A little “Friendly” Advice for Facebook

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May 6, 2010

There was a fascinating quote in The New York Times today in an article on Facebook’s privacy decisions. (Facebook’s privacy actions will either create mad blowback or turn it into the world’s first trillion dollar company.)

“If I’m looking for day care for my 6-year-old, I’m going to put that in my status (Facebook) message, not do a Google Search.” (Sean Sullivan, F-Secure.)

Search, Curation, Advice.

In the world, and on the internet, there are important common behaviors: search, curation and advice. Search is a great way to find things and it’s clearly a huge business; results are organized and prioritized… by the algorithm. Curation, on the other hand, growing in importance online, is search but with a human hand. Social networks help curate in a sense because one “friends,” organized by degrees of separation, share content they care about. But advice? Many a web property was built around advice. Most have failed or languished.

Mr. Sullivan’s quote points to the need for trusted advisors, not algorithm results of independent ranking experts (e.g., Better Business Bureau, Consumer Reports, your newspaper). Mr. Sullivan’s important day care decision will be assisted by the advice of friends and respected Web friends.

As Facebook creates tools that blur the lines between search, curation and friendly advice, it will likely lose its way. People are their own best filters and Facebook needs to make sure it doesn’t cross the line. Peace!

Message Resistant Consumers.

By

Steve Poppe

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May 4, 2010

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Just as farmers are toiling now with herbicide resistant weeds, members of the marketing community are having trouble connecting with advertising resistant consumers.

Roots.

Roots is a concept I discuss with my consulting clients; the return to a simpler, more prideful lifestyle. Don’t throw away your million iPazzles — not that type of simple. But do watch old black and white, finely crafted movies on them. (Etsy is a hot web property that plays to the roots phenomenon — catering to the hand-made crowd.)

Because of herbicide resistant strains of weeds, many farmers are back in their fields plowing and manually pulling weeds, a practice hey had long forgone. Roots. Advertisers, on the other hand, rather than creating more meaningful and sales-appropriate messages — also roots — have decided to take their selling messages to new places. Advertising is now all over our favorite web applications and phones and and and… As we become more resistant to sales message we don’t need to invent new media to carry those messages; we need to reinvent the messages themselves. The introduction of account planning to advertising was the first acknowledgement of that. It’s use in digital media is growing and not a moment too soon.

Marketers, here are some words to live by: don’t overly complicate, message the benefit, avoid sameness, read Maslow, and smile (whistle) while you work. Peace!

Data and Product Recalls.

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Steve Poppe

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May 3, 2010

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Every product purchased in a store using price scanners creates a record. More often than not that record is tied to a credit or debit card. Consumer products befouled in manufacturing, like liquid children’s medicines from McNeil Consumer Healthcare, or collapsing baby strollers, bad tomatoes, sticky brake pedals, etc., also create purchase records. Why not use these records to alert purchasers to recalls. I’m no analytics nerd but this seems like a no-brainer.

The way recalls are handled today is messy. And, dare I say, not particularly transparent (sorry for the markobabble). The ability exists for marketers to do one-on-one contact with purchasers of faulty or dangerous products. No longer is there a need to scare everybody. No longer the need to make us check our cabinets and refrigerators for lot numbers. No more hiding recall information on website FAQs pages. No more expensive newspaper ads filled with obfuscation.

Let’s use data collection for good, not just for cross-selling, up-selling and McPestering. Good data. Good boy. Roll over. Peace!

An acute ear and silken tongue.

By

Steve Poppe

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April 30, 2010

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Good account planners have the ability to read data and see patterns. They see holes in the market that can be filled by behaviors playing to those patterns and they jump on them. Good planners, like good anthropologists, do not insinuate themselves in to the pattern, they just observe. That’s good account planning.

The Ear

Great account planners do all that but have the added benefit of a acute hearing and a silken tongue. The “great” use their ears to truly hear what consumers or interviewees hold dear and important. Just as a Galvanic Skin Response test can measure fear or arousal, a great planner knows when a topic is heating up. Megan Kent of Brand Synchronicity tells us that the amygdala (brain part) is the consumer’s bull shit filter, well great planners have a filter too — they filter out the chaff, and hone in on the important. Emotionally and rationally. That’s the ear.

The Tongue

The silken tongue comes in during the consumer interview — when the planner is probing, digging and trying to get to the good stuff. It takes a wicked silky tongue to break through a consumer’s defenses. Consumers can see in your eyes and body language if you are really interested. They can tell if you are simply probing or if the discussion is, indeed, two-way and you’re truly interested. If you do it correctly, with good pacing, consumers will tell you a lot more than you expect. But your interest has to be genuine. I must be straight to the heart. And it’s best if somewhat disarming. The silken tongue.

From good ears and silken tongues come the best creative. Peace!

The Diffusion of Advertising

By

Steve Poppe

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April 29, 2010

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Advertising ain’t what is used to was (a little Southernism I made up). Creation of big selling ideas by highly paid creatives and marketing people, broadcast to millions via TV, radio and print was the ad business. Today, thanks to technology, the ad business is undergoing a diffusion like never before. Digital agencies, though not yet offered a seat at the big table, are new and important players. Google is the most profitable advertising agency in the world and Facebook is hot on their trail. And when I say “mobile advertising” does any one company come to mind? That one is going to be huge…but it’s still to play out.

Buy or Build?

Big traditional ad agencies clearly see the need to offer digital, social and mobile but are asking themselves “Do we buy or build?” Right now they’re doing both: hiring someone smart in each discipline and using them to select cottage industry players who are truly immersed. Better than last year, which was all “Go out and get me a subservient chicken.” Or “Find me those nerds who built the US Weekly Facebook poll.”

I’ve long thought that mid-size agencies were poised to win in this diffuse advertising world, but now I’m not so sure. True, they can more quickly parlay a powerful branding idea into a market-moving integrated campaign but the model may not be extensible.

Bud Cadell is right when he says the old ad agency model is broken. It will take open minds, forward thinking, experience, software, an understanding of brand building, and lots of money to fix the process. I’m of the mind that the successful model is more likely to come out of MDC Partners than WPP. It will be fun to watch though. Peace!

Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

By

Steve Poppe

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April 28, 2010

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Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA). There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about.

Intent.

Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008. Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style.

Unanonymous

I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation. Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations. And surprisingly, it’s not that scary. They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall. All the rest were spot on.

Facebook

Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal. There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to. It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.

Others

Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success.

Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

Digital Media Off the Rate Card.

By

Steve Poppe

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April 26, 2010

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David Carr published an interesting piece in today’s New York Times about Nick Denton, his Gawker Media tech blog Gizmodo, and the lost next gen iPhone. According to Carr, the blog post generated 3.6 million hits on Gizmodo – a site averaging 90,000 hits a day.

(Not too long ago, during the tough economy, Mr. Denton decided to pay his staff of writers based upon hits. The more papers you sell, said the crusty old news man, the more money you make. When the pay-per-readers story hit the wire, Mr. Denton was vilified and some good writers left. Buh-bye, said he.)

The writer who broke the lost iPhone story was well paid for her/his day’s work and Gizmodo’s brand made it to Ohf-rah (Oprah). Eastman Kodak, who serendipitously bought all the ads on Gizmodo for the day, reaped mad dividends in terms of reach. (What’s the opposite of “make good?”)

Mr. Denton’s maligned approach to paying writers for audience portends things to come in social media. Media will be bought based on eyeballs. And media will be bought based on transactions. When this equation makes it to traditional ad agencies you may even find the creative output changing. That is, some of the ads won’t be built for portfolios but for consumer interest and traffic. Social media will soon be monetized based upon consumer interest and sales, not the rate card. And it will be exciting to watch. Peace!

The Ascent of Marketing.

By

Steve Poppe

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April 23, 2010

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Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store. The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI?

Television

The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men.

The Web

Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

Social Media

Enter social media. And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales. I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.” That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

One Way Value. Reversed.

By

Steve Poppe

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April 22, 2010

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Gareth Kay is the planning director at Goodby Silverstein and before that Modernista. He’s smart. His presentation “the brief in the digital age” is quite thought-provoking and weighs in on a number of today’s pop marketing discussions. (Bob Gilbreath’s book “Marketing with Meaning” is another smart reference on the changing landscape of marketing.)

Mr. Kay’s presentation can be found here on Slideshare.

My favorite slide outlines the “before and after” environments of the “new” brief:

Pre-digital ——————————–Post-digital

Interruption Participation

Image Manipulation Value Creation

Saying things at people Doing things for people

Intangible Value Tangible Value

Perception Behavior

Back in the 90s, everyone thought interactive TV would change commerce. Never happened. The Internet did. Thanks to the web, the selling canvas has evolved. We are no longer just sculptors, but painters and singers. Of course we must do more than interrupt. The web allows us to create participation like never before. And it’s an awesome advantage, but there is a famous saying “Good advertising makes you feel something, then do something.” More often than not, that “do something” was get out of your chair and buy. The post digital brief is right on, no doubt. Yet let’s not forget “one way value,” value for the customer only, does not necessarily make the cash register ring. It should, but it must be played carefully. Peace!

You Can’t Buy Happiness.

By

Steve Poppe

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April 21, 2010

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You may not be able to buy happiness, but you can certainly buy refreshment. And that in a nutshell is Coke’s problem in the U.S. Short of a cold slap in the face, there is really nothing more refreshing than an ice cold Coke. Pepsi is refreshing but a bit sweeter so it loses the refresh-off. Orange soda? Ice Tea? Cold bottled water? Not as refreshing. The Pepsi “Refresh” campaign, where the word is mostly used as a synonym “reboot,” shows possibilities but doesn’t yet deliver.

I love the entertainment value of the current Coke TV work out of Wieden+Kennedy. It’s pretty, heartwarming and fun. But it lacks the primary motivation for consumption. Sure refreshment may trickle through the work but it’s secondary. People don’t drink Coke to up their happiness quotient.

The soft drink market is the States is facing lots of issues: Sugar, recession, obesity, competitive specialization, i.e., energy drinks, yet soda consumption is actually outpacing waters and teas for the first time in a while. Overseas Coke is growing by double digits in countries like Russia, India, Egypt, Vietnam, Philippines, Turkey and Brazil. Are they buying Coke to get happy? Roots is a big movement in the U.S. right now. Coca-Cola and the Coke brand need to get back to its roots. Peace!