Where the suckers moon!

Fortune lies not in the deep

But in the shallows

Where the suckers moon.
These are opening lines from Randall Rothenberg's epic on traditional advertising agency. The great book is aptly titled- The life and death of an advertising campaign.

While you ponder over the opening lines of the book (WTSM is about Wieden & Kennady's account- Subaru), let me bring you to the moot point- how will does one evaluate a digital marketing agency.?

Traditional marketing agency's performance could be linked to market share, volume growth, top of mind recall; the point is it can be tracked to the business performance matrix. How does one link digital marketing agency to business? Why would you one digital marketing agency the other?

Lets take a traditional agency for example. A typical pitch will provide following range of services...
1. Brand Planning or Account Planning: high level strategy to connect macro environment to consumers and business reality.
2. Communication development/Campaign creation: Theme based TV Films, Press ads, Outdoor etc
3. Competitive and consumer information (Hmm, too much to ask for the retainer?)
4. Media Planning and Buying
5. Below the line expertise
The agency is marketing extension to translate the strategy into effective communication and get the message across the consumer. Traditional agency is the brand custodian, creates cutting edge brands. Hence the performance of such agencies in very good FMCG companies will be linked to market share, volume growth and consumer related recall. There can be a science to choose a traditional advertising agency.

What about a digital agency. What I quickly did a random poll on linked to find out how should one measure the performance. I received many answers, but only to confirm my suspicion that there is no formula to evaluate a digital agency. But here are some salient pointers from the poll (there are only execution led)

1. The digital agency must have both capabilities- marketing and technology

2. Should be good with numbers (read analytical). If there is a proprietary tool, it is great as it will help to align and measure objectives.

3. The agency should be able to deliver some good-looking work.

4. Passion for digital.: there is other school of thought as well. I have seen a number of guys coming into this field due to the tendency to try "something new".

5. Media Buying

These are few good pointers to start with for a digital agency, and this is it. Believe me there won't be other parameter. Maybe CTRs, media value ads etc.

However, since there are no great case studies on effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns and lasting impact of creatives, digital looks likely to remain at the bottom of the priority chain. What digital agencies lack is the planning approach like the traditional agencies. This would mean integrating consumers, measuring impact of the communication and coming up with traditional media and digital media synergies.

What could make a bigger impact is the utilisation of research (such as dynamiclogics, which I spoke about in my earlier post), real consumer trend mapping (such as twitter) and measuring the buzz. Go beyond the CTRs and ROIs, and measure consumer opinion (social media marketing).

Maybe, we would also need clients who can support and appreciate the digital marketing efforts. I guess a wishful thinking!

Till then we will only keep things simple- where the suckers moon !

Cheers!

Slumdog Millionaire!

"Slumdog Millionaire" won 4 oscars (I saw the downloadable version of movie recently)...

Screenplay: Outstanding is the word, and also does the work of putting India on the world map. We have some great guys in this field (Anurag Kashyap, loved his No Smoking)

Picture: A westerners image of India- poor & hungry people. The movie has timed well with Arvind Adiga's "The white tiger", which is also about the poor destitute India. Maybe here we would want a richer picture of India, demonstrating our progress.

Director: Hats off to Danny Boyle for the film. Super camera and shots. I have seen "Trainspotting", and that is a brilliant film as well.

The last one was for Music. It was great to see AR Rahman, SRK and Anil Kapoor on the stage, a proud moment for India (I'm sure Gandhi would be similarly exciting, but I wasn't around). I hope that it wins at least 4 Oscar from here. Man, you should have seen Anil Kapoor on the stage, he was so pumped up!.

So, why is a movie description featuring in DIgital Marketing blog? I was driving today and while I was reminiscing of these proud moments for India, I also remembered one discussion with an international professional. "Indians don't blog; don't express their opinion", he said, "And that is
the reason why though in the west social media is the new buzzword, in India it has a long way to go."

Consider this...

1. I searched for Slumdog millionaire (from India) a few hours ago, I found only 15k results on Google

2. Blog search in Hindi was more dismal- only 7 results.

3. The reach as a media vehicle (comScore calls these as the conversational media) for blogs is good- Orkut.co.in (12.5 Mln Unique Visitors & 40% reach), Bloggers (8 Mln Unique visitors & 26% reach), wordpress (3.5 Mln Unique visitors & 11% reach). However, actual blogger community is still very small; a rough estimate would be about 50k active bloggers. An old article but you might get some information here...

We might be world's largest democracy, however it seems very few of us have opinions to share. In US elections, Barack Obama was able to move a number of youths through his social media influence. Compare this to our Indian politicians, who don't even have a website to their name. I did find Lal Krishna Advani's blog on the net, http://blog.lkadvani.in/ (it wasn't working that's another story). The sad reality is none of us believe in expressing ourselves and that this opinion will make a difference (come on!)

However, there is a silver lining, blogging is becoming big. Aamir Khan (http://www.aamirkhan.com/) has a blog. I had heard that even Amitabh Bacchan had started blogging, however even after 10 minutes of persistent search I couldn't find it. Akshay Kumar also seems to have a blog (http://akshaykumarblogs.blogspot.com/2007/11/akshay-kumar.html), but doesn't look genuine.

Blogging has started in some way, but has sto still reach the tipping point (borrowed from Malcolm Gladwel :). We still have to go a long way beyond clicks and click through rates and ROIs. Blooging, I believe is the true word of mouth marketing.

FYI, here are some interesting feature on "Slumdog Millionaire"

J Ramanand:
http://passionforcinema.com/arrahman-not-just-madras-bombay-or-dilli/

Rk: http://passionforcinema.com/slumdog-millionaire-kamaal-ki-story/

BomBay Bitch (she does a great job of hammering down our own industry): http://www.bombaybitch.com/site/and_the_award_goes_to___/

Pray with me for Slumdog's oscar win!! But before that please watch the movie; it is releasing on Jan 23rd 2009.

BTW, have you seen the Google's new favicon (small icon in your browser), it's great.

Cheers!

Gadgets Ads et al...

It has been a while that I have put a new article on my blog. Pretty much, last few months everything was happening, and unfortunately was regular work which took lot of time. The realisation dawned upon me when I was going through the LinkedIn profile; now you can add tools to stay connected (You see I'm not that proficient user of Facebook). I found it a great way to stay connected.

That brings me the to the discussion of Content Vs The Gadget. How does one get access to a thousand of browsers out there- through content (traditional) or gadget/tool (Hmmm...)

Computers are getting personal and so are the the website. The scope of customising the websites to your taste and preference; There is a huge scope of customisation.(Though I belong to the old generation, who use the website as it is, but I'm sure the techies and the young new generation is adept at this art). I have seen my nephew customising his Google and Yahoo home page and close friend using Google reader to get himself updated with the latest happening. Small little gadgets does a save that extra effort that you might otherwise require to source the content.No wonder Google is promoting these dinky units in a big way. These can be rendered in multiple formats- HTML/Flash, can have live data feeds and can be placed on any web page, including iGoogle.

So for marketers, we might not yet bid Goodbye to the old world of CTR optimied, Geo and IP targeted ad units, but we would want to utilise the Gadget ads in a ever increasing way. comScore, the leading third party digital Media audit agency has reported and increase in popularity of this new offering.

This is a list of interesting gadgets/applications...

Coke bubble application
Fidelity instruments Market monitor
Southwest Airlines- Ding (my favourite :))
Target- The widget allows you to search Target products from your desktop
Acuvue- wink application

Here's another great article that I came across on iMedia- Creative Primer on Power of Brand Widgets.

Cheers!

Accenture Global Digital Advertising Study 2007

My friend Anuj Anand shared a very interesting report with me last week and as usual i was about to junk it ;). A better sense prevailed and I didn't regret a bit going through the report.

Though it is called "Accenture Global Digital Advertising Study 2007"and you might think that it pertains only to US (no wonder their local baseball competition is also called World Cup), it does have something for all of us. Coming back to the report, the key takeaways were...

- 79 percent of our survey participants agree that advertising will become more performance-based, as the industry moves towards precise measurement of results, rapidly delivered. This will impose a performance discipline on an industry that has rarely felt this kind of pressure.

- 87 percent agree that analytics will become more accurate and more critical to the business. This shift will drive a decline in the use of traditional success measures — total audience per advertisement — but will enable advertisers to gain increased return
on investment through more accurate targeting of audiences.

- 97 percent agree that advertising relationships with customers will become more interactive, and the other 3 percent say they don’t know, meaning that not a single respondent disagrees. As a result of this greater interactivity, capabilities such as clickthrough buttons on TV will enable a two-way dialogue with the consumer all the way to purchase. These capabilities will also create a more meaningful feedback loop on advertising effectiveness.

- 43 percent of the respondents believe that digital media will become the primary form of programming and advertising content within the next five years, and a further 33 percent say this will happen in between seven and 10 years. The impact of this transition may be
accelerated by the typical pattern that early adaptors tend to be from higher income
demographic groups that are more attractive to advertisers. Traditional advertisers are largely unprepared for the wave of digitally driven change about to engulf them.

- Only 29 percent of executives believe the industry is technologically prepared for the resulting changes in performance measurement. The proportions are even lower in terms
of customer analytics (25 percent), targeted advertising (21 percent) and customer interactivity (13 percent).

- Largely as a result, the highest proportion of respondents (43 percent) believe advertising agencies have the most to lose in the transition to digital advertising, followed by broadcasters with 33 percent.

- Correspondingly, 46 percent believe that online search companies have the most to gain, followed by digital advertising specialists with 19 percent.

- 77 percent agree that advertising will be viewed in an integrated way on three screens — television, computer and wireless handset.

Indian scenario can't be more rosier. Digital agency Zenith Optimedia expects Internet ad spend to double, from 210 crores 2006 to 450 crores in 2007 and can potentially rise to 2,250 crores mark in 2009 (a 10 times increase). As a share of advertising pie, the share will rise to 6.8%, which was 1% last year. There is another interesting report on digital industry.

It just certifies a fact that we already know, that the advertising industry is facing a radical transformation — in terms of its technological and cultural impact. We need to focus strongly on the use technology to offer advanced customer interactivity. Targeting and analytics are gaining real competitive differentiation.

Therefore the implications for us are...

- If you are a new media company — build, partner or buy systems (sales, reporting, delivery) to support products across three screens and to deliver targeted advertising in privacy-compliant ways.
- If you are a marketer — escalate your integrated marketing and advertising initiatives across three screens, keeping a critical eye on performance metrics.
- If you are a technology company — focus on developing front-end and back-end systems specific to each medium’s unique needs.

If you can't locate PDF on the net, do write to me and I'll send you a copy :)

Cheers!

The First Step

What is the first prerogative of an eMarketeer? (Part 1)

A. Online: which includes SEM (which now includes SEO & PPC), Display/Banner advertising, E-Mail Marketing, Affiliate Marketing & Social Media

B. Offline: which includes TV, Print, PR Outdoor and BTL activities.

I belong to a small world of e-commerce, where the business survives on a website. The distribution is through the internet, which is also the first source for reach. Our first point of contact is our website and also it is the final consummation point. The consumers are also limited- a high ticket item, which can be bought only through a credit card (estimated to be 15 Mln in India). We have limited budgets (unlike FMCG/Consumer Durables), and being a start up ROI, every quarter is very important.

So what is the first step toward establishing that revenue generating website? Where should we put the monies, how should we measure the mediums? Please note that this is not a research paper with theta & Deltas, and might not have substantial data points for "Hence proved" formula. These are observations, which can act as handy reference points.

Step 0: Select a good Webanalytic tool
Before you proceed on strategy and define number that you will measure and which will define your ROI, select a measuring tool. You can better your website/campaign only if you can measure it. There are a number of tools available- Websidestory (now takenover by Omniture) is a great tool for eCommerce platforms and offer a wide range of products, right from Site Measurement to marketing performance (to measure SEM, Affiliate and other marketing campaigns). Omniture is a much superior platform, which allows you to measure the Social Media activities (RSS & Blogs) and has very simple dashbaords. They too offer suites for marketing campaigns & SEM, however the price is very steep. One good platform for content platform is Webtrends (we had the trial version of this software and was a good way to start appreciating Web Analytics). All these are real time softwares. There are a number of free tools also available- Google urchin is the most popular (You can use this too and evaluate it against the other platforms). However, the only hindrance is the privacy of data (and more so because I feel Google representatives can access the information. Now that they have vertical specialisation, it becomes even more scary. Clicktracs is another one. DGM also has its analytic tool and claims it to be good called DC Storm. Their affiliate and PPC is through this dashboard, and can be used for site Analytics as well.

Webanalytics will help to...
1. Estimate the daily traffic (and hence the popularity of the site) and the time spent (quite critical parameter for a content site)
2. Estimate the sources of traffic (where are they coming from, which websites) and hence the quality (basis what they do on the site, like on an ecommerce site, conversion is paramount)
3. Understand the navigation (and hence do website optimization)
4. Measure conversion and hence define goals for marketing campaign and site ROIs.

There is tons of data and webanalytics needs to sync in with the business goals if it has to make sense. The implementation of the platform is critical, as before we start relying on its results, we need to be very sure about the numbers that we see on the dashboard. More importantly pick and choose Key Performance Indicators (KPI) which will drive the business. This is not a one time affair, it needs to accessed daily and refined to suit business needs. You might want to check out Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics- An Hour a day"

If you want to know how is your website performance ( and need a second reference point) you can look at audience measurement tools like comScore and Nielson Netrating (not available in India as yet). These are panel based data and works on similar logic as TAM (television Audience Measurement). It will you to corroborate WebAnalytic data for your traffic sources and navigation beyond your site. Hitwise is another superior tool, but like other has no services for India.

Step 1: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM might have been confused with Pay Per Click about a year back, but now for all practical purposes includes SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The above is the image from Eye tracking study which reemphasizes, the focus on natural listing (The first image is for Google, second for Yahoo and last one is MSN's).

SEO is the cornerstone of internet marketing. If your company's ROI depends on your website, this is the first step towards making it a revenue churning machine. For new to this term, SEO relates to left hand side section (minus the top highlighted portion) on Google and other Search Engine interface. The click on this link is free, and there is not one rule to get to the top. Experiment and try, learn and experiment again. Writing Metatags, having site maps and building links through link exchange is not enough, as Google algorithmis never consistent. You would have to consistently look at numbers and take action accordingly.

You would need to invest in resources and have a special team, comprising of content writers, tech, website designs and a SEO specialist. There is no shortcut, and no blackhat SEO technique (read as spam) that will give you results. Best way is to learn this trick yourself, even the result itself take a long time to come (in some cases more than 3 months). One great resource is John Bettelle's book "The Search" and his blog http://battellemedia.com

SEO is basis a simple funda- your (read as site) is worth basis how many recommendations (read as backlinks) that you get. In the sphere of social media, getting the site recommendations will gain precedence over the work done by "Google Bots". Hence if you are looking at SEO, start dirtying you hands with Social Media as well. Gain and nurture well wishers and advocates for your site who will get you that relevant ranking on search engines.

Pay Per Click, is what made Google what it is and changed the way we look at internet marketing. It is measurable, it is very instant and very powerful. Here you can bid the price that you want to pay if a guy clicks on the Google ad, arriving at this price is very scientific and a combination of the part of net return that you can put on table vs your competition and the demand for that product. Invest in identifying these keywords, the moment you start your business. These would almost be like a portfolio of keywords that can act as drivers for your business. If you are regular at this game, you will soon realise how to target the mindset of your TG (by looking at the keyword). But mind you, this is only 20% of the clicks (traffic) rest 80% is free as SEO.

There are good number of agencies which help in Pay Per click campaigns- Webchutney (highly recommended), Quasar and also GroupM (more for brand campaign). If you have crossed 15 lacs as the total spends on Google SEM, you should be looking at an automated solution- Efficient Frontier (highly recommended) and DGM work on these lines. I had also come across on other agency called Net Elixer, which had a similar model. All these platforms have unique optimisation algorithms, which optimise towards a goal. For an ecommerce platform, it is easy, as we are only looking at conversions/products sold. However for a brand advertiser, the goal will be different.

SEO and SEM should work in tandem. Though initially you will have to focus on SEM, as the results come faster and it is fun to see the numbers increase every day. SEO on the other hand will pick up slowly, but very high on conversions (double of what you will get through SEM). SEO and SEM combination works the best. For High conversion keywords, one needs to be present on both natural as well as paid listing. As your SEO campaign starts picking up, you would have to move lower converting SEM keywords into SEO. Over a period of time you will get the best mix which gives the best ROI.