Back by popular demand! Building on last year’s packed Show & Smell showcase combining inspiring emerging technologies and sensory marketing, this hands-on crowd experience of leading edge technologies, continues to define the key factors of how to make new technology work in a promotional marketing program or experiential states.
With live demonstrations of technologies you won’t see every day—technologies bringing together the physical and digital to harness your sight, smell, touch and taste including Twitter-driven robots, crowd-controlled gaming, and a host of emerging technologies even WE haven't seen yet.
You can go here to see what we presented last year, we had a number of pretty cool things there, including the Twitter gumball machine! So if you're going to be in Austin this weekend, come see us!
Presenters
David Polinchock, Dir, Media Lab, AT&T AdWorks
Kurt Karlenzig, SVP Global Digital Strategy, The Marketing Store Worldwide
Warren Kronberger, Dir of Research & Dev, The Marketing Store Worldwide
Just love this promotion program for the new James Bond movie Skyfall. It has everything a great promotion should have,. It's fun, it's place-based (you know how I feel about that!) and it's pretty darn engaging. Kudos to Coke Zero for putting it together. They really use the space well and the placement of people telling you how much time you have left adds to the excitement. Plus, it's great for spectators, as you watch people try to complete the mission. Sadly, liability issues here in the States would probably prevent something like this from happening here. Check out the video to see how they did it.
A few years ago, I made the observation that just because a lot of people go there, doesn't mean it's a good place to advertise. For example, almost everyone visits funeral homes, but that doesn't mean they're a good place to provide advertisements.
So now Webtrends is out with a new report that shows that maybe, just maybe, advertising on Facebook isn't really driving that much, at least as it relates to click-throughs. As they say in the article, many brands use Facebook for more then just their click-through rates, so maybe this isn't a deal breaker.
Still, putting your ads in front of people because they're there, doesn't seem to be driving business. Content without context is just noise.
UPDATE: You can go here to see more details about the report.
Facebook’s advertising business is soaring. Yet the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal.
At least that’s according to a new report issued by the analytics firm Webtrends that recently examined 11,000 different Facebook ad campaigns which totaled 4.5 billion impressions. Webtrends found that in 2009 the average click-through rate on Facebook was 0.063 percent. That figure slipped to 0.051 percent in 2010.
Because of that decline, CPMs on Facebook have crept upward, going from 17 cents in 2009 to 25 cents last year.
The only ad categories that were able to crack 0.1 percent click-through rates were "tabloids and blogs" (0.165 percent) and "media and entertainment" (0.154 percent). The worst performing ad category on Facebook, per Webtrends, was healthcare, which generated 0.011 percent click-through rates and an average cost-per-click of $1.27.
However, Facebook’s CPMs are still relatively low in the grand scheme of things (consider that video ads on Hulu can sometimes fetch $50 CPMs). And while many advertisers turn to Facebook to drive traffic or sell products, many traditional brands use the site for its social value, not its propensity to drive clicks.
Yet even "social ads"—at least as defined by Webtrends—are only effective for so long. “Out of the ads we measured, we found that interest-targeted ads began to burn out after three to five days,” reads the report. “Eventually the rotting CTR leads to Facebook deactivating the ad, and it’s back to the drawing board.”
Regardless, advertisers continue to flock to Facebook. According to eMarketer, ad spending on Facebook will reach $2.19 billion in the U.S. in 2011 and close to $4 billion worldwide.
Remember when you were a kid and you asked your Mom if you could do something? She would initially say no and you would respond "But everyone else is doing it!" And Mom's around the world respond the same way. "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?"
Are you doing things today because they're the right thing to do for your audience or because everyone else is doing them? Are there people in your company constantly saying "Everyone else is doing (fill in the blank) and if we don't do it, we'll be left out!"
For example, when I wrote about Foursquare marketing here, I said:
Most marketers, if not all marketers, should use the tools that best engage their audience, whatever those tools are. They need to stop listening to the many reports out there and start listening to their guts and their customers.
All too often we're doing things just because they're popular. But everyone's there you hear people say. You know, there's a lot of people visiting funeral homes, but that doesn't mean they're a good place to advertise.
For 2011, how about resolving to what's right, not what's popular. It's harder to do the right thing then it is to do the popular thing, but in the end, the right thing will get you further. Of course, what's right may also be what's popular, but prove it's the right thing first. Make sure it creates a compelling, authentic and relevant brand experience for your audience.
I recently wrote about the Fast Company Future of Advertising article in Challenging Conventional Thinking and Forbes has a follow-up piece interviewing advertising students about what they think about the future of advertising.
It's interesting, I spend a lot of time with college students and frequently what I hear from agencies about what college students are doing is at odds with what my students tell me they are doing. When the industry was talking about how the future of advertising is Second Life, the majority of the students I taught didn't even know what it was. Just recently, I've been asking my students about their use of things like Twitter & Foursquare, and many of them aren't using either.
So what did these students see as the future of advertising?
Being multicultural; crowdsourcing; adapting to the changing media landscape; more interactive; breaking down the silos; sparking movements; ability to change how things are done; able to react quickly; senior people looking to junior people for trends.
Maybe I've just been looking at the future of advertising for a long time (I started exploring how VR would change the business back in '91), or maybe I'm just cynical about the ad biz. But did the students really say anything that you haven't heard hundreds of times, at meetings, industry events and hallway chatter all over the industry? It's good that they see a bright future and are enthusiastic about working in the ad business, but there's little new and actionable here.
Don't get me wrong. Nothing energizes me more then teaching and talking to students. I would love to teach full time just to be in that energy flow. As I've said for years, even with clients you love, you still spend most of your day overcoming "no." With students, they're always asking why not. It's a very positive place to be.
I say quite frequently that the ad industry is sometimes too in love with the shiny bauble, the newest, latest thing. But too often it's not about experimenting to try new things, it's just jumping on the bandwagon, so that someone can say "Look, we're cool too." And too often, in the rush to follow the new, we forget about the basics. That it's about creating compelling, authentic and relevant brand experiences. That it's about companies that make good products and treat their customers and employees well. That's pretty hard to do.
It's important for the ad industry to take stock of what it does and how it works. It's important to listen to new, young voices and see how they can help us reenergize the advertising business. But let's not throw away the industry because new technologies are available. We've had these conversations every time a new tool has entered the industry.
UPDATE: As I was writing my post, Fast Company came out with their piece, The Future of Advertising, which has generated a great deal of conversation the challenges facing the advertising industry. What's interesting is that the same challenges facing the biz were probably said when we moved to from print to radio; from radio to TV and every time something new arrived. I recently wrote:
Of course, there's no mention of creating better commercials that people actually want to watch. And that's the challenge with any ad that's delivered without consumer control. As long as they don't have any choice, we don't really worry much about the content.
I wonder what would happen if agencies got paid based on the Nielsen ratings for their commercials. If most people skip your commercial, you don't get paid. If it draws big numbers, you get paid a lot. Betcha' that would change the industry a lot.
Yes, technology is changing things. But have you seen any movies set in the future, say Blade Runner or Minority Report? What do you notice about those films as it relates to the future of advertising? Yep, that all of that time in the future and advertising is still pretty pervasive. In fact, it's even more pervasive then it is today. Think of those giant billboards from Blade Runner or the famous (or infamous, depending on your POV) scene where retinal scanners welcome Tom Cruise to the Gap. The only future world I can think of without pervasive advertising is the one from Brave New World and there, they train you in-vitro to be a consumer. That's pretty pervasive.
While we talk a lot about the measurement of advertising, one thing we don't do is connect advertising to sales. Yea, it's not always a direct connection, I get that. But at the end of the day, business is about selling things. What we do in advertising has to have a positive impact, doesn't it? Many of the recent hits in advertising seem to have created better opportunities for the agencies that created them then they did for the brand.
So it's time to challenge some of the conventional thinking about SM and the ad biz in general. Too often we just accept things as truth without really questioning them. In the end, we may find out that they in fact are true, but let's do some questioning for a few minutes, shall we?
Really, You Do Control The Message. I think this where I disagree most with conventional thinking. Sure, you may not control the distribution of the message, but you start the message. You have all of the control based on the experience you deliver. People amplify the message you start. You want people to pass along a good message, give them a good experience.
SM in business isn't really about friendship, it's about business. We wrap SM up in the language of friendship, but more often then not, it's about generating business. If you're following more then a few hundred people, do you really have a relationship with them? Or are these new tools just another distribution channel to get our information out? Look at how many companies still use Twitter or FB as a one-way communication tool, not And BTW, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's OK to conduct business, that's what businesses do.
There is no such thing as word of mouth marketing. WOM is not a marketing strategy; it’s the outcome of a great product telling a great story. And let's not forget that many WOM programs start with the brand telling something to someone. WOM doesn't occur in a vacuum where the product just mysteriously appears and people start talking about it. If you're paying people to talk about your product, that's called advertising.
Do we really want to be part of a tribe? I think that there are really just a small number of brands that inspire people to join their tribes. They can be big companies (like Apple or Urban Outfitters) or smaller companies (like Moosejaw or maybe a local bookstore). But I'm not sure the vast majority of companies will ever inspire people to join their tribe. We usually just want the products we use to do what they're supposed to do. By pretending all brands can create tribes, we're creating a set of expectations that the vast majority of companies just can't deliver.
More then most industries, the advertising biz thrives on the shiny bauble syndrome. We can't wait to play with the latest tools and too often, we declare them the future of advertising. We jump from tactic to tactic all the while pretending that they are really strategies, not tactics. Just in the past few years, ad agencies have transformed themselves from ad agencies to Second Life agencies; branded entertainment companies; WOM marketing agencies and now social media agencies.
Too many companies are using SM only at a surface level. Yep, companies like to talk about the consumer being in control, transparency and all that stuff. But are they making changes that matter throughout the organization? Whole industries -- like banking or airlines -- continue to operate in complete disregard for what's in the best interest of their customers. Their policies and procedures still show how they really feel about the people who buy their products. Hiring some folks to Tweet or handle your FB page doesn't change your business. Putting your employees and your customers above everything else, that changes your business.
It's easy to get people to talk about you, it's much harder to get them to engage with you. When I'm speaking at events, I always joke that if I were doing my presentation naked, I could get everyone in the room to talk about me, but probably not as many people who would save a place for me at lunch. Too often we confuse talking about with engaging. Talking about can lead to engagement, but only if there's real connection behind it. Are you really delivering on your message or do you say things simply to get people talking.
SM is a new way to engage. The tools we're using today are new, but SM is as old as people. The first cave drawings were SM. Pamphleteers were SM. It's faster and broader today, but the underlying concepts are the same as they've been for thousands of years.
Advertising is the cost of being boring. Nope, advertising is the cost of doing business. Zappos does advertising. So does Apple (I've seen at least six Apple commercials while I've written this article). They're not boring brands, are they? Yes, some companies, like Urban Outfitters, don't do traditional advertising, but again, they're pretty few and far between. And is it advertising that's really bad or is it how we do it?
People don't mind advertising, they mind how we deliver it. I talk a great deal about just in time marketing in my presentations. People want information about brands and products, but more and more, they want it on their own terms. What we don't want is the constant interruption of advertising. It's everywhere and it never stops. Companies that spend their time looking at how to captivate, instead of capturing their audience, will be the companies that people want to hear from.
Social Networks + Advertising = Amway. When I was a kid, everyone knew at least one AMWAY salesperson who never stopped looking for a sale. They were constantly trying to sell you or convince you to become an AMWAY salesperson like them. We didn't like it in person and we don't like it in SM.
If you think that listening is new, then you're already in trouble. All too often, I hear people saying that the really cool thing about SM is that it lets you listen to your customers. Some companies have even added Chief Listening Officers. But thinking that listening to your customers is a new way to engage just shows how out of touch most companies are.
You can't force listening. Have you ever been in a conversation and you really didn't want to listen? You nod politely, you occasionally say something, but mainly, you're planning what you're going to say next. You're not really listening and having a conversation. You're simply exchanging sentences. You can't force someone to listen. And if you look at how many companies still operate today, they're not listening.
Legacy vs. history. This will someday get it's own post, but there's a huge difference between history & legacy. Legacy holds you back. It's what keeps those policies & procedures in place, even when you know they're not right. It's the walls that you put around creating a better experience. History guides you to the future. It's knowing where you came from.
Few like to co-create. Many like to complain. Yes, there are brands that have created tribes that want to help co-create your brand. But more often then not, people like to complain when you've done something wrong. And complain they will. When you've wronged them, they will make sure that anyone who listens will hear about what happened. Remember United Breaks Guitars?
No man can serve two masters. In the battle between doing what's right for customers or doing what's right for the investors, the investors usually win. Again, there are a few companies who buck this trend, but mostly, companies do what's best for investors or shareholders. Banks continue to add fees to boost profits. Airlines nickel & dime customers every way they can to add to the bottom line. It's OK for companies to make money and to make even lots of money. But when they do it at the expense of customers and employees, that's when things are wrong.
For over 10 years, I've been talking about the need to create authentic, relevant and compelling brand experiences and it's even more important today. And yes, I think SM and all of the new tools available to advertisers today can have a very positive impact on business. But let's put them in the right place. Let's question what we're hearing today and really see how these tools can make our businesses better. And if you want to think that this is a new way of business, then really change your business. Lip service doesn't really do service to anyone.
What does an abundance of information create? Basically a scarcity of attention.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how all of this information impacts us today. We talk about the ability to multitask, but I'm not sure we've mastered it as much as we think we have.
And the interesting thing about the quote from Samuel Johnson was that it was written in 1751. So, one hundred and fifty years ago, people were complaining that there were too many ads in the world.
A study out today shows what happens when we place ads everywhere, without context or relevance to the audience. Now, I know that they're writing to be excited about the data, but let's look at what it really means. With ad networks and video content almost everywhere we go, 70% of the people surveyed didn't remember seeing any of it. 70%. And thirty percent only remembered that they saw something. Maybe they did ask about what they saw, but that's not listed here in the article. So, only 30% of people surveyed about a completely ubiquitous form of advertising remember seeing something in the last 30 days.
I think the mall stats are pretty frightening. I haven't been to a mall lately without there being digital screens everywhere and if 85% of the people aren't seeing them at all, then it would seem to me that's a pretty big fail. Same thing for doctors offices. I was just at an appointment with my wife and they had a screen right in the center of the waiting room. I don't know how anyone could miss it. Come to think of it, I can't remember if it was on or not. And that was about 2 weeks ago and I'm in the business!
For years I've been telling people that you need to create compelling, authentic and relevant brand experiences to connect with todays audiences. But it's easier to just repurpose existing content and slap it up wherever we can. And, since this is one of my soap box items, we keep talking about the consumer being in control while looking for advertising that they can't turn off. Folks, we can't have it both ways. I wrote this in 2006:
So, let’s once again be clear about this. Advertising based on the fact that you can’t turn it off IS NOT A GOOD ADVERTISING MEDIUM. That’s what got the industry into the situation we’re in now. People don’t like continually being force-fed advertising.
You don’t build a relationship with anyone when you start by talking about the fact that they can’t avoid you. You can’t think reach and frequency and relationship building at the same time. They usually, in fact, work against each other.
When we just place content, without thinking through context and relevancy, it seems pretty clear that we create something that a big hunk of the audience ignores. When I did the msnbc.com NewsBreaker Live game a few years back, we scored 80%+ who played the game and 70% unaided recall. That's because people enjoyed the game and we created the right context. Going to the cinema is a social experience, as was playing a group game. In fact, when we did it in the UK, people enjoyed the entire movie going experience if they played the game first.
Not to mention that right now, lots of folks have a digital signage network in their pockets, thanks to their smart phones. With augmented reality, QR codes and bar code readers on the phones, we should be looking for ways to deliver more relevant content. But again, it's easier to just repurpose content we already have then it is to create something that would potentially be of more value to the consumer.
Don’t we understand that the reason brands are seeing a decline in the effectiveness of TV advertising is that we don’t like ads interrupting everything we do? If you’re involved in putting together one of these in-store networks, ask yourself: How many of your friends, not in the advertising business, have said to you—“Hey, can you put up lots of monitors in your store and run commercials on them?” My guess is not that many.
Where does “create a better experience” fall on your list of reasons to install a digital network? My guess is that the top spots are occupied by “increase revenue” or “create opportunities to promote partners” and somewhere further down the line is create a better retail experience. And even when it’s on the list, my guess is that few people have actually defined how it will create a better experience for the consumer.
So, stop what you’re doing right now and look at your experience first. If it doesn’t create a truly better experience for your audience first, you’re not doing it right.
Newly released survey data from GfK MRI confirm the popular wisdom that consumers can run but they can't hide from advertising. Thirty percent of respondents said they'd seen a "place-based" video ad in the 30 days before being queried.
Stores were the venue in which respondents to the polling (conducted this past spring) were likeliest to have encountered video advertising within that 30-day period, with 19 percent saying they'd done so.
Other places registering in double digits were shopping malls (15 percent), restaurants (11 percent) and medical offices (11 percent). Slightly fewer reported seeing video ads within the 30-day period in bars/pubs (9 percent), airports (8 percent) or gyms/health clubs (7 percent). As GfK MRI says in its analysis of the data, the percentages translate into a total of 67.4 million adults who saw video ads in these locations.
Big announcement yesterday that Bing & Facebook have created a new search partnership. In addition to regular search results, you'll also get Liked results, showing you what your friends have thought about whatever you're searching on. Look at one of the critical conclusions that Fast Company has drawn based on this new partnership:
Companies have to focus on creating great customer experiences. Because when their customers go searching online—for a movie, a camera, a travel destination—their friends’ recommendations are going to be front and center. Launched a store that no one "Liked?" you’re not going to show up in the search results.
Silicon Alley Insider has a pretty clear look at how it might work. "For example, Microsoft online veteran Yusuf Mehdi demonstrated that if you're looking for a steak house in San Francisco, Bing wil be able to look at your friends' likes and dislikes to rank certain restaurants higher or lower. Same thing with videos: a video that a lot of your friends have posted will show up higher in Bing results than a video that hasn't."
Google algorithms have been great, but they can be easy to game if you know what you're doing. Plus, they're based on connections, so it's possible that the really best results turn up on top because people click it first. Many times, I find that the top results aren't always the most relevant.
But adding how people are really ranking the business is pretty interesting. And this is closer to how we search for things in real life. I ask friends and family what they think. Combining that with other search information, gives me a potentially much better picture in the results.
Interesting to see where search goes from here and how Google will respond.
Among the features Bing is rolling out to users in the coming days is a module called “Liked Results” to its search results. Looking for information on that new Tom Cruise movie? On Google, your search engine would serve up the relevant pages it has calculated are the most popular. On Bing, as of now, it serves up the regular Google-style results and a module that shows you pages your friends have liked -- including, for example, movie reviews. You no longer have to do the work of trolling through search results to figure out which of the pages might tell you whether the movie’s a hit or a bomb. Trust your friend Sara’s taste? Click on the page she Liked.
So, as the ad industry continues to talk about how the consumer is in control, they also spend a great deal of time trying to figure how to take away that control from them. How's this for a quote:
"At the end of the day, there's very little difference between what a DVR and VOD allows you to do. . .there's overlap between them, but [a DVR] allows you a lot more control as a viewer."
So networks want to push VOD over DVR's because DVR gives a lot more control to the consumer? Yep, that certainly sounds like we're putting the consumer first, eh? When you add the fact that many networks now take up 20% - 25% of the screen to hype a show other then the one you're watching -- now complete with sound & motion -- and I start to think that maybe the ad industry doesn't really believe this "consumer in control" thing.
Now, I do believe that there is a value equation here, but I also think it's changing. Before cable, when we really didn't pay for TV, we excepted commercials as the payment for getting our shows. With cable, that equation changed. After all, we are paying now to get the cable and those channels. But, we tolerate commercials anyway. And it seems that we'll watch commercials in exchange for more freedom to watch shows when we want. Right now, that might still be an acceptable value exchange for consumers, but we'll see how long that lasts.
Of course, there's no mention of creating better commercials that people actually want to watch. And that's the challenge with any ad that's delivered without consumer control. As long as they don't have any choice, we don't really worry much about the content.
I wonder what would happen if agencies got paid based on the Nielsen ratings for their commercials. If most people skip your commercial, you don't get paid. If it draws big numbers, you get paid a lot. Betcha' that would change the industry a lot.
In the meantime, let's stop pretending the consumers in control. Because really, that's not how we treat them.
TV networks are scrambling to come up with a way to force viewers to sit through commercials.
If they had their way, you'd never be able to fast forward through an ad again.
Right now, their best bet for keeping viewer eyeballs glued to those all-important cash cow ads is to supplant DVRs -- a paid service-- with fast forward-disabled video on demand (VOD), which is included in your cable bill. Believe it or not, networks are actually finding that viewers are more than happy to put up with commercials if it means being able to watch shows whenever they want and not having to pay extra to do so.
Have you seen any movies set in the future, say Blade Runner or Minority Report? What do you notice about those films as it relates to the future of advertising? Yep, that all of that time in the future and advertising is still pretty pervasive. In fact, it's even more pervasive then it is today. Think of those giant billboards from Blade Runner or the famous (or infamous, depending on your POV) scene where retinal scanners welcome Tom Cruise to the Gap. The only future world I can think of without pervasive advertising is the one from Brave New World and there, they train you in-vitro to be a consumer. That's pretty pervasive.
Now I want you to think about the brands you use every day. Not just the big brands, but all the brands you use. Your car, computer, phone, phone service, washer & dryer, your food, your socks & underwear, your deodorant. All the brands you interact with on a regular basis.
Do you have relationships with any of those brands? Are you part the tribe of those brands? Or do you mainly use them and hope and expect that they will actually deliver based on what they do?
I've written about this before, but today listening to Seth Godin and seeing how people reacted to his presentation made me think about it again. Full disclosure, I am very envious of Seth and what he's built. I am. He's done an incredible job of building the Seth Godin brand. I've read many of his books and many of his blog posts and usually find them very helpful and inspiring.
But lately I've been questioning this whole relationship thing. I use Apple products, but I'm not really involved in the Apple tribe. And I definitely have a love/hate relationship with Apple. It's certainly passionate, but that passion isn't always positive.
I drive a Subaru Outback, which I love. It's the best car I've ever driven in the snow. I would recommend it without hesitation. But, I'm not part of the Subaru tribe. I've barely registered our Outback with the online Subaru groups.
My relationship with T-Mobile is sometimes OK. Its a little strained right now thanks to the fact that they want me to pay $329 for the new G2 phone when new customers can buy it for $199 and I'm thinking about moving to AT&T and getting an iPhone. I've really been trying to stay with T-Mobile, but the G1 just isn't cutting it any more and as much as I like android and a keyboard, for a $150 savings, I'll go back to the iPhone.
I'm pretty happy with my Fruit of the Loom, but there's no relationship there. Dog food we use, same way. Got a new Dyson and while it's started off strongly, I have to wait and see if it dies in a year like my other vacuums. Two dogs will do that to vacuums. And while I've almost always owned Nikon cameras I don't think I've ever visited a Nikon users group or anything like that. Maybe with the new S8000 I have since I'm still trying to figure some things out. Sydney loves mac & cheese, but she's not brand loyal at all.
But Seth said it's all about connections and if you make a boring product it's hard to connect. Hugh MacCleod has a cartoon (and a shirt I got at the GasPedal WOM event) that says advertising is the cost of being boring. And I started think that most of the products I use are pretty boring. And if boring products have no place in the connected world and they all went out of business, well that would send us into a pretty big economic disaster, wouldn't it?
So I'm wondering, how many brands really can create movements? I hear lots of examples of small companies that create local movements. Certainly companies like Apple, Lululemon Athletica, Trader Joes, Anthropologie and others have done very well creating relationships with their audience, so I know it's possible. But my socks & underwear? Not likely. And many other brands I deal with every day are like that too. Good, solid companies, but a movement? Not so sure.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Can every brand create a movement? And if brands can't create a movement or they don't have a tribe, does that mean they should be out of business? Don't get me wrong, I think all brands should strive to look for ways to engage their audiences. But I'm worried that we might be setting some pretty false expectations for brands to follow.
