official story is that the spread of the internet and wireless communications is about the spread of democracy. I take that to be patently preposterous, given the pertinent realities.
Meanwhile, consider the great marketing advantage to it all: By getting us all to participate 24/7/365, the behavioral engineers gain not just an array of spy-cams that make Big Brother purple with envy, but written, quantifiable records the ever-expanding field of “consumer behavior.”
Hence, here is marketing consultant BlueKai Analytics bragging about how its “Intent Data outperforms other data sources by 200 to 300%”:
BlueKai Intent™ is the single, largest source of Intent data qualified by in‐market actions and keyword searches in the world. It is aggregated, real‐time data from top tier websites with unique access to purchase, shopping comparison, and product research behavior from their users. Intent behaviors extracted from these sites include: price search by make and model, destination city for travel or activity on loan calculators, product comparison, or specific keyword searches. Time and again this type of data is highly correlated to consumers who are ready to buy.
Unmatched scale of over 160M in‐market shoppers across 7 key verticals
Strict Intent data qualifications
Data transparency means exact targeting without guessing
Thousands of in‐market attributes provide unparalleled targeting granularity and specificity
Intent data providers include 80% of the top 20 sites in each vertical
In case you feel like making the gesture, here’s the link to BlueKai’s “opt-out” process. [Note: I think it's broken!]
