Monthly Archives: August 2012

August 20, 2012 · 10:38 am

Racing To The Bottom

I was speaking with Don Antonio this morning.

English: digital hub Català: digital hub

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He’s a media maven who’s an incredible resource to me both personally and professionally. We were chatting, as we do from time to time, about the state of affairs in digital media and the topic of pricing came up. One needn’t think very long about how buyers and sellers interact before the realization that there’s a horrible misalignment of goals out there.  No, after 30+ years in the media business I’m not shocked that agencies want to buy things less expensively while sellers want to grow their revenues and maintain “rate card integrity.”  But it feels different now – let me explain.

It’s always been about the client – the advertiser – and getting results.  The problem now is that there’s no reasoning with a machine.  Real time buying, trading desks, and other “innovations” just push down CPM’s (which is why a lot of premium sites won’t deal in this space).  Meanwhile, a well thought out integrated promotion can’t get sold and activated because it doesn’t fit any models.  Many newer buyers (and sellers) learn  the tools but don’t understand the business.

Another thing.  comScore in particular (they sell the software) and others in general are making a big thing about not counting digital ad exposures unless there’s proof the ad was in a visible part of the page.  Nice idea – why pay for an ad that the user never saw even if it was displayed.  The problem for me is this – no other medium is doing that.  Oh sure – TV and radio can prove an ad ran – now let’s see the proof that even though the set was on someone was in the room and paying attention.  Magazines do research this but I’m not sure it’s used in rate negotiation.

We’re racing to the bottom, as The Don put it.  We use tools that drive down CPM’s and we impose delivery standards that make us work harder than any other medium to get paid.  I know – complaining isn’t a pretty way to start the week, but what are we thinking?  Your thoughts?

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August 17, 2012 · 8:57 am

Your Name Here

Let’s end the week with some Foodie Friday Fun on beverages.

A logo used, and trademarked, by PepsiCo for M...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have seen an announcement that Mountain Dew was adding another product. They added something called Johnson City Gold, which is a malt-flavored addition (Olde English for the younger set?) to the line. However, according to Food Business News the Johnson City Gold product name may be short-lived. As part of the test market introduction, the company is running a contest to establish a new brand name. Sound familiar?

It should. There was another contest recently called “Dub The Dew” which elicited such fine names for a new green apple-flavored soda as “Diabeetus,” “Gushing Granny,” and “Moist Nugget.”  This is what can go very wrong in these days of a marketing department of millions.  A noted hacker group hijacked the contest (with pretty hilarious results) and Pepsi, to their credit, admitted in a tweet that “Dub the Dew definitely lost to The Internet“.  Ya think?

I admire the Pepsi folks for letting their customer at Villa Fresh Italian Kitchen (the local guys who actually ran the contest) give it a try.  I’m also a big fan of a well-executed practical joke.  This wasn’t the first time an internet-based naming program had gone terribly wrong.  It probably won’t be the last.  There’s a lot of good sentiment in wanting to listen to your customers, but remember that your customers in this case are a younger demographic, just the sort that thinks the creation of a new internet meme is way better than the creation of a new brand.

Maybe the promotion succeeded – after all, I’m writing about it as have many others.  Is any PR good PR?  Maybe so in this case – it’s all pretty harmless fun.  But it might be neither fun nor harmless the next time, and thinking about that balance between welcoming the crowd into the conversation and controlling the message is an important part of marketing these days.

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August 16, 2012 · 11:05 am

Trust

Johnny Carson turned around his TV career with a show called Who Do You Trust.

Johnny Carson

Ultimately, I think marketers can do the same for their many of their campaigns by asking exactly the same question as if they were their consumer targets.  Whom do they trust?  The answer is “not you” until you’ve earned it, and the places and ways to do that are, increasingly, via social media of some sort.  After all, eMarketer “forecasts that Facebook will have nearly 826 million users around the world this year, up from 650.7 million in 2011.”   Furthermore, a survey of US adults conducted by About.com found that 84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources. The study found that there were 10 primary trust “elements,” or cues, that brands must establish in order to engender trust, including accuracy, expertise and transparency.  eMarketer again:

In a social media context, customers wanted to see that brands had a significant number of positive reviews, and that they didn’t go out of their way to hide the negative ones. The survey found that 41% of respondents said the ability to see reviews on social networks added to their feeling of trust in a brand. Reviews played a bigger role in cultivating trust than seeing that friends had “liked” or recommended a brand, or that the brand had accumulated a large tally of “likes.”

Friends trust their friends or friends of friends or entities that are human, particularly when they’re in review mode.  Corporeal things, not corporate things, if you will, until those corporate things have a human face. Earlier this week I’ve written about how brands need to stop behaving like brands as well as how a cup of soup had a ton of marketing value while some marketing expenses fell flat.  While I hadn’t really planned out a theme week here on the screed, maybe a reminder each day that we need to speak to our audience transparently, honestly, and in a human voice isn’t a bad thing.  What do you think?

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