What Brands Want Hasn’t Changed Much

March 6, 2013

Top-Marketer-Concerns---ANA-2012What Brands Want Hasn’t Changed Much – a great article from Brian Morrissey today. He covered recent research from ANA – the 2012 survey of marketers‘ Top  Concerns.

I’ve known folks at Digiday for a year or so but had the distinct pleasure of meeting Brian for the first time last week at IAB. Yeah, it’s nice to put names and faces together so that meeting probably grabbed my attention when I saw the email come in, but his coverage of this research really hit a note with me.

For all of the column inches of text covering “shiny bobbles” like the latest social media tip or mobile ad feature, what marketers really want is:

  1. Accountability 64%
  2. Integrated marketing 50%
  3. Innovation
  4. Building strong brands

Top marketers are focused on delivering strong data-driven customer experiences and shareholder value… What a breath of fresh air!

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Posted by Mark Ogne

#CustomerCentricity – is your customer view 360 degrees, or 208, or 151?

November 7, 2012

Quick thought… how frequently do you hear people talk about a 360 degree view of the customer? How frequently are the same people referring to a core marketing database that is exclusively offline OR online in its capabilities? This is a clear indicator of the actual range of their customer centricity.

Historically, the marketing database held insight about customers and prospects and aggregated information from many offline channels… telemarketing, POS, customer service, direct mail, and others. 15 years ago, that was pretty close to a 360 degree view. However, since the advent of digital communications channels, more and more insight has been outside the view of these assets… rendering them less valuable and perceptually obsolete. Today, with about 42% of media impressions being in digital channels, this historical vision has now shrunk to about a 208 degree view, and, promises to continue shrinking.

Contrasting this, all too often I see industry luminaries extole the benefits of a 360 degree view of the customer and refer to a solely digital solution… Yeah, that’s actually only a 151 degree view. Even a less accurate view of the customer, and typically with far more remdial concepts of marketing data and predictive analytics.

What does this all mean? Customer centricity will be illusive until online and offline marketers start sharing data and tools… communicating towards the same objectives. The traditional direct marketing folks have assets that digital marketers would be floored if they understood; Predictive analytics, record matching, cross channel campaign tools and more. However, the people who manage them frequently do not see the path to actioning these assets in the new world. Meanwhile, digital marketers are trying to build things that already exist and their vision is limited in scope, never actually seeing the 360 degree view of the customer.

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Posted by Mark Ogne

Survey – Is Facebook the next Apple or the next MySpace?

August 13, 2012

In a blog entry last March, Is Social Media a Consumer Haven or Marketing Channel?, I discussed the disconnect in value exchange between social properties and their consumers. I went so far as to identify the pressure Facebook will feel when they become subject to quarterly earnings expectations after their IPO, and hypothesized the situation where they will increase the exposure of personal information to encourage marketers to spend with them. Well… the game is getting started…

Today, Digiday featured the article “Brand View: Facebook’s New Targeting Options” and identified new elements of consumer data that will be available for marketers to leverage. I’m a firm believer in data driven marketing, this blog entry is not a comment about that. Rather, I point back to my initial conjecture that Facebook will do this and emphasize that this action will end up making no sense to consumers. Opposed to content rich sites like Yahoo or Microsoft properties, Facebook has no content, consumers create all of it but don’t yet recognize that it is their content and their profile are being monetized.

Mark my words… within three years, we’ll either see a Facebook with a dramatically new approach to monetizing their platform or a dramatically smaller company. Maybe both.

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Posted by Mark Ogne

Life, liberty and our belief in advertising

June 26, 2010

Headline – advertisements regarding restaurants, soft drinks, apparel or electronics are about 5 times more believable to consumers than political advertisements. Hmmm, watch out for the November mid-term elections!

There certainly appears to be a breach in consumer trust. Honestly, shouldn’t our political leaders be held to a higher standard than a can of soda? Really. Not that the can of soda is reputable, but we deserve the right to believe in our government. While shelf space is important to Coca Cola and Pepsi, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness “should” rank higher on the scale of believability in the minds of US consumers.

Love to hear your thoughts!

Mark

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Posted by Mark Ogne

Reaching consumers has become more difficult…

June 1, 2010

The challenge has increased exponentially.  There are more channels, more screens and more data than ever and the rate of change is increasing. Adoption driven by accessibility and affordability, technology enables consumers to access a vast wealth of information, on their terms. Starting in the last few decades, the trajectory of change has ramped up fast and is not projected to slow down.

Selecting one of the top spend channels, TV, we can see dramatic intra-channel shifts: From a peak year in mass TV advertising, 1965, until 2002, the number of 60 second spots necessary to reach 80% of one’s target audience has increased from three to 117[i]. Translating this to trust and recent research surrounding brand message acceptance, 60% of respondents said they need to hear information about a company three to five times before they believe it[ii]. Correlating these two points, an advertiser would need to provide at least 351 60 second TV spots to provide sufficient TV exposure to satisfy 80% of one’s target audience need for message acceptance. This, all while nearly 40 million US households have DVR capabilities and 59% of them “currently use a DVR to skip through the commercials”.[iii]

Fast-forward to the current decade. Today’s teen has become a moving target. Nearly all are double or triple tasking while watching TV.   U.S. teenagers trust information from each other 5X more than adults and 10X more than ads[iv]. If you think about what this world looks like 5 to 10 years from now, this scenario will be even more complex as this demographic will be your future target.  It will pay to get on top of this challenge sooner than later.

Complicating this, pushing more “noise” at consumers who have become increasingly insensitive to the charms of marketers has proven to risk exacerbating the issue and drives negative long term brand impressions.

The above is an excerpt from an upcoming whitepaper I wrote. I’ll update this post when the final production is available.

Mark

[i] Tim Stengel, former CMO at P&G

[ii] Edelman Trust Barometer, 2009

[iii] eMarketer – Mintel, “Attitudes toward Traditional Media Advertising and Promotional marketing – US”, 2009

[iv] eMarketer – Deloitte, “State of the Media Democracy Fourth Edition: Select US Highlights”, 2009

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Posted by Mark Ogne

Website personalization vs customization

September 26, 2009

Customization is derived through explicit, stated preferences, while personalization is driven by both the explicit and implied – behavioral, demographic and brand specific information. How did the user get to the site (referral information like URL or search keywords), prior purchases, and onsite activity are key to driving relevance on a website.

Consider this, your brands’ website probably constitutes less than 0.5% of a visitors life experience, if you’re wildly successful… there’s a world of insight necessary and available to the purview of  your personalization scenario. A world that requires integration with a more comprehensive data set: your marketing database, third party data and analytic models to decipher it.

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Posted by Mark Ogne

Forrest Gump was a mass marketer

June 11, 2009

forrest-gump-chocolates“My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonnaget'”. Yeah, right… in a mass marketing spray and pray world, sure!  But  Lieutenant Dan…

It’s a marketers job to figure out which chocolates taste best and then figure out how to find more of just those. Most people would think this is a great place to stop. I think we should also go and figure out how to find bigger chocolates! Forget the box Forrest, pull up a truck!

mandm-persoWouldn’t be a great world if we could each go to a Godiva store and order a box with your name on it, with just your selection of chocolates… “I’d like a box of Mark Ogne, please”. You may not know this, but did you know you can order personalized M &M’s? What a cool idea… check it out!

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Posted by Mark Ogne