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(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).

Online Advertising trends

While I am in the mood to look at trends [see post: 6 factors that make a marketing leader successful made yesterday], this article on VentureBeat does a good job of highlighting the trends in Online Advertising; in particular the Content vs Community debate, which continues to surface, re-surface (and yet never go away).

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.

The Meatball Sundae Webinar: A review

WOW. What a great way to spend an hour! With 2000 people on the call Seth Godin’s seminar about ‘Meatball Sundae’ was well worth the investment in time.

I thought I’d quickly highlight what was said in the seminar, and how I interpreted this, for those who could not attend and haven’t read the book.

———————

This is a revolution that changes everything. Just like the Industrial Revolution, and revolutions of the past (brand, transportation, assembly line, mass marketing and TV) the current Internet Revolution is just as big. Probably bigger.

It’s time to take a deep breathe and think…….”what do I need to do today, what can I change today that I will be glad about in 10 years time?”

Josiah Wedgwood is perhaps the best marketer that ever lived. He fundamentally understood that you need to ‘shift’ what you do each day. (Edit: read up about Wedgwood, his approach to increasing pottery sales was an example of great strategic (marketing) thinking)

Marketers too often think about the ‘pretty’ stuff on the top (cherry and cream) when really they should be thinking about the foundation of the product or the service (the meatballs).

Make people want to talk about you.

These are the 14 (Mega) trends Seth pointed out:

1) Direct Communication. Get your right. Major disintermediation is happening. Don’t get caught out, or up.

2) The amplification of consumers needs to be leveraged. Think conversation.

3) Tell authentic Stories. People don’t buy from specs, reports or checklist. Your brand story has to hold up, from every angle. Above all – be the brand you say you are.

4) Speed. You have all probably heard it a million times before, but it is getting more important. Fundamentally change the way your company deals with speed. Fast businesses thrive. Slow ones die.

5) The long Tail – The Billboard Top40 is irrelevant. Own a segment of the long tail curve – not a tiny niche; and understand the implications of personalisation and involvement to own a segment.

6) Outsourcing. This is not about pennies. Outsourcing helps you understand costs, BUT changes the business you are in. This means there is a death of the ‘factory’ model going on where you no longer need to do (build, buy, sell, market) everything.

7) “The dicing of everything“ (I need to readup about this!!!, I will blog about this in due course)

8) Infinite choice and Infinite Channels. In a world with 80M blogs PR is now different. There are channels for everything. Make your own channel. But beware being louder and offering variety is not the way to capture attention. Additionally yelling is not sufficient any longer.

9) Consumer to Consumer. ‘Connections’ are intimate, fast, and person to person. And connections are everything – just look at ebay, paypal, facebook.

10) The concept of ‘Scarce’ v ‘Abundant’ is a key theory to understand. ‘Disposable’ products are becoming less attractive as land becomes scarce. Equally in the past having lots of information = power. Now everyone has access to information so information is less the ‘key’ area: ‘access’ to information is. Offer something that is scarce or go for mass adoption. Don’t be in the middle.

11) Big Ideas. Advertising and big ideas are dead. The ‘Big Idea’ should is the product itself.

12) Permission. Anticipated, personal, relevant wins. Still.

13) The New Rich are a lot like you and me. They drive pickup trucks, buy comics, drink in Starbucks…….this has a dramatic impact on the way to court the rich.

14) There are new Gatekeepers. Traditional gatekeepers are not as important as they used to be…..Today ‘Leaders’ are more important than gatekeepers.

Bonus Trend – There is a ‘reverse bell curve’ (”The Seinfeld Curve”), and it highlights their are two ways to make money…. 1) be ubiquitous. 2) be scarce.

What I learnt

Oh man. Loads!

• You need to be organised to thrive around the long tail and this new economy, world and revolution.
• Take a deep breathe start things small, gain traction, gain attention.
• Search matters. Every Google search is comparable to a TV ad, or a magazine of yesteryear. But Organic Search is the CRITICAL. The product itself should be ‘optimised’. Clever meta tagging is simply part of the story…..what people say about your product is really the most important thing.
• Find out how friendship and engagement relate to your business. This lasts months or years, and that is why community is so important, why social media is so important. Find your tribe and show humility.
• Make products that people want to talk about. ( be remarkable)
• Everyone is a marketer now. In 1920 the head of Manufacturing ruled the roost. The Manufacturer was in charge. That’s why Ford choose black paint – it dried quicker…..Today the marketer is in charge. Don’t blow it!
• Google and Wikipedia are ‘choice machines’
• As opposed to sitting in an empty room thinking of, looking for the ‘big idea’, marketers should sit with people inside their organisation to refine what is done, delivered, created, made or sold.

Finally, this is a very decent table comparing the old world (left) with the new world (right):

Eight Business Technology Trends

Bruce discusses The McKinsey Quarterly and their “Eight Business Technology Trends To Watch” ;with a particular emphasis on those trends with an impact on Customer Experience.

As an aside “Business Technology” trends. There’s a phrase that won’t last too much longer.

n.b. 1: Bruce Temkin is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research focusing on customer experience.

n.b. 2 : Don’t forget the BBC’s review of Technology Impact in 2007, now available in pictures too.