3/11/2010Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
Google’s Search algorithm is one of the most fascinating analytical initiatives (or should I call it a project) that exist in our field today. Enough books and articles have been written about it that linger between unveiling its inner workings and increasing the cloud of its secrecy. The weekly meetings of all of Google’s critical Search Engineers in the never ending attempt of improving the quality of its search results are probably one of the most interesting meetings, close in importance and impact on people’s daily lives to the president’s weekly “Mood of the nation” briefings and discussions.
One of the more intriguing elements of this weekly meeting and for me the foundation of Google’s long lasting superiority resides in the changed philosophy of how to do testing. Its core principle is that every search query is part of at least one test (more likely multiple) there is no separation anymore between non-tested activities and the usual small percentage of separated space of testing. Wired editor Steven Levy describes it well in this month’s magazine:
“There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. ‘On most Google queries, you are actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously’ says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. ‘Essentially,” he says, ‘all the queries are involved in some test’. In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you are a lab rat.”
It’s a fascinating detour from most marketers more conservative testing philosophy where testing only happens in a well shielded space. I am curious to see how we could translate this Google approach of 100% covered, constant, and multiple testing to other marketing activities.
3/8/2010
Posted by Dan Brough, SVP, Director of Search Marketing, Draftfcb New York
Earlier this month, Google began cracking down (I.E. removing) online pharmacy sites in the US and Canada. Google AdWords will only accept ads from online pharmacies in the US which are accredited by the National Association Boards of Pharmacy VIPPS program. Also, pharmacies may only target ads to users in the country in which they are accredited.
Here is a screenshot taken in February of a Google SERP page containing a query for a popular cholesterol drug Vytorin. Notice the amount of AdWords advertisers:
Since the policy change, notice the lack of competitors:
So why all the fuss?
For years, epharmacies competed head to head with the major pharmaceuticals and questions have been raised about the quality and safety of drugs offered by these companies. When Google lifted its trademark policy in 2009, epharmas began aggressively adjusting search copy to include branded drug names in their creative.
I view this change as a good thing for both the pharmaceutical companies as well as Google’s users. If you are going to advertise a sale of a drug, you should be accredited to sell that drug in the country you are targeting.
3/3/2010Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
Browsing through some of the most recent books about web analytics I could not stop realizing that we are still in the early stages of understanding consumer’s behavior in the digital world. Most analytical approaches are continuing to focus primarily on traditional website metrics: unique visitors, bounce rates, etc. It feels like web analytics have stalled in understanding consumer behavior on individual websites and have failed to push themselves into a larger digital universe, that include any digital medium, from the web to mobile to ebooks, and in best case even beyond the digital sphere.
Some of these books are attempting to understand “Engagement” and suggest different ways of build the right engagement metric. But in most cases it is just a compilation of traditional website metrics. Most marketers are still trying to understand consumers in a channel centric and specific way, whereas consumers have long moved beyond the separation of all the different media, communication, and sales channels. They consume and interact with brands and services first, with channels last.
Quite often this fallacy can be explained by the fact that we look at things that can be measured instead of asking ourselves what should be measured. The vast and immediate access to data and metrics are not just overloading our systems to decipher anything meaningful, they are hindering us as well to really identify of what should be measured.
The biggest strategies of moving the digital metrics discussion to a next level should be:
- Move beyond metrics that are only relevant for one channel to metrics that are relevant and actionable across multiple channels.
- Realize that website metrics are only a very small portion of all relevant metrics. It’s more productive to go broad than going too soon very deep.
- Set not only standards of how to measure certain things but more importantly understanding what is a “good” and what is a “bad” value in certain metric category. I have seen so many marketers who look a comprehensive metrics sheet and can only utter “interesting”, since there is no context to evaluate these figures.
- Don’t overemphasize “real-time” metrics that give everyone an illusion of constantly optimize every single marketing output. Yes, it is important to build a learning organism and mechanism but it’s not the most important action to deploy it in “real-time” manner (which means actually a delay of a few seconds, minutes, or hours) as extracting the right recommendations from the analyzed metrics. We focus too often on the optimization of the very small variable (e.g. blue or red color in a banner) versus understanding the truly big variable (e.g. ivest in paid search or in DRTV).
It’s still early in the world of “digital metrics." We are at best an excited and curious young adult, at worst an overeager, naïve, and overly aggressive teenager. 2/23/2010
Posted by Jim Lucas, Director of Shopper Marketing
Shopper Marketing, lest anyone think otherwise, continues to escalate in importance to marketers of every stripe. That fact is reflected in part by at least five currently developing trends:
- Increasing competition of retailers’ private labels vs. manufacturer’s brands
- Range rationalization
- Delisting of products
- Product portfolio rationalizations
- Evolving new product development processes
Understanding these trends and helping our clients cope with the new rules for success is the subject of my blog for the international publishers of the recent book titled Shopper Marketing: How to Increase Purchase Decisions at the Point of Sale (to which I was a contributor). It’s a blog post that provides some insights on how to navigate this new in-store battleground.
2/18/2010
Posted by Steve Schildwachter, SVP, Group Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
Last week comScore announced its acquisition of ARSGroup, combining two well-known names in the measurement of advertising messages. You can read the basic news story here.
This is not a routine merger of two companies that offer the same services. ARS is known mainly for pre-testing of TV commercials, often in the form of animatics, while comScore is "the global source of digital market intelligence and the most preferred measurement service."
Naturally, much will be made about the new media testing company taking over the company that for decades has served Ye Olde Marketing.
There's another way to look at it, however. ARS is used mainly for measuring advertising before it is produced and goes on the air, where comScore focuses on consumer behavior in the market. More than the emergence of digital media, this signals the emergence of measurement and accountability.
This is a development worth watching.
2/11/2010Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
While rereading a 10 years old book by Tom Kelley, describing the success ingredients of his design firm IDEO (one of the most innovative firms over the last 30), I encountered the description of one of the most common problems that he and his team are facing within the design practice: Fuzziness. Kelley described it as encountering a fuzzy instead of a clearly defined problem which seems to be the cause of many failed design solutions, or in our world marketing programs. Quite often challenges that we are trying to solve were never clearly defined, they remained fuzzy despite (or because of) the team’s anxious eagerness to work on a solution. It becomes very obvious while watching the numerous commercials during the Super Bowl on Sunday.
This famous and unique media property (the most expensive not just in the US but in the world) is the same visual location in time (CBS between 6.30 and 9pm EST) but the problems that these different brands are trying (or sometimes pretending) to solve is very different from each other. My guess is that most marketers could not describe succinctly of what their presence in the Super Bowl is trying to attack or solve as a problem. It seems that this is driven by a few factors:
- Pressure of mainstream spending behavior - Everyone else likes to be on the Super Bowl, so let’s do it, too. They all can’t be wrong.
- Immediate solution focus - Let’s start working on the solution now, we are already behind schedule
- The misunderstood power of reach – the brand can reach as many people as nowhere else without realizing (or admitting) that most of the brands advertised are at best only for 10% of the US population.
Too often we love to work as fast as possible on a solution without spending the time, energy, and intelligence to understand the problem. The enemy in our marketing discipline is more often the eagerness to create something interesting without the focus and filter of understanding and defining the problem.
Fuzzy problems are expensive. Most problems can be scored on a scale between 0 and 1. At 0 one does not even realize that there is a problem, at 1 the problem is clearly defined and understood. Everything in-between is a higher and lower degree of fuzziness. The Marketer’s obligation is to get as closely possible to 1 and not stop already when they have barely moved above 0. It might be a good exercise for any marketer to judge in any given project where one is on this 0 to 1 problem fuzziness scale. My bet is that we would be surprised of how low we would score very often our clear understanding of the problem, all translating into a high degree of fuzziness. And fuzziness is expensive.
2/10/2010
Posted by Leo Ryan, Context Planning Director, Draftfcb London. Originally posted on my personal blog; Burning Head.
I recently joined Draftfcb having emerged from a from a social media specialist agency. Since joining I have been working with some lovely folk on direct marketing and CRM, big grown-up data driven marketing. And although its a far cry from the intimacy of social world's hundreds or even thousands of followers and friends it has prompted me to have a think about how the idea of direct and CRM marketing will change as the continuing growth and evolution of the social web means that at least:
- Consumers are increasingly having direct relationships with brands (not mediated by a media channel) thereby pushing DM much higher up the marketing agenda
- The variegated nature of communications in this socialised environment will mean that ‘Direct’ will become a far more nuanced term; what is an email open rate compared to a re-tweet, a friend message or a nudge? How will we measure and value these different responses? How will we encourage consumers to participate in them?
- What will be the regulatory framework that evolves to manage all of this? One of the drivers of regulation will be consumer demand for transparency no doubt, but what about their demands for control? At the moment we can opt-in, and in more sophisticated systems check our own details and update them.
- How will consumer expectations of 'personalised communications' evolve beyond their name on the envelope? If you’re a bricks and mortar business with a legacy enterprise customer database go freak yourself and check out what I can do to update any aspect of my Google, or any other online network profile. Take note; that will quickly become the default for what consumers expect to be able to do to any of their customer profiles. And to my earlier point on legal compliance; what customers expect can often become what legislators mandate.
So how to prepare?
I’m going to start by thinking about CRM as a much looser idea more fitting with the ambiguity of the social environment: CRM = Audience Dialogue Participation
- Customers are now audience members; audience could include customers, resellers, reviewers, staff, media, legislators etc. And they could all be more than one of these at the same time.
- Relationship becomes dialogue; this audience is not someone you send emails to but someone you have a dialogue with; a dialogue that could include a passing friendly nod through to a deep conversation over a shared passion.
- Management evolves into participation; if this is a dialogue then the brand isn’t in control and they are not ‘managing’ anything; rather they are a participant.
So I’m going to take these three principles and look at DM programs with a social skew; strategy, objectives, tactics and measurements. How could they be loosened up? Your thoughts on the back of a post card, or in the comments below. 2/6/2010Posted by Matt Meadow, Search Associate Media Director
New Search advertising formats integrate images into PPC ads :
There used to be a time when you went to a restaurant and sat down to look at a menu. The menu contained a brief description of the food item, and either that triggered your decision to order it, or you moved on to the next description.
Much like a conventional paid search ad.
Then along came IHOP, Waffle Houses and Denny’s chain restaurants. They replaced most of that elegant descriptive text with glorious, glossy pictures showing incredibly sexy images of various meals, positioned in prime menu real estate. With that one simple tactic, this helped to guide consumer decisions with just a glance, leaving the text portions looking less. . . appetizing.
There are several new Search ad formats on the horizon, but here are the two newest ones.
First to market: Rich Ad in Search (RAIS) from Yahoo:
This ad type combines paid search with rich media, engaging consumers in Yahoo! search results, currently available for branded advertising for a significant minimum monthly spend. These ads can contain a logo or a short video attachment that will open below the ad. Search teams marketing Pharma brands are also very interested in the ability to add fair-balance information right in the ad:
Next up, Google prepares to launch with PYI (Promote your Image), which will show up in the “images” search requests. If successful, it is speculated that they may compete with regular paid search ads. No minimum spend or ad parameters have been approved to share yet, but this ad format is expected to roll out Q1 2010.
Bing is rumored to be working new ad format that may also integrate an image, but no further details are known at this time. We can at least hope for a sexier acronym than “RAIS” and “PYI.”
Opinion on what these changes mean varies by industry expert, but most agree it further blurs the line between display and search advertising, and no tangible metrics on early results are available. Expectations are that these ad types will perform very well, adding more relevance, credibility and eye-catching real estate to entice consumers to click through.
As for measurable results, much remains to be seen.
Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
Over the last weeks I traveled to South Africa and a few European countries to meet with colleagues and some local industry experts, all with the goal to better understand how marketing agencies are dealing with the accelerating influence of digital marketing. Independent of how brands are spending their marketing investments, from less than 2% in South Africa to over 30% in the UK on digital and mobile activities, a lot of the marketers on the service side of our discipline are asking the question of how they can truly make a decent margin on digital work. The question has moved from how much they should invest in the build out of their digital capabilities into the challenge of how to make money with it.
The large agency holding companies (IPG, WPP, Omnicom, Publicis) report EBITA numbers of between 6% on the low end and 15% on the high end. It’s very difficult to find out the profit margins of the various pure digital agencies within the holding companies, so one has to rely on estimates and insights derived from industry experts. There definitely seems to be a challenge for larger traditional agencies to make decent margins on their digital work. After discussing this with a few knowledgeable marketers some explanations rise to the top:
- Scale: Even most pure digital players had a difficult time to create a decent margin until they reached a sufficient size to not just recoup initial investments but have the expertise and size to monetize on their offering. Size does matter. Interestingly enough smaller very specialized boutique agencies can make good money, too, due to low overhead cost and flexible delivery mechanisms. But most small digital departments within a large marketing offering have huge trouble to generate a positive short or medium term ROI on their personnel and infrastructure expenses.
- Premium versus Discount pricing: A lot of the large marketing service firms know that they have to expand their digital offering. Therefore they are willing to discount their digital work to enter this fast growing discipline. After winning the work (by buying it through cut throat prices) they often realize that they can not deliver the work with sufficient quality while simultaneously loosing money. It takes take them much longer than ever envisioned to build a profitable digital practice, and quite a few of them still have not achieved it.
- Lack of paid search capability: A lot of the marketing service firms have either still not realized that paid search is almost 2/3 of all digital spend, or they lack the internal media planning expertise to build it out in a smart manner. They are victims of the separation of creative and media offerings in the 80ies and 90ies. For a lot of these companies it might be too late to ever regain the lost territory.
- Resource allocation: The haste of hiring digital talent leaves quite a few large marketing service players with too much unbillable or incorrectly hired expertise that drags down any profitability. It’s very challenging for traditional marketers to identify and attract the right digital personnel that can build a well oiled delivery machine while creating brilliantly engaging and business building digital programs.
While a lot of marketers at service firms talk about the urgent need to expand the digital side of their business, they are flying blind in how to make it happen without eroding their good margin from their more traditional core business. It will be interesting to observe of who is able to make this transition to not only great but profitable digital work.
2/5/2010Posted by Steve Schildwachter, SVP, Group Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
My first-hand lesson about how social media messages depend on content and relevance, posted on 11 January, reminded me of a successful client I worked with in the late 1990s.
This client had his own formula for marketing: Message, Media, Creative. The idea was to start by figuring out what you wanted to say (Message), where is the place to say it (Media), and how to say it in a way memorable, convincing, and relevant to the medium (Creative).
This formula works as well today as it did way back in the 20th Century. The greatest channel-neutral plan or the most entertaining creative don't mean bubkes if the message isn't appealing.
A modern example of this principle is the above Google diagram* describing how your SEM copy is everything when inviting consumers to your cause. It's actual advice is: "A successful link bait can increase inbound links, traffic and brand awareness."
In English: If you have a strong message, suitable for SEM and write it well, you can meet your objective.
* Hat tip: the blogress Little Miss Jen.
(This post originally appeared on Ad Majorem)
|
|
|
|
|