CMO and Marketing Leadership

CMOs Who Kick Bad Habits For Adaptive Habits Are Stronger Performers

Christopher Stutzman — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:48:59 +0000

What does it take for CMOs to transition the organization from the well-known to the unknown? At Forrester, we call it adaptive marketing. In previous research, we identified the five habits of adaptive marketers. But many CMOs ask whether the destination is worth the journey.

Another way of putting it: What's the implication of doing things the way they've always been done?

That's the question Forrester sought to understand when we fielded a study in collaboration with The CMO Club to understand how well CMOs have developed capabilities that enable them to nimbly adjust to changing consumer behavior and market conditions.

You can read more about the findings of the study in the CMO Strategy section of Advertising Age.

Here's the top line:

Have You Taken A Stand On gTLDs?

Jeff Ernst — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:57:26 +0000

The window to apply for a dot-brand or dot-category generic top-level domain (gTLD) opens on Thursday, January 12th. Have you driven your company to a decision on what to do?

Many of the 50-plus marketing leaders I've talked with about this program in the past six months still haven't figured out what they would do with a domain registry but are concerned about another applicant getting their string. This is a very real concern, and I have addressed this and several of the other most frequent questions I've been getting on this topic in my recent report, "It's Decision Time For gTLDs."

So if you don't have your gTLD application ready to submit, what should you do now? First off, don't get so stuck in the hype about the risk of cybersquatters or of someone else getting your dot-brand. Stick to the advice we gave back in June to evaluate this opportunity strategically, looking at what new business initiatives or models you could deploy with the ability to own and operate a registry.

It is not for everyone. In fact, of the 50 companies I've talked with, fewer than 15 have a strategic initiative in mind for gTLDs. It seems like a no-brainer for a pure web-based business, but what about the brick and mortars? Is the Internet core to how you do business? How you attract, sell to, and service customers? How do you distribute your products and services? What about your supply chain? If these questions are relevant, then you need to be taking a closer look.

gTLDs

2012 Super Bowl Heralds Change In Video And TV Marketing Strategy

Tracy Stokes — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:06:49 +0000

NBC recently announced that it would be streaming its coverage of the 2012 NFL Super Bowl online. NBC has streamed big events before (2010 Olympics, Sunday Night Football), but the big difference here is that it is selling video ads that will run exclusively on the online stream independently of the TV broadcast. This is a huge step for NBC as an ad seller since it is recognizing its untapped online audience and attempting to monetize it. Although the Super Bowl streams (restricted to the US only) are expected to greatly pale in comparison to linear TV viewership, Forrester expects the streaming audience of the Super Bowl to grow dramatically in years to come.

2011 has seen some major change in advertising. Although TV is still king, there's no denying that online video, across a wide variety of devices, is experiencing strong growth. TV advertisers must now contend with smartphones, computers, and tablets as alternative sources of premium video content for engaging viewers with targeted ads.

As media fragmentation increases, marketers will need to rethink their strategies and start to look at online video and TV as two sides of the same coin. In our latest report, "Why Marketers Must Integrate TV And Video Strategies" (subscription required), we make the case that marketers will merge their online video and TV advertising teams to more efficiently reach their audience across whatever screen they happen to be watching. Next month, our VP Practice Leader, David Cooperstein, will be speaking at the ANA TV & Everything Video Forum in New York about how marketers' attitudes and strategies are shifting in the face of this new media convergence.

Thoughts From The 2012 TVOT Conference: Where Are The Marketers?

David Cooperstein — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:03:41 +0000

Yesterday, Researcher Mike Glantz on my team attended the TV of Tomorrow (TVOT) conference in New York City. Practically from the conference floor, here is what he had to say:

"The conference was a packed house of technology vendors, data providers, advertising agencies, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), and TV networks all discussing their collective vision for the future for TV as we know it. I wasn't able to catch all the panels, but some key themes I noted from the ones I was able to attend:

Is Nielsen In Trouble?

David Cooperstein — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:04:53 +0000

This past week, Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, openly decried Nielsen's national, sample-based TV measurement. Although Scanzoni has an inherent bias (GroupM's parent WPP owns Nielsen competitor, Kantar, which has a set-top-box data-based TV measurement system of its own called RaPiDview), his words still speak volumes about the state of TV audience measurement and the need for a new system.

In our report earlier this year, "TV's Currency Conversion" (client access required), we predicted that set-top-box data would start to gain traction in local markets where Nielsen's samples were especially small and statistically unstable. Since then, data providers like Rentrak and Kantar have been gaining traction in these local markets, offering marketers granular user-level data from local cable companies' set-top boxes. Nielsen, too, is aggregating set-top-box data as part of a push for a hybrid methodology, but these efforts are confined to its small local market; its legacy national measurement methodology continues to be based on a relatively small sample of households.

However, Nielsen has more problems on its hands than local TV measurement. Consumers are constantly multitasking with other devices while they watch TV. With attention spans no longer guaranteed during commercial breaks, marketers need new ways to measure their ads not just on TV but also across smartphones, tablets, and laptops as well. As media fragmentation continues to grow, marketers will need behavioral cross-platform metrics that measure their audiences across multiple media touchpoints.

Jay-Z Decodes The Future Of Digital Out-Of-Home

Tracy Stokes — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

For the 2010 launch of his autobiography Decoded, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z ran a teaser campaign with Bing that released one page of the book per day on out-of-home signage; people across the US tried to decode the pages from buildings, pools, and clothing racks. Jay-Z is one of many marketers giving the once-stagnant out-of-home channel an infusion of digital and creative innovation. Place-based networks, digital signage, digital billboards, and hybrid installations offer an array of options for marketing leaders to consider as they try to reach on-the-go consumers. This reinvigorated medium offers marketers greater relevance, engagement, and interaction. It grabs consumers with content at the right time in the right place -- when they are about to make a purchase decision -- and offers the immediacy of instant gratification or information through smartphone-enabled technology.

To get a picture of this new media landscape and to find out more about how leading marketers have begun to use digital out-of-home, check out my new report, "Digital Remakes Out-Of-Home Advertising."

What do you see in the future for digital out-of-home? Are you ready to get outside?

Thanks!

Where's The Meat In ANA's Claims Against ICANN's gTLD Program?

Jeff Ernst — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:59:08 +0000

My colleague Chris Stutzman reports from the 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing conference that Association of National Advertisers (ANA) CEO Bob Liodice used his keynote presentation to continue to hammer ICANN's generic top-level domain (gTLD) initiative. Maybe he should listen to Dana Anderson, SVP at Kraft Foods, who spoke about how "lasting change happens in leaps and bounds, not through incremental shifts."

I've been advising companies since ICANN's announcement in June on how to evaluate the .brand or .category opportunity, and most of those companies haven't found a bona fide new business opportunity that justifies the investment in a gTLD. But with few exceptions, they're looking at ICANN's plans as one of the biggest opportunities since the dawn of the Internet to take more control of their brand online, which is why the ANA argument troubles me.

The heart of the ANA's arguments come down to claims that it will cost brands billions of dollars in defensive registrations to protect their trademarks from cybersquatters and other web perpetrators of all sorts. But let's dig into that a little deeper:

Modern Lessons In Brand Leadership — Highlights Of The 2011 ANA Masters Of Marketing Conference

Christopher Stutzman — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:47 +0000

The 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing conference once again brought together the power brokers of US advertising in a state-of-the-state event of entertainment, networking, and speeches over three days. In all, more than 1,700 marketers and marketing service firms convened in Phoenix to share in this year's official theme -- growth.

Indeed, these are trying times for CMOs to deliver growth through traditional marketing. Growth has been challenging and inconsistent for most marketers over the past three years as they fight a war on two fronts -- the turbulence of the economy and the turbulence of empowered customers. Thomas Friedman reinforced those points, asserting that in order for America to grow, as a market and a people, the notion of "average" cannot be accepted; companies must become exceptional once again by unleashing creativity and innovation on a global stage. That's why the more salient subtext of the conference was leadership.

How Will You And Your Marketing Programs Be Measured In 2012? Take Our Survey On ROI Trends.

Tracy Stokes — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:26:55 +0000

According to an Advertising Age article that discussed a new IBM survey released today, many CMOs "believe that marketing's financial return on investment will become a key marker of success in the next three to five years." With continued economic turmoil, marketing leaders are facing increased pressure to measure their results, but faced with an overhwelming amount of data, finding the right KPI needles in the haystack of information can be overwhelming. To sift through this data overload, we are conducting research for a report on how leading marketers will be measuring success. Take our survey on ROI measurement to tell us how you are changing your ROI approach for 2012, and we'll send you a copy of the results so that you can see how others are navigating the ROI path.

Thank you!

Break Down The Walls Of Shopper Marketing

Tracy Stokes — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:42:13 +0000

As the economic malaise lingers on, a more frugal consumer mindset is spurring consumers to embrace new digital technologies to make more informed buying decisions. This shift in behavior is releasing shopper marketing from the confines of the store walls, as consumers make purchase decisions at home and on-the-go. Once a tactical outpost in the sales organization, shopper marketing is now being embraced by forward-thinking marketers like Kellogg's and Clorox, which are focused on getting on their consumer's shopping list before she even gets to the store. But with this new opportunity comes potential organization confusion. Where does shopper marketing end and brand marketing begin? And where should it sit in the organization? Check out my report, "Shopper Marketing Breaks Out Of The Store," to find out how consumers' shopping habits are changing, how retailers are responding, and what it means for brand marketers.

How is your consumer shopping differently? And how is shopper marketing changing your organization? Answer here or join the discussion on The Forrester Community For CMO & Marketing Leadership Professionals here.

Thanks!

How Marketing Mix Modeling Is Adapting To New Technologies And A Heightened Demand For Marketing Accountability

Luca Paderni — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:00:45 +0000

Marketing mix modeling solutions have been around for quite some time, providing marketers in several key categories with complex statistical models that aim to find the correlation between past marketing activities and business outcomes, like sales or market share.

However this space has recently seen significant changes, due to a few specific dynamics:

The proliferation of digital and social media with increasing importance in the marketing mix.
Marketers' increased demand for tools that are not only able to deliver insights on past campaigns but also able to give forward-looking recommendations on how to improve marketing return on investment (ROI) in the future.
The rising role that sophisticated software plays in integrating the ever-growing number of data streams and in enabling complex analysis to be navigated and customized via powerful graphic user interfaces.

To help navigate this complex and highly relevant space for senior marketers, our research team has published the first Forrester Wave™ for vendors in the marketing mix modeling space. We screened more than 30 vendors, shortlisted six that we consider to be the key players in this very fragmented market, and ranked them according to more than 40 different criteria. The evaluation uncovered a market in which:

Want To Know How Your Marketing Colleagues Are Planning Their 2012 Budgets? Take Our Survey And Find Out.

Tracy Stokes — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:58:32 +0000

Budget season is upon us. With a rapidly changing media landscape, many marketers are re-evaluating how they allocate their marketing dollars. How is your budget changing for 2012? Will you take back TV dollars? Spend on social? Move more to mobile? Invest in innovation? I'm writing a new report that will take a look at marketing budget plans for 2012 to help marketing leaders understand how they should benchmark their budgets. Please take a 10-minute break from your email overload to take our survey and tell us your plans. What's in it for you? Take your choice of one of our top summer reports and a copy of the survey results -- your own direct line into what your colleagues are planning.

New Cross-Media Metrics Will Change How Marketers Approach “Video” Advertising

David Cooperstein — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:39:11 +0000

One of our ace researchers on the CMO and marketing leadership team, Mike Glantz, pulled together this blog post to follow up on a report we collaborated on a few months back, "TV's Currency Conversion" (client access required), which discussed the merging of Nielsen data and set-top box and other census-level data. Although television is the overall dominant advertising medium in US, marketers are seeing audience fragmentation across the spectrum of broadcast and cable networks. In the digital world, online video viewership continues to grow and enables marketers to target niche audiences with relative precision, compared with TV. However, marketers have been hesitant to see online video and TV as two sides of the same coin because there has not been a common measurement to link the two media, and digital video is perceived to lack the massive reach that TV currently enjoys.

CMOs And CIOs Tackle Technology: Q&A With Robert Mead, CMO, And Michael Mathias, CIO, At Aetna

David Cooperstein — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:50:37 +0000

Recently my colleague Sharyn Leaver and I had the opportunity to meet with Robert Mead and Michael Mathias, the CMO and CIO, respectively, at Aetna. They will be speaking at our upcoming CIO-CMO Forum on September 22, 2011, in Boston, so this serves as a bit of a preview to what should be an eye-opening presentation. Enjoy!

David Cooperstein: What external changes drove you to build a deeper partnership with your technology peers?

Robert Mead, senior vice president, Aetna marketing, product and communications: The US healthcare system is fragmented and well behind the curve in terms of price transparency and consumer-friendly products and services. The deep partnership between technology and marketing at Aetna lets us put leading-edge technologies and powerful tools and applications directly into the hands of people so that they can be confident consumers and informed patients. Our close collaboration with our colleagues in technology is driven by a few external factors:

The increasing cost of care and the corresponding changes in employer-based insurance -- consumers are being asked to take more ownership of their health and wellness and their healthcare spending.
The introduction and rapid adoption of technology empowers consumers (and patients) to engage in the healthcare system where they are in life and in the way they want to be connected.
Healthcare reform aims to bring millions of previously uninsured Americans into the marketplace as consumers.

David: How have you measured the results of a tighter relationship between the two of you in terms of corporate goals and personal metrics?

Time For Marketers To Move To Adaptive Planning?

Luca Paderni — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:37:49 +0000

Marketing planning has changed little in the past century. It's essentially a linear process built on the development of rigid 12-month plans built around brand and channel metrics. This approach is coming increasingly under strain as the combined effects of the growth of digital marketing platforms and a volatile economy demand marketing plans that deliver clear business outcomes and can adapt and improve to meet evolving market dynamics.

Over the past 12-18 months, we have come across several marketing organizations that have decided to do something about this situation and look for new ways to improve their approach to marketing planning by adopting some principles borrowed from a relatively new methodology originally conceived for software development efforts: agile development.

From the interviews that we did with marketers that are experimenting with this new approach, several of the key principles of "agile" development looked particularly relevant to innovating their approach to marketing planning:

CMO and Marketing Leadership

CMOs Who Kick Bad Habits For Adaptive Habits Are Stronger Performers

Have You Taken A Stand On gTLDs?

Categories:

2012 Super Bowl Heralds Change In Video And TV Marketing Strategy

Categories:

Thoughts From The 2012 TVOT Conference: Where Are The Marketers?

Categories:

Is Nielsen In Trouble?

Categories:

Jay-Z Decodes The Future Of Digital Out-Of-Home

Categories:

Where's The Meat In ANA's Claims Against ICANN's gTLD Program?

Categories:

Modern Lessons In Brand Leadership — Highlights Of The 2011 ANA Masters Of Marketing Conference

How Will You And Your Marketing Programs Be Measured In 2012? Take Our Survey On ROI Trends.

Categories:

Break Down The Walls Of Shopper Marketing

Categories:

How Marketing Mix Modeling Is Adapting To New Technologies And A Heightened Demand For Marketing Accountability

Categories:

Want To Know How Your Marketing Colleagues Are Planning Their 2012 Budgets? Take Our Survey And Find Out.

Categories:

New Cross-Media Metrics Will Change How Marketers Approach “Video” Advertising

Categories:

CMOs And CIOs Tackle Technology: Q&A With Robert Mead, CMO, And Michael Mathias, CIO, At Aetna

Categories:

Time For Marketers To Move To Adaptive Planning?

Categories: