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Mediasmith Anvil |
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Volume 6, Issue 1 March 8, 2007 |
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The
Revolution Will Not Be Organized! |
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Reprinted
with Permission By David Carlick Editor’s note: Dave
Carlick is a long time advisor to Mediasmith management. While his comments
don’t always reflect those of the editor, we appreciate them all the same and
thought you would too. They are very reflective of the fragmented media
landscape we all face today. So we are breaking with tradition to bring you
an Anvil written by an outsider.. How to engage customers in an
attention-deficit-disorder economy I can’t
write a long essay: I have to read my e-mail, respond to my phone—OK, I’m
back, just had to send an instant message. Oh, shoot— If
this article seems fragmented, it’s because the open-media world it covers is
fragmented. Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed the rise of open media
disrupt marketing, media, advertising, and public relations—and it’s only
going to get worse, or better, depending on your perspective. But what does
this all mean for the people at the heart of the open-media revolution—those
of us who are trying to reach customers, persuade new prospects, and
influence the influencers? The answer would be simple if the revolution were
an orderly one. But it’s not: Like most revolutions, it’s messy, chaotic, and
constantly evolving—which means the best I can offer is a snapshot of some of
the battles being fought, and the lessons I’ve taken away from them. I leave
it to you to make your own assessments. The revolution will be televised. But
you won’t necessarily be watching it on your living room television set.
Instead, you’ll be watching on your computer, cellphone, portable device, or
digital-media center. YouTube proved that you don’t need a big production to
get an audience, but democracy works both ways: Big productions can put clips on YouTube and get both
big online viewer numbers and improved offline viewing numbers. People want
what they want when they want it and where they want it. Advertisers understand
this and are placing electronic ads wherever they can think of—phones,
computers, billboards, toilets. Content distributors are slower in figuring
it out. Forget the pace of change; it’s
the pace of ossification you need
to worry about. One
byproduct of advances in technology and an amped-up media environment is that
companies now run the risk of moving from innovative challengers to ossified
legacies in a matter of years rather than decades. That’s progress, I guess,
but how does it happen? Is it size alone that prevents companies from making
the necessary transformations? Bureaucracy? My advice: Don’t yodel. |
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Mediasmith Morsel More than half of marketers are
eager to experiment with emerging technologies A
recent study conducted by Forrester
Research reveals that by 2010, firms will spend $26 billion in Internet
marketing and more than half of these firms will increase online spending
further by shifting dollars from other channels. A full 94% and 79% of
marketers use, or are planning to use, email and search marketing. Interest
in rich media also remains high—more than 65% of marketers report they are
using, or are planning to use, rich media email and display ads. Furthermore,
38% and 37% of marketers are piloting or expect to pilot blogs/social
networks and RSS. Media
and communications and consumer products companies are leading the pack when
it comes to new channel adoption. More than 80% of consumer products
companies use or plan to use email, search, and rich media emails, and 41%
use or plan to use advergames/in-game advertising. Media and communication
companies lead adoption in all other channels. Source: “Interactive
Marketing Channels to Watch in 2006” If
you are eager to experiment with emerging technologies—look no further! At Mediasmith, we are immersed in all of the
latest Web 2.0 technologies, and we’d love to show you how our experience and
expertise can assist you in your business endeavors. Please contact our
Director of New Business, Michael
Rosenfeld, or contact our agency for more information. |
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The lab rat is always right. Online
behavior is honest and real. In the online world, people click—or they don’t.
Every page viewed presents myriad choices, and each choice represents the
truest indication of the user’s interest. In contrast, focus groups (and even
surveys) are filled with people who lie to marketers and get paid for
it—which means that marketers who use these groups are often basing their
theories on invalid input. Look at MySpace: It paid better attention to
people’s true opinions (clicks), and it grew faster than its conceptual
parent Friendster as a result. So remember: If the lab rat can’t find the
cheese, it isn’t the rat’s fault. The rat is doing what all of the stimuli
suggest it should do. What to do with clicks? As my hero Wally (of “Dilbert”
fame) would say, “Watch and learn.” The pay-for-performance genie
will win out. And on the sixth day, Search was born. Search
delivers clicks—cool. But what is a
click worth? How many clicks make a customer? Can we do it with fewer? Are
there bad clicks? Which click is the most valuable? Whoa, the price of these
keywords is going through the roof! Can we buy leads instead of clicks? And
so it goes. The advertisers who figure out how to get the most out of their
clicks will be the winners. Thus, it’s not surprising that current online
“click” expenditures meet or exceed online CPM expenditures. Marketers are
buying customers by the piece rather than media by the pound. And why not? It
works. If
you can’t be found from a search box, you don’t exist. Rumor has it that the most often searched term on
Google is Yahoo.com. And indeed, during my tenure at Ask Jeeves, the
corporations that used the Jeeves search solution on their own sites reported
that as much as 70% of user navigation occurred through the search boxes. As
users, we just look at a page, and if we don’t like what we see, we go right
back to that search box and type in a new entry. Who needs a bookmark? Who
needs navigation, memory, or history? Just search again, and it’s all right
there. |
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Mediasmith Morsel |
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All hail the search
“editors”. Within the world of search, there’s an
advertising side and an editorial side. The spider and ranking algorithms and
software represent the editors, determining relevant answers. Like the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg,
these “editors” are extremely powerful—so powerful, in fact, that companies
devote vast resources to plumbing their depths. They’re also inscrutable: You
can’t take them to lunch, and you can’t buy them with an ad campaign. And
like Mr. Mossberg, these search “editors” are sick and tired of pushy people
trying to spam them for a hearing, and they’re genuinely eager to get the
right information to the right people. Outdoor advertising will go
digital—and indoor advertising will get the outdoor treatment. The
only segments of the advertising market growing these days are online and
outdoors—growth that will increase as more and more outdoor advertising goes
digital. Soon, signs will have day parts—meaning you can buy slots based on the
time of day, weather, and a host of other factors—and people will be able to
interact with them and receive targeted messages from advertisers. And why
should outdoor marketing be limited to the outdoors when virtual worlds are
on the rise? The truth is, it won’t. In virtual worlds, signage will be even
more pervasive. In the not-so-distant future, we’ll likely see Clear Channel
ads running on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley, on Second Life (an online society within a 3D world), and in War of the Palo Alto Suburbs (a
forthcoming multiplayer battle game I’ve created). Populations will replace
demographics. It isn’t about the long-tail; it’s about the small population: Everyone lies within the center of a bell curve, and the trick is placing them in small “populations” where they’re at the center. (Targeting!) Online marketers are able to do this in a way that broadcasters and big print can’t. (Think of the checkout process at Amazon). Thanks to computers and software and increasingly intelligent algorithms, we can “bucket” these small populations with behavioral information so that we can refine our relevance and targeting. Demographics, by contrast, are far too clumsy for an open-media world. Case in point: Something like 30% of the traffic at the “women’s site” iVillage is made up of men. And demographics—not psychographics or behavioral targeting—were what led Honda to make the delightfully successful mistake of introducing the Element as a youth car only to have it snapped up by geezers who loved its practicality. The
words of friends are the words that matter. There’s no denying it: User-generated content
(UGC) in on the rise. And from a publisher’s perspective, why not? Until
online applications tore the guts out of the agate sections of newspapers, UGC
(in the form of classified ads) claimed a huge portion of print space. UGC
provides a way for publishers to leverage their efforts and generate more
pages for advertisers. And advertisers in turn are figuring out that if
prospective customers want to read pages about college kids vomiting, that’s
OK: It doesn’t necessarily hurt the brand—in fact, it could even add a
coolness factor. The real change is that people’s media consumption is being
determined less by the editors of the New
York Times or MTV or even MySpace than by what their friends send them. |
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Mediasmith Morsel eMarketer estimates that US Marketers will spend $865 million on social network advertising in 2007, rising to $2.15 billion in 2010 as more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Among the key findings:
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The open-media revolution has made word of
mouth—historically the most important driver of sales—more important than
ever. As a result, the entire world has become “Zagatized.” Everybody is a critic,
and everybody can type. Your customers have control—and even more than that,
a huge, bellowing voice: They will make or break you, not just at the cash
register but also in the media marketplace. Marketers have agencies; now
consumers do, too. The “Zagatization” of everything, the creation of comparison shopping engines, and the rise of lead-generation companies have effectively created a network agency for the consumer. Marketers and agencies have long used software to target consumers; why shouldn’t users have software that finds them the best deals? We all know about CRM (customer resource management); someday someone will come up with VRM (vendor resource management) for the consumer. Instead of a spam filter, you’ll have a value filter. Online
will go above the line; offline will go below. The people who are running the online
dashboard—that is, those who are in constant dialogues with their
customers—will drive strategy and go above the line. Think about it: Feedback
and data from all of those clicks; blogosphere measurements; e-mail
communications; tests of online offers, landing pages, and conversions;
search trends; and widgets that spread like wildfire are coming in 100 times
a day in the online world—and twice a year in the offline world. Remember:
The lab rats are our friends—and they’re working very hard in the online
world. You:
The Person of the Year. Just who, exactly, was Time Magazine talking about when it put that mirror on its cover:
me or someone else? And does it represent power to the people, or is it just
the people working for the media for free? The answer is, it means all of the
above and more. As a result, we have a democracy that extends far beyond what
our founding fathers envisioned but that fits every one of their founding
principles. That’s why I believe today’s democratization of content is a
trend that should be embraced rather than feared. As for the open-media
revolution that inspired it—we’ve met
the enemy, and we are it! This article originally appeared in AlwaysOn Mr. Carlick is a long time advisor to Mediasmith management, and is the
managing director for Vantage Point Venture Partners. Prior to that, he built
Carlick Advertising into one of |
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