“Your responsibilities”.

Imagine an agency telling a prospective client – not one we’re working with already – that they had to actively participate in delivering to make the marketing programme effective?

I love it.

Now I’m recommending we put this into all new client proposals. It’s authentic and transparent and gives the brand clear boundaries and guidelines that will help us give them exactly what they hired us to do.

What do you do in order to improve your client briefing and agreements?

easy.  Today we showcase a client and their challenges and a book and a blog post.  Together they give you the one principle you need to write a B2B online brand strategy.

How to get customer community integrated into your marketing

Three things we read and discussed coincided this week:

1. Planning with the Silver Fern Farms marketing team
2. Reading The B2B Social Media Book
3. Commenting on Confused of Calcutta’s blog post – Musings about communities and prices

Start with the blog post - there are three main points: Everyone in the community is a customer; Communities expect a range of prices for each product or service; A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer.  

Take the range of prices – some customers are happy to read free offerings; others will contribute to comments or test purchase items while others are avid fans.  The Silver Fern Farms team were discussing how to organise messaging across different geographical marketplaces – not all their range is sold in each country. [They sell lamb and venison in supermarkets.]

Treating all the customers and prospects as a single, composite customer enables us to deliver into separate marketplaces with variable messaging.  Yes, we do not use the same message to each group.  BUT we know the customer is smart and can read.  Being clear about what products are available in which supermarkets matters.  It builds awareness of the wider product range and helps customers appreciate the global nature of the Silver Fern Farms business.

Is B2B any different for online?

Slant these ideas into the business to business B2B world. This is where I find clients have the greatest problems “coping” with a singular community.  And ironically, this is where the greatest opportunities exist for B2B.

Read this quote from the Book

Most B2B companies live with fear. The fear of giving away too much information, saying something wrong, giving competitors an advantage.

But I know B2B companies have another fear. Integrated messaging.

This is perceived as hard to do.  Mainly because of the territoriality of the agencies and staff who service the brand.

Each market, each customer, each group of buyers fits into a hierarchy of customer-types. From the inquirer who wants to read for free but not participate up through to the possible purchaser.  Your brand needs to set up its marketing to allow and

enable each customer type to engage at the participation level the customer chooses.

I wrote that in bold because this principle is the key to your strategic marketing plan.

How does engagement work in practice?

Set up a range of marketing activities that allow any customer from the vast pool of possibles to enable customers to get what they need.

Think of it as a staircase, each step has an increasing level of engagement and possibly a higher price.

When planning your online messaging think of your brand’s online presence as if it were a niche magazine.  You should aim to be the best ‘trade journal’ magazine you possibly can be.  Dominate your niche and the customer will figure out which of your offerings (from free to paid) she wants and where/how to acquire for herself.

It’s rare for a class act like Disney to get a project like this so badly wrong.  We spoke to low budget movie blogger and Client of Creative Agency Secrets, Julian Darley about why he thought this happened.

1. Be honest in your product budgeting. In the movie business, budgets are kept secret.  This conceals reality.  People forget that the marketing money is not usually included in a film budget. If it is included its obfuscated and so the headlines are probably wrong either over- or under-estimated by pundits and critics.
2. Disney kept changing the marketing pitch they knew it was going wrong so they were thrashing about with different versions of trailers which only served to confuse audiences.  Do  your market research and don’t keep changing your pitch.
3. Unless your product is a world-beater, don’t keep spending until you have to have a winner in order to make it pay.  Changing your approach may be OK when your product budget is small but when it’s this big that’s dangerous
4. Choose a title that helps the audience guess what the movie is about.  John Carter is neither a famous person nor a clear explanation of the genre of film.

Julian goes on to explain,

Look at the trailers, Disney kept changing their minds and releasing different trailers.  Was it sci fi or a straight hero/rescue or a historic romance (it starts in period costume) and there are lots of battles in it so is it an action/adventure battle. or an interplanetary sci fi film?

These many angles are different – they reveal a different part of the story and the way we’re telling it.  In my opinion you’d better test it on the public first.

The main lesson for brand marketers

It is amazing how clear people’s opinions are and how unchangable they are, once they are formed.  Disney found that no amount of huge budgetary spend on promotion and influence can retrieve a bad opinion after those initial impressions have taken root.

Take a read of this Problogger article – 10 famous things David Ogilvie said and how they influence blog writing.  The answer that Disney ignored is there in the list at number 9 ”

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

Julian Darley said that as a film maker and script writer he’d add to this “and do your market research early“.  Audiences are the key to great money in movies – and few can afford to ignore their views, as Disney shareholders may soon learn.

Related articles

• ’7 Business Lessons I Learned From The Artist’ (openforum.com)
• It’s a Shame About John: How the Failure of John Carter Only Ensures More Hollywood Unoriginality (thebrowntweedsociety.com)
• Great Geek Debates: Disney Princesses vs. Hayao Miyazaki (wired.com)

Creative Agency Secrets was asked to prove its salt by giving some free consulting to a new organisation, DirtyMan.co.nz Perversely, it is all about keeping men clean!

Avoiding costly product launches

The team is a start-up and was looking to gain profile without too much hard cost.  Our suggestions included:

• Painting up an old caravan to take to events
• Asking supermarkets about promotions based not in-store ($$$) but in the car park
• Setting up google alerts for three phrases aligned to the 3 personae of their ‘ideal customer’ profiles
• Set up a press or media page on the website to host high resolution pack images, past coverage and background information
• Print A5 leaflets on light card single sided and then use the back for several different purposes: a Postcard; letterbox maildrops; product information – just overprint in black when you need them

Prioritising your time and money

We time showing DirtyMan how to prioritise their decisions with regard to which promotions to spend money on and how to pick the ones that would give the best return.  They were considering a radio show sponsorship, leaflet drops to households and joint promotions with other non-competing brands.

For a startup, we think the best promotions are those that

1. Bring a customer face to face with the brand
2. Drive awareness to a new audience based on someone else’s data list

We recommended assessing any joint promotion based on the size and quality of the database of the other company.  And so a sports team sponsorship that has a supporting newsletter (especially an electronic one) and a Facebook fan group is probably worth more than a radio show with no mailing list.

What were the outcomes?

Here’s what Tracey Orange, the owner had to say after the briefing with Creative Agency Secrets:

Yes I did find my meeting with Rebecca useful, we have been busy talking to lots of people over the last week or so and I guess I am taking bits from everyone I speak to, and then formulating our plan from here.

After meeting Rebecca we are going to use some of her suggestions, one was to get out and meet our customers face to face and we now are looking for a cheap promo vehicle brand up and use for onsite promos and events, (if you know of any old land rovers for sale please let Mike know), she also gave me some good things to be talking to organisations we want to align with and not to be just giving stuff away but to leverage product for contacts database names and she also suggested getting hooked up with a clothing brand or similar and then the next day we spoke to someone who is going to see about hooking us up with a menswear clothing brand so fingers crossed.

Would you like access to our ideas?  Think about how to apply these to your own brand.

Get in touch and ask for a FREE 20 minute chat on the phone or Skype.

Image via Wikipedia

Reading the rules the IOC is imposing on athletes competing at London 2012, makes me cry out loud. IOC, STOP and THINK. You are potentially challenging the largest consumer-powered communication engine to a fight to the death and I think I know who’ll win.

What is social media best known for – quick updates and fast thinking sound bites. Here’s what people accredited for the Games can do “…postings, blogs or tweets should be in a first-person, diary type format and should not be in the role of a journalist – i.e. they must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants or accredited persons.”

So I can say what I’m doing but not that I just beat someone else or noticed them eating, breathing or taking off an (unbranded) shirt.

All sounds unworkable and just too onerous – except that the threat of being chucked out and de-accredited may mean athletes decide just not to do any social media at all to be on the safe side.

As one commentator, Chris Matyszczyk, says

…the IOC might not yet understand the instant impulses that tweeting engenders. You grab your phone. You cradle your laptop. Out pop words whose speed is that of a Usain Bolt from the blue.

The long history of regulation and control of the Olympic branding and logo is well known (A client of ours, Rowperfect even got a “cease and desist” letter in 2000 for using a photo of an athlete in GB kit and mentioning that they trained using their product).

So the rules include the statement “Participants and other accredited persons must not use the Olympic Symbol – i.e. the five interlocking rings used alone on their postings, blogs or tweets on any social media platforms or on any websites.” You also can’t create a website with the word olympic in the URL but can create a sub-page like rowperfect.co.uk/olympics – for the duration of the games….till 15th August 2012. What’s the point? Make and leave a legacy not create and take down.

And above all there’s full personal legal liability AND the Games police will be watching from the Olympic offices www.olympicgamesmonitoring.com password protected and restricted access.

Read the full IOC Social Media Internet and blogging guidelines.

Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.

This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”.  For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?

Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned

Take a look at the image here.  This is Nick’s thesis.

There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.

Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.

Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.

Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect.  They sell rowing sports equipment.

Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.

Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.

Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned

I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.

Does this have resonance for your brand strategy?  Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?

New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.

Related articles

• Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
• Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)

Image via Wikipedia

There was a once a time when global brands selected their marketing and advertising departments on their creative ability and trained them in the philosophy of business.  The most successful staff members were the ones with the most unique ideas which would push their brand to success.

This last sentence is still true these days, with one exception, the internet has allowed for the most successful and unique ideas to come from anybody around the world.  No longer must you work as a ‘staff member’ for a company or brand to have your creative ideas fulfilled, nowadays it’s as easy as entering an online competition or registering on a website.

Sharing brand ideas

Take video sharing specialist, Tongal, for example.  This website gained global attention last year when it entered in a US based initiative programme where “emerging” companies were asked to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services. This programme secured over 400 entries, and one of the winners was Tongal, who are now participating in a project for Brisk Tea.

The irony of this is that Tongal, itself, is a competition based website which allows anyone around the globe to enter their skills in creative thinking, filming, pitching and testing products.

Do brands need creatives?

It would seem that to work in the marketing department for a global brand in this day and age, you don’t need a creative bone in your body; you just need to know how to run a competition and recognise a great idea when you see one.

PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, recently launched a competition very similar to the one in the US which found Tongal. The project, called PepsiCo10, asks “emerging” companies to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services by mid-July 2011. The primary fields of interest include social networks, mobile marketing, location-based properties, digital video, gaming and “learning” platforms.

“PepsiCo10 will bring value to our business by ensuring that we are at the cutting edge of whatever digital and social media technology is out there,” Peter Charles, a PepsiCo marketing manager, said.

This movement to ‘hunt’ the globe for great creative ideas is gaining more and more popularity, and so it should. Essentially, everyone wins, the brand gets the creative ideas they want for a reasonable price (PepsiCo is offering £10,000 to the winner), the winners or top entries get recognition, make contacts and gain experience in how to pitch winning ideas and the public get to see the most cutting edge, unique and creative advertising and marketing campaigns from sources which otherwise, would probably have never surfaced.

Other brand contest sites

A leading agency in this ‘buy an idea’ movement is idea bounty, a website that that allows clients to ask the world for creative ideas in exchange for a reward, or Bounty. The clients review the submissions and select the best Idea as the Bounty winner. Clients can only use Ideas that they’ve paid a Bounty.

And what about Swagapalooza - turning it round this is new products pitching bloggers with large followings.  A product in search of an audience…. creative?  Innovative?  Worthwhile?

What does the marketer of the future DO?

Are we heading towards a future where a marketing departments primary job will be to select winners of competitions for creative ideas?  As bad as that sounds for all you marketers out there, I think the answer is probably even worse.  Why even have a marketing department for that task when people can submit their entries online and have the public vote for the creative idea they want to see actioned the most.

Be warned – The End is Nigh!

11 Crowdsourcing websites:

1. 99 Designs – graphic design
2. IdeaStorm - ideas
3. CrowdSpring – Graphic design
   
4. CrowdWorks – more for corporates
5. Brandstack – logos
6. InnoCentive – problem solving for businesses
7. Spudaroo – specialist for copy writing
8. AdHack – advertising experts who’ll write your next ad for you
9. Brainrack – a brainstorming site
10. NamingForce – to name your product
11. Clipik – video editing

Related articles

• Is spec work evil? (creativeagencysecrets.com)
  
• PepsiCo and Highland team up in hunt for ten new social media hits (telegraph.co.uk)
• 10 ways of crowdsourcing your needs or talent (the10most.com)
• Evil Genuis Finds Case Study in her Pepsi (inc.com)
• Mashable Teams With PepsiCo To Find Europe’s Most Promising Startups (mashable.com)

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

I 've known clients like this

A guest post by Stephen Greensted.

Cynicism, Duplicity and Institutional Incompetence

In my last post, I looked at thirty reasons for advertising agencies not winning an account when they thought they were ahead. I could easily have added another seventy reasons.

But it’s not always the agency’s fault. Clients are just as likely to mess up the process. Recently, I’ve been sitting on the client side of the table more than I have on the agency side.

And very interesting it has been, too.

Here are ten common reasons for Client screw-ups:

1. The clients knew before the pitch whom they wanted to appoint but were compelled by Procurement to go ahead with a pitch nonetheless
2. The pitch was called by the new marketing director to enable him to appoint theadvertising agency from his former job
3. The pitch was a statutory pitch, the purpose being to make the incumbent agency to try harder and charge less
4. The client was looking for free ideas but had no intention of moving his business
5. What the clients really wanted was a digital solution, but failed to mention that in the brief
6. The new marketing director called a pitch, fired the incumbent agency, and then got fired himself by the managing director
7. I’m going to have to be a bit careful about this one since a lot of people, me included, still feel litigious about what happened. Here goes: a bullying sort of recently hired client called an agency review. He knew which agency he wanted to appoint. However, this agency didn’t really come up with the goods in the pitch, but the least well-known agency which pitched produced a cracker of an idea based upon a very well-known pop video from the 1960s. The small agency was not appointed. Three months later, that idea was running on TV in a slightly different guise. The client had passed on the idea to his favoured agency, and told them to run it
8. The client had specified that he was not going to appoint an agency with conflicting accounts, and then complained when the agency could not show a relevant case history
9. The marketing director said she was in charge of the pitch process. She wasn’t. It turned out to be her bosses in the States who were not going to appoint a French advertising agency
10. When we drilled down through the substrate and peered around in the gloom, we realised that the potential client didn’t really want great advertising to sell his company’s beer. What he really wanted was advertising to make him famous. He probably could have spent his time more wisely with a PR company

Again, neither all agencies nor all clients are either sinners or saints. You can find all sorts there, but you also come across some fairly extreme ones who are really only in it for themselves. I have as many client side friends as I do from the agency world. But, if you’re going to pitch, remember that you’ll never really know what went on in the clients’ heads. Pitches are hugely exciting, but they’re also disruptive and expensive, and should only ever be undertaken once you have answered yes to the following three questions:

1. What is the true reason for this pitch?
2. Who on the client side is really in charge?
3. Are you sure you can work with them?

Geoff Howard-Spink had an additional three:

1. Can we do great work for this client?
2. Are we going to make a lot of money out of it?
3. Is it going to be fun?

He went on to say that if the answer was yes to any two of these three, you should seize the account. If you can only say yes to one question, politely decline.

Which we did from time to time.

-Stephen Greensted

Related articles

• How To Lose A Pitch When You Thought You Were Winning (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)

• Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
• Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
• Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
• Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
• Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group

#agileagency

How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology.  Code is now on a par with content.

Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues.  Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement.  We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.

Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products

Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients.  Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.

Webb - campaigns are humdrum.

Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes

Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.

Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.

Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation.  Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on.  Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.

Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.

Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company.  E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website.  Someone turned that brand round.  The danger is to think the core product is what matters.  We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers

Malbon - Three things in summary

1. Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture.  Because inside tech the world is your company.  Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
2. Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos.  The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
3. Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of.  Brining the two worlds together is great.  Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.

Also covered by RachCreative

Related articles

• Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
• SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)