Working with very large brands in large organizations means not knowing whether you're taking two steps forward, one step back or one step forward and two steps back in any given moment. We all like to say that there's light at the end of the tunnel but working within a marketing organization versus in an agency, the tunnel is much longer and sometimes the light can seem much further away. You're thinking about how decisions you'll make today will effect your brand three or four years hence.
Yes, we absolutely live in a real-time world and we have to be hyper-quick. But at the same time changing consumer perceptions of a brand sometimes can take years just as meaningful competitive marketshare moves take time. Influences affecting consumers are more varied, more random and less controllable than ever before too. They're also global and hyper local all at once.
It is indeed a fascinating time to be in marketing. And while some facets of marketing make it an extremely sexy discipline, others make it a more difficult discipline than ever. In this world, the adage, don't mistake motion for progress gets infinitely more complex to recognize.
Television advertising has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. However, it is arguably on the verge of its greatest changes ever. From where I sit as the Global Head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages, charged with navigating our brand's foray into the digital world, I see three big changes:
- The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing.
- The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story.
- Location-aware technologies will force a greater degree of engagement on a format that had historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions.
When you look at the statistics, the reasons are obvious. According to a recent study, 60% of television viewers also look at their mobile phones while watching TV shows. 33% have their laptops open in front of them and most interestingly, iPad owners spend the most time in front of the TV with their tablet than any other activity. It makes sense for TV advertisements to be thought of as an element in a broader narrative arch for the brand - a narrative arch that allows the brand to tell a more complete and a more interactive story. But what are the implications for marketers today? Read the complete post on the Harvard Business Review website and catch the earlier piece that I had written for them too.
Probably one of the most exciting parts of working at PepsiCo Beverages is in seeing the physical and digital worlds come together especially as the whole cause marketing space gets more directly integrated with brand marketing. This PepsiCo 7-Eleven program is a perfect example of that and one that I find to be awesome.
For every 20 oz. Pepsi product bought from 7-Eleven, we will donate five cents to the good cause. If the person also checks in using Facebook Places, we will double that donation. Feeding America provides emergency food assistance to those who are food insecure. Its network of food banks supply food to more than 37 million Americans each year, including 14 million children and 3 million seniors. The program is being promoted both in-store and online, with case cards on Pepsi end-caps, and advertising on Facebook and participating food bank websites.
For too long, the digital industry has looked at brands like Pepsi simply as a monetization strategy. What's worse is that sometimes our digital friends view us as being uninformed members of the digital ecosystem - something akin to prey. Not only is that perception misinformed, its going to start impacting the bottom-line of many companies in the digital ecosystem.
On the brand side, marketers cannot afford to play that role anymore. We need to show a much stronger return on all our marketing investments just as we recognize that traditional forms of marketing (ie banner ads) aren't as effective as they once were. We also understand technology better than we're often given credit for. If you treat us as your monetization strategy, you probably won't get much attention from us.
So how do we think about our roles in the digital ecosystem? I like to think of it as four key points:
The role of brands extends beyond simple advertising and is evolving towards meaningful sponsorships, content curation and creation. The way Pepsi is partnering with the X-Factor across retail, in show and online (check outPepsi Sound Off
This piece by me was first published in Ad Age.
Enough said. Via Ad Age.
Having played around with Google+ for a few weeks now, here are my raw thoughts on the social platform and its role in the Real-Time Marketing world. Some of these thoughts made it into this Ad Age story for which I was interviewed last week.- Finally a Google social networking bet that has a chance of surviving. There's no question, this is Google's best bet ever in the social networking space. There have been so many false starts and half hearted efforts that I had begun to wonder whether Google could every crack this space. The reason why things are different this time - rather than incubating the product in isolation in Google Labs, from the get-go Google+ is integrated into the rest of the Google ecosystem through single sign on, the navigation bar and the ability to add in contacts and friends. There's a lot more integration to do but it works effectively as a real-time stream of content being shared to you and from you based on social context.
- Google's challenge is that we simply do not know how Google+ fits into our lives. Maybe Google+ been intentionally silent on that for a good reason. Facebook has become part of our digital habit -- I sit down for a cup of coffee in the morning and I go on Facebook to scan my newsfeed. I find some really compelling content while surfing the web and I tweet about it to the world. It's not clear if Google wants Google+ to be an add-on to my digital habits or a replacement. A lot of people -- the 20 million people who are playing around on Google+ are asking themselves that question. The funny thing is that Google+ has the best of Facebook and the best of Twitter -- you have the ability to broadcast and select closed groups who should receive that broadcast. So is it meant to be a bridge between the two but do we really need that? Targeting for brands in a real-time fashion this way is extremely powerful.
- Google + misses a true radical innovation opportunity but all is not lost. Google's historic strength has been its search engine algorithms and its blistering fast, technology backbone. Simply speaking, it has the best scientists and its algorithms are unmatched. That's why its the undisputed leader in search. But in Google+ I have to manually find my friends and add them to circles manually. It is time consuming and can quickly get overwhelming managing all of these friends and circles.
If I could log in and have Google+ make recommendations based on how I have interacted with people in the past that would be valuable. The home run would be if they could add a "Suggested Circles" functionality that helps me manage my networks. They do something similar in gmail today with "Important first" and the "Priority Inbox" functionality, so this wouldn't be a big step for them. After all, who wants to go about adding friends and categorizing them yet again. To take that thought a step further, Google+ could also suggest brands and products in a similar fashion. - Google+ can really work for brand marketers if we're given the right tools. From a brand perspective two things matter most - knowing where, when and how we can engage meaningfully with our consumers and in turn being mindful of how they'd like us to engage with them. As marketers, we absolutely want to find ways to engage with our consumers on Google+ that are organic to the Google+ philosophy and in ways that consumers are using the platform. But to be effective we need very strong analytics. We have to be smart in how we engage -- we can't be everywhere or do everything, so we need analytics that help us make decisions on how and where to best reach our consumers at moments in time when we matter. Google has said that when they do launch brand pages they will have strong analytics. Google understands brands because they have worked closely with us on search and they know what analytics we need, so I am happy to wait for that.
Keeping in mind the importance of people's privacy, we'd also want to know psychographic information about who are engaging. This is not an anonymous platform, so we always have to respect that. If Pepsi could reach out on Google+ and engage a Pepsi fan and then also be able to engage with their friend circle or their work circle that would be a win. In the end we want to participate in a way that makes sense for the platform, consumers and the brand. - Google+ functions effectively as a real-time sharing engine. There's no question in my mind that Google+ is strongest as a real-time content sharing engine for me to push out specific pieces of content to specific people circles. Google+ integrates more seamlessly with YouTube, Google Photos and Google Music as Ian Schafer emphasized in an Ad Age piece. That is its greatest strength. Its something that I cannot do with Twitter (lists are for viewing tweets from select people not for sharing out tweets to groups) and while I could do it with Facebook, the people management feature has gotten cumbersome. It is also symmetrical limiting me from controlling distribution the way I may want to.
- Google + streams are very different to the Facebook newsfeed. That's an advantage. If someone gave me one wish in the world, I'd probably use it to understand how Facebook's edge rank system actually worked. Like the Google search algorithm its a black box and I'm not exactly sure how many users (and which users) may see a specific post of from one of my brands. From a marketing standpoint, that's a bit of a problem.
However, in the case of Google+ everything published appears in the stream in chronological fashion. I have a much better sense of what a user will see. Now, this can certainly get overwhelming but there's absolute clarity in terms of what will make it into a user's feed. You could argue that the Google model is simplistic and not scalable but what's certain is that it forces you to take those circles seriously. And for Google that's a good thing and for marketer's it makes Google + more valuable.
It's going to be fascinating watching the evolution of Google+ To get 20 million people to play with it in a manner of weeks is no joke. The social network is definitely off to a good start but there's obviously a lot more to do to create true stickiness of the Facebook variety. One thing is for sure, if Google were to integrate the Google+ stream and comments into its search engine algorithm, that alone may provide enough incentive for a lot more people to take it even more seriously. Only time will tell whether Google decides to go in that direction or not.
There's a much ignored side effect of the social media phenomena. A side effect that has immense ramifications for the marketing world but gets no attention whatsoever. An effect that we as an industry must pay much more attention to. Otherwise, we're at risk of trivializing what we do, hurting each other's interests whether that be advertiser, agency, publisher or consumer related and wasting millions in marketing dollars.
I call it the trillion impressions problem. Largely thanks to the social media phenomena, we now live in a world which has many billions more (if not trillions) brand related media impressions that can be monetized in some form or the other. Most of these additional impressions are driven by the fact that consumers now are the ultimate marketers endorsing brands, advocating for them and talking about them across the social networks. It's a because customers are creating customers.
But there's a problem with these trillions of media impressions about brands. We don't know what they're worth and we're not putting enough thinking into understanding their value especially as triggers for deeper engagement. We're not putting enough effort into figuring this out. Instead we have every media company and startup trying to selling brands a new kind of impression without anyone helping companies understand their worth.
For example, I cannot accurately quantify the value of a Pepsi display banner advertising impression versus a paid search impression, a mainstream news story about Pepsi impression, a FourSquare check-in impression at a Pepsi location, a Get Glue impression of a Pepsi branded sticker, or a Facebook edge ranked surfaced newsfeed impression of something the brand is doing. I'm not even sure if the Pepsi target consumer is seeing these impressions. I also don't know exactly which is more important, how do they influence brand affinity and which drive purchases the most. And this is just the beginning of it. What I do know however, is that every publisher, technology company and many an agency wants to sell me a lot of these new brand media impressions that are now in our ecosystem without anyone knowing or assigning an accurate relative value to them.
And that's the problem. Marketing budgets haven't grown at the same pace, and we have no way of qualifying the relative value of one type of brand impression in the media ecosystem to another. We also do not have the tools in place to tell us which type of impressions lead to the greatest consumer engagement and do the most to drive brand equity, brand health and sales of products.
Just because there's a lot more to buy, it doesn't mean we can or more importantly, we should. Let's not forget the basics. A trillion impressions are worthless if they don't move a business forward.
More Headlines
June 26, 2011 Do $185,000 Domain Names make sense?
June 21, 2011 Conversational Marketing Summit Presentation
June 10, 2011 Your 30 Billion Competitors
June 10, 2011 Staking everything in Real-Time Marketing
June 3, 2011 The X-Factor, YouTube & a New TV Mindset
April 30, 2011 Social Vending, TV Ad Tagging & Marketing Convergence
April 22, 2011 Will you tie bonuses to Facebook fan counts?
March 26, 2011 The SXSW Pepsi Refresh Project Panel. Under the hood
January 15, 2011 Making a Splash in Digital, Forbes Interview
December 9, 2010 7 experts' predictions for 2011
December 3, 2010 10 Digital Marketing Industry Pet Peeves
November 9, 2010 From the Other Side - Advice for Agencies
September 27, 2010 Twitter's a Fledgling or a lot more? WSJ Story
Archives
Subscribe to this blog
