The more options that we can find to reach a consumer, we, as advertisers will most likely try if it’s in the right context. Most large brands have leveraged billboards, print, TV Commercials, Social Media, Display, Email or Paid Search at this point, in some way or form. So how can a strong brand ensure effective communication in all of these areas, and streamline messaging effectively and quickly to consumers to the point of purchase? Ideally, without creating any distractions for the consumers.
Try creating a “Brand Board” online for all of your advertisers and partners to access. Brands that can keep the conversation going internally will come out on top. Advertisers need to know what brands are doing across all mediums so that display ads have the same tone as commercials, and commercials have a way to tie consumers back online. Consumers, male and female, young and old, are spending more and more time online. That said, brands need to find a way to connect the dots offline and finish their experience or picture perfect message online.
We know a lot about today’s consumer: their gender, how often they buy, their income, age and where they go before and after they visit your site. We also know that consumers are moving extremely quick today, muti-tasking like we’ve never seen before. Having the right message at the right time is crucial for advertisers – more than ever. Creating a relevant connection from offline to online and even online to online has never been more important. This brings us to our example below.
We clicked on an online ad for Mobil 1 performance oil offering proven performance for up to 15,000 miles. The display ad we found was targeted, simple and clean. The landing page was VERY text heavy with no connection of the “Next Service Date” graphic from the messaging we saw in the banner ad. True, the banner takes me to a page where we can read about oil, but it still seems disjointed. The page does not contain the same theme or language as the display ad. Have we lost the ability to quickly reach the 18-34 year old male who may be looking for coupons to quickly print out to run to the nearest store after seeing a very similar ad on television?
Could the “Brand Board” have connected the display team with the landing page team and created a better experience for the consumer? We ask brands to think about this. Big brands that realize they have a responsibility to create a seamless interaction throughout their online and offline campaigns will have a leg up on the competition.
Brands know that their marketing dollars are going to go a lot further with a campaign that takes consumers to an end to end experience.
“Mobile Web” is generating an inordinate amount of buzz in the streets these days. The cause: smartphones. Such phones as the iPhone, HTC EVO, Blackberry, and Nexus One are changing how people view and access the web. The increasing amounts of users are causing websites to cater to these mobile devices due to smaller screen resolution and browser limitations. With these smartphones getting more and more popular, websites must look to new development and designs to create more compatible ways for user interactions while staying within the confines of their domain.
Development for mobile devices is about speed and compatibility. This is getting easier with new mobile browsers supporting HTML5 and CSS3 standards. HTML5 gives developers the ability to write less code and support web videos without the need of Flash; which some phones, such as the iPhone, are not supporting. CSS3 allows developers to use codes to create website elements rather than rely on excessive images which take more time to download. With these two new technologies, developers are able to create richer mobile websites and applications that accommodate users without being limited by the smartphone that a user may have.
When it comes to designing for mobile devices, it is about user interaction and understanding the fundamentals of mobile web design. Remember that even though mobile devices are getting larger screens with better resolution and have the ability to switch to horizontal viewing mode, not all sites are designed FOR mobile. Making a website “mobile friendly” is not the same as designing a mobile website!
Here are a few things that you should keep in mind while designing for mobile web:
Understand the differences in navigating in mobile web vs. web
Remember that with touch screens a user’s finger is doing the navigation, so make your buttons easily clickable for them
Know your design space and phones
Simplify your content
There are no hover states, as of now
Understand that your users are on a phone and on the go, so they have more immediate needs; they would be using your main site on their computer at home, otherwise.
So what is in store for the future of mobile devices and mobile web? Obviously one can only hypothesize and dream, but with advancements in nanotechnology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpJQNMBNtOo), Haptic surfaces and 3D technology the line between reality and science fiction is getting more and more blurred.
Let’s Discuss: The power of combining your brand’s visible assets with promotions to make celebrities out of your audience.
EMG 30-Second Rundown
NASA is currently running an online promotion called “Face in Space” to draw attention and interest to the final two Endeavour shuttle flights, STS-133 and STS-134. The promotion leverages a microsite that allows people to upload a photo of their face to be taken aboard one of the remaining flights and launched into orbit (a nice alternative route into orbit over others that are morbid, costly, or statistically challenging). The campaign has been quite a success so far with over 62,508 total participants from 6 continents (including yours truly representing EMG in space), and a significant amount of global media coverage.
NASA is motivating participation (and driving awareness of its programs in the process) by making available to its audience a chance to be visibly associated with its brand in a significant and meaningful way. Call it “celebrifying” its audience.
Other recent examples of brands employing this tactic:
To celebrate selling 500,000 Fiat 500 vehicles, Italy’s Fiat Group launched an online promotion that invited the public to submit photos to be incorporated into the paint job of a special edition Fiat 500 showcar (to be known as the Fiat 500 Thousandth). The promotion has received worldwide coverage and all 1,500 spots that were available on the car will be filled.
In anticipation of the Paranormal Activity DVD release, distributor Paramount invited all the fans that made the movie such a success to submit their name for inclusion in the DVD film credits. Just over 149,000 fans participated, and as of writing this, 823,000 DVDs have been sold.
The EMG Takeaway There are two dynamics at play here that make this tactic of celebrifying your audience so powerful, Celebrity to the World (incentive) and Celebrity to Us (bonding).
Celebrity to the World is the incentive a brand offers when it creates the opportunity to associate your face or name to the public using a visible brand asset. The prospect of being able to tell my friends my photo is going to be launched into space makes me feel like a celebrity, and motivates me to participate.
Celebrity to Us describes the connection that is formed between a brand and an individual when the brand incorporates them into one of its visible brand assets. Knowing I’ve been included in the launch of a space shuttle makes me feel like a celebrity to NASA, and deepens my bond with the brand.
The real takeaway is that when pairing an incentive to an online promotion, it can be just as effective (if not significantly more so) to appeal to the ego of participants instead of their checkbooks. If NASA created an online essay contest and offered $1,000 to the winner, I’m quite positive they wouldn’t have received the same level of participation or media coverage.
Final Words: When designing a promotion, consider what visible assets your brand can leverage to make celebrities out of your audience to incentivize participation and deepen a connection with your brand.
3 Questions to Continue the Discussion
What brands have made you feel like a celebrity?
If you’re a brand manager, what visible assets have you used to celebrify your audience?
Is your face going to be on board on of the final two Endeavour shuttle flights?
Let’s Discuss: A very insightful panel hosted last night by networking organization Digital LA entitled “Digital Music Panel: Artists Go Social.” The panel was comprised of artists, artist management, music labels, marketing technology providers, and even the CMO of The Grammys.
EMG 30-Second Rundown
The general topic of the panel discussion was how artists are using social media and digital technology to market themselves and their music. A wide range of questions directed at the panel covered areas such as the varied approaches to social media taken by emerging artists vs. established artists, the shifting role of the record label in promoting artists, what it is fans expect from the artists they engage with, and emerging technologies impacting how fans connect with artists.
The EMG Takeaway
Here are four themes that emerged from the panel that I found relevant and interesting. With a shift in context, these themes can easily be applied to brands in general, not just music artists.
New Revenue Models Continue to Emerge – The music industry is no stranger to experimenting with revenue models for monetization of artists, driven for years by an erosion of album sales, shrinking profit margins, and rampant piracy. One of the interesting models shared at the panel was that of a revenue share between mobile application developer (in this case, BlueHaze) and artist. Rather than having an artist (or label) front money for the development of a mobile application, BlueHaze has arranged deals where revenue derived from the application is split between BlueHaze and the artist. In this model, both parties have monetary incentive to see the application succeed, the artist doesn’t take on any financial risk, and the application developer has the potential to see greater upside than they would from a standard development deal.
Artists Take Control – One of the key themes of the panel was that artists are more empowered than ever to take promotion of their music into their own hands via social media and digital endeavors. This isn’t a ground-breaking theme, but I felt compelled to include it so I could drop this gem of a quote from one of the panel-members, an LA-based artist with national exposure: “I’m a rapper, I shouldn’t know about web optimization – but I do.” In other words, this empowerment means a modern music artist, especially an emerging one, needs skill sets that go beyond just the musical variety.
Don’t Ignore the Etc. – In the context of social networks, there’s a phrase we use at EMG called “Don’t ignore the etc.” in response to people referring to “Facebook, Twitter, etc.” One of the artists on the panel was adamant about this in response to an audience member’s remark about the decline of MySpace’s user base. To this artist, MySpace still represented a very viable source of communication and interaction with fans, and was ignored at the artist’s peril. Not ignoring the etc. means recognizing the communities and networks that matter to your fans.
Convert Your Audience – It’s not enough to just accumulate an audience through social media. Ideally, artists will implement mechanisms for converting their audiences in a way that directly impacts the artist’s success. This doesn’t mean just Tweeting out a link to Ticketmaster either. The most creative conversion mechanisms reward audiences for taking action, and two of the companies present on the panel, CultureJam and Eventful, offer technology that allow artists to do just that. CultureJam offers a product that allows bands to deliver, among other things, free MP3 downloads to fans in exchange for sending out promotional Tweets on the band’s behalf. In this conversion, the fans get music, the band gets exposure. Eventful gives artists a platform for directing their fans to “demand” local concerts. In this conversion, the fans get a better chance of seeing their favorite artists, the band gains both leverage with local promoters, as well as valuable insight for planning tours.
Final Words: While the economics of the music industry can be at times daunting to artists, the availability of tools, channels, and technologies for growing an audience and making it count is very exciting, and ripe with opportunity. It should also be noted that no amount of tools, channels, and technology can make bad music good (mediocre music maybe), and these tools, channels, and technology require incredible dedication, strategy, and hustle to be effective.
3 Questions to Continue the Discussion
If you’re an artist, what web technology could you not live without?
If you’re a fan, what is most memorable experience you’ve had with a band through social media?
If you’re a marketer of artists, but social technology provides the best blend of promotional effectiveness with positive experience for the fans?
EMG 30-Second Rundown: The men’s personal-care category is steadily growing (up 1% while the rest of the category is down over 5%) and marketers are taking every opportunity to capture share with one of the biggest array of product launches for men in nearly a decade. Brands which have prevoiusly skewed towards women are even vying for a piece of the pie as seen with Unilever launching its new Dove Men’s + Care line.
Key Quote: Marketing actually has a long history of gender-bending brands that have added, changed or developed gender identities long after they were well-established.
The EMG Takeaway: There are major opportunities for brands to develop products that market to genders in which their brand typically does not appeal. Personal-care has been a category that has seen more of this than most others over the past decade and now with successes and lessons learned from failures, is poised to jump in with both feet. With all of the brands now clamoring for attention in the personal-care category with new products and marketing messaging that suggests men need to “smell like a man” and “embrace being a man”, success for these brands could mean big changes for other CPG categories and industries. With the influx of all this targeted messaging to men around these products working together to create the perception in men that all products they use should be this way and convey this message, its only a matter of time before we start to see laundry detergent, suntan lotion, air fresheners or other products start to have men’s lines.
Final Words: Men like to be reminded that they are men and use products that make them feel more manly, especially when gender lines are blurring more and more each passing year. Marketers and brands have proven to be able to cash in on this time and again when they come
Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:
1. What brands could benefit the most from launching a male or female line of their products?
2. What is the most effective marketing message the men’s personal-care products are using?
A. Using this product will make women want you (example: Axe Body Spray)
B. Using this product will make you feel like a man (example: Dove Mens + Care)
C. Your girlfriend wants you to use this product (example: Old Spice Body Wash)
3. Do you think more brands will start marketing to men or will it just be a short fad within only the personal-care line.
EMG 30-Second Rundown: The pace at which technology is accelerating is exaggerating the differences in culture, expectations, and mindsets among different generations of today’s children, teenagers, and young adults. It’s essentially creating mini-generation gaps. Kids only years apart might have vastly different communication preferences, and even mental capabilities such as multi-tasking.
Key Quote: “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology…College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
The EMG Takeaway: Perhaps the notion of the “18-25 year old” marketing segment loses a bit of relevancy as the difference of only a couple years displays itself in exaggerated ways. The article is also resounding endorsement of the discovery process, truly understanding who you are trying to reach, their expectations and needs, and why that knowledge might alter your tactical approach. It’s a phenomenal reminder too for us to step outside of our own expectations for how we want products marketed to us. While one generation might find receiving a text message upon entry to a grocery store utterly intrusive, another generation (or sub-generation) might expect the interaction and find the experience odd or disappointing without it.
Final Words: An article interesting for the insight it provides, and the reminder that it serves.
Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:
1. How do you stay actively in touch with the expectations of those outside your own generation?
2. Have you observed instances of this mini-generational gap in your own life?
3. Kids have always had the attitude that their parents are hopelessly out of touch; is this any different, or is the contrast of the divide starker than ever?
Basically, someone goes out and hides something in public and posts the coordinates online. You are then supposed to go to that website, get the coordinates and put them into your GPS (hand-held GPS, not your car navigation).
The coordinates get you pretty close to the item (or “cache” as it is called) and you have to use the clues they post online to find it.
The caches ranges in size from a small matchbook to a big ammo box. Inside you’ll always find a log where you can put your name, and in the bigger ones people leave little knickknacks and toys. It’s great for kids because they can trade one of their old toys for a toy that is inside. Some caches even have stuff for grown ups like movies (my buddy got a Willow DVD out of one).
Geocaching is a great hobby for technical geeks like me who like to “figure things out” and for families who want to spend time together outdoors.
So far, me and my family have found 48 caches in and around our city. How about you? Are there any other geocachers out there?
I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now. In case you somehow haven’t heard of Google Wave before, here is a description from the website:
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
In simple terms, I see it as a dynamic message board. It’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t been hooked on it yet. It doesn’t feel conducive for everyday use. I definitely do not see it replacing email or IMing anytime soon, like some suggest will happen. Seems more for specific group projects or interest groups.
Even then, you have to be able to wrap your head around the concept and features in order to be able to use it and I think the general public might be turned off to it before they get past the learning curve.
One of the hardest things at first is that you don’t have any friends when you first join. Two things to help:
1) When you join Google Wave, you should get a wave in your inbox from Google that allows you to invite some friends.
2) In the search box, type “with: public” without quotes so you can browse and join public waves. (see below)
I just got a bunch of invites and sent it out to a few people here at EMG. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart once I start using it in a business setting.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Day Ignite 2009 Customer Summit in Chicago (10/28 - 10/29) as a Day Partner, care of Earthbound Media Group (my employer and Day Partner). Topics covered ranged from the upcoming Communiqué (CQ5) 5.3 preview (which I’ll comment on momentarily) to running CQ5 in a Cloud environment to the new Microsoft Sharepoint Connector - and much much more! At the conclusion of the conference, we were treated to dinner and a show at the Chicago House of Blues - Foreigner! It was pretty neat!
The first thing that I want to share is the David Nuescheler’s Top 10 list of new features in CQ 5.3:
I have been involved in content migrations for EMG and its clients and a few in my earlier jobs as well. Some of them wanted to migrate from a database driven custom CMS to a ECMS product, Some wanted to migrate from a Database driven CMS to another Database driven CMS tool and some others were not sure of which way to go except for the fact that they wanted to move from their current CMS. Bottomline for all these migration scenarios is the client wants a better Website or Intranet (as the case may be) that gives the client more mileage.
Whatever the case maybe there are some common factors for content migration that will determine the complexity of the entire process.
1. Origin of Content / Content Repositories - The simplest scenario will be to migrate from a well defined relational database to the new system. But, this is never the case. There are always multiple systems from where the content originates – it could be a combination of one or more of the following : database systems, flat file, legacy systems, another content management system etc. The complexity of the migration process increases with the number of content sources.
2. Content Quality – One of our clients had their navigation system in imagemaps, thankfully, they did not want to migrate the existing navigation system as-is. In another instance, when we were automating a migration from flat files, we found that the HTML files did not follow any template and some of them were missing values for fields that were mandatory on the new system. So, we had to do a partially automated migration.
3. Content Types and Amount of content– Content Type could be text, Documents, Media etc. In a manual migration, Amount of content to be migrated will play a major factor.
4. Upgrade existing system – So far, I have not come across a scenario where the client wanted to do an as-is migration. There has been a substantial upgrade – either by defining additional fields, additional value add by implementing Search Engine Optimization, Information Rearchitecture, content cleanup etc. The complexity of migration will obviously increase with more value adds to the existing system.
5. Users, Roles and Business workflows - Mapping the users, roles and business workflows from the as-is system to the new system is a time consuming process. Sometimes we may have to redefine the mapping if the new system does not support the working of the as-is system.
Method of migration – Based on the above factors, we should be able to figure out if we can do a completely automated migration, completely manual migration or a combination of automated and manual migration.
The entire process will be successful only if we keep the actual “freeze” time (change over from the old system to the new system) within acceptable limits.
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