Make Digital Marketing Work

The year was 19 days old when the digital marketing industry reported what we think is the first properly significant story of the new decade.

YouTube (owned by Google) has apparently won the rights to stream live cricket matches from the Indian Premier League.  This marks a significant stepping up of Youtube’s activities in an area which has become dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Broadcasting channels.

Given the amount of bad feeling and mudslinging that has been going on between the two companies, this is unlikely to extract a pleasant response from Sky.

The tail end of last year was dominated on the one hand by Murdoch claiming that Google was a parasite and on the other by Google saying that if Murdoch’s organisations didn’t know how to make money out of the traffic they receive from Google then it wasn’t their fault.  I think many could be forgiven for thinking that Google is teaching a lesson with Youtube on how to make money in a new media world and that the intended recipient of learning is indeed Mr Murdoch.

If Google is therefore interested in broadcast media and has ideas of how to make money, is there anything to stop it from deciding to do the same thing with news media?  Their entire argument is that money can be made, it’s simply that News Corporation doesn’t know how to do it, and whilst Murdoch’s empire has its friends and supporters in high places it is a brave person indeed who could stand up to the weight of Google’s coffers, it’s global reach and it’s board’s unashamed intellectual prowess.

If battle lines are being drawn and warning shots sent across boughs then this going to be a year to watch in earnest  and one that at the end of which media will be unrecognisable from how it is today.

The decade is barely a few days old and already the marketing industry is in full swing.  I read yesterday that display advertising is promoting itself with a series of ads designed to court controversy and prove its ability to cut through.

The ads feature controversial slogans such as “Working women make bad mothers”.  Aside from the fact that my own mother was a working woman and still managed to be the best mother in the world ever (and I am prepared to commit an act of violence on anyone who tries to argue with me on this), I can’t help feeling that the campaign isn’t so much proving how display advertising can cut through and provoke discussion as proving that nothing cuts through quite like controversy in any medium.  This was after all the corner stone that tabloid journalism was founded on and the Daily Mail has proved itself to be highly effective for over 100 years.

Advertising has been known to court controversy as well and achieve enormous cut through.  I am reminded of the print ads and window displays used for Benetton in the 80s and 90s and the absolute storm that the All the colours of the World campaign caused in South Africa whilst the company became the fourth largest in Italy.

The difference between great advertising like that and simply making a controversial statement is that Benetton had values.  There are many politicians that court controversy as well but unless they have values that others can admire the controversy tends to engulf them and damage them rather than lifting them to dizzying heights of success.

I therefore can’t help feeling that the display advertising campaign could have done with a bit more planning to actually prove its point but there again, I and many others are writing about it so maybe it has got something going for it.

This morning whilst enjoying my cup of tea and hangover curing sausage sandwich I flicked the television on and say what seemed to be a hastily put together piece on BBC Breakfast Time.

In it several people were discussing the Procter and Gamble ad for Olay.  The ad is for the well known anti wrinkle treatment but the (still amazingly stunning) Twiggy had been airbrushed to hide her own wrinkles.  The ad has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Procter & Gamble were apparently (according to the piece I saw) unaware of the level of photo retouching that had been applied and were quoted as saying that the level  of airbrushing was  inconsistent with their own policies.

The ad received two complaints via Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson’s anti airbrushing campaign which has now received over 700 complaints in total referring to a number of ads.

The fact that this story which I would normally only expect to read through my industry bulletin emails has made the nations news service is certainly indicative of the strength of feeling on this subject.

A few years ago Dove created the Evolution ad which won a host of awards at the time and is widely believed to be one of the finest Ads of the decade

This seems wholly out of step with the news today, I mean Twiggy is a national treasure and gorgeous, she doesn’t need any help persuading people how gorgeous she is.

It also underpins what we have been saying for ages

1)      Consumers don’t believe what you tell them

2)      Consumers don’t believe what you show them

3)      They will believe what an acquaintance says no matter how little they actually know them

The Olay ad is a fine example as to why this attitude exists.  It’s a wrinkle cream, and you showed someone with their wrinkles airbrushed out.  What bit of that made sense and how silly do you feel about doing it?  Naturally P&G didn’t authorise or suggest it, but somewhere in the chain someone decided that Twiggy without a touch up wasn’t enough, and that was a huge mistake.

The digital marketing world in which we inhabit forges relationships between consumers and brands and is centred on the customer.  This ‘old advertising’ example is a megaphone shouting out the big idea (buy our product and you will look like Twiggy).   I don’t think I can highlight any clearer the difference between the two approaches.

We think that this form of advertising not only doesn’t work, but is actually harmful to a brand, after all who wants to be branded as a liar?

There is no escaping the fact that we live in uncertain times, and as a humble agency we try to stay abreast of all the issues that might affect us.  We need to make decisions and predictions and so we do, but try not to bet the farm on something that could go against us and bring the whole world crashing down about us.

One thing is for sure and that the world is moving and turning and changing at a pace that is likely to catch anyone out at the moment if they are not very careful and even if they are you can still find yourself with a prime set of incisors lodged in your rear end.  Yesterday was one of those days and our thoughts are with those affected as various announcements caused global concern on the financial markets and another high street retailer went into administration.

It was only a few weeks ago that I was talking about Book publishing and made the statement that “shares in Waterstones are safe for the minute”.  I didn’t consider Border’s Books and that might be the problem.  Online retail has reached a pivotal moment of preference for consumers and there are at least two brands that most people have considered ‘first’ when it comes to online book retail.  For companies that are left with a predominantly store retail model, Christmas has been a saviour each year to keep the wolf from the door.  It is probably a combination of shifting purchase points to online and a less extravagant Christmas brought on by the prevailing economic conditions but I can’t help feeling that organisations who do only bet on physical stores for retail are going to find it harder and harder.  Certain items such as perishables will naturally appeal to the senses of touch and smell and therefore are not as close to the front line as those which have a shelf life but the writing is on the wall.  It is no longer a case of online being a risk, it is now a case that ignoring online or treating it as an ancillary channel is probably the riskiest strategy of all.

Could this be the last Christmas where we viewed online as anything other than the primary retail channel?

I found the news waiting for me this morning that Media Week is to be removed from the newsstand and another of my favourite Haymarket Business Media titles, Revolution is to become a quarterly supplement giveaway with Marketing Magazine.

According to the story I read, Media Week is going to retain an online editor and utilise the staff of Brand Republic which is a several times a day destination for my browser.  The brand is also going to survive (at least for now) as the Media Week Awards and the Media Week Annual Conference but that must be slim solace for a brand I’ve known in the industry for a very long time, not to mention the staff who are being cut.

Revolution is going to be published as a supplement to Marketing Magazine which the press release says is unaffected by the changes and also backed by what the press release calls a “Blogging initiative in 2010”.  Not sure what that means, but along with New Media Age, Revolution acts as my compass in the industry and I for one am going to miss the title a lot.  When I worked in New York Revolution opened their offices at the same time as we did and the two ex pat crews had a drink or three on Bleeker Street several times.

It is the first of what I suspect are going to become more regular announcements from magazine and newspapers of layoffs, restructures, consolidations and new initiatives all aimed at cutting costs to make up the shortfall from falling circulations and advertising sales.  It’s a brutal world out there now if you are in publishing and we send our thoughts out to anyone at Haymarket who has been adversely affected.

We put our thoughts down about newspapers and magazines in previous blog posts, and we saw Nick Gregg offer his advice in a piece entitled The 5 key action points that might save publishers. Similarly  Robert Andrews gave out his advice in his piece Four Controversial Ways To Save Regional Papers Online, and that struck us as intrinsically the best way for publishers to think.  Utilise the assets you have in new markets to preserve funding for your product.  The move away from print to online is now pretty irresistible and unless publishers have got a strategy in place to meet it, more and more titles are going to disappear or be consolidated and it is going to happen very quickly.

We have been approached a lot of times by potential clients who do not have very much budget and our policy is to help wherever we can, and to be honest about where we can’t.  One of the biggest misconceptions that seems to come up is that you can perform parts of the overall mix and expect it to work.  You can’t, or at least you shouldn’t.  The interactive Mix works because it deals with a cause and effect basis that engages with consumers may not be aware of your products and services but are open to finding out more about them.  It does so using techniques that have been proven to work but which are never quite the same for each client but which rely on careful measurement and analysis throughout each stage to ensure that the results are kept optimum.  We can work across a number of budgets but the ROI we deliver is in terms of actual sales and revenue which we create demand for through the process

It isn’t enough to simply build up the database, it is what you then do with the database that makes our techniques deliver.  We build up trust and begin to test offers whilst segmenting the data based on a series of criteria.  Its all about building relationships between clients and customers, and to build on this through to first sale, repeat and regular sale and then referral.

When we have created the process you will then be able to see it working for you as an overall marketing process, so that for an agreed spend you will already have an idea of how much money you are going to make.

We do pride ourselves in being different and offering up a joined up digital marketing solution because we don’t actually see too many other agencies doing that.  At the same time there is an argument raging about whether digital agencies are grown up enough to act as lead agency for clients.  We think that the reason many digital agencies are not able to offer this is because they are still focused on providing tactical solutions rather than looking at the strategic marketing process that is needed for each client and offering a joined up solution to meet it.  I’ve been having a lot of discussions online about this very subject and the longer the conversations go on the more I am convinced that the solution is to look at all digital media as a strategic toolbox, and not focus on providing individual disciplines.

A lot of this isn’t necessarily the fault of the industry because most agencies started out as tactical suppliers of the shiny new thing, whether it was web design fifteen years ago, or display advertising twelve years ago, or search ten years ago, or email eight years ago, or analytics seven years ago  or social media five years ago.

That made a lot of sense then because the accepted sensible way to do things was get in bed with an offline brand or advertising agency and become the digital guys for them whilst getting introduced to a great client list and charging whatever the market would pay.   Digital Agencies were the remora fish to a bunch of sharks, cleaning off whatever needed to be done and some have grown extremely large doing it.  That symbiotic relationship now though is challenged because clients have heard that this digital media lark is cheaper and works better than the offline stuff.  Of course Ad and brand agencies are still telling the world not to panic and that they are still the top of the food chain.  More over they are still looking at the world in terms of the way that they have always done things, and therein lays the problem.  The world isn’t like that that anymore and it won’t work.

Clients want it and digital agencies have to stop thinking tactically if they are going to provide it.  Its taking the strategic approach that will give digital the showcase it deserves and deliver the benefits to clients.

The conservative party today announced that they would initiate a deregulation of media ownership that would rival the 1980s big bang regulation of the financial industry.  The details are of course very sketchy at the moment but the aim, according to the Telegraph is to,

“sweep away cross-media ownership rules which prevent local groups owning more than one newspaper or radio station to provide tougher competition for the BBC and give commercial operators more chance of survival”

David Hunt was interviewed and quoted as saying “There is a massive crisis in the media industry. We will strip away the regulations in the same way that Big Bang revolutionised the City to make it a major financial centre of the world.”

Now this story s set to run and run and in a speech on Thursday Mr Hunt is expected to elaborate a little more but I can’t help feeling a little uneasy about this.  On the one hand he is right that media owners are facing very turbulent times but that is as much to do with the march of progress and technology as it is to do with the financial crisis and the existence of the BBC. .I am also uneasy with complete deregulation of the media in principal, especially given how complete deregulation of the financial industry (the Conservative party’s own example not mine) has left the state of the world’s banking industry, and whilst I do not know any media barons personally I am not inspired by the thought of the guardians of news being given free reign whilst at the same time weakening the BBC.

I am looking forward though to finding out more details of what is planned although I will miss BBC3 and BBC4 if they do go as they are two channels I like to watch quite a lot.

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at publishing.  It’s too big a subject to fit into one or even a week’s posts and there is a lot going on in the rest of the agency but I did want to include a bit about magazine (periodical) publishers because whilst they do share things in common with newspapers it is a hybrid problem that they face and one which may require the most outlandish of solutions if profits are to be protected by the publishing companies.

First off I have been a dedicated magazine reader all my life.  When I was a child I read comics, and then at the age of 11 started reading titles such as ‘Skateboard Scene’ to go with my new found passion whilst trying to learn how to bowl ride.  Other titles that I have been devoted to have included The Face, NME, The Stage, Diver Magazine,  Which, Home and Garden, Private Eye, The Economist, Personal Computer World, , PC User, Computing, PC Week, Internet Magazine, Internet User, Wired, Marketing, Marketing Week, Revolution,  New Media Age.

The point is that I have read a lot of magazines.  They can loosely be split into titles I read for pleasure and titles I read for work.  Of the ones I read for pleasure I read them to find out what was new, what was cool, what to buy, what was a better buy, how to find the best price. I also read some of them to find out where to go and what to do.  I made sure I was in the know and that the kit and equipment I had was as up to date and as quality as I could afford.

Of the titles which I read for professional reasons I was able to keep my knowledge up to date and current, abreast of new trends and thought processes, aware of competitors and what they were doing and saying.  I was able to get good deals for equipment I wanted the company to buy and I was able to check my salary against similar jobs when it was leading up to a wage review and I was able to find new job opportunities when it was time to move on.  I read them on the train, at home and in the office.  I read them early in the morning in the evening at weekends and at lunchtime.  They were informing, entertaining and reference material.  They were an invaluable part of my life.

That’s a pretty exhaustive list and my memory fails me at what point I learned that these were actually termed as business to business and business to consumer titles.  I suspect that my experience of magazines is not so dissimilar to that of other people.  They provide in depth knowledge and resources for niche audiences.  The more information and stats it was able to provide me with the better I liked it.

These days I have a single resource for pretty much all these things and that is the Internet.  The Internet is extremely good at providing resources to niche audiences at a low cost which is bad news for the B2C titles.  It is also the greatest information resource yet conceived by man which is bad news for B2C titles.  Blogging provides more analysis and news than I can ever consume in a single sitting and Google provides me with lots of research material to base purchases on.  It seems that advertisers, the bedrock of all periodical publication agree with Ad revenues down for the entire industry.

It’s a problem that publishers have seen coming but now it is here most seem to be no nearer a solution and ill prepared for the shift.  Instead of tooling up and preparing for this well in advance there is suddenly a wealth of ads for digital directors and Heads of Digital.  Head hunters are on the phones screening candidates for their ‘gravitas’, knowledge, and willingness to explore any and all possibilities to find the correct solution for their business.  The sad thing is that if this is genuinely their first foray into this arena then it is probably already too late to find a business solution to the problem.

Fortunately that doesn’t include the majority, who have explored a number of possibilities over the years, from teasers and paywalls to new news free and value added services.  The trends and solutions have gone in cycles with the Economist recently announcing that more of their content will move to behind the paywall.  They are putting a lot of faith in the belief that news and commentary has value to the audience, especially as there are free alternatives available on blogs.  Their issues (certainly as far as some points go) are therefore the same as those facing newspapers and there are enough citizen journalists who will be more than willing to write the story and capture the audience whilst they come up with new and interesting ways to monetise their blog.  Most will fail and vanish after a few attempts but they will soon be replaced at the speed of Google and eventually someone will figure out the method that sticks.

One model I looked at some ten years ago now was for an independent magazine called SimplyCity.  It was aimed at the modern urban living woman and seemed to me to be perfect for the Carrie Bradshaws of New York which is where it was first issued.  The magazine provided content and ideas on where to go, what to buy, what to wear, and other lifestyle information.  It had a catchy title and an attitude that epitomised single women living in the city at that time.  The website then gave additional content but most importantly provided access to purchase the products and other items that the printed magazine had introduced its audience to.

There was also a theme that ran through the articles and follow up articles so that each subsequent version directed traffic to the next instalment.  If the previous instalment had been online then the next one would be offline and visa verse.  This was therefore a case of offline driving traffic online and online driving traffic offline.  You got some content free (online) and paid for other content (offline) and online supported itself with eCommerce.  It’s a model I loved but in amongst the dot com crash the cost of managing what was effectively two sets of publishing teams (offline and online) and carrying stock was too much for the company and its investors to bare.  We were all pretty young then and I know my knowledge wasn’t as rounded then as it is now and so I wasn’t able to give them as good advice as I could today.

If we were doing this today I would recommend that the magazine operate as an affiliate which would claim commissions back from products featured, and sell advertising to increase the visibility of lead products and services.  That would negate the need for stock and fulfilment whilst providing an online revenue stream and a reason for the site to co-exist alongside the printed version rather than cannibalising it.  The question of dual content is one that is still expensive but if the audience could be tapped into this a series of trackbacks to relevant blogs could also be integrated so that commentary and discussion was provided and boosted the audience’s own SEO efforts.

Another idea that has been suggested to me and which I agree with is providing access to tools and data to subscribers.  The content is therefore available to anyone online but methods to interact with the stored data of the publication are made available through applications.

I began by saying that this post was too long for a single article so I will pick it up again in another article.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.

I wrote yesterday about book publishing and predicted that the book was not dead and would continue with its admittedly minority but niche audience.

Newspaper publishing is less clear.  Over crowded tubes and the increasing switch of commuters to pedal power has made a noticeable difference on the number of Times and Telegraphs left behind on the 7:43 to Liverpool Street in the mornings.  Murdoch correctly predicted that news would be delivered digitally.  What he failed to predict was the way that the value of news was commoditised and made freely available.  On the one hand, the BBC has its mighty news service which breaks stories of interest throughout the day and on the other hand citizen journalism is providing some excellent news coverage that is trusted by more and more people.  Then there is Google that aggregates it all together and makes it available at the type of a search string.

As a child I remember watching the movies of the thirties which many would say was the golden era of newspaper publishing.  Reporters took on heroic levels of importance with a dogged determination to find the story and rush it to the editor’s office for inclusion in the morning episode.  Even Superman was a journalist at the daily Planet and everyone knows that Spiderman took the pictures that mattered for the Daily Bugle.

Today however both Superman and Spiderman would have problems.  Whilst they were holding the train one handed to stop it plunging into the river,  everyone down below would be pointing their camera phones whilst a blogger sat in Starbucks and published the story as it happened.  Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet but could he conceivably fly faster than a wireless connection with broadband?  I suspect not.  Krypton’s last son would get scooped every time.

Please excuse me for vanishing into my childhood for a second but I think the analogy highlights the problem perfectly.  Daily newspapers were all about the scoop and the strength of commentary.  Even with super powers it is difficult for the news agencies these days to replace the person on the ground equipped with modern communication methods, so what hope does a mere mortal with a press pass have?  Similarly an army of young boys in short trousers can never  build a distribution network as efficiently as Google with its ability to help people “read all about it”

One of my favourite movies when I was growing up was All the Presidents Men, which is probably also journalism and newspaper publishing’s finest hour.  The complex story showed two dedicated professionals use every ounce of their experience and professionalism (as well as a few little strokes) to get the story that ultimately removed a president from office.  Never before, never since was the ethic of journalism so well highlighted.

I found myself wondering how it would go down if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found the story today.  Would they have waited to publish in the Washington Post or would they have released it piece by piece in an anonymous blog to gather information in the form of other anonymous comments which would then be tweeted and linked across the world.  One can imagine deepthroat.wordpress.com becoming one of the most read blogs in the world if it did play out like that and all the Presidents men wouldn’t have been able to stop it.  The recent story of Trafigura which was first reported in WikiLeaks shows that the Internet is understood by everyone at the top of a story as a way to circumvent even legal attempts to stop the story being told.  No need for Superman in that little episode.  All you need is the power of the Internet.

Newspapers are hurting there is no doubt about it.  Times and Sunday Times bulk bundles ceased to be given out to airlines and hotel chains this week and joins the same move by the guardian and Observer a few weeks ago.  So what can publishers do to stop them taking their place amongst the ranks of the Dodo?