Adventures In Digital Marketing

OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week.  It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall.  Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.

OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture. 

NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually.  Good - that was my idea
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\

Howard
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Blogged with Flock

Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila

I’ve been using LinkedIn for some time now, and whilst it is in some ways nothing more than yet another ego surf exercise, it does prove useful as an additional contact store and tool for getting back in touch with people on a par with both Plaxo and way better than Friends Reunited IMHO.

A few weeks ago they introduced a new service on top of the usual jobs and other stuff they already provide, called Answers.

Answers is a way for you to ask a question, not necessarily related to your professional area of expertise although it would make a lot of sense I am guessing, to your network of friends, their friends and so on. 

Basically, it allows me, for example, to ask 97 direct contacts, 2,600 secondary contacts and an overall network of 224,500+ people the following question:

"When people from traditional marketing say "digital sucks" what do you use to back up your argument that it doesn’t? Stats, data, examples?"

OK, so it’s not the most eloquent of questions, but it’s to the point.  This was inspired BTW by an email from a colleague at work who sent an email around questioning the effectiveness of digital and saying that it "isn’t the silver bullet it’s cracked up to be" (i’ve paraphrased this slightly!).

I decided to address this point directly, and after writing a long, blog like response, I deleted that and took the mickey. 
Anyway, it inspired me to ask the network at LinkedIn and see what they say when this happens (and it happens more often than not working in integrated agencies - there are a lot of people out there who still fear the digital reaper) and see if i’d even get a few answers at all.

So, i’ve left it over the weekend, and what i’ve ended up with are six answers (one of which is a little weird and I suspect blog spam, but maybe i’m not reading it right?), which I’ll reproduce below, and follow up in a post later on to see what I think of the service.  So, here are the answers to the question above…

Digital is cheaper and I pay the bill.  Show me that your plan provide us with better results…

Lodewijk Hof, Owner, Hof Holding

Well it is eminently easier to produce, design, test, adjust on the fly, cheaper, better stats, more easily targeted, quicker to ‘mount’ a campaign….. there are arguments a plenty here. It’s also easier to, if not monitored and done right, waste a lot of money - so although it can be argued that digital works, in many ways, much better, it can go very badly wrong!

Chris Warrender, eBusiness Consultant; specialising in eCommerce, social media and online marketing and advertising.

Many of the consumers that clients are looking to engage with are leaving traditional media in droves and digital is the only place to reach them. My yardstick: clients trying to market to anyone within what is being called "Generation Me" (born 1970 or later) should include digital marketing and non-traditional marketing (including buzz, viral, etc.) in their campaign/marketing mix.  Unfortunately, we are in a transitional time where clients need to do both. Similar to the early days of the compact disc. Music labels had to provide both CD and cassette.

Bart Caylor, Principal, Owner, and Consultant at Brainstorm

Everything has its time and place. Digital doesn’t suck…and traditional media isn’t the end all be all. There are so many factors to consider…what are you selling? Who are you selling to? What is the purpose of your advertising?  As some of the other answers have stated…at this point in time you have to have a good mix…the right mix rather…in order to be successful. If you don’t have a large budget, make sure you’re getting an effective reach and frequency in your #1 medium before adding a second and third medium to your mix. Otherwise you’ll just be too spread out.  I guess if someone told me digital sucks…I’d first laugh in their face and then I’d show them Google’s stock quote.  Sorry I don’t have better resources to turn you onto.

Scott Aderhold, Marketing and Media

(This is the weird one!) Remember those Star Trek episodes "Scotty, beam me up!" ?  We humans have always dreamed of "beaming" ourselves, objects or even travel in time. In fact, every morning I travel on the London Underground to work, I ask myself how the world would look like, if we could all be "beamed". But that’s all science fiction - everybody would agree!  Not me. The world is currently coming apart. It divides itself in huge steps into what we would call the material and the virtual world. And absurdly while it splits into those two, somehow the borders between material and virtual world blur.  With virtual world I am not referring to Second Life, GTA, the Habbo Hotel or anything alike. The virtual world is the world where everybody is connected to each other and different mechanics and laws of physics play. The virtual world is the world of digital communication. The one on your e-mail client, on your iPod, your MSN Messenger, your Skype, your internet browser, your computer desktop or even your mobile phone.  And in the world of digital objects, "beaming", traveling in time (at least backwards), copying, replicating, distributing, referencing, linking, contextualizing, tracking, recording, remixing, archiving, searching, tagging, ordering, twisting and destroying is all too common.  That’s because all can be wrapped in ones and zeroes. And there’s a lot that you can do with ones and zeroes.

Christoph Burgdorfer, Telecommunications Consultant and Professional

I have coached our salespeople to not present it as better, but as way to target the clients campagin to a specific niche audience. I think trying to convince someone that digital is better is a philisophical argument that is to be avoided when dealing with a client.  I also tell the salespeople to encourage the client to develope a metric of how much a visit to their website is worth. That will force the client to look more deeply into their on-line presence. That analysis is good for them and good for us. It forces the client to look at their digital presence in a detailed way. They will ask us for help with the analysis which will deepen the relationship between client and us.

Murray Grevious, MIS Director at Creative Loafing

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Howard

Over at eMarketer.com James Belcher is commenting on how RSS is still attracting a great deal of interest with people in the digital advertising industry but the popularity of the technology is far from mainstream with the people we’re trying to target.

Apparently only 2% of the US Internet using population actively use RSS on a regular basis, and only 9% know what it is at all.

But, as he correctly points out, the main reason for this (something I have voiced often myself to people I work with in my own agency when trying to persuade them to buy into RSS at this very early stage) is that RSS simply isn’t available in mainstream products (and by that we generally mean Operating Systems) at the moment.  Yes, it’s in OS X and Safari, but that’s hardly mainstream for most of the world, as much as that probably annoys many of us, and the real tipping point for RSS will undoubtedly be the release of Windows Vista in 2007 (fingers crossed!).

Until then, RSS will remain a technology on the outside looking in but it truly is a powerful tool and I cannot wait until it’s firmly embedded in our tool kit as digital marketers.

One thing I just want to point out from James’s post is that he says that marketers are interested in using RSS to get around spam filters.  Whilst this probably is true for a lot of people in this industry I really hope that it’s not the majority of us.  To think like that, to treat RSS as a broadcast medium, is such an old school traditional DM way of thinking.  It’s more than that - it’s to do with the whole shift in the advertising relationship and how we communicate with our audience.  Spam filters are in irrelevant if your already speaking to people who have choosen to listen in the first place.

Howard
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Semapedia is a great new project that is linking virtual world wikipedia articles to real world physical locations.

By using the cameras that are in most mobile phones nowadays users can scan in a barcode sticker, which will be posted on physical objects, and in turn, download information about that place straight to your phone’s browser.

It goes a bit like this:

• People get given stickers that look a bit like crazy barcodes, you put them on places & objects & use the reference number from that barcode to create a review, or a piece of information about that place or object on the Semapedia website.
• Anybody with the new Nokia phones (and all next generation mobile phones I guess) can download a piece of software that translates these barcode things with the camera on the phone.
• The idea is you walk along, see a barcode somewhere, use your camera phone to translate the barcode, It then pulls the information about that place / object straight off the Semapedia site straight to your phone.
• Think about restaurant reviews… album reviews (Sema-codes on CD’s in shops?) …semicodes on billboards in Tube Stations (the barcodes can be as big as you want them to be) … possibilities are endless.

Exciting stuff! So far the technology is only working on Nokia handsets, so I couldn’t actually test it on my Sony, but readers for most other phone platforms are on the way via the Kaywa Reader software, and their web site allows you to register your email address so they can tell you when version 1.1 is out.

By bringing social networks and collaborative user generated content into the physical world this begins to bridge the gap that can seem so wide at times.

See, social tagging does have a real-world use!

Howard
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I just read an interesting survey by Coremetrics. They asked 120 marketers which skills they needed
to perform their job, which skills had become the most important over the past two
years and which they most needed to acquire or improve.

    The findings included the following:

    Analytics and measurement skills are becoming critical:
    — For 73% of respondents, analytics and measurement have become more
       important over the past two years and these skills are now seen as more
       important than branding (23% feel this has grown in importance) and
       product promotion (more important for just 13%)
    — 86% say their decision-making is more reliant on analysis than two
       years ago

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) skills are also becoming more vital to the
marketer’s role:

    — For 31% of respondents, SEM is the most important skill in their
       current role
    — 60% feel that SEM skills have become more important over the past two
       years

But many marketers feel they lack the skills personally or within their
organization to handle their evolving role:

    — 50% say they need to improve their analytical abilities
    — 41% feel that their SEM skills are in need of improvement
    — 83% are finding it tough to hire staff with these skills
    — 71% believe traditional training and education methods are not
       adequately geared to the needs of today’s marketing organizations

I found the survey interesting because there is such a disconnect between supply and demand. Most job descriptions for general marketing roles now ask for familiarity in some of these skills. There is a lack of trained talent out there and this lack of talent is limiting the growth of digital marketing as a whole.

Joanthan

As promised, I just wanted to follow up on the Nielsen Buzzmetrics webinar from earlier this week by posting links through to the PDF of the slides and the MP3 recording of the voice part.

Max Kalehoff and Pete Blackshaw were excellent hosts and speakers and I strongly recommend you listen to their presentation and, should you get the chance to participate in the future on another webinar, that you do.

Howard
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Seth Godin has pointed to a great Web 2.0 traffic watch list that the folks at Alexaholic have put up for him.

I’m impressed by how much traction Linkedin still has. As an avid user myself, it does seem to be the community website for grown-ups. Although I can’t say that I have made any valuable business contacts through it, it does seem to have that potential. I wonder how much further it can still climb.

Jonathan

Ofcom have produced a report that highlights how media fragmentation is affecting a generation who have grown up expecting to have the world at their fingertips through the Internet, and are increasingly finding that traditional media isn’t giving them what they or want.

The report has been commented upon by BBC News who have come to the conclusion that the so called "Networked Generation" is using online media more and more and leaving the old world behind.

"Sixteen to 24 year olds are spurning television, radio and newspapers in favour of online services"

Shock!

"The 2006 Ofcom report also found that increasingly households are turning to broadband and digital TV".

A startling piece of insight.  Who would have believed that people are switching to broadband and digital TV in this day and age?

In seriousness though, there are some interesting facts in the report.  Firstly, there are apparently 1.8 million people in the UK who are now using a VoIP service, such as Skype, to keep in touch.  I can see this myself, let alone 16-24 yr olds, as a lot of my friends, many of whom I would never class as being very web savvy, have switched over to Skype as recently as a few weeks ago to speak to each other, especially when long distance is involved and it is effectively free. (Admittedly the tipping point for this was a close friend in Japan installing Skype and a lot of others following to keep in touch - had this not occurred I don’t think they would have been so keen to find out about the service).

The second interesting thing is in regard to social networking sites.  Apparently a massive 70% of the 16 to 24 age group have used a social networking site such as MySpace or Bebo (not saying how many regularly use it of course - I guess that could be a lot lower), compared with just 40% of the rest of the country.  The report goes on to say that 20% of them have their own blog, which might be, I suppose, contained within their MySpace usage.  This is a huge number of people regularly using the online space.

Focusing on the topic news itself, Kay Withers, a representative from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) is quoted as saying:

"We want to find out what it means to turn away from newspapers and public service broadcasting, and to find out the types of news sources they are now favouring."

Which is an interesting thing to say. It assumes that the biggest impact the move into online media will have is in the news and current affairs area as opposed to anything else, such as entertainment or general communications.  The easy answer for someone like me would be to say that blogs and other forms of citizen journalism are drawing in the crowds as a result of increased trust due to the transparent nature of the new media but, in reality (and I have no data for this) I suspect that teenagers simply aren’t interested in the news.  I personally don’t know many of them who would gladly read the Guardian or switch onto News 24 to catch up with the latest on the Lebanon crisis.  Could it not be that these people are still too young, simply interested in having a good time, to be bothered with traditional media?  That will come later, when they have a mortgage to worry about etc. etc. (OK - sounding old now) and the biggest impact that they are having at the moment is in terms of light entertainment which is, for marketers of a more traditional TV led ilk, the interesting fact?

The IPPR go on:

"This could have a major impact on media regulation, public policy and on the political world too."

For this I offer one possible future (I am sure there are others) - there will be no regulation!  The whole point of "new media"/citizen journalism/blogging/web2.0/etc. is that it’s de-regulated or, at best, self-regulated. That’s the beauty of it. That’s why it’s so attractive in the first place, by bypassing the regulatory bodies, by placing the means of production and distribution into the hands of the consumer it frees the audience and the producer at the same time.  Public policy and the political World will have to adapt to the new generation, not the other way around (and that’s the way it should be after all!).

Of course I fully believe, and hope, that this trend in a move towards purely online (if not "digital" media, for it will be offline too before long if you consider offline to be "in your pocket") continues to grow at the pace it does, but I think the picture needs to be looked at in a wider context than simply saying kids don’t like old media in such an easy move.

If you consider Adam Curry’s 5/50 rule, which theorises that within 5 years 50% of the content will be generated by consumers, then the move over to those sources by the audience is a natural path for them to follow.

What the report does highlight very well is the increased fragmentation of the audience share.  The graph below goes to show this, and that’s probably the most interesting thing we can observe as marketers.

No single media is going to do the trick any more.  It’s a mixed bag out there, and only getting more complex and the trend is to move away from the platforms that have for so long been the bread and butter of the industry - TV and print. As TV, Radio, and eventually magazines and new papers, move over to purely digital platforms that allow for the same kind of interactive marketing as the platforms like the web and mobile currently provide we will be forced to adapt our thinking to take control (if possible) and advantage of the freedom/complexity that this fragmentation provides.

The graph has the same basic trend for all segments of the audience, the truth is, as always, that kids are doing it more quickly.

Howard
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Eric from MarketingMonger.com brought to my attention a Webinar running tonight at 4pm EDT (New York in the Summer) by Nielsen BuzzMetrics entitled "Engagement: Is Consumer-Generated Media part of the new "Engagement" Metric?"

I’ll be sitting in from here in the UK from 9pm GMT to hear what Marketing VP Max Kalehoff and Pete Blackshaw, Marketing CMO (someone that Eric assures me is extremely sharp and well worth listening to) have to say about this massive trend within our industry. Hopefully I’ll be able to blog about it later on here on adventuresdm.com.

For more information, visit the Nielsenn Buzzmetrics Events section over at their site where you can also register if you are interested in attending.

Howard
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Clickz  are reporting from a recent Nielsen//NetRatings’ study that downloading of podcasts is now a more  popular online activity than posting on blogs, in the US.

"Podcast
listeners skew younger, with Web users between the ages 18 and 24
nearly twice as likely as the average Web user to download audio
podcasts, followed by users in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups. Video
podcast downloading was slightly more popular among the 25-34 group,
followed by users in the 18-24 and 35-44 age groups.

"The
portability of podcasts makes them especially appealing to young,
on-the-go audiences," Michael Lanz, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings,
said in a statement. "We can expect to see podcasting become
increasingly popular as portable content media players proliferate."

The
study also found that podcast users are more than three times as likely
to use Apple’s Safari browser, and twice as likely to use Firefox, than
Internet Explorer."

That’s an interesting finding about IE at the end. I suppose that Mac users are more likely to have an iPod than PC users which could account for the weakness of IE amongst this audience, IE being an unsupported browser on the Mac since 2005.

Jonathan