Customer World

Data-driven advertising - How do we move it beyond the web?

I came across an interesting service platform Meme Machine which has interesting customer-focused applications using data.

Calling itself reactive advertising Meme Machine defines this platform as:

"Reactive advertising is a technology for dynamic customization how display ads look and behave in real-time based on what we know about each viewer and the surrounding factors for each exposure. So instead of one campaign having three different ads, we can run three million different ads, where each is unique for the person watching it. Real-time data and dynamic content are two of the things that makes the Internet really unique. Coming up with the basic ideas for a dynamic ad is just one piece of the puzzle and you also need an engine that can mix up the data and make sure that the right stuff is actually shown to the right people."

Meme Machine has a reaction library and has some cases like Scandinavian Airlines, Swedish Post etc. 

How do we really fuse data that's online, offline and transactional?

To make this more widespread & relevant to a consumer &  marketer, the question that came to my mind really was, how do we use offline data & behaviour for such a service in addition to online information that gets tracked. Imagine a variety of devices and vehicles that consumers today either read, watch, listen, carry along with them - radio( FM), TV, Mobile, Outdoor, Magazines, Newspapers etc.which is not tagged or data rich today.

I believe we still have a long way to go  & innovate here. Here in lies interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped. There must be different applications across devices & media vehicles that must bring this to life. The control, of course, must lie with the consumers to bring all of this together. The applications must talk to each other, pull relevant content, send proactive messages as things happen in each media vehicle or device or by interest tagged by consumers, to bring this conversation & experience to life with each consumer.

Multi-channel marketing poses new data challenges

The world of database marketing has changed since the time we knew it . There were only a few options as one knew it - lists - internal/ external, direct mail and telemarketing a decade or two ago. Today, for companies, customers come from different channels - social media, mobile, website leads thro' SEM or SEO etc. There is a need to track this customer data, organize them in a manner to know where they are coming from, is becoming increasingly critical. Before they know, many customers reach-out to companies from many channels available, in no time, which are available to them. This leads to multiple responses, follow-up and absolutely wasted marketing monies & more importantly a frustrated customer! Only when they organize and track this data across channels can companies do systematic campaigns & profiling of these customers. Not many companies are ready to handle this challenge. In my view, they are sometimes blisfully unaware of the problem and how to manage them!

It starts by building clear customer paths on how customers can potentially reach out to these companies, how they need to be tagged, scoring them by their interest and value, allocating them to an appropriate channel with clearly laid-out follow-up programs by channel. 

Deb Campbell of Clario Analytics has written a nice article on this topic:

Marketers still need to gather and keep the best data they can on their customers, understand them, segment them, track them over time, do some predictive modeling to market relevant to them and target new prospects most like them....Today, marketing channels are exploding all around us, not only with e-mail, search and display ads but also with all the social networking sites.

How does all this affect database marketing?

While the multiplication of channels can make tracking harder, and as a result make it more difficult to amend a database, you still need to know your customers’ needs and wants, and market to them one-to-one. Database marketing best practices haven’t changed as much as how you implement them.

You may have customers who are Internet-savvy and want messaging sent to them digitally. You have to target them, and those like them, in this way. Perhaps another customer segment prefers sales reps to contact them.Where database marketing pays here is that all this information can be captured.....

The solution is to keep your database as up-to-date as possible, with changes of addresses and e-mails, titles and positions. Track and segment your database at both levels, and target prospects with similar preferences and behaviors.

Crowdsourcing - When customers get together on unfair credit card interchange fees!

There has been a lot of talk and buzz around crowdsourcing. Social media too is shifting the control from marketers to a "network of customers" who influence product/brand preferences and purchase decisions. Many marketers have been using this power effectively. Here's an example of how customers have got together against what they believe is an unfair practice. The interesting point to note here is that 7-Eleven stores have provided the platform for consumers to get together and voice their concern. It's an example of a great platform owned by a marketer to get together with their customers'  for a cause. It drives authencity and trust between the marketer and their customers. Take a look:

" 7-Eleven has announced that its franchisees and store operators have collected more than 1.6 million signatures in the “Stop Unfair Credit Card Fees” petition drive. 7-Eleven says it believes this marks the largest number of signatures collected for a public policy issue on record.

The signature drive ran from June 22 through Aug. 10 at store counters coast to coast.

“Consumer response to this grassroots petition drive exceeded expectations,” said Joe DePinto, 7-Eleven president and CEO. “Customers share our frustration over the hidden fees that American retailers and, ultimately, consumers are forced to pay. They, too, want Congress to take action to regulate these unfair fees, which are the highest in the industrialized world.”

Interchange fees aren’t transparent to the consumer and assessed to store owners every time a consumer uses a credit card. These charges result in higher prices which are borne by all consumers, whether or not they use a card or cash. In 2008 alone, these fees cost American businesses and their customers $48 billion. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) 2008 State of the Industry data, on average, an American convenience store owner paid 63 percent more in transaction fees than they earned in profits."

If you as a marketer genuinely believe there is a cause you can take-up for your customers, do that with conviction. Get them together, become a platform for their conversations and they will surprise you with their response overwhelmingly.

Which media forms will grow and engage consumers?

VSS, a leading PE firm that invests in media, communication & information industries released the next 5 year forecast of the communications industry. It has interesting trends on where consumers are expected to spend more time and therefore engage with marketers' brands. This has a direct impact on the kinds of media, investments & marketing programs that are expected to grow during the coming five years.   

What's expected to grow and shrink?

Here are some of the segments and sub segments of the communications industry which are forecast to grow over the next five years and those that are forecast to shrink over the next five years

"VSS reported that direct marketing benefited from the same trends as branded entertainment as marketers increasingly opted to reach their target consumer with one-to-one messaging as opposed to one-to-many. Digital technology has enabled marketers to perfect their techniques in targeting customers. While direct mail and telesales spending declined due their reliance on such stressed industries as automobiles and financial services, direct marketing still registered a 3.2% increase in 2008 to $106.52 billion, and is forecast to achieve a 5.6 % CAGR during 2008-2013. E-mail marketing performed even better, and continues to expand at double-digit rates because it offers a low-cost alternative to direct mail and other marketing strategies"

What is Growing?
Internet Media	Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Professional Information	Subscription Television
Business Information	Mobile Advertising and Content
Education	Videogames
Direct Marketing	Business-to-Business e-Media
Event Marketing	Tradeshows
Public Relations	Digital Out-of-Home
e-Books
What is Shrinking?
Newspapers	Yellow Pages
Consumer Magazines	Business to Business Magazines
Broadcast Television	Home Video
Radio	Recorded Music
Traditional Out of Home	Traditional Consumer Books

Getting serious about digital privacy

As a consumer, I have often always wondered every time I had cleared by cache on the laptop, who is accountable or responsible for dropping all the cookies that sit there without my knowledge or even with my "soft" implicit permission - a few of the websites or brands were tracking my behavior using 'app and codes' that sit on my PC. I just hate such intrusions on my privacy for the monetization benefits of somebody else. 

Finally, there seems to be first steps being taken in this direction. The key trade groups - IAB, AAAA, DMA, BBB, ANA announced self-regulation principles. How will they come into effect is critical, what measures are being taken to punish offenders will make a big difference for consumers like me trusting any information that I provide online. Here are some principles that they have adopted:

• The Education Principle calls for organizations to participate in efforts to educate individuals and businesses about online behavioral advertising. To this end, the digital media industry intends, in a major campaign that is expected to exceed 500 million online advertising impressions, to educate consumers about online behavioral advertising, the benefits of these practices and the means to exercise choice, over the next 18 months.
• The Transparency Principle calls for clearer and easily accessible disclosures to consumers about data collection and use practices associated with online behavioral advertising. It will result in new, enhanced notice on the page where data is collected through links embedded in or around advertisements, or on the Web page itself.
• The Consumer Control Principle provides consumers with an expanded ability to choose whether data is collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes. This choice will be available through a link from the notice provided on the Web page where data is collected.
• The Consumer Control Principle requires “service providers”, a term that includes Internet access service providers and providers of desktop applications software such as Web browser “tool bars” to obtain the consent of users beforeengaging in online behavioral advertising, and take steps to de-identify the data used for such purposes.
• The Data Security Principle calls for organizations to provide reasonable security for, and limited retention of data, collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes.
• The Material Changes Principle calls on organizations to obtain consent for any material change to their online behavioral advertising data collection and use policies and practices to data collected prior to such change.
• The Sensitive Data Principle recognizes that data collected from children and used for online behavioral advertising merits heightened protection, and requires parental consent for behavioral advertising to consumers known to be under 13 on child-directed Web sites. This Principle also provides heightened protections to certain health and financial data when attributable to a specific individual.
• The Accountability Principle calls for development of programs to further advance these Principles, including programs to monitor and report instances of uncorrected non-compliance with these Principles to appropriate government agencies. The CBBB and DMA have been asked and agreed to work cooperatively to establish accountability mechanisms under the Principles.

 

Download Ven-principles-07-01-09

Augmented reality - the fusing of data, search and advertisers

Here's an interesting cool mobile app released by layar, a company based out of Netherlands.

Basically the app figures out exactly where you are and in which direction you're looking, and then it presents additional data overlaid on top of the camera's image. Be it a bank's ATM that you may want to reach or imagine you reach a locality in your city and would love to find some houses to live here, just use layar and it will find you some houses, real estate agent too and you can call him right away!

Watch it live here:

I do believe it has limitations. It's not all pervasive at it looks:

a. You need an android phone
b. The service needs to be available in your country.This to me is a serious limitation. In a country like
    India, which has a huge penetration of mobile phones, it will serve a real need. In a world of connected
    information that's almost seamless, one cannot be selective in making such a service available. To
    me it must be simple enough to be downloaded and used anywhere in the world. The data on the web
    must be leveraged. This is really where most services fail. You can't have a product on the net and
    expect it to be available only in Europe, US and Netherlands.
c. It still needs the consumer to do something to throw this data thro' this browser. The novelty factor
    may die after some time. It needs to be embedded with what the mobile phone consumer does. I am
    sure this will improve over time.

I do think  applications like these will redefine the way consumers, data providers and advertisers will collaborate in the future.

When consumer information belongs to consumers!

There's a whole business out there on the web and offline world( direct mail databases, telemarketers etc.) where companies trade your information and make money by way of advertising. They place cookies( without your permission) on the web, track all the information you read, buy and click, use your registration information, get your subscription & transactional data and then bombard you with offers that you may not necessarily want or interested in. Finally, you get fed-up, the companies too get fed-up as there's a diminishing ROI in their marketing efforts and they start searching else where. Then comes a new Google and there's excitement again all round only to wither away after a couple of years! What happens if you as a consumer start trading your information.You as a consumer decide what information would you like to give out and get some returns out of it. That could be the future that's sustainable and  more importantly of value to you.

There are three parties who make money - first YOU, then a central customer information exchange(CCIE) that enables this and an advertiser who seeks to pay for people that they would like to build a dialog with ( remember, I am not using the word - sell, advertise or market!) 

Here's an interesting perspective Jerome brought my attention to:

Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files.

Bill Densmore has been thinking about this for 14 years. A career journalist who’s shifted to journalism research, Densmore is a fellow at the futurist Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Each of us has equity in the lives we live, he believes, and it’s time to cash in. His solution is the “information valet project,” a reordered media universe in which dozens of companies compete for the business of brokering our lives for the online news and commentary we covet.

He envisions it working something like this: You choose an InfoValet. It asks you what level of personal information you want to share with the Web sites you visit. At the low end that could basically be your name, rank, and serial number, and at the high end a laundry list of your needs and pleasures. Your InfoValet finds out what sites you want premium—i.e., nonfree—content from, and then it names a price. Its profit will come from charging you a little more than those sites charge it, and what they charge will hinge on the desirability of your “persona” to their advertisers. Densmore can imagine someone wealthy, acquisitive, and candid who’s so desirable he gets to travel the Web for pretty much nothing.
Read more.

My view:  Densmore has a  view of  how information from media can be monetized. It's a great idea & brilliant. But, we don't necessarily live to consume advertising information alone in everything that we do everyday, as we search for information. That sounds quite ridiculous and  ominous to me. Sometimes, I just seek information but necessarily don't need advertising tags next to it. Sometimes, I consume information to buy products, want to know more about some products that I read about or I saw in my friend's place and in this context & time, some advertising information necessarily will help me make better decisions. The context of consumer searching the information to me is important. Sometimes, many of these solutions are too web-centric. It needs have a fine balance between on-the-web and off-the-web linkage.

To me, consumers need to have the flexibility to join an information exchange where their membership entitles them to open or close their privacy information as they need it for that context. It must be their prerogative to build a world of links ( what ever they do - on the web and off-the-web) that is available, to the information exchange, as this will enable consumers to reach out to advertisers rather than the other way around. These are consumer info-banks that are owned and managed by consumers themselves.

The death of registration page

This has been happening to me for the last couple of years.Whenever I found interesting articles or information on the web and click the link, I am always led to a registration page to access this information which is really frustrating to fill - almost most of the time. I  never fill it up. I close the link and move on or I look at the star( information critical to complete registration) fields, fill some junk to get the info.

This has led me to wonder on the following questions:

1. Do companies believe every information seeker is a prospect?
2. When and how do such information seekers turn into prospects for these companies?
3. How does genuine information get converted as hot/warm follow-ups by companies?

I believe that as web becomes all pervasive, the registration page will become extinct. In fact, if you are an aggressive web user, you almost hate registration pages. Alternatively, you will connect with people of similar interest and get this information anyway. It's time for companies to redefine their registration page strategy. 

Here's an interesting perspective on this point by Jeremiah Owyang:

Most marketers don’t know why they want prospects to fill out registration pages, they’ve been doing it for so long, they’ve forgotten why. I’ll remind you, there’s only two reasons: 1) To get their contact information so they can bug them. 2) To get demographic and other data so they can bug them more effectively (target marketing). That’s it.

A technology will emerge that will allow users to pass only as much of their social networking profile information as they want over to a CRM system, how much? It’s up to the user. A new social contract will appear that will encourage users to give as much information as they want, and in return the brand will reciprocate. The more information the user gets, the more the brand will give back in return, I call this a “Social web contract”. Since the data will come from the profile information within a social network, there won’t be a need to have a collection web form, instead information will be passed through connective tissues. Obviously this flips a marketers world upside down as they are ultimately measured in most cases on generating leads and conversions, there’s a pretty radical mental shift that will need to take place...

Why Retail loves email?

Many retailers seem to think so. During this past holiday shopping season, e-mail marketers were out in full force.

According to the “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008” report, from Smith-Harmon, promotional e-mail volume accelerated in October and reached a peak in December when retailers sent consumers a monthly average of 14.6 e-mails.

Smith-Harmon’s analysis of the top 100 retailers revealed that 90% of them increased the number of e-mails they sent during the holidays.

“Retailers ratcheted up their e-mail marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers’ dwindling spending dollars,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Mail: Online Marketing Strategies. “That was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”

Nevertheless, for retailers with large advertising budgets, e-mail campaigns represent only a tiny fraction of their marketing budgets

“E-mail marketing still accounts for only 1.5% of direct marketing budgets in the US,” says Mr. Grau.

Next generation marketing services companies

In an era of disruptive technologies, changing landscape in the relationship between brands and consumers, a multi-channel environment where customers tend to get information and build trust about the brands or products that they own or want to buy in more new ways than one, most marketing services firms have been left behind in the past. What does it take to build the next generation marketing services companies? Here's a very interesting perspective by Adam Needles and something that I have been writing about in this blog for a couple of years now. Take a look:

What are the key pillars of a next-generation marketing-services agency?

There are five key characteristics that will mark successful marketing agencies in the near future:

Integrated, multi-channel suite of marketing communication capabilities: Marketers must understand the combination of mediums that are most effective for reaching their target customers and brand communities; marketers must also realize this will change over time.  This means that marketers need agencies that can execute campaigns across an ever-changing combination of mediums and do so in a coordinated fashion; moreover, it means that recommendations for the ‘marketing mix’ need to be driven by real client/brand needs, not agency agenda.

Balance of strategic capabilities with strong tactical execution: Agencies are often asked to manage scale campaigns while ensuring that they are executed at every point and via every channel with perfect, ‘ground-level’ tactical execution.  This means that successful next-generation agencies must have a blend of talent — both communication medium experts and business/marketing/brand strategy experts — that can make sure the complete spectrum of a client’s business needs, from the highest level down to the lowest, are fully covered.

End-to-end results measurement and closed-loop client analytics integration: Next generation agencies must be fully integrated with their clients’ information systems and be able to supply real-time marketing performance measurement data, across mediums, directly into their clients’ closed-loop analytics platforms. Measurement and analytics also need to be focused.

Sophisticated, underlying technology platform:  Whether it is for driving execution management for integrated campaigns or it is for improving measurement and integration with closed-loop analytics platforms, a sophisticated, underlying technology platform is a critical component of next-generation marketing services agencies.  In fact, technology infrastructure must be as much a priority as hiring smart people at agencies. 

Holistic focus on both brands and brand community: Agencies are in a unique position to help bridge what is often a highly inwardly-looking perspective of marketers and brand managers with the outside world – helping to better connect brands with their brand communities.The core objective of any agency’s set of services is to support the marketing of brands.  This means that agencies need to be hyper-focused, as never before, on the impact of their programs on both brand equity and on brand revenue.

Look like the current marketing services firms have a lot to do and rejig, if they want to remain relevant to marketers in the near future. The faster they do it, the more successful they would be.