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Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

Marketing-advertising shift signals need for content Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

In an interview with Zazoo published this week on the HotHouse blog, Econsultancy vice president Rebecca Lieb observed that the Internet is bringing about a fundamental shift in power within companies from advertising to marketing.

She says that “not only has online search technology made it simple for customers to connect with businesses, the evidence shows that most searchers are going straight to a company’s website for more information about their products. In other words, it’s not advertising driving people to your business online, it’s search.”

Companies, she says, need to shift their thinking from an emphasis on advertising to an emphasis on marketing and content creation. That means there’s “lots more media to play with. And it’s free – but that doesn’t mean you can mess with it.”

In the digital age, she says, you need a long-term perpetual strategy. To be able to successfully develop and execute a perpetual strategy, according to Rebecca, “You need to think like an editor.”

“Brands are not just businesses,” Rebecca says, they’re now media companies.”

An excerpt from the story:

“…traditional media based their business model on a (mostly) clear separation between advertising and content. What happens when the ‘advertiser’ is also the content provider?

“In the digital context, according to Rebecca Lieb, ‘Being authoritative is more important than being objective – though transparency and disclosure are incredibly important.

“’If, for example, you’re a sporting goods company and you publish information on your site about mountain climbing. That information can be entertaining. The information is not invalid, as long as you know where it’s coming from.’

“Rebecca concludes: ‘The rules aren’t different; it’s the channels that are shifting.’”

Are you ready to act like a publisher with your website and social media program?


Adventures with our namesake Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

OK, we’ve been skirting around this issue since Zazoo was first started, but now it’s time to tackle it head-on: to all of you who have forgotten to type the “.au” when looking for us, yes, we know that we share the same business name as a Belgian condom company (Should we have checked this out before buying the domain name and business name in Australia? Yes. Would that have changed our decision on the business name? Probably not).

Why mention this now? Well, a brand agency in the US has used a Zazoo campaign (the condom, not the digital content agency) as an example of using fear in advertising. You can view the ad below.

 

The brand agency, Woodbine, says the Zazoo ad “remind(s) us that functional purchases really can be driven by emotion. Revamping a brand so it connects on both an emotional and analytical level with consumers is an important step in revitalizing a faded brand image.”

By the way, I wonder if our Belgian name-sharers would mind if we co-opted their tagline for our business as well? Zazoo - fun, sexy, safe. What do you think?

- Ray Welling, Content Guy


Is the Internet destroying advertising? Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

A professor of the Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania has set off an incendiary bomb within the advertising industry by writing a treatise on why the Internet will spell the death of advertising. I won’t comment on this, I just encourage you to go and read his article, scroll down to read the comments, and see some of the other responses that have been published. Gotta love the Internet, blogs and Twitter for quickly whipping up passionate opinions about business and social topics!


Hard to measure branding impact, but it’s there Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Online Media Daily has published a commentary piece on the difficulties of measuring value online and the implications for online branding. It is a bit dense, but well worth reading carefully. In summary, Andy Atherton argues that 1) Something that is valuable is not necessarily directly measurable, because value can be difficult to measure; and 2) No model can substitute for relevant experience and common sense. Models aren’t always right.

To support his argument, Atherton quotes a recent study from the Atlas Institute which concludes that about 60% of all paid search clicks are on branded terms. Calling that number “simply astounding,” Atherton writes that ”Obviously Atlas’ parent company, Microsoft, has a vested interest in moving the market away from an excessive focus on Search, so skepticism is warranted. However, even if we cut that percentage in half, the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of the money brand marketers are spending on other media (online and offline) is having an impact - even if we can’t measure it precisely. 

“The other just as important and also equally inescapable conclusion is that marketers who only spend on search are losing potential sales to those marketers who use the full funnel. A consumer who begins by searching for ‘Campbell’s Soup’ must be more likely to end up buying Campbell’s Soup - versus buying Progresso soup or any other brand - than if they began by just searching for ’soup.’ ”

He concludes that, “Accountability is always good. However, accountability should never be a mandate (or an excuse) for doing only things that can be precisely measured. Just because we can’t measure something as precisely as we would like, doesn’t mean that thing is not valuable. That’s point #1.   

“Point #2 is that a measurement itself is only as good as the model on which it’s based. Models are a complement, not a substitute, for experience and intuition. 

“There’s an interesting parallel to be drawn with the current financial crisis. An army of ‘quants’ had built complex and impressive models explaining how return could finally be separated from risk. Some experienced investors, following their own common sense, avoided this trap - Warren Buffet comes to mind.  Often common sense is the best sense of all.”


Worst ads - some are real stinkers Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

Here’s a link to a list of the worst TV ads of 2008, according to BNET: http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/1000452/bnets-worst-ads-of-2008/

Warning: includes racism, vomiting and fart jokes!


When you can’t control ‘Whassup’ Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Like it or loathe it, Budweiser’s ‘Whassup’ campaign of a few years ago resonated throughout the world as an irritating but catchy and wildly successful way to promote the beer’s brand. Well, the Whassup guys are back, this time on YouTube, and they’re barracking for Barack Obama - and there’s nothing Budweiser or their ad agency DDB Chicago can do about it. Apparently when the ad’s creator Charles Stone III (gotta love those triple-barrelled American names - grandpa would be proud) came up with the concept, DDB licensed the concept from him for five years - an agreement which finished three years ago.

The Whassup ads first appeared in 1999, just before George Bush was elected US president, and the new video shows what’s up eight years later for the original characters - they’re fighting in Iraq, caught in a hurricane, unable to pay medical bills and attempting suicide as their stock portfolio tanks. In 2008, ‘Whassup’, is change, in the form of Obama.

I feel for Budweiser and DDB, but this is a classic example of social media at work - companies no longer have control over their brand and the way it is used. They just have to embrace it and see what the effect is on their brand and their sales. Look for more of this type of consumer power to come in the future.

You can see the ad, which has already been viewed more than 2 million times, here.


Digital transformation still slow Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Rebecca Lieb, writing on the ClickZ website, rightly observes that it’s high past time that the advertising and media industries fully embrace digital solutions. She writes, “It’s not just old-timers on the traditional agency side of the equation who are stubbornly resisting the shift to digital. It’s an issue across the media landscape. Their reluctance was perhaps somewhat understandable in the go-go ’90s and in the sober, austere, bleak era around 2002. But now?

“Still, I’m seeing traditional publishers cut back on digital endeavors (and digital staff) in a desperate and futile effort to sustain their flagging, dead-tree legacy brands. I’m seeing digital executives going to senior management with requests for back-end tools, such as content management systems and social media software, only to learn their corporate overlords have no idea what all that stuff is, much less what it’s actually used for or how it can benefit the business.

“And I’m seeing some of those print publications flatline. Friends who have been print journalists for decades are panicking in the face of cutbacks, early retirement, consolidation, and plain old extinction.

“But they’re not learning digital skills. A critic friend stays up nights over the fact his paper is due to shutter at month’s end. When I inquired about his online skills, he replied that even the most fundamental elements of a story, such as hyperlinks, were determined and executed by the online editor. He doesn’t know how to do any of that stuff.”

I’m happy to report that not everyone in the advertising and media industries in Australia over the age of 30 is a techno-Luddite. But a lot more needs to be done to encourage them to embrace digital formats and produce new ways of communicating ideas that capitalise on these new formats, rather than continuing to produce digital creations that are still rooted in traditional thinking.

Gen Y is not reading newspapers anymore. They’re watching TV without ads, via DVD or DVD recorders, They’re staying away from websites that throw pop-up ads at them. Those of us who grew up with traditional forms of communication are still in the majority - but we won’t be for that much longer. As Lieb says in the headline of her article, “Digital or die”.