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Every week, Ban­ner brings you more cool campaigns/ideas/articles found whilst sniff­ing round the inter­web.

• Don’t Shoot the Bear! – You­Tube made inter­est­ing by Tipp-Ex. Great cam­paign for driv­ing user input. Be cre­at­ive with your ideas. Try: fishes, dances, rap, tickles, picks up, shoots and eats to get you going… (It will all make sense when you are there, trust me.)
• Another You­Tube cre­ation, this time with Sly and some friends…
• If you missed the Apple spe­cial announce­ment yes­ter­day, then you won’t want to miss this. Finally, a place where Apple “fan­boys” can go and com­mu­nic­ate with the like-minded.
• Last week we looked at how Voda­fone is using Lewis Hamilton. This week, we are look­ing at another “Gil­lette boy”. Roger Federer goes viral with over 5 mil­lion hits last week. Real or Fake? No-one’s telling…
• Nel­son Man­dela, Barack Obama, Mother Teresa, the Inter­net… They (may soon) all have one thing in com­mon.  Click here to find out.
• Plan­ning to build your own Star­tup Com­pany? Need a service/site idea? Try this gen­er­ator and strike digital gold.
• Is it Christ­mas? Some­times it’s the simplest sites that give you the best answers.
• I saved the best for last. Here is a really great example of HTML5 when brought together with some cre­at­ive think­ing and a lot of pro­cessor power. It’s still just an idea and a first stab at that, but it really high­lights the power of open source solu­tions. Great track too.

It’s no longer break­ing news Intel are buy­ing McAfee and although the sub­ject has been thor­oughly covered in the tech press in recent days, I’ve been giv­ing the sub­ject some thought and find myself a little sur­prised at the level of con­sterna­tion — even out­rage — expressed by some com­ment­at­ors (or their read­ers) on the subject.

What is it about this deal that seems to have wound people up? Here are my thoughts.

“Intel McAfee acquis­i­tion is biggest, and worst, deal in secur­ity history”

Richard Stein­non, Chief Research Ana­lyst at IT-HARVEST LLC, wrote a piece entitled “Intel McAfee acquis­i­tion is biggest, and worst, deal in secur­ity his­tory”. He looked at the deal from vari­ous angles (Tech­no­logy Acquis­i­tion, Brand Enhance­ment, Invest­ment etc), and couldn’t find a single thing to redeem it, say­ing “Some deals just don’t make sense”. In this case I don’t agree, but it’s his ana­lysis of the ‘tech­no­logy acquis­i­tion’ angle that interests me.

Surely, tech­no­logy acquis­i­tion is exactly what Intel are doing?

OK, so we’re not neces­sar­ily talk­ing about run­ning McAfee’s products ‘as-is’ in sil­icon, but per­haps we can look for­ward to some hardware-accelerated desktop/server secur­ity products, and we’re def­in­itely talk­ing about acquir­ing the smarts to secure mobile devices, aren’t we? More on this later.

Over­priced?

Another cri­ti­cism leveled at this deal is that Intel are pay­ing too much for McAfee, but my guess is that value is in the eye of the beholder, and that to all intents and pur­poses, McAfee is worth exactly $7.68 bil­lion if you’re Intel.

Moreover, Intel and McAfee already have a trus­ted, stra­tegic part­ner­ship in place, and they think the busi­nesses are a good fit. This is why Intel haven’t acquired one (or more) of McAfee’s com­pet­it­ors; there are dozens to choose from.

Even if the busi­ness was not worth the price Intel are paid, the deal has effect­ively split the com­ment­at­ors into two camps: those that think Intel know what they’re doing, and those that don’t.

Intel Soft­ware Acquis­i­tions. Source: arstechnica.com

The 3^rd Pillar

Intel have a pretty clear strategy with regards to soft­ware acquis­i­tion and are bet­ting a few things are going to happen:

First, mobile devices (not just hand­sets) are going to be the growth mar­ket in the next 10 years. Intel’s Atom range com­petes with ARM and PPC in this space and they want to put their products in as strong a pos­i­tion as pos­sible. Intel reckon there will be 15 bil­lion mobile Internet-connected devices world­wide by 2015. Eric­sson CEO Hans Vest­burg thinks this is con­ser­vat­ive and is bet­ting on 50 bil­lion by 2050.

Second, threats — that accord­ing to some “have yet to mater­i­al­ise” — will provide a new mar­ket for secur­ity vendors. In this con­text, Intel believe secur­ity will form the 3^rd pil­lar of com­put­ing, along­side energy-efficiency and connectivity.

Third, it is bet­ter to offer an integ­rated bundle of sil­icon (Atom), OS (Wind River) and secur­ity (McAfee) to mar­ket than just sell pro­cessors and chip-sets.

Is this a good thing?

I think so. Recent his­tory has shown that if it’s pos­sible and prof­it­able for cer­tain types of people (e.g. crim­in­als) to take advant­age of secur­ity vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies to make a profit or a point, they will do it.

If the pre­dic­tion of the ubi­quit­ous 50 bil­lion con­nec­ted devices is any­where near cor­rect, then this is going to be a huge mar­ket for crim­in­als (and idi­ots) where con­sumers and busi­ness will need to be pro­tec­ted. This is also prob­ably the reason that Intel’s Soft­ware and Ser­vices Group would be a global top-ten soft­ware com­pany if it were an inde­pend­ent entity.

Couple this with the changes in Inter­net usage as a res­ult of  iPad, iPhone and Android devices, and it’s a poten­tially explos­ive situation.

What will it mean to Intel’s competition?

That depends on who you ask and which com­pet­i­tion you’re talk­ing about. AMD might be reas­on­ably san­guine and may even see it as an oppor­tun­ity to chip away (pun inten­ded) at Intel’s share of the laptop/desktop/server CPU mar­ket if Intel’s focus is elsewhere.

In the long run, though, mobile/embedded device secur­ity is Intel’s main motiv­a­tion for this deal, and clearly believes it will be a key dif­fer­en­ti­ator between them­selves and the likes of ARM in the energy-efficient pro­cessor mar­ket. And, that the answer lies — at least in part — with McAfee.

Over the next few years as the embedded-thing-connected-to-the-internet-market explodes, I think we’ll see Intel and McAfee vindicated.

From using Twit­ter as a social paint­brush, to tar­get­ing the under­dogs of great­ness, here are some of the best campaigns/virals/ideas/social media drivers we’ve found down the back of the digital couch in the last week:

• Can Chat­roul­ette actu­ally be used for some­thing use­ful? One agency thought so. Does it go too far? You be the judge.
• Twit­ter becomes a social paint­brush to con­vince Amer­ica that Canada is great!
• What hap­pens when you mix glit­tery vam­pires and product place­ment with a social media strategy? Great idea or cringe worthy cash-in?
• With bet­ter mobile pro­cessors, oper­at­ing sys­tems and down­load­able con­tent, aug­men­ted real­ity takes another bold step in shiny Google boots. Review & Down­load here!
• Slack­ers deserve credit too. Puma agrees. A great spot for the non-athlete athlete.
• Old Spice may have set a pre­ced­ent for the groom­ing industry, but who’s this claw­ing their way to the top of the pile?
• Some­times, a great idea doesn’t need to sell any­thing at all. Here’s a great flash­mob just to make one guy have the best birth­day ever.
• Exe­cu­tion by Schweppes. A little remote and under­played, but think of the pos­sib­il­it­ies? Any­one else think­ing; “Yellowstone!”
• Every­body loves Gary, the Walk­ers Crisps man, right? So what hap­pens when you ask Lionel Richie (yes, him) to do a Walk­ers crisp ad?
• Even Hugh needs to get in on the act. Read about Mr. Hefner’s hunt for a Social Media mis­tress.
• Do you think Voda­fone was run­ning out of ideas on how to use Lewis Hamilton for their cam­paigns, what with the NOT win­ning races? Any­one else thinks this is a little… lame?

It’s speak­ing sea­son at the Ban­ner search team, and over the next couple of months we’ll be speak­ing at con­fer­ences in Lon­don, Stock­holm and Oslo.

First out is SEM Kon­fer­ansen in Oslo (14−16 Septem­ber). Here we’ll run a couple of ses­sions with a main one-hour event ded­ic­ated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Fol­low­ing this we’ll con­tinue our Nor­dic jour­ney and ven­ture across the bor­der to Stock­holm and the world-renowned SMX (28−29 Septem­ber). With no-less than three speak­ing ses­sions penned in it’ll be a busy couple of days.  We’ll be dig­ging into the Google qual­ity score and how to integ­rate search and dis­play advertising.

Back in Lon­don we’re run­ning a retar­get­ing ses­sion at the always-excellent A4UExpo (12−13 Octo­ber). This is the premier UK event for affil­i­ate and per­form­ance mar­ket­ing, and a bril­liant oppor­tun­ity to under­stand more about this excit­ing mar­ket­ing model.

If you’re plan­ning to attend any of the above events, please write a line in the com­ments as we’re always happy to catch-up over cof­fee in-between ses­sions. Oth­er­wise you’ll surely find us net­work­ing in the bar.

Google has announced that it is chan­ging its ad policies to allow advert­isers to use third party trade­marks in their ad cop­ies, even without approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­pon­ent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­nic­ate the brands they sell or support.

The policy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­sequence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the European Court of Justice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­it­ive trade­mark keyword bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

Both policy changes are planned to come into effect on 14 September.

Read the full press release.

Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The reason is simple – never before have pro­spects so clearly told advert­isers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­im­ise this opportunity.

The concept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effect­ively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find cam­paigns that were all point­ing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely lim­ited internal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that someone arriv­ing from a spe­cific search such as “product x specs” will not imme­di­ately see the product they are expect­ing, and pos­sibly just hit the back but­ton in frus­tra­tion and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Secondly, even if they are determ­ined enough, and decide to give the site a second chance, they still have to find their way through via internal nav­ig­a­tion and search func­tion­al­ity. This leaves them vul­ner­able to get­ting lost, frus­trated and ulti­mately giv­ing up, and return to their search engine of choice for a bet­ter match to their ori­ginal query.

Simplist­ic­ally, there are two levels of seg­ment­a­tion when it comes to keywords and land­ing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Cat­egory, Product, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, com­pare, com­plain, trouble shoot

At the first level, advert­isers will send cat­egory searches (e.g. “print­ers”) to a cat­egory page, and product spe­cific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the product page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the second level, the advert­iser will util­ise the search mod­i­fi­ers to bet­ter under­stand what the con­sumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y spe­cific­a­tions”) will send traffic to the cor­res­pond­ing sub page or sec­tion of the land­ing page.

While this might seem like com­mon sense and straight for­ward to imple­ment, there are a few things to con­sider. The second level of seg­ment­a­tion increases the com­plex­ity of the cam­paign by quickly mul­tiply­ing the num­ber of indi­vidual land­ing pages. These indi­vidual land­ing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, access­ible and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, advert­isers can expect hap­pier site vis­it­ors and improved con­ver­sion rates.

Even if search has matured incred­ibly over the last few years, both from a tech­nical point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coördin­a­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all levels of the organisation.

Earlier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Huddle. This was an intim­ate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was roun­ded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the latest devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­ment­als right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gible dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his exper­i­ence of man­aging inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­por­ate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­it­ate increased own­er­ship and sub­sequent coördin­a­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­res­en­ted by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent innov­at­ive fash­ion. With the object­ive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selec­ted part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­no­logy as it was about com­mu­nic­a­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­no­logy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest factor to suc­cess is still the people driv­ing it.

With search engines char­ging for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­ic­ally being con­sidered a dir­ect response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s little need to optim­ise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity factor to determ­ine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if object­ives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an import­ant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­ev­ant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge advert­isers per click, their rev­enue increases.

The fol­low­ing chart out­lines the main factors that determ­ine the qual­ity score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This qual­ity score is then used in an algorithm that determ­ines click-cost and pos­i­tion.

Due to this, it’s very pos­sible that an advert appear­ing in top pos­i­tion is pay­ing less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course max­im­ising their rev­en­ues by the higher num­ber of aggreg­ate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more com­plex for advert­isers, con­sider the fol­low­ing scen­ario: an advert with lower CTR is con­vert­ing very strongly on the web­site, as it effect­ively pre-qualifies the traffic. In com­par­ison a high CTR advert for the same cam­paign con­verts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to fil­ter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the land­ing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to cal­cu­late the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depend­ing on objective.

In prac­tise, it’s dif­fi­cult to make this type of dir­ect com­par­ison on a live cam­paign, due to the ever-changing nature of com­pet­i­tion, qual­ity score, pos­i­tions and costs. How­ever, from exper­i­ence, typ­ic­ally for b2c the bene­fit of a higher qual­ity score from optim­ising ad cop­ies towards CTR (with res­ult­ing lowered CPC and higher pos­i­tion) out­weighs the altern­at­ive, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­ment­a­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­ic­ally, these involve a chunk of research to determ­ine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘har­assed MD’ and ‘digital refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They provide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­ic­ally they are simply made up.

That’s unfair of course. These seg­ments rep­res­ent por­traits of group­ings of char­ac­ter­ist­ics as seen by the research­ers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I’m mak­ing is that exactly what these group­ings are is fun­da­ment­ally down to the sub­ject­ive view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ulti­mate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do bet­ter. I’d been on some lead­er­ship train­ing course and taken a test to determ­ine my Myers-Briggs per­son­al­ity. I found what it told me to be both accur­ate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it’s been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essen­tially it breaks the world down into 16 per­son­al­ity types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The indi­vidual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I’m Intro­ver­ted, iNtu­it­ive, Think­ing and Per­ceiv­ing. I won’t go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred’s of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years mil­lions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evid­ence about what makes an indi­vidual per­son­al­ity type tick. I began won­der­ing whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typ­ing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an exper­i­ment. At Ban­ner, we cre­ated a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be com­pleted in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same res­ults as other tests. And then we invited IT pro­fes­sion­als in the US, UK, France and Ger­many to have a go. Every­one who com­pleted the sur­vey got a copy of their res­ults and a little bit of ana­lysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the res­ults were rather remarkable:

Focus­ing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accoun­ted for 40% of the IT pro­fes­sion­als we sur­veyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Archi­tects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then com­pared Europe to the US – aston­ish­ingly the top per­son­al­ity type in Europe accoun­ted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Ger­many were almost polar opposites.

A present­a­tion of the top-line res­ults is embed­ded below. You can down­load it from Slideshare.

The good and the bad

So is this really the pan­acea for seg­ment­a­tion? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in spe­cial­ised job roles. As soon as it is exten­ded to more gen­eral busi­ness roles (eg gen­eral man­age­ment) the indi­vidual per­son­al­ity spikes van­ish and the dis­tri­bu­tion returns to that of the gen­eral population.

There are those who are not con­vinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to per­son­al­ity – Google ‘Cri­ti­cisms of Myers-Briggs’ for a pretty com­pre­hens­ive list. There are a whole bunch of other com­pet­ing systems.

But, as a pos­sible approach it at least removes some of the sub­jectiv­ity from seg­ment­a­tion. The pro­files we built up (by review­ing every piece of lit­er­at­ure on the sub­ject) gave us over 60 dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity attrib­utes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be com­mu­nic­ated with through to what kind of par­ents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.

Money is tight. Budgets are squeezed. You simply don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s decision time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the attendees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have chosen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of bin­ary terms. Brand or demand. Stra­tegic or tac­tical. Even mar­ket­ing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never bin­ary. Every piece of demand activ­ity you pro­duce is an embod­i­ment of your brand. Like­wise every brand com­mu­nic­a­tion should drive demand.

To focus on demand gen­er­a­tion for a moment – there is a tend­ency in the industry to think purely in terms of the num­bers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this com­mu­nic­a­tion achieve? It often leads to a nail the prob­lem, ham­mer the offer, for­get the brand approach (well, we did fol­low the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The prob­lem is that this tends to focus so heav­ily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end oblit­er­ates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we gen­er­ate demand and what it means for the brand, some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

For one thing, the cus­tomer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the prob­lems they face and less about simply what car­rot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the res­ults – we still need to hit the num­bers. But we begin to con­sider the leg­acy of what we cre­ate. What effect will it have on our repu­ta­tion? What will the recip­i­ents say to friends and col­leagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see some­thing from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand gen­er­a­tion here, the bene­fits also extend the other way. By mak­ing more brand-focused com­mu­nic­a­tion respons­ible for grow­ing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands try­ing to cap­ture lofty ideals that are irrel­ev­ant to the con­text their cus­tom­ers find them­selves in (the world peace syndrome).

The res­ult will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loy­alty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?