In my last post, I talked of the coming disruption of the three way relationship between marketer, agency, and media property. Essentially it centers on the idea that marketers (who are often behind themselves) are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of digital savvy of their agencies and are now turning to media properties for strategic ideas and creative capabiliites. And these media properties are making themselves all the more ready, willing, and able to carry out the needs and wishes of the marketers.

I believe that that’s happening. But there’s still a big problem with that model. Consistent brand messaging

On a micro-level, this new way of doing things makes perfect sense. Crafting an marketing campaign tailored to the offerings of an online property could maximize the effectiveness of the campaign itself. For that media property.

But last I looked, most advertisers don’t use all their spend on one property. They’ll pick many properties in many channels. They’ll test here and there. They’ll sometimes concentrate on branding, sometimes concentrate on direct , sometimes (and the web makes this more possible, concentrate on both.

If the marketer - the company that is the end client - has to tailor each of its marketing messages to that of the publisher, chaos could result.

Publishers will need to realize this and further expand their services, sort of becoming almost full service for their advertisers. But still, this still could run into brand confusion as each publisher will owe it to their paying client to create the most effective campaign for their specific property or properties, leaving potentially different and confusing brand messages across several media properties.

Wise agencies should see this as the window of opportunity and work with publishers before they even get clients to formulate the framework for effective marketing campaigns that can perform very effectively over a cross section of properties and platforms.

Don Frischmann of Rubicon Consulting wrote this great article for AdAge.   A great read.

Nothing is Insignificant When It Comes to Brand Fulfillment

 

The culture of participatory social media is having some surprisingly significant effects on both the way satisfied customers play a role in contributing to the marketing message development of products and services. And it is also playing an increasingly important role in defining the key touchpoints that customers use in the deciding factors one what to purchase. What makes this all the more noteworthy is that much of this is rooted in offline purchases. I’m putting this together from two recent studies…

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Polling and focus groups are like observing the behavior of the chimpanzee in captivity — you have a living, breathing, chimpanzee, but you have one that is under stress, duress, and has been partially acclimatized to appeasing its handlers — it wants to keep safe, it wants to be fed, and it wants to get out — so observing chimpanzee behavior in captivity is like observing consumer or market behavior in focus groups — you have real-live response, but you have the response of something that is beholden to you, that is wondering what’s in it for me — you have corrupted behavioral data.

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Here’s an amazing statistic:  a full 57% of marketing executives recently responded with the following answer to the question if their firm has a crisis response communication plan:  NO.  What makes it more amazing is that in the same survey, 53% said that their business had experienced a crisis in the past…one that resulted in a loss in sales, a reduction in profits, or negative press.  A majority of that 53% say that the recovery period took a year a more.  Only one-half have trained spokespeople.  And it shouldn’t go unnoticed that there’s an overlap of 4% here of companies that have suffered a crisis in the recent past but have yet to install a plan to address future crises.

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