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'Marketech' - more sales, less outlay

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

All my rich friends, who work in the financial sector, think the world has ended. If you were employed in the technology sector in 2001, you felt the same way. After this bubble, the tech sector looks much more solid. I�m not suggesting a consumer downturn won�t hurt, but businesses still believe that new technology and investment online can help them cut costs and improve efficiency. And they�re right.

In the up-coming downturn, tech companies will obsess about market share, pipeline and, most importantly, revenues. Strong brands will prevail over the weak � as they tend to do in shrinking markets. But gone are the days when brand advertising alone would drive sales. Welcome to the world of hard-nosed demand generation. This new marketing science brings marketing more in sync with sales than ever before.

Tech marketers will need to appeal to businesses and consumers under pressure. They will have to find solid, rational stories around unemotional issues like ROI, interoperability, energy efficiency etc. And tell those stories without big media budgets. Today�s most effective marketing tools are all technology stories of their own � social media, consumer generated content, search, video-on-demand, marketing automation, the long tail etc.

In 2001, the dot-com millionaires went back to banking. In 2009, the banks have run out of money and pure-play advertising has run out of road. The new marketing landscape is crawling with as many technology-based marketing tools as last year�s sub-prime mortgages. Feast yourselves on Google Trends, Google Analytics, YouTube, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and loads more. Embrace them today � they�ll be more expensive tomorrow.

IMHO: Outsourcing brainpower

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In the 80s advertising alone was able to make a profound difference to a business's fortunes. Today, this is much less true. The campaign is dead. Yet marketing has become intrinsic in modern organisations. Marketing now touches everything a company does, everywhere.

The struggle to create relevance and differentiation in a highly commoditised world has never been more intense. Undervalued, unloved and sometimes unkempt, the people best able to deliver this are still lurking in agencies and design shops - posing as planners and creative talent.

Unfortunately, today's obsession with procurement is driving agencies to 'unbundle' the deliverables of marketing and flog them at rock bottom prices. Clients simply aren't allowed to pay for strategic thinking. This is madness.

Management consultancies are able to charge exorbitant fees for suggesting strategies largely based on the forensic analysis of trailing numbers. How can this ever buck a market trend? Before anyone at McKinsey, Bain or Accenture puts out a fatwa on my life, I believe they all have a valuable part to play. But 'blank slate' creativity is simply not their bag.

And that's not all. Technology is affecting the marketing landscape faster than ever before. Automated marketing programmes, real-time reporting and mobile campaigns on 100 different platforms. Does any client have the bandwidth to cope? Frankly, I doubt it.

So step up and fork out for agency 3.1. Besides the typical skills, expect them to be digital and search literate but also business savvy and totally comfortable with tomorrow's technology.

They won't come cheap. But luckily for the procurement people, they'll be worth every penny.

IMHO: Personal advertising

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Staff Writer, Steven Elliott

(Rod Banner is in California at FORTUNE's Brainstorm Tech 2008)

It may be an apocryphal story, but it's said Lester Wunderman, the self-styled father of direct marketing, laments the fact that he chose the term 'direct marketing' over 'personal advertising'. Poor Lester may not have to despair for much longer. As marketing becomes more digitally-driven, it strikes me that the distinction between advertising and direct marketing is increasingly blurred.

Today's most celebrated advertising campaigns invite interaction from their audience. Engagement is the new measure of success. Few channels don't now offer the ability for a customer to respond in some way. From the red button on your digital TV to Bluetooth-enabled posters. We may not always be selling directly off the (web)page, but levels of response are now being used to measure the effectiveness of brand advertising.

Of course direct marketing hasn't stood still. The combination of variable digital print, personalisation and advances in data mining and analytics is making campaigns more relevant and targeted than ever before.

What's really changed in the past year is the application of similar analytics and mass personalisation to online advertising. Publishers like Google are now capturing user data every bit as revealing as the shopping habits monitored to such effect by the likes of Tesco. Behaviourally targeted television advertising won't be far behind.

In this converged marketing landscape the separation of advertising and direct marketing disciplines is nonsensical. And in my view it's going to be far easier for brand-savvy direct agencies to evolve than it is for advertising agencies to acquire the left-brained marketing skills needed to thrive in this new world.

IMHO: Marketing 2.0 - The pig is dead.

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:30:00 +0000

Jeremy Bullmore once said that marketing is a posh word for selling but for once, he's wrong.

Marketing is often perceived as the stuff you 'apply' to bring a product to the attention of its potential buyers. It may even include the persuasive argument required to make someone actually part with their money.

But today's customers aren't falling for spin anymore. Today's marketing has to affect a company's entire DNA. Product Design, User Interface, Out of Box Experience and Customer Support are all part of the brand experience and need to be considered as part of the marketing brief.

The key is to know what makes your customers tick and to be certain of what they are trying to 'get done'. Only then can you provide precisely what they will need to accomplish these goals. 'If I know what you need, I can build what you will buy'.

The day is past when you could simply put lipstick on a pig and expect it to become desirable.

Search - the new research

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:30:00 +0000

Getting content onto a website is pretty simple now with the prevalence of Content Management Systems (CMS). Architecting it in a customer-centric fashion, however, has become more crucial than ever.

Differentiation and relevance are the two miracle ingredients for successful marketing but they still elude many companies. One way to nail them is to figure out what your customers are trying to get done and then ensure your offering helps them do it best.

In the past you could only gather insights into their attitudes and desires by spending a lot of money on research. But now there are heaps of new tools that help you to look into your potential customers' minds by way of search data. And many of them are free.

The big daddy of them all is arguably Google Trends. Though not the answer to everything, it gives some fascinating statistical insights into what people are looking for and where they are when they're looking.

More powerful still is Microsoft Adlab. MS have built some very impressive tools that predict the demographics of the people who hit your site - or anyone else's. Both of these services are completely free.

Then there's Wordtracker - a site built to help you discover the efficacy of various different search terms. They charge for this service but there's a free trial if you want to see what it's like before parting with any cash.

The upshot is that the marketing landscape is fundamentally changing. Web 2.0 innovations are throwing off powerful tools that help us create more customer-centric online experiences. It would be a mistake not to take advantage of them.

IMHO: Minced Peace

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:00:00 +0000

I'm very mixed on the notion of religion. Very keen on the idea of ethics and virtue but puzzled by just how twisted things become when different flavours of God come into play.

Christmas is ostensibly a religious festival to commemorate the birth of Christ but it seems to have become blotted out by booze and presents and confused by Santa and mistletoe.

The good news is the tiny vestige of spirituality that can still be found if you look hard enough.

I'm prepared to celebrate the birth of anyone who comes into the world simply to do the right thing. And so are all my Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist friends (or any other flavours that I have left out).

Wouldn't it be sublime if, this Christmas, we could share the stories of all the great religious leaders. And let?s pray that everyone listens. So that next year we can live in a more tolerant and diverse world. A place where barbarism, justified in the name of God, is a thing of the past.

IMHO: Clean tech - a perfect storm

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Dwindling oil reserves, instability in the Middle East and global warming have prompted a review of our addiction to fossil fuels. Clean tech is the new sector heralded as offering the answer. It's a tantalising space - new energy investments alone are set to hit $60 billion this year. But that's just one part of the picture. How we consume the stuff needs to change.

The tech sector isn't impervious to environmental responsibility. Think about all those power-hungry servers spinning their disks for insufficient reason. The millions of power adaptors, gobbling juice with nothing connected to them. And the pointless horsepower in our laptops - a 2 gig plus Core Duo chip to run a word processor may soon be deemed as socially irresponsible as an SUV.

And how easily can we recycle tech products? With enough CRT monitors in the world to present a serious environmental problem, the industry has woken up but still needs to take more responsibility for its detritus.

Clean tech is a huge opportunity. Leading tech brands that embrace it will discover a key differentiator. New brands will surface on this new wave of optimism. But investors, be careful. The VCs are stuffed with cash again. Their hype machines have been dusted down for another outing and it's been some time since the fall of Dot Communism. Don't let exuberance cloud your judgement.