marketing communications

The Confluence of “Mature Marketing” and B-to-B MarComm

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conference attendees, mature marketing and B-to-B buyersIn recent years, a seemingly endless stream MarComm literature has been published focusing on how to communicate effectively with different target groups. 

Whether it’s seniors … baby boomers … Gen-X or Gen-Yers … minority populations … B-to-B or technical audiences, marketers have all sorts of helpful advice coming in from all sides.

The more I’ve been reading this material, the more I’m seeing confluence rather than divergence. 

For example, there’s a high degree of commonality between marketing to “mature” consumers and B-to-B audiences.  The overlap is huge, actually.

Consider these aspects of crafting strong MarComm messages that make good sense for both B-to-B and mature audiences:

  • Sticking to the facts about products or services.  Both audiences tend to make judgments and decisions based on “information and intelligence” rather than “emotions or peer pressure.”
  • Providing lots of content.  “More is more” with these audiences, which tend to be far more voracious in their reading habits and appreciate the availability of copious information.
  • Avoiding “hype” in MarComm messages.  These audiences have “seen it all” and aren’t easily bamboozled.
  • Avoiding “talking down” to these audiences.  They are experienced people (and experience is the best educator); they have good instincts, too.
  • Designing communications so that these audiences will stick around and absorb what marketers have to say.  This means avoiding small type, garish colors and gratuitous design elements … not to mention the slow-loading graphics or animated visual hi-jinks that pepper too many websites.

None of this is to contend that emotions don’t play a role in driving purchase decisions.  But the reasoning processes that mature audiences and B-to-B buyers use to filter and evaluate MarComm messages are far more consequential than any “creative” aspects of the message platform could possibly deliver.

It would be nice if more marketers would remember this when crafting campaigns that target the “thinking” audiences out there.

Persistent Myth: The Ten Most Persuasive Words in the English Language

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Advertising word cloud - persuadable wordsIt’s something many of us in MarComm have heard about and read about for years now: Which words are the most persuasive ones in the English language?

In fact, it’s been the topic of entire news articles since the 1960s.

The words in question sound just about as relevant today as they must have back when the first “definitive” list was published:

  • Discover
  • Easy
  • Guarantee
  • Health
  • Love
  • Money
  • New
  • Proven
  • Results
  • You

It’s a solid list … and it certainly seems like these words would be among the most persuasive ones in our language.

It’s also plausible that some sort of formal “research” would have been conducted to come up with the list in the first place.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.  In fact, it seems more likely that the list was dreamed up on the back of a napkin by an advertising copywriter looking for an interesting new copy “angle.”

Allegedly, the first appearance of the English language’s  most persuasive words was in a trade publication called “Marketing Magazine.” But no evidence exists that such a publication ever really existed.

Instead, it appears that several businesses decided to publish a list of persuasive words as a way of promoting their own products and services.  Attributing the list of words to a third-party (fictitious) publication with an authentic-sounding name gave their promotional messages an added flavor of credibility.

The list appeared first in a New York Times advertisement in 1961, and it was picked up several months later for an ad run in the Washington Post by Levitt & Sons, a real estate developer (of Levittown fame) that was promoting its new Maryland-based Belair at Bowie development at the time.

Both ads touted the elusive “Marketing Magazine” as the source for the list of most persuadable words.

And then the group of words began to morph, as “lists” of this kind are wont to do. More “experts” got into the game … more words were switched out or added … and more sources were cited as being the wellspring of the research: Duke University; the University of California; Yale University’s Psychology Department (!).

But who really cares about the provenance of the list? As it turns out, these “persuade” terms are among the most popular ones that advertising copywriters have used for years.  And for the most part, the terms retain their power to persuade, 50 years on.

For the record, other words that have made it onto the list at various times include:

  • Amazing
  • Announcing
  • Bargain
  • Compare
  • Easy
  • Free
  • Happiness
  • Hurry
  • Improvement
  • Introducing
  • Miraculous
  • Now
  • Offer
  • Quick
  • Remarkable
  • Revolutionary
  • Safety
  • Sensational
  • Suddenly

Regardless of which words actually belong on a “Top Ten” list as opposed to being the runners-up, there’s one thing you can say about all of them: They’re oldies but goodies. 

And this, too:  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.  (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Online display advertising’s clickthrough performance: Now it’s just embarrassing.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , ,

poor online display ad clickthrough ratesRecently, several executives at the Advertising Research Foundation, the online analytics firm Moat and media buying company Accordant Media created six completely blank online display ads – no copy and no images – in three standard sizes and two colors.

The idea was to test the veracity of information being collected on clickthroutgh rates in online advertising and the algorithms that drive automated ad buying and selling — ads being automatically served where they will generate the most clicks.

Once the ads had been created, the crack team had them served via a demand-side ad platform, using both run-of-exchanges as well as being trafficked to publishers that would accept unaudited copy.

The idea was to see what sort of clickthrough rate would be garnered by these “faux” ads.

It’s common knowledge that clickthrough rates for online display advertising are abysmally low. But what transpired in the ARF-led team’s “nothing-doing” ad campaign was startling, to say the least.

The average clickthrough rate on these ads, across 1 million+ impressions served, was 0.08%. 

That clickthrough rate rivaled the better results achieved by online branding campaigns … and isn’t very far off the average performance for a direct response effort!

The team noted that the modest cost of this research effort (less than $500) was a “pretty good deal for a diagnostic check-up on a $100 billion machine.”

And what are those results telling us? A couple things, I think:

  • If you believe these clickthroughs are legitimate, there’s not much difference between someone clicking on an ad by mistake and the degree of intentional interaction with actual online branding campaigns.
  • If you believe that these clickthroughs might be happening to generate click rates that someone can roll up into an ROI calculation … you might be correct, too.

But ARF’s Ted McConnell reported that a follow-up screen appearing once an ad was clicked asked why the person who clicked did so — out of curiousity or by mistake. 

Here’s what McConnell reported:  “We detected no click fraud in the data we counted.  Half the clickers told us they were curious; the other half admitted to a mistaken click.”

McConnell noted that the team went beyond the follow-up query in its investigation.  “To obtain further insights, we tracked hovers, interactions, mouse-downs, heat maps — everything.  (Heat maps detect click fraud because bots tend to click on the same spot every time.)”

So, what’s the major takeaway finding from this experiment? 

If it’s that online brand advertising campaigns are going to deliver abysmal engagement, you already knew that. 

But if you think achieving a clickthrough rate of 0.04% or 0.05% for an online brand advertising campaign is an indication of anything in particular, you’re probably off by miles, too.

Was this “nothing-doing” research worthwhile, seeing as how it didn’t test “real” ads? 

I think it was … because the findings are telling us that below some threshold level, what we’re really experiencing is just noise. That’s not exactly what the online display advertising advocates want to hear …

(Still) Seeking the Sweet Spot with QR Codes

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

QR codesI’ve blogged before about how QR codes – those splotchy icons at which someone can point their mobile device and be taken to a website for product information, a coupon or some other type of content – seem to be having difficulty becoming accepted by the mainstream of U.S. consumers.

And now we have yet more evidence to suggest that QR codes may never achieve the level of potential that marketers have hoped for them.

Youth marketing and esearch firm Archrival give us the latest clues as to the lack of adoption we’re seeing when it comes to QR codes. Here are two key findings from a survey it conducted among 500+ students at 24 American college campuses in late 2011:

 Although ~80% of respondents owned a smartphone and claimed to have come in contact with QR codes, only ~21% were actually able to successfully scan the QR code example that was presented in the Archrival’s survey.

 Three out of four respondents reported that they’d be “unlikely” to scan even one QR code in the future.

What’s the problem? Archrival uncovered a number of hurdles when it comes to QR codes. Several of them could be classified as “deal breakers” in the overall scope of things:

 Many survey respondents did not realize that a third-party app needs to be activated in order to scan a QR code. They mistakenly assume that it can be activated with their camera.

 Other respondents believe that the QR code-reading process is too lengthy and cumbersome.

And on a more fundamental level, doubts are being expressed about the value or usefulness of the web landing pages that are promoted via the QR codes.

What we may be witnessing is a dynamic that’s similar in some respects to what happened with CD-ROMs about a decade ago. There was once a boomlet of CD-ROMs being sent via mail to consumer and B-to-B customers. CDs were viewed as a great way to provide extensive rich content that was difficult to download and expensive to print traditionally.

But because the tool was “one step removed” (it needed to be loaded into a desktop computer in order to be viewed), the rate of interaction with these CDs turned out to be abysmal.

Similarly with QR codes, first there’s the need to possess a smartphone with a barcode scanning app installed. Once properly equipped, people then need to take the time to find and launch the app on their mobile device before pointing the camera at the QR code.

For many in today’s “instant gratification” world, taking those extra steps, however simple, may be a bridge too far.

Celebrity endorsements in advertising: All that glitters is not gold.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

David Duchovny - Baume & Mercier Celebrity EndorsementWe love our celebrities, don’t we?

Christina Applegate takes motherhood … to celebrity status.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is a fabulous celebrity … and a panel of experts has been commissioned to find out why.

 His very existence … makes Prince William a celebrity.

Because the public goes so (Lady) gaga over celebrities, celebs have been used to hawk products and services for decades. Often, they can add pizzazz to what is otherwise a pretty routine advertising campaign. But how effective are the added glitz and glamour in ringing up additional sales?

I’ve long suspected that the value of celebrity endorsements might be over-hyped. Now we have some quantifiable proof. Ace Metrix, a California-based ad measurement firm, evaluated ~2,600 television ads shown during 2010. The company tested 263 unique national ads featuring celebrity endorsements, spanning 16 industries and 110 separate brands. All ads were tested within 48 hours of breaking nationally in order to capture immediate rather than “cultivated” ad effectiveness.

The celebrity ads were then evaluated against a control group of non-celeb ads in order to determine their comparative effectiveness in generating ad “lift” (better performance).

What the Ad Metrix analysis found was that only ~12% of the ads using celebrities showed more than 10% lift over average advertising norms in their respective industries. Even more startling, ~20% of the celebrity ads yielded 10% or worse (net negative) performance over the average advertising norms.

Here are some of the celebrities who had a “net negative” effect on their clients’ TV advertising effectiveness during 2010 – worst listed first:

Tiger Woods (Nike) – I guess this hardly comes as a surprise!
Lance Armstrong (Radio Shack)
Kenny Mayne (Gillette)
Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (Nationwide Auto Insurance)
Donald Trump (Macy’s)

Which celebrities managed to generate better-than-average scores? Queen of the heap is Oprah Winfrey for her 2010 spots for Liberty Mutual and Progressive Insurance. Ed Burns (iShares) and Carl Weathers (Bud Light) took the other top honors in positive lift.

Peter Daboll, head of Ace Metrix, had this to say about the findings: “This research proves unequivocally that, contrary to popular belief, the investment in a celebrity in TV advertising is rarely worthwhile. It is the advertising message that creates the connection to the viewer in areas such as relevance, information and attention, and this remains the most important driver of ad effectiveness.”

Interestingly, Oprah’s ads weren’t pitching products per se, but rather addressing current issue topics – in this case, warning against texting while driving. So one way to get through to the consumer via a celebrity is if the content is informational rather than a sales pitch.

But if the goal of the advertising is product sales, chances are the more the celebrity is truly “connected” to an advertiser’s product or service, the more successful he or she will be in engaging the target audience beyond simply the “curiosity factor.”

You can read detailed findings from the Ace Metrix analysis here.

Third-Party e-Mail Lists: Clicks to Nowhere?

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Clickthrough fraudOf the various issues that are on every marketing manager’s plate, concern about the quality of third-party e-mail lists is surely one of them. It’s a common view that the effectiveness of a purchased e-mail data file is worse than a carefully crafted in-house list based on input from the sales team plus opt-in requests from customers.

Part of the reason is that there’s less likelihood for recipients to be interested in the products and services of the company, which only makes intuitive sense. But there may be other, more nefarious reasons at work as well.

Ever heard of a click-o-meter? It’s the way some e-mail lists are made to look more effective than they actually are. In its basic form, this is nothing more than people paid to open e-mails with no other interest or intention of further engagement. The more technical way is to have an automated click setting, usually done through a rotation of IP addresses.

To the casual observer, this gives the impression of recipients who are interested in a company’s offer, but the final analysis will show something quite different: near-zero purchases or other relevant actions. The problem is that for many campaigns, ROI will be slow at first, so the grim reality that the company has been punked comes later.

The growth of the autobot click-o-meter phenomenon tracks with the growing interest in purchasing third-party lists based on cost-per-click (CPC) performance rather than on the traditional cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. Not surprisingly, when list vendors started being asked to sell lists based on a CPC versus CPM basis, for some of them the temptation to “juice the numbers” was too great. And since many of the databases come from other sources and are private-labeled, the problem is perpetrated throughout the system.

Many purchasers have wised up to this issue by settling on one or two list brokers that they know and trust, by asking about the data source, and by asking for client references for the lists in question. If an e-mail database has suddenly changed in pricing from a CPM to a CPC basis, that may be another cause for concern.

Another option is to hire a third-party traffic monitoring service to assist with back-end analyses of e-mail campaigns to see what’s working or not working in specific campaigns and nip any problems in the bud before they do too much damage to a marketing effort.

But like anything else, self-education is critical. Most companies who are victims of fraudulent e-mail practices become so because their staff members are unaware of the potential problems. But the information is out there for the asking, and that knowledge will soon become “intuition” – usually the best predictor of ROI!

Search Goes Global

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SEO in Different LanguagesMost companies hitched their wagon to search engine optimization long ago. That’s not surprising, because high search rankings are one of the most effective ways to get in front of customers and prospects when they’re in the mood to research and buy.

But up until recently, SEO has generally existed in the world of English. By contrast, SEO campaigns in Spanish and other languages haven’t worked so well. Despite the fact that Spanish is among the most widely spoken of languages, many Spanish-language countries have been behind the curve in Internet connectivity. And you could say the same of other languages.

But that’s not the case today. As more people overseas have become connected, the amount of content in Spanish and other foreign languages has risen dramatically.

Looking back at a bit of history, in the early-1990s essentially all of the search engines were in English only; if you wanted to conduct a web search, you had no other choice. That started to change by the mid-1990s when ~75% of all Internet searches were being conducted in English.

Fast-forward to today. According to Internet World Stats, an information resource that chronicles web usage in more than 230 countries and world regions, searches in English now account for only ~25% of all searches conducted.

Time was … search spoke English only. But the dramatic growth of Hispanic and other non-English digital markets means that companies that take the time to invest in foreign-language content and SEO initiatives will find themselves in the strongest position going forward.

It’s yet another item for the marketing department’s to-do list. Fortunately, help is available … with companies like MSEO.com and SEO Matador providing turnkey programs for implementing SEO campaigns in multiple different languages.

Where are Newspapers Now?

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Newspaper ad revenues continue in the doldrums.John Barlow of Barlow Research Associates, Inc. reminds me that it’s been awhile since I blogged about the dire straits of America’s newspaper industry. The twin whammies of a major economic recession along with the rapidly changing ways Americans are getting their news have hammered advertising revenues and profits, leading to organizational restructuring, bankruptcies, and more.

But with the recession bottoming out (hopefully?), there was hope that the decline in newspaper ad revenues might be arrested as well.

Well, the latest industry survey doesn’t provide much cause for celebration. A poll of ~2,700 small and mid-size businesses conducted this summer by Portland, OR-based market research firm ITZBelden and the American Press Institute finds that ~23% of these businesses plan to cut back on newspaper advertising this year.

The kicker is that these revenues are being spent, but they’re being put to use in other advertising media.

The ITZBelden survey found that a similar ~23% of companies plan to up their 2010 digital ad spending anywhere from 10% to 30%. This compares to only about 10% planning to increase their print advertising by similar proportions.

Moreover, the survey findings reveal that small and mid-size U.S. businesses have moved into digital marketing in a significant way. Not only do more than 80% of them maintain web sites, they’re active in other areas, including:

 ~45% maintain a Facebook or MySpace page
 ~23% are engaged in online couponing
 ~13% are involved with Craigslist
 ~10% are listed on Yelp! or similar user-review sites

One area which is still just a relative blip on the screen is mobile advertising, in that fewer than 4% of the respondents reported activities in that advertising category.

Where are these advertisers planning to put their promotional funds going forward? While newspapers should continue to represent around one quarter of the expenditures, various digital media expenditures will account for ~13% of the activity, making this more important than direct mail, TV and Yellow Pages advertising.

There was one bright spot for newspapers in the survey, however. Respondents expressed a mixture of confusion and bewilderment about the constantly evolving array of digital marketing communications options opening up … and they’re looking for support from media experts to guide their plans and activities.

And where do they see this expert advice coming from? Newspaper ad reps.

Perhaps the Yellow Book’s “Beyond Yellow” small business advertising campaign – you know, the one that touts not only the Yellow Pages advertising but also web development, online advertising, search marketing and mobile advertising – is onto something.

Google’s Instant Search: Instant Irritation?

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Google's Instant Search is a Non-StarterHow many of you have been noodling around with Google’s new Instant Search functionality since its unveiling earlier this month? I’ve spent the better part of a week working with it, trying hard to keep a “completely open mind” as to its benefits.

I’ve finally came to the conclusion that … I can’t stand it. I’m a pretty fast typist, and generally know what I’m searching for. I really don’t need Google “pre-anticipating” search results for me, and find the constantly jumping search results window extremely off-putting to the point of distraction.

I gave Instant Search a full week … and couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve now elected to turn it off completely.

Wondering if I was the only one with this view … it certainly didn’t take long to find out that there are a great many people out there who feel the same way. You can use Google search (either the “instant” or “traditional” will do fine) to find any number of blog posts and user comments about Google Instant Search that are just one notch shy of mutinous — and hardly genteel in their choice of language. (A few examples can be found here and here and here.)

If the comments by disgruntled users are to be believed, Bing/MSN may find itself with a nice little bump in search volume market share by the end of September.

And if that actually happens, Google Instant might die a quiet death – which wouldn’t be the first time Google laid an egg in its “throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks” approach to product development.

But if Google Instant does gain traction … there are some negative implications for search marketers as well. Many companies seek to structure their online marketing campaigns by determining the optimal amount of spending on search advertising, display ads and social media. The key to success in this endeavor is undertaking a process that examines the millions of cookies and billions of clicks that are made by web users, along with factoring in other elements like geographic location and time of day.

All of this information is weighed against the cost of various ads and the likelihood of success as they are served to the user. That’s determined by running regular models of millions of keywords and word combinations, judging the relative costs to determine the optimum frequency. For some of the most aggressive marketers, these models are run once or twice daily.

The advent of Google’s Instant Search scrambles all of that, because it makes the process even faster and more hectic than before. As those of you who have experimented with Instant Search know, you start seeing “suggested” search results with just the first one or two keystrokes … and those choices continue to change with each new keystroke made or movement of the cursor down the list of Google’s suggestions. For marketers, the result is a lot more velocity on the ad side – and more price changes.

As proof of this, within the first few days of Instant Search’s launch, sites that Instant Search recommends after the first one or two letters are typed into the search box – “Mapquest,” “Ticketmaster” and “Pandora” are three useful examples – were experiencing significant increases in traffic, whereas their hapless competitors were not.

If that’s what is happening with the big boys, where does this put smaller businesses? The answer is obvious: They’re going to get squeezed big-time … and as a result, their search advertising costs are going nowhere but up.

Mighty sporting of you, Google.