Tag Archives: marketing

September 3, 2015 · 10:37 am

Programming Surprises

I come from the world of advertising sales. Strike that: I come from a world that no longer exists even though there is one with the same name still out there. It’s called advertising or media sales except there isn’t a heck of a lot of selling going on – just a lot of buying.

I dislike programmatic buying for a number of reasons, but the one I’m going to discuss today has implications for your business, even if your business isn’t media. Your brand may be using programmatic to purchase ads. Certainly digital ads and, soon if not now, TV, print, and even outdoor. I completely understand the efficiencies of this system and from the buy side the system is great. From the publisher or content distributor side, it has had the effect generally of pushing pricing down. Zero-sum games do that. However, that’s not today’s beef.

In a word – transparency, or lack thereof, is my issue. Many brands have no clue where their ads are served nor do they know for certain which creative is being used vs. which targets. They don’t really know how fees are being taken along the way and they’re not really sure what their budget is getting them in terms of placement. In short, the last thing you want as a marketer – or any businessperson – is a surprise, and this system has the potential to deliver many of them, most of which are bad.

If you think you can mitigate the surprise issue with a Service Level Agreement, think again. Most of those contain a cure period. Even if there is an hour during which your ads run on an unapproved site, the damage is done. Surprise!

When the bills come in and you find out that your $250,000 budget bought you $175,000 of inventory due to fees, causing your effective CPM‘s to rise significantly, surprise!

Ad spending in the US for programmatic TV will rise to nearly $4 billion in 2016 according to some estimates.  That kind of honey attracts a lot of flies, and I suspect we’ll see an even more fractured technical landscape supporting this buying.  No matter what your business, you can’t work with partners who are hiding something, at least I can’t.  Can you?

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September 1, 2015 · 11:00 am

CMO – uh oh…

I find research interesting. Maybe it’s my basic, curious nature or maybe I’m just nosy, but I enjoy reading studies of how businesses and consumers behave. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. More often than not, I’m a little shocked. Today is one of those times. The folks at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have been conducting a survey of top U.S. marketers since 2008. You can read the latest CMO Study here. They released this year’s data and I found one section – the one on marketing analytics – particularly interesting. Let’s see what you think.

There are the headlines, as summed up in this analysis:

Just 31% of projects use available or requested marketing analytics, well within the 29-37% range seen over the past 3-and-a-half years, according to US CMOs responding to the latest edition of The CMO Survey. B2C product companies appear to be leading the pack in usage of marketing analytics, however, at twice the rate of their B2B product counterparts (45.6% vs. 22.8%). B2B product companies also give the highest rating to marketing analytics’ contributions to their firms’ performance. Overall, marketing analytics are most apt to be used for customer acquisition, customer retention, social media and segmentation, per the report.

Frankly, I’m not surprised but I am a little disappointed.  Two-thirds of the marketing work is still seat of the pants, basically, and it’s even worse when you’re marketing to other businesses.  I can sort of understand this last point – it’s hard to tell when a website or social visitor is a business target or just a random consumer that’s wandered on to your digital presence.  You B2C marketers, however, have no excuse.

What it really means is that companies lack quantitative metrics to demonstrate the impact of marketing spending.  That is a recipe for budget suicide.  It’s not just that they’re generally not using analytics.  The survey also asked about what data is being used.  Only 15% of firms able to prove the impact of social media quantitatively and four metrics dominate how companies show social media impact:  likes, general traffic, click-through rates, and hits/visits/page views.  In other words, the really broad, pretty useless measures.  I spend quite a bit of time with clients trying to get beyond those measures into data than can translate into actionable business decisions.  These generally can’t.

Any of us engaged in marketing need to become comfortable with analytics of all sorts.  They’re what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Fail to eat them and you’ll starve.  Are you coming to the table?

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July 23, 2015 · 10:22 am

Stirring With A Fork

One of the things I work on with clients is using the appropriate tools to solve their needs.  We also focus on using those tools in the right way, which means using the right tool in the right manner to solve the issue.  Failing to do so is the equivalent of stirring a big pot of soup with a fork.  Sure, you can sort of get things mixed up that way but there are more appropriate tools (a spoon) that are better suited for the task and which will result in a better, more efficient result.

I thought of that as I read the report on a study by Regalix.  They surveyed senior B2B marketers to understand current trends in social media marketing and the challenges faced by them in implementing a social media strategy.  While much of the data showed progress, certain results made me raise an eyebrow.  Let’s see what you think.

According to the study, 94% respondents choose increasing brand awareness as the key objective of their social media marketing efforts.  I find that interesting since many of these same marketing types denigrate the use of banners as being only suited to raising awareness and their focus is more on generating click-throughs and other direct actions.  Frankly, there are other tools more suited to the awareness task as well.  I wholeheartedly agree with this point, made in the Research Brief report on the study:

Given the power of social media to engage with customers, it is surprising to find brand awareness overwhelmingly top the list of key objectives, says the report. Perhaps, opines the report, a reflection of the fact that most organizations still largely use social media as a broadcast or advertising medium, and not as much for meaningfully engaging with customers.

Exactly, and there is our fork stirring the pot.  If all you’re doing is switching the megaphone from broadcast media to social, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have much, if any, success. How do you think you’re going to generate actionable insights from social data when you’re doing very little to engage your audience? 71% of organizations said they were either not able to measure the ROI of their social media campaigns or were not sure how to. Only 29% said they were able to measure it.  That’s not surprising since there probably hasn’t been much to measure given the inappropriate manner in which they’re using the social channels.

I have nothing against forks, but I never use them to stir the pot.  You?

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