Presentation: “The future of Marketing”

A nice presentation created by Matt Dickman, and posted on his slideshare page.

Filed under: 2.0, Advertising, Branding, Business, Customer Experience, Design, Influence, Strategy, Twitter, Web, Web2.0, ideas, marketing, technology, web 2.0, word of mouth

What’s Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

Here is an updated look at What’s Next In Marketing and Advertising based on the presentation by the same title that Paul Isakson gave last year at Marketing 2.0.

The greatest takeaway from this outstanding presentation (outstanding in so many ways:- message, typeface, imagery) from my perspective is, “It’s not what you say that matters, its what you do.“

Living by that statement alone will make me a better marketer, and the companies that I work for more many times more effective.

Filed under: 2.0, Advertising, Business, Ideas and Riffs, Strategy, ideas, marketing , Advertising, marketing, marketing 2.0, Paul Isakson, slideshare

Direct Mail Resource

The Royal Mail (the national postal service of the United Kingdom) has to be part privatised by 2010, and in the run up to this date there is no doubt in my mind that the company is trying to raise its game. (Royal Mail Holdings plc owns Royal Mail Group Limited, which in turns operates the brands Royal Mail (UK letters), Parcelforce Worldwide (UK parcels) and General Logistics Systems. The Post Office Ltd., which provides counter services, is a wholly owned subsidiary).

One innovation I have spotted (and like) is the MMC – The Mail Media Centre.  The Royal Mail’s vision is to be “demonstrably the best and most trusted postal services company in the world” and in this regard they seem to be on a big ‘win the hearts and minds’ mission.

And the MMC is a big step in the right direction.  Its a cool resource for all direct marketers to immerse themselves in. By showcasing compelling creative and offering expert advice, it is clear they want to inspire excellence in direct mail.

Key contributors include Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, London, Patrick Collister, editor of Xtreme Directory and Amanda Phillips.  They also feature expert content from Chris Arnold, strategic & creative director of Symple, Darren Burnett, head of data planning, Elvis, Mike Colling, managing director of Mike Colling & Company, Steven Day, director of UK Changes, Tim Dunn, head of marketing services at Mobile Interactive Group (MIG), Caroline Kimber, head of data planning at Stephens Francis Whitson, Jane Pritchard, head of strategic planning at Tullo Marshall Warren, Clare Taylor of Clare Taylor Consulting UK, coupon company Valassis, and Chris Whitson, planning director of Stephen Francis Whitson. Plus, they have made available selected content from an award-winning Redwood Publishing title - Contact magazine.

That’s some team sheet!

Yes the devoted online marketer will no doubt shout me down (“if you’re not with me, you’re my enemy” lol), and yes there is lots going on in online media that is down right impressive; but when used appropriately traditional direct mail still has a role to play in the marketing mix.

Don’t discount traditional direct mail just yet.  It can still be very innovative and very effective when used well.

If you are going to take a peek at the MMC, if I were you I’d head straight to the Creative Showreel.   Then take a look at their Knowledge Centre, Case Studies, Research, Facts & Figures, and the other Useful Tools.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Business, Design, Direct Mail, Media, Planning, Research, Strategy, ideas, marketing , Best practice, case studies, Direct Marketing, DM, Facts, Figures, MMC, Research, The Royal Mail

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time has been on sale for over three weeks now.  I haven’t read it yet (or bought a copy) but it sounds very good.

The 100 books covered covered are listed here.

Filed under: Books, Branding, Business, Entrepreneur, Ideas and Riffs, Media, Planning, Strategy, ideas, marketing , 100 Best Business Books, 800ceoread, Jack Covert, Todd Sattersten

The disconnect between between Brands and Agencies

Futurelab is a marketing strategy consultancy with a focus on customer-centricity and innovation.   They help:

• Marketers to generate the highest possible return on their investments.
• Innovators to create meaning for the customer and the bottom line
• CEO’s to connect their strategy to what customers really want.

Now I have never worked with Futurelab, nor can I say with any authority whatsoever, that they are good at what they do.  But I was delighted when they emailed me with a nice report offer.

As a result of Futurelabs belief that something is “seriously broken in the land of marketing”, they have decided to encourage debate and thinking by producing and distributing two reports.

The reports analyse the disconnect that currently exists between brands and the agencies that service them – with the aim to encourage a global conversation on the renaissance of marketing as a profession that drives profit, innovation and customer-centricity.

Here is what they cover;

• In Reconsidering the Advertising Industry they take the agency perspective, and compare the internal workings of agencies to what their clients need.  They offer tactical suggestions and structural recommendations that allow agency executives to better equip their organisation for a challenging future.
• In Bridging the Brand Divide they look at the same data from a client perspective; reviewing what brands are looking for and what they feel agencies are not delivering.

For each disconnect (between Brands and Agencies) they offer suggestions and tips brand leaders can apply to get their agencies to better deliver what they need.

Great stuff.

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, Business, Media, Planning, Strategy, ideas, marketing, technology , agencies, Branding, brands, Bridging the Brand Divide, customer, disconnect, Futurelab, innovation, investment, marketing, profit, Reconsidering the Advertising Industry

Another Echo Chamber: The real-time web

One of the big things about the web as a platform imho is that it places ‘people’ not ‘corporates’ at the centre.  With people come opinions, ideas, thoughts and conversations.  And lets face it: People work and move faster than bloated, process based corporates.

But there are issues.

Whilst the work from venerable web firms like Twitter, Google Docs, Acrobat Connect, Meebo and Octopz are certainly a step in the right direction towards a Real Time Web (and technologies like XMPP, SIP, HTTP extensions (Comet), and RTMP are helping too), I can’t help thinking that as the Real Time Web becomes a popular term and trend, it will be marred by negativity around real time syndication or overuse of various RSS feeds and APIs.

Take a look at an example below (click image to enlarge)

Now I am a fan of e-Consultancy.com – but is there any value for me (the customer) seeing multiple tweets on the same subject?  I don’t think so.  It really makes me feel like I am sat in the middle of an echo chamber.

I am sure there is a big difference between genuine Real Time Web Applications, and Real Time syndication.  But it is sure annoying to seeing more and more web properties displaying ‘real time content’ in this way.

Real Time web without de-duplication?  No thanks.

Filed under: 2.0, Ideas and Riffs, RSS, Semantic Web, Twitter, Web, Web2.0, digital, ideas, marketing, technology, web 2.0

Seth Godin speaking in the UK – “The London session”

In a rare UK presentation Seth Godin will present on how marketers must go beyond attracting eyeballs to tightening the interconnection and deepening commitment with their clients and staff alike. You can read more about it here and buy tickets here.

In addition to his presentation, as usual Seth will lead a dynamic Q and A session giving audience members the opportunity to ask direct questions relevant to their own situations and receive answers from the leading marketing mind of today.

If you have not heard him speak before, here are a few tidbits.

Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Events, Ideas and Riffs, Strategy, ideas, marketing

Your call may be recorded

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times.

“You’re call may be recorded and used for training purposes.”

I no longer believe it when I hear it.  And if I don’t believe it, I’d expect many others don’t either.

By all means record calls, make improvements: call centre representatives are a very important bridge to a brand.  But keeping these types of disclaimers on ALL of the time is not the right thing to do.  Far from it.  It’s a lazy and fake way of pretending that you care about customers – and it has a negative effect now.

Could a company be more insincere? If a company wants to try they might want to throw up a library shot of beautiful call centre representatives as a starter!

Filed under: Branding, Business, CRM, Customer Experience, Customer service, ideas, marketing , Branding, call recording, Customer service, training

Visualisation at its finest

A fine piece of visualisation here.   Jessica’s blog is one I read everyday.

Filed under: Imagery, ideas, illustration , humour, visualisation

The rumours of the death of the blogosphere are … perhaps greatly exaggerated

Nicholas Carr states that;

Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days.

Wow.  I’m amazed.  1.5 million blogs (not bloggers), globally.

A sizeable crowd are saying blogging is mainstream.  And dead.  And yet there are only 1.5 million regularly updated blogs. Strikes me that the problem is not ‘blogging being mainstream’, but finding the good stuff between the professional blogs and the drivel.

26/11/08 Update: This is a good perspective too.

Filed under: Blogging, Business, Ideas and Riffs, Measurement, Media, Web, blogs, ideas, technology , Blogging, mainstream, nicholas carr, state of the blogosphere, Technorati

10 reasons why online advertising spend will dip in the UK recession

10 reasons why online advertising will dip in the UK recession:

1. There is a very small (but growing) percentage of conscientious people who don’t want to waste the advertiser’s money on a bad PPC click-through.  And so, as times get tougher, and because everything is tracked, some statistical trends will show a downward shift.
2. There is a percentage of people who do want to waste the advertiser’s money on a bad click-through.  And because everything is tracked, stats are up on poor quality click through’s.
3. Online advertisements are still too impersonal.  And this will become even more apparent in a ressesion.  If you read a magazine with an advert, or if you see an advert in a store, you can be mad at the shop assistant or the publisher.  If you click on a bad web ad, you have only yourself to blame — and by default that is never fun.  And rarely repeated.
4. Online PPC ads like “iPod Touch, just £20″ work.  But an ad like “SAAS.  Bespoke BPM Development testing professional” doesn’t.  The largest volume of investment in PPC advertising is in the long tail, and the adverts down in the long tail are broken.  Badly.  Ineffective advertisers with be the first to cut the budgets or shut down their experiments.
5. When up against it in a recession, human beings often ’stretch’ the truth.  The problem is, misleading and aversive adverts don’t perform well, especially online and especially during difficult times – when consumers become more defensive, critical and wary.
6. There’s no way “ad supported” ventures can pay for as many things as they were supposed to pay for any more.  Now this is being realised, there is going to be a pileup of ventures hitting the wall- taking their ad budgets with them.
7. When online ad revenues fall, there is major potential for a media driven ‘death spiral’.  A well communicated idea, story or worldview behind the short term argument “online advertising is dying” will easily transcend more relevant medium or long term spend trends.
8. Online advertising is horribly inefficient (becoming less so) but cheap (becoming less so).  And cutting spend is easy-peasy.  Your mum could do it.  Human beings are programmed to make these easy decisions quickly and painlessly.
9. ‘The End of Online Advertising as we know it’ will be auto-translated into ‘The End of Online Advertising’ in the consciousness of unknowing or immature advertising buyers.  The product of this will be FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in the consciousness of a big proportion of online advertising buyers in the long tail.
10. Behavioural targeting will be trumpeted as a saviour in an era when existing online advertising will be promoted as ‘in transistion’.  The result will be a drop in spending whilst behavioural advertising is researched and evaluated.

Filed under: Advertising, Business, Computing, Conversion, Ideas and Riffs, Media, Strategy, Web, digital, ideas, marketing, technology , budgets, marketing, Online Advertising, recession

The Powerpoint Pitch: Wake me up in ten minutes

I like Apple’s marketing.  It’s great.

(Do I still have your attention? Bear with me on this)

But their runaway success has a down side (not for Apple).

The (very) big downside is the Powerpoint slide that looks a bit like this:

You’ve seen it before right?  Wrong.  I knocked this out 30 seconds ago.  But one’s like this are used in nearly every presentation given by creative agencies and design teams trying to make a point.

OMG!  Wake me up ten minutes into the pitch or presentation when you’ve got to the bit when you demonstrate your own creative thinking you me-to-wannabe-good-for-nothing-look-a-like-creative-agency-of-little-distinction.

Arrrgggghhhhh.

Do people fall for this?

Filed under: Apple, Branding, Business, Design, Fun, Ideas and Riffs, Media, Strategy, ideas, marketing, technology , Apple, Ctreative Pitch, Powerpoint

Google looks to measure ‘influence’ and the ‘influencers’

Dirk van Graver at “Record | Preserve | Share” has commented on a business week article that asks us to imagine one number that sums up how influential we are.  It is a subject I discussed some time ago, when I was craving a golden ratio in relation to social networking.

Back then I said;

It is pretty obvious Trust would be a great dimension for social networks to embrace. So would Influence or Buzz (or both). And when elements like this are developed I believe Social Networks will be onto something very significant indeed.

If you didn’t follow the link, according to the Business Week piece, Google has a patent pending “for ranking the most influential people on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.”

It is a great idea.  Clearly if this works, it would finally make adverts on social networks relevant and potentially profitable.

It would seem (if the report is to be believed) that Google is applying the same approach to social networks that it has used to dominate the online search business (it would be like a page rank).  Apparently the Google approach would take into account all manner of aspects of influence, from ‘how many’ people you know, to ‘how frequently’ you talk with them, to ‘how strongly’ they value your opinion.  So your ’score’ could be compared with that of pretty much anyone in the world.  A personal Google ‘influence score’ if you like.

Hear are my hopes and fears:

FEAR #1: I worry that if an influence score is used to justify, or generate a monitization strategy for social networking sites, the emphasis on what constitutes ‘influence’ must start on a sound footing.  This is an area that I really don’t want to see messed up – as I’m not sure many social networking sites can withstand high profile failures at monitization.

FEAR # 2:  If influence is measured by Google, (or anyone else) surely everyone will be able to find their (or their companies, or their competitors) biggest advocates or doomsayers?  Yes?  Well I cannot see that happening accurately.  I would be very surprised if your biggest influencers are known by you (i.e connected to you) and so how do Google propose to measure or track that?  And in fact, surely influencers by definition are 3rd parties (i.e. are unconnected to you) in the first place?

Hey, maybe I missed something and that is the whole reason why Google is exploring this.

Which brings me on to my great hope.

Hope #1: I hope how ‘many’ people you know (‘follow’, ‘connect’ with, ‘add’ as a friend) is not closely related to your degree of influence.  Those fools who have adopted a strategy of following ‘en-masse’ in Twitter (in the hope that a high percentage will return the favour) must not be seen by advertising buyers and sellers as ‘influencial’.  They are not.  Bob with 1000 friends is not necessarily more influential than Susan with just 85.

Equally seniority isn’t the be-all either.  John the 46 year old bachelor & CEO is not necessarily more influential than Raphael the 28 year old IT Manager, who is a father of two.  And postcode xyz, doesn’t bear higher influencers than postcode 123, in the same way that an OxBridge student shouldn’t be seen as more influencial that a 2:2 student from a ‘lesser’ ranked university.  My hope is that an influence algorithm doesn’t arbitrarily look at volumes and a set of pre-determined values and rules.

Influence is, I believe, far more multi dimensional and complex than that.

If this becomes a reality what are your hopes and fears for ‘Influencer’ tracking?  I’d love to here your views.

Filed under: Business, Buzz, Facebook, Google, Ideas and Riffs, Influence, Measurement, Online, Social Graphs, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web2.0, ideas, marketing, technology, trust, web 2.0 , Branding, Business Week, Google, Influence, Personal Brand, ranking, Social Networking, Twitter

Godin + Scoble = differentiation

Back in March I wrote about CV’s (that’s a ‘résumé’ to satisfy my US readers).  In that post (admittedly pre-economic downturn and global credit crunch) I was joining a conversation about the need to have a CV to get a “remarkable” job.  At the time my gut instinct was “yes”, and remains that way.

In fact what I said at the time was; “In a world dominated by ‘average’ and ‘ordinary’, the easiest, fastest and most efficient means to show how remarkable you are is to stand out alongside ‘average’, and show it for what it is.  Be close enough to warrant comparison. Far enough apart to stand out.“

At the time Seth Godin said “If you rely on your resume, you’re playing the wrong game…” (see post comments); albeit he admitted he was being particularly hyperbolic in his original post to make his point.  I think he was right on both counts.

And yet just 7 months later – here we are.  For many, job hunting is a stark reality.  There’s doom,  gloom,  stocks tumbling and low low confidence.  Plus the heady mix of redundancy and competition.  And probably confusion with CV’s & résumés flying about amid posts like “Can LinkedIn win from losers?” and sort your CV cropping up left right and centre.  So what should you do if you need a job (remarkable or otherwise)?

My advice is read Seth’s original post as well as another by Robert Scoble who recently offered more advice just very recently.

A pinch of Godin + a dash of Scoble will get things moving in the right direction for you I am sure – and it will certainly help you begin to market your personal brand much more effectively.

Filed under: Branding, Business, ideas, marketing , credit crunch, CV, Godin, how to get a job, LinkedIn, personal branding, Résumé, Ressession, Scoble

1000 Paintings on youtube

Regular readers will remember I have posted about the One Thousand Paintings project before; here and here in fact.  I even bought my own 956.

There is now a Google Tech Talk video about the project, which really demystifies the whole thing, and adds a tonne more too.

Filed under: Art, Buzz, Cool, Fun, ideas, marketing , Art, art project, Education, engedu, Google, googletechtalks, One Thousand Paintings, paintings for sale, talk, talks, techtalk, techtalks