Lairig Marketing

AdAge (MediaWorks) Falls On Face

Today was going to be the month-end wrap-up, but it will have to wait until next week.

I found another in a long line of examples yesterday of bogus information being spread online. Let’s give it a name - MSMspam, for mainstream media spam.

My article for marketingprofs.com a few weeks ago warned about the vast amount of uninformed and downright inaccurate market research on the Web. If you told me, however, that I would see such a thing on the venerable AdAge, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But see it I did. In an otherwise excellent piece about the future of TV advertising (i.e., there IS a future for TV advertising), Bill McCabe, a senior VP at direct-response TV experts A. Eicoff & Co., wrote the following:

“…market-research firm Outsell recently reported that online advertising this year is expected to increase 12.3% and reach $105.3 billion, exceeding the combined amount spent on radio and TV advertising for the first time.”

Maybe on Mars, but not on this earth.

Two big problems. Number One. Online advertising spend has been tracked since day one. Every reputable source reflects this year’s spending to be in the neighborhood of $25 to $30 billion. Pretty far away from $100 billion, no? Won’t cross over TV AND radio for a long time.

Number two. Never heard of Outsell. So I searched, and found (a) an automotive consultant that does some very interesting work with live chat, and (b) a publishing consultant. Might be the latter, but neither showed any online ad spending data on its website.

I submitted a comment to the story . It has not been accepted/published 12 hours later. I sent an e-mail to the Editor of AdAge at the same time. No response, so I just sent another. The article still stands with the erroneous information.

As always, it continues to knock me on my ass that no one else catches this stuff. Or cares.

MSMspam. Spreading like so much kudzu.
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See above post.

Reinventing The Wheel For Online Advertising

Here is a crude synopsis of advertising: put together some creative imagery and messaging, and push it out to as many places as appropriate to reach prospects. What varies in this equation is the distribution, not the creative.

For example, let’s say we are talking about a print ad. The advertiser takes this single version of creative to the media team to place it in different magazines and newspapers. The target publications will be read by a similar segment of consumers, but they might be all over the lot in terms of topics - sports, home renovations, business, etc. We hope and pray that the advertising stands out equally across these diverse media topics.

In most cases, the digital advertising world has adopted the same model - make a nice little banner ad, and pump that single version across branded sites and portals of every stripe.

What if we varied the other piece of the equation, though? Not the media, but the ad itself. What if we took advantage of the digital technology available to create an infinite number of ad spots?

Here’s an example, as reported on ClickZ.

“A redesign of Last.fm, the CBS-owned free online music platform, is giving advertisers the ability to create smart ads that can…move to the beat of whatever music a user is listening to.
Aside from enabling ad messages that can react to music, the new site design allows ads that are based on and can "reflect" the music or activity on the page. For instance, ads can…include interactive elements, such as maps with concert listings for the artist being played. They can also peddle tickets to shows and let people make hotel reservations near concert sites.”

Digital versioning is not new. Several companies, agencies, and IT OEMs have web-based applications that allow users to compile different spots by selecting from templates and asset libraries.

But the Last.fm endeavor takes us to the next level of “contextual advertising.” It automates the selection process, and incorporates real-time data (in this case, the song being played and the user‘s location).

Hard as hell to create, and complicated to manage. But tremendously relevant and contextual. And, I bet, a better return than a “completed” pre-roll.
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So the school sends out this e-mail:
Faulty and Staff Lounge (NVC 14-290)
Owing to budgetary constraints, the college will not be able to provide coffee in the lounge this semester.
Our faulty lounge will have no more free coffee!??!! RECESSION !!!

Tree Falls in Forest. A.K.A., Engaging With Video Advertising.

We’re on a roll with biased ad-effectiveness studies. Here are two more.

Tremor Media, with every reason in the world to promote research about online video advertising, distributed a press release last week highlighting its research findings on 100 campaigns with 65 million pre-roll impressions.

“Tremor Media is observing pre-roll completion rates around 80% for both :15 and :30 second streaming video advertising, which they [sic] attribute to their [sic] business practice of matching advertising with high quality content.”
"We've seen slightly higher completion rates for 30-second ads than 15 seconds…"

Interestingly, Tremor’s CEO is quoted “we wouldn't suggest it [30-second ads] as a best practice.” If they have higher completion rates, why not?

[Quick aside: Per the blogging post yesterday, Tremor falls into the Ooops category - most recent blog was in April.]

Sample of one, here. When I link to an online video and I receive notice an ad is about to play (through something like “your video selection will begin shortly,” or an adjacent advertising pop-on takeover), I mentally clock the time in my head and move to a new browser window to read an e-mail or surf another news item. Or maybe even reach over and finish my cup of coffee. The video ad has “completed” and I haven’t seen any of it.

So “completion” is a bullshit metric. Click-through would be a good one. Which brings us to biased study # 2.

An AdAge article on Tremor’s study referenced similar completion findings from Break Media and Panache, as well as “click-through rates [that] averaged 10%.” In case you missed that,,,“CLICK-THROUGH RATES [that] AVERAGED 10%.” The study results were rebroadcast a million times, yet not once did I see anyone ask “are you kidding me?” That is 10 times the average “average” result. This would be like someone saying he could increase your salary by a factor of ten, and you yawned in reaction.

If those results had any panache, advertisers should be backing up trailer loads of money to the video ad networks. As we know, they are not.

More from Tremor’s press release:
“With Tremor, we can be confident that our pre-roll advertising will be delivered in-full, on-time, and as-promised…”

They should add - “whether anyone watches it is another story."

Brand measures and repeatable, replicable click-through rates are the only metrics to make the case for pre-roll. Anything else is bias. Pretty close to bs.
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NASCAR is joining the Alliance to Save Energy, an organization that promotes energy efficiency, to encourage consumers to conserve gas.

Ding Dong - Corporate Blogging Is Dead

Blogging is a b*tch. Forrester will charge $379 to tell you that. I will do it for free.

Forrester published (or I should say “made available”) “How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging" in June. It found 53% of the nearly 200 business-to-business marketers it surveyed felt blogs were marginal or irrelevant to their 2008 marketing strategy. (Forrester was also shocked - shocked! - to see a decline in the number of new blogs. I guess the notion of saturation hasn’t taken root at Forrester.)

Since my revenue is zero, I have to keep my costs down. I took a sample of the 90 business blogs Forrester reviewed. It told me all I needed to know. Why aren’t most companies recognizing value in their blogging efforts?

They suck.

You have to find them first, though. I would kill to have the site traffic an Avaya or a Cisco gets. Hiding blogs under a “Community” or “Resources” or “News” (?!?!) tab seems self-defeating.

Be that as it may, content is the real value driver for blogs. I found all types of content in my mini-survey.

Senior Executive Speech Blogging
If you miss any events Novell participates in, fear not. You can read the executives’ speeches (er, I mean blogs) online.

Crowd Blogging
If you love a messy screen full of random feeds and comments, check out Adobe and IBM. Remember to take your meds first.

Pitch/Press Release Blogging
If someone threw out the sales collateral, just drill down on Cisco’s site and read the virtual sales calls (er, sorry, again I meant to say blogs).

Product Tutorial Blogging
If you want to know how to use a product and the technology behind it, never mind customer support. Check out Autodesk, Adobe, or TIBCO. Title of recent blog posting from TIBCO - “CEP vs. WSDL + SCA + BPEL.” I am serious.

Random/Ooops Blogging
Wonder if they’ll ever blog again? Go to Avaya or HP. A shame for both, since most of the blogs are informative and well-written, even if they are a bit tangential to their brands.

For what it’s worth, I could have placed Oracle in each of the above categories.

Forrester prescribed a bloated set of recommendations for businesses to extract more value from their blogging efforts. Mine are much simpler.

Blog from the middle-management level, with a customer focus, on a consistent basis, in an on-brand voice.

And for God’s sake, add some value.
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Go to Novell's home page, and check out the first spot in the rotating flash. How embarrassed should that "dancing guy" be??!!

How Would You Save Jamba Juice?

This month’s “save” is a former wunderkind from the West Coast now in big trouble with Wall Street. Jamba Juice was due to release quarterly earnings last week, but asked for a one-week extension until this Thursday. Its CEO and CFO resigned recently for undisclosed reasons, though there is plenty of incriminating evidence.

Jamba Juice, a $400-million nationwide retailer of healthy smoothie-type drinks, is seeing same-store sales decline. In 2007, its first full year as a public company since being bought out by a shell acquirer, it increased its new store count by more than 15%. Not exactly what you’d recommend rolling into a recession.

This year, Jamba Juice has tried to catch up to the tidal wave of misery. It has cut back on new stores, closed some older ones, initiated a breakfast menu, and started strategic ventures with Dole and Nestle. It needs to hurry. Net income is negative and its stock price, which was the equivalent of two smoothies a year ago, can now be picked up for the price of a package of Twizzlers.

Brand Strategy
“Inspire and simplify healthy living.” This positioning is to be applauded given the poor health and rate of obesity in the U.S., yet those same dynamics absolutely constrain your growth opportunity. Overweight people are not going to be convinced that a smoothie-a-day will make it go away.

Marketing Communications
Jamba Juice scores well here. The website is well done, and its promotions for recession-beating prices and the new breakfast menu are compelling.

Retail Operations
This is the ultimate paradox, supposedly the core of Jamba Juice’s value proposition. It has taken the worst of Starbucks - slow service - but unlike Starbucks, can’t convince people to sit down. The dichotomy between the Starbucks and Jamba Juice at 23rd & 8th in Manhattan is telling. Two doors apart, one with 10 tables always full, the other with 30 tables mostly empty. You guess which is which.

Strategic Ventures
This is where the company needs to put 100% attention. Dole, Nestle, and “store within a store” fit way better than the traditional retail venues. Let the health-inspired person make her own Jamba smoothie at home. Let the airport standby passenger, who has time to kill and an expense account to burn, treat himself to a $5 smoothie. Let Nestle fight the grocery shelf-space battle for you.

Let your value proposition be the ingredients, the packaging, and the marketing communications. Let someone else bear the heartache of delivery.

Apparently, Jama means “to celebrate,” Jamba means “elephant.” Akin to the only two outcomes to this story.

Transcript Of Rejected Seinfeld/Gates Microsoft Commercial Leaked !

Camera pans gate, stops on sign reading “Famous People Retirement Home.”
Sound of birds chirping.

View Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates relaxing on lounge chairs beside pool.

JS: So this is the life, eh?

BG: [puts down “Retirement for Dummies” book] Sure is. Any regrets?

JS: Honestly? I keep thinking the final show could have been a little funnier. [looks away, as if in deep thought]

[short pause]

BG: What about “Bee Movie”?

JS: [sighs] Yeah, I guess that needed a little more punching up. You? Any regrets?

BG: That’s easy. I wish I could have done something to make people see how good Vista was.

JS: “was” ?

BG: I mean “is.” Sort of spoils this retirement vibe.

JG: [excited and very nasally] Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if we both pull a Michael Jordan? Announce we are coming out of retirement for one last hurrah? Except we’ll only do it once, not three times, of course.

BG: [beams] Yeah? What would we do?

JG: I don’t know. What if you and I went around the country in a little van giving away DVDs of “Seinfeld - The Last Season”? And maybe throw in a “Bee Movie” every now and then.

BG: [taken aback] How does that help Vista?

JG: [thinking quick, leans forward in chair] OK, we could put one of those little sticky label thingies on it that says “Powered by Visa.”

BG: [angrily] VISTA!

JG: “Powered by Vista.” Right.

BG: [dejected] I don’t know, Jerry. I’d have to think about it.

JS: OK. [quick pause] Maybe in the meantime I could come up with one of those memorable slogans for you.

BG: How much would that cost me?

JS: [confidently] Nothing.

BG: Nothing?

JS: [waves right arm from chest outward] Nothing!

Camera pans out and up into the sky. Sky transforms to black, stars appear, occasional comets streak by.

Tagline appears, with narration.

“Microsoft Vista - more bloated than Steve Ballmer.”

The Digital Agency Pitch Process - Broken On Arrival (Part 1 of Many)

No matter which side you sit on - the client side or the agency/services side - the manner in which “new business” is proposed, pitched, and awarded is best described as a goat rodeo. The good news for traditional agencies is, that as messy as the process is, things have at least become fairly standard and predictable. On the digital side, however, it’s not even worthy of the term “messy.”

This post will be the first of who knows how many to probe what’s going on in today’s digital pitches, and how they can be improved - or at least get them up to the level of “messy.”

Let’s start with the Objectives section in the request for proposal (RFP) the client sends out, where the desired outcomes of the project to be bid are (supposed to be) laid out.

I have reviewed four RFPs in the past two months for digital projects, mostly focused on website redesign. None followed any standard outline. In only one case was there a section called Objectives. In the other cases, it was up to the bidding agency to divine what it was the client wanted to achieve upon project completion.

Complicating matters is a definitional problem, whereby a task is frequently listed as an objective. For example, “Implement SEO” is a task, not an objective. For that matter, “Implement BETTER SEO” isn’t an objective either. What would better SEO get you? Maybe the objective really is “Increase ranking in organic search results.” (This should be even more specific as to how much and what categories of keywords.)

More examples below.

Not Objectives
Improve the online user experience.
Integrate website with backend databases.
Better “look and feel” across site.

Are Objectives
Increase users’ average time on site.
Increase online conversion rates.
Increase brand performance measures (awareness, etc.).
(These would be more precise if quantified by absolute numbers, percentage gains, etc.)

Engaging in a competitive pitch process signals a major business initiative. The objectives as shown in the RFP (in a clear Objectives section!) should reflect the needs of the business.

If all you really want is better SEO or a redesigned home page, just get three simple time-and-price bids. Don’t put everyone through the horror of a full-scale business pitch.
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DATA YOU SHOULD KNOW…Cigarettes made up just over 31% of US convenience store sales in 2007. And you thought it was the stale hot dogs and gallon-size Slurpees.

Don’t Bank On Banks At The Grocery Store

The trend of putting branches of retail banks in grocery stores and supermarkets caught some real steam in the late 90s and early 00s. Since the beginning, expert sentiment has cycled positive and negative as to whether this was good business, for either or both the supermarket and the bank. Looks like we’re headed into another negative sentiment cycle.

Chevy Chase Bank this month gave up the ghost on all of its 54 branches in Giant Food stores. No doubt there are two very large “macro” issues at play - the recession (oops, the NBER hasn’t called it yet), and the overbranching of America (like the overpedicabbing of Central Park). Banks need to make some cost-efficiency decisions - supermarket branches are an easy target.

At its core though, this discussion is about channel strategy - where you distribute your goods or services, and how you market them. I believe the in-grocery banks are failing on both counts.

Distribution
Co-location is good if you understand your customers’ wants and needs around both products. Sometimes you can get away with the weak proposition of “convenience,“ such as a dry-cleaning drop-off or a coin-changing machine at the front of the grocery. But banking isn’t convenience-driven. I think bankers felt this wouldn’t be an issue, as most people make many visits per month to the grocery. However, the current economy has blown that hope out of the water.

Co-location is also good, by the way, if you can do it cost-effectively. An in-store branch requires high investment in both onsite staff and infrastructure (a problem the dry-clean drop-off and coin-changer don’t have). Not to mention the risk of the all-too-frequent Friday afternoon stick-up.

Marketing
“Just be there and they will come” doesn’t work as a channel strategy. You and your partner need to come up with relevant cross-promotions that generate “win-win” for each. Websites, circulars, in-store signage AND signage in the traditional bank branch must let customers know there is value in there somewhere.

The product mix needs work too. If all you are offering is the same thing I can get elsewhere, then we are back to the weak proposition of convenience.

Give the banks credit for this at least - they got it right when they stuck ATMs in the supermarkets.
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DATA YOU SHOULD KNOW…There are reportedly over 6000 people at a FIVE DAY Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in California as we speak, and NOT ONE was able to do a search and find yesterday’s post.

The Biggest Search Marketing Lie Ever Told

Did Putin send his minions to take over AdAge? And comScore, Yahoo, and MediaVest? All at once? This is the worst propaganda piece I’ve read this year:

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=130353

Just look at this headline:
“Why CPG Brands Better Buy Paid Search;
Sponsored Text Ads Increased Awareness 160%”

The search world must be awash in pom poms and champagne today. Every SEM consultant probably sent his or her client a copy of this 1200-word AdAge hype. In sum, it concluded that sponsored search advertising, those tiny little text ads most people don’t see when they use Google or Yahoo search engines, is empirically proven to raise unaided brand awareness, “even among consumers who never click on them.” Less important, but a billion times as laughable, was the finding that consumers have a better perception of the #1-positioned advertiser than those in lower positions. Duh.

No one will challenge the study. Except, of course, this lonely little blog. It’s why Lairig Marketing exists.

The Panel
The study was conducted on 6000 comScore panelists, recruited due to their history of searching on CPG-related keywords. Given the way results are presented, it is doubtful the panel was segmented for distinguishing characteristics such as prevalence of sponsored-ad versus organic-listing usage, and frequency of search.

Study Dynamics - Part 1
The panelists were shown “simulated” search results. There is no information whether the panelists were told of the study’s objectives nor what they were instructed to do during the simulation. For example, were they told to take a look way over on the right margin, even though some of them might never do so normally?

Study Dynamics - Part 2
What were the panelists shown for sponsored results? Real ones, or mock ups with stronger brand wording? This statement from the article is chilling: “the simulated setting also meant less ad clutter than real-world media studies typically involve.” Huh?

If you don’t think real world is important, try a Google search on “shampoo” and tell me in three days if you can remember the #1-ranked “brand.” Will you remember TGel? Unaided? Did you even see TGel?

Brand Awareness
You can’t define brand awareness the way a taxi cab instructor defines road sign awareness. “OK - what did you just see? A stop sign or a yield sign?” Brand awareness is not measured in minutes or hours. As a panelist under simulated conditions, you can bet I’d commit everything I saw to memory. Like a good panelist should. Like a real consumer doesn’t.

There is no argument that some consumers click on sponsored search results in the CPG space. It’s one reason why Google’s stock price is so high. Attempting to tie text ads to branding, however, sets us back about 25 years vis-à-vis the tenets of brand marketing.

Where is Al Ries when you need him? Putin must have gotten AdAge to muzzle him, too.

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DATA YOU SHOULD KNOW...Almost 45% of interactive ad spending last year went toward display advertising, while paid search advertising garnered 38%.

Close Only Counts In Hand Grenades…And Customer Service

Remember those old-time department stores? Where you had to take the elevator to the 4^th floor and walk all the way to the back down a long dark aisle to find the “Customer Service” desk? Wouldn’t it be cool if the same experience could exist online?

It does. A recent survey of 31 online businesses looked at their “live chat” functionality and found the following poor performance:

...88% have live chat on customer service pages

...42% have live chat on product pages

...15% use proactive chat

(something closer to 100% would be preferred for these)

I should point out, beyond the small sample size, that this research was done by a chat services outsourcer (which makes it in their best interest to publish a tale of woe), but my own experience echoes the direction of these findings. If you want to see a few more findings from the study, go here:

http://www.catalogsuccess.com/story/story.bsp?sid=109636&var=story

Live chat is a great opportunity to take advantage of the interactivity and immediacy of the web experience. Yet so many companies make half-hearted attempts or are stymied by poor website design/technical support. (And by the way, this whole discussion is just as pertinent for those with “click to call” functionality.)

For starters, you don’t need it on the home page, especially when it gets placed at the bottom of the left-hand nav way, way down below the fold. If a customer needs help while on the home page, you should redesign it.

Next, think about making customer service more prominent. Too many companies rely on 6-point-font upper nav that says “contact us” or “help.” I’ve never understand the design taxonomy that shuns the actual words “Customer Service” appearing at least twice if not three times in navigation.

Finally, on the shopping or purchasing pages, live chat should be prominent and as close to the action as possible. If you have difficult-to-understand shipping options, put it down and to the right. If your search functionality isn’t that good, put it high and to the right.

Don’t mimic the department store model for customer service. It didn’t get them very far.

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DATA YOU SHOULD KNOW…

More than half of the electronic payments processed by Visa come from debit cards.