Updates from March, 2012

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  Tim 11:13 pm on March 30, 2012 Permalink  

  My ad ran where? 

  A recent story in Adweek listed just about every possible peril of using ad networks for online display campaigns. It featured a case where display ads for major brands were running on a horribly-designed site full at least questionable if not downright offensive content.

  So should we flee as fast as we can from online networks? Hardly.

  Buying online media blindly from networks merely to get the best possible CPM carries risk. It’s not unlike buying run of network on cable. Sometimes you get good programming in good timeslots, sometimes you get garbage at 2:43am.

  Network buys need to be carefully purchased and closely monitored. When we’re purchasing a network, we research sites where we’ll be running in advance. That’s exactly what we did with a mobile network buy for a client that’s running right now. We eliminated questionable sites before the buy even went live. And it’s also why we have tools like Adometry, which allows us to track the exact sites and placements for our ads on a network and make adjustments if necessary.

  Ad networks can be highly effective. They reach broad audiences, they provide “one stop shopping efficiency” and pricing is often very attractive. But the buy has to be managed. It takes good tools and hard work to ensure the client’s money is well-spent. That’s where an agency can deliver real value for a client.

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• 

  Nat 12:00 am on March 1, 2012 Permalink  

  Facebook Timeline for Brands 

  We’ve known for a little while that Facebook would be moving Brand Pages to the new Timeline format and today they launched a preview for page administrators. The change will happen automatically for brands on March 30th, so we wasted no time in diving in and checking it out. Here’s a quick glance at what Brand Managers need to know about the changes.

  1. Cover Photo replaces Profile Image
  The Cover Photo is the biggest visual branding opportunity in the new format and a great image here can really set the tone for a brand presence. Previously, brands were limited to a maximum 200×600 pixel image in the upper left-hand corner. The new cover photo is 850 pixels wide and dominates the initial view of the page.

  

  Ben & Jerry’s dedicated their Cover Photo to their famous Holstein Cows.

  It is important to note that Facebook has added restrictions to how this image may be used, prohibiting coupons, purchase information, calls to action and contact information. They seem to be encouraging brands’ better angels and it will be interesting to see how well this policy is adhered to.

  2. Tabs are now Boxes
  In their previous major design revision, Facebook “Tabs” were replaced with links and icons along the left-hand navigation and much confusion was created. We continued to call them Tabs even though the design metaphor no longer fit, so it is with some relief that this content is now added to the top navigation and can be promoted with large graphical boxes.

  

  Starbucks is handling the new boxes elegantly.

  Brands can display four boxes in this space and Photos is the only content piece that is fixed in place. Boxes can be anything from your “Like” counter, a map, various apps or custom pages. Additional boxes (up to 12 in total) are displayed in a dropdown menu.

  3. Custom Pages canvas is bigger
  Custom Pages (AKA Page Tabs) now have 810 pixels of width to play in, up from the 520px allowed in the previous design. The Custom Pages will reside in a nearly blank canvas, free from the Facebook user interface elements that crowded out the old pages. This is a huge opportunity to create rich sub-pages inside your Facebook presence.

  

  The size difference can be seen here, where Dove has an old Custom Page sitting inside the new canvas.

  4. No more default landing page
  In the previous design, brands could create “Like Us” pages and designate them as the default landing page for visitors who had not yet liked the brand. This tactic has been the basis for like-building campaigns that sometimes required visitors to like a brand before receiving special content (a practice known as Like-gating). This capability is now removed, making Timeline the only default view.

  I’m not sure if this spells the end of Like-gating as we know it, but it certainly looks like brands are going to lose a favored Like-building tactic. Interestingly, Facebook also prohibits referencing “user interface elements, such as Like or Share” in the new Cover Photo. With these two policy shifts in place it will be interesting to see what Facebook has in mind for the future of Like-building for brands.

  5. The Timeline
  Images are bigger and (potentially) more engaging. Posts can be customized by widening them, pinning them to the top of the page or (as before) deleting them entirely. A well-curated Timeline is going to be a great opportunity to communicate a brand’s personality.

  

  I like the visual consistency of the content on Ben & Jerry’s Timeline.

  6. Messages
  Visitors can now contact a brand privately using a prominently placed Message feature. It will be very interesting to see how users embrace this new private communications channel inside Facebook, which has until now been a strictly public forum for brands. Social Media Managers everywhere will be adding this to their to-do list.

  This is just a quick overview of the new features and overall we are very excited about what they mean for customization and brand engagement. If you have any opinions or questions you would like to share, head on over to our new timeline and let’s continue the discussion.

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  Jim 5:17 pm on February 27, 2012 Permalink  

  What does Digital America look like? 

  Remember when we used to rank cities by how “wired” they were? (Austin was high, Biloxi was low.)

  Remember when our media plans excluded digital messaging and social networking for people over fifty?

  Remember when we thought online video viewers were overwhelmingly young, white men?

  The face of Digital America is changing. And while the growth of the Internet is hardly newsworthy, there are a few surprises in a recent study from Nielsen and NM Incite. Here are five nuggets regarding digital and social media usage that might cause you to reconsider your views of online behavior.

  • 54% of visitors to social network sites and blogs are women.

  • Women outnumber men (53% to 47%) among online video viewers.

  • Men are more likely to own tablets than women (53% vs. 47%).

  • 274 million Americans have daily access to the Internet—at home, at work or at a third place. However, 100 million Americans (a third of the country) do not have access to broadband.

  • Whites make up 61% of smartphone owners. The next largest group of smartphone owners are Hispanics  at 17%.

  One thing is certain: adoption of new technologies is a dynamic process and the digital demography will surely be different a year from today. Stay tuned.

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  Jim 5:52 pm on January 10, 2012 Permalink  

  Put a code on it 

  

  If you watch the uneven but occasionally hilarious IFC cable series Portlandia, you are familiar with Put A Bird On It: a design movement that enhances objects by adding a bird.

  Marketers have their own version of this fad: Put a QR Code on it.

  These chunky barcodes are showing up on everything from billboards to, alas, urinals. I recently saw a QR Code on a website which accessed (wait for it) another website.

  In theory it’s a great idea. When scanned, a QR Code provides additional content that enhances the host message. A print ad can turn into a full- motion product demo. A real estate flyer can offer a guided tour of a home. A concert poster stapled to a telephone pole can unleash a music video.

  Unfortunately, the public doesn’t share the marketing community’s enthusiasm for QR Codes. According to a recent Forrester Research survey only 5% of Americans with smart phones actually scanned a QR Code during a recent three-month survey period. Those that did tended to be young, affluent and male.

  Does this mean that QR Codes won’t ever be a viable marketing tool? Not at all. But as with any emerging technology, it requires patience and best practices. Here’s how our agency is using QR Codes for maximum effect.

  Get real
  While it’s easy to slap a code on virtually any medium, be realistic. Are consumers inclined to chase a city bus down the street to scan a code on a transit ad for a casino? Probably not. On the other hand, QR Codes make sense at the point of sale, in print advertising and mobile couponing.

  Make the experience worthwhile
  Consumers who take the trouble to whip out a smart phone and scan a code should be rewarded for their efforts. Make sure the content is more than a pointless rehash of the host message.

  Integrate
  Don’t use the technology for technology’s sake. Make sure the scanned message advances your overall brand story.

  Be Patient
  Don’t expect miraculous results from a QR Code effort. The percentage of those who scan the code will be low. The technology relies on third-party apps that can be clunky to use. But smart phone penetration will continue to increase and the QR Code user experience get better with built-in readers.

  By applying common sense (and some uncommon creativity), there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put a code on it.
  

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  Chris 5:08 pm on September 30, 2011 Permalink  

  Rising up against declining CTRs 

  Over the last couple of years, industry studies have reported a general decrease in average click-through rates (CTR) for online display. This trend was recently highlighted in a Google study looking at CTRs across 2010. The favorability of online display is starting to be questioned given steady declining CTRs and other stats flowing from user studies that find something like 16% of online users account for 80% of all clicks.

  It shouldn’t be a shock to us as marketers (who are consumers ourselves after all) that CTRs are declining. As continually barraged as we are with advertising messages furiously competing for every last nanosecond of our attention, it makes sense that users who are interacting with content they have voluntarily sought-out might not be so ready to be redirected to your site just because you have been gracious enough to place an ad on the page they are viewing. It just doesn’t work that way and we need to rise above the dependence on the click as the only measurement by which we judge campaigns success.

  The focus should move from driving the click to maximizing the impression. We make a lot of impressions in online display, but what is the true quality of those impressions? Not very high if we tell incomplete stories that rely on the click to resolve the narrative. Instead, we should focus on succinct, engaging storytelling in-banner that fully communicates within the unit.
  At C+F (shameless plug) we call this “short-fuse messaging”. The focus should be on strong, yet pithy, complete messages. If your message gets truncated because the user decided not to bless you with the scarce click, then you have not communicated effectively. If the user does click—great and we love that—but it shouldn’t be mandatory to complete the communication, nor the be-all end-all in measurement of success.

  The trick then is to engage in a relevant and meaningful way, maximize the impression and then create paths back to your destination for users to engage with what you have to offer. Paid Search can help. Strong SEO is table stakes. And of course, including online display along with other media in an integrated campaign helps reinforce and drive traffic.
  Site side metrics are still important and driving people to your site to engage them remains key. However, relying solely on an ad click to facilitate this customer experience is dangerous and impractical.

  It presents a challenge to our industry. Account Management must deliver clear strategy for concise storytelling. Creatives must be able to communicate impactful, relevant and complete messages inside ad units. And of course media needs to continue to run communication against a targeted audience in the most relevant environments. We still must learn and optimize continually.

  However, we must evolve the use of online display if we are to continue to recommend this media in our campaigns and ensure we use this medium the best way for the greatest impact on our audiences. If we stay tied to the click, our favorability with our clients will inevitably go by the way of user CTR.

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  Nat 6:15 pm on August 26, 2011 Permalink  

  One-third of Facebook users could be missing your message. 

  This piece from ReadWriteWeb on Facebook usage by platform really got my attention. It links through to Facebook’s statistics page, which shares the following mobile data points.

  • • There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
  • • People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
  • • There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

  These stats underscore the need for brands to take a write once/publish everywhere approach to web content. If we use Facebook as a bellwether, 33% of the potential audience is consuming content on mobile. If marketers want to meet this opportunity, they will need a cross-platform content strategy that delivers users to a responsive, empathetically-designed web presence. We will be writing more on responsive design in the coming weeks.

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  Jim 6:13 pm on February 25, 2011 Permalink  

  Cockroaches, Dinosaurs and Advertising 

  “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic cockroach.”

  —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

  

  I was thinking about the first sentence in Kafka’s novella the other day. Many of us advertising veterans are having uneasy, Samsa-like dreams of our own.

  Our fear is that we’re a waking up as dinosaurs in an industry that’s been radically transformed in the last few years.

  In the not too distant past, even a modest media budget was an assurance that we’d reach our “target audience” with a “brand message” through the trusty mass media of broadcast television, drive time radio and daily newspapers.

  Our job was to craft clever ads that would bust through the clutter, attract attention and succeed through repetition. We interrupted programming that people wanted in order to force-feed them something they grudgingly tolerated—our ads. It worked because the consumer was a prisoner of mass media.

  That was then. But that ain’t now.

  Advertising is no longer a series of controlled messages tidily distributed to passive masses. Not only do consumers control when and how they receive information from a brand, they are creating their own brand content. (Exhibit A: Some ten million people have watched “United Breaks Guitars” on YouTube.)

  The traditional marketing campaign—a one way message pushed out to a defined audience for a limited time period—is less relevant in a rapidly moving, real-time, interactive world. Today, progressive marketers are creating brand platforms: open-ended, ongoing, curated conversations with customers and prospects in all media and beyond media.

  A platform extends beyond the walled garden of the marketing department into all areas of the organization—sales, R&D, HR, customer service. A platform captures the soul of a brand and presents it as a robust, interactive experience. It’s the Pepsi Refresh Project or IBM Smarter Planet.

  Our agency is restructuring so that we can better succeed at painting these sort of big canvases. We’re getting there–having launched brand platforms for LifeWise Health Plan (“Boringly Good“), Symetra Financial (“Don’t Fear 65“) and the Seattle Aquarium (“Let Leonard In“).

  Here’s the catch: platforms are hard. They take time. They require far more effort than a traditional campaign because they demand orchestration of multiple disciplines—art, copy, public relations, event marketing, digital programming, and more.

  But dinosaurs be warned: Platforms are the future, and the future is now.

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  Dan Goldstein Creative Services, and Lee McKnight Jr are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Lee McKnight Jr 3:43 pm on March 22, 2011 Permalink

    Nice post Jim. Sounds like the restructuring is well on its way.

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    Dan Goldstein Creative Services 10:59 pm on June 30, 2011 Permalink

    As one rapidly evolving reptilian to another, it’s exciting to think of these platforms as metacampaigns that take even bigger picture thinking. And a new creative consciousness.

    Seems, through my lidless eyes, anyway, that there are still those occasional throwback moments when a great product or service should just spew its consumer news.

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  Nat 6:49 pm on December 9, 2010 Permalink  

  Either you’re part of the conversation or you’re not. 

  “The reality is that social media are where the national conversation is taking place today—and either you’re part of that conversation or you’re not.” – Brian J. Dunn, CEO of Best Buy

  I like Brian Dunn’s sober analysis of social media’s role in business. Today, social is simply a fact of life for marketers—full of tough challenges and potential rewards. It’s a space where the right customer experience can build lasting brand loyalty, but the wrong approach will be met with the sound of crickets, or worse, a pitchfork-wielding mob.

  A recent survey of small business owners reveals some restlessness with social media as a marketing vehicle. Respondents were asked to rate the effectiveness of their social presence in generating site traffic. A minority of 29% declared satisfaction. While the survey is limited in scope, I think it reflects the challenges many marketers face as they create their own approach to social media. In their efforts, they’ve probably discovered a couple of things:

  1. If you treat social as a direct marketing vehicle, you’ll probably get a traditional DM response rate (that is to say, very low). Fact is, most consumers who “like” brands don’t believe they’ve given permission to be marketed to.
  2. Liking, friending and following create weak-tie relationships that don’t easily convert to increased commerce.

  While there’s no formula for success in social media marketing, here are a few attributes of a successful effort.

  • The ability to create value from weak-tie relationships. The ease of use of social media increases participation, but not necessarily dedication or loyalty. You can’t ask too much or push too hard.
  • Good content is the message. Remember, your Facebook fan did not opt in to the relationship out of a love of marketing messages. They simply like you. Offer them news or product support and lay off the crass “monetization” plays.
  • Fits a business purpose. If you concede the first two points, your social media effort will probably not be about new customer acquisition. That’s ok. Start by listening, then concentrate on adding value to your current customer base. Cultivate them, bring them back, most of all, create positive experiences that motivate people to say nice things about you.

  The social web has amplified the power of word-of-mouth and has changed the consumer’s decision-making model for good. A marketer’s traditional efforts to gain top-of-mind consideration can crash on the rocks of negative internet feedback or can be amplified by happy consumer advocates.

  However you go about building your social media presence, make it responsive and relevant and direct it toward creating the positive word-of-mouth that drives business in the digital age and any other age.

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• 

  Tim 5:34 pm on November 17, 2010 Permalink  

  The Little Things 

  Little things say a lot about your brand. Think about your office. The materials used on surfaces. Books on your bookshelf. The computer on your desk. They all give a visitor clues about your brand. What message are you sending? And how can you change it to make it more consistent with your brand?

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  Tim 11:20 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink  

  Strategy, Engagement, Accountability: A blueprint for success in a changing media world. 

  Do you feel the earth moving under your feet? We do, too. A massive shift is taking place in the media landscape; an upheaval that is permanently transforming the relationship between consumers and marketers.

  Connecting brands with the right audiences is a daunting task in today’s marketplace. The brand must be differentiated within millions of competing messages in an ever-expanding choice of media outlets.

  What’s more, consumers are taking a more active role in conversations about brands. Their blogs, online reviews and Facebook posts can equal or exceed the impact of a TV commercial or online display ad.

  The solution for marketers is simple, but not easy:
  Be authentic, accessible and valuable through innovative interaction with customers and prospects.

  At Copacino+Fujikado, we believe that people are inherently social and seek relationships not only with other people but also with brands. Brand stories, conversations and experiences in all forms can build lasting relationships between marketers and consumers.

  Today, the job of media is far more complex than simply planning and buying space and time. That’s why we have re-structured our media group into an interdisciplinary engine that combines strategy, engagement and accountability.

  Strategy is the science and art of knowing a brand, understanding the audience and finding the most effective way to connect the two. We have a suite of powerful research tools and processes: Knowledge yields consumer insights. Consumer insights lead to compelling messages.

  Engagement is connecting with people by using the full range of storytelling and conversational platforms available. We inform, entertain, provoke, converse and listen in many channels, simultaneously:

  Paid—mass media that gives messages immediate scale and reach.
  Owned—communication channels uniquely belonging to the brand, such as e-newsletters, apps and events.
  Social—the opportunity to carry on an intimate conversation through social media sites, blogs, word of mouth, etc.

  Accountability is the ongoing process of measuring and analyzing a communications program to track efficiency, impact and, ultimately, ROI.

  Clearly, this is not your father’s media department. It’s an integrated toolbox of skills and expertise that enables our clients to thrive in the changing world of marketing communications. Thirty years ago, there were no mobile phones. Twenty years ago, there was no web. Fifteen years ago, there were no blogs. Ten years ago, there was no Facebook. Five years ago, there was no Twitter. One year ago, there was no iPad. The only constant is going to be change. We can embrace and innovate. Or we can dwindle away. We prefer the former.

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  David Miller is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    David Miller 12:39 am on November 13, 2010 Permalink

    Tim,

    Excellent points. Good read.

    There’s clearly been a tectonic shift (and it continues.) It seems everything marketers have needed to learn about media has been demonstrated by the Ice Age:

    Move, adapt or die.

    What’s really quite interesting (worrying?) is the profile of clients who once-upon-a-time relied on “traditional media” (too often not planned, projected and integrated) — who are now rushing headlong to social as a magical elixir. While they remain similarly sure what it does for their business or their brands, heck at least it doesn’t cost as much as network :60′s!! (I recently heard someone describe “Twitter” as the “the last refuge of the unaccountable.”)

    Undoubtedly the downturn has been pretty harsh to the ranks of communications directors, the primary basis for client-agency relationships. I suspect the slow build in the economy will have clients relying on trusted agents for customer insights, strategic pathfinding, inspired communications –- and critically — to be organized around the resolution of a business challenge, not simply a media flight.

    In short: C+F is in a great spot. The market is clearly coming to you. Can’t wait to see what’s next from you and your team.