My fellow AdVikings wrote a few days ago about the great MS launching their defense of the display advertising model. Unsurprising bit of timing: just as recession bites, and marketers flee from the gloss of ‘brand building’ in favour of actually closing business.

Is it a dog? Is it a shame? No, it's G1

Of course, as AdViking points out, the whole point of brand building was supposed to be about closing sales as well. And therefore I find it hard to disagree MS and their attempts to map the various touch points between the brand and the consumer in an attempt to allocate values to the various touchpoints.

But - and it’s a decent sized but - let’s not forget that marketing is an unholy balance between art and science… the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.

So, if you consider that T-Mobile’s current advertising campaign:

• their radio spots are (to these ears at least) a major disincentive to buy from them (hate them!)
• poster treatments work substantially better

Now I happen to be interested in getting the new G1 Android phone, which is only available from T-Mobile. (OK - I know it’s ugly, but this is an illustration, work with me here). The negative impact of the radio advertising is cancelled out by other things. But is there any way Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping can measure that successfully? Or, by buying a G1, do I tell the marketers that their awful radio ads had the desired affect?

Tags: android, branding, engagement, G1, Microsoft, recession, T-Mobile

Credit crunch

It’s a scary world out there at the moment.

The impact on the rest of the UK economy of HBOS turning into the minority partner in the Lloyds Halifax megabank is yet to be felt, but there’s no shortage of doom-mongers around… and this is not the time or place to argue with them too vociferously. I do, however, remain guardedly optimistic that we’re not seeing the meltdown that the papers seem to be helping us talk ourselves into. But the alternative remains a fairly daunting one: a ‘bath-shaped’ recession (or at least downturn) that could last a while… the big question seems to be ‘how deep?’.

What impact does that have on the marketing industry?

Rainy days

In the last comparable recession, back in the early 1990s there was talk of ‘the end of western civilisation’. It was pretty torrid, but we survived. What was interesting, from a marketing perspective, was the surge in the use of direct marketing techniques/expenditure. The downturn then raised the perception of the Direct Marketing discipline - and with it budgets - to the level where, from being a small part of marketing expenditure, it has reached equal footing with the flashier, arguably sexier world of above the line marketing… i.e. advertising. I found an amusing recollection of that period over at adliterate, where the author recalls the hubristic dreams of DM agencies back in 1990 that DM would ‘kill off’ glossy advertising.

So here we are in 2008, and all the data points to this period being critical in the development of Digital Marketing. 81% of marketers are planning to increase their digital budgets… and 82% of them at the expense of other advertising media.

So is this digital’s ‘moment’?

Digital will win out in a recession (compared to other media) because:

1. it’s fast - the results come in very quickly
2. it’s effective
3. you can measure it
4. you can optimise to what works on the fly
5. it remains comparatively inexpensive (no really!)
6. … oh, and unlike the 2001/2 marketing recession, digital is now a firmly established part of mainstream marketing… not the experimental silo it was then.

But the real winner will be engagement marketing. Yes, talking to people you already know. Building on relationships - and keeping your promise with sharpened attention to value and service. Getting people who already buy from you to recommend you to their friends… all that wonderful stuff.

OK - so I have an interest in this - my company, Silverpop, is deep in this territory, providing solutions for engagement marketing, particularly email marketing. We also published a white paper this year on marketing in a recession, which you’re welcome to download.

Tags: credit crunch, digital marketing, engagement, recession

Here’s one example.

And it seems we’re all reading much the same source material (Wikipedia, TBL etc) but coming up with very different interpretations. Hardly surprising given… see more that:

• there’s still room for debate about exactly what Web 1.0 and 2.0 are/were
• Web 3.0 seems to exist mainly as a wireframe to hang speculation from.

HOWEVER, my twopenn’th is that, through Web 2.0, we’ve witnessed a significant change in the way events and relationships are formed and developed - we’ve moved from a broadcast/publishing world to one where everyone can have their own voice - the democratisation of the means of creation and dissemination of content.

That’s a huge shift… it’s meant that ‘opinion formers’ can affect not just those in the immediate area, but anywhere in the world.

The traditional media channels are still struggling to cope with the changes this has brought on, witness editorials from the likes of Andrew O’Neill pleading for us to believe that the public will always put more trust in Broadsheet Newspapers (like the ones he has edited or written for) rather than blogs and social networking. Um… Hitler Diaries anyone?

So where to next? For me it’s a couple of main things:

• ubiquity: Web 3.0 will refused to be caged inside a computer monitor or the screen of a mobile/PDA
• relevance: e.g increased ability to get results that are personalised to location/observed past behaviour to provide a more intelligent response

Of course, it also entails much more usable data being collected by those guys who ‘don’t do evil’… but consumers have proved again and again that they’ll make that sacrifice if they get something they value in return (c.f. Tesco Clubcard).

Tags: engagement, web 3.0