How to Survive the Ad Biz in 2013

This past year I had lunch with a friend who used to run his own agency.  He closed it ten years ago and built a brand strategy consultancy.  Although he calls on marketing executives, and sees agency people in meetings, he was remarkably removed from goings-on in the advertising business.  Stopping for a moment, he thought, and said:  “My overall impression is ‘turbulence’.”

It was either this...
or start in the mail
room.

We won’t argue with that:  Turbulence.  Clients continue changing agencies at a rapid pace.  Assignments are spread among different agencies, either within or across holding companies.  It’s a buyer’s market, with agency fees generally down.  There were more layoffs last week, and many others change jobs voluntarily.  How do you survive all this turbulence?

It’s not just advertising.  Also this year, Fast Company announced “The Four-Year Career” and advised that “career planning is an oxymoron”.  The gist was that you may as well plan for constant career change because it’s going to happen to you anyway.  Their modern definition of a career path:  “Tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all the while.” 

How to Survive the Ad Biz in 2013

This blog made a similar point in How To Get Ahead in Advertising:  “Advancement is not so much a straight line through one discipline, but tacking like a sailboat across various disciplines.  We will always need specialists, but it’s the generalists who will advance the farthest in agencies of the future.”

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, there were fewer specialties, therefore, fewer specialists, so becoming a generalist was more achievable.  Most of the ways to reach consumers only reached them, i.e., with one-way messages from advertisers to audiences.  Today, there are many, many specialties and new ones invented all the time.  Media has multiplied and specialists have proliferated.

You’re already a specialist by virtue of what you do every day.  Copywriter.  Art director.  Social media community manager.  Web developer.  Shopper marketer.  Account executive.  Everyone shows up for work to do a specific thing.  You probably don’t expect to be doing that job forever.  How do you become a generalist, too?

Be Curious

First, be curious.  While you’re doing that job, have good peripheral vision, paying attention to how others contribute.  If you’re at an agency with many different services, take advantage of the many opportunities to learn.  If you’re at a specialist agency, for example a digital shop, you can still learn because by nature the work will intersect with other disciplines.  For example, your mobile app may also be part of a shopper marketing program.  You can also read about a couple of disciplines you haven’t learned yet.  Pick a couple of topics and focus on those.

Be Courageous

Second, be courageous.  Take a step outside the comfort zone of your day-to-day activity and try a new specialty.  I’ve been impressed by the willingness of up-and-comers to move from one discipline to another.  We even ran a program that rotated account executives over a two-year period among advertising, direct, digital, shopper and experiential.  More experienced people should do this, too.  I had a colleague who took his 25 years writing successful TV commercials and applied it to writing all the SEM copy we did for a large client.

Capabilities lead to Possibilities

Over time, you will go from specialist in a couple of areas to generalist who can see the big picture.  That kind of perspective gives you two super-powers.  One is that you are obviously more marketable.  The other is that you are more effective.  You’re not just a specialist playing your position well, you have a sense of how the other parts of the marketing program come together.  Ultimately, you’ll be qualified for a job to centrally run those interdisciplinary marketing efforts, either as a client, creative director, or agency account lead.

Put another way, capabilities lead to possibilities.  You need possibilities.  You could lose your job, it could bore you, or it could cease to exist, but chances are you won’t be doing the same job four years from now.  The trick isn’t just to survive, it’s to survive by growing along with the industry.

Advertising Jumps the Shark, Gets Back on Track

Does content deliver advertising or does advertising deliver content?

Joe Mandese at MediaPost has the answer for you, in a piece headlined “Advertising Jumps The Shark: Becomes Conduit For Content”.  

But first let’s get through that headline.

Jumping the Shark

Numerous readers pointed out in the comments section that the headline misused the term “jump the shark”.  Any student of pop culture knows the story:  On the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, Fonzie water skis over a shark, a moment now seen as the point where the show lost its original purpose – a fond look back at the 1950s – and got just plain silly.

Let’s first admit that the advertising industry has jumped the shark many more times than Fonzie, before or since.  We’ve jumped the shark via pointless line extensions, bad strategies, failed campaigns and poor planning.  Mea culpa.

Conduit for Content

In this case, the alleged shark jump is the launch of a new digital advertising platform that pulls existing Internet content into online ads.  It seems like a simple concept – link ads and content – but there’s a bit more involved.

The platform’s purveyor, Kontera, claims to be able to identify the most relevant content and serve it in web display, social and mobile ads.  That’s a bit more complicated than a shark jump – and more revolutionary.

3 Reasons Why it Matters

Mandese’s right, this is an important development the entire advertising industry should watch.

1.  It makes advertising useful, informative and/or entertaining.  These are the three things audiences seek in any medium.  For some reason we’ve been relearning that lesson the hard way in the digital advertising world.  In this case, Kontera claims to be supplying content that’s already popular, and hence should make ads more relevant.

 
2.     It adds sanity to online advertising.  Most web display advertising is the opposite of shooting fish in a barrel – more a minnow in the ocean.  You run ads that get clicked at infinitesimally low rates, paying only for those very small results.  Matching truly relevant content to truly relevant ads could significantly shift the equation of supply and demand.
 
3.     It challenges the distribution model.  Whether on TV, online or in-store, content normally is a means of distributing advertising.  That is, a :30-spot interrupts the program you were watching.  Kontera allows advertisers to buy ad space and use it to distribute all kinds of content.  Extrapolating that beyond web display ads, you can see how it would change journalism, entertainment and information in general.

Fond Look Back at the 1950s

If you read further down in the comments section of Mandese’s article, you’ll see an arcane conversation between him and me about whether it was also true in the 1950s that “advertising (was) a means for distributing content,” much like Kontera.  My point is that Radio and TV shows of the period, like soap operas and Texaco Star Theater, were also examples of brands delivering content.  (Mandese disagreed.)

It doesn’t really matter.  The only thing it proves is that for the past fifty years we’ve been force-feeding audiences our advertising when they wanted to see their content.  Up to now web display ads have followed that same model.

If, as an industry, we succeed in reversing that, and make advertising a means for distributing content, we won’t be jumping the shark.  We’ll be back on track.

More Unusual Overlap on the Gigantic Venn Diagram

Often on Ad Majorem we discuss the Gigantic Venn Diagram, a concept that captures how the media landscape continues to change all the time and how consumers use media in a lot of different combinations.

This morning I’d like to direct your attention to a good article that should have been datelined from “An Unusual Overlap on the Gigantic Venn Diagram.” No, not The Twilight Zone. The QR code.

Yes, the QR code. It’s been criticized for a number of reasons, mainly due to its misuse by clueless marketers who insist on putting it in useless places like 30-sheet billboards along major highways.

David Henkel points out, however, that a QR code can be an effective direct mail tactic. Now that U.S. smartphone penetration exceeds that of feature phones, it's easier to imagine someone using a QR code to get more information about the product or offer they see on a piece of paper.

I hasten to add that like all technology, QR codes are not a solution unto themselves. Consumers will only respond to them if marketers communicate something relevant enough to cause a response.

So, here’s an overlap on the Gigantic Venn Diagram to think about: Direct Mail, Mobile, and Websites. It hits all of the Three Ds (Digital, Direct and Data) but better still, it recognizes how consumers use media.

Thanks to my colleague Patrick Moorhead for pointing out Henkel’s article.

The Role of Creative Production

Exploding Growth in Media Formats Puts More Demand on Creative Production

It’s a cruel quirk of advertising lingo when financial terms creep into normal business practices and hijack their identity.

One such example is “below the line.” In the days of Ye Olde Marketing most agency invoices were simple calculations of a 15% commission. An accountant, faced with expenses that had to be billed as one-time fees, drew a line on the invoices and listed the non-commissionable items below it. The commission structure hardly exists anymore, but the important work of Digital and Promotion gets stuck with a moniker that connotes second-class status.

Production: "Non-Working?"

In a similar way, Media and Production expenses are defined on some budget documents as “Working” and “Non-Working.” Production is said to be “Non-Working.” More than a few agency producers have complained about this term, especially in an era of tight budgets. Anything called “Non-Working” is just begging to be reduced.

At the very same time in history that Production budgets are squeezed, its role is more important than ever. As a colleague succinctly put it the other day: Exploding growth in media formats puts more demand on creative production.

Production costs were predictable in the past. Each discipline, be it Advertising, Promotion or Direct Marketing, knew what kind of programs they could expect to do. The biggest variable was a higher cost for a more elaborate TV commercial, in-store display or mailer.

Two Kinds of Complexity

In modern times you see two kinds of added complexity. One is that there are many new channels of communication, or as my colleague put it, “media formats.” As we’ve posted before, even “TV” isn’t that simple because it entails various online versions on top of the standard broadcast :30.

The second kind of complexity is that if we truly start a project with a channel-neutral or media-neutral approach, we won’t know ahead of time what mix of old and new formats we’ll be producing.

How to Cope with Exploding Growth in Media Formats

Here are a couple of suggestions on how to cope with this new dynamic.

Consistent Brand Voice. If your brand reinvents itself every year or every quarter, you not only risk confusing your consumer, you make creative production less efficient. Even the most routine IMC program these days has many moving parts across Advertising, Retail and Digital. A consistent approach will make it easier to produce things on the fly. To be clear, the goal is not cookie-cutter creative, it’s running a tight strategic ship.

Plan ahead. A digital agency creative director joked to me once that IMC stands for “I already Made the Commercial.” Too often, TV artificially drives the process. Instead, use to your advantage the long lead times demanded by retailers. A good client-agency partnership will plan one year ahead of time for best synchronization of efforts.

Media neutral production. Starting a project with a consistent brand voice and one year of lead time is useless if you then just assign production silo by silo. How can the various specialists help one another? At some point each one has to tend to her own work, but starting everyone from the same place makes it easier to synchronize.

Be a cost-control maniac. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: That’s why God created Procurement. As marketers, however, we have a responsibility to deliver great work at a reasonable budget. Challenge yourself and your colleagues to find new ways to save money. (At some point in the near future we’ll elaborate on this point.)

Any other experiences, suggestions or questions?

3 Reasons You Should Care About the BzzAgent Acquisition

Last week Boston-based BzzAgent, a word-of-mouth marketer with extensive analytical capabilities, was acquired by dunnhumby, a direct-response marketer, also with extensive analytical capabilities, that in turn is also owned by U.K. retailing giant Tesco. (American readers should know that dunnhumby works extensively in the U.S. with Kroger.)

Bzz you should notice

I’ve worked directly with BzzAgent, and it’s always been a great experience. The starting point of their capabilities is a network of some 800,000 Bzz agents, consumers who receive product samples from manufacturers hoping to generate positive word-of-mouth. Just search on Twitter for #ImaBzzAgent, #BzzAgent or @BzzAgent to see the conversation they drive. As their CEO Dave Balter has pointed out to me in the past, BzzAgent is more than a network of “advocates,” they truly understand social media and analytics.

To oversimplify a bit, BzzAgent is great at driving consumers toward brands, and dunnhumby is great at closing the sale at a particular retailer – which is also known as shopper marketing. This is a powerful model for manufacturers and retailers alike.

3 reasons you should care about the BzzAgent acquisition

1. Shopper Marketing holds Social Media accountable. As Balter put it in an interview last week, social media “is still in the world of ‘likes’ and clicks, but substantial budgets just don’t come from that. Shopper marketing, on the other hand, is the ultimate measurement vehicle. It’s a thousand percent about ROI.” Yesterday someone posted on Ad Majorem that social media is just media, not necessarily an advertising vehicle, and they’re right if no one knows its effect on sales.

2. The path to purchase still ends at bricks and mortar. I’ve posted before that Social = Mobile. If you accept that premise, and observe that shoppers carry mobile devices into stores, we can also say Social = Retail. Apple and Google mobile platforms offer plenty of apps for looking up product information. Twitter is a secondary market for online coupon offers. At some point the cash register rings and its usually at a physical store.

3. There’s a trend forming. Not only did dunnhumby acquire BzzAgent but Walmart acquired Kosmix, which for lack of a better term we’ll call a “social commerce” platform. Read more about Kosmix here, here and here. And then there’s Groupon, which is also a blend of social media, shopper marketing and e-commerce. In short, retailers are figuring out how to harness the power of the Internet.

Perhaps now someone will figure out foursquare’s reason for being.

Hyper Island II: The Network

NEW YORK – Every day at Hyper Island starts with a “morning reflection”. You get a chance to stop, consider what you’ve learned and how to apply it. Then you share insights in group discussions. It’s mandatory to take a lot of notes, which I’m repurposing here as a blog post.

Networks are the Base Unit of Communication

I learned a lot on Day 1 but the one thing that most changed the way I think was the concept of Networks. Your Network is the list of people you choose to read, listen to, and interact with.

Our lecturer, Mark Comerford, said this: “Networks are the base unit of communication. If you don’t reach the Network, then you don’t reach me.”

That was a radical idea for me, not because of my experience with mass audiences, but because I made a mental shift some years ago from mass audiences to one-to-one communication. My newer paradigm has been that Digital, Data and Direct all work together, allowing us to engage people in ways relevant to them, and measure the results.

In a bit of self-analysis, I realized that I had seen each individual person as their own gatekeeper – and that is true, by the way. What I had been missing is the fact that each individual person relies on their Network to be a gatekeeper. The implication for marketers is to figure out how you are going to offer something of value to these Networks.

That value is what matters to the Network of people. The currency of the Network is stuff that’s interesting to its members.

What My Network Taught Me This Morning

After a few minutes of journaling, we sat in a circle – a Network, if you will – and shared our insights.

My good friend and colleague, Terry Corrigan, shared something that anyone coming from a traditional ad agency background, big or small, would want to hear.

Terry observed that “the digital space isn’t about selling, it’s about being useful.” Many of you know this. He went on to describe how “being useful” builds brand equity.

Many traditional agency people and their traditional clients think about brand equity as a function of the TV advertising. What we say, how it looks, what products we choose to advertise – all of these contribute significantly to a brand’s equity.

The same applies to digital programs. Best Buy’s Twelpforce and Zappos customer service build brand equity. Motrin’s ignorance of the space hurt their brand equity. Brand equity is your reputation.

This point is significant because many clients ask about the ROI of Social Media. Instead of dissembling because we don’t know how to calculate the ROI, we should make the impact on brand equity part of the answer.

Time again for lunch. You can follow our Hyper Island Master Class on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #HIMC.

Direct Marketing will continue to influence advertising

Last night the Chicago Advertising Federation honored Howard Draft with its Silver Medal Award for lifetime achievement, which honors contributions to the local ad community as well as the community at large. The venue was a large dinner at The Drake Hotel and it was fantastic to see a lot of people I’ve worked with over the years.

Howard has obviously achieved a lot, including a series of agencies with his name on the door, which was a running joke throughout the evening’s remarks. It’s not all chest-pounding, though; Howard’s myriad agencies have been very successful. (Full disclosure: If you didn’t know, I work at Draftfcb.)

Direct Marketing in the Past

Most of Howard’s agencies were of the direct marketing variety. Back in the day, “Direct” had always been a little too scientific for most of the big ad agencies. Only David Ogilvy called it his “secret weapon”. The other agencies knew it was powerful, but as Rick Fizdale said last night, “What I knew about Direct could fit in a thimble.”

Fizdale, former Chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett, told the story of how he led an effort to acquire Kobs & Brady, the 1980s powerhouse Direct agency, and in the process met Howard for the first time. The acquisition didn’t happen, and I would never do justice to Fizdale’s version of the story, so I won’t try to retell it here.

One line of the speech is worth pointing out, however. Fizdale referred to “The advertising I practiced and the advertising (Howard) had mastered.” He was comparing traditional brand advertising and Direct Marketing, but what I loved about this line was how casually and naturally he declared both disciplines to be advertising.

Direct Marketing in the Future

Howard, in his acceptance speech, told how he failed to get a job at an ad agency when he was first starting out, and instead landed at a Direct agency. “I firmly believe,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here tonight if I hadn’t gone into direct marketing.”

This is true for a couple of reasons. One is that Direct allowed him to be the entrepreneurial guy he is, outside the stultifying structures of most traditional ad agencies. The other is that he prepared himself for the turn-of-the-century shift toward accountability in marketing. Direct had always been accountable.

This trend will continue, unabated, for as far as any of us dare predict. We’ve posted before about Direct, Digital and Data, and how you can’t have one without the others. The Digital Age is really the continuation of the Direct Age. Data gives us the ability – and the burden – to be accountable. In this way, Direct Marketing will continue to influence advertising.

Book Review: The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr
W. W. Norton & Co., 276 pages

Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, explains his theory that the Internet, like all forms of media before it, affects our brains by changing how we think and communicate. In the specific case of the Internet, this effect is to shorten our attention span.

Casting all irony aside, I will now blog about it, in hopes you will have the patience to read an entire book review. Ready? Here goes.

While Carr does believe Internet use reduces the attention span, he actually has a more elaborate thesis: Throughout history, humankind has created many tools, measures and media, all of which literally changed the way we live, usually bringing some advancement to civilization. The human brain adapts to each of these advancements. Neurologists have proven the brain to be plastic in nature, operating according to the routines by which we live. This principle explains muscle memory, addiction, and how we communicate.

The Shallows lasts ten chapters, with the charming irony that Carr interrupts some of the chapter transitions with “a digression”, perhaps to underline his overall point that few of us can stay on track anymore. Nevertheless he stays on track, starting with a personal perspective, then plunging deep into the science of neurology, followed by the history of communication media, and finally tying the two together to show that the Internet, like all media before it, influences our ways of thinking. It’s a compelling case.

This book is thick with science and history, all presented as the engaging story of our journey through oral traditions, cuneiform, papyrus, paper, books and the Internet. Carr sees the benefits of all these media. He embraces the Internet, pointing out how it not only stores information efficiently, but has developed our skills at locating the right information. We may not remember the Dewey Decimal System, because we don’t have to -- and that’s the danger. Carr quotes more than once a caution expressed by Socrates that writing down texts, instead of memorizing them, was “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”

Carr is neither Luddite nor Cassandra. Most of the books’ press coverage pursued a “bad Internet” storyline, but in reality Carr sees “the Net” (as he calls it) as simply another invention that’s not only a product of our brains but an influencer of how we use them. In that way the story is a bleak one for bibliophiles. A key finding is that just a decade and a half of Internet usage has reduced our ability to digest long-form literature such as an essay or a book. More than that, Carr laments in a personal observation, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” There’s a kind of resistance-is-futile feel to this and other passages of the book.

Carr also captures a debate between Determinists, who say out technology affects our history, and Instrumentalists, who say our history affects our technology. Carr seems to side with the Determinists, based on his analysis of science and history. Science tells us the brain is “plastic”, forming neural pathways based on how we employ it most frequently. History tells us that we have always molded our brains with each new technology, including the map, the clock and the printing press. It’s worth remembering how revolutionary books were as the Renaissance dawned: “To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object.”

Pursuing the Determinist angle, Carr's examination of the Internet focuses on linked text and its cascading cross-references. Reading a page in a physical book leads merely to the next page. Reading a page on the Internet can lead to hundreds of other pages with just one or two clicks. Chapter 7, “The Juggler’s Brain”, explores how Internet multitasking erodes comprehension. You can access all sorts of data but not all at one time. The software you’re using to read this review isn’t called a “browser” for nothing.

Google comes in for some criticism in The Shallows for its über-quantitative culture. Google’s very business model is based on the number of choices people make, so the more links we click, the more data we feed to the beast. It occurred to me while reading this passage that SEM is like direct marketing on Red Bull. Instead of sending in a single BRC, the consumer votes early and often, every time they click.

Why this matters to Marketers

How does The Shallows matter to marketers? I see two implications.

The first implication is how we train ourselves as professionals. The Internet isn’t detrimental unless it becomes our exclusive way of working. The antidote to Carr’s dystopian view is a balanced use of various media, with a return to more contemplative experiences. Reading is solitary and the Internet is interconnected – you’re never alone with your thoughts. We need balance.

The second implication is that we are marketing to a consumer population that increasingly lacks this kind of balance. The advent of social media will drive short attention spans. How can we engage consumers in an environment like this? It won’t be easy. We can only do so much to influence society, but just going with the flow doesn’t do much good. Balance your messages.

I’m glad you stayed with me to the end of this book review. You probably realize that I recommend reading The Shallows, preferably the physical book. You may not have realized that in tribute to the book, this review contained no hypertext links whatsoever.

Outputs vs. Outputs

A former colleague, Miguel Gonzalez, made this statement about mobile marketing at NATPE 2010 last week in Las Vegas:

“Mobile is the enabling device constantly in the possession of every consumer,” he said. “Instead of counting clicks, look at engagement metrics to measure how you’re doing in the marketplace.” (See the full article here on MobilizedTV.com.)

There are Outputs -- and then there are Outputs. It's not the total impressions that matter, it's how engaged someone was with your content. In Ye Olde Marketing we cared mostly about gross impressions; in modern marketing we care about engagement as well as impressions.

You clicked your way to this blog entry, but what I really care about as a publisher is that you read this far into the text. Do I look at hits per day? Sure. The numbers that matter, however, are new followers who took the time to sign up, time spent on the site, pages viewed and comments written. (A lot of this resulted from my Christmas holiday experiment.)

Miguel's statement was about mobile marketing, but I would argue it applies to all modern marketing. Measurement tools permit us to understand engagement much better than we did before.

Check out Miguel's new blog, Depth on Demand, now appearing on Ad Majorem's blogroll.

Message, Media, Creative

My first-hand lesson about how social media messages depend on content and relevance, posted on 11 January, reminded me of a successful client we worked with in the late 1990s.

This client had his own formula for marketing: Message, Media, Creative. The idea was to start by figuring out what you wanted to say (Message), where is the place to say it (Media), and how to say it in a way memorable, convincing, and relevant to the medium (Creative).

This formula works as well today as it did way back in the 20th Century. The greatest channel-neutral plan or the most entertaining creative don't mean bubkes if the message isn't appealing.

A modern example of this principle is the above Google diagram* describing how your SEM copy is everything when inviting consumers to your cause. It's actual advice is: "A successful link bait can increase inbound links, traffic and brand awareness."

In English: If you have a strong message, suitable for SEM and write it well, you can meet your objective.

* Hat tip: the blogress Little Miss Jen.

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.

The Three Ds of modern marketing

There are Three Ds of modern marketing you dare not ignore: Digital, Direct and Data.

Yesterday's post about the "constant process" of online media ("Digital" to some of us), got me thinking about the Three Ds, which have been a recurring theme lately in my daily work.

The "constant process" of Digital means that you don't just launch a campaign and see what happens. You launch, measure and optimize.

This is exactly the same with Direct, the second "D". When I was an AE at Leo Burnett we proposed to our client an inbound telemarketing program ("an 800 number" to some of us). Burnett's direct marketing department was new, and we had hired an incredible talent in Tom Collinger, now a professor at Northwestern University. His words to the client stick with me to this day: "If you launch a program like this, it's a commitment. You never really turn it off."

Direct, like Digital, is an ongoing process. The whole purpose is to establish a relationship that makes your brand or product line meaningful enough to a consumer that they will continue to receive and respond to your messages. Increasingly they will send messages of their own, which also have to be measured.

Both Digital and Direct depend on Data, the third "D". The measurement and optimization is all performed based on how consumers respond to your message, and that response is more measurable than ever. As Lester Wunderman recently (under)stated: "The science of data has really built (the direct marketing) business."

Not only must we recognize these Three Ds of modern marketing, we are practically compelled to use them in combination. It would be inadvisable to run a Direct program without Digital and impossible to run one without Data.

These couldn't be a Venn Diagram because the circles would be right on top of one another. I prefer to think of these Three Ds as a 6-4-2 double play combination in baseball, like Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance.

Whatever the right analogy is, these are certainly the right combination. Historically, marketing has been based on events that we execute, that succeed or fail, and that teach us lessons to apply next time. In the modern era we can learn those lessons in real time and adjust accordingly, driving up the sales curve as we go.

Online Media is a Process, not an Event

The above headline is my revision to a statement by Seth Godin that generated some Twitter buzz today. Seth wrote: "The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations: It's a process not an event." That's a concise and brilliant thought.

If I may edit a little, the same observation applies to all online media. Online Media is a process, not an event.

The diagram above illustrates this point. Traditional media requires a marketer and an agency to plan, buy and execute. Online media -- and yes, social media -- requires steps beyond execution.

Those added steps are to measure, optimize and revise. It's a constant process. That "constant process" is the difficult part for most organizations, because it requires a sustained effort throughout the marketing timeline and beyond. You don't just launch and then watch the sales roll in (or not).

I've provided a bit more explanation of what the "constant process" entails in this presentation on SlideShare. Even so, it's just the start. My next post will elaborate on what comes next.

"Oh -- were we supposed to prove the results of what we did?"

Measurement and accountability are favorite topics of mine because they are the keys to the future of our business. Technology now permits us to know a lot more about the results of what we do.

Even so, it seems many executives don’t want to know the results. Perhaps they don’t trust the mysterious black box marketing mix analyses that impugned their efforts in the past. Perhaps the idea of understanding an algorithm (or even spelling the word) is intimidating or boring. Or maybe it’s just a lack of familiarity with the methods old and new we can all use to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

We’d all better get familiar fast. Even if we provide the smartest strategy and the greatest creative, it won’t mean much without analytics. As described in the short history of advertising, there are plenty of consultants who are willing to fill the void.

The good news is that we have a lot of options for measurement. Here are just three, plucked from the news this week alone.

1. It’s possible to measure TV advertising’s effect.

Let’s start with some fuzzy math. Or, in the words of Lucas Donat, “fuzzy analytics”. Donat wrote this week about a method of measuring TV advertising’s effect on sales. It’s very simple math: establish a baseline that estimates what sales would be if you did not advertise for the time period in question. What’s the baseline? That's the fuzzy part. You are making a 21st Century dart throw, a guesstimate. Why not? You have to start somewhere. As Donat explains, you must attend to this model over time and learn its rhythms, constantly measuring your actual sales curve to understand the marketplace effect.

This is very old-school, but it is absolutely acceptable math. Years ago when I worked on McDonald’s we used this model every single month to understand whether Two Big Macs for $2 was driving a sufficient lift in transactions to justify the lower average check we expected from the discount. Step one, under the tutelage of McStatistician Larry Knodle, was to establish a baseline. We treated these monthly case studies very seriously, and referred back to them for the planning of each new program. You’ve never known accountability, by the way, until you’ve explained store sales and profit to a committee of QSR franchisees.

2. David Ogilvy’s “secret weapon” should now be standard equipment.

I didn't mention that Lucas “here’s-how-to-measure-TV” Donat is actually a direct marketing guru, and one imagines he is well-schooled and experienced in all of the measurement tools of that trade. Draftfcb, my employer, is the result of a merger between an ad agency and the world’s premier direct marketing agency. I love the way my colleagues from the former Draft think about measurement; it’s a product of decades measuring their work in direct marketing. Before the merger, direct marketing was something I only read about. A great example was “Ogilvy on Advertising”, David Oglivy’s 1983 survey of the craft, which included a chapter titled “Direct mail, my first love and secret weapon”. It’s either quaint or prophetic that in just the third paragraph he mentions “computers” as a major advancement in the discipline.

On that note, I highly recommend this article in DMNews that summarizes how direct marketing has been transformed in the past 30 years by technology. It is a wonderful, concise retelling of the ways direct marketing has come in to its own. There are lots of quotes from bold-faced names in the industry. Howard Draft remembers the 1980s as a time when "we started to play around with quantitative media analysis." A quote from Lester Wunderman says it all: “The science of data has really built our business.” Interestingly, the article never mentions the words “measurement” or “accountability”.

3. Isn’t Digital supposed to be measurable?

This morning there was an article about IRI, Dynamic Logic, ComScore and X+1 teaming up to offer “CPGConnects”, which would go beyond the marketing mix analyses mentioned above. (The article helpfully notes that MMAs are “CPG’s ROI of choice”.) This new venture would analyze consumer purchase data that could be used to plan more effective online campaigns. Part of the news here is that CPGConnects would tie purchase data to consumer segments such as loyalists and switchers, and see how these individual segments respond. An intriguing example was the diagnosis of a packaged-goods brand campaign that attributed sales lift to incremental purchases by existing customers, as opposed to bringing in new buyers.

The article also notes that scale will be a challenge for CPGConnects, as in: most CPG digital campaigns are way smaller than the broadcast advertising budgets. This will change quickly in the next five years as ad messages are delivered digitally (pre-roll, digital OOH, etc.).

I remember reading an interview with Coke CMO Joe Tripodi a few years ago, when he was in the same role at Allstate Insurance, in which he bemoaned the lack of uniform metrics for digital campaigns. It’s true that Dynamic Logic and DART offer different ways to measure what your online campaigns are doing. In my view that’s a good thing, because at this early point in the History of Internet Advertising we need more than one reference point to measure the results of what we do.