YOuTube still of Air NZ safety video with Stephen Adams

Airline safety videos are a great messaging platform

I read an article about airline spend on glossy safety videos and found some great marketing reasons for investing in high production values.

YOuTube still of Air NZ safety video with Stephen Adams

4.8 million views and counting

First – aligning cultural values with education. Air New Zealand partnered with the Department of Conservation (DOC) to promote the importance of wildlife protection. That was after they did a movie hook up from Men in Black featuring the All Black rugby stars.

The baton was picked up by United whose $1m spend and 160 crew on their current Safety in Motion video boggles – but apparently viewers love it.

Qantas uses a true customer romance story (with actors and the actual people in the credits – no they don’t look alike at all), British Airways features home grown “national treasures” like Gordon Ramsay. So far so good – but did you know some of these get millions of YouTube watches? Sounds like a new revenue stream from people who won’t even be paying to fly with you.

In these straitened times, does this make the cost of production a worthwhile marketing investment?

Sources:

New ideas often receive pushback

New ideas often receive pushback.

That’s because they’re new, they represent change and that can be threatening to jobs, budgets and ‘the way we work round here’.

It doesn’t mean they are necessarily a bad idea. I find that frequently it takes a couple of goes to overcome the pushback and also it takes some time – maybe a year or more.

There’s nothing more powerful than “an idea whose time has come”. But that doesn’t just happen. The marketing communications outreach that builds the comprehension, that challenges the status quo, that offers alternative pathways is where us B2B marketers can prepare the ground so that you overcome the pushback, get acceptance for a pilot or a trial and then move towards adoption.

Here’s a case study.

I’m the MC for a B2B marketing careers event at the Marketing Association which I first proposed as an un-conference a year ago. Now the event is re-framed and is happening next week.

Let’s talk?

Not everything is enhanced with AI.

Use your experience of life, of human communication and decision making to work out times in the customer journey when personal, individual, manual actions will have greater effect.

I love using letters, phone calls, SMS – all great tools for use cases when you need cut through and to effect human-to-human contact as a context for making a sale.

PM me and I’ll tell you one use case I’m doing right now with a CV for a job application.

No it won’t do the whole job for you, yes you will use your human insight and creativity to frame up the AI supplied text. It’s so satisfying.

Getting a “no” is a good result for the sales pipeline

The inexperienced new business development marketer will disagree with that statement. Why wouldn’t you want more prospects in your pipeline?

The customer doesn’t owe you their business – but they do owe you an answer.

Creating marketing tactics that provoke the prospect to answer “no” is a good thing. Sales know not to pursue them and can focus their efforts elsewhere.

And remember, no is just for now.

95% of B2B prospects aren’t ready to buy at any one time. So going back to them later, may mean they’re ready to hear your brand message and review their plans.

Rebecca Caroe and Sam Irvine, two people on screen discussing AI

Marketing with AI – a warning

Sam Irvine is CEO of Copyright Licensing New Zealand – as a B2B marketer he understands the use cases for AI and marketing. There are two main ones, you can use it internally to manage processes as organisational AI and secondly for external outputs like campaigns and marketing material creation.

Good and Bad AI Actors

Sam acknowledges the time saving benefits of AI and he warns that many LLM training sets were created with scraped data taken without permission. He notes some legal cases in USA and Europe currently challenging this – Books3 which has 200,000 books pirated from the internet has been taken down after a  law suit.

The days of tech startups seeking forgiveness not permission are over.

New Zealand has a cross-party political group looking at AI right now but there aren’t yet any legal cases being heard.

Sam’s advice to marketers

Be careful about which tools you choose to use – are they ethical and responsible?

Nvida and Adobe have licensed all the images they use from Shutterstock and other photo libraries. The original creator is paid when you use their AI generated images.

A closed AI is one developed internally and trained on the organisation’s own data.

An open AI uses public data.

Three risks of using open AI

  1. Your input data will be added to the training set. Is this confidential information that you are authorised to put into the public domain? Sam warns against adding client data into an open AI system.
  2. The output you get could include copyright material taken from the LLM training set which could put you into the courts.
  3. You might get an answer which is wrong. Be careful around fact checking those outputs.

As the data sets are being withdrawn, the information used by open AI models is now getting older and less relevant. It’s incumbent on all of us marketers to use AI in the right way and embrace it while protecting ourselves and our clients.

Copyright NZ has courses on copyright, contracts and agreements including AI. www.copyright.co.nz

Watch Rebecca’s interview with Sam Irvine

 

Threads social – early thoughts

It launched. The “new” rival to Twitter. And there have been many attempts to become serious players in the social media space. Read the list of Launch > Defunction > Acquisition > Milestone.

Meta will be closely watching our early behaviour on the platform. What we do now may well influence the features, algorithm and future they build for Threads.

This is a rare opportunity to scale a new social media site backed by someone with the money and experience to do it differently (and frankly, Zuck needs some good publicity). Meta will start by doing everything to prove they are not Twitter, not Musk and will be using all their experience and expertise to make Threads a success. They probably won’t be able to resist monetising Threads in due course, but right now this is terraforming in real time. It’s exciting to watch and fun to participate.

How will ThreadsApp play out? My thoughts based on having being a social media user since August 2007 including 7 themes to watch are below. But first… what was ea

My Twitter bio

Halcyon days of the past

What was it like being on social media in 2007 – 2012?

At the time I was in London, part of a group which met in a cafe every Friday and shared, learned together and hacked our way through what had changed on blogs and social in the past week. We all learned a ton and it was a free-flowing exchange of ideas IRL which bonded us. We discouraged advertising and direct selling. We worked together based on what people said, did and knew.

Hats off to Lloyd Davies who founded the Tuttle Club group and thank you for introducing me to amazing bloggers (because those were our roots) like Euan , Kevin Whatley, Jemima Gibbons, SoloBass Steve Lawson, Toby Moores, Adriana Lukas, Mike Sizemore. You know who you are.

The free-for-all nature of discovering and learning was a heady drug. It was untainted by marketers and salesfolk. We read and liked and followed what interested us.

Yes the feed was a “firehose” which was unfiltered. But the scale was mostly manageable.

It was peppered with cute and meaningless features like “Pokes” and Throwing Sheep…. really.

Social media now

Today this world is transformed into a money making machine. From both sides – advertisers and brands chucking out messages, links, offers and “exclusive” discounts while users are far more tribal, abusive and clustered into pockets of mutual interest around news, sport and politics.

From a brand point of view it’s not all bad.

But we have had to get used to the slow inevitability of what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of each and every social media platform.

When a company is neither disciplined by competition nor by regulation, enshittification inevitably ensues.

They move from fun playground, to competitive boxing ring, to the gradual withdrawal of beneficial privileges into a paid-only format. Each step makes the experience less fun, less participative (unless you pay) and makes us ever more skilful at muting, filtering and speed reading. The pleasure and

The promise of Threads

What should you do now?

Dive over there now and join ThreadsApp (it’s in the App and Play Stores). When you get there, read and watch and learn and understand what a “pure” social media network is like before the negative influences start to dominate.

It’s fun. It’s a new frontier of simplicity.

Yes much of the first 24 hours of posts were themed around “what’s happening here?” and “what do I do now?”. But this will improve and develop.

What I’ve noticed so far.

  1. Most of us are only following people we already know on Instagram. But it does give a home-grown advantage to users who have a large following. This will change.
  2. Much of the featureset is familiar including quotes, retweets, carousels and comments. There is NO edit button. Interestingly, there’s no way to do a “thread” on threads…. you just have to comment on your original post. This will change.
  3. Many people are ‘muting’ accounts which don’t align with what they want to read/follow/learn. The self-preservation filtering process has already begun, and will continue. This won’t change.
  4. Folks using it in the same way they already use other social platforms for marketing / sales purposes are like tumbleweed. Nobody engages with a obviously sales-y link. This won’t change.
  5. Links off the site which are combined with an engaging message, question or observation get comments and replies. This won’t change.
  6. You can’t delete the Threads App without also deleting Instagram. So Meta’s leopard isn’t changing its spots. This won’t change.
  7. Currently there’s no filtering possible. Frustrating for me as I like to create the environment I want to hang out in. Th
Threads app, threads post, marketing on threads app,

Tumbleweed

My warning to marketers

As an industry we have a TERRIBLE track record of spotting a great opportunity and then (frankly speaking) shi*tting iin our own nest as we kill off the lovely thing we found with promotions, adverts and offers. This spoils it for us all.

Don’t do it.

Build your brand with meaningful, on-brand conversational posts and messages.

Yes if you have to link off the social platform to your site, do it. BUT remember the social platforms all understand how to manipulate, human psychology and behavioural economics. They will work to keep visitors on their platform and prevent them from leaving. Any way they can.

I’ve already spotted this when clicking a link to an article on a newspaper from Threads… I read it, clicked another link within that article, read another page, clicked the back button and instead of going to the first newspaper article, it went right back to Threads. Cute. I had to re-click the original link a second time to get back and finish reading the article. That sort of behaviour by me (a consumer) is unusual, it’s only driven by me REALLY wanting to read… most would give up and shrug their shoulders and go back to scrolling Threads.

You’re probably not fulfilling your marketing goals by trying to drive traffic to your owned assets. Work harder to build engagement around topics that align with your brand mission and. which showcase your unique wonderfulness.

And get over there and have a play around.

We all have the chance to build what the future will look like. As I said at the start of this post, Meta will be closely watching our early behaviour on the platform.

Don’t F*CK IT UP, please. For all our sakes.

 

Academy for Women Entrepreneurs, Pacific Women in Business

AWE Pacific Summit 2023

I am a panelist at the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs summit talking about Social Media, Marketing and communications.

Three talking points and answers

From your experience in B2B Marketing, what do you think our Pacific & Maori business women who target businesses as customers should focus on for their marketing activities?

  • Understand the customer – walk in their shoes
  • Keep good records – CRM
  • Businesses may look daunting as sales targets but they are made up of people – befriend them.
  • Use LinkedIn – buy a Premium membership and Sales Navigator
  • Build your email list from day one
  • Don’t build your house on rented land
  • Focus on local marketing first

Can you give some examples of SME women led businesses you have supported with your digital marketing insights expertise?  

  • Sue Skeet – Notice Match
  • Climber Property – Grace Hu
  • Equal Exes – Bridgette Jackson
  • PICMI – Genevieve Griffin-George
  • Catherine Stewart  Barrister
  • Method Recycling – India Korner

What are some tips you can give our Pacific & Maori business women for their digital marketing activities & campaigns? 

  • Buy expertise if you don’t have it yourself. Fiverr, Upwork
  • Learn how to brief
  • Find your tribe…. start very very narrow for your audience
  • Keep your owned digital assets at the core of your strategy.
  • Stay in touch regularly
  • Build community
  • Join the Marketing Association B2B SIG

Happy to give guidance to anyone who needs more detail on these topics.

Simplify your martech stack

I attended the Marketing Association’s B2B meetup and here’s my write-up on the event.

Key learnings

  • Use what you have to the fullest extent – all functionality
  • Simplify your stack NOW
  • Check your use case matches your technology
  • Bring the team with you – upskill them to be confident using technology

Match your MarTech Stack to your needs

Technology is an essential component for successful B2B marketing – but the plethora of choices is beyond confusing – it’s daunting.

The Marketing Association’s Special Interest Group for B2B marketing hosted a panel discussion “Does your martech stack fit your needs?” to tackle this giant question head on.

Ably led by Cassandra Powell (Assurity), the panel shared their insights and experiences using technology to support marketing activity.

Find the right tools

Half the panel confessed that they were in the process of simplifying their technology at the moment. Traverna Addenbrook (Spark) assesses each based on whether it supports Spark’s data unification goal while Sharn Piper (Attain) always matches the tool to the job which needs to be done and then tries to use that tool to its fullest extent.

Datacom’s Alex Mercer confessed that when she joined they had 220 websites! Her team are integrating platforms in support of their brand development. Getting the data talking across platforms is a sizeable job. Simon Wedde (Stitch Tech) strongly advocated seeking native integrations between different software tools and to never use custom integrations, because one software update can cause you headaches. He also recommend to use your own data when doing demos of new tools so you can assess tech platforms’ suitability to your unique use case.

Bring the team with you

Many marketers inherit ‘hangover’ software which is already in place. This is not necessarily a disaster because if you assess the adoption rates for each, you’ll quickly be able to make a case for getting rid of the ones you don’t like or have become outdated. By surveying your team and understanding the landscape of actual use Travena managed to simplify her stack and improve both the integrations and the processes which support the marketing team. She had a word of caution about fear. Some team members may not use technologies which are in place and you need to understand your team’s capability around each tool before deciding which to sunset out of the tech stack.

Get the most out of your stack

Many marketers already know that we use only a small percentage of the capability of the software tools we buy. Relax says Simon, just use that part really well – but also build your use cases to confirm that the tools are aligned with business needs.  It’s important to understand where your data is and how clean and up-to-date it is says Traverna. She reminded the meeting that sometimes things turn out in unpredictable ways – this isn’t a disaster. Don’t blame the model is her advice. If you understand data lag and the implications you will not have any trouble explaining to stakeholders what happened and why. If you’ve already done your internal PR with these folks you can remind them why they invested in this tool, that they should trust your marketing process and trust you. Marketers need to be comfortable around technology so they’re empowered to make informed decisions.

What about AI?

Sharn is not worried about AI tools replacing marketers, but he is worried about a marketer who knows the AI tools better than you replacing your job. The AI itself is not what you should be concerned about. His team is already running tests using AI to save time or money in the business. Get it done, know what works and what fails and build your knowledge about how to write AI prompts.

Rebecca Caroe

Member of the B2B Special Interest Group Board

Facebook “interests” crib sheet

A client wanted a list of all the different interests which you can select on Facebook to refine a advertising campaign.

Here’s some research

I found these pages which purport to have the full list of interests for Facebook advertising. some are more recent than others. The last link suggests a layering strategy which may help