Category Archives: digital media

April 3, 2014 · 11:51 am

You’re Already Behind

The IBM folks have been surveying Chief Marketing Officers for quite some time and the latest results of that survey have come out.

Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

You can read the study yourself by clicking through but I’d like to point out one data point that really got my attention.  It was this:

It’s questionable whether CMOs are moving fast enough to keep up with the speed at which the commercial landscape is evolving, or whether they need something akin to a turbo boost…The situation is, if anything, worse than it was when we completed our last Global CMO Study.  In 2011, 71 percent of the CMOs we interviewed told us they felt underprepared to deal with the data explosion. Today, a full 82 percent feel that way. Two-thirds of all CMOs also report that they’re not ready to cope with social media, which is only marginally less than was the case three years ago.

This is scary.  It used to be that marketers would pay for tons of research better to understand their customers.  The dream was a 360 degree view of the customer’s purchasing and media habits.  Today, that dream is very viable – it’s within a marketers grasp – but only if the marketers have structured their organizations and daily routines to include analytics.  I’m not just talking about web analytics but also point of sale information, real-time data from social media, and any other font of information which can be integrated to round out that view.  That seems to me to be common sense and yet less than a fifth of CMO’s feel ready to deal with all of this.  Put that in the context of over two-thirds of them acknowledging that digital channels will play a bigger role in their interactions with customers in the next three to five years and one concludes that the vast majority of companies are far behind where they need to be.

I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe it’s an investment issue – it’s hard to find dollars to invest on new things in almost every organization.  It might be a priority issue but the folks in charge seem to acknowledge the need.  Maybe it’s the life-cycle of the CMO, which has always been one of the shortest tenured positions in the “C” suite.  No matter what it is, it’s a tremendous opportunity for anyone who can get their company’s stuff together and leap ahead of their competitors.  Will that be you?

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March 20, 2014 · 8:41 am

Data, Data Everywhere (Part 2)

Yesterday I discussed finding a couple of articles that didn’t make sense in the context of one another.

Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

The first was about a lack of data from digital media and how that medium needs to be more accountable.  Today’s article is about a study conducted by IBM.  As they said in their release:

The study, entitled “Stepping up to the challenge: How CMOs can start to close the aspirational gap,” is based on findings from face-to-face conversations with more than 500 CMOs from 56 countries and 19 industries worldwide. Conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV), the study reveals that 94 percent of CMOs believe advanced analytics will play a significant role in helping them reach their goals. However, an increased number of CMOs say their organizations are underprepared to capitalize on the data explosion – 82 percent compared to 71 percent three years before.

In other words, there is already too much information crossing the desks of the folks in marketing and the people in charge can’t make sense of what they have now.  It’s only going to get worse as the marketing information generated from mobile and social continue to grow.  Is digital media not accountable as claimed by the head of the ANA or is it TOO accountable and overwhelming as found by this study?

These two pieces taken together point out the reality of marketing these days.  We are awash in an ocean of data and it’s no longer about “do we have the information?” but “can we find the right information among all of the data we have?”  I’ve had clients who told me they had little transparency into what was going on with their customers but because they didn’t have a thorough understanding of data systems they already had in place – web analytics, social media measures, etc. – they were wrong.

The claim that digital isn’t accountable and lacks data is a negotiating position, similar in my mind to the dance that goes on each year before the networks begin to sell in their upfront season.  If anything, the fault with digital is that it’s still relatively new and old ways of thinking about media and data are changing (or should be).  So yes, to paraphrase the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, there’s data data everywhere but I think there’s plenty to drink. Maybe even too much. What’s your take?

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March 19, 2014 · 9:48 am

Data, Data Everywhere (Part 1)

Today’s rant is one of those about a couple of discordant pieces of information that found me this morning.  Maybe I read too many things and I get confused – it happens.  On the other hand, the two articles I’m going to cite are fairly typical of some thinking that’s floating around in digital media and marketing.  I’ll deal with the first one today and the second one tomorrow since I’m not big on 1,000 word posts . Let’s see what you think.

Both these pieces came from MediaPost – one from a marketing newsletter and one from an agency newsletter.  Let’s start with the latter.  In an article entitled “Digital Is The Least Accountable Of Media,” the head of the ANA  is reported as having claimed that

Digital media, once thought to be the most accountable media turned out to be the least accountable, with viewability levels, according to some studies, hovering around just 50%. That’s got to change or advertisers will pull dollars off the table…the industry has to improve media measurement significantly. Marketers obviously need and want to buy digital media, but the return on investment has been hugely disappointing.

There is that nasty term – “viewability”- again.  It means that some ads on web pages are on parts of the page that aren’t seen (scrolled down to) and yet since they are served when the page is served they’re counted as having been displayed.  I’ve added a couple of articles on the topic below.  I have issues with digital being singled out for that since no one takes people leaving the room to go to the bathroom into their TV commercial ratings nor people turning down the volume for radio measurement.  Frankly, given that digital is the only medium of which I’m aware that doesn’t use sampling when gauging audiences I’m not sure why it’s held to a different standard.  Sure, digital has other issues (traffic fraud being the worst) but data isn’t one of them.

Which leads to the second article about that data and a new study about how it affects the top people in marketing which I’ll cover tomorrow.  Let’s just say there doesn’t seem to be a demand to get more data from digital.  Stay tuned.

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