Data is the new “Black”

August 8, 2009

I had the distinct priveledge of participating in the hosting of a truly engaging event in New York this week. The objective was to provide professional value to attendees through the delivery of provocative presentations by recognized thought leaders in the marketing space, quality networking and let’s not forget the cocktails!

Dave Frankland from Forrester Research and Tim Suther were the featured speakers. The topic – the value of customer insight in the search for improvements to the performance of marketing investment.

Dave started out the evening by featuring compelling research on the struggle of the relationship between marketers and consumers:

  • In a competitive world many marketers have decided to turn up the “volume” of marketing messages because they sense a reduction in performance – causing a sever problem, driving approximately 50% of consumers to “strongly agree” that they get too many messages.

consumers are overwhelmed

  • Why is it that consumers feel so strongly about the “volume”? It’s because they also believe that they’re recieving irrelevant garbage – 50% to 75% of consumers believe the messages they receive are irrelevant. As a result, a vast majority of consumers have signed up to the do not call registry and have installed spam and popup blocking software. A large portion are even viewing TV timeshifted so they can fast forward through commercials – I do this myself, saves as much as 20 minutes in a 60 minute show and I can watch a NFL football game in about 45 minutes without missing a thing!

consumer marketing is largely irrelevant

Tim followed up by making the following points:

Acxiom High Performance Data is the New Black

diffvaluecustomer

databuildingblockinsight

  • Identify customer value
  • Invest proportionally
  • Find/recognize & engage accordingly
  • Measure acquired value
  • Institutional memory
  • Take the Easy Money

    • Learn more about the Acxiom Global Marketing Performance Series.

    To read what attendees had to say about the event, I’d encourage you to view some of these articles:

    logo_1to1media logo_dmnews

    Leave a Comment » | Differentiated Value of a Customer, Events, Multi-channel marketing, Strategy | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Mark Ogne

    DMDays ’09 – new digital marketing committee announced – iDirect

    June 24, 2009

    The Direct Marketing AssociationDuring the opening keynote at DMDays John Greco, president of The DMA, announced a new committee designed to help mentor his organization into a transformative era, bridging their legacy as a primary thought leader in direct mail into the new digital and multichannel world – iDirect.

    Fundamentally, this is an incredibly interesting issue and worthy of commentary. What role does the industry establishment play in the current and future evolution of marketing?

    The first dimension that comes to mind for me is the communication between online and offline constituents within a company. In this case The DMA has a superior chain of relationships with large brands, and their ability to influence direction is substantial. Time will tell how this will shake out.

    My greatest impression is that the marketing world is neither digital nor direct… it’s both. The beauty of digital media channels is that they typically possess a deep level of addressability… a quicker, more accurate form of the same measurement that underlies traditional direct marketing principles.

    Noted by industry icon, Stan Rapp, “iDirect Marketing is the new Direct Marketing empowered by interactive insights and multi-channel involvement brought to life with new digital technologies.  It is a fresh approach to marketing directly, driven by a remarkable degree of innovation and information shared via the infinite internet and other digital media.  It’s what’s missing today when you simply say “Direct Marketing” or “Interactive Marketing.”

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    Posted by Mark Ogne

    Opening day at Forrester’s Marketing Forum – the keynotes

    April 8, 2008

    Engagement. Not only is it the theme of the forum, it’s a solid description of the participants and our hosts… Engaged.

    Recap of the keynote presentations…
    Brian Haven kicked things off with a great presentation…

    Engagement = fundamentally a different view of customers. Engagement is about relevance. It’s about developing strategies to find, monitor, measure and leverage the opinions and behaviors of a brands’ interaction with their market influencers.

    Engagement model:

     

    The emphasis of this model is to change the marketers view of the customer and the company’s relationship with them. The new view is a dialog. A dialog that involve motivated customers and gain their interaction with an organizations brand. The inner circle describes the process from the consumers perspective.

    Mark

    1 Comment | Events, Strategy | Tagged: , | Permalink
    Posted by Mark Ogne

    Adiós Miami, the close of the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit

    February 28, 2008

    I came to this event with great plans of contributing numerous live blog entries but found that I was too busy to meet my own expectations. This is a good thing. We had a constant flow of great booth traffic, and this conflicted with my desire to see a lot of the presentations, and make a lot of entries.

    Typically a glass half full type of person, I changed up my strategy… ask people about the sessions, the exposition, and what they found as the big take-aways. Here’s a short list of the most memorable:

    • The event was very focused. As opposed to broad online marketing shows, this one had a clearly defined focus… doing better at email marketing.

    • Attendees were very interested in hearing about things that are new, either a new way to view things or new tools to help them. Illustrative of this point is the interest generated by the Dell SMB testing session. Immediately following this presentation, maybe a half dozen marketers came by our booth and asked about our approach and what we had to offer in this area.

    • Beyond the typical subject line, day of week, and other content concerns, marketers were asking us about targeting and dynamic content capabilities, and email to webpage integration.

    Most presentations were hands on, take notes, and start implementing new ideas on Monday morning. The upside is that the time spent is based around trying to increase performance. The downside is that some of the audience may not know how to discern between options within these ideas, or know that there are options.

    Would love to hear your comments!

    Mark

    Leave a Comment » | Events | Permalink
    Posted by Mark Ogne

    Live from the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit ’08

    February 25, 2008

    Welcome to sunny Miami!pict0004.jpg

    Day one is underway, sort of. Actually, the event started on Sunday. Nearly 400 marketers fell on the sword and elected to go to a classroom presentation to become “email certified”. This is really amazing, the commitment that so many people have delivered to the event. Seriously, rather than sitting by the pool for an extra day, they focused on an 8 hour lecture series and had to take a test… that they needed to pass. Imagine your boss sent you to this certification class and you didn’t pass the test.

    With more than 800 marketers in attendence, the event’s full and there’s a constant flow of traffic moving about. Attendees appear to be from a broad cross section of companies, large to small, and industry representation from technology and retail and travel and more.

    The sessions this morning covered online marketing and the office politics we deal with, and relevancy and the ability to create emails that inspire action on the part of recipients. The comments about the office politics meeting were a bit tepid but the relevance panel was well received. Marketers are gravitating to consumer centric strategies… a wonderful thing.

    Love to hear your thoughts –

    Mark

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    Posted by Mark Ogne

    Email Experience Evolution, 2/12/08

    February 15, 2008

    Event locationI just returned from San Diego and the EEC conference. The show was great… there were so many talented marketers at hand, many insightful speakers, and of course, great weather. Gotta love San Diego!

    When I look back at trips and events in particular, I always ask my self what I think the big take away was. For this show, it had to be the keynote presentation by David Daniels from Jupiter, and Jeanniey Mullen from OlgilvyOne. Their presentations were very good, extremely insightful. However, the one thing that really bowled me over was a survey they conducted with the audience, in real-time using wireless gadgets. 47% of the audience identified “behavioral drive marketing” as being the top item to focus on in 2008. This, coming from a room of email marketers!

    The world is evolving and marketers across many disciplines are now shifting their focus to their target audience. This is really great news for our industry.

    Let me know your thoughts –

    Mark

    2 Comments | Events | Permalink
    Posted by Mark Ogne