I’m working on a school project — one section of the project involves developing digital marketing plans.
Here’s a very rough draft of one for smoking cessation.
The plan definitely falls within the branded utility category — with a little bit of inspiration from Nike+, eco:Drive, and this month’s Wired cover story, Living By The Numbers.
I’ll be expanding this (needs a ton of elaboration and an appendix with some of the standard media plan fare) and doing some additional ppts throughout the rest of 2009.
Branding As The X Factor Whenever you ask a brand marketer what the financial impact of a brand campaign was, they’ll usually explain something along the lines that “you can’t measure the value of a branding campaign” or “it’s a long-term investment.”
Below-the-line marketers tend to laugh off those statements because they are held to higher short-term accountability standards.
Maybe they’re both right.
The best marketing campaigns should should see both short sales lifts in combination with long-term increases in brand equity.
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Marketers Are From Mars, Branders Are From …
But if we’re going to give brand marketers the space to argue that branding efforts have long-term value then we need to start measuring the incremental value created and compare it to alternative investment opportunities. Venture Capital is a both a vibrant investment model that has straight-forward metrics and methodologies to analyze whether investments pay off. Brand marketers and their agencies would be well-suited to learn, apply, and evaluate their brand investments by similar methodologies. Some things, obviously, won’t transfer. Brands rarely enjoy M&A or IPO exits the way startups do. But that’s only one way to evaluate investments in the long run.
It’s difficult to predict whether an innovative brand campaign will pay off in the long-run but if we don’t set clear, transparent goals, expectations, and metrics (along with effective means for measuring whether we achieve them), then there’s a good chance we’ll fail.
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Fight For The Future
I’m starting to think that the future of advertising isn’t Madison+Vine but instead MadisonValley.
Would you mind writing a post, either here or on your blog, about FB Connect and how consumer product brands will utilize the tool?
Here’s how I think how brands can best utilize Facebook Connect:
1. Supplement or replace a proprietary authentication system.
This decreases the sign-up friction costs (people often don’t participate on sites because they don’t want to go through the hassles of signing up and typing in all their data points).
Facebook Connect allows the brand to collect some data points directly through Facebook, with permission from the user, so that brands can focus on asking questions that they wouldn’t have access from a Facebook profile.
2. Leverage the Newsfeed.
When a user participates on the brand site in a meaningful way, Facebook Connect lets users share that experience with their friends via Facebook’s Newsfeed. There are serious residual effects from focusing on the Newsfeed but it has to be something interesting and not spammy.
3. Keep the database accurate.
Facebook Connect maximizes the chance that a brand site will have accurate data on its audience. If a user changes his information on Facebook then, at the user’s discretion, the information will port to the brand site.
Some examples where Facebook Connect could help brands:
Kashi
http://www.kashi.com/
A community for people trying to live healthy
Starbucks
http://red.starbucks.com/red
A community for people commiting to helping buy Starbucks RED products.
Nike Plus
A community of runners.
http://nikeplus.nike.com/
Each of these sites ask users to create a profile and miss out on the Facebook Connect opportunities.
We’re in the early stages of this so perhaps one day OpenSocial or some new identity management system will emerge as a more important player than Facebook Connect. It’s quite easy to see LinkedIn offering a similar service in the near future.
CP+B has been bold with their beta website by automatically reposting any tweets related to CP+B directly on their front page. It’s not necessarily a tactic that every brand should use but I commend CP+B for experimenting with it.
Pakurar posits that most ad agencies are quite limited in their ability to impact brand perceptions because they usually don’t get to address the customer service experience.
First, a fact: The way a business operates — customer service, for example, or delivery, or sourcing, or employee training and incentives — can communicate a great deal to consumers. Everything communicates.
if we are expert communicators hired to give advice to brands, and if a brand’s business operations do indeed communicate a great deal to consumers, then by the transitive property, agencies need to be prepared to offer an informed point of view on how operations can better communicate to a given audience.
But the marketing industry is, by and large, unable to do so.
The value of a supreme 0:30 commercial is easily and immediately undermined by poor customer service.
Decide Customer Service the MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU DO, because the only route to profit is MAKING CUSTOMERS HAPPY and do it in PUBLIC, reach out to people, don’t put the onus on the individual to battle through the firewall, constantly monitor the social web for people who are unsatisfied with the product or service you sell and MAKE THEM HAPPY.
Then, customer service becomes marketing, and every person you make happy will sing your praises across the web.
Customer relations (in-person communications) and customer service are one of the biggest opportunities for marketing communications agencies. The largest firms (and government) tend to poorly design user experience from both the in-person and digital/OOH side.
The interesting question is, how do we break the siloes down to address and upgrade F500 customer service?
I think the key is going to show how poor customer services shrinks revenues and profits (assuming they do). If we can show this, and show how fixing it is cost-effective and lucrative then we have an opportunity to make corporate experiences a bit more humane.
That said, I’m not sure Google really cares about creating an amazing OS.
Google’s foray into the OS market isn’t about making Microsoft-level revenues on an OS but instead about weakening Microsoft’s vibrant revenue streams.
I imagine Google knows that Microsoft is one of the few companies with the potential to beat Google in search.
If Microsoft develops a truly more effective search engine than Google, then Google becomes incredibly vulnerable.
Although there are plenty of barriers to entry to building an incredible search algorithm (e.g. servers, coordination between servers, etc), there are few lock-in factors that can keep consumers using Google’s search product. Google always has to be percieved as the best search engine or the company’s health is at risk.
And Google’s search product isn’t that good relative to what will be doable in the future.
If Google can develop an operating system that is good enough compared to Windows and continue to build out its Google Apps suite (if not throw support behind OpenOffice) then Google can chip away at Microsoft’s profit centers and knock Microsoft out of commission as a search competitor. Classic disruptive innovation situation. Google is smart to try and rally the open source community around this. It’s a strategy that Microsoft literally cannot afford to take.
I love reading how designers, art directors, and creative directors think.
Creativity’s short interview with CP+B’s Matt Walsh is short and good.
A lot of the ideas we come up with often have a lot of complexity to them: concepts, technology, structure, designs, messaging, etc. A big part of our job as experience designers is to take all of this complexity and make it invisible to the user. Our products and sites need to feel simple and intuitive to engage with. This is no easy task, and the quest to capture it provides inspiration for me on most projects I work on.
Whenever you ask a brand marketer what the financial impact of a brand campaign was, they’ll usually explain something along the lines that “you can’t measure the value of a branding campaign” or “it’s a long-term investment.”
