Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations
Published on May 20, 2008
Deep down below the layers of interface, CSS, HTML, and XML—down where only the geekiest among us roam—everything comes down to this: it’s all zeroes and ones. On or off. The digital switch.
It goes without saying that clean, CSS-based, standards-compliant code is called for here so users on slow connections, with old browsers, or using screen readers will be able to access your content. Feel free to use Flash and video, as long as you consider alternate means of content delivery. Then test and test and test again.
Though interaction and conversion becomes a bit more complicated at the point the interface meets the visitor, though there are a few more shades of gray, in the end it comes down to the same thing: yes or no.
You will succeed in attracting and engaging your audience…or you won’t. Your audience will visit your site looking for information they want to find or a product they are interested in. If they don’t find it, or if you don’t otherwise engage them, they’ll leave.
We know this, and yet the attraction of designing for ourselves, because we know best, or simply giving the client what he or she wants, after all they are paying, tempt us regularly.
As web designers, we have a unique and thorny task. How do we present the information we most want a visitor to see while simultaneously serving the visitor the content they came for? The two may not be the same, so an awareness of who our audience is as well as why our audience is there should be considered before a single design decision is made.
If you know who your target audience is, you can tailor your site’s look and feel, content, and action areas to appeal to your audience and draw them in. If you know what your site visitors want, you can use that information to mutual benefit. Site visitors will leave having found what they came for, and—if you have done your homework—you will have gotten the response you wanted from them. This may be their contact information. It may be a product purchase. If you are really lucky, the site visitor will sign up to receive email and you will have a chance to forge an ongoing relationship.
We all know that site visitors prefer a site that is easier to use. An optimized site will have more traffic. A site that is cross-browser compatible will carry the same message and branding to everyone who looks at it, without unpleasant and unexpected behavior. Usability, Standards and Content Optimization are, at the end of the day, also audience considerations.
In this article, I’ll discuss the process of deciding or determining who your audience is, the basics of understanding audience motivation and response, the process of making design decisions based on audience considerations, and how to use what you know about your audience to influence behavior.
Visitors, Users, and Audience
What distinguishes your audience from visitors and users? Visitors include everyone who happens upon your site. Users are intentional visitors who are looking for something specific.
Your Audience are the visitors you are trying to reach, to whom you are trying to deliver your message, and with whom you are most likely trying to establish an ongoing relationship. They are made up of groups of individuals with certain characteristics, needs, and desires in common.
Target the group. An individual responds.
Decide whom you intend to target. You may have a single target audience or multiple target audiences. Often you will have primary and secondary targets.
For example: If you are designing a site for a political candidate, possible audiences might include registered voters, citizens of voting age, members of the candidate’s party, independent voters, current supporters, potential supporters, and members of the press.
More specific categories might include students and young voters, women, union members, business owners, and members of different ethnic and cultural groups. When looking at this list, it’s obvious that some members will fit into more than one category and some groups will share common traits.
First let’s break our list up a bit.
All registered voters:
- Current supporters
- Potential donors
- Potential supporters
Who might be:
- Members of candidate’s party
- Independent voters
- Students and young voters, women, union members, members of different ethnic and cultural groups
- Members of the press
Let’s diagram this so we can see the relationships more clearly.
The most critical audience you are trying to reach is in the grey area above. Once you have determined how the structure and content of your site will serve this audience, you can move on to the task of responding to the specific needs of narrower groups.
Understand your Audience: Research, Focus, Interview
If at all possible, do some audience research. The way in which you approach this will be determined by your needs, the scope of the project, time, and budget. Your research may include simple internet research or involve setting up focus groups. If you can’t manage the time and cost of a focus group, it is still beneficial to interview representatives of your audience. Develop a survey or conduct in-person interviews. Gathering or listening to the concerns of what might well be a current audience can be especially useful. In our candidate example, what can emails, letters received, or face-to-face conversations tell you about the issues closest to their hearts?
Find out what they would be looking for on a site similar to yours. Using your biggest competition as functional examples, ask what their experience on these sites has been, and what they liked or didn’t like about these sites. Research their browsing habits. What browsers and operating systems do they use? What is their connection speed? What is their technical experience?
The Process of Making Design Decisions Based on Audience
Our diagram above shows multiple target audiences, but we are going to primarily target prospective donors and prospective supporters. If you look again, you’ll see that we probably want to specifically target subsets. We will want to keep current supporters involved and happy, as well.
Let us say we decide—based on the message we want to deliver and the audiences we are targeting—that the most important content areas on our candidate site are:
- Action Items:
- Contribution form
- Volunteer form
- Sign up to receive email from the campaign
- Regular Content:
- Feature items—information of a timely nature, such as an upcoming event, new endorsement, etc.
- Your candidate’s stand on the issues
- Candidate bio
- News about the candidate
- Events
- Endorsements
- Voting information
When designing your wireframe you will want to know which of these content areas needs to be called out prominently and which your site visitors will already be looking for.
In this case, volunteers, donations, and signing up for email are critical to the campaign’s success and apply to both current and potential supporters. They are action items that require the visitor to interact with the site, and are your best option for forging a continuing relationship with the visitor. These items are directed toward a large share of the audience. You will want to feature them prominently, perhaps even include them on every page.
Most of the regular content consists of the items your audience and visitors will actually be looking for.
You’ll want to make these easy to find. Although navigation to these items should make sense in terms of placement and grouping, you don’t need to make an extra effort to call them out. You probably do want them to appear above the fold.
Now, remember these members of your audience—members of different ethnic and cultural groups, union members, and women? Sometimes responding to these segments is a matter of content. Certainly this group will look carefully at the issues area. Sometimes it is a matter of targeted communication. Ask what they are interested in. Heath care? Employment? Be sure to address their concerns. Consider translating the bio and issues pages, and make the translations accessible from the main page. If an individual feels important to you, their response is more likely to be positive; contrary to all this talk of grouping and segments we are, after all, targeting individuals.
Site construction
Let’s examine our candidate’s audience again. You’ll notice that quite a large section of the population is represented. You can expect significant variations in client browsers, operating systems, connection speeds, and technical proficiency.
It goes without saying that clean, CSS-based, standards-compliant code is called for here so users on slow connections, with old browsers, or using screen readers will be able to access your content. Feel free to use Flash and video, as long as you consider alternate means of content delivery. Then test and test and test again.
Developing an Ongoing Relationship
There is nothing especially new about what I’ve discussed so far. Targeting specific demographics has been around since the 1800s. What is far more recent is the ability to respond to this information instantly. There are opportunities for developing ongoing relationships and opportunities to influence behavior when the visitor is still on your site. The first time they visit. Right now.
Relationship building is a critical part of getting return visits, business, or support. The basic contact form seems almost prehistoric compared with forums, blogs, wikis, support areas, share and bookmark links, RSS feeds, and newsletters. And that’s just the short list.
The most basic relationship is between your site and an individual member of your audience. Nurture this relationship and care about it. Not responding quickly to an email, support request, or user comment is bad customer service and, at the risk of stating the obvious, you’d need to provide an awfully compelling message or product to overcome the resulting negative perception.
Much more complex, and amazingly powerful, is the potential of community building. Done right—you’ve heard the phrase “a rising tide floats all boats”—you can increase your marketing potential exponentially by the number of active community users. If not done carefully, however, it can bite you. The web is clogged with abandoned blogs and forums. It goes without saying that free speech is not always kind, yet editing (or censorship) needs to be done with a light hand.
Customize the experience
I’m not really sure why more sites aren’t learning what shopping cart designers learned a long time ago. The path a user takes will provide information on their interests. You have a unique opportunity to recommend other content based on what the users appear to be interested in.
For example, if your site visitors click on senior issues, recommend they also view your issue page on health care. If they view information about an event with an admissions charge, recommend volunteering as an alternate option for attending. If they contribute, ask permission to add them to your mailing list and send breaking news not yet available to the public.
Send targeted email linking to the specific information you think the user may be interested in.
Influence behavior
Influencing behavior is based on the premise that if individuals are sufficiently interested in something, they will be willing to leap a hurdle to get it. A common application of this is requiring contact information before receiving access to a free download. This contact information is valuable, as the user has already expressed interest. This allows you to follow up. If you can get permission to send newsletters or email, you have the opportunity to maintain the relationship long enough to increase the chance of gaining a supporter or customer.
Summary
Your chance of connecting with your audience grows significantly with every audience-centric decision you make. Remember that binary choice at the beginning? You will succeed in attracting and engaging your audience or you won’t. Zero or one. Yes or No.
The process of reaching the individual is improved by understanding what they have in common with others. You will know the person by understanding their group. Once they establish contact, make a comment, ask a question, order a product, or request a quote for service, they become an individual again. The more you treat them that way, the stronger the relationship you are building will be.
It boils down to this. Create a site that is findable, usable, and has what your audience is looking for. You can only benefit by benefiting them. If you succeed, you can take them by the hand, say look at this! And they will.
Roundtable: Taking measure of which metrics matter
Marketing metrics have never been more important. The weak economy, which has caused scrutiny of all budgets, has given marketers yet another reason to put in place processes to measure the impact of their efforts. But are they acting on the volume of data flowing from their marketing channels, particularly online? Even more fundamentally, are they aligning their measurements with business goals? And if they are dedicated to improving their analytical capabilities, where are they getting people with the right skills? BtoB Editor Ellis Booker recently asked these and other questions during a telephone roundtable composed of Pamela Jacobs, manager-worldwide developer communications at IBM Corp.; Laura Patterson, president and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing; Boren Novakovic, director of b-to-b operations at Whirlpool Corp.; and Jim Sterne, producer of the annual eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (going on this week in San Francisco) and founding director and chairman of the Web Analytics Association. BtoB: What are b-to-b marketers measuring? Jim Sterne: Everything they can, and that ranges from how many people respond to an ad to how many sales are closed and then trying to hook up those two end pieces. And the tough part is, my goodness, we’ve got so much data. How do we sift through it? Is it wise to spend money on the newer or measurable media? I think we’re not seeing the movement of money over there because it’s measurable. I think we’re seeing the movement of money over there because it seems to be a better connector. In other words, search marketing is people reaching in and pulling information rather than having it pushed at them. Laura Patterson: I think that’s a really good observation, but the challenge that we’re seeing when we work with people in this area of marketing and measurement is that they tend to be very down in the weeds of what they measure. So they’re measuring every activity they can. But in terms of being able to talk about how it’s impacting the business, they’re pretty much still struggling. We just completed our [annual] 2008 marketing performance measurement and management surveys. And we are continuing to see people trying to measure things like market share, purchase frequency and recency, and people keep talking about needing to measure how they are increasing business with existing customers. But when you look at what they say they’re measuring, they’re hardly measuring anything related to that. They don’t look at things like, for example, rate of customer acquisition, or customer loyalty or customer lifetime value. BtoB: So you’re saying there is a disconnect between what’s being measured and some of the objectives? Patterson: According to everything we are seeing out there and their resource, the answer to that is yes. Pamela Jacobs: At IBM, it is aligned. We’re measuring everything we can, and we have analytic teams that work with just those measurements, and they align the measurements with our objectives so that way we are able to bridge the gulf between what we’re measuring and our objectives. BtoB: How’s it at Whirlpool? Boran Novakovic: I’m in the supply chain organization, and we work very closely with our merchandising and sales groups. So it’s maybe a little bit of a different setting. Our b-to-b Web site operation [is] targeted toward our retailers and dealers, if you will. So we do really two broad categories of metrics. One is strictly focused [on], I would say, operational metrics on how much business are we driving through the Web. So we measure purchase size and cost per transaction. And we measure revenue with that and also the percent of channel adoption. BtoB: How have your measurement priorities changed over the last year? Why have they changed, if they have? Jacobs: I’ll just take a moment to talk about what we do with our developer Works’ Web site. Software developers are very, very comfortable on the Web. So primarily our marketing is through the Web and our Web site. Developers, because buying software is a complex purchase, must spend time learning about the product to make sure that it meets the needs that they are trying to achieve. So our role in marketing is very different, I would say, from other b-to-b companies in that we need to train [our audience]. We need to provide all of these resources to them so that they have what they need to make a valuation and a decision. So we measure training, and our strategy over the last five years has been to hone in on the new Web 2.0 offerings, which are community-based, like forums, podcasts and chats. Our measurements are morphing as the technology morphs. BtoB: Can you give us a feel for what those engagement metrics are? Is it number of posts that an individual does in a period or how often they come to the site? What sorts of things are you looking at, since you’re not using the classic click-through numbers? Jacobs: [We] have a very, very, very active electronic marketing group, and in fact I manage that group. And so we do [measure] the click-throughs. We also measure registrations, and we then can align our marketing to their behavior on the Web. We’re measuring unique visitors, we’re measuring who our evangelists are, we’re measuring who the experts are that are in our community site and we’re working toward a measurement system where the peers can rate the experts and we can find out exactly who are the leading experts in the field from that measurement. Novakovic: Our measurement strategy has stayed fairly constant [for] the last two years. It focuses, again, on a lot of those things I talked about earlier. And I think the next frontier of measurement is how do we really drive more customer focus and understand all the stuff we can do—what is truly important to a particular segment—and just focus on that? BtoB: Jim, you’ve been talking about the changes in measurement for a few years now. How do you see the forest for the trees? Sterne: There’s a convergence of the Web metrics kind of things, the Web analytics click-through, with the measuring marketing ROI in general and measuring marketing processes. The Web people discovered that they could measure stuff, and now the whole marketing department’s saying, “Oh, this should be part and parcel of our global marketing return on investment analysis.” BtoB: How do you see the great unwashed in terms of organizing themselves for cross-department use of analytics? Patterson: I want to acknowledge that IBM and Whirlpool are best- in-class companies in just about every way you can think of. So the things that they’re doing, I suspect, are light years ahead of many other b-to-b organizations, particularly the midsize companies. Many [of these companies] didn’t even have a measurement strategy six months ago. It’s very common for us to see [companies] tracking results [for which] they’ve never even established performance targets. When they get to the end of an initiative or a program, they can arbitrarily declare a success because they didn’t have a stake in the ground to begin with. There was never any measurement system, strategy or process. Sterne: It’s been my feeling that the whole concept of return on investment has fallen down in the process—that people do a heavy ROI analysis in order to get funding to get a project going—but at the end of that project, nobody ever goes back to revisit, “Did we reach our numbers?” BtoB: Has the current economic scenario impacted your strategy? Sterne: It’s a matter of controlling spending. Where do you cut your spending on those things that are not demonstrably giving you return? So interest in and attention to metrics tends to blossom in tough times. Jacobs: At IBM, the economic scenario has created more of a need for marketers to link their efforts with sales, which is really good business because we need to be able to measure our value in providing leads. So I think more effort or more energy is spent identifying our impact on sales leads. Novakovic: We’ve been fairly disciplined around measuring our ROI and focusing our business cases every time we go through our annual budgeting process. These times bring even more scrutiny, and that’s why having these metrics is extremely valuable because they make the business case stronger. We have a fairly structured audit process. So [metrics] really help drive even more focus, and it helps because it clarifies your ideas and mission. In times like these, everybody’s fighting for priorities. Having fact-based data, I think, helps establish that priority. BtoB: Are your online measurement strategies affecting your offline strategies? Jacobs: Well, absolutely. Our online measurement strategies are affecting offline strategies, and here’s a great example. IBM Developer Works, you know, is a Web portal. But we sponsor offline events all over the world. We are sending e-mails, and then they go to our Web site and register. When they register, we are extracting all kinds of information from how fast the class fills up—what topics are good, say, in Russia, what are not working in India—and all of that data is then evaluated for the next year on how we will direct our offline strategy. Novakovic: What we’re trying to do is not look at them in the binary way as either/or, but rather how they can complement each other. I’ll give you a couple of examples. What is the cycle time to deploy a promotion by using the Web, as well as hands-on communication and in-house selling that will enhance the value of that promotion and how it’s executed overall versus doing it one way or the other? We’re trying to look for synergies. BtoB: Where are you getting the people to handle analytics? Are you training them internally? Are you hiring from the outside? Where do you find good talent? Sterne: You can grow it from inside, but it is more about character traits than it is, at the moment, about education. It’s great if they have a math background. But they have to be curious. Tim Goudy at Coca-Cola, in preparation for his keynote for the eMetrics Summit, said they’ve made a decision to outsource the analysis because the tools are changing so fast. The business needs don’t change very quickly, but what you can measure, and how to correlate it and what do the data mean is something that takes a trained person who’s got experience at a number of different companies. Patterson: Many [product marketing people], particularly on the marketing communications side, don’t exercise a lot of analytical muscle. So there has been a real challenge or gap in skill sets. Our recent research said that only about a third of the organizations feel that their people have the skill-sets to be able to do the kind of analytical work required of them, and they’re trying to get them trained. But the challenge isn’t just there; it’s even at the university level. I find that in many of the schools, [they're] not pushing the analytics as hard as they should be. Jacobs: IBM, I guess, can be differentiated in that we train and hire from within. What happens is people learn about the databases, and they learn about the entire process and so they are always in training. Novakovic: [Whirlpool is] very similar to IBM in terms of we do it from within. We’re looking for people with engineering backgrounds or people who are really process- oriented. You have to be smart, but you have to have some affinity to work with technology such as databases. You have to understand the business process because you’ve got to put it in the right context. Then we give them additional analytical training by sending them to our in-house Six Sigma program. After they come out of four months of that rigorous analytical training, they’re pretty much ready; you can just unleash them, and they’re amazing. BtoB: Is it critical that your senior management get a summary of this measurement data? Jacobs: Yes, our senior management does see the data. The measurements are created to justify your return on investment and what you’re doing with your campaigns. So, yes, the measurements and the data are raised up to the senior level, and it’s absolutely important. And actually, to get back to the original question, I would say that most everyone in our organization from the Web—the bottom-level Web person all the way up to senior management—is looking at it. Novakovic: Data at a certain process level goes to the appropriate people. So people that are engaged in the activity day-to-day, they look at, let’s say, most of the data. Our senior managers and executives just look at more aggregate and more, I would say, business unit-level metrics. Sterne: It’s critically important. At the very bottom level, we’ve got people who are optimizing specific processes, a direct mail campaign that is driving leads to the sales department. And at the upper level, we’ve got people who are responsible for overall strategy. This is an incredible tool for, you know, when you look at the ability for Web analytics to measure behavior on a Web site. BtoB: Yet there are marketers who are frantically nervous about having senior management who may not be educated on how to read these reports. Sterne: Reports are the terror because people love reports, and they immediately fall into the weeds of the data instead of looking at the big trends. And that’s why it’s very important for us to only give the right amount of information to the right level in the organization. BtoB: Laura, are there any rules of thumb on figuring that out? Patterson: Most people believe that they should have a minimum of three levels. There’s a level that’s the executive level that looks at it from the strategic perspective that Jim is mentioning. Then there’s an operational dashboard that the CMO and the VP of marketing should be using to look at processes, and efficiencies and effectiveness at a level down that they’re probably using with their staff. And then there’s a third level often used at the tactical level that is used by either the individuals, or program managers or departments, depending on how the organization’s set up, that looks at those activities, those tasks and the results of those against performance and the returns of those. |
Gain Marketing Insights from Social Media
Analyze social media to harness the new dynamic of market influence
There has been a revolutionary shift in the media world. Marketing is no longer a one way communication channel. People talk back to brands and companies on blogs, discussion boards, and an ever-evolving array of social media formats. These discussions are as influential or more than advertising, public relations and other marketing initiatives.
To adapt to this new dynamic of market influence, brands need a holistic analysis of all the influences on consumer perception. By analyzing social media, and comparing it to traditional media coverage, marketing professionals can measure consumer influences on key business issues such as:
- Brand perception: Discover the unfiltered attitudes and perceptions consumers have toward your brand and your competition.
- Product category drivers: Understand why consumers buy the products they buy and what barriers they encounter.
- Product strengths & weaknesses: Learn which features are most important to consumers and whether they have unmet needs that may present opportunities for breakthrough products.
- Ad recall & likeability: Monitor whether your ad campaign is resonating with consumers, creating buzz, and driving customers to buy your product.
Making the Case for a Social Media Strategy
Social media is making an impact on all aspects of business communications today, but some senior executives still need to be convinced. This white paper summarizes what you need to build executive support for incorporating social media in your marketing plan.
You will be armed with the information you need to listen directly to word-of-mouth discussions so you can create more compelling brands, products, and messages.
The Ad Agency Conundrum by Paul Isakson
Through all of the rambling that was the post titled, The Future of Advertising is Design, Linda was kind enough to leave a link to a post she put together in the comments which contained the above quote from the venerable Mr. Lee Clow.
I have always intended to do a shorter follow-up post to clean that mess up and this quote gave me the perfect lead-in.
What I intended to get at, but derailed with tangents, is that based on what Mr. Clow is talking about above – that what we do now (at least those of us who are to survive in this industry) is far bigger than what in the past has been called advertising – we have to think bigger than advertising at the beginning of creating ideas.
If an ad agency* is to prosper at whatever it is we’ll call it in the future, they have to think bigger than the standard TV, Radio, Print and OOH model that then tosses a bone over to “interactive” by asking “the web guys” to put the TV spot on the web site. O.K., they also want a micro-site based on the TV spot. And make it a “viral” micro-site while you’re at it. Oh, and get the PR agency to do a press release on the new campaign. There. It’s all integrated now. Right? (Pssst. No. That’s wrong.)
Where most ad agencies are getting into trouble, at least in my best guess, is that they are starting with looking at reaching the client’s objective/goal by asking, “What’s the ad campaign we need to create to solve this?” Or, “What’s the message we need to tell people that will solve this?” If your approach is to start by assuming it’s an ad, or starting by assuming the answer is to tell people something, then you’re going to miss significant opportunities and as the quote above says, your client’s brand will not be able to survive against others taking a bigger picture approach.
This is where the link to design came in. I didn’t mean design will become advertising or advertising will become design. I simply meant that as an industry, we need to bring design thinking into the process to help us think bigger than advertising.
That’s all. For now at least… Ha!
*For the record, we can plug “digital agency” into this equation too. If a digital shop is only thinking about how to best solve their clients’ problems with web/digital solutions, they’re going to quickly end up in the same situation. The only thing keeping them safe right now is that what’s going on in the digital arena has everyone excited and so they’re not taking the same heat as the traditional ad shops. Once the shine wears off the penny, they’ll be hearing the same song.
Study: A Billion Dollars in Internet Advertising is Wasted
Study: A Billion Dollars in Internet Advertising is Wasted
Advertisers continue to plow a ton of money into Internet advertising, even in the face of an recessionary environment. At the Forbes Online Brand Summit this weekend, Citi projected 20% year over year growth. eMarketer is calling for a 23% increase.
Search remains the big daddy. According to eMakreter it will account for 40% of the $25 billion that marketers will spend online this year. Right behind it at 21% (or $5.1 billion) is display advertising. However, according to a new study, a giant percentage of these ads are wasted because they fall below “the fold”
The Eyetools/MarketingSherpa eye tracking study, released last week, found that about 60% of web site visitors see the ads that are 100% visible and “above the fold.” Below the fold – e.g. the part of a web page where users are required to scroll – the situation is grim. These ads are visible to roughly 70% of web users, but only about 25% actually see those ads.
Let’s do some back of the envelope math here. Assuming that all of the above data is accurate and that 50% of display ad impressions fall below the fold (this is a conservative guess – it might be significantly higher) that means that nearly a billion dollars in online advertising – $937M based on these calculations – is below the fold and ignored by 75% of web users.
The situation is actually be a lot worse when you factor in trust. A Nielsen study released late last year found that only 26% of consumers trust banner ads. So even if your display ads are visible and seen, they’re not trusted by the vast majority of the public. That aint good news.
The conventional wisdom is that online display ads are good for branding. Well, this appears to be a myth for lots of impressions. Now factor in that they also continue to be a disaster when it comes to direct response.
This is a train wreck waiting to happen. Scoble called it back in 2006. And it further illustrates that marketers are polluting the web.
What this means – especially in this climate – is that at least $1B of what’s spent on online advertising is completely wasted and is unsustainable. Advertisers are going to eventually wake up and recognize that unless it’s a highly visible placement, banners get you largely nowhere.
Advertising is dead. So why am I excited?
Last Word: Renny Gleeson
Advertising is dead. So why am I excited?
I hear advertising is dead. A pretty solid white paper entitled “The End of Advertising as We Know It”, says so. Of course the same company whose ex-chairman predicted in 1943 that “there would be a world market for maybe five computers” put out that white paper, so take it with a grain of salt. And lots and lots of blogs. Say. It. A. Lot. But advertising isn’t dead, nor is it just a “penalty companies pay for being unoriginal.”
Brands need provocative relationships with good customers. They need their stories told, and “interactivity” is driving the reemergence of the collaborative narrative as art form and communications medium.
Bad advertising is getting a wake up call. Or a pink slip. Or an agency review. All those folks trapped in stifling layers of bureaucracy at agency roll-ups and conglomerates paid to look at brand communications as a single well crafted message to be beaten through the skull of “The Consumer” while you make your quarterly earnings targets—yep, you’re dead. If you thought a website tacked onto a campaign made it interactive, cue dirge. Wah waaah. Often overlooked is that this holds true for marketing as well. Bad marketing, that is. Get lost. And good riddance.
This is a great time to be in advertising. I am blown away by the possibilities, boggled by the pace of change and raring to go. But this can’t be an exercise in “do it because we can”—we need to find ways to make our interactive stories touch hearts. As an industry, even with the distance we have come, we are still reading radio plays into the TV camera. But we will make a cool medium run hot. We will make it work with other mediums to create new storytelling paradigms. We are rewiring culture, brands and minds.
Storytelling is a Team Sport
Walter Isaacson shared a story about great historical narratives—The Iliad, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey. He said that those stories were collaborative experiences, not narratives set in stone. They served as memes propagating cultural standards and life lessons. Plays by Shakespeare weren’t passively observed, they were rowdily engaged with—back to the actors. These narratives were collective. Orally transmitted. Subject to reinterpretation and embellishment based on context and audience reaction. The printing press, said Isaacson, froze words. It meant a single unchanged narrative could be shared across great distances. But it made cold, static books (funny, right?) the vessels for stories, not the living, breathing storytellers themselves. You could now send one clear, fixed message or you could be contextually engaging (e.g. responsive to your audience), but you did one at the expense of the other. The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle of narrative. Interactivity has reopened the door for collaborative storytelling.
The promises and pitfalls of interactive communications create an extreme situation and in extreme situations, mental maps that don’t calibrate with reality can be fatal. Those unwilling to adapt are retiring, getting fired, or dragging their employers (and clients) down. And getting written about it in white papers that TRUST ME, you don’t want to be in.
Interactivity is a broad concept reduced far too often to a discussion of tools and capabilities. And while you need rock solid interactive tools and capabilities, that doesn’t mean you “get it.” I’m excited because no agency “gets it,” from nimble, sub-ten person shops to the big shops. You’ve got tech shops pretending they understand branding, brand shops hoping that a few technical hires solve their interactive “problem,” agency rollups pretending they’ve got ‘best-of-breed’ services for every need, and brands with “interactive” separate from traditional brand management. A glorious chaotic mess. My suggestion? Hitch your wagon to the greatest storytellers, because they will find a way to express the joy of their stories using the most effective tools possible.
Playing is not Optional
I’m excited because I am at a place, working in a medium, where failure is tolerated and encouraged. Steve Ballard, aquatic explorer and discoverer of the Titanic, Bismarck and Yorktown said all the major oceanic discoveries were accidents—failures—people looking for one thing and finding another. Operate from awe and wonder, not fear. It’s mind expanding. And there is too damn much happening interactively to get all precious about it. Fail forward fast, learn and move on.
This is a new game, and no one knows the rules. The folks writing the code don’t know the rules—a friend said he’d never join Twitter or Facebook, because “why waste time on a social network created by social losers.” We are making up a lot of the rules as we go. But if you don’t play, you are out of the game. And the good ones, the smart folks, are diving in. Experimenting. Learning their way around the “always on” landscape. Applying that learning.
I’m excited about a recent move to eliminate the term “users” (software) and “consumers” (markeing), and replace both with the term “players”— its more respectful, more human, and because as this medium matures (and it’s got a long way to go), game design models (RPG’s and more recently ARG’s) seem more and more relevant in engineering brand experiences than traditional advertising processes. And because that’s what we really want people to do—play with our brands. Buy them. Love them. Find some little bit of themselves in them.
What would you do for love?
I’m excited that the most creative stuff I see online isn’t done by brands or agencies. It’s done by normal people. Civilians, for God’s sake. Having FUN. People making great stuff (and crap, for sure) because they like to, feel the need to, are inspired to. A lot of agencies and brands are doing interactive work because they have to. They know they have to. Like eating fish oil pills for your Omega-3. Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival (a great book on dealing with extreme paradigm shift) talks at length about working from a place of fear or from acceptance. “I suffer through my obligations, but I’d do anything for love.”
“What would you do for love” isn’t an idle question here. Ask your next potential hire. The answer could determine whether you thrive in this medium or try to get by treating it like a topical spread or the “+ fries” option with your Happy Meal.
Critical interactive skill sets for the space include search strategy, game design (online, console, ARG), mobile development and production, UI/IA, data collection/modeling/interpretation, application developers, server-side technologists…the list grows daily. But you need to start with an organization excited about the possibilities of the medium—excited, committed and each personally responsible and accountable for full engagement. Every person in your shop should be asking themselves how they master this space. Finding a passion and diving deep into it. Sharing it.
Marketing and brand communications need storytellers and their stories. We inform, educate and create cultures based on stories. We define ourselves through their telling and their interpretations. A story is realized through the act of the storytelling. Of engagement with an audience. A great story, unread isn’t. The interactive medium by its nature invites people into the process—suggesting, collaborating, amplifying, advocating and diffusing. And there will always be good and bad storytellers. The best of them move us, inspire us, change us, drive social change, and sometimes—yes, sometimes—sell us something. In advertising, when we are at our best, we build a message around a fundamental human truth, we engage the heart, and we tell compelling stories that create meaning for brands awash in a rising quagmire of white noise. And yes, we sell stuff.
As long as there are products to be sold and stories to be told, advertising is not dead. . .
Renny Gleeson is Global Director, Digital Strategies, Wieden + Kennedy.
ROI takes center stage at CMO summit
Proving ROI, using new technologies and leveraging partner marketing were key topics at Red Herring’s CMO 2008 conference in San Diego last week.
The conference drew more than 300 senior marketing executives, mostly from b-to-b companies, who shared strategies for competing in today’s challenging business environment.
One of the hot topics was partner marketing, with presentations by several executives whose companies use channel marketing models.
NuTerra Strategies Launches Wisconsin’s First Media Neutral Ad Agency
NuTerra Strategies LLC, a Wisconsin business strategy and market analysis firm (www.nuterrastrategies.com), announced today the official launch of its media-neutral ad agency: The ROM Group, www.theromgroup.com.
The ROM Group is a new breed of advertising agency focused on delivering return-on-marketing-investment (ROMI). ROMI is the new metric of marketing performance and accountability. Companies that measure ROMI outperform their competitors by more than 20%. CEOs, CFOs and CMOs recognize the value of this important metric and major companies worldwide are already actively using it to make marketing decisions, choose ad agencies and allocate budgets.
“For more than two years our clients, regardless of size, have been asking us to help bring strategy and accountability to their marketing and advertising,” explained Richard M. Pedersen, Jr., president of The ROM Group. “Business leaders want everything their companies do to be accountable to revenue. The ROM Group was created to deliver that accountability for marketing and advertising.”
The ROM Group is what industry analyst and former Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Joe Cappo calls a “strategic brand architect”. Rather than following the traditional agency model of doing everything in-house, The ROM Group partners with best-of-breed professionals who have deep expertise in their specific practice area. This structure makes The ROM Group profit-neutral, unbiased by the need to drive practice-specific revenue such as design, packaging, or Public Relations.
The strategic brand architect model does not mean The ROM Group lacks creative fire power. Just the opposite. The ROM Group’s core staff is comprised of business strategists, market analysts and former ad agency creative leaders. “With our internal creative leadership and the strengths of our creative partners, The ROM Group is positioned to challenge some of the strongest creative shops in the Midwest,” said Pedersen. “I am especially proud of our digital and interactive strength. Clearly this space is exploding. We have the partners and the depth of knowledge to bring real value to our clients and their brands.”
The ROM Group is also media-neutral as it does not accept media commissions, giving it the freedom to choose the most effective and efficient media options rather than those that generate the biggest commissions.
“We believe it’s time to stop guessing whether advertising delivers revenue and start proving it,” Pedersen said. “For those business leaders looking to make their marketing and advertising investment accountable, we believe The ROM Group is their best choice.”
The ROM Group: The ROM Group (ROM is an acronym for return-on-marketing) is an ad agency that designs and executes marketing/advertising campaigns that deliver on client objectives for return-on-marketing-investment (ROMI). The firm is owned by NuTerra Strategies LLC and is based in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
NuTerra Strategies LLC: NuTerra Strategies LLC is a business strategy and market analysis firm focused on assisting senior executives of small to mid-market companies in achieving stronger top line and bottom line growth. The firm is based in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
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Contact:
Steve Buelow
920-964-5564 Ext. 1006
sbuelow@theromgroup.com
The ROM Group
1048 Glory Road, Suite B
Green Bay, WI 54304
www.theromgroup.com
Introducing the ROM Group
Introducing The ROM Group
An ad agency that is a media-neutral strategic brand architect
Exclusively skilled at forecasting and measuring Return-on-Marketing (ROM)
Specialists at uncovering what your customers secretly want
Experts at developing customer need fulfillment campaigns
Run by business strategists who understand your business priorities
