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Super Bowl is upon us as is the advertising madness around. There are a few key themes that will hold true this year for sure and are already surfacing:1. Releasing ads online early is becoming table-stakes. Nearly everyone seems to be doing this and with good reason. It's about building momentum into the Super Bowl typically done with a mixture of paid and organic promotions of the TV ads online.
2. The smarter advertisers are constructing narratives around teasers, the TV commercial and what should happen after the ad airs. Some are even focusing on second screen social TV experiences (we being one of those).
3. A much smaller subset of advertisers are recognizing that there's more to the Super Bowl than just the advertising or their own advertising. As a result, they have a more integrated, cohesive strategy build around the entirety of the Super Bowl experience. More will move in this direction next year.
4. Hashtag mania is taking hold. Lots of advertisers will be promoting hashtags. Many over their Facebook urls or website address. Time will tell whether these are valuable or if they get lost in the clutter of the moment. How many people will use those hashtags that are promoted?
5. Ad-meters galore for certain. Last year we got to experience lots of different ad meters. This year there are going to be even more with many varied measures of success. What's certain every advertiser will probably have at least one meter that they will be able to point to and say that they did well! In another year or two, the ad meters will reduce in number.
For more on the Super Digital mania, read this Reuters piece and this Ad Age story where our Pepsi plans are discussed (there's more detail in the Ad Age story)
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.
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.
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.
Last week I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a piece about the new branded domain names that ICANN announced. Starting in 2012, companies or individuals will be able to apply for custom domain names that instead of ending with ".com" or ".uk" would end with ".brand" like dot pepsi or dot mountaindew. It'll cost $185,000. Here's my more unfiltered take:
- I'm not convinced this is a good decision. Yes, it is a more branded domain name but it causes confusion among consumers. For every brand that forks out the money for a branded domain, there will be two that don't.
- The pricing seems atrocious. I'm not sure where ICANN got the $185,000 figure from but it appears that the business community wasn't consulted. $185,000 is a lot of money and ICAAN appears to be trading on the insecurities that digital marketers may have about their brands.
- It also seems that ICANN wishes they had benefited more directly from the domain name squatting gold rush of the 1990s and are now trying to make up for it. From a industry standpoint, I don't think it makes sense. And nor does Esther Dyson, former ICANN chairwoman.
- Other domain name formats have come and gone in the past but they've failed. Remember dot biz and all those domain names that were actually meant for tiny countries? With dot com and the country domain names we have a standard. It's a vocabulary people are used to.
- ICANN is supposed to be in the business of reducing digital confusion and making findability of websites easier. They say this will unleash global imagination.This does the exact opposite. Even Google thinks so.
- ICANN seems to have confused the opportunities to have more top level domain names with the specific needs of marketers. I can maybe understand the value in having more top level domain names for generic topics like shoes but pushing brands into that space is a mistake. Read this insightful interview with a former ICAAN Chairman for more.
- I can only imagine the copyright and trademark infringement issues that will arise in January. Without clear rules around this, we could have a lot of chaos.
I think this is a mistake and most importantly, it is guaranteed to cause user confusion. It'll also cause angst among marketers like myself who feel pressure to fork out the money to purchase a domain name. Similar to the whole net neutrality debate, we as an Internet community, are running the risk of enacting laws, policies and guidelines that hurt the Internet rather than help it over the long term.
Update: @38enso said it best in a tweet reply to my post. - Content drives traffic not URL name. That matters the most.
Here's the video of my Real-Time Marketing presentation from the Conversational Marketing Summit. Enjoy.
View more videos from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time
