Marketing Strategy

Ad--or add?--value

Interesting synchronicity between Chris Anderson's thoughts on the unconsidered "negative externalities" of PR spam and Max Kalehoff's observation of the costs to consumers and advertisers of bombarding consumers with messages:

the cost of advertising for the consumer is rarely factored into marketing strategy or advertising planning. This is important because that cost translates to brand experience, affinity and equity. Fundamentally, how often have you ever heard a marketer ask: “Does our advertising — ultimately, our message — cause our customers to love or hate us?” The closest advertisers come to addressing this question — and this was especially true at Ad:tech — is in discussion of thresholds of tolerance. Thresholds of tolerance? That sounds like a framework more suited for discussions of pain or torture. (The Cost Of Advertising For Consumers)

One of the beauties of search marketing has always been that when the engines manage relevancy well, the advertising is a benefit, not a cost. As performance models begin to emerge in the social network space, the sliding scale between unnoticed skyscrapers and interruptive vs valuable ads will make all the difference. Introduce ANY real consumer cost (in creepiness or by tolling their social interactions) and they will flee to the next cool social platform in droves. Find a way to ad [sic] value and you've got the next Adwords.

Wasted Advertising, take 2

I've expanded a bit on my Corollary to Wanamaker in my latest Chief Marketer column: Untracked Conversions Mean Wasted Advertising.

What Marketers Must Understand About Unified Search

My latest Chief Marketer column, covering a trend I'm calling "unified search": What Marketers Must Understand About Unified Search. Exemplified by Google's Universal Search natural search enhancements, Ask's new "3D" search interface and innovative smaller players like Kosmix, this trend will eventually--finally?!--move us past the text-only search results pages that Google perfected and everyone else copied.

Our full brief (PDF) on this topic is also available from the DoubleClick Performics website: Unified Search Brief.

The Economy of Attention: Captivate Your Online Audience or Be Stuck in the Past


Gotham Hall - FOOA, originally uploaded by carsonworkshops.

The "Future of Online Advertising" was held in this amazing hall, formerly a bank, in June. Around the clock in the left middle of this image, there were three really retro aphorisms:

  • “Waste neither time nor money but use both for your own and your neighbor’s good.”
  • “There is no gain so sure as that which results from economizing what you have.”
  • “It is what we save rather than what we earn that ensures a competency for the future.”

Seeing these old economy exhortations to frugality in contrast with a new economy conference inspired my latest article on ChiefMarketer.com: The Economy of Attention: Captivate Your Online Audience or Be Stuck in the Past...

Ingenuity and the social web?

We're gearing up for our annual DoubleClick Performics client summit, Aug 13-14 in our hometown, Chicago. We've got Steven "Freakonomics" Levitt delivering our keynote. Lots of great networking and info sharing sessions too.

Can't wait to see all our clients and partners here in Chicago. Some pple may be disappointed that we're breaking our tradition of Cubs skyboxes, but we have an amazing event planned for Shedd Aquarium, easily the best venue in Chicago for a party.

I'll be hosting a panel featuring founders of some of the coolest "social web" properties out there: Jeffrey Kalmikoff from Threadless, Meetro and BazaarVoice. Our theme is the age of ingenuity, and the social web is spinning out some unbelievably ingenious ideas right now. If you're coming, or even if you're not (sorry, by invite only!), I'd love to hear your thoughts on what's most ingenious about the space right now. What would you ask these leaders in the space if you couldn't just track them down on linked in, facebook or their own sites and ask them yourself ;-)

I'll be posting more on this panel as it approaches. Fire me your thoughts by email or in comments...

To quote Rob Norman...

The CEO Global of MEC Interaction is really smart and adds a certain energy to a marketing strategy panel discussion. A sampling paraphrased from a recent presentation:

  • "to hubblize" = see clearly by getting above the atmosphere (as in the space telescope)
  • "something less than a quarter of a major brand's ads and promotional budget is actually discretionary to the brand manager"
  • "there is no answer to the ad standards question. accept a world with multiple standards"
  • with reference to user generated content: "the thing about self-immolation is that people tend to do it only once."
  • marketers need to learn to market in the context of "the phenomenon of US": the hive mind, the  social networking world. CRM will endure but the C will shift from 'customer' but 'community'"
  • "interactive is not a medium, it's a parallel universe"
  • mktrs need to differentiate between two types of messaging: self-contained full expressions of a message vs signposts to the message

Rob, you need a blog!

Facebook experiments get marketing strategists all a-flutter

Us marketing strategy types are seriously geeking out on the opportunities of Facebook 's platform. Bill Sweetman helped his colleague rent a coach house via leads generated from a Facebook status message ad, for instance: My Facebook Coach House Experiment.

My own modest experiment: using the LinkedIn "My Company's Hiring" application, I added two of our current search marketing positions to my profile. About a week later, I've gotten one lame recruiter inquiry ("let us show you that we have great people for any job") and, just today, one interesting viable candidate. Given my fairly small network of 40 friends, not at all bad. Interesting and promising.

Mycompanyshiring

Trends and Trendiness in Advertising 2.0

NYTimes.com "Bits" Blog: Marketers Twittering, But Not About Second Life

Apparently marketers are bailing on Second Life and getting excited about Twitter. Not surprising that there would be trendiness in the emerging space. Nice observation that it's often the simple obvious (even unoriginal) applications that have the most appeal appeal, and gain scale... and it's scale that marketers primarily need for them stay interested...

New Consumer Engagement Platforms, courtesy of Facebook

Nice read on the emerging opportunities for marketers on social networks by Gary Stein: Advertising on Social Networks: The Third Wave. Marketers need to see these sites as more than collections of eyeballs waiting to have ads "impressed" upon them. New mantra should be: Add value to networks. Contribute enough value to help a network go viral. The new social network "platforms" or APIs, first from Facebook but coming soon from LinkedIn, MySpace and others, should make it easy for the best marketers to reach their audiences in new and better ways. To quote Gary:

The opportunity to more deeply integrate the brand with the experience has always been a drive for online advertisers. Since the early days of the Web, we've tried to get away from the notion of placing ads. In fact, all that language ("insertion order," for example) are holdovers from offline.

Smart advertisers have become more focused on thinking about the spaces in which they encounter consumers and making that experience better. The challenge, of course, is to make it better in a way that builds brand value. But open APIs and the chance to create branded functionality will be too appealing to ignore.


Ad software maker OpenAds girds to take on Google - Yahoo! News

Competition is a good thing... but $5M makes it competitive with Google?

Openads, a supplier of free software used by Web sites to manage online ad campaigns, has received $5 million in initial funding, bolstering it to prepare for increasing competition globally with Google Inc.

Any competitive threat OpenAds pose to DoubleClick, Google or other larger providers is not from this small capital infusion but via viral uptake among a large base of small sites and networked publishers / advertisers. That's how Google's advertiser base and AdSense network grew early on.

Ad software maker OpenAds girds to take on Google - Yahoo! News.

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