Lairig Marketing

Websites To Beat 30-Second TV Spot In Race for Obsolescence

(Note: this post does not apply to e-commerce and media-related websites)

Now that everyone has the perfect website standard down pat - the top nav, the left-hand nav, the footer nav, the rotating main-area flash with the four promo call-outs below - it’s clear what a waste of time it’s all been.

Website content a mile wide, and eight miles deep, 99% of it uninspiring, noncustomer-centric, dated, noninteractive. For what purpose? To serve a relative handful of visitors, without distinguishing those who are there for the first time and those who are there for a repeat visit? Your garden-variety 30-second TV commercial is far more engaging than your garden-variety website.

You can see the comScore data for yourself, and how the traffic falls off as you move down the top-50 domains. Better yet, look at Hitwise data that shows the top 10 sites controlling 25% of all web visits.

Or this recent study, by Yahoo and Media Contacts (yes, yes, bias alert, but still), which found that of the approximately 85 different websites the average person visits in a month, only about 1.5 actually translate into high-engagement experiences.

If the future of Marketing, of the world, is an engaging digital experience, then websites as we know them are toast. Microsites, landing pages, in-banner interactivity, and widgets will rule.

If you don’t believe it, delete 20% of your web content and see if anyone notices. Recall my post on IT industry partner portals - rated poor year upon year by the user community.

The future is about interactive strategy, not website design. It is miles beyond SEO and SEM. To that end, it involves a good three months minimum of strategic thinking.

Given the time of year, and the current point in the economic cycle, now seems like a good time to put on those thinking caps.

Now, excuse me, while I go watch that damned “Saved by Zero“ spot again.

Media & Creative - The Unbundling Bundle

In May of 2007, Microsoft acquired aQuantive at an ungodly (premium) price. The company was comprised of a digital ad-networking business and a set of interactive agencies under the jammed-together moniker of Avenue A/Razorfish, the latter a result of an even-earlier combination.

I predicted at the time in an AdGabber/Adrants discussion forum that Microsoft would:

• Divest the Avenue A/Razorfish portion
• By end of 2007
• Because it wouldn’t be able to assimilate the agency culture

Looks like I am only going to get the first one of those right. My timing was way off, because my logic was misguided.

At the end of this August, word hit the street that WPP was in talks to take Avenue A/Razorfish off Microsoft’s hands. And just this week, the latter dropped “Avenue A” and is now simply called “Razorfish.”

So, it is coming together, but not for the reason I thought. My prediction was based on the fact that Microsoft, in all its years, has never been able to market and sell a sustainable, value-added services organization. And even though Avenue A/Razorfish represented well over half of aQuantive’s business, I felt the cultural friction would heat up in no time.

I missed the obvious. Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo was not a 2008 phenomenon - it was going on back in May 2007. The Redmond team wanted desperately to be in the media business, and aQuantive was a decent substitute when no progress could be made against Yahoo.

At the time, Microsoft must have believed, or was led to believe, that the media and interactive agency parts of aQuantive were synchronous. I don’t know who pointed it out, or when, but it now knows they are not. And since Microsoft is used to stratospheric operating margins, it will stick with the 50% media brings rather than the 20% agency work does.

(In an ideal world, Razorfish would be spun out as a public company, and regain its independence to continue its tremendous growth. The current economic and financial environment might preclude this outcome. A shame.)

There was a raft of advertising and media agency mergers in the early 2000s. They are all, officially or unofficially, undone. And last week at the ANA conference, client-side panelists spoke about by-passing creative shops completely, and going direct to their media agency partners.

All of this says we might be just about out of room for any more nails in the “bundled agency-media” coffin.
=== ===

JUST WONDERING…Who is getting richer off of Vista’s troubles this year - Justin Long or Steve Jobs?

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.
=== ===

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.
=== ===

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.
=== ===

NASCAR is joining the Alliance to Save Energy, an organization that promotes energy efficiency, to encourage consumers to conserve gas.

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.

===   ===

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

Pure Marketing Genius - Print This!

You’re trying your best to be Green, but because it is late and you are far behind on reading your favorite e-mail newsletters (such as Lairig Marketing), you bite the bullet and hit the “print” button on about five of them before leaving the office late at night. You hustle toward the door, stopping at the printer.

You expect about ten pages to be waiting for you. But when you get to the printer, you are shocked to see it is still chunking out pages. You grab at the output, about 38 pages in all. Yep. Five little e-newsletters printed out = 38 pages.

Wasteful madness.

While most e-mail platforms will allow printing that skips the not-so-contextual AdSense text ads brought to you by Google all around the borders of the page, the items within the vertical pane such as banner ads and html links tend to cause fits for printer software. Thankfully, many companies are developing solutions to cut down on all the extraneous paper.

One company, however, is going to slay two birds with one stone. The second bird is where the genius move comes in.

http://www.dmnews.com/New-technology-puts-targeted-ads-on-printed-Web-page/article/111629/

“After a 15-month test pilot…Format Dynamics is broadly rolling out technology enabling advertisers to place targeted ads in a specified location on pages printed from the Web…CleanPrint is Format Dynamics' patented software that dynamically reformats pages printed from the Web to produce a clean, paginated format…it also digitally serves a targeted advertisement with each page that only appears when a reader prints from the Web.”

Upon reading this, I didn’t know whether to weep, or wet myself. How come I can never think of ideas like this?

CleanPrint ads will probably get credited as “Web advertising” instead of “print advertising.” The more interesting debate to watch will be which format proves more effective.

In any event, we have come full circle. The Web will now drive us to traditional marketing, instead of the other way round. Priceless.

===   ===

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?…Whatever happened to the guy who wrote the business case for FedEx to buy Kinkos? Whatever happened to the guy who approved the merger?

Let The OfficeMax “Elf Yourself” Countdown Begin!

Find a blog, other than this one, that even mentions the OfficeMax "Elf Yourself" campaign outside the Thanksgiving-to-New Year period. I thought it might be a good time to get way out in front of the viral marketing/word-of- mouth cheerleaders and ask this question:  will OfficeMax let the elves loose again this year?

Let’s look at three arguments.

First: I posted an analysis back in January that shows how the two prior "Elf Yourself" campaigns contributed nothing to OfficeMax in the way of sales. Strangely, the company has publicly stated those results were right on par with expectations. Expect nothing – get nothing. So, logic works in reverse in the case of this argument – one vote “yes” so far.

Second: OfficeMax just launched a real marketing campaign – “Power to the Penny” – that will price already-low-end items at a penny to lure people into its stores. Marketing communications will cover most of the bases – YouTube, radio, and yes, even consumer-generated content.

This should actually have a positive impact on sales (although not on profits). Maybe the CFO will look at the results and say “do more of this penny kind of stuff this holiday season, and forget about p*ssing our time and money away on the elves.”  One vote “no.”

Third: The tie breaker should be the news that leaked into the press but didn’t get much play, no doubt pleasing OfficeMax senior execs. Here are the lowlights - it is reducing about 2700 managers across its 900 stores, cutting half its assistant managers and two-thirds of store supervisors. To offset these cuts, it plans to put an unspecified number of low-salaried “specialists” on the retail floor.

That is about as bad as it can get in retail, and should therefore be a slam dunk “no” vote, making the final score two “no” and one “yes.”

But I have this feeling logic won’t win out. My gut says the elves will make one more appearance. The caveat being, of course, that OfficeMax hasn’t been bought out by then.

The viral marketing and word-of-mouth bloggers will be ecstatic. As for OfficeMax, when you’re going down for the third time, you ain’t got nuthin' to lose.

===   ===

WHATCHOO TAWKIN BOUT, WILLIS…If John McCain needs practice on how to do “a Google,” maybe he could search on “Carly Fiorina” and “ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground.” Then he could pick a new economic advisor.

Joseph A. Banks The Cash

The economy is in the crapper, no one wears suits to work anymore, and the trade association for neckties folded a month ago. Yet JoS. A. Banks (JOSB if you don’t mind) had a record year in 2007, and continues to outperform in 2008. This 100-year-old men’s clothing business with over 400 retail locations must be doing something right. Let’s take a look.

The Facts
Early this month JOSB reported Q1 revenue 12% higher than Q1-07. Comp store sales were up, I repeat up, 6%. They were also up for full-year 2007. Compare this to any other apparel retailer, especially George Zimmer’s Men’s Wearhouse (“I guarantee it”), which seems to be coming apart at the proverbial seams.

The Brand
This may be JOSB’s weak link. JOSB relies mainly on local media to present itself as upscale at a “value” price. I can’t find any public data on its brand measures, but I’ll hypothesize JOSB has low unaided awareness but good aided awareness and recall. That’s enough leverage for the remaining factors discussed below.

The Website
JOSB has been able to grow both bricks-and-mortar and e-commerce at the same time (while not giving up on catalogs, despite the dramatic increases in postal rates). Its website is distinctive, clean, and very intuitive as far as navigation is concerned. No bells, whistles, widgets, or social networks required.

Marketing
To make up for a weak brand, JOSB does a lot of promotions. This freaks out Wall Street (which isn’t a big fan of JOSB management anyway), never a fan of increasing SG&A and inventory levels. But frequent promotions make sense in that situation.

Customer Management
JOSB has leveraged its channels to build a customer list of 4 million names. Plenty to drive targeted direct mail and e-mail campaigns.

JOSB also pushes customer service as a differentiator. Who doesn’t? However, JOSB’s claim seems credible, given its control of the company-owned in-store experience and the thorough website section for service.

What could go wrong?
- Demand could continue to fall dramatically
- Google could start selling suits
- JOSB management could shoot themselves in the foot

Of these unlikely scenarios, the last seems most likely. The issue I would keep my eye on is the aggressive plan for new-store openings over the next couple of years.

Everyone else is cutting back. Why JOSB isn’t is a riddle.

ISPs & Online Ad Networks - The Only Ones You CAN Trust

After two stabs at the raging online privacy “debate,” I kept my mitt ready for more stories about identity theft. In four weeks I caught a dozen. Most were at the whacked end of the scale. And not a single one related to the feared, and "certain," Armageddon scenario - an ISP or online ad network invading a user’s privacy.

If these strange but true stories don’t convince you where the true privacy dangers are, I give up.

He Ain’t Heavy…
James Hartman was able to make $3.2 million of fraudulent purchases using the Social Security number and a photocopy of the driver's license of his brother Ed, who was unaware of the crime. James had purchased five vehicles from a single auto dealership, using just the photocopied information, as well as two houses and some mountain property. He is now serving an eight-year prison term.

Maybe They Should Label Stuff Next Time
HSBC bank admitted to losing a computer server holding transaction data of 159,000 account holders in a Hong Kong branch office. The bank said it lost track of the server during renovation work at a branch.

Well At Least It Wasn’t A “No Doc” Loan
New York Post columnist John Crudele reports he twice successfully received new American Express cards by mailing in applications that had been torn up and taped back together.

Three Wrongs Don’t Make It Right
On February 27, Bank of New York Mellon was transferring back-up tapes with data including names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers when it lost a box with six to ten (they don't know how many?) unencrypted tapes containing the data. 4.5 million customers are potentially affected.

An Expensive Night Out
Two Estonian-based hackers put a malicious program on a Long Island Dave & Buster’s server, nabbing the account numbers of 5,000 credit and debit cards. The card numbers were later sold, and some were used in fraudulent purchases worth $600,000.

Wrest In Peace
A California woman was charged with using a genealogy research website to look up the Social Security numbers of people who had recently died and taking over their credit cards. A simple call to the card companies to change the cardholder’s address was all it took for the woman to steal 100 “dead” identities.

No wonder Revolution Money (http://www.revolutionmoney.com/) has been in the press a lot lately…