Marcomms | Ian J MacDonald

Metro Misses the Mark

Filed under: Ambient,Brand,Marcomms,Outdoor,Social Media,Uncategorized — Ian J MacDonald @ 8:53 pm

A campaign here in Toronto caught my eye recently. Metro, the free pick-up newspaper, are trying to promote their paper on the basis of it’s ‘sharability’. Presumably attempting to counteract the now well-established phenomena of people sharing news content online via their social networks. You can almost see the chain of events here.

- Research to see why people prefer consuming news content on tablets and smartphones on their commute rather than print.
- Research shows the ability to share news is a key driver.
- Marketing department confuse digital sharing in a closed network of social media contacts with sharing your used paper with a stranger.
- Hence the campaign below is born.

Of course the moral of the story is that even the best insight in the world is damaging if in the wrong hands. Use market research in context and never follow it blindly. It’s s guide to finding the answer, not *the* answer.

And the best thing about it? These ads are running on the TTC, frequently adjacent to this ad which, if adhered to, rather screws up the sharing idea!

SuperBowl 46 Commercials Review

Filed under: Brand,Marcomms,Television,Uncategorized — Ian J MacDonald @ 10:43 am

So last night was the showpiece final of the NFL season, the Superbowl. With an audience of over 100 million, ad spots in the Superbowl come in at a pricey average $3 million! These rightful centrepieces of any campaign have become an institution in themselves, and millions of Americans look forward to the ads as much as the football! So the audience is also attentive – and increasingly, online simultaneously. The Superbowl this year generated 13.7M tweets! Get the creative right, and tens or hundreds of thousands of tweets will be sending your positive buzz through the roof, get it wrong and you damage your brand in a major way, or get it somewhere in the middle and you’ve wasted $3 million. No pressure then, let’s get into the creative!

Best Ads By Quarter – First Quarter

Strong showing from Best Buy and M&Ms. Best Buy, forgetting their ongoing customer service issues and lack of synergy in their on and offline businesses, created an ad which is not only interesting, seeing the inventors behind some of the most popular technology currently, it aligns their brand with such innovation and technological excellence with a compelling product truth. Whether the ‘rub off’ on the brand worked, sales will decide.

The M&M spot was just good old fashioned FMCG advertising, good use of humour, strong characterisations, and simple premise.

Notable mentions for Pepsi and Audi.

Second Quarter
I loved the Dorito’s ad, and in second place I had Budweiser. The Bud ‘Prohibition’ execution underscored a brand attribute that is like gold dust in current times of uncertainty and mistrust – heritage and reliability. Any brand that can legitimately lay claim to having been around a long time, unwaveringly enriching consumers’ lives, should be all over that right now.

But I have to give it to Chevrolet for their second spot ‘Happy Graduation’, purely because this ad uses humour so effectively, and makes the product look a million dollars. It positions Chevy Camaro ownership as an aspirational goal and I can really see it doing well virally. Just great advertising up and down.

Halftime
Traditionally the home of the really big spots! Last year Chrysler ‘Eminem’ execution was the ad of the superbowl for me, and I have to say again with the same positioning they have done it again, this time with Clint Eastwood in ‘Half Time America’. It just about stays the right side of the line, atmospheric, uplifting, connecting the brand with patriotism yet not overstepping the brand permission line. It’s the perfect example of ‘vanity spot’ creative, this ad only works in Superbowl halftime, and is 100% relevant to the ad spot which it occupies. no doubt this will help further fuel Chrysler’s resurgence. This is an example of truly heavyweight advertising.

Third Quarter
I really liked how Budweiser continued their American Heritage theme and blended classic Americana with a modern execution and stayed true to their ‘good times’ positioning and so I hand it to them, also because that heritage play I mentioned earlier is so strong right now. Fiat 500 also had an amazing ad with a car which was represented by a beautiful Italian woman, with the strap line ‘you never forget the first time you see it’ , and I rated Bridgestone ‘Performance Basketball’ highly, because it communicated a product truth (low road noise tyres) so powerfully. The whole execution was centred on product benefit which I liked. It just lacked that sizzle or cut-through device to beat Budweiser.

Fourth Quarter
My winner of the 4th quarter owes as much to their competition as their ad agency. With Apple preferring not to advertise during this year’s Superbowl, (no doubt they will believe themselves above advertising at all in a few years) the door was left wide open for Samsung, and they burst through it. A great execution ‘Galaxy Note’ which highlights product benefits like video calling and location services, whilst positioning Samsung as an accessible, young, fun, brand of the people and Apple in contrast, as a dull, geeky, arrogant corporation. I absolutely love this commercial. Notable mention for Honda with their Ferris Bueller execution, really enjoyed that ad as well and positioned the brand as grown up, yet fun and energetic!

So, all in all it wasn’t the best year for ads to be honest, but there were some real gems in there! My standouts were Chrysler ‘Half Time’, Samsung, Budweiser, Chevrolet ‘Happy Graduation’ and Best Buy. I must give special mention to Budweiser because as a body of work their ads were consistent and quite powerful. You can watch all the ads here and decide for yourself though!

Are UK Marketers Smarter Than Premier League Managers?

Filed under: Digital Marketing,Direct Marketing,Marcomms,Uncategorized,eCRM — Tags: Brand, General Consulting, Marcomms — Ian J MacDonald @ 2:14 pm

“I know half of my advertising doesn’t work…I just don’t know which half!”

John Wanamaker

So we all know the marketer’s quandary. How to attribute conversions and success back to media accurately. Now sure I know there are many more tools available today to try and decipher the riddle, like econometrics, cross visit participation, outright asking users how they heard of your site. But can anyone, hand on heart, say that they know the exact contribution and RoI from all their media?

Here’s a bit of fun for a Friday!

It often strikes me that media is lot like football. In a football team, players work together, in concert, to achieve two broad common objectives – score goals, minimise goals conceded.

In a marketing campaign, media work together, in concert, to achieve broad common objectives – such as increase market share and block out competitors.

Football players, like media, have different jobs to do. Can we map the roles?

Let’s look at some goals to explore this idea.
Extending my analogy we could say that this is an example of TV (defender) ‘winning the ball’ ie generating awareness, and then perhaps frequency being built by exposure to outdoor, and radio, (a pass from midfielder Fabregas to midfielder Nasri) culminating in PPC (forward, Arshavin) converting a brand or brand+generic search because it was a great shot but he was in the right place, at the right time. Just like appearing in the SERPs at the right time to harvest latent consideration caused by ad exposure frequency.

If we looked at a different goal, say a midfielder scoring from range, I would say this is a user clicking through on a display ad. A rare thing, but it does happen! A midfielder who creates and scores goals himself is like a great DR display campaign.

What is the point I am trying to make? Well, on average, who is best paid in a football team? Below is the average salary for different roles in a Premier League football team according to a PFA survey in 2006. OK, a bit of date! It’s probably twice or three times this now, but it’s still true that strikers are paid more than defenders for example. If you were to apply the same ‘attribution’ to a marketing budget of £10M, I have shown what your breakdown would be. Looking a bit heavy on PPC! Does that mean that managers are suffering from last clickitus?

John Terry is like a great TV campaign, primarily winning the ball (awareness) yet contributing with goals (direct response to website)

A player like Filippo Inzaghi, a legendary poacher in the box, would be the PPC or SEO of football, converting chances (consideration) created by midfielders (online display).

The fact is, we will never know the whole story of what contributes to a conversion, just as we never really know who contributes to a football victory. It’s the sum of the parts and has a million influencing factors. But one thing is certain. No one ever won a football match by putting out eleven strikers. No one ever won a match putting out eleven defenders. You should be tailoring your mix according to your sector, market position and strategic objectives.

Evolved marketing is about testing, learning and refining. Every now and then, eliminate a media from the mix and observe the results. In this way you can arrive at stats like the one that says that over 50 games, Arsenal averaged 2.1 points when Fabregas played, but only 1.75 when he didn’t play. Sure, still fallible, and many other factors may be involved, but more robust than instinct alone. Can you replicate this type of insight in your media mix?

Lastly, before we beat ourselves up about attribution, if you looked at UK adspend by media ‘forwards’ only represent about 18% of the total mix, so you could say marketers are actually doing a better job of attribution than Premiership football managers, with equally mystifying attribution problems to solve. What do you think? Does treating your marketing campaign like a football match make it more fun!?

8 Responses to “Are UK Marketers Smarter Than Premier League Managers?”

Chase Watts Says:

October 19th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
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Reba Tilly Says:

October 23rd, 2011 at 8:04 pm
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Karmen Provencio Says:

October 27th, 2011 at 9:11 am
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Acnebehandlingar Says:

November 1st, 2011 at 6:51 pm
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Melaine Maarx Says:

November 24th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
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Joshua Baugus Says:

January 28th, 2012 at 2:05 am
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Hoa Says:

January 29th, 2012 at 9:59 am
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carrie Says:

January 29th, 2012 at 7:26 pm
Highly interesting post.

Just how important is usability?

Filed under: Digital Marketing,Marcomms,Mobile,Usability — Tags: General Consulting, Marcomms, mobile, usability, UX, website — Ian J MacDonald @ 7:53 pm

Recently New Media Age asked me to comment on the importance of usability, specifically across multiple channels. To most of us, that means mobile and online! Below you’ll find my thoughts on this.

What are some of the key areas that usability can affect in digital marketing?

Usability is everything in digital marketing where a digital product or service is involved. There is very little point in optimising your acquisition costs if you are not optimising your conversion ratio through optimising usability.

What challenges does the growing number of mobile devices pose in terms of usability – what is the best approach to ensure a smooth user experience across devices?

One year ago, a brands biggest focus should have been having a mobile optimised site. The fact that so many still do not have this is rather worrying for UK marketers. A staggering 79% at the last estimate are not optimised for mobile despite data suggesting mobile will overtake desktop for internet usage by 2015. The clock is ticking!

But for those that do have mobile optimisation, usability now means delivering the seamless experience that users expect across platforms. As cookies alone will not yet allow marketers to identify the same user across platforms the answer is surely to create a compelling value proposition for registration and use shared cross platform registration data to provide a relevant and contextualised experience to a given user, whatever device they happen to be using at that moment.

How has the role of usability and user experience evolved over the past year, and how is it being integrated – both agency, and client side?

The role has expanded as tools like eye tracking have become slightly more affordable, but chiefly because of the increasing cost per acquisition in cluttered media environments and thus the need to increase conversion.

The take up and application of such techniques appears to be a little overlooked by digital creative agencies and perhaps rightly so – the best place for a UX team is most definitely client side where the team will have the proper connections to the web development pipeline to implement their recommendations and MVT tests.

As alluded to earlier, UX importance becomes more pronounced as cost of acquisition increases, for example general media inflation in the year of the olympics or lower disposable income meaning it’s harder to convert users to purchase.

Do you feel usability should be taking more seriously, or is the industry already recognising its value in the digital mix?

It needs to be taken more seriously. I would like to see a day where brands in search of revenue growth first look to increase conversion of their existing traffic, or increase the yield (basket value) of existing conversions, before splashing out to drive more traffic to the top of the funnel. Surely usability should be the first port of call, followed by upweighted acquisition, after all acquistion is only one aspect of the holy trinity for marketers; acquisition, conversion and retention all being optimised is what leads to massive uplifts in traffic, conversions, recommendation, yield per user, and ultimately, the bottom line.

2 Responses to “Just how important is usability?”

ZibreviewVide Says:

September 27th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
It is remarkable, very good piece
Philip Fabin Says:

October 11th, 2011 at 11:43 pm
I just wanted to comment and say that I really enjoyed reading your blog post here. It was very informative and I also digg the way you write! Keep it up and I’ll be back to read more in the future

The Importance of Timeliness and Agility in Direct Marketing

Filed under: Direct Marketing,Marcomms,eCRM — Ian J MacDonald @ 9:03 pm

How Arsenal FC Broke a Golden Rule

It’s with sadness that I have to turn to one of my great loves for an example of poor marketing – Arsenal FC. But if we can learn lessons, let’s do just that!

For those not interested in football, Arsenal FC have been without a trophy for 6 years now. This is due to a number of factors which are not the focus of this blog, but the takeout is that faithful fans have been putting up with the most expensive tickets in the Premier League since the move from Highbury to The Emirates and no trophies. And fans love trophies!

Arsenal have had a topsy turvy season of ecstasy and agony – how does this affect their customers responsiveness?

The Lesson

To the lesson. Arsenal were having a good season this year but since losing the Carling Cup Final in February to a last minute shambles of a goal, their season has really gone to pot. Going into a huge match against league leaders Manchester United on 1^st May, they had won only 1 game in their past 9 in all competitions, and gone from a position of being able to win 4 trophies, to being practically able to win none. A glimmer of hope appeared on that May Sunday when Arsenal managed to overcome the likely eventual champions Manchester United at home 1-0. A massive result that gave the Arsenal faithful something to smile about for the first time in months. Perhaps this season’s collapse was a blip. Perhaps manager Arsene Wenger’s ‘youth policy’ really will bear fruit soon.

Sadly, the following Sunday Arsenal were soundly beaten by Stoke of all teams, 3-1 in a timid and shambolic performance.

Timeliness of Communications

So if you were in charge of sending out membership and season ticket renewal packs (with the cheery news of a 6.5% price hike), when would you time your communication? If you answered immediately after the crushing final nail in the coffin at Stoke, we need to talk.

The point is, there was a time less than a week earlier when the audience were feeling positive. They were feeling receptive to the club and the way it is run. That was the window of opportunity to maximise response and renewals.

Influence the Things You Can

As marketers, it’s vital that we are flexible in our approach. We need to be planning direct communications in windows wherever possible, not fixed dates. Because we just can’t control macro factors or even some micro factors which have an influence on our audience’s receptiveness.

The golden rules of direct marketing are there for a reason – because they increase ROI. Relevant, Targeted, Timely. This was relevant. This was targeted. But it wasn’t timely.

The window of receptiveness in this case was the 7 days following the Manchester United game. Presumably however, the comms plan said a certain date for renewal packs and that date was stuck to. Rigidly. That’s not evolved marketing.

Evolved marketing is making sure you have the set up in place to react and tailor plans as much as possible because you never know what is coming, and you certainly can’t control it. Of course, it is not always so easy in practice. Lead times and in the case of Direct Mail postal time are difficult to account for. It’s not practical to tear up your carefully cultivated creatives over every occurrence. Nor should you, maybe it’s just a copy tweak that’s required or a slight timing change. But wherever possible, make your plans agile and flexible. Take account of factors affecting the success of you campaign whether you control them or not. You never know when that window of opportunity for a killer relevant, timely communication will appear – or disappear, as Arsenal FC found out. When it appears, be set up to dive through that window. When it disappears, think again before you pull the trigger on that campaign.

One Response to “The Importance of Timeliness and Agility in Direct Marketing”

Michael Chambers Says:

May 23rd, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Could not agree more, makes perfect sense. Maybe you could pop into the Emirates and advise them on this, and also have a word with Mr Wenger about spending a little cash this summer – it’s not your money Arsene.

The Importance of Continuity Planning And The Voice Of the Customer – Just Ask Sony

Filed under: Marcomms,eCRM — Tags: Brand, General Consulting, Marcomms, PR — Ian J MacDonald @ 1:00 pm

By now everyone is aware of the data breach of Sony’s Playstation Network. I say by now, because this time last week you might not have been. Millions of online gamers, myself included, found the Playstation Network ‘unavailable’ since 19th April, with no real explanation given. A technical hitch of some sort? We should be so lucky.

When the full horror of the situation emerged, that actually Sony had been the victim of potentially the biggest data security breach in history, it was almost a full week later. Almost a full week.

Given the fact that usernames, emails, passwords and most crucially (potentially) credit card details had been lost, this represents an absolutely unacceptable delay. With so many online accounts for users to manage these days, people often use the same password across multiple accounts for ease of memory. So when an email and password for one account is compromised, the security risk is like a pebble thrown in a pond. And the ripples aren’t pretty. Victims of the monster.co.uk data breach a few years ago will remember finding their facebook and twitter accounts posting spam and virus laden links to their peer network, if they shared a password across monster and twitter or facebook.

Sony may or may not be to blame for the hacking attack. But what they are definitely guilty of, is poor continuity planning and even poorer customer focus.

The damage to the brand has been amplified by the poor crisis communications strategy. Sony’s official line is that they had to find out whether user data had actually been lost before communicating. Sorry, that’s not good enough. If there’s even a chance of it, they should have comunicated ASAP.

Speak For Your Customers
In the war room that no doubt was hastily assembled at Sony HQ on the 19th, where was the customer champion? Who was the one in the room representing customers? I’ve been in similar situations, and whilst technology teams might want to keep shtum and put collective heads int he sand, as marketers it is our role to say that is absolutely not acceptable. Especially now, with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Customers can ask questions directly and quickly. A good customer focussed brand needs to answer them. Swift communication is not only key to protecting the brand, but is also frankly non-negotiable. To not give customers the warning to change their passwords on other accounts until 6 days later is utterly unacceptable.

What We Can Learn From This
The lesson in all this is two fold. Number One, make sure you have continuity plans in place, with solid and accountable action plans. If the worst happened over a bank holiday weekend for your brand, what would happen? Do you know who would do what, and when? If you don’t, you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position. Number two, be the voice of the customer. I often preach that everyone in a business is a marketer in some way. Everyone has the power to influence an element of the marketing mix, whether that’s the guy who cleans the washroom influencing physical evidence or IT team influencing product reliability. But as marketers, we really are the ones who should have the customer at the front of our minds, and speak for them. It might not always be popular in the boardroom (or the war room) but customers pay the bills, and any brand which disrespects that, will regret it at their leisure.

Never be afraid to be the one who says, “if I was a customer, would 6 days in the dark be acceptable to me?” If it wouldn’t be, don’t let it be so. Someone at Sony should have put the customer first and insisted on customer communication as an order of absolute priority. It’s not the crisis which is remembered – it’s how a brand dealt with it. In this case, that’s not good news for Sony.

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Metro Misses the Mark

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SuperBowl 46 Commercials Review

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Are UK Marketers Smarter Than Premier League Managers?

8 Responses to “Are UK Marketers Smarter Than Premier League Managers?”

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Just how important is usability?

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The Importance of Timeliness and Agility in Direct Marketing

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The Importance of Continuity Planning And The Voice Of the Customer – Just Ask Sony

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