Shabinet : an ineffectual opposition

Shab-i-net

[Shab-ee-net]
-noun
A collection of representatives in opposition to the ruling party, demonstrably unable to coherently voice the concerns of their consituents against the prevailing political dynamic.

Quantum Computing for Dummies

I was blown away by last nights' edition of Horizon on the BBC - "What is Reality?". I wont even try to describe what it was about in the confines of this blog, you'll have to watch it for yourself. However, a section of the program covering quantum computing really caught my imagination, so I decided to find out more.

This video from the University of New South Wales was the best, easiest to understand overview I found on the subject. I love the opening quote from Richard Feynham:

"You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it"

Without a doubt, this is the next frontier in computing which, once matured, will see a massive step change in computing capabilities. Watch this space.

Music for Shuffle

Here's a lovely thing. Created by Irvine Brown, an interaction designer in London, it's "a series of short, interlocking phrases (each formatted as an individual MP3) that can be played in any order and still (sort of) make musical sense."

Hear it here.....

ASA ruling: remove claim to solve all problems, break black magic & banish all evil.

I've never thought that working at the Advertising Standards Authority could possibly be a barrel of laughs. However, reading this adjudication on Mr Latif, I think I would have enjoyed working on this case.

ACTION

"The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Mr Latif to remove the claims "Your entire problem will be fulfilled in SEVEN DAYS", "No matter what your problems are I can help you to solve them in seven days" and "Latif's work is 100% guaranteed", and also to remove the references to "depression" and "sexual impotency". We told him not to claim he could solve all problems, break black magic, banish evil spirits or improve the health, wealth, love life, happiness or other circumstances of readers. We asked CAP to advise its members of the problem with Mr Latif."

Read Mr Latifs' advertising copy and the full ruling by the UK Advertising Standards Authority here.

Not getting it: An insult.

Maybe I'm getting old, but it used to be the case that accusing someone of "not getting it" was the ultimate insult in the marketing community. It was an accusation slung at the ad agencies by the upstart digital pioneers to set themselves apart and portray their competitors as dinosaurs.

So I was a little puzzled when I read that Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, said at the firm’s user conference  earlier this year that the CMO was the primary barrier to marketing automation because they "didn’t get it". This didn't strike me as a comment geared to ingratiate  marketeers to the idea of marketing automation, or his company's offering. 

So for the sake of balance, I'd like to offer an alternative view.

CMOs do get it - at least the ones we work with do. There are, however a number of challenges that they - and we - face:

1. Access to experience and skills to achieve success – the biggest impact marketing automation has is on internal processes which often need considerable re-engineering  
2. The relationship between the IT department and Marketing can be strained sometimes. You need someone in the mix to successfully bridge the gap 
3. Marketing automation creates complete transparency on the process and results.  For most, this is a blessing, as they are able to prove ROI attributable to marketing. However, for the few this can be an unwelcome spotlight

It's pretty important to understand these challenges and equip yourself to help if you're working with clients to introduce marketing automation into their workflow.

Marketing in the age of distraction

For my sins, I used to be a teacher. Every day the challenge was to inspire and engage a bunch of minds, all of whom had different starting points, different aptitudes, and wildly differing attention spans. There’s some interesting research coming out of Stanford on attention and cognition in the classroom which I’d like to share with you. I think the teacher’s dilemma in the classroom reflects well our challenge as customer experience architects. We are marketing in an age of distraction.

Our task used to be easy: Interrupt someone’s attention for a short while to get our point across. We used basic psychology to create a persuasive message, and data to find the right people to get the message to.

Educationalists would recognise this as the “managed attention” approach. Get everyone together, reduce all external influences and distractions and burn the point into the memory of the recipient in one or two hits.

However, over the last few decades, the centre of gravity in education has moved to a student centric model, using techniques to tailor learning experiences to the needs and learning speeds of the individual. Information has been “chunked” into smaller units for consumption in flexible timescales, across multiple media.

Likewise, marketing has transformed from a mass model, to a customer-centric market of one. We can no longer rely on managing our customer’s attention through interruptive techniques. We have to chunk our messages up into small packages for our customers to find wherever they are in their media journey – on or off-line. We need to make sure they make the connections which form the basis of our narrative throughout their journey. We can only do this by making sure that the DNA strands of our brand are strong as they run through our messages and the context they are found in.

N. Katherine Hayles, a professor emerita of English at the University of California at Los Angeles has observed that in a media rich environment, “students are getting better at making conceptual connections across a wide variety of domains”. She describes how this behaviour of skimming and surfing through a world of multimedia generates a condition which she calls “hyper attention”

"One of the basic tenets of good teaching is that you have to start where the students are," Hayles says. "And once you find out where they are, a good teacher can lead them almost anywhere. Students today don't start in deep attention. They start in hyper attention.”

When I look at our marketing arc – the map we at Proctors use to construct our customer experiences – I see an entry point where we welcome visitors from the media meta-verse into our universe of influence. This is where we start our lead nurturing process with a program of in-bound marketing content and touch-points. 

Our challenge as marketers in this age of distraction is to make sure that at that entry point we can identify where they are in their decision process and how we sit in their perception in order to guide them from hyper attention to deep attention and consideration.

IT Professionals fall victim to fashion

Here's a breakdown of email clients identified through a recent B2B broadcast. 

The audience is IT Manager and upwards – lots of Directors and plenty of Managing Directors (in fact 20% of those whose title is given).

The mailshot went to 1,350 prospects, 25% Enterprise, 75% medium sized organisations.

The various versions of Outlook etc are as expected but note the 6.2% using iPhone.

Looks like IT folks are becoming fashion victims with the rest of us......

Soap Creative - 10 Facebook Myths Busted

Love this take on Facebook from Australian agency Soap.

Soap Creative - 10 Facebook Myths Busted

View more presentations from Soap Creative.

Don't discount the multichannel

In September 2009, the UK became the first European market in which online advertising spend overtook television. 

Traditional ad formats have suffered badly during the economic downturn as advertisers turn to digital formats that are both less costly and measurable.

However, online does not automatically signal lower marketing expenditure and increased revenue and an intelligent combination of online and offline techniques is often the best way to lift sales. The Web has shifted the dynamic of the relationship between brands and customers, and the ability to reach prospects in a more relevant and personal way is one of the unique advantages offered by online. However, marketers need to be realistic about what can be achieved. Consumer campaigns are still best served by incorporating off-line components due to the practicalities of maintaining up to date mailing lists.



While targeted B2B marketing efforts are much better suited to online these will still not meet their full potential if used in isolation and marketers should not be seduced by any Silver Bullet solutions. It’s very easy and tempting to follow the herd after the latest buzz techniques, tools and channels and hang your strategy on them.

The first key to success is a mindset that tests and optimises a mix of online and offline techniques that are right for that business and its customers, and to remember that every one is different. The best analogy for this approach is that of creating a “balanced portfolio” of marketing initiatives. Some are established and bear solid, stable returns. Others you take small stakes in, creating a spread-bet pool of new, higher risk campaigns and techniques with potentially higher returns. It’s a balance of being conservative and steady with your core activity and open minded on the new and smaller stake opportunities that will offer the best returns and crucially to continue to test to find the optimal mix.

Therefore, the key to a successful campaign, especially those using a variety of marketing approaches, is to be able track results and to focus on those elements that generate the best results. Tracking allows the marketer to optimise both online and offline campaigns and thus generate far higher conversions. However, given the controversy surrounding Phorm which raised questions about behavioural targeting and pre-empted EU legislation imposing limits on how data can be used and the use of cookies, it is unsurprising that targeting has not been embraced for lead generation by UK marketers to date. If introduced successfully through a multi-channel strategy, targeting is still a viable and very powerful option.

A call to action based around a Personal URL, a URL address tailored to an individual which is tracked when activated, can be integrated into any combination of DM, email, telephony or SMS. This directs campaign response to your website, this can be personalised within the browser if desired without recourse to multiple micro-sites, which can be expensive and unwieldy for tracking purposes. The user’s interaction (solely) within that site can be tracked, this provides the meta-data and context on the customer lead that allows warm prospects to be identified in real time and scored for follow up with sales teams and/or marketing activities based on the nature and level of their actions.

By targeting only those customers that have clearly demonstrated a clear interest through their interactions it’s a simple process to rationalise sales and marketing spend to drive ROI. In real terms this can offer call centre cost savings of over 70 percent and an additional benefit is the preservation of brand equity since sales need only contact those who actually want to be called.

The freedom to track customer engagement within a website through the customer’s opt-in (via the Personal URL) when coupled with the option to personalise the campaign’s messaging offers all the advantages of targeting without the sinister overtones of all pervasive web tracking.


One of the most dramatic examples using these principles we have seen recently is a campaign for Intimis client Auto Europe, the world's largest car-hire broker. The additional units sold over the first six months of their campaign amounted to an average weekly uplift of 65% with the figure being in excess of 100% some weeks and a maximum weekly uplift achieved of 133%.

Ultimately a successful cross platform campaign can be reduced to 'Three Ts' – Test, Track, Target – by finding the optimal marketing mix and approaching only those prospects likely to convert, it’s possible to save a lot of time and money.

However this approach is wholly dependent on a sufficient number of users inputting the Personal URL in the first place. Therefore the success or failure of the campaign comes down to the initial call to action and although the technology may impact the results, there’s (as yet) no option to upgrade the marketer.

This posting appeared in the DM Weekly News – 03/09/10