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.

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.

Judith Hurwitz’s Top 11 predictions for the software industry

If you are a tech marketer (and lets face it, you probably are if you are reading this), or even better a software marketer, you should read Judith Hurwitz’s Top 11 predictions for the software industry.

HiPPO – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion

What have I been doing? It turns out there is a phrase for it, and it’s been around a while.

“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.” Courtesy Avinash Kaushik

HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Thankfully there is some great technology making HiPPO’s extinct. Multi-variable testing tools & platforms like Interwoven’s Optimost will continue to make a big difference in the remainder of 2008 and in 2009.

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.

the little things that matter

Adam Kmiec is an Interactive Marketer at Colle+McVoy.  His presentation on Slideshare about micro interactions is well worth looking at.

Just how influential is Word of Mouth?

Buzz marketing: “low key”, “just for small enterprises”, “simply non-core” “not for serious businesses.”  Wrong. Buzz Numbers HQ report here some statistics about buzz and WOM marketing that every serious marketer should read right now.  For a more complete list of stats about buzz and WOM try the full article at FreshChat too.

The stat for me to commit to memory: Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendations – (my guess is you knew that anyway, or you wouldn’t be reading this…..) but remember the numbers:- 65% trust friends, 27% trust experts, 8% trust celebrities. (after Yankelovich)

Update 22/07/08: Casting the net slightly wider than just WOM – I can’t really argue with these 50 Brilliant ways for Marketers to start using Social Media.

Where are you on the stairway to heaven?

David Armano’s excellent diagram of the ladder up to Brand Heaven and the ladder down to Brand Hell. 

Column inches – a lesson in logo (re)design

Elegant font & web 2.0 colour palette used in new logo redesign: £14,000.00

Printed Mousemats: £1,000.00

Printed Pens: £500.00

The look on everyone’s face when they see a picture of a man holding his, er, column inches, when the logo is put on its side: Priceless.

So. All publicity is good publicity right? Alas maybe not.

Definitions of marketing

There is a lot of debate and commentary about Seth Godin’s recent post about a definition of ‘marketing’.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) would have you think the definition is this. Ouch.

Is Seth’s definition any better? Does its brevity raise more questions than it actually answers? Do the four words focus the mind (an achievement in itself)?

I really think marketers need to make their own personal definition of marketing – in every role, and in every project. But I do think a little more Seth and a little less (CIM) would help focus the mind. Ofcourse the real message here is that if you under promise you are invisible. And over delivering needs to be a defacto response in your company. Why?

Consistent ‘over delivery’ = Reliability

Over delivery = ‘Delight’

Trust = Reliability + Delight

As for under promising? R.I.P.

Earning a living, in appalling rendering conditions

For all the email marketers out there – earning a living in appalling rendering conditions – This is for you.

Hat tip to the author Mathew Patterson.

You may also want to check out, or join the Email Standards Project.

Please help

Sport Relief

(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

It’s official. I need help.

As my current Marketing Manager is going on maternity leave, I need help. A years worth of help. It’s official. Email me with you CV if you think you are the up to the mark

This really is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a leading UK SI, Salmon. Salmon’s UK marketing department is small, but its lead generation efforts are big; to match the the aim of driving the achievement of Salmon’s annual revenue targets.

You will need experience in business-to-business (B2B) marketing in a high-tech (software, hardware or IT services) environment; and you will naturally enjoy demonstrating skills related to integrated marketing programmes, and working well with internal stakeholders.

From day one, you’ll enjoy understanding Salmon’s brand values. And when you are ready (you’ll be a quick learner) you’ll thrive on communicating our core values and building sophisticated campaigns; successfully helping to plan, execute and measure integrated lead generation campaigns.

For the listaholics…….

Main duties

• Help to plan, execute and measure integrated marketing programmes, against agreed objectives and budget
• Sound marketing administration
• Assist in the planning and execution of PR, seminars, conferences, user groups, direct marketing
• Work with salespersons on a day-to-day basis, providing support for their activities
• Create content for internal and external communication, both email based and print based such as email updates, Newsletters, customer win postcards
• Maintain list of customer reference sites for sales use, press opportunities and case studies
• Liaise with Salmon’s business partners and suppliers, in a professional and conscientious manner
• Maintain marketing relationships, processes and systems with business partners
• Maintain Salmon’s CRM system (Salesforce), sourcing and managing data for external communication
• Maintain and update the Salmon website
• Create collateral/presentations to support Salmon’s services and solutions
• Maintain marketing budget

Experience and skills

The successful candidate will need to be able to demonstrate their experience in the following:

• B2B marketing in a high-tech industry
• Successful execution and measurement of lead generation campaigns
• Effective copywriting for corporate website, micro site, emails, eNewsletters, direct mail
• Organising seminars and conferences
• Measuring campaign performance against objectives
• Integrated campaigns: – PR, events, email marketing, web
• Microsoft Office, especially MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Word

Experience in the following is desirable:

• UK IT Services market
• Using Salesforce.com or similar CRM systems to track and report on marketing campaigns
• Digital and Email marketing
• PR Administration, and/or Romeike Media Disc
• Adobe / Macromedia Contribute, Photoshop, Acrobat

Don’t delay. This position will be filled quickly.

6 factors that make a marketing leader successful

Forrester‘s Marketing department do a great job, and they have cut me a very personal email called the Marketing Leadership home page, which has 6 Success Imperatives – the 6 factors that make a marketing leader successful.

Needless to say each imperative leads to a report that I can’t share, but I can share the imperatives themselves!  They are;

1. Harness emerging customer trends.  Find the results of global Consumer studies which expose how consumers change their interaction with brands, media, and each other.

2. Thrive on market and technology change. Markets and technologies change rapidly, and effect how your firm manages consumers, content, processes, and business partners. This imperative will help you set priorities and select the right tools and markets to stay ahead of your competitors.

3. Differentiate the brand experience. Brand loyalty continues to drop as product cycles shorten and consumers turn away from advertising. To differentiate your brand from the pack, and justify high margins, find the latest research on brand and loyalty management.

4. Optimise the marketing and media mix. “Half of the marketing budget is wasted; we just don’t know which half” no longer holds true. With new marketing and media planning tools and methods, you can raise the return on every marketing dollar and develop effective multichannel campaigns.

5. Build influence across the company. The role of the CMO is evolving from “market communications” to corporate business strategy, putting the customer first in everything the firm does.

6. Create and nurture high-performance teams and partnerships. The changing role of marketing forces leaders to review their organisation, skills, and partners.

Sound advise as usual from Forrester, who I have to say have always been my favourite analyst co.

Tales from the Inside: Niklas Zennström, founder Skype, Joost & Atomico Investments

Here is an opportunity for all you technology marketers to rub shoulders and ask questions of two technology heavyweights.

Second Chance Tuesday are chatting to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and Niklas Zennström, the latter who was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the year in 2006 and is one of Europe’s most successful technology, media and telecoms entrepreneurs.

When: 19 February 2008, 6.30pm to 9.30pm
Where: The Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, London NW1 4LE
Cost: £45, with a discount to £25 for entrepreneurs and is payable in advance.

For those of you who have been asleep for 5 years, Niklas Zenntröm is an Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Atomico investments, Joost, Skype and Kazaa among other companies. Through Atomico, Niklas serves as a Board Member for several start-up companies, such as FON.

In his career to date, Niklas has won a series of industry awards including ‘Business Leader of the Year 2006’ (European Voice), ‘Innovation in Computing and Communications 2006’ (Economist Innovation Awards) and the ‘Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for Technology Change Agent of the Year 2006. Niklas has also been named ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ (European Business Leaders Awards 2006).

Rory Cellan-Jones is a journalist for BBC News. Starting out as a presenter at BBC Wales, he transferred to London and became the business and economics correspondent. After the dot com crash of 2000, he wrote the book Dot.bomb. Since January 2007, Cellan-Jones has been the BBC’s Technology Correspondent with the job of expanding the BBC’s coverage of new media and telecoms, and the cultural impact of the Internet.

Update 20/02/08:   BBC take on Zennstrom and the TV revolution here

If you are a networking freek, previous guests have included have attended from organisations like: 7Digital, ASOS, B3ta, Babble.net, Bebo, Betfair, BT, Buildersite.co.uk, The Cloud, Cominded, Crowdstorm, eBay, DTi, Endemol Gaming, Figleaves, Firebox, Freshminds, The Friday Project, Friends Reunited, Friends Abroad, Gala Coral, Glasses Direct, GNR, Google, Gumtree, Hitwise, Houses of Parliament, Imagini, Joost, iSporty, Ladbrokes eGaming, Last.fm, Lulu.com, Play.com, Match.com, MoveMe.com, Million Dollar Homepage, Microsoft, Ministry of Sound, Mofo Games, MOO, Monumental Games, Moreover, MTV, Mydeo, Myspace, News International, Nexagent, Oracle, Orderwork, Oxygen Games, Quikker, Paypal, Play.com, Reuters, Shopping.com, Shop Qwik, Skinkers, Skype, Snipperoo, Sony, Technovate, The Universal Music Group, Toptable, Yahoo!, The Young Foundation, Weeworld, Zopa, Zoomf, Zubka.

Typical investors have included : 3i, Atlas Ventures, Accel Partners, Advent Ventures, Atomico Investments, Benchmark, Battery Ventures, Close Ventures, Creative Capital Fund, Deutsche Bank, DFJ Esprit, Doughty Hanson Technology Investors, Episode 1, Fleming Private Equity, Goldman Sachs, IBIS Media, Index Ventures, Ingenious Ventures, London Seed Capital, London Technology Fund, Liberty Global Investors, Morgan Stanley, Nesta, New Media Spark, Mathematical Capital, Oxford Capital Partners, Seraphim Capital Fund

And of course the press has included: Angelnews, BBC TV and Radio, Business Week, Channel 4, City am, The Daily Express, The Evening Standard, The Financial Times, Fortune, The Guardian, ITN, Netimperative, New Media Age, The Observer, Sharp Edge, Silicon.com, Techcrunch, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Spectator.

I can’t make it, so I would really like to hear from anyone who attends.