Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Digital Tide Creeps Up On TV

Last weekend I sat down to watch the Champions League Final between Real Madrid and Juventus.  Historically, this has been a prime example of ‘Event TV’; a huge must-watch sporting occasion – shown live on broadcast networks. A genre that traditional broadcasters have held up as a final unassailable bastion against the efforts of Silicon Valley to take over the living room.  However, no longer it seems.  

After scrolling around and finding that only BT was showing the game, the familiar complexities of navigating today’s TV landscape began.  Although a BT customer, I didn’t have access to the right package but I noticed its coverage was live and free on YouTube.  With multiple remotes in hand I switched from Freeview via a Humax box to the TV apps on my Sony TV.  I then launched YouTube and fiddled with the sound settings and there it was: full-screen UCL action.  

Now while far from being a slick user-experience this felt like a moment when the tech titans had finally breached the last defences of traditional broadcasting.  It’s been a long time coming with Google launching its first salvoes at the traditional broadcasters almost ten years ago before launching into its own hardware venture with Sony.  Since then, there have been...

What Will You Bid For These Pyjama Tops?

In our Digital Strategy Sessions there is often a moment when the executive teams realise that digital marketing and media doesn’t come with a rate card that can be negotiated over a good lunch in Soho.

Nowhere is this more true than when reviewing the programmatic auctions that drive modern digital media markets. For executives used to well-thumbed pricing manuals for TV spots, out-of-home billboards or double-page spreads, this new environment can be disorientating.

Traditional media formats benefit from a baked-in sense of value and price. This may be down to an established econometric model, a long-held benchmark, a missive from the procurement department or simply the deal done by the media agency at an away day. Just like the company furniture, executives are comfortable with price and value. In contrast, when entering an auction-driven modern media market, the lack of historical payments to lean back on can be discomforting.

One of the disconcerting aspects of attending an auction – offline or online - for the first time is not having a definitive price for the items you want to buy. The cost is determined by your budget and the value of the auction lot in your own context.

To draw upon a simple example from my family history, long before the digital world, a much-loved uncle of mine...

Would Your Digital Strategy Pass The Chairman’s Test?

One of the common scenarios I come across in the Digital Strategy Sessions I run is when a company has invested in a range of disparate digital products and programmes but are left feeling unsure about what is really being added to the bottom line.  In the majority of cases the problem is that the digital marketing programme is not delivering against business outcomes that senior executives genuinely care about.  This is partly because, in recent years, digital marketing has grown up and slowly joined the mainstream but has not yet been integrated with existing business planning procedures.  For example, senior executives don’t care about clicks, fans and followers. They might like the idea of having the latest digital wizadry but what they really care about are revenues, business development, growth markets, cost efficiencies and recruitment. If the digital marketing programme can’t be demonstrated to deliver against these issues – even in a minor way – it can never expect to receive the full support of those signing off on major investments. The question I pose in the Digital Strategy Sessions is would you be happy to stand up in front of your chairman or your clients’ board and present your digital marketing plan?  And, more importantly, are you happy you are addressing the issues that are top of their to-do-lists?

Getting The Data Habit

In the Digital Strategy Sessions I run I often talk about acquiring the data habit. The world of web analytics and data can be utterly overwhelming for those who are coming to it for the first time. It’s the part of the digital marketing ecosystem where jargon and strange language goes on steroids and the whole thing can easily sound like a geeky maths class. Even when looking at simple tools, such as Google Trends, it can be easy to get lost in the vast data sets that it uses. How can so much information be so meaningless is the sense that I think a lot of people – understandably – have. That’s why it’s important to find a single business-related issue and focus on that. And then, crucially, keep on returning to that data on a regular – maybe weekly – basis. The next step is to find a way to log the changes that you see and the picture will begin to appear. You could do this with a few screen shots – or maybe download a CSV file and create a chart in Excel. It doesn't have to be too clever to begin with. Perhaps just try following a company’s brand name on Google Trends and see how it changes over time. Before you know it, you will have developed the data habit.

The Creepy Line

Whilst the constantly changing world of technology is interesting, the way it affects our lives, opinions and behaviour is where marketeers should focus. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the way technology affects our privacy. In the Digital Strategy Sessions I run, I call this The Creepy Line. It’s the feeling or idea of technology becoming too pervasive. The interesting aspect is that everyone has a different threshold. For some, being tracked their every waking moment is a positive choice, as they see immediate useful feedback, maybe in the shape of health data - such as sleep or exercise patterns. For others, the mission is to stay ‘off-grid’ to as great an extent as possible. For most, it’s somewhere in between where people are happy to offer up very intimate details about their lives in some areas, such as a fertility app, but want to keep everything else under wraps. Understanding where your customers’ Creepy Line sits and what, if anything, you can do to influence it, is increasingly important. The difficulty arises when using so-called second or third party data – or someone else’s first party data as it’s sometimes known. Third parties may guarantee the ethically sound nature of their data using, ‘privacy-safe’, ‘scrubbing’ techniques to remove Personally Identifiable Information (PIIs). However, such talk immediately takes me over The Creepy Line.

Advertising Aliens

At a Digital Strategy Session I ran the other week for a creative agency, one of the management commented that she’d recently been to an advertising conference and felt like she was at a technology show. Her comment was that if an alien had landed at the event, it would have assumed advertising was largely about software calculating small differences in consumer behavior and purchasing patterns. Certainly all very different from the days of the fabled Big Idea, where ad agencies would arrive and unveil the result of their reductive brain-mashing. These days, a lot more attention is paid to the brute-force style analytical approach where the goal is to maximise clicks, fans and followers. Undoubtedly, the apparently revolutionary advantages brought by automated markets trading signals and attention data are highly alluring for CMOs with data-hungry procurement officers breathing down their necks. However, as media companies increasingly morph into software houses and drive the big data agenda forward, it’s very easy for the power of good creative to get lost. Or become confused with innovative data management platforms or whizzy, layered look-a-like and life event targeting techniques. No doubt, it’s all just part of the ebb and flow occurring in media and marketing as the rising tide of digital and networked media continues.

Everyone Wants Answers

Everyone would like specific answers to their specific digital marketing questions. And ideally they would like them immediately and in a paint-by-numbers format. This is one lesson I have learnt from the four hundred odd Digital Strategy Sessions I have run. Generally, it’s good to give people what they want. Especially, if others are saying they can provide perfectly packaged, specific, actionable, deliverable, measurable strategic plans.  However, in my experience – unfortunately - it’s just not feasible. The world of digital is now so vast, fluid and throws up so many challenges – not to mention jargon – that I think it’s best to focus on the landscape and how digital and networked media is changing specific sectors. And how that influences business strategy – if at all. In fact, most marketing folk and brands know this to be true, and understand that the most important aspect of operating in today’s markets remains understanding what consumers (aka people) are doing differently, and how technology is changing their expectations. Along with the tools that let them operate in these new networked media environments.  So in the Digital Strategy Sessions that’s what I focus on and, generally, people find it helpful. Even if deep down they really want specific answers to their specific questions. But, hey, don’t we all?

Search, Display And Social Combine

Last year was the moment when social channels stopped pretending to be earned or organic and became paid media, as the market was flooded with behavioural targeting options and 'social display' exploded. Increasingly, and somewhat ironically, the only place to now gain organic reach is through search (aka Google in the UK). That said, SEO is also being turned upside-down by the rise of knowledge graphs, entities and the subsequent erosion of keyword influence. Furthermore, display and search are increasingly difficult to view separately as search marketeers call upon audience demographics to augment their keyword intent data. Returning the favour, display advertisers can use keyword data to target their brand images via data management platforms, using groovy new approaches such as content remarketing. Additionally, as vast programmatically-driven markets expand, traditional commercial models also blend. Thus, display marketeers are able to access auction-based models previously associated with search which means turning from CPM to CPC. Welcome to the new world of markets for attention data - or signals. They may seem confusing - but they aren’t going away.

Mobile Everything

There are certain words used very frequently in marketing meetings that probably mean entirely different things to the individuals sitting around the table.  Mobile is one of those words.  For some people it means smart phones (but not tablets); for others it means ‘on-the-go’; retailers might be thinking 'in-store'; developers might ponder iOS8 vs Android Lollipop; data-heads may focus on location layers; programmatic fiends may zero in on geo-fencing; while consumers (aka people) might not really make a distinction between one screen and another – it’s all just information.  Indeed, Google's data shows that most mobile search is done in the home or at work, as the smartphone is now the first port-of-call that oftens leads to other screens and media.  It may be more helpful to think about mobile as the latest stage of computing.  This is hardly a radical idea – a quick peek at any analytics tool over the last few years makes that trend clear.  However, prepare for further confusion as the terribly-named Internet Of Things takes hold with sensors built into cars, toys, clothes, shelves and even medicine.  Increasingly, it only makes sense to talk about specific usage cases for individual sectors and categories.  Or in other words - insights.  Which is what marketing has always been about.

Privacy Is The New, New Thing

The rise of privacy as an online issue is creating the greatest challenges to brands and marketing. Once again, it’s interesting because these issues are not primarily about technology, but consumers' (aka people’s) views about what they feel comfortable with. In some cases, this means people don’t want to hand over any information at all. For example, in the case of brand driven communities that rise and almost immediately fall. In other cases, the exchange is almost immediately recognised as a good deal and the users flood in and happily hand over very private details. Whatsapp is probably the most striking example of all in recent years. Prior to its launch the idea of handing over your phone book and contact list to an anonymous corporation may have seemed beyond the pale. However, all it took was the promise of free SMS, hardly a gigantic offer on the face of it, and the users flooded in. Neither did its acquisition by Facebook change that. The exchange was still seen as sound.