The State of TV Advertising Now That the Super Bowl Is Over

On Sunday, millions of people watched 4-1/2 hours of Live TV.

Today, millions of people will do the same.

As covered in my previous post, despite the popular reporting that TV is Dead, the medium is actually alive, well — and changing.  Live TV viewing is holding steady at 4-1/2 hours per day.  Much of that viewing happens on an actual TV.  At the same time, audiences are adopting new ways to watch TV, like DVRs, OTT, Online and Mobile.  It seems like we have video everywhere.

It's all TV

In the same way this blog says "it's all advertising" I'd say "it's all TV" when it comes to these new ways of delivering video.  Maybe we should say "it's all Video".  Either way, it's part of a trend as illustrated below in Twenty Years of TV Innovation.

What Social Media Taught Me on Super Bowl Sunday

My last post led to some enlightening discussions on Twitter and LinkedIn about the so-called Death of TV.  One insight was that when many people say "Death of TV" they actually mean "Death of Cable".  Much of the press on this subject talks about the cord cutters, and who can blame them?  Cable TV's delivery model forces you to buy up to 200 channels when most people watch no more than 17.

The Future of TV is Personalization

Which is a good reason to cheer for SlingTV, HBO Go, Google Chromecast and the other services starting to become available along with Hulu, Amazon Prime and Netflix.  All of these allow audiences to choose exactly what they want, which is why we said the other day that the future of TV is Personalization.  There's one day a year when 114.5 million people all watch one event, but during the rest of the year they all watch various programs that interest or entertain them.

It's all TV.  As the chart below illustrates, technology is meeting the demand for new ways to see what we want, when we want it.  TV's not dead.  It's innovating, growing and continuing to be a part of our lives.

Are Social Media and SEM really "advertising"?

In an early post, you can read that “the ‘ad’ in Ad Majorem means all marketing communications, from social media to direct mail to Internet gaming to television commercials. To most consumer audiences all of these are advertising.”

Today we’re going to debate that statement a little.

Is Social Media advertising?

On The Social Graf blog, Erik Sass noted yesterday that in recent IPOs for LinkedIn and Zynga, advertising revenue was not a big factor. LinkedIn makes almost half of its money from headhunting and job-finding services; Zynga makes 80-90% of its revenue by selling virtual goods. Does this mean “advertising takes a back seat”?

The question is not whether Social Media is advertising or is putting it in the back seat. They have a symbiotic relationship; great advertising has always driven positive word-of-mouth. The only difference today is that social media has turbocharged word-of-mouth. Maurice Levy of Publicis tripped over this dynamic the other day when he said “Recommendation and endorsement from a friend is sometimes more powerful than the greatest ad.” No, not "sometimes" – always more powerful than the greatest ad.

Word-of-mouth is advertising – advertising we can only hope to influence, never control.

Is SEM advertising?

Meanwhile, over on AdAge’s DigitalNext column, Josh Shatkin-Margolis says we should “Stop Pretending That Search Engine Marketing is Advertising”. He actually made a great distinction in his second paragraph: “SEM is the worst form of advertising, but bear in mind that it is the best form of targeting.” True enough. No one will claim that unclicked search copy is effective. Cheap? Yes, as in “the impressions are free.” You get what you pay for.

Yet is there any reason a consumer would not call this advertising just because it neither promises nor delivers a memorable, persuasive message? I don’t think so. We’re splitting hairs with some of these discussions.

Another headline this week proclaimed that “Google Passes Yahoo in Online Display Advertising”. So are we going to say that Google’s online display is advertising, while the search copy just pixels away is not?

What is advertising? What isn’t?

A wise colleague, now retired, used to say, “Everybody’s selling something, boitshick.” This is true of both search and display. Social Media, too, although it’s a little different because we are counting on consumers to help us do the selling. To those consumers, however, it’s all advertising.

What is Hyper Island?

NEW YORK – This is the first of three days I’m spending at Hyper Island Master Class, a sort of boot camp for marketing and advertising people catching up on “Digital”. For more about Hyper Island, read the recent article in Fast Company, and a response of sorts published in Adweek.

Even having read about Hyper Island in advance, I didn’t know whether to expect a class in writing code for HTML5, or how to sign up for Twitter, or… well, I imagined a lot of possibilities.

Here is what I’ve gleaned so far, after the first morning’s agenda.

Change Management. While the curriculum features digital tools, case studies, best practices and important principles, the real topic of discussion is adapting to changes around us. This isn’t only a matter of increasing knowledge, it’s about increasing our ability to embrace the changes going on in our industry.

Communication is what’s changing. Digital is partly a range of media we must all learn, but its significance lies in the way it permits people to comment and connect much more rapidly than in the days of Ye Olde Marketing. Word of mouth has always been the most reliable form of marketing communication, and it’s more out of control than ever.

It’s not about how you sell something, it’s about what you sell. The old paradigm is “market what we can make”, creating ads with finely tuned messages, hoping for big awareness among a mass audience. What shatters this paradigm? Consumer experiences drive commentary far more authentic than what we can possibly say about our products or services, regardless of medium.

Time for lunch now. I’ll write more later. You can follow all the action on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #HIMC.

Gigantic Venn Diagram and the Rube Goldberg Machine

This past week I had lunch with a client for whom we are handling a multi-channel project including advertising, digital and retail, plus a collaboration with their public relations agency. We talked about the complexity of projects that juggle many strategies and much execution.

Gigantic Venn Diagram

We’ve mentioned the Gigantic Venn Diagram before (here, here and here) so it’s worth defining the term.

The Gigantic Venn Diagram is the complete range of channels available to marketers today. Every conceivable broadcast medium, digital application, retail program, PR initiative – it’s impossible to even list everything because new channels emerge every week.

Moreover, the Gigantic Venn Diagram is dynamic. Not only are new channels emerging, they are converging and moving in relationship to one another. Like any Venn diagram, the circles overlap, but in different combinations each time.

The overlap, in fact, is different from brand to brand, from project to project, depending on the strategy demanded by the business objective. You should never have the same diagram twice.

Making sense of the Gigantic Venn Diagram is the key challenge of any marketer today. It’s also known as channel planning, or in some places “comms planning”. You must have a well-defined business objective, a clear consumer insight, and a channel-neutral mindset.

Rube Goldberg Machine

Let’s say you’ve succeeded at writing a modern channel plan. Your Gigantic Venn Diagram will be the blueprint for a Rube Goldberg Machine. If you didn’t know, Rube Goldberg was an inventor who built contraptions of impossible complexity. Real-life examples include a popular Honda commercial and the children’s game “Mouse Trap”. My real-life examples are marketing programs that attempt to drive awareness, entice with sampling, engage online, and a host of other things that will sell more products.

All Rube Goldberg machines are tricky. Making the parts work together is a complex task of turning many strategies into much execution. It’s hard to draw Gigantic Venn Diagrams and build Rube Goldberg Machines, and not many teams succeed at both. The most spectacular failure in recent memory was the short-lived Enfatico, a one-stop agency consisting of different WPP resources created especially for Dell. A new example is Travelocity hiring the Publicis combo of Razorfish, Zenith and Leo Burnett. Also new and intriguing is Ruth, the new integrated services boutique of PR giant Edelman.

Can One Agency Really Do It All?

We addressed this question in a recent post (“Can One Agency Really Do It All for a Client?”) and also started a few LinkedIn and Twitter discussions to gain wider input. There seemed to be two camps: optimists and pessimists. Count me among the optimists, mainly because I’ve seen the magic of channel-neutral planning.

Still, it depends on what you mean by “all”. If we mean one agency handles channel planning or comms planning, yes, there are several agencies that can do that. If we mean one agency draws the Gigantic Venn Diagram and builds the Rube Goldberg Machine – well, then the field narrows considerably.

Wow! Now THAT was fast!

Headline, 28 April 2010: "Study: Marketing Departments To Reorganize."

Headline, 5 May 2010: "Mixed-Up Marketers: Execs Struggle With New Roles."

OK, ha ha. These two headlines are coincidental to one another, but both are really signs of the times. All of us struggle with continual changes in the media landscape (including retail), changes in our business models, and changes in how consumers choose to engage with our brands and products.

Here are the most interesting points from the two articles cited above.

• Three-quarters of global marketing leaders expect to reorganize their departments by the end of 2011, according to a new Forrester study.
• Why? The rise of digital and social media, plus "maladaptive" org charts that are slow to react to consumer needs, among other factors.
• Marketers share only half their data with Sales, and assume that Sales shares only half their data with Marketing.
• Among 500 marketers surveyed by Genius.com, 50% don't blog, 49% don't tweet, 25% don't use LinkedIn.

I wonder where they will be after the re-org? Readers?

Content, Relevance and just being a mensch

If you follow me on Twitter you know I used that platform over the holidays to conduct an experiment: What would happen if I signaled blog posts exclusively on Twitter, not using LinkedIn, Facebook, e-mail or any other means? It seemed like a good question since LinkedIn was driving most of my blog traffic even though I was consistently posting links on Twitter.

What did I learn?

Content

As previously posted, content matters most and it only matters if it matters to the recipient. Reviewing the Twitter generated traffic of the past two weeks, a reflective, end-of-year holiday time period, it seemed clear the post about goal-setting mattered more than the post about Twitter vs. LinkedIn. In the same way, a post about writing attracted new readers who saw #writing as the signal of a mutual interest. In other words, it was relevant to them.

Relevance

To say content matters also means the content is relevant. Relevance is a function not only of content but of placement. In other words, content may matter to you but it will only be relevant if you get the content at a moment when you are willing and predisposed to digest it.

Here was my own lesson in relevance. During the holidays I read an AdAge.com article about hiring and firing at ad agencies. One of the article comments suggested a link to some advice about finding a new job. I added a comment suggesting a link to my own advice about how to keep your job in 2010.

Boom goes the dynamite. The next day I had my highest-ever traffic for a single page, simply because people predisposed to the topic of job survival saw some additional helpful content. I wasn’t selling anything; I was just trying to be helpful.

The high traffic number was kind of fun for a moment, but it was illusory because many of the people stayed for less than a minute. The much more meaningful statistic was the number of new followers to the blog. In Ye Olde Marketing gross impressions mattered; in modern times it’s more about the relationships we start.

Just being a mensch

The cartoon above is Tom Fishburne’s tribute to a piece by Guy Kawasaki. These six types of Twitter users rang true for me based on almost three years experience. There was also a personal lesson, however. I realized that the perspective of my original experiment was type #1, The Brand trying to sell you a product. No harm done in this case since it’s just Steve’s blog but I will apply the lesson to my clients’ businesses. I’d rather be The Maven, but frankly that's not me; I’ve been blessed with many Mavens here at my agency (@scubachris, @chi_media_guy, @menocal, @lilmissjen, and of course the maven of them all). Instead my new year’s resolution on Twitter is to be The Mensch – someone who has some experience to offer for the benefit of those to whom the content matters and is relevant.

To most of you reading this post, the principles I espouse are not new – we’ve all read them in various online and offline business publications. Still, it’s much more meaningful for me to experience them for myself.

Twitter vs. LinkedIn

Thanks to many of you who follow me on Twitter for participating in an experiment the past day or so: to see the effect on Ad Majorem’s traffic by mentioning content only on Twitter.

I’ve been wondering about Twitter. When I first joined in April 2007, nobody else was using it. By the time I launched this blog just three months ago, Twitter was all the microblogging rage.

Yet LinkedIn has generated most of the blog’s traffic. In a way this is logical since LinkedIn and this blog are both devoted to business topics. Most of my contacts on LinkedIn would have an interest. The blog's content by nature will be more relevant to that audience.

Then again, many of my friends on Twitter have some connection to marketing and advertising, too. So why weren’t my tweets having the same effect as my LinkedIn status updates? To understand this a little better, I've stopped posting updates to LinkedIn for the past two days and used only Twitter.

Disclaimer

Do not try this at work. Most social media strategies do not rely on a single platform to start a dialogue with your target. In my case this is a low-risk experiment since it's just Steve's personal blog and not some new media venture funded with venture capital.

So what happened?

Overall traffic was about the same the past two days. LinkedIn's percentage of visits went down, but still accounted for 21.6% of visits based on leads posted last week. Twitter is on an upward slope, but still only 18.5% of visits. On the other hand, Twitter was the leader in pages per visit (1.44) and new visitors (61.1%). The biggest source of visits is still Direct Traffic -- people who come to the site by entering the URL or perhaps having it bookmarked -- holding steady at about 32.9% of visits.

Content matters

To start this experiment, I asked people to retweet a very generic notice: “a blog all about #marketing and #advertising”. Even though many of you retweeted it, the results weren't anything special. The same day, without any special effort, I tweeted something a little more intriguing: “The product we advertised will polish the award we won for advertising it.” The results were a little more intriguing, too: lots of retweets, strong pageviews, and new followers on the blog as well as on Twitter. Why? Content matters. If the content is pedestrian, not even retweets will generate interest. If the content is interesting, however, it will generate interest – and retweets. No big news there. Some rules of Ye Olde Marketing still apply in the New Media Universe.

I’m going to continue using the Twitter-only system for the next couple of weeks and see what happens. This will be a test of my copywriting ability. If you like what you read and think others would, too, then please retweet. Otherwise just move on to whatever the Muppets are singing this week.

A big "thank you" to those who have helped so far. Please continue the karma by following these kind souls: @adlandjones, @TheYaffeGroup, @MargotMHorn, @robbiew, @joshi_mridul, @maedrolet, @robbdotcom, @saman325, @eermm, @mjulius4, @lilmissjen, @DrumsForAds, @Absatzlehre, @michaelleander, and of course my corporate masters @Draftfcb.