The HubMagazine #32

E x c h a n g e o f I d e a s | September/October 2009 | $10.95

A p u b l i c a t i o n o f R e v e r i e s . c o m a n d C o o l N e w s o f t h e D a y

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M A G A Z I N E

s e p t e m b e r / o c t o b e r 2 0 0 9

pIVot poINt

Some people say that there’s no such thing as new

media or old media, that it’s all just media. We now

know that this just isn’t so.

Old media were just channels through which

messages were communicated in hopes of influencing

attitudes or, even better, changing behavior.

Those media can still pack a punch sometimes. But

they are starting to look rather primitive compared to new media, which are more than just vehicles for our

advertisements and promotions.

These new media — which are usually (but not

necessarily) digital media — are different because they’re

all about call and response.

Sometimes it’s the brand calling

and the shopper responding, while

other times it’s just the opposite.

These new media are also

different because, while they’re

still about the delivery of messages, they are not the neat

and tidy messages of marketing’s ever-present past.

These new media messages can be upbeat, positive and

cheerful, but they can also be angry, negative and mean.

In other words, these new-media messages are about

real people living their lives in the real world, and that’s

the real beauty of new-media.

Marketing has a problem, and it is precisely this

disconnect between what happens in marketing and

what happens in real life. It is a gap that new media

bridge with astonishing efficiency and effectiveness.

Can we measure that? Maybe, maybe not — certainly

not in the traditional sense. But we can count on it to

connect with our shoppers in ways we have only begun to

imagine. This issue of the Hub is about those possibilities.

Tim Manners

[email protected]

HUB�e

M A G A Z I N E

20C O V E R S T O R Y

HP MeteorologyHewlett-Packard CMO Michael Mendenhall says the future of media calls for blue skies with lots of clouds. An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners.

5R O U N D T A B L E

Being SocialThe dawn of marketing communications as conversations is here. A discussion featuring Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, Aaron Magness of Zappos, Richard Binhammer of Dell, Bert DuMars of Newell Rubbermaid and John Andrews of Collective Bias.

32S U M M I T R E P O R T

Screen GemsThe convergence of digital media at retail is re-defining the shopping experience. Featuring: Mike Linton, Jim Hood and Andy Austin. By Vince Weiner.

May the old media rest in peace.

Call & Response

editor-in-chiefTim Manners

senior editorsPeter F. Eder Jane Harris

managing publisherJoseph McMahon

Art DirectorJulie Manners

Design conceptAlexander Isley Inc.

IllustratorJohn S. Dykes

circulation DirectorBertha Rosenberg

brain trustActive InternationalArc WorldwideEURO RSCG DiscoveryHenry Rak Consulting GroupHoyt & CompanyInsight Out of ChaosLandor AssociatesMcGuinn.comMarketing DriveMars AdvertisingMiller Zell Inc.TracyLockeTriad Digital MediaWomanWise

Hub clubProphetRPM Connect

FriendsThe Bellwether Group

The HubDavid X. Manners Co.107 Post Road EastWestport, CT 06880203-227-7060 ext. [email protected]

n brought to you by the editors of Reveries.com and Cool News of the Day, The Hub magazine is dedicated to exploring insights, ideas and innovation as the ultimate drivers of success in marketing.

n published bi-monthly since July 2004, The Hub’s circulation is exclusive to reveries’ proprietary database of approximately 3,500 senior-level, client-side executives in Fortune 1000 marketing departments and major ad agencies.

n Advertising: For more information on The Hub’s sponsorship and advertising opportunities, please contact Joseph mcmahon ([email protected]) or 845-238-3516.

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C O OL N E W S

The Storefront Project, Amish Internet and Printcasting.

R E S E A R C H R E P OR T

The Media Feast | What’s up with media? What’s down? What’s holding steady? An executive summary of a Reveries.com survey.

C A S E S T U D Y

Burt’s Buzz | At Burt’s Bees, a culture of caring is both the medium and the message. By Dori Molitor.

W H I T E PA P E R

Open Up! | Are you up for the challenge of open branding? By Alex Do.

W H I T E PA P E R

Shopper Marketing Online | Walmart sets the standard for engaging consumers online. By Greg Murtagh.

W H I T E PA P E R

Activating Creativity | Bringing brands to life across channels and disciplines moves people to action. By William Rosen.

W H I T E PA P E R

Digital Bridges | New research uncovers keys to successful digital-media integration. By Jim Garrity and Kerry O’Connor.

W H I T E PA P E R

Codeword: Partnership | Television is alive and well for advertisers who innovate and collaborate. By Cindy Jolicoeur.

W H I T E PA P E R

Feeling the Media | Making shoppers feel the love means making the media feel their pain. By Al Wittemen.

C O OL B O O K S

Ripped, The Beckham Experiment and Losing the News.

A L S O

Cool News of the Day, a daily e-mail newsletter of marketing insights, ideas and inspiration, is edited by TIM MANNERS. For a free subscription, visit www.reveries.com

cooL NeWs

Amish Internet While other newspapers retreat to the internet, The Budget is succeeding by avoiding electronic media. The Budget is no ordinary newspaper, though. It is written by, and for, the Amish community. And it does have a bare-bones website, but it carries “only local news briefs.”

That’s because of the newspaper’s writers, “known as scribes, feared their plainspoken dispatches would become fodder for entertainment in the ... non-Amish world.”

Staying offline turned out to be a good move, as the newspaper “solidified its steadfast fan base,” continuing a tradition dating back to 1890. The Budget began “as a series of letters swapped among Amish families who had dispersed across the Midwest,” and in some ways hasn’t changed all that much.

While the paper’s local edition, published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, is written by a paid staff of twelve writers, its national edition is filled with contributed letters, faxed or mailed in by unpaid scribes.

These letters sound uncannily like Twitter feeds: “Supper and singing were held at our house last night, so have been busy this morning getting dishes away and house in order,” for instance. And: “We’ve had some nice rain the last few days and the grass is greening up nicely.”

“People call The Budget the Amish internet,” says Keith Rathbun, its publisher. “It’s non-electric, it’s on paper, but it’s the same thing.” Business is good enough that The Budget plans to hire a couple of more reporters.

[So ur c e : Meghan Barr, Associated Press, 8/17/09]

Printcasting“All my assumptions about print were wrong,” says Dan Pacheco. “Advertisers wanted to be in print, and young people are interested in magazines.” Dan first realized this after creating a website about the local music scene for the Bakersfield Californian newspaper: “Advertisers kept asking him when the magazine was coming, he said, because they preferred to appear in print.”

So, now, Dan is pioneering a new kind of magazine that “lets readers pick which articles they want in their magazine and then print it themselves.”

The enterprise is called Printcasting, and since its introduction last March, it has spawned some 250 magazines.

The concept takes “advantage of advertisers’ willingness to pay as much as 40 times more for print ads than for online ones — while it removes the costs of paper, ink, printing presses and a pavement-pounding sales force.”

Printcasting keeps 10 percent of revenues, gives 30 percent to writers and 60 percent to publishers. The venture “is backed by an $837,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s program to find digital models for local news.”

[So ur c e : Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times, 7/20/09]

The Storefront ProjectWhat started as an “artistic social experiment” has turned into a hip, trendy and successful restaurant. At the Waffle Shop, customers enjoy fluffy waffles and coffee and are videotaped as they discuss whatever is on their minds — “politics, society, culture.”

Located in a lively Pittsburgh neighborhood, the Waffle Shop is “part of an advanced undergraduate course at Carnegie Mellon called the Storefront Project.”

The idea is to “develop a concept and take it out into the community to see how people react and interact.” And so students created The Waffle Shop, as part restaurant and part reality show, in what was supposed to be a two-semester project.

But it has proved so popular that it is now in an extended run, with extended hours. Originally, the Waffle Shop was purely “a night-owl hangout drawing a generally young, hip and vocal crowd.” But now it’s open for brunch, too, and is also “attracting many families, people from the neighborhood and curious passers-by.”

In a new twist, the Waffle Shop’s manager, Dawn Weleski, listens to internet news feeds via headphones and then repeats the news so customers can hear, with videos of the novel newscast carried live online at waffleshop.org. The site also now allows “users to sign into Facebook and Twitter feeds and talk back to the talk shows.”

Jon Rubin, the professor who runs the Storefront Project, is now looking at various business models to make the Waffle Shop permanent, either as a for-profit or not-for-profit venture.

[So ur c e : Adrain McCoy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/29/09]

september/october 2009 tHe HUb

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that’s still most untapped — is on the customer service side. Customer service is the Holy Grail of social media because building customer relationships is all about service.

If a consumer is having a problem and you can help them proactively, that’s a huge word-of-mouth builder as well as a big benefit to both the consumer and the brand. For example, one of our

What are the greatest opportunities in

social media?

Bonin Bough: The opportunity is to move from impressions to connections, and from campaigns to conversations. We have an opportunity to be closer to the customer than ever before and to co-create and react to the customer like never before.

The double-edged sword is that if we treat digital like any other communications channel, then we miss the value of it as an enabler across the business. Then we want to plan against it and carve out specific opportunities to use it. You can do that, but that’s not the largest opportunity. It can provide real-time customer insights and trends that are valuable for research and development.

Aaron Magness: The greatest opportunity is to form more of a personal relationship with employees, partners, customers and everything that goes along with that. You’re really able to get out the true voice of what your company is and that allows people to form a stronger relationship with you.

It’s not like the old days of buying from a faceless corporation.

Now, it’s like you’re buying from a friend, and you know they’re your friend because they have a personality and they tell you what they’re doing.

They show you what it’s like to work inside their company and that’s where the real value comes in. It’s really about breaking down that barrier of customer versus corporation, and allowing people to interact with other people.

A RoundtAble FeAtuRing

Bonin Boughpepsico

Aaron MagnessZappos.com

Richard BinhammerDell

Bert DuMarsNewell rubbermaid

John Andrewscollective bias

roUNDtAbLe

The opportunity is to move from impressions to connections, and from

campaigns to conversations.BON i N BOugh

Richard Binhammer: The best opportunity is to listen, learn and engage directly with your customers, but also to share information. We have had product ideas come forward that we’ve implemented, such as becoming part of Product (Red). We’ve engaged with customers online, solving problems, learning about their experiences and improving business processes as a result.

Bert DuMars: The greatest opportunity — and it’s the one

Being Social

garage organization products had a manufacturing flaw and we found out about it through a negative product review on our website.

We had a product manager contact the consumer and quickly had the product replaced. We took someone who had a bad experience, turned him around and he was thrilled. So, we see social media as a way to solve problems through the customer service organization to a point where it’s just the way we do business here.

The dawn of marketing communications as conversations is here.

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tHe HUb september/october 2009

If you look too hard for a return-on- investment on social media you’re going

to lose the authenticity of it. A A RON M AgN E SS

John Andrews: The biggest opportunity in social media is to build a collective conversation between brands, retailers and consumers. Done correctly, social media is now activating consumers as part of the brand management process in a real and authentic way.

That’s been done at some point in the past where consumers did focus groups or surveys, but this is a longer-term activity where you’re actually building a community that has an affinity for your brand. You are building a longer-term relationship with that community and including that as a standard part of your brand management process.

How must organizations change to realize social

media’s potential?

Bough: You need to take an integrated approach. First, it means rethinking internal process, which is everything from policies and guidelines to encouraging outward conversations across your entire employee base.

The next piece is integration. How do you integrate divisionally? Where do customer relations in this world live? Where does public relations live? Where does marketing live? How do they build more of an ecosystem than just a channel?

The third piece is changing the way that we measure the success of marketing programs.

Magness: Organizations need to realize that people are going to be using these tools anyway. Your ability to dictate your brand to the consumer is long gone and in actuality the consumer is telling you what your brand is. Not only are they telling you, they are also telling all their friends.

DuMars: One big issue is changing the metrics, which also ties in with incentives. You need to discern how much time should be spent on the channel and how to measure it to show that it’s delivering results. Another big key is integration of social media with traditional marketing campaigns.

So if you’re doing TV commercials, radio or print or any other mass media, integrate that with your social media efforts, and vice

You can either be part of it or you can be against it. If you’re against it, it’s going to have a pretty adverse effect. So, it’s really about embracing it and embracing the transparency that goes with it.

You shouldn’t have a lot of reasons not to be as transparent as possible or embrace these tools that allow people to communicate. You should want to communicate with your customers and external partners. That’s where I hope

versa. It amplifies the social media effort and also ties into your mass media effort, so they start working together to benefit each other.

The one other thing — and this is really difficult — is showing that your brand cares. A lot of traditional marketing is about getting the message out. When you add the social media side to it, it’s about people; it’s about people caring. So, how do you show that? That’s another key success factor.

Andrews: You have to immerse yourself in it. The biggest mistake is just taking the standard approach you’ve taken with traditional media and adding it to the space. Social media is not just a new communications vehicle to layer traditional tactics on top of. It’s not just a PR vehicle either. What’s different about social media is the participation.

The first thing that I had to do was to learn how people communicate and influence one another in

more businesses understand the potential impact of social media.

Binhammer: Dell’s interest in being directly connected to our customers has always been part of our corporate culture. So, social media is just a new tool to deploy in doing that, and in a lot of ways it’s a more effective tool.

For example, a conversation could be going on at Starbucks right now in Minneapolis between two Dell customers and I haven’t a clue what they’re saying. On the other hand, a conversation can be going on between two Dell customers on Facebook or Twitter and I know exactly what they’re saying.

But those aren’t necessarily changes in the organization; they are changes in our ability to listen, learn, engage and connect with our customers. I see it as an organization deploying tools to increase those opportunities to be able to connect and take advantage of the information that’s out there.


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building that’s really the focus of most brands at this point. The next step is to get them excited about our brand and then go to Walmart or Target or any one of our retailers and purchase them.

We have to have metrics all the way through the process of interest, excitement and brand love. Once we have them excited, we need to be sure we then get them to a place where they can buy our products.

Andrews: We’ll start with very simple metrics, such as: What kind of 30-day conversation is there on Twitter? Then we set up some kind of messaging baseline: Where does our core messaging response with consumers exist today?

We look at a grid of the competitive set and where we want to end up, agree on which metrics we want to track as forms of success. We need to move away from the traditional metrics of traffic, because traffic isn’t very valuable. I would rather have a thousand high-quality engagements than a million hits.

Ultimately, we want to connect with shoppers and drive that connection to the shelf. We’re working with a couple of retailers on experiments on a social version of the circular that activates communities around offers.

What is the most surprising thing

you’ve learned about social media?

Bough: The most surprising thing is how empowering social media is as a movement. It has the ability to be bigger than just, “hey what a great thing it is for marketers and customers to be able to talk.”

Customer service is the Holy Grail of social media because building customer

relationships is all about service. BERT Du M A R S

communitites. I involved myself in communities that had nothing to do with me, or my message, but just as an active participating member. That helped me learn not only the pathways but also about the relationships that are involved in that.

How can results of social media efforts

be measured?

Bough: We do something called “brand health measuring,” where we have a set of metrics that includes everything from impression data to share-of-voice. We also look at the frequency with which customers want to have relationships with us and how they want to have those relationships.

Anecdotally, we know there is value that’s moving the needle. What we all struggle with is how to measure that movement. We start by trying to align with traditional metrics that we do understand — impressions, share-of-voice, and those kinds of basic things.

Then we look at a series of comparatives versus our competitors as well as “gold standard” programs from outside our competitive set that may help us improve our effectiveness.

Magness: A million and one companies and consultants are out there who will tell you that if you pay them enough they’ll be able to measure results. What we look at is more directional — we’re not

trying to have today’s Facebook update or today’s “tweet” from 450 of our employees turn into an immediate sale.

What we are really trying to do is form that lasting relationship. If you look too hard for a return-on-investment on social media you’re going to lose the authenticity of it. We focus more on forming good relationships as opposed to trying to get the most out of today’s sale.

Binhammer: There’s always this great question about the return-on-investment. My point is this: What’s the business objective? Business objectives vary across the business, so there is no single ROI. Once you understand your business objectives, then you can go and measure.

You’ve probably seen the stories online that Dell has done two million dollars on “DellOutlet” on Twitter. Is Dell’s objective in social media being reached? Absolutely. We moved a few million dollars of product and did so faster and better and more efficiently than we would have otherwise.

Since we became involved in social media in early 2006, we’ve also seen significant change in sentiment towards Dell. When we first started out, 50 percent of what we saw online was negative, whereas today it’s below the 20 percent mark. But that’s a very different business objective and a very different business result to measure.

DuMars: Today, it’s all about tonality; it’s the positive brand awareness and the positive brand

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tHoUGHt LeADers

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BONIN BOUGH is the global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, where he oversees digital strategy and the implementation of social media tools and techniques. He formerly was with Weber shandwick and ruder Finn Interactive.

AARON MAGNESS heads marketing, public relations, social media and business development for Zappos.com. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and survived the running of the bulls in pomplona, spain.

RICHARD BINHAMMER leads digital media outreach and blog response, with special emphasis on communities and corporate reptutation for Dell. He has also held corporate communications positions with Golin Harris and Fleishman Hillard.

BERT DUMARS is vice president, e-business and interactive marketing for Newell Rubbermaid. previously, he was director of the electronic tax Administration for the Irs, and held marketing positions with Dell, Intel and Learning tree.

JOHN ANDREWS is managing director of collective bias at Mars Advertising. He previously was responsible for social media, community, mobile and in-store media for Walmart. He can be reached at [email protected].

in interacting with you on all kinds of levels.

Out of the blue, I’ve had customers tell me that they’ve been customers for years, that they are looking at their next Dell purchase and ask for my recommendations. That’s reassuring, nice to know and fun to interact with.

DuMars: I’ve been surprised by how integrated social media becomes into what I do. I’ve had conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that have continued for the last year or two. I learn a lot from them and I’m assuming they learn a lot from me. It’s not just a broadcast tool.

I’ve also been surprised to learn through social media how artists use our Sharpie pens, doing things you would never have thought. Some are actually taking white Ferraris and doing Sharpie artwork

For example, we are a huge supporter and sponsor of the BlogHer conference. I walked into this conference and there were 2,000 of the world’s most influential online women sitting in a room.

You could feel the amazing power that they have in terms of what they are doing to change society. It’s pretty exhilarating when you think about how digital media is redefining society.

Magness: The most surprising thing about social media is how quickly businesses try to bastardize it and make it more about how many fans or followers they have as opposed to really forming relationships. I’m surprised at how quickly people lose sight of that.

I think they are losing sight of where the real value is, which is in forming these lasting relationships.

Our CEO, Tony Hseih, said, “So many people are trying to be interesting as opposed to being interested.” That is just so spot on.

Binhammer: The most surprising thing is how generous communities can be and how welcoming they are to brands. I would have thought people would want to be left alone or not want Dell to be part of their communities.

But, in fact, as long as you’re genuinely interested in engaging, listening, learning and participating, people seem to be a) interested in having you around and b) interested

The most surprising thing is how generous communities can be and how

welcoming they are to brands. R iCh A R D Bi N h A M M ER

all over them. They’re beautiful, but I never thought anyone would modify a $300,000 vehicle with a Sharpie pen.

But those are the things that you find out about when you engage in social media. You find out about the really cool and the unusual things that people do with your products. We are finding out that there are whole new markets out there for us.

Andrews: As soon as you launch a digital campaign it begins to change, so you better have a flexible plan. You build guardrails


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As soon as you launch a digital campaign it begins to change, so you better

have a flexible plan.JOh N A N DR EWS

and stay within a certain place but no matter how much you plan, it will change the moment you launch it. People are going to approach it in their own way.

That’s why building long-term communities helps you be a little more predictive about what those changes might be. When we launch programs, we’ve already spent three months talking to someone in the community about what those things are.

This goes back to allowing your community to share in the branding process. You get better ideas that way. By the time you launch, you’ve got some people who take serious ownership because they feel like they helped build it. So, they want to talk about it.

Who is doing the best job with social

media and why?

Bough: I love some of the work that we’re seeing done by the Ford folks. I think the Ford Fiesta movement is genius. Dell is selling millions of dollars’ worth of product over Twitter. Wow! I also love what John Andrews did at Walmart, where he created a real value exchange with mom bloggers by providing them with exposure.

If digital lives just in marketing as a marketing channel, then it fails to capture the power of the organization, which is everything from strategic planning to R&D to innovation.

All the folks who are thinking about how we game-change our business should be thinking around digital alongside us. That’s the integration that we’re driving.

Magness: Businesses that are really utilizing social media as a way to

interact with customers and answer questions are doing the best job.

Transparency, collaboration, communication is really what it is all about. Twitter is one way to do that, but the one thing that gets overlooked the most is the phone.

I think Zappos does an incredible job in social media over the telephone. You’re talking to real people, employees of Zappos.com, and they’re there to help you. We’re just trying to get that same

I thought that was great. It showed that they really valued their fans, who had built up this great base of consumer love for the brand and they were willing to take the risk of letting their consumers control it.

Giving that control up is a big step for a brand, especially like Coca-Cola.

Andrews: I admire Zappos, where everybody in the company is encouraged to interact with customers in the social space.

cultural commitment that we have on the phone and apply it to these various tools.

Binhammer: It’s really our customers who are doing the best job with social media. In many ways it is like having a customer in the halls of Dell everyday. If I’ve been on Twitter for 20 minutes and then go into a meeting, I know what our customers are saying.

Other people, smarter than me, have certainly equated social media to the concept of a village because it closes that communication gap.

Using technology is now like being back in the village of 1800’s where everybody knows everything, just by walking down the street.

DuMars: Coca-Cola looked at what a couple of Coke fans had done on Facebook — they built this fan page up to three million fans of Coca-Cola. Coke had the legal right to take back the page, but instead chose to let these two guys to keep running it.

Zappos really lives this idea that we’re all the brand. In a short amount of time they’ve built a company in a pretty competitive space. I don’t think we have a shortage of shoe retailers, but they’re evidently worth close to a billion dollars.

From a retail standpoint, Walmart is doing a very good job. They had a big presence at the recent BlogHer conference. It’s less about marketing right now and more about learning. It’s impressive that an organization as big as Walmart is sending people to events like BlogHer.

We have a great opportunity in this space. I’m a big Mad Men fan and feel like it’s 1950 and television has just been invented. Who’s going to be like P&G and immerse themselves in this medium, blow up old models and capture everything that digital could be? That’s a pretty cool opportunity. n

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What’s up with media? What’s down?

What’s holding steady?

Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, CNN, The New York Times ... for this Cool News survey, we asked readers whether the ability of various media brands to build national brands appears favorable, unfavorable or neutral these days.

Google scored highest (82% favorable) and MySpace the lowest (50% unfavorable) in our survey. That’s not terribly surprising. Google also scored the lowest unfavorable (5%), followed by YouTube, one of its acquisitions, at 6%.

“If building traffic to a brand or its marketing initiatives can help build a brand, there are few more powerful tools than Google,” said one survey respondent. “More utility than a medium, but indispensible the way that a water main is to an urban center,” said another.

Our survey was taken shortly before the Microsoft-Yahoo deal was announced, but neither of the new partners finished particularly well. For Microsoft’s Bing engine, the result was no doubt affected by its newness, with 66% rating Bing either “neutral” or “don’t know.”

The big issue for Bing is weaning people off of Google: “I have used Bing and like it, however I still return to Google for most of my search work,” a reader wrote. Like Bing, Yahoo scored highest on “neutral,” at 44%, with “favorable” at 33% and “unfavorable” at 18%.

Perhaps more surprising is how well The New York Times fared (66% favorable). The Times certainly has its business-model challenges like every other newspaper, but there seems to be a certain reservoir of good will toward the publication.

On the other hand, a number of respondents said the paper is hurt by a “liberal bias.” As one reader put it: “Agenda-driven news outlets do not make a good news brand.”

The political flavor of some of the responses was striking, and it came from both sides of the aisle. “Steve Forbes is the closest thing America has to a fascist 19th century robber baron, and it’s reflected in the book’s editorial,” a respondent wrote, referring of course to Forbes magazine.

Even the mighty Google was not immune from such attacks: “China, censorship, big brothering ... not cool,” a reader commented.

reseArcH report

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tHe HUb s eptember/october 2009

Google

Favorable 82.4%

Unfavorable 4.7%

Neutral 12.9%

Don’t Know 0%

No opinion 0%

Bing

Favorable 17.2%

Unfavorable 8.9%

Neutral 32.0%

Don’t Know 34.3%

No opinion 7.7%

Yahoo!

Favorable 32.5%

Unfavorable 17.8%

Neutral 43.8%

Don’t Know 3.0%

No opinion 3.0%

Twitter

Favorable 47.9%

Unfavorable 24.9%

Neutral 21.3%

Don’t Know 4.7%

No opinion 1.2%

TheMedia Feast


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CNN also took its political lumps, although it fared reasonably well, garnering a 51% “favorable” and 20% “unfavorable” response. A few took issue with the quality of its reporting. “Can’t stand the repetition of the same old stories,” a reader complained.

Our readers continue to take Walmart to task — in this case, Walmart.com, with “favorable” at just 35% and “unfavorable” at 24%. This contrasted dramatically with Target.com, whose “favorable” score, 62%, was one of the survey’s highest, and its unfavorable, 8%, one of the lowest.

It’s a curious result, given Walmart’s extraordinary marketplace reach versus Target’s cheap-chic challenges in a depressed economy.

Many questions remain about Facebook (58% favorable) and Twitter (48% favorable) and their potential abilities to help build national brands. LinkedIn did better than either, with 60% “favorable,” perhaps a function of its appeal to our business-oriented readership.

Despite its relatively high “favorable” rating, Facebook faces questions. Some expressed concerns about privacy issues while others were conflicted about its value as a medium for marketing.

However, others credited Facebook for its ability to build fan clubs.

Twitter’s strong suit seems to be its potential as a customer service tool. But there are still plenty of folks who think both Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time. Twitter, especially.

Some of the Twitter-length comments were particularly amusing, such as: “The capability to assist in the building of a national brand encumbered by a 140 character limit is an interesting one. Few have the discip …” And, ironically: “How can anything with only 140 characters communicate in a logical, meaningful manner? It cannot.”

R e s p o n d e n t p R o f i l e

A total of 170 survey respondents included agencies (24%), brand marketers (24%) and consulting firms (18%). Twenty-five percent worked in packaged goods firms, 12% in media/entertainment and nine percent in retail. A majority were senior-level executives with 78% reporting more than ten years of experience in marketing.

Survey Results:http://hubmagazine.com/survey/eating_media


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The New York Times

Favorable 66.1%

Unfavorable 14.3%

Neutral 17.3%

Don’t Know 1.8%

No opinion 0.6%

Walmart.com

Favorable 34.5%

Unfavorable 24.4%

Neutral 29.2%

Don’t Know 6.0%

No opinion 6.0%

Target.com

Favorable 61.9%

Unfavorable 7.7%

Neutral 19.0%

Don’t Know 8.3%

No opinion 3.0%

Clear Channel Radio

Favorable 12.9%

Unfavorable 26.5%

Neutral 28.2%

Don’t Know 21.2%

No opinion 11.2%

Media Feast

12


We marketers spend a lot of time talking about this medium or that medium, especially these days. In fact, it’s hard to go anywhere — either in business or in personal life — without being asked

if you’re on Twitter and Facebook.This is all great and certainly very exciting. But it

tends to skip over what matters most, and that is creating a culture of shared values with our consumers.

As I look across the many Facebook fan pages and Twitter posts, I see huge potential to create the kind of communities promised by these new social media. It’s

cAse stUDY

It’s a culture that says, “we care.” We care about our family, friends and business associates. We care about public policy issues. We care about the brands we use. We care enough to show up every day — in some cases every five minutes — and speak our minds.

The question is, do we, as marketers, care as much as our consumers? Certainly many of us do, but just as certainly some care more than others. My point is that those companies that care the most — that have a culture of caring — are most likely to see the most success with social media.

What is a culture of caring? I immediately think of Burt’s Bees, the personal products company. At Burt’s, a culture of caring permeates everything they do — in fact, “we care” is their company’s mantra. Its culture of caring encompasses its products, packaging and facilities. It extends to its suppliers and, most important, embraces its employees and ultimately its consumers.

So extreme is the culture of caring at Burt’s Bees that some might look at it and conclude that it is an anomaly, a product of some crazy ‘60s hippie sensibility that doesn’t pertain to many other companies. There’s no denying the obvious countercultural roots at Burt’s Bees, but to dismiss it as radical to the point of irrelevant would be a mistake.

True, Burt’s Bees may be different than your company because it has a single product line, which might make it easier to build the kind of culture it has. But the fact is that every enterprise has a culture of one kind or another — and a choice as to what kind of culture that is.

Like every other company, Burt’s Bees has values, a vision and a mission statement. It has goals and objectives, both long-term and short-term. It measures its progress against those goals and objectives and offers employees incentives to achieve those goals.

It communicates with its shareholders, its employees and its consumers. It has an image and a marketing strategy to build its brand equity. In short,

At Burt’s Bees, a culture of caring is both

the medium and the message.

amazing to see the passion and excitement from so many consumers about the brands they love.

However, I also see a lot of old-school attempts at fitting into this new kind of communication. I see Facebook fan pages that are really nothing more than advertisements and Twitter posts that amount to nothing more than 140-character promotions.

This is obviously a huge missed opportunity because as most of us well know, these new media are about conversations, not commercials. This is nothing new — it’s part of internet culture, which has always been resistant to commercial interruptions.

It also suggests that many brands have more work to do than they think when it comes to getting the most out of social media. Twitter and Facebook may fade over time, or even go away, but the culture that makes them so wildly popular is here to stay.

Burt’s Buzz


13

Burt’s

the framework of the company is no different than that of any other company. In most ways, it’s a very conventional company.

The only difference is that it chooses to care about certain things — like using natural ingredients, minimizing its carbon footprint and not testing on animals, for instance. Above all, it chooses to care about the wellbeing of its people, both those who work for the company as well as those who purchase its products.

Burt’s Bees is also very clear and strong about its choices, which has big implications for how it is perceived in the marketplace. I recently spoke with Jim Geikie, General Manager, International, at Burt’s Bees, who said that it is the company’s clarity of purpose that defines the brand.

“When you’re very clear about what you are and aren’t, it ends up being a magnet for consumers and also employees who share those points of view,” he said. While Jim does not lead marketing, he observed that this changes the way Burt’s Bees communicates from a marketing standpoint.

“It comes down to push marketing versus pull marketing,” he said. “We don’t push our marketing on people. It’s all pull — public relations, point-of-sale in the retail environment, product education and training on the web. We’ve started to do some print advertising in the past year, but for the previous 25 years we hadn’t done any. And no television.”

Social media is, in fact, a part of the mix for Burt’s Bees, but they aren’t

just jumping on it because it’s the latest cool thing. In many ways, it’s old hat for them.

The culture of social media — the openness, dialogue, creativity, the sense of

caring — is an exact fit with the culture at Burt’s Bees, and at least generally the way it’s been from their beginning. Jim stresses that it’s a journey, though, and that getting things right is still very much a work in progress.

But it’s paying off for Burt’s Bees, at least for now. For the most recent year reported, ending June, 2008, the company grew by 18 percent, while reducing its waste to landfill by 50% and energy consumption by seven percent.

Burt’s Bees lives and breathes a culture of caring, which naturally results in growth, even during this recession.

Now that’s something to Tweet about! By the way, you can follow me on Twittter, @WomanWise. n

DORI MOLITOR is founder and ceo of WomanWise LLC (womanwise.com) a Watersmolitor company, a hybrid consultancy-agency specializing in marketing brands to women. Dori can be reached at [email protected] or (952) 797-5000.

Source: Burt’s Bees

Merging Strategy and Culture

Mission

Vision

Goals/Objectives

Strategic Thrusts

Reinforcing Systems

Behaviors

Values

Cultural Way

14


B y A l e x D o

l A nD or A S S o c i At e S

Open source, open access, open standards, open architecture — all are part of why

so many have fallen in love with Facebook, Firefox, WordPress, and — I’ll say it

because everyone else is saying it — Twitter. They’re all flexible platforms, invite

user opinions, and enable co-development and co-creation to varying degrees.

The “open web” and its underlying set of technologies have indeed made a big impact on how we interact and engage with online properties, sites, social networks, and the like.

Okay, “open” may be one of the most overused — if not abused — buzzwords in the digital space right alongside Web 2.0. But few would disagree that it is a catalyst for changing the way businesses think about soliciting feedback, understanding consumers, interacting with users and prospects, collaborating on innovation, and more.

Let’s start with how “open” is defined for the computer software field. From Wikipedia in June 2009: “The source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided to the public, which is permitted to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms.” For a business, perhaps the proper angle from which to appreciate “open” is either from a technology point of view — what is feasible? Or from an economic point of view — what is made easier, or more affordable?

But what about brands? How about an open brand? It’s hard to imagine how “open” could be applied to the branding world, which is more about centralized control, strict guidelines, and carefully crafted brand communications — far from open.

The challenge for marketers is negotiating the battle between two important and competing advantages: control (traditional methods) and customer participation (open methods).

Open Up!

WHIte pAper

Can brands be fluid, free-flowing, flexible, and yet still consistently stand for something compelling, differentiated, and relevant — the key tenets of a strong brand as we know it?

Brands can and, in my opinion, should. And I think consumers want to see brands open up and want to participate more actively in user communities. Consumers today are more skeptical and less trusting of corporate businesses and are hungry for personalized experiences.

Inviting them into a community of like-minded individuals is a great way to regain their trust. In other words, to resonate with today’s consumers, marketers can’t rely on the same old tricks.

This wouldn’t be an opinion-piece without a public challenge, so I’m challenging the world’s leading brands to explore various degrees of openness, and how it can offer a more valuable and certainly more provocative platform for interactions, communications, and true relationship building.

Here is a series of what-if statements for you to consider. (Note: “user” is defined in the broadest sense — anyone who has any interaction with a brand, but is not necessarily involved in a transaction.)

WHAT IF brands enabled users to modify a brand, product or service, take it apart, put it back together in unexpected ways, and offer it back up for public consumption?

WHAT IF brands provided for those possibilities above and balanced them with some guardrails — a baseline of parameters, controls, limitations to


15

account for taste levels, cultural nuances, biases? WHAT IF brands enabled users to create their

own future, describe what cannot be seen, and encouraged them to be active innovators?

WHAT IF brands truly (and I mean, truly) welcomed what users had to say beyond feedback and suggestions, openly inviting user opinions and committing to implementing viable user ideas?

WHAT IF brands respected people and their identities outside of their domain? Said differently, what if you “owned” your profile on Facebook, what if you “owned” the rights to your user credentials on Gmail, and what if you controlled your profile as a Safeway Club cardholder?

t h e n e w R o l e f o R M a R k e t e R s

Digital has changed marketing and branding, period. The role of the brand manager has changed, and the role of the brand has changed even more dramatically. Gone are the days when marketers tried to obsess over and micromanage outbound messages in attempts to control perceptions.

Today, to keep pace with consumers, many successful brand managers have shifted the way they engage with consumers — from acting as manager to becoming a facilitator. They see that consumers welcome a world, more specifically a “community,” of participation, co-creation, and constant dialogue — and this is the way of the future.

For brands to facilitate a community of users effectively, it is imperative that companies open themselves up. By that I mean companies need to encourage users to be more actively involved in their business activities — whether helping ideate future offerings, evolve existing ones, or provide feedback across the board.

The key to success is understanding your core users and then arming them with the tools they need to be active. One of the biggest benefits of building a community is that you’ll gain a considerable amount of customer intelligence — from feedback and observed patterns in user behavior to a stockpile of user-generated content and insights.

In fact, some brands have successfully managed to integrate their consumers into their business strategies and activities. No surprise, two types of

web brands are doing this well: Web 2.0 brands like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.com, and open-source brands like Linux and Mozilla. And both seem to be more successful and faster growing than their traditional web competitors.

Going forward, marketers need to focus less on who’s in control and more on (1) ways to invite users into a meaningful experience and (2) ways to engage community interactions. But how to do this is the challenge.

While open-source brands and Web 2.0 properties are inclined to facilitate user communities by the very nature of their business models, other companies, such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, media/entertainment, and manufacturing, find it more of a challenge to figure out how to build a community of users.

a n e w B R a n d M o d e l

There is no single model for an open brand. A company’s approach to open branding should be based on its business model, market strategy, and its customers’ appetite for community engagement. Here are a few common approaches that can be found in the marketplace today, though certainly many others exist.

Open to ideas: Soliciting feedback about existing products and services or improvements (future scenarios). For example, Starbucks launched its Mystarbucksidea.com site as a virtual suggestion box of sorts.

Users can submit ideas to the Starbucks team but also make their submissions viewable by the community of users. Community members get to rate submissions so the best ideas rise to the top; it’s then Starbucks’ job to ensure top suggestions get implemented.

In many ways, this is a democratic way of innovation and business improvement and has a direct impact on brand perceptions. Most important, it’s a way for companies to listen to the voice of the consumer.

➜ Good for companies that are set up to implement changes and improvements quickly and cost-effectively.

Open for me: Providing tools for personalization and customization (remixability, open architecture). For example, the NikeiD program has given online

Are you up for the challenge of open branding?

16


I recently wrote an entry on Landor’s blog titled “open branding” (www.landor.com/?do=thinking.blog). In it, I discussed how open a brand could

be and how effectively a company could integrate customers into its key business activities.

my blog post, similar to this article, encouraged com-panies of all sizes across various industries, to explore what it would be like to be an open brand. truthfully, the picture that I painted was utopian and could be somewhat difficult for most brands and businesses to put in place. readers of my blog echoed similar sentiments.

Comments (3)

n Aaron Templer. this is contextual, no? Great thoughts for some business models and under some strategic contexts, but certainly not all. the first example of this that comes to my mind is a law firm. opening a brand like that could open doors of misconstrued as solicitation or legal advice proffered from the firm, which could put them out of business. but great thoughts for a thursday morning!

n Annie Smidt. When it’s a brand, I suspect use of “open” paradigms as attempts to sell more rather than playing fair in a give and take exchange. When a sneaker company lets you “design your own” shoe or a company /brand twitters or facebooks to solicit ideas and feedback from customers and potential customers, I don’t get the same warm fuzzy feeling that accompanies interacting with individuals (not brands or companies) who blog or tweet or release open source software because they are passionate and authentic.

I feel like, for the most part, companies that open up, and even allow some consumer-driven morphing of their brand, are just doing it for, ultimately, financial

gain and increased brand equity. I don’t feel like they reALLY care about their consumers’ opinions, except where they can boost the bottom line.

In the service of full disclosure, I must admit this is a skepticism born of being a designer and design strategist and thus part of the industry that creates these open, faux-public-embracing brands.

business is business, and capitalists want to make money—but I keep getting this sneaking feeling that if they “get their hands on” the lovely idealism of open source ideology, they’ll pollute and ruin it.

We’re in an exciting and perhaps time-limited period where the people have the power. open source ideas are vibrant and pushing technology and thought in all sorts of great directions—and for the most part, it’s going so far because it’s a labor of love for the people involved. I really worry about mixing this with the ulterior motives inherent in old-school, traditional business and branding. Just makes me nervous.

n @ryanmilani. Great overview of the open culture we’re moving into. I’d also throw open Government into the mix as well. It’s interesting to see how people talk about brands and how brands are each uniquely adjusting to the open culture.

We’ve built a twitter app called openbrands.org that funnels conversations around brands into channels. If you’re reading this, then you might find it interesting.

. . . .

my simple response to these comments is that I agree. It’s a big challenge for all brands out there. but, I’d argue that for most companies, the benefits are too compelling to ignore.

A n O p e n E x c hang e

shoppers a way to personalize their athletic sneakers. At the end of the day, it’s still a pair of Nikes, but customers can take pride in some customizations that they’ve made with their purchases.

➜ Good for companies that are willing to modify existing products and services in a modular way.

Open to collaboration: Inviting users in to help reveal new product or service opportunities (co-creation). For example, IBM has two programs in place that invite users into the innovation and ideation process early on in product development — where ideas are still half-baked, even before a plan is put into place.

IBM ThinkPlace is a site where customers (external to the organization) can generate new ideas, whereas IBM Innovation Jam is a destination for employees to participate in the innovation process, irrespective of their roles in the organization.

➜ Good for companies that have a structure in place for taking new ideas from a wide range of sources and seeding them for further consideration.

Building on open: Enabling a platform for users to drive content creation (prosumer/crowdsourcing). For example, Lego Mindstorms is a community built around creation — that is, the creation of robots.


17

ALEx DO is digital branding director in the san Francisco office of Landor Associates, responsible for building brand-led digital strategies for companies including Accenture, Yahoo!, microsoft, and expedia. He can be reached at [email protected].

It encourages its users, either individually or in groups, to create the smartest, strongest, and most advanced Lego robot ever. And, it’s less involvement than you might think; the innovation can occur in less than 30 minutes.

➜ Good for companies with high market-share and few competitors that compete directly with existing product lines or service offerings.

Open book: Being transparent, as much as appropriate, with business plans, processes, and operations. For example, American Apparel has well documented details of its operations and business matters on its site — the good, bad, and not-so-American.

American Apparel provides a glimpse into its manufacturing plants, highlights highly debated topics such as immigration hiring practices, expresses its point of view on gay rights, and more. It even includes links to bad press and offers its own perspective. For the most part, it’s an unfiltered and unapologetic look inside the company.

➜ Good for companies that are highly visible in the marketplace and constantly under the microscope. A good way to beat the press, potential critics, and speculators to the punch. Also, a great way to connect with supporters.

t e n s t e p s t o a n o p e n B R a n d

If you’ve got an experienced team, a solid budget, and an appetite for innovation, you can create an open branding program that engages your customers in an entirely new way.

Be aware that implementing an open branding initiative as a standalone project — without mandate, without clear corporate vision, and without a well-defined strategy — will often lead to wasted investments and resources.

Here are ten basic and cost-effective steps to get started — building on existing tools and established best practices.

1. Crystallize your brand positioning and promise (at Landor, we call this the Brand Driver).

2. Get to know the community you want to interact with — who are your supporters and contributors, your influencers, employees, engaged consumers?

3. Agree on an approach to open branding that makes sense for your business.

4. Align strategies and objectives back to your business model — is your program about

monetization, increased efficiencies, higher engagement, etc.?

5. Put into operation your strategy and approach (e.g., get management buy-in, define key program and support teams, document processes).

6. Manage internal adoption, processes, and risks.

7. Create tools for communities to use as they participate in the brand-building process (e.g., enable feedback to be easily submitted, enable customized experiences, provide content and widgets).

8. Use the technology, channels, social media outlets, and custom-built online environments that are right for your approach.

9. Facilitate your community and its ongoing dialogue, which takes significant investment and commitment (e.g., start conversations and facilitate the participation and content, both user-generated and brand-driven).

10. Track, manage, refine, and continue to keep it fresh and lively (listen and learn).

t h e C h a l l e n g e

Businesses need to focus on ways to facilitate the right dialogue and interactions with users to drive business value. If brand managers can focus on developing tools to involve consumers in key business activities instead of focusing on more traditional marketing methods, they will be rewarded with an active community of fans and evangelists.

Open branding programs can be the platform for this community building — and enable brands to truly engage with their best customers.

Most important, if a brand is able to establish a community that draws in users time and time again, it has succeeded in creating the ultimate platform for driving loyalty. And what brand can do without loyalty?

Of course, I’m “open” to thoughts and comments! n

18


WHIte pAper

Without a doubt, the two hottest subjects in marketing today are digital media and shopper marketing. The question is, how can we best combine the two

to drive awareness, trial and shopper engagement in advance of the retail store visit?

It’s really not a new question. In fact, I’ve been working on answering it for both retailers and packaged-goods brands for more than ten years. My passion for online began in 1998, when consumer packaged-goods companies were building their first brand websites and still deciding whether they should put brand website URLs on their packaging.

Walmart sets the standard for engaging

consumers online.

because it placed a quality, online brand message, along with related content, in front of consumers at exactly the right time. In many ways, these were the first online shopper-marketing executions — circa 2001.

It was powerful stuff, because it gave the packaged-goods brands a leg up in the online shopper marketing space when nobody else was sharing digital content with channel partners. For example, perhaps a consumer might not click a link to a box of cereal, but they certainly would click a link for useful recipes and content about how to be a great parent and give your kids a fast, nutritious breakfast — sponsored by General Mills’ Box Tops for Education.

When it comes to online media, even the world’s most powerful brands must wrap themselves around relevant insights and contextual content. Maybe consumers aren’t interested in having a “relationship” with dry cereal, but when Mills added the Box Tops for Education wrapper, it shifted that perspective.

wa l M a R t : “ i n s t o R e s n o w ”

Since those early days, I’ve worked with retailers all across the country to develop this concept to its maximum potential for them and their packaged-goods partners. My first big client, starting about five years ago, was Walmart.

Walmart.com’s goal was to reach their customers before they got to the store. This made sense for two reasons: 1) Shoppers were visiting the Walmart website to do research before their shopping trip — yes, even for CPG brands; and 2) Walmart saw their site as a shopper marketing and communication vehicle as well as an e-commerce site. They are smart multi-channel marketers and turned consumer insight into action.

Today, Walmart.com has evolved into a leading e-commerce site that offers all the necessary features for media agencies to consider it as a true media property.

Shopper MarketingOnline

The problem was, even though we built great websites full of interesting and relevant consumer content, the sites received little traffic. Brands simply did not know how to get shoppers to their sites.

This was about the time that chief marketing officers started questioning the return-on-investment of their early forays into online marketing, and began folding standalone “internet groups” back into core brand-manager responsibilities.

For me, the turning point came in 2001. That’s when I began working with leading-edge retailers like HEB.com and Walmart.com to syndicate branded content (recipes, health tips/tools, seasonal articles, and so forth), sponsored by packaged-goods companies, onto their sites.

Retailers liked this because it made their websites “stickier” and added functionality. Brands liked it


19

They have set the gold standard by acting like a publisher, and making it worthwhile for a brand or media agency to invest real marketing dollars in retail media (see sidebar).

The Walmart site offers brands an opportunity to reach consumers with video, interactivity, downloads, links back to their websites, free samples and sponsored content. This content is featured on the homepage, via a link called “In Stores Now,” and promoted in every email. Brand banners are targeted by department and by category.

Pages are also optimized for search-engine visibility: Try Googling “free samples” — the Walmart.com online sampling program comes up number two or three in the organic listings.

As a result, click-through rates are five- to 20-times the national display advertising average. Brand message engagement time as measured by time spent on the brand experience pages measures more than 1.3 minutes. That kind of brand engagement would be hard to match in the store.

With some creative thinking, new possibilities emerge. Why not feature laundry tips next to major appliances, sponsored by a laundry detergent brand? That’s actually already happening: See the Tide partnership in the washer and dryer department on BestBuy.com.

You can also find “how to video” libraries on CVS.com’s “CVS Today” hub — engaging consumers on topics from beauty to health to holiday decorating. It all comes down to a clear definition of your shopper and what is likely to be most helpful or engaging.

The future for retail online media certainly is bright. A recent study by comScore, in partnership with dunnhumbyUSA, on the effectiveness of online advertising in building retail sales of consumer packaged-goods brands, highlights the opportunity.

According to this study, which was conducted over a 12-week period, “online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment grew retail sales of advertised brands by an average of nine percent. This compares to an average lift of eight percent for TV advertising as measured by Information Resources, Inc.”

Bill Pearce, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer of Del Monte Foods, is optimistic about these findings: “These are precisely the types of persuasive studies we are looking for at Del Monte as digital plays an increasing role in our marketing strategy,” he says.

Shopper marketing, brand marketing and media teams need to create multi-channel, online media experiences that can extend their national brand campaigns onto their channel partners’ sites with impact, efficiency and metrics reporting.

Retailers are just beginning to understand what they need to do to offer a high quality shopper marketing experience online. They are making the commitment and getting great results. Said another way, it’s the promise of shopper marketing — a better shopping experience — online. n

GREG MURTAGH is ceo of Triad Digital Media, an Inc. 500 company that manages and operates online media programs for retailers including Walmart, cVs, sam’s club, Dell and bestbuy. Greg can be reached at (813) 286-6586 or [email protected].

Retailers as Publishers

To deliver a quality media experience, retailers need to act like publishers.

n Use IAb standard ad placements.

n Allow use of national campaign creative.

n Use rich media options (Flash and video).

n Feature brand ads above the fold.

n execute ads via a mainstream ad-serving tool (e.g., 24/7).

n provide as much ability to target as possible.

n provide the advertiser data on site consumer demographics and behavior.

n Deliver a full metrics report after each campaign.

n price options competitively.

n provide sponsorship opportunities where brands can “wrap” themselves around an activity (e.g., home decorating), a recurring event (e.g., back to school), a health issue (e.g., diabetes) or a seasonal hub (e.g., Halloween).

20


coVer storY

hPMeteorologySeventeen years at Disney, ultimately as marketing chief of Disney

Parks & Resorts, left Michael Mendenhall with a keen appreciation

for quality content and the importance of keeping a sharp focus on

the customer. It also gave him a healthy respect for a story well told.

Michael’s own story is that, about two years ago, he left Disney to join

Hewlett-Packard as its chief marketing officer. It’s not as unlikely as it

might sound. The two companies actually go way back — in fact Walt

Disney was Hewlett-Packard’s first customer, having bought from them the

audio oscillator used to film Fantasia in 1939.

More recently, Disney and HP became

strategic partners, developing technologies

to help adjust to changes in the way content

is consumed and distributed. This

captured Michael’s imagination.

“The industries that sustain society —

energy, healthcare, education and

others — are experiencing information

explosions that need to be managed in a

way that provides insight so that they can perform better,” he explains,

adding, “We’re providing innovations that make this possible, and that’s a

very important story to be told.”

It’s also a happy story, in that HP is doing well, even in today’s turbulent

economy. That’s because HP’s trajectory was already set before the stock

market crashed last year — tracking skyward, literally into the clouds —

a “digital ecosystem” as Michael calls it, in the sky.

Well, maybe not literally in the sky, but pretty close. HP’s strategy

is premised on harnessing the power of massive computer

networks in remote locations, which even most non-geeks

now refer to as “clouds.” Cirrusly.


21

How will clouds change our lives?Clouds allow for dynamic and adaptive

infrastructures in how you manage, store and secure information. They also allow for real-time, intelligent interaction and interface using software.

Clouds let you scale quickly and more affordably, and to engage customers with great efficiency. They allow you to pull analytics that have been somewhat difficult to access in many companies because the information is stored in multiple places that really don’t speak to each other.

Clouds enable you to centralize that function, pull those analytics — business or consumer — very quickly into your dashboards and into your planning. It’s about effectiveness, efficiency and being very dynamic.

What’s very exciting is that clouds allow marketers to build applications that drive their business strategies and help drive transactions. HP has some great offerings in this area, from MagCloud to CloudPrint to BookPrep to SnapFish, which is one of the largest photo sites online today.

What’s the thinking behind MagCloud?MagCloud (see sidebar) has taken away all the

pre-production and pre-publication costs associated with magazine publishing. In the U.S., 62 percent of magazines sent to newsstands are never sold. That’s more than two billion wasted magazines, enough to circle the earth 18 times.

It’s economically viable now to print 1,000 copies of a magazine, 100 or one copy. MagCloud takes full advantage of the “long tail,” as you think about audiences fragmenting against topics and niches. Here’s a service, through the clouds, that has democratized print and allows anyone to participate.

How about your partnership with MySpace?That’s another example of engagement that was

more in line with our marketing strategy from our imaging and printing group. We were trying to unlock the content from the digital world and bring it into the physical world.

So, we embedded an HP “hit print” button on

the MySpace pages where 125 million MySpace users store and display more than four billion images. HP’s technology enabled these images to be easily printed and shared. We were connecting these users directly to the benefits and functionality of HP’s printing business and doing so in a highly personal way.

Do you think Twitter works as a medium for marketing?

When you look at the amount of engagement that’s going on with Twitter, certainly it’s working and can be a valuable tool in a company’s mix. We know there are a lot of passionate social consumer or customer groups that are very interested in following a company’s dialogue and are very passionate about a brand.

So, Twitter becomes a way to engage and gain insights. I think you’re going to see Twitter applications that will allow marketers to pool and aggregate the insights that exist in the streams around their products and services on Twitter. That will be the next innovation from Twitter.

Is it still as important to create mass awareness as it used to be?

It really depends on your industry. I’m not saying you can’t generate mass awareness online — when you think about the number of people engaging in many portals today, there are a lot of eyeballs there. But you will have certain people who need more of a mass level of engagement, depending upon the type of product.

If it’s a largely commoditized product that has a very low price point and low margin, it may be more effective to pursue mass communications. Of course, they don’t necessarily have to go the conventional media route to do that, either. It has also become incredibly important to have a relationship and to follow this macro-trend of personalization and customization.

How has HP’s marketing organization changed with the emergence of digital media?

Given the increase in the amount of digital information, marketing organizations are struggling to manage disparate pieces of information into a

Hewlett-Packard CMO Michael Mendenhall says the future of media calls for blue skies with lots of clouds.

22


comprehensive program that engages customers. People have to figure out how to maximize this potential.

In doing that, they need to apply sophisticated technology and applications that capture a customer’s or consumer’s digital footprint, and that will allow them to measure the ROI in the digital world. A digital footprint is more exact than some other measurement tools. It’s something that you can see, monitor and analyze.

Today, there is sophisticated technology and applications that really give marketers more visibility into behaviors, that track immersion into brand experiences, give you lead generation and drive the digital or retail commerce. So, it becomes important for a marketing organization to bring a digital capability into their mix and into their organization.

How is measuring digital media different from measuring analog media?

Regardless of type of media, metrics really need to be tailored based on specific objectives and goals that the marketing program is trying to achieve. At HP, we measure engagement, brand preference and reputation.

We continue to work on refining metrics as software applications become more sophisticated, so that we are looking at how our entire media and communications portfolio works together to drive sales. Many of those applications are different than what you would have found in conventional media.

Is creativity different for digital than other media?

It can be, but ultimately the answer lies within the power of storytelling. No matter the channel or medium, it’s about great storytelling, and creativity is an essential piece of storytelling.

Storytelling and the idea of co-creation are at the core of what we do now as a brand. The paradigm is no longer based on interruption — grabbing attention for your product — but on a more nuanced approach of engagement in an increasingly digital world.

Has the advent of digital changed the way that you work with your agencies?

It has changed our focus, the importance of an integrated marketing mix and how we look at the optimization of that mix. We have made it a very strong practice within the company and we expect our partners within the digital space to bring some great talent and resources to bear.

What’s it like being a marketing guy at a technology company?

It’s very interesting, because both Shane Robison, our chief technology officer, and Mark Hurd, our CEO, have brought change to HP. This is a very different company than it was four years ago. They understood very quickly that the customer should be at the center of our dialogue, and how we think about research and development.

The fact that they brought me into the office of strategy and technology means that the consumer and business insight that marketing brings to the table helps direct HP in the R&D space.

So, I have not experienced any friction. In fact, we brought in some great capabilities that have really helped give R&D far more specific direction. The more you are armed with great, specific information about your customers, their behaviors and the market opportunity, the more rewarding it is for any person who’s in research and development.

What’s the best way to budget for experiments with newer media?

We are constantly re-evaluating our mix and looking at tools that are going to provide for far more engagement. It’s not about building an interruptive plan as much as it is about building an engagement plan. It should not be about distracting customers; it should be a model of engagement.

We must avoid the temptation to only dip our toes in and budget minimal resources. Clearly, it has been demonstrated over the last three to five years that these are important networks or channels that can really be deployed in strategic ways to produce greater success for companies. That’s true whether they are launching new products or services, or they’re just in a sustain mode.

Far too many marketers have only allocated minimal resources toward small tests. Given the speed at which consumers are adopting and engaging with these technologies, it becomes incredibly important that one commits to the digital space as a marketer, even if it makes you uncomfortable sometimes.

How do you create “models of engagement”?To give you an example, HP produced user-

generated online support forums this past year that allow us to tap into the collective intelligence of our customers. This enables our customers to help each other with solutions or with the various products and services HP offers.

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Mag C l oud Mag a z in e s

Hewlett-packard is riding a “cloud” to a new service that could be magazine publishing’s answer to Youtube. the service is called

magcloud and it allows niche publishers to “crank out” special-interest magazines one copy at a time, for just 20 cents a page.

publishers can then charge as much as they want to readers, who can order copies online. “there are so many of the nichey, maybe weird-at-first communities, that can use this,” says Andrew bolwell, who heads magcloud for Hp.

so far, magcloud has produced hundreds of magazines, “including publications on paintings by mormon artists, the history of aerospace, food photography and improving your personal brand in the digital age.”

publishers can either upload their own finished pDF, or use provided templates to design and format their magazines. Hp then “farms out the printing jobs to

In January, we had more than five million page-views alone in this space, with more than 10,000 posts and about 400,000 searches. That’s just in one month. Now, think about the collective customer intelligence relative to our products that we’re seeing as a result. Those insights and that information become incredibly valuable.

Another type of engagement happens with HP Idea Labs. This is a site where we actually opened up to the collective intelligence and untapped talent among the 1.3 billion people in the online community.

It gave these 1.3 billion people the ability to engage and interact with several of our labs. It gave information and instructions on each of the featured technologies, and allowed that end-user to immerse in technologies that were in development. That gave us speed-to-market with products and services.

Is the digital opportunity bigger in R&D than in marketing communications?No. Those insights help not only R&D, but

also help you market, communicate and hopefully transact. When you look at the number of transactions and amount of e-commerce taking place and the growth in that space, it becomes an incredibly important part of the mix.

So, the opportunity is not just one of R&D; it touches the entire marketing mix and becomes a very valuable and important tool in the marketer’s tool chest. It should be an ecosystem strategy around your entire marketing mix. It should be a legitimate resource and funded practice.

Is there a direct link to generating sales?The value that is generated can be direct or

indirect, tangible or intangible. Much of it is indirect because it is about customer service, which plays an important part in a company’s brand and reputation.

Consumers are increasingly looking to the digital space as a place to help them solve their problems, which builds their loyalty and ultimately helps drive sales through new, innovative customer service

partners scattered around the globe and takes care of billing and shipping for people who order the magazine.”

However, the service itself is not necessarily Hp’s intended profit center — that would be sales to print shops of digital printers made by its Indigo unit. the machines “range in price from $300,000 to $600,000 each” but are capable of printing “one copy of 10 magazines or 10 copies of one magazine for about the same price,” at the push of a button.

magcloud could also be a boon to local print shops, which can also use the Indigo printers to let customers customize “invitations, stationery and announcements.”

Hp is keeping all options open: “We are trying to experiment with these new types of business models,” says Andrew bolwell, noting that the foray into on-demand printing is low-risk for Hp.

[Source : Ashlee Vance, The New York Times, 3/30/09]


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MICHAEL MENDENHALL is svp and chief marketing officer at HP, where he directs all aspects of the company’s corporate and communications marketing operations globally. previously he was evp of marketing for Walt Disney parks and resorts.

models. So innovation and the role of R&D cannot be underestimated in all areas of your operations as there can be clear direct and indirect benefits.

Does innovation at HP necessarily involve these social networks?

No. We have 23 labs all around the world that are innovating, of which six are open to social networks. So, all of our labs don’t work within this given environment, but we believe in the power of open innovation.

How do you see the potential for digital media in the retail environment?

That’s incredibly important. We’ve installed some digital kiosks with touch capabilities and people are becoming very comfortable with them. We’ve installed kiosks in Chicago at the airports, which is really just an interface on things to see and do — restaurants, dining, entertainment and places to stay. We’re seeing more and more of that type of technology at retail.

When you go around the world, outside of the United States, where mobile transactions and interfaces are even more sophisticated, you see where it provides and plays a very important role in consumer and customer engagement. It has demonstrated to be quite a success around the world.

What’s the best way to integrate online and in-store?

It’s one complete strategy and how you approach all of your customer touch points in both the digital and physical worlds, and how that impacts your future strategy. It’s about following the technology form-factor that is creating and driving the behavior around which you want to build your strategy.

Mobility and retail certainly are big pieces of this — whether that’s retail in a physical location or in the e-commerce space. It becomes very important that this is built into your overall strategy.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned about digital media?

That would be the importance of having a strong technology foundation within any company, or within any industry, that has the capability of pulling the right business or consumer analytics and insights out of the information.

As I’ve traveled around the globe, I’ve seen that

many marketers and companies have great data that would give them terrific insights into where, when and how to engage with their customers, and where they should be innovating in R&D.

But they don’t have the resources to manage that information, tap into it and pull out those very smart business and consumer insights. And, by the way, many of them have the information. They just don’t know how to get access to it and or how to manage it.

What is your greatest challenge? As you think about the macro-economic climate

and the fact that we are in a global recession, I just hope that there isn’t a protectionist, anti-American sentiment that starts to emerge. We truly are all in this situation together and have to solve it together. We are much closer to each other economically than we are geographically.

Does digital media make your challenges easier or harder?

If you think back to the advent of mass media, you would have found people who would say, wow, isn’t this difficult, now we have radio, now we have TV, now color TV. As things iterated through platforms, people would say, wow, this looks so challenging now — how are we going to do this and how should we change our strategy?

The biggest change has not been that it’s more difficult; it’s the speed at which it changes. You’re finding consumers becoming very comfortable with adopting newer technologies and software much more rapidly. That’s the change that becomes challenging for marketers. I don’t think it’s the actual platform or the hardware itself, but rather it’s the speed at which it changes.

You need to build an organization that is fundamentally more dynamic, that can respond to the global landscape in real-time and be more adaptive than it’s ever been in the history of marketing and communications as we know it. n

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B y W i l l i A m r o S e n

Arc Worl DW iDe

W hen the legendary New Zealand All Blacks rugby team lost unexpectedly at the 2007 Rugby World Cup, its sponsor, Adidas, realized it had an

opportunity to restore the team’s close ties with its disenchanted fans and, in the process, make real its own brand purpose.

To do this, Adidas employed a “new world” manifestation of creativity to bring the brand to life for its fans. Specifically, the sports footwear and apparel maker drew from the fans’ deep connection with the ultimate symbol of the All Blacks, their jersey. Adidas made it both the message and medium.

voicing interest in the team. Adidas was at the center of it all, demonstrating its mantra, “Impossible is Nothing,” along with fans around the world.

i n s p i R i n g p e o p l e t o a C t

Fueled by new technologies that give people more options, more control and higher expectations, the marketing landscape is changing dramatically. No longer can marketers rely on the brand or “the deal” alone to inspire action or make the sale at retail.

In this new world, getting people to change their minds and, ultimately, their behavior requires a new type of creativity. It is creativity that moves people — to experience, to purchase, to recommend, and to return. It puts an activating idea at the center of marketing efforts — an idea that triggers involvement — and unites all of the marketing disciplines and media channels around it to connect more effectively with people and inspire them to act.

Whether the concept plays out in-store, online, over the phone or via underground events, the result is creative work that resonates with people to such a degree that they actually want to participate, engage and become part of something.

These are ideas that stimulate action — from trying a new product or visiting a store to subscribing to a Twitter feed or joining a global movement. Sometimes they inspire individually and directly, sometimes en masse. Often they drive an immediate purchase, but they always elicit an observable response.

This kind of creativity is channeled against a specific behavioral opportunity and linked to a specific business opportunity. It’s about using all of the marketing disciplines to connect with people and change what they do. Of course, it must start with people and what has value to them. Just as products and brands need to have value in people’s lives, so do our actions. And people’s expectations of value have changed.

Bringing brands to life across channels and

disciplines moves people to action.

In what’s considered a first, it employed nano-technology, also known as “molecular manufacturing,” to “sign” the names of nearly 10,000 fans who submit-ted their signatures via a website onto a real, nano-imprinted thread sewn into the captain’s jersey.

The result: Ten thousands fans symbolically accompanied the All Blacks onto the field for the Tri Nations rugby championship (which the All Blacks won for a fourth consecutive year). Intense interest in the All Blacks returned, with 18 percent more fans

Activating Creativity

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Everyone loves bribes and entertainment, but there is a new, broader, more technologically enabled face to value: Simple, straightforward utility, which is behind the booming iPhone App store; experience and access, that offer the things money can’t buy; personalization, embodied in the numerous design-your-own sneaker websites; and social good are just a few examples of what people value today. Brilliant examples of new, creative, approaches that leverage these many dimensions of value radiate around us.

R e t a i l i n g h o p e

Consider what the Red Cross in Lisbon did to raise funds for its main causes during the Christmas season. The non-profit agency decided to promote the sale of an unusual product as the perfect holiday gift alternative. It is a product you can’t see, touch, wear or hear — but you can feel. That product is hope.

The Red Cross built a pop-up retail store inside a popular Lisbon shopping mall. Alongside the usual holiday gift options, the concept enabled people to feel the experience of purchasing hope. The store, promoted through traditional advertising media, featured the expected fixtures and displays, but each sold photographic cards valued at 10 euros as

donations to the Red Cross. It offered different sizes, values and kinds as they related to different causes.

People might have left the store with their hands empty, but they left with their hearts full. The results: Hundreds of people lined up to buy hope on opening night, and on the first day, the store reached the mall’s top 10 in sales. The Red Cross itself found its own awareness climbing among the public. Why? Hope changed the way people see the act of giving.

Then there’s the bankrupt Japanese city of Yubari, population 13,800. Once a thriving coal-mining town, it found itself $353 million in debt when the coal mines shut. Yubari officials decided they needed a marketing miracle and in their research, they discovered Yubari had the lowest divorce rate in Japan.

This laid the groundwork for a unique “No money but love” tourism campaign. The city opened a Department of Happily Married Couples and designed a lovable character, Yubari Fusai.

More than 3,000 couples have flocked to Yubari to obtain official “Happily Married” certificates issued by the department. The couples also could purchase “love”-related CDs, plush toys and even special-edition beer. The efforts have generated more than


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$30 million to help Yubari whittle down its debt and tourism has grown by double digits.

Like Yubari, companies and organizations are finding that people will engage — or act — when they connect around shared values. New technologies are helping them do that.

When Hallmark Cards began exploring ways to be more relevant to socially conscious millennials — primarily the offspring of Baby Boomers — it joined in the fight to eliminate AIDS in Africa through Project (RED). Employing social media, the company launched a campaign on Facebook to raise awareness of AIDS among its more than 200 million members.

The “Card for Africa” Facebook application lets people sign and send a virtual card for Africa. It calculates the real-world distance the card travels and draws people’s attention to the impact Hallmark Product (RED) cards and gifts can have in the fight to end AIDS in Africa. The results: More than 40,000 people have signed the card and it has traveled more than 50 million miles.

p R o M o t i n g a C o o l C u l t u R e

Other companies also are promoting and marketing their products by embracing advanced technology that engages consumers. UNIQLO, the Japanese apparel maker that combines high tech and cool culture in its casual clothes, did that last year by combining video and interactivity. The marketing campaign featured a downloadable application, UNIQLOCK, a blog widget that told time through an ongoing fashion show.

As young Japanese women wearing UNIQLO apparel danced to catchy music, the screen changed in time with the clock. The music-dance-clock application could be used as a computer screensaver, a mobile screen, or embedded in a Facebook page.

A World UNIQLOCK page on the company’s website showed how successful the campaign was. A world map there displayed the number and location of users who incorporated UNIQLOCK parts into their own blogs. More than 41,600 blog parts established in 83 countries have recorded more than 120 million page accesses.

IKEA also employed technology to transform its famous two-dimensional IKEA catalogue cover into a three-dimensional replica living room people could enter in-store. The living room toured 24 German cities and people could have their pictures taken in it. They then visited their IKEA store, thus driving return traffic, and picked up a custom edition of the

catalogue featuring them as the cover model. This personal marketing campaign boosted the

IKEA brand appeal. More than 7,100 people had their pictures taken, and the promotion increased traffic and sales in IKEA furniture stores. You can also imagine how much longer the catalogue was proudly displayed on coffee tables around the country.

i n s p i R a t i o n t o a C t i o n

These examples just scratch the surface. More and more of the world’s leading marketers are realizing that activation is not a channel. It is a discipline that unites all channels — to spark life into brands and inspire people to act.

So why, in these challenging economic times when building both brand and sales would seem a mandatory, are so many marketers missing the opportunity to apply this new kind of creativity?

Clearly, developing deep, activating insights into people and their behavior across marketing channels requires sophisticated techniques, experience and expertise that not all partners can bring to bear.

Also, a new form of creativity requires a new form of creative thinkers — capable of developing ideas against behavioral opportunities that cross retail channels, customer databases, mobile applications and social networking platforms.

It requires a commitment to focusing on actions — namely, what one is going to do to bring the brand to life and connect with people. Not what are we going to say, or what are we going to promise. What are we going to do?

So what are you going to do?Try asking yourself what behavioral opportunity

lies at the core of your most important business opportunity. Then consider the people at the center of it and what they value. Where can they connect with your brand’s purpose? How can you bring your brand to life in a way that engages them around shared values?

That’s the brief you’ll need to create the activating idea that will bring your brand to life so powerfully that people will participate. I’d love to hear what you come up with — and where you go from here. n

WILLIAM ROSEN is North America president and chief creative officer at Arc Worldwide, the marketing services arm of Leo burnett Group, specialists in shopper, digital, promotion and direct marketing. He may be reached at [email protected].

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Early digital pioneers remember the frontier days of the ’90s. Looking back, and looking around, who successfully migrated, who struggled, and what can be learned from the journey?

To gain these insights, we conducted a collaborative study with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Association of American Advertising Agencies (4As), sponsored by Google. We surveyed 294 participants from a wide range of senior marketing executives and professionals across a broad spectrum of advertisers, agencies and digital media companies.

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2. Advertisers are reluctant to move dollars away from the “tried and true.” This is true even though consumers with Twitter-sized attention spans have moved on. Most major advertisers have many years’ worth of data regarding performance of their traditional media campaigns and take comfort in knowing that if they run a network campaign flight of 150 TRPs, they will see a number of metrics move in the right direction.

While digital media often offer much greater ability to analyze the results of the marketing communications effort, the senior managers using the data are less familiar with how to interpret the results. Therefore, they tend to continue investing in traditional media.

3. Organizational silos impede progress. Decision-making in many corporate organizations is often a sort of group process. Decision-making processes can also be complicated when organizationally siloed groups have biases based on their often long-past experiences.

Silos have long been cited for introducing too many players into lengthy decision making processes, which ultimately compromise decision-making. The number of approvers (or simply people who think they are empowered to “just say no”) can further exacerbate the decision-making process.

4. Advertisers lack the metrics to enable them to integrate digital media into the mix. Fifty percent of all ANA research respondents cited lack of access to necessary information as their biggest challenge in achieving more successful integration and better overall results. Underlying challenges included data formats that were inconsistent or scattered across the organization, as well as a lack of resources to work with the data.

DigitalBridges

New research uncovers keys to successful digital-media integration.

Our research uncovered reasons why roughly one third of advertisers surveyed responded that they are either “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with their progress with integrating traditional and digital media. Four primary issues surfaced:

1. Key people in the organization still don’t understand digital. This appears to be a big challenge at companies where senior management is unfamiliar with digital media and lack a basic understanding of how people consume media in the emerging digital era.

In the ANA portion of the research, approximately one third of respondents indicated that very few of their senior executives understand the value of combining traditional media with newer digital media.

They also generally don’t understand how digital media fits into their customers’ lives. This creates a real challenge for marketers seeking a better ROI by moving traditional media budgets into newer digital media.


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The challenge is that most corporations have literally tons of data that could be valuable to marketers, but typically the data hasn’t been collected or organized with the intention of using it for marketing purposes.

This spawned what might be described as the 90/10 rule (attributed to Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist) which suggests that for every $10 you invest in tools, you need to invest $90 in human resources to do the gathering and analytical work.

l e s s o n s f R o M s u C C e s s

Some marketers are doing a very good job of integrating their way into the future — what ideas can be learned from their successful approaches?

• Have everyone sitting at the same table at the very beginning stages of a new project. Many agencies-of-record still develop campaigns the old fashioned way — with the main creative idea (typically a TV concept) developed first, in isolation. Only afterward are other agencies invited to help develop a more integrated campaign. This is one of the greatest obstacles to effective integration.

By having all appropriate parties at the initial briefing session, sitting around the proverbial table, everyone hears the business strategy, campaign objectives, consumer insights and target audiences at the same time, in the same way. All parties are encouraged to think about creative approaches that involve big ideas that can play across the broadest spectrum of media.

In this environment, it is critical for advertisers to communicate specific roles and responsibilities for each group clearly and to foster teamwork. They should also punish parochialism — e.g., when one agency brings an idea forward because they know they could get paid for executing it, rather than every agency being tactic-neutral.

• Develop and broadly communicate success criteria before the campaign effort is initiated. A recurring theme from our respondents is that campaigns (especially those with significant digital components) are often judged, after the fact, as failures. Frequently, those doing the judging are not aware of the original success criteria (if any) that existed for the campaign. Therefore, each evaluator is applying his or her own subjective criteria.

To address this malady, marketers should establish detailed, rigorous success criteria, across all forms of media, at the outset of campaign development. It is equally important to communicate those criteria, at the earliest stages of campaign development, across

the entire spectrum of stakeholders. Finally, it is just as important to publish, to the same audiences, objective reports detailing the precise results of each campaign.

• Advertisers and agencies have to work together to close the knowledge gap. Most marketing-focused organizations have a keen thirst for digital media awareness and education. Advertisers often have extremely valuable resources available to them that they can tap into. Digital media companies and agencies have considerable intellectual property that they are usually happy to share with clients.

Marketers should develop a robust program of digital marketing education aimed at multiple levels in the organization and leverage expertise from media and agencies involving them as “faculty” for these programs.

Something as simple as a lunch-and-learn session once a month with one specific topic covered each session (e.g., social media, mobile marketing or gaming), can go a long way towards filling knowledge gaps that can lead to better integration.

• Teams need to include members across a spectrum of traditional and digital media. Not only do traditional marketing people need to understand digital — digital people need to understand traditional media, too. As a former agency president said during an interview:

“The old guard and the new guard are worlds apart, emotionally … It’s important to have each group really understand what the other does and value that.”

In summary, better integration and better working relationships almost always lead to better results, and increase the likelihood of an advertiser remaining competitively relevant in the eyes of the best business prospects. n

JIM GARRITY is founder and ceo of Bellwether Digital Bridge. He was previously cmo of Wachovia, where he led development of roI methodologies. Jim can be reached at 704-904-8271 or [email protected].

KERRY O’CONNOR is founder and partner of Bellwether Leadership Research & Development. Kerry has consulted to Google, toyota, procter & Gamble and At&t, among others, and can be reached at [email protected] or 248-790-8000.

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Some time ago, I was invited to a conference to speak on trends in marketing. It was in preparing for that engagement that I came across a quote from an advertising icon which

read, “The future of advertising is that advertising doesn’t exist.” Powerful words, but to paraphrase the great Mark Twain, the reports of advertising’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

Instead, the art has morphed and changed, evolving with technology and the way we live, work, play and consume media. And although the vast majority of discussion in our field is focused on the digital revolution, there is more to life than today’s small screen.

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Television is alive and well for advertisers who innovate and

collaborate.

Couple that information with the recent Gallup & Robinson findings that ad recall is 11 percent lower than average when consumer confidence is low, and you’ve got a pretty daunting picture.

So what does this mean for brand marketers? Does television lack the staying power to help build brand preference and recall over the long term? Do we siphon more of our budgets from traditional media to feed the great online monster? I’d argue that our call to action is less about a medium switch and more about a change of method and mindset.

Building marketing partnerships is a time-tested strategy to achieve a broad array of objectives — from opening new channels of distribution (like Benjamin Moore selling paint through Pottery Barn) to engaging new audiences (bringing the kinder, gentler Martha Stewart’s craft supplies to Walmart shoppers) to increasing brand favorability or credibility (offering Newman’s Own products at McDonald’s).

Regardless of the goal, when multiple brands bring their assets to the table and approach an issue or opportunity as partners, everyone wins. So why not approach media the same way? Building collaborative relationships based on mutual audience relevance and complementary business goals can deliver success to all parties.

R e l e v a n C e a n d p a R t n e R s h i p

The key components — relevance and partnership — are the secret ingredients. The objective is to capture and interest the audience through compelling content — not just for 30 seconds, but also over a period of time — resulting in greater brand loyalty.

Consider the Food Network’s recent hit, The Chef Jeff Project. Chef Jeff Henderson is an accomplished chef with a notable résumé including Caesar’s Palace and Bellagio, in addition to his Posh Urban Cuisine.

He’s also a former felon who turned his life around in prison when he discovered his passion

DVRs may have made appointment television a thing of the past, but strategic use of the medium is alive and well. No matter that the web is our number-one entertainment choice, or that we spend more time tweeting, texting and facebooking than watching television. No other medium has equal power to engage and inspire than television; we just have to be smarter about how we use it.

Survey results from numerous sources acknowledge that the effectiveness of traditional television advertising has declined over the last few years. And while some stalwarts may choose to disagree, declining ad revenues tell a bigger story.

Codeword:Partnership


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for food, learned to cook, and dedicated himself to a better future for himself and his family, and later, for other young people at risk.

The savvy programming folks at the Food Network saw the inherent value in his story and created The Chef Jeff Project as a six-part “culinary and life skills boot camp,” designed to help six at-risk young adults turn their lives around and build a better future.

In each episode, Chef Jeff mentors the crew by training them in culinary fundamentals while holding them to standards that reinforce important life skills such as overcoming adversity and maintaining a strong work ethic.

Those who successfully completed Jeff’s rigorous program were awarded full scholarships to The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institutes. As the weeks progressed, the candidates visited the school, prepared signature dishes for a panel of judges, met with admissions representatives and all were ultimately awarded scholarships to The Art Institutes location of their choice.

But the integration did not end there. In an effort to engage viewers who may have been inspired by the show, The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institutes and the Food Network teamed up to offer the Chef Jeff Project Scholarship Contest.

The competition was a co-branded, online essay contest, hosted on Foodnetwork.com, offering the winner a $20,000 scholarship awarded by the Food Network to The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institutes. The Food Network heavily promoted the competition both on-air and online. The contest further engaged viewers by allowing a consumer to win the exact same prize as the on-air contestants.

This partnership was a win for the Food Network, since it not only provided a life-changing competition “prize” via the scholarship, but also heightened the emotional investment of the show’s participants and engagement of the viewers by raising the stakes, resulting in critically acclaimed, top-rated programming.

For The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institutes, the partnership helped increase brand awareness and reinforced its positioning as a leading culinary educator, resulting in increased inquiries and applications to its schools, but also created a positive brand halo for having provided the opportunity for these young adults to improve their lives. The results were exceptional. In an era of reduced ad recall, nearly three-fourths of the audience remembered The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institutes, and brand favorability ratings increased over 10 percent.

Another great example is the partnership built between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program and the Documentary Channel. With Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as a catalyst, Americans were looking for answers about fighting global warming, and for solutions to rising energy costs. While Energy Star had those answers, as a voluntary government program it lacked the budget to create a full-scale advertising campaign.

Meanwhile, its media partner, the Documentary Channel, was interested in offering a cohesive, solutions-oriented piece on the issue. The results: a meaningful partnership which created a feature-length documentary highlighting individuals, businesses and institutions fighting global warming with Energy Star which received play on the Documentary Channel, online, and at film festivals across the United States.

The alliance was structured to leverage credible content from Energy Star, and the brand was entitled to the creative assets, which were cut into 30-second PSA and two-minute brand spots. In its first seven months, this innovative partnership out-delivered the impressions generated by the Gore-sponsored “We” PSA campaign, and has been requested by more than 50 film festivals to date.

Any good partnership requires a deep and thorough understanding of each party’s strengths and weaknesses, and a vision for how they complement each other to create a stronger whole. Ultimately, true partnership success is defined by longer term, sustainable relationships that deliver mutual benefits.

So, in a sense, a traditional concept of advertising may not exist for much longer. But that shouldn’t come as any surprise. This has been coming since the early 2000’s discussion of bringing customer-centric planning to the digital revolution.

As with other challenges facing our world, the brand marketers who emerge victorious from this metamorphosis will be those who are flexible and innovative enough to join forces to achieve their goals. n

CINDY JOLICOEUR, a vice-president at Marketing Drive, leads the agency’s energy & environment and education practice groups, providing branding, b2c and b2b marketing solutions to a range of clients. email her at: [email protected].

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B y V i n c e W e i n e r

Ac t i V e in t er n At io n Al

From social networks to widgets to in-store television — digital media are both changing the way we live and the way we shop. Whether the medium is Facebook, the

iPhone or Wal-Mart TV, the opportunity to make the cash register ring — anytime, anywhere — is greater than ever before.

Where should we take this opportunity? What are the opportunities to use these media to not only sell more stuff, but also build relationships? What must we understand about the way shoppers use these media to better serve their needs and reach our goals?

Last March, Active International’s Retail Marketing division, in collaboration with the Hub Magazine, convened an invitation-only summit in New York City to examine these questions. About 100 marketing and media executives attended the daylong event, held at the Omni Berkshire Hotel, to listen, share and debate the ways in which digital media are changing the face of retail.

Our agenda centered on the three major emerging trends in digital communications — social networks, mobile media and digital media networks. We invited three experts in each area: Mike Linton, former CMO of eBay and Best Buy; Jim Hood, co-founder of HipCricket and former CMO of Einstein Bros. Bagels; and Andy Austin of EWI Worldwide and former director of customer experience for AT&T Stores.

Following are edited excerpts of what each had to say.

Mike Linton: Social Media

Every brand wants to build a community, but communities only develop for a reason. You can

Screengems

The convergence of digital media at retail

is re-defining the shopping experience.

enable a community, but you cannot will it into existence. A lot of businesses just aren’t going to have the energy and the consumer interest required to develop a vibrant community.

The eBay community grew up around eBay; and eBay did a great job facilitating the exchange among members. It grew up because people were trading ideas on how to use and improve eBay and were willing to help each other to make the marketplace better.

That community grew up around the product and members of the community actually became product experts. It was a community that helped itself grow, and eBay listened to their suggestions and facilitated that quite well.

Facebook is also a community, but the community and the social interaction among members is the product. When marketers see Facebook, or other sites like it, they see huge numbers of consumers sharing their interests and announcing who they are. These consumers self-identify and can share opinions, recommendations and information in real time with all of their friends.

Every brand wants to share their product launch news or hot deals with likely buyers. But just because you want connections to those consumers,

sUmmIt report


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doesn’t make it so. Just like brands want the same recognition that Nike has with the swoosh and Target has with the bulls eye, we all want a strong, positive community around our business. What a great way to create intimacy and dialog and source ideas from passionate customers.

However, it is clear consumers don’t have an unlimited amount of passion and time to support a community for every brand they use. The key question is: “Will consumers join and support a community for your brand?” Even if they will, they might not want to be “sold” or merchandised in their personal space.

I think each brand will need to find its own way, but the social utility potential and the benefits of a truly passionate community are tremendous for the brands that figure it out.

I’m guessing a lot of people who want results from social networks aren’t active users. That’s like arguing over a circular but never having looked at one. Active use will help you evolve the traditional marketing ROI train of thought.

Lord knows, the last thing you want, particularly as a CMO, is the head of Sales or the CFO telling you what should happen on social networking without having experienced social networking personally.

I would encourage everyone to join Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Invite some friends, play some games, and see what happens. See if you contribute actively to the communities you join, or are just a passive observer, and pay attention to the ads.

Consider the ability to target messaging and experiment with interactions between friends in real time. Update your status, send a tweet, state an opinion and share a link. See if your community of friends responds.

Without any hands-on experience, you might end up looking at social networking and community as a pure transaction model, which won’t help you, your company or your community.

If you enter social networking with the same metrics you’re using for a Sunday circular, you are fooling yourself and doomed to an early exit. Consumers won’t exhibit the same behaviors in this medium. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t working for you.

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to think your community will evolve like it would if you were in control just like a basic marketing program. It won’t. It will grow up and do whatever it wants.

It might start talking about your business or your motives in a way you don’t like and you can’t just turn it off like you can close down a marketing campaign.

My theory is that there’s no bad media, just bad pricing and the incorrect media for your individual brand. I recommend experimenting to understand where your brand can go. Just because it’s a cool medium doesn’t mean you should be in it. If it’s a good medium for the brand, figure out what it’s worth to you.

In the end, your consumers will tell you what works for them, providing you can find a way to hear them. There’s no universal answer and a big risk in standing pat and not experimenting.

On the flip side, there’s a risk in thinking you know what you’re doing and trying to skip the learning steps required to understand your brand and consumer base in the social spaces. It is definitely best to experiment, test and expand as quickly as makes sense for your situation.

Jim Hood: Mobile Phones

Mobile phones are changing shopping and shopping behavior in just about in every way you could think of. Mobile phone marketing is really just a logical extension of the awareness-interest-action continuum. It gives people the next step — a place to get more information, a place to go, to try, join up, get a sample. So, I often think of it as tagging on strategically to a marketing effort that’s already there.

Shoppers are using mobile phones to ask for information, get a sample, join a club or be one of the first 100 to do something. They’re getting a coupon or incentive. While there’s a branding component, there’s usually an action component, as well. In many regards it’s just basic marketing stuff, but it’s brought to you through the ever-present mobile phone.

More often than not, shoppers or consumers are going to be closer to a purchase decision with a cell phone in their pockets than when they’re just watching TV, listening to the radio or sitting at their desktop computer. Almost by definition, you’re closer to a purchase decision if the mobile phone is your primary communication device.

There are some very pedestrian examples of how this can work, such as Jiffy Lube, which is hardly a high-tech business, but a big radio advertiser. They’ve started regularly tagging the end of their radio spots with a chance to text to get a free oil change. One in a thousand might get a free oil change, but everybody

gems

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gets a coupon for some type of automotive service.Every time Jiffy Lube does this, they find that the

redemption rates — and in particular the new customer conversion rates — are higher than any other call-to-action that they would use. So, if you’re already running radio spots, there’s no incremental media cost, but you get the response in the marketplace.

For text messaging, by the way, there’s a lot of compatibility with radio. But a restaurant could run a radio commercial about texting in for today’s special, which can be changed every day because it’s really very quick and easy to change the offer that you get, as opposed to changing the TV or radio commercial copy every day.

I’ve seen applications designed to allow customers to announce their presence. We’ve done this a few times at Disney where people go to a park, and can literally log in and send a text message that simply says, “I’m here.” They’ve opted in for messages that will tell them about things that are going on around the park, which restaurants aren’t particularly busy, or where the lines for attractions are relatively short.

The customer feedback on that has been very good. That’s pre-GPS, too — you don’t even need to know where people are except that they’re in the park. We’ve also done that with malls, where you can opt to receive messages from stores in that mall that are relevant to you that day. Some of these examples may seem ordinary but that’s a good thing because not everything has to be an extraordinarily sexy idea.

One of the Nestle waters did a tie in with Universal Parks. Most of the messaging was right on the shelf, but you could text in to win a day at Universal. Research afterwards showed higher awareness and favorability levels, a lift in purchase and in intended re-purchase. This resulted just by asking people to take out the mobile phone and start the dialog.

Virtually all mobile campaigns have to work within the broader campaign strategy. Most are not standalone efforts. At Einstein Bros. Bagels, the medium was flat-screen TVs in our restaurants. Advertisers support the TVs, so there’s no cost to the retailer to install the signs. The screens also carry advertising about our products. So, in the morning we were telling people about lunch offers and in the afternoon we were promoting breakfast deals.

As I left the company, we were developing programs that would let customers know that they could text a code to get a buy-one-get-one deal for

lunch anytime that week or the next week. We also knew the purchase cycle of how often these people came in. So, if we knew they came in once every ten days, we could offer a promotion good for seven days, and get an incremental visit. Essentially, we got that message to them for free.

These screens can be very customized. You can allow guests to send messages to other guests. You can have local traffic and ski reports, and the sixth grade music teacher can put up a digital notice that the class is staging a play that night, for example. For restaurants trying to create a community feeling, having that neighborhood aspect of community events can be very effective.

Within the last year, Einstein started celebrating employees and “customers of the month” on a regional basis. All of those do-good things are celebrated on the screens. As we get smarter, the system has the functionality to do almost anything we can think of to get up on those screens, and also link them to mobile phones.

Andy Austin: Digital Signage

When I joined Cingular, eight years ago, it was a challenged retail layout that was made up of the conglomeration of 13 regional cell phone carriers. So, we had all different kinds of store layouts with slatwalls, these weird easels that we mounted brochures on.

And, of course, we had the same challenges other retailers had, with 24-year-old part-time salespeople who aren’t career-oriented. You all remember where cellphones were eight years ago, when it was really a voice-centric device, and not a lot of other services. But we wanted to sell text messaging and things like that because we actually could bill for that back then, which is not the case now.

Over those eight years, there were a lot of milestones, and the biggest one was when Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless and we launched the RAZR. That was a big deal for us because it gave us something that people were coming to our stores for — an iconic device.

So, we changed our stores from these hodge-podge locations and tried to move into a vehicle for brand loyalty, where customers could come and fall in love with what Cingular stood for.

Fast forward to two years ago, where AT&T absorbed Cingular into its umbrella and we did the re-branding. I had the opportunity to lead the physical


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re-branding for our vast dealer network of retail stores from Cingular to AT&T. We needed to take what was a wireless phone store and convert it into a communications store.

We were going back to the old phone store model. We had to sell dialtone, long distance, DISH Network, TV services and all of those kinds of things. That’s where we came up with the concept of the “Experience Store,” which we first launched in Houston.

It totally shifted us from selling cell phones to selling a network connectivity concept. That’s when we really launched a campaign around the idea that you could be part of the AT&T family. We launched all these new products on our 3G network, but they were very challenging to sell. One example is an exclusive product called Videoshare, which has the capability to have a two-way voice conversation, but a one-way video conversation.

So, you could be in the mall, having a voice conversation with your mom, while showing her the outfits that you’re trying on, for example. That was very difficult to bring to life in the confines of a retail environment. So we came up with a concept called “Salesperson Karaoke.”

This was a concept where salespeople were using digital signage and other interactive kiosks in our stores to show people using things like Videoshare. We totally changed the paradigm of how our sales people sold, and allowed technology and video to deliver the product attributes.

We moved our sales people from product experts — which is what we needed to be when we launched the RAZR — into empathetic, brand ambassadors.

We really believed — and this is a long evolution — that when someone wants to fall in love with a brand, that a retail location is one of the many ways to do that. So, at the last three feet, the moment-of-truth, when they’re going to make that purchase, and fall in love with the brand and be excited about what their experience will be — a brand connection rather than a product connection.

That’s exactly what I try to achieve when working with brands. To merchants, it might look like a retail opportunity to sell more or improve metrics like willingness to recommend. But when we peel back the layers of the onion and investigate that a shopper is really a human being who has a basic desire to want to fall in love with a brand, that retail opportunity turns into so much more. The payoff is exponential.

VINCE WEINER is svp of retail marketing at Active International, leading the development of the Vstore, a retail experience linking interactive media. Vince can be reached at [email protected] or 845-732-8514.

B R i n g i n g i t a l l to g e t h e R

Mike Linton, Jim Hood and Andy Austin each made it abundantly clear that the convergence of social media, mobile and interactive retail is presenting marketers and retailers with some truly innovative opportunities to connect with shoppers on a higher emotional level at retail.

While there has been a great deal of effort and progress to date on how we mine for retail insights, turning those insights into meaningful action has been an on-going dilemma. However, just as certainly, there’s an opportunity to carve out a space that combines what shoppers love about shopping online and in physical stores.

Given how folks are forming communities online, as they continue to look for new ways to use their mobile phones as their everyday lifeline — and how they are responding to interactive technologies at retail — I think we can seamlessly blend all these screens into a new kind of retail experience.

This would be an experience that for the retailer truly inspires, delivers a higher level of engagement, can simplify while customizing based on each individual shopper’s needs and motivations. For the shopper, it would be a truly energizing shopping experience that delivers real time responsiveness and an enhanced level of customer satisfaction and personal interaction.

After many conversations with brand marketers, retailers and media companies, it’s clear to me that creating a new kind of retail experience that bridges digital and traditional retail is not only doable, it is almost here.

Hurdles and challenges remain, but it is now possible to allow brands and retailers to play with these media and see just how far we can take their shoppers’ experience.

The exciting part is that the shopper will be a critical partner in this process and will tell us what success looks like. n

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WHIte pAper

MediaFeeling

the

Most of what we call “emerging media” is still more emerging than it is media. We all understand the potential, but, honestly, most still don’t know exactly

where to take it, much less how to measure the return-on-investment.

What we do know is that we can’t advertise in the usual sense on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Flickr. We have to figure out how to be a thinking and feeling part of the social experience, the conversation, and sense of community. That’s very different.

The same is true for media in the retail store. It’s not about using every square inch of a store’s real estate to shout out about our brands. It should be about making the most of the opportunity to become an upstanding member of the community.

A very basic understanding of who those shoppers are, why they’re in the store, what they want and, most of all, how we can help them, is fundamental to success. This is no different than what the most sophisticated marketers say about their approach to social networks online.

However, while consumers go to social networking sites to socialize, shoppers go to stores to shop. They are in the moment of the task, which is not necessarily the best moment to absorb our advertising or promotional messages. It’s critically important to understand that moment from as many vantage points as possible to get measurable results, which of course is the whole point.

In fact, I believe we are on the verge of definitively proving the value of media at retail. We now have a better understanding of how to make that media accomplish our goals, as well as tools that enable us to measure media at retail both in terms of its effect on brand equity as well as sales lift, in a way that

surpasses most other kinds of media. The enormity of the potential of media at retail is

nothing new. Back in 1982 I gave a keynote speech at a POPAI convention. At the time, the great revelation was that 70 percent of shopping decisions were made in the store. It was an exciting moment because it made us realize just how big our industry was and how fast it would grow.

We can save the debate over whether that famous statistic is true or not for another time. What’s important is what we have learned since then, which is that we had our priorities reversed. We fixated on how much we could sell at retail, which is a supply-chain issue.

Yes, selling more stuff is the goal ultimately, but it’s not just about priming the pipeline. It’s more about creating a better shopping experience. Our job is to inform, involve and entertain our shoppers, and drive measurable growth based on that.

This has never been more important than in today’s economic environment, with post-crisis shoppers. They are more invested in a better life and seeking better products than ever before. They are more skeptical and suspicious of brands that seem to charge too much and deliver too little. The advent of online social media has both accentuated and accelerated these changing attitudes towards advertising, in-store, at-home and elsewhere.

The goal now is to transition our focus at retail from “point of sale” to “point of experience.” It’s not only a matter of getting our shoppers to do something; we also need to make them feel something. And if we want shoppers to feel something, we need to feel the way they do. That shouldn’t be too difficult, since we’re all shoppers too.


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Making shoppers feel the love means making the media feel their pain.

B i l l i o n s o f M o M e n t s

Creating a shopping experience with feeling can involve a broad range of activities at retail. Since this issue of the Hub is all about emerging media, let’s focus on the medium that gets perhaps the most attention at retail these days — screens — specifically the screens in Walmart stores.

Walmart’s screens get so much attention because they translate into literally billions of moments-of-truth each and every week. However, it’s not just about a bunch of screens at Walmart; that may have been true a few years ago, but it’s not true anymore.

Today, Walmart has at least four kinds of screens at its new, next-generation stores that navigate, educate and inspire shoppers: 1) Welcome screens at the front of the store that help shoppers set up their shopping trips; 2) Category screens (like you’ll find in grocery and HBA) that direct shoppers to specific destinations and then to featured items nearby; 3) End-cap screens, generally about 45 seconds in length, with messages that say, “Pick up the product and put it in your cart”; and 4) TV Wall screens, featuring digital content that inspires or triggers shoppers to buy.

As a general rule, the farther you are from the product, the more you should build awareness and intent to try. The closer you are, the more “reason to buy now” information you can give shoppers to engage and convert them.

Think of Walmart’s media as a “package of screens,” with an opportunity to tie in with merchandising along the path to purchase, to inform shoppers in the right stores, with the right products and messages at the right times.

This is a model that other retailers should study and emulate (or improve upon) as a best-practices standard. It is equally important for brand marketers to consider that all screens are not the same at retail — or at least at Walmart — and plan their media strategies accordingly.

Whether at Walmart or any other retailer, certain principles apply to success in creating content for screens in a way that not only sells more stuff, but also improves the shopping experience:

Set the Mood. Shoppers have many moods that vary by time of year. Their frame of mind is very

different during Back to School versus Spring Cleaning, for example. Create content based on these moods.

Stay on Task. Your shoppers are in the store on a mission to shop, not to push a button and watch your beautiful digital art show. They’re in a hurry. So you better catch them with a strong introduction, product benefit and call-to-action.

Solve the Problem. Don’t sell it; solve it. Show the solution, not the product. Take it up a notch from functional benefits to the emotional side of solving the shopper’s problems.

Match the Path. At certain points, shoppers want to be stopped, interrupted and inspired with a unique experience. At other points, they just want to make a decision, and you need to help them review and compare. Understand the difference.

Sense the Change. Post-recession shoppers are different in that their highest value is no longer social recognition so much as it is a sense of responsibility for making good decisions. This requires a very different kind of communication.

See the Shopper. Imagine yourself as your product, looking out at your shoppers from the shelf. Who’s coming at me? What are they doing? What should I look like, where should I be and what can I say to get them to take me home?

Feel the Pain. Her screaming kids beat your message every time. So, don’t add to the noise. And you’ve got to make it easy. It’s all about keeping it simple.

In short, translate your brand equities to what shoppers are feeling in the store, and understand how those equities can be highlighted based on those feelings. If you approach media at retail that way, your brand will become a respected — if not loved — part of the shopping experience, and healthy, sustainable, measurable growth will result. n

AL WITTEMEN is managing director of retail strategy for TracyLocke. He has 35 years of experience in marketing, sales and shopper marketing of consumer packaged goods. Al can be reached at [email protected] or (214) 259-3531.

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cooL booKs

Ripped

In Ripped, Greg Kot tells “how the big music companies committed capitalist suicide,” writes Dana Jennings in a New York Times book review (8/15/09).

The book “ranges from the days when the record companies gnashed their teeth over the growth of home taping, to music publishers’ blunt attacks on sampling in hip-hop, to the life, death and canonization of Napster, to the iPod and beyond.”

Greg “writes about how established artists like Prince, Radiohead and Wilco thrived in the digital age because they didn’t sit around and whine like emo punks while musical civilization as we know it crumbled.”

All the while, music industry “executives couldn’t get their analog heads around the digital future. If industry leaders had always followed their mistrust of technology, we’d still be listening to music on 78-r.p.m. shellac, or maybe even wax cylinders.”

They instead reserved their innovative energies to create “payola ... shady contracts” and accounting practices to deny royalties ... to the vast majority of its artists.” The irony, as Greg writes, is “the moral posturing” about file sharing.

Even Edgar Bronfman Jr., ceo of Warner Music Group, kind of had to agree: “By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find. And, as a result, of course, consumers won.”

The Beckham Experiment

David Beckham “longed to conquer mythic America in the way the Beatles had in the 1960s,” but ultimately “brought a patronizing attitude to American soccer,” writes Michael MacCambridge in a Wall Street Journal review of The Beckham Experiment, by Grant Wahl.

Two years ago, when Beckham signed a five-year contract with the Los Angeles galaxy, he and his wife, Posh Spice, “were greeted by hundreds of paparazzi and nearly as many A-list friends upon their arrival in Beverly Hills.”

Some “700 media credentials were issued for his introductory press conference” and “his mere presence led to sell-out crowds throughout Major

League Soccer.” But the idea that David Beckham could “carry soccer to the center of the American sporting consciousness ... ran into problems almost instantly.”

First, he “was injured for much of the 2007 season, and ... Nielsen ratings for MLS matches returned to microscopic levels, losing out to softball games and Scrabble tournaments.”

A “culture clash” within the club compounded problems. While Beckham was pulling down $50 million a year, his teammates were “making $30,000 or less.”

Basically, Beckham’s version of a British invasion “has been a cautionary tale of hubris and mismanagement, cultural miscommunication, and the ineluctable truth that, in true sports, there is no script.”

Losing the News

Alex S. Jones “swiftly demolishes the notion that news is defined only by the hour of the day,” in Losing the News, reviewed by Sir Harold Evans in The New York Times (8/23/09).

“The most valuable element in journalism,” he continues, “is often enough not an episode that occurred today, yesterday, or, horrors, the day before. It’s the creation of a new awareness provided in either months of investigative or relentlessly regular coverage.”

When that kind of awareness is left hanging, when “embryonic news doesn’t get enough attention,” the result can be disastrous — “the insufficiently monitored housing bubble, leading to the financial meltdown ... the formation of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, leading to 9/11,” for example.

Alex Jones also estimates that “85 percent of fact-based news currently originates in a newspaper attempting to record, explain and investigate. Television — network, local, cable — he dismisses as derivative media, doing less and less original reporting.”

Alex does recognize the web as “dazzling in its breadth and innovation,” but “does not believe websites will ever ... sustain foreign bureaus, science and cultural staffs, and investigative teams.”

The solution, he hopes, is that quality newspapers will develop separate online and print enterprises, and between the two earn profits while also creating the awareness essential to a democracy.

The ultimate goal of marketing accountabilityis not to improve the rigorof ROI measurement, but rather to make more money faster, through better,more effective and efficient marketing investments— that both ring the cash register and build the brand.

— Michael Dunn

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