Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: advertising history, giants of advertising, raymond rubicam
Back in the day (and by that I mean around 100 years ago) Raymond Rubicam (founder of the famous Young&Rubicam) had a hard time getting clients to admit or even understand his impact on their business. Business back then had more to do with production and assembly lines than it had to do with sales, marketing and others.
These notions were not too popular with the big guys at the time but Raymond knew what he was doing. He knew his impact on the business he advertised was huge.
So he helped his clients hire the best sales managers around. He helped them see a new way of doing business. He opened their eyes. How did he do it? He trusted what he did. He left his mark on the clients he advertised. He helped them evolve. Most important – he didn’t quit. He did not settle for the second place either.
“Resist the usual” Raymond used to say. He encouraged copywriters and art directors in his company to change whenever needed. He was a genius and an innovator.
But that was than…
[to be continued]
Written by Mihai Dragan on Friday, April 10th, 2009 ( 4 responses )
Tags: brands, conversation, death of advertising, evolution, management, Marketing
I can safely assume that advertising as we know it is bound to disappear in the next 10-15 years. Why? Because it’s loud and boring. Useless most of the time.
The internet, our fastest media yet is a conversation. People talk, discuss and engage one another just like they do in the real world. The best online advertising does the same thing. Once in a while something, which I would define as conventional-to-online advertising comes in and bothers them. Screaming. Waving hands. Going all “look at me, I am here!” on the users.
Just like TV. Just like print. Just like outdoor advertising. All of them scream. I belong to a generation that was born with advertising in its current form and that can’t be tricked into “seeing” ads. We want what we want.
We will google before buying, read reviews, ask friends and google again. We need to trust a brand before engaging it. We need to bond with it. We need to know this brand gets close to us and has a chat whenever we feel like.
The advertising as we know it can’t provide this. And it goes beyond advertising. The changes companies need to make to survive are also in their marketing department, in their management attitude and just as well in the R&D department.
The death of advertising is coming. Long live the brand conversation.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: crm, customer relationship management, online marketing, salesforce automatition, salesforce.com, social crm, twitter
Wikipedia defines CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as “the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers”. People usually mistake the technology for the process and for good reasons: the companies that spend most on marketing the concept are the ones selling the technologies and want the concept associated to their brands.
The leading CRM software providers at the moment are SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com with Microsoft growing at a fast rate. Microsoft has actually the highest growth rate, followed by Salesforce.com . The first backed up by its financial power and the second backed up by innovation and flexibility.
It should be noted that “flexibility and innovation” are terms that should be taken with a pinch of salt. The software cannot outpace the process too much as it becomes unusable for the company adopting it.
The benefits
What is the CRM good for? Everything. As a company revolves around its clients a customer-centric approach in management would have huge benefits in any company.
Imagine running a company (well – in case you are not already running one). Start with the beginning: a small company, focused on every customer and willing to serve him or her as good as possible. This is doable when you have a customer base of 5, 10 or even 50 clients. But what happens when you have over 1000 clients, 2000 prospects and you are running large scale advertising or marketing campaigns? You must automate.
This is where the Customer Relationship management comes in. Both as a process and a technology.
Who puts the “Social” in Social CRM ?
Salesforce.com apparently. They have recently integrated Twitter in their platform (quite a nice product). Many of you might ask – why Twitter? Why such a small social network? Well, according to Compete.com, Twitter is not so small anymore. With around 54 million page views it is surpassed only by Facebook and Myspace.
The social networks are the hubs your customers congregate now. This is where they share their views, opinions, feelings, thoughts and a whole lot more.
Brands should tap in this vast resource. They should listen, understand and reach out for the new customers.
The Social CRM has emerged as companies look for non-intrusive but useful ways of integrating social networks and their users. What seemed like a distant shift in perception several months ago seems closer than ever with the new trends.
Have a look at a very interesting presentation regarding the subject, put together by Fabio Cipriani, a Senior Consultant at Deloitte Netherlands and author of Blog Corporativo.
Connecting the dots – Online Marketing and Social CRM
Online marketing is just a part of OCRM (Online Customer Relationship Management). Just like the classic marketing is for the classic CRM.
The trouble with online marketing is that it doesn’t get the credit it should. We, the interactive enthusiasts, are yet to prove overall efficiency. How else can we but with the help of the CRM and its social features. Altough the Social CRM has just started its journey I am sure we will start seeing a great adoption rate in the future.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: branding, crisis, long term, Marketing, oportunity, sales, short term
Why did I use VS between Brand building and Sales? Couldn’t they just team up? Can’t we have both of them in our marketing strategy?
Sure we can but in times of crisis management seems to focus on short term clear results and want to see sales figures going up or at least staying afloat. The longer term strategy of building brands, earning consumers’ hearts and adding intangible value to the company seems a little too “fancy” and expensive to be considered. But is it?
Short term sales versus long term vision
Crisis separates followers from leaders in the economic world and in the battle for mind and pocket share. Truly visionary brands innovate, invest and develop during the hard times. Today’s big brands are the ones that not only survived but made the most out of the difficulties they’ve encountered.
Short term tactics may add profit points but if we were to take into account the brand value losses companies cutting corners end up losing more than they’ve initially planned.
If everyone is doing something, that thing is probably wrong. I know it may seem risky but companies need to differentiate, even in terms of marketing strategy.
So, when your competitors are focusing on short term tactics, focus on tomorrow and build your strategy and brand around the bigger picture. The crisis may be the only oportunity you’ll get.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Friday, January 9th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: book review, branding, differentiate, Marketing, marty neumeier, the brand gap, zag
“Zag” is probably the book with the best title of the decade. Why? Because it says it all. You don’t need to read the book. Just the title.
I would like to say that Marty Neumeier is a great author (I loved The Brand Gap) but Zag is a book that should not have been written and sold. It’s a pity they had to cut down all these trees so people can read 192 pages of … nothing.
Instead of reading it, here’s the summary: “Differentiate from your competitors”. Doh!
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, December 1st, 2008 ( One response )
Tags: blogvertising, Interactive Advertising, real estate, recession, results, seo, web development
“You don’t make silk purses out of saw’s ears” says an old proverb. That goes very well with interactive advertising too.
While searching for new clients look for more than financial stats. Search for a deeper understanding of the services you are providing, a good management, a professional approach to your business relationship, chemistry and others.
True story: at some point we gained a new account, a very influent company in a fast growing domain. We made an one year deal and started working. We’ve implemented a new website, with some never-before features like an intelligent search engine that would register user’s preferences and recommend offers that would match these preferences, an easy to use layout and state of the art newsletter engine and many others.
We’ve done such a good SEO job that in less than four months the main categories would rank among the first three search results.
We’ve run a successful blogvertising and rich media campaign that helped the website gain exposure. The AdWords campaign was as efficient as it gets and users would spend more than 7 minutes on the websites, looking for offers and contacting sales representatives.
Overall the new business brought in by the website had grown from less than 5% to almost 50%. The traffic grew by more than 1000% and the newsletter registrants doubled. I would call this good interactive advertising.
But…The principal was a man that didn’t quite understand this “internet mumbo jumbo”. So, when the recession stroke he decided to cut the internet spending, although he was warned that this move would cut new deals by almost half. He did it anyway.
Among other great decisions was the layoff of other important members of the company that dared to disagree with him. As we were asked to do things that would harm their company we disagreed and closed the account.
We had one last invoice to collect and as I phoned the CEO last week he too resigned his position and was now currently with another company.
So you see…you can’t make silk purses out of saw’s ears. Focus on working for people that have the business ability to distinguish between personal choices and professional ones.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 ( 4 responses )
Tags: 2008 interactive trends, 2009 advertising predictions, communication groups, dentsu, havas, Interactive Advertising, interactive agencies, interactive agencies group, interactive communicaton, interactive vs conventional, interpublic, media convergence, omnicom, publicis, wpp
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the last year, you have already heard about this thing called “The Financial Crisis”. I am also sure there was nothing too joyful about it.
So – what is this Financial Crisis and how are we, as interactive advertising people, affected or helped by the monster?
The Basics
First of all I will get into the basics of the Financial Crisis, nothing too complicated, just a simple “Financial Crisis 101″. Here goes:
a. The Recession is NOT the Apocalypse.
Although you may have heard some rumors regarding this, there is nothing spectacular about recession. It’s just part of the usual economic cycle.
You know when you get a lot of money, and spend it on useless stuff? You borrow some bucks from your friends, only to give them back at the next pay check. That’s exactly what happens with American economy. Only on a larger level.
b. So, are the recession and financial crisis the same thing?
Well, no. Financial crisis is the thing that happens when your friends stop giving you money because you didn’t pay them back the last time. Also – you don’t have a job and the money you make can barely give you a decent living.
That’s pretty much USA these days. The recession usually happens on a period of 10 years. The country needs some money in excess, borrows from other countries and than pays back in the next 10 years.
60 years have passed since the USA financial super-bubble started to inflate. Guess what … it went “Pop!”. The crisis has just began and it will affect a lot of people next year too.
c. Where can I hide?
The bad thing about this is that the whole world will “benefit” from it. Some will win and some will lose. In the bigger picture, you can look at the Crisis as the “wealth redistribution program”. Probably China and India (unlike the USA, they have a rising economic trend) will gain more and more influence. Probably the world will invest less in cars and more in green technology (we already see the rising demand for anything that is “green”, and it was predicted that green technology will outpace the Internet growth in 2008).
For what I am concerned I am sure the world will invest more into Interactive Advertising and less in Conventional Advertising, starting 2009. Which brings us to…
The Interactive Advertising Industry in 2009
Basically, if you want a safe place to keep your money until the times get better, look for an interactive agency that showed a profit in the last year and has a growing trend. Invest there.
What are the stats ?
I’ve put together some data to get the conversation started:
- Business to Business marketers will increase their Internet spending by 16% in 2009, compared to 6% in conventional advertising, according to eMarketer;
- Small and Medium business will increase their online buying activities by 40% due to lower costs and better services;
- Top 100 Advertisers moved 1 billion dollars to Internet from the conventional media (a huge 33% growth, as reported by AdAge);
- TV Spending is still the king but is loosing the war, with a 4.2% decrease to 66.9 billions;
- China is the country with the most Internet Users in the world (253 million users) and loves mobile (according to the Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China, released in July 2008);
- Top ten UK Interactive Agencies have totaled a £ 304.608.921 turnover last year;
- 60% of the top 100 interactive agencies are independent.
These seemingly disparate data will lead us to some very interesting conclusions you might or might not agree on. Let’s see them.
We will have to learn Chinese
No self respective interactive agency won’t be able to compete in a globalized market without some .cn expertise. 253 million users (and rising) are not to be ignored. At the moment the things are not very clear there but I am sure the government will ease up on censoring the Internet, allowing it’s citizen to enjoy more virtual freedom, as well as a chance for Internet related jobs and services.
Many conventional agencies will die
It does sound a little rough but I am sure clients won’t allow too many unaccountable spendings in 2009 with the recession at its peak. Advertising spending will rise overall as the market will be more and more competitive but some agencies are just not trained for results.
The new interactive advertising
Interactive advertising has proved successful and many clients will need the same accountability in off line advertising as they have online. The theory of media convergence will prove itself in 2009. We will start seeing displays that record the users preference, billboards that target your mood and contextual TV advertising.
Global budgets handled by Interactive Agencies
Most interactive agencies are way more budget conscious than conventional ones. Clients love that and they might consider this move.
Conventional Agencies acquired by Interactive Agencies
Interactive agencies are now the Cinderellas of Advertising but the times are changing and I would bet on at least three huge take overs or mergers next year.
Huge advertising groups will start fading. At least one new Interactive Communication Group will rise.
The likes of WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis, Dentsu and Havas will have big problems trying to hold their position in the new market, as capital is scarce, clients are ever demanding and the companies they run are inflexible. I sense that there will be at least one group with a interactive-based business philosophy that will rise to challenge the giants. Who will that be?
The world needs results in these times of economic struggle. Conventional has lost its spark and Interactive Advertising is getting better and better. These “new” (some are over 10 years old) agencies are growing at a faster rate anyone has predicted, just as the Internet does. The future holds many secrets but one thing I’m sure of: the interactive advertising is here to stay.
If you would have to place your bets, what would you bet on ?
Written by Mihai Dragan on Friday, November 14th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: Interactive Advertising, new media, research
Research in advertising has been a praised tool for quite some time. David Ogilvy, the promoter of advertising research always said “Look before you leap”. How else would you know where to place your advertising, how to do it and where to look for results?
With Ogilvy dead in 1999 and traditional research methods proving rather inefficient online we should look for new ways of doing research for interactive advertising.
Research in the Interactive World
Research provides answers. Answers for your following online campaign, stats on users behavior, your expected conversion rate, needed budget and others.
These answers are harder to find online because the questions are a little (ok, a lot) different from conventional media. Back in the day the questions you had to answer to were ” Who ? (Spokesperson), Says What ? (Advertising Message), To Whom ? (Target Audience), How ? (Which Media Channel), With What Effect ? (Desired Outcome) ” (source).
These simple questions followed a simple rule: The advertiser sends a message which is received (or not) by the audience, through some kind of media and evaluates his results after. Times have changed and the process of sending messages has turned to dialogue , where people want to stay in touch constantly with their favorite brands.
Once upon a time brands were the all mighty companies imposing trends by mass communication tools like TV, Radio and Print. Along came the Internet, the new media, and everything changed. People were interacting with each other and wanted to do that with brands too. Companies had to give in and start talking rather than shouting.
Nowadays the trend is picking momentum off line too as customers demand better interaction. Mobile marketing helped this and I am sure the future holds other means of helping users interact.
So you see research, as a concept, has to change. It has to evolve. We have to follow conversations rather than messages. We have to understand people and their lives rather than “demographics”. We have to understand tribes, rather than opinion leaders.
Ask the right questions to get the right answers.
Research is based on questions. The best answers come from the best listeners, asking the right questions.
Here are a few questions you should take into account next time you will be doing interactive advertising research:
- Who is the person you’re talking to and who are his or her friends?
- How do you keep track of your conversation with your tribe ? (find more on the subject here)
- What makes you special ?
- Does your brand fit in the tribe you are talking to ?
- Where will your followers answers go to ?
- Is your conversation pleasant? Are people listening to your marketing? Do they trust you ?
- What are your target’s interests ?
These questions are the start to a clear view of where you stand. This is what you should know about your audience in order to communicate better, to receive better results and understand the market you are in.
The world is changing. So is Research.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, October 27th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: list, long tail, Marketing, social media, tribes
Nick Fell, planner at Ogilvy Advertising in London put together a list containing 10 pieces of content defining these days’ marketing reality.
You will find there the Long Tail Theory, the Tribes concept, 2008 State of Social Media and some others I am sure you will find interesting. Enjoy.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 ( One response )
Tags: australian, blogs, Marketing, top 100
Julian Cole, Social Media Strategist for The Population, has gathered a list of the best 100 Australian marketing blogs.
Number one is Bannerblog, probably one of the most popular blogs in the creative department of each and every interactive agency.
To have a chance making the list a blog had to either be written by an Australian or by someone living in Australia. I found out about this great resource reading London Calling, one of my favorite blogs, which made the list at number 7.
