Archive for January, 2014

Here’s an interesting list of trends from the recent Ad Exchangers’ summit. Its a great list. I’d argue there is a big one missing.

And that is to do with automating the business of marketing. How we do things as marketers needs to be automated and moved to the cloud – this will in turn free up capacity to embrace these trends.The category has an entirely uninteresing monkier – Marketing Resource Management – think of it as Marketing Effectiveness Engine.

1. Is 1:1 interaction with your audience actually necessary? Is 1:some actually fine? Research shows that marketers are not sure about the payoff of a segmented versus individualized approach. Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger
2. “Programmatic”, or a way of automating the buy and sell process, was the word of the day. Panelists agree that people always will create demand, but the demand can then be processed by technology.
3. Native Ads are on the rise. To combat “banner blindness and skipped pre-roll ads”, marketers are increasing the level of programmatic digital advertising. –Rebecca Lieb, Industry Analyst, The Altimeter Group
4. Measure Native Ad effectiveness against paid, earned, and owned media convergence. Start measuring somewhere or you’ll never know what works. -Lieb
5. It’s time for marketers to act, not just think, like real publishers. “Be omnipresent but not superfluous,” noted Jonathan Hunt, Head of Digital Strategy, Vice. “Cater to where your future audience actively consumers, creates, and shares what’s most important to them.”
6. Empathy is the key to going viral. The sharing mindset goes beyond keywords and tags, and is emotional based. Smart content in marketing embraces this factor. –Jonah Peretti, Founder and CEO, BuzzFeed
7. Mobile is a marketing must. Prepare to embrace integrated, contextual, and experiential strategic mobile marketing. –Jenny Wise, Mobile Marketing Analyst, Forrester Research
8. Cross-Device Linkage metrics are increasingly important for some business models to analyze. AOL Networks is seeing that with brand advertisers 45% of display spend is going cross-linkage, according to CEO Bob Lord.
9. Publications are still untapped grounds to support your earned media strategy. Think The New York Times “PAID POST” where brands share thought leadership content in a natural discovery environment. –Michael Zimbalist, VP, R&D, The New York Times
10. Centralizing data sources is key to your engagement strategy. Understanding how to develop a universal customer profile is critical to delivering on the promise of relevance and value. –Kevin Akeroyd, GM, Oracle Marketing Cloud

Forbes highlights Marc Andreessen as using Twitter the way it was intended. Like a human. And they are right – not just in that Mark is using Twitter well, but that he is using it the right way.

Andreessen is exactly the kind of person who could be excused for not using Twitter like a human. Inhumanly busy? Check. Prominent enough that they could cause a media firestorm with a wrong choice of words? Check. Powerful enough that a tweet could derail multizillion-dollar deals? Check.

And yet, he’s using Twitter the way you wish every person who gets invited to Davos would. He doesn’t just tweet humorous utterances and replies every once in a while. He goes on epic rants (most recently on the NSA). He tells stories. He entertains replies and is seemingly willing to banter with anyone who’s got anything smart to say. He even, o feat of social media savvy, uses the “favorite” option as a way to “like” tweets, which has become all the rage of late.

But it is going to take more that just the business leader changing for others to benefit from this advice. 

First, context is everything. Say you are the CEO of a bank – your business context is very different from that of a Silicon Valley super star. Would you be able to behave in the same way? Simply put, no.

Second, communication needs to be a priorty. Mark has clearly prioritized communicating. Most business leaders don’t. Except through facile emails and videos cooked up by comms teams that would be, for the most part, better off getting out of the way.

Third, Mark’s brand is Mark. Most business leaders struggle with this. Are they the brand – or is the company the brand. In this new world of zero intermediaries I argue it has never been more important for Executives to build their own brands and communicate authentically. Most wont because communicating isnt a priority for them – they favor opacity over transparency (see 2) and if they did, their business context might not allow for it.

Either way, I hope Mark continues what he is doing.

The Tipping Point

A great post from Jeff. Like he says:

The data suggests that there are two very different patterns going on with respect to e-commerce penetration. The two largest categories — “Food and Beverage” and “Health and Personal Care” — show e-commerce penetration well below the overall average. These categories essentially are the domains of grocery stores and drug stores, and e-commerce (at least to date) has achieved only modest penetration of these massive categories (but Amazon Fresh has designs on changing that).

The other four categories are what I would consider to be the domains of traditional specialty retail categories, the ones that are transacted in the malls of America. All of these demonstrate e-commerce penetration well above the overall average, ranging from a low of 12 percent for “Clothing and Accessories,” up to 24 percent for “Media, Sporting and Hobby Goods.” It’s in these specialty retail categories where e-commerce to date has had its strongest impact.

One additional observation is that the pace of online share gain in the specialty retail categories shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. All of these charts are “up and to the right.”