Get Shouty

This is one way to get through a firewall…..

Route THIS!!!!

I’ve got a brief I’m very excited about- it’s for an well established environmental group here in Australia and they’re trying to prompt people to write 50,000 letters to Members of Parliament before the next election- which will be in the next few months.

They, of course only have a tiny amount of cashola- but heaps of cred and a compelling message.

I’m a big fan of online activism, but in our click through age it’s easier to get friends on a MySpace page than to get a younger and passionate audience to put something in the post.

So how can I prompt a postage stamp? It’s letters in the mail that is political currency here.

If I had the dosh I’d do something like the Take Note campaign which allows you to write your message online, which then gets sent by mail- but I can’t afford to pay for the stamps or the envelopes.

Care’s ‘I am Powerful’ creates an incredible emotional reaction and I love the Power Circle as a mind map of support- but I need letters…..

Any ideas?

Yesterday I was in Melbourne, a city I just love, part of a team presenting to a group of really smart marketers. I showed a collection, not of case studies per se, but of thought starters on how to create digital connections between brands and their consumers.

The philosophy can be described by my digital planning diagram, but is best summed up by the following:

• Insights (Research)- you must have them about what your brand truth is and about your audience.
• Bravery (Design)- it’s easy to have a ‘look, don’t touch’ philosophy for your communication, but the rewards of conversation and the merits of authenticity reap long term results
• Smarts (Evaluation)- have an understanding of what you want to get out of your online efforts. Reach? Sales push to a specific channel? A consumer panel for insights? Map and measure your goals.

It brought home to me how powerful storytelling is in generating understanding and inspiration. It was a joy to see what these guys created at the end of the day in their team workshops.

Of course there was a call for hard numbers, particularly around how much do you need/ can you get away with shifting online to get results. We had a scenario on hand that highlighted:

• if you took 5% away from the ATL TVC media  budget
• what would you need to spend online to make it up?

We were able to evidence:

• that we could gain almost 3 times the exact target audience we needed to reach to make up the budget shift
• with less than half the budget
• delivering 4 times the time with brand
• and articulate the product benefit in a way the would also increase packaging recognition in channel.
• Hurray!

Some more studies on the effectiveness of moving budget to online:

• IAB Cross Media studies on Colgate, and Kleenex  (thanks Sean!)
• some hot presentations from the Adelaide Now “introduction to online advertising seminar”
• and a great little story on the effectiveness and emotional pull of blogs in Australia

Thanks guys- I hope to see you all again soon.

Here I was thinking that I was being a little naff in asking questions, lots of questions.

In my trawl for FMCG/CPG case studies I came across a cool bit on the Linked in site that I hadn’t found before-LinkedIn Answers.

There’s heaps of good stuff:

• What have been the most successful programs for advertising successfully online?
• What are your favorite big brand blog case studies?
• What is the best way to measure marketing ROI?

And this: Guy Kawasaki askes a simple question: What should I write my next book about?

Finding all this it made me feel alot better- and not because I have more to draw on but because it really brought home to me that it doesn’t matter who you are, asking questions and listening to all the answers makes you a better marketer.

And if no one wants to share? Then give, give, give!

iMedia report that Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing online ad spending will rise to $470 million in 2006, up from $390 million predicted in 2005, according to a report from eMarketer.

So it must be working…that wool is coming off from marketer’s eyes…

As ever, we need stories that bring this to life- not only to tell our clients, but to remind ourselves that a measure of success is also a campaign’s ability to be remembered, be re-told.

Marketers in Australia need these tales of online success- we’re in a bit of a drought right now.

 I’m trying to get a collection together of CPG (or FMCG) case studies as a resource for online effectiveness- please contribute!

This is traditional:

MSN Jell-o case Study

CPG brands succeed because they differentiate in the consumer’s mind—driving sales is not enough to guarantee long-term success. For Kraft it was important to measure the branding impact of online advertising, as well as the immediate sales lift. The study shows that online advertising produced these measurable results:

• • Online advertising increased Jell-O offline sales: +7.5 percent increase.
  • Key branding metrics lift: +7 increase in purchase intent (top 2 box score).
  • Both sales and branding improve when online is increased considerably above current levels.

I kinda like this Ninja-style one:

This is the seriously edited version of an amazing Aussie style online campaign, not for FMCG- but an $70,000 return in eight weeks with an active community sounds like a great idea:

Background: We ran out of cash to hand feed our sheep and ran out of grass.
So, faced with sending the entire flock of 2600 to slaughter and lose 7 years of breeding for superfine wool (which no bastard wanted to pay for anyway), we went public and appealed to people to adopt our sheep for $35 a head, the amount required to feed them for 100 days (the planning horizon during a drought).

Action: Bodgied up a blogsite with PayPal to take donations.

Got the Press involved:  I sent press releases to 2 Sydney dailies – SMH & Tele – and waited. Two days, 3, 4, and a call from Tele asking for pix. Sent what we had. No, need a sad pic of farmer and wife. We took one, hard not to laugh. Kabloom! 5000 hits on blogspot

Got advocates:Louisa and Daniel, no training, giving interviews on air to listeners all over the eastern states. Orders pouring in. 10000 hits by start of week 2. Recruit local business centre for help. Disaster. Customer complaints. Recruit sister-in-law. Great

What’s that rumbling? The rising drone of the online conversations about us. StatCounter lets me see where hits coming from. Follow hits backwards to source to find links. Turns out people are posting stories and links on their personal blogsites, discussion groups arguing about the rights and wrongs of farming in Australia, quilters and knitters and spinners and crafty ladies telling each other they adopted, highschool girls (lonelygirl15) adopting a lamb for company in their adolescent cocoons.

Results: Our target $87000. Total Week 8: $70000. (We had spent $60,000 up to when the appeal started.)

Customer is always right. No, not “customer” in our case. New friends? No. We are now family. This farm is their farm. These sheep are their sheep.

Promotional Budget: Media $0. Website: $0. PR: $0. Reason for Outcome: 1. Novelty.

Next steps: Expand the relationship. Expand the family.

What’s your favourite? 

Fionn from DGM gave a comprehensive and totally accessible presentation at the Bootcamp last week on SEM.

Who knew that effectiveness modelling could be funny?

The term that resonated with me was : Return On Ego.

The context here was making sure that you compartmentalize business decisions in the online space between those that are founded on KPI’s and those that make the Brand team feel good.

I love the concept of being able to analyse the sexy but a bit vapid vs the perhaps a little dull but efficient.

Hot!

Update: Had to share this quote from Philippe over on Sean’s Craphammer site

About ego, always remember the wise words of Baba Ram Dass (a friend of Timothy Leary): “The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it–just don’t get lost in it.”

These images are from the Thank You Project, which is truely lovely in it’s sentiment and almost equally as awful in it’s visual and experience design.

 This online exhibition collects and displays thousands of thankyou notes and images. You can browse the gallery (this is cool! check out the Mum messages, or the great teacher messages, or just thanks to the universe messages) or create a thankyou for someone you know.

Like this:

I’m presenting at the  interactive boot camp over the next couple of weeks, the first one on Wednesday,  and have been tasked with giving a bit of a 101: “How to plan great interactive media campaigns”.

My process is this, used to create ‘digital connections’  between consumers and brands:

It’s a continuation of my thoughts on Loveocracy and another post  and some bouncing back and forward with Sean and Gavin.

The centre of the diagram is brought to life with this kind of voice over: 

“digital connections opportunities present themselves when we look for an overlap between the Brand Position and Consumer Interests, what Position unites the two and what Promise can be tactically expressed?  Aiming to be inside this area makes great sense.  It’s the point at which all the vectors unite”

I surround this with robust research (insights), consumer experience design (context) and evaluation modelling (building actionable intelligence) processes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and get your examples on great interactive media planning.

After I’ve finished the bootcamp I’ll compile it all together and post the presentation for all to share.

David Armano’s latest post Blogs Are Free Samples of Your Brand has an interesting, call to action: Stop calling yourself a blogger.

“Blogging is a commodity.  Anyone can do it.  We are human beings with passions and interests that come out in our blogs—not the other way around.  Stop calling yourself a blogger.  You are a… (designer, businessperson, marketer, artist, baker, mother, grandfather, etc).  Calling ourselves bloggers takes away from what makes us unique.”

An article in the New York Times, Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog  puts forward that the term might be Artist 2.0:

“It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight… being a musician is rather like being a business manager, memoirist and group therapist rolled into one, with a politician’s thick hide to boot. ”

Joseph Jaffe has a posted a video from his Australian visit, Content + Context, which brings to life Adam Curry’s claim that in 5 years time 50% of all content will be consumer generated.

That’s quite a trend. With over 75 million blogs there are a lot of people who are doing it, a lot of people expressing themselves. Not all of it will be good, sure. But is it vital to define people who create content? Are they artists? Are they bloggers or vloggers or podfathers? Do you define the nature of expression ,or the nature of the person, by the materials used? Just because people had access to pencils, it didn’t make everyone a writer.

Isn’t it more important for people to define themselves? Isn’t this Creation Age all about self definition and self expression?

I believe that the hand of an artisan is shaped by their tools. Sergovia’s hands were undoubtedly those of a classical guitarist, I have a film producer friend that could organise a colony on Mars in two weeks and I can spot a network engineer at ten paces.

I am blogger.

Fundamentally, the resistance I have in turning away from allegiance to the medium is the notion that building something, expressing something (for someone else) is somehow more valid than creating it (for yourself).

I’d have to disagree.

With great respect David: blogging is unique. It’s solitude and time to think in very good company. It provides structure and discipline to create and it provides feedback and authority to just born thought.

Oh, and loads of stuff to Get Shouty about too….

Hanging out at the Water Bar, originally uploaded by josephjaffe.

I believe I was talking about brand minxy-ness here.

The guy to my right has obviously never heard anything like it.

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Joseph Jaffe was in town this week. He dropped his balls (you had to be there), fought some dinosaurs (hooray!) and held court in his self depreciating chap-tastic fashion.  Interested and interesting wins in my book,  and he has had double servings of both for breakfast.

It was quite an experience to watch him skillfully acknowledging the old school resists to his message, while still challenging the assumptions and prompting innovation testing.

It seems that marketers do want to do something different and join the conversation. Unsurprisingly they don’t want to spend their budgets on projects that might not get results. 

What they want to do most is create the old sales spike. Not a long term brand building proposition sure, but when the average tenure of a CMO is 23.2 months there doesn’t seem to be much incentive to create long term value.

Evaluation modelling is really the key here- which combination of the digital channels, or as Jaffe would say, which of the 93 crayons can you use to create the best picture for your brand?

I’m a maths fiend. I love how you can make numbers dance and tell a story and there’s a creativity to crafting a series of premises that a financially driven board can follow. I’m looking forward to new metrics on a brand by brand basis beyond TARPS and CPM.

The only figure worth a damn is TWB (time with brand). You win if people choose to hang out with you and you loose if they ignore you. Thanks for the juice Mr Jaffe!

Thanks XKCD for the pic.

Thanks also to Paul for last name vigilance.