According to Forrester, just 23% believe their traditional shops are capable of executing interactive marketing. On the other hand, only 22% percent agrees that their digital agency is ready “to lead the brand”.

Read it again and think it over. It is kind of a stupid question in the first place, but Forrester’s findings say in so many words that –according to advertisers, possibly– in more than 75% of the cases, digital communication either sucks or harms your brand.

Even though Forrester adds that ‘the whole industry is in flux’, advertisers should not go with that particular flow. Unless you gladly keep spending your money on either speculations that are of no practical relevance, or on turf wars.

Your brand is built by what you do.

Let’s get your priorities right first. It is not your brand strategy which eventually will determine what your brand is. Not even if that strategy has been carefully calculated and generates brilliant communication which always delivers a consistent message everywhere. Not today. Not anymore.

You simply cannot advertise your way to greatness. Your company truly, authentically has to walk the talk. Consumers judge brands the same way they judge people: by their actions rather than their promises.

So, as a company, if you’re not there yet and if I were you, I’d rather spend my budget on internal marketing than on ’several different agencies’. Because, if the walk is right, whoever does the talk is of secondary importance. Although I’ve already been dishing up our outspoken opinion on that touchy topic in previous posts, I will do it again below. With peppers on top.

If you’re funding a turf war, it’s your loss.

Some advertisers try and play it clever. Like Procter & Gamble for example. They work with lots of different agencies. That is why they ‘incentify collaboration’. It is quite acceptable that this is the only possible approach for a +400-product company, but you really don’t need to spend a lot of money on research to find out that ‘the multiple-agency approach means higher administrative costs and more coordination’. Dixit Forrester.

The multiple-agency approach is far from efficient. Despite the glam smiles you’ll be getting from every party involved, you’ve just started a turf war which will sneakily but very efficiently devaluate your budget. And you know how it is with wars in general: nobody wins. And with turf wars in particular: especially not you.

There’s no real life and digital life. It’s the same place.

We have all become very techno-dependent in both our personal and our professional life. That has changed the way we communicate. That has changed society. And that explains why your next internet strategy has nothing to do with the internet. But everything with how people live today. Your next internet strategy simply is your communication strategy.

Does that mean you no longer need offline media? No, it doesn’t. It simply means that the balance has tipped. Your main concern should be your digital communication strategy. Why? Because today it is inherent to real life. And it makes it possible to tap into the networks of everyone you reach. Then, and only then, you should look into how offline media can serve your digital strategy.

Conclusion?

First get your act together internally. See to it that everyone at your company buys your message before your customers do. And then hire marketing creatives whose brains have been digitally conditioned ever since. Preferably working at 1 and the same company.

Yeah, we are waiting for you to call. ;)

A sum up of our findings…

The impact of Local Businesses on Search

Latest initiatives in this field are the following:

• Google Maps – OK, this exists already for a long while, but more and more you can find local businesses on the Google homepage (search for “aannemers in Gent” for instance)
• each local business can now claim his local business information on a Google Place page and have a “owner verified listing” notification showing web results, reviews, links, pictures, transit information, directions etc
• Nearby Places you might like (a new addition to a local businesses’ Place page) offers an overview of (surprisingly) places nearby that you might like, based on other users’ reviews
• Coupons for Local Businesses – now a local business can add a realtime coupon or update to his local page, pushing his entry up the results and enabling it to be more relevant
• Pages now even have detailed “What people are saying about” your steak, your wine, your service, … entries
• Favorite Places – overviews of rated local businesses near large (for the moment) US cities including the possibility for local businesses to direct people from their window to reviews about their store, shop, hotel, restaurant, … including nifty QR-codes spreading it in the real world
• Near me now – a mobile web solution when you are looking for a restaurant nearby and want some user ratings to make the right decision – right from the ease of the Google Mobile homepage (iPhone 3.0 & US residents only currently) was launched recently
• Google Places Directory - an Android application with web search reviews of restaurants, hotels, gas stations, parking places etc. is similar to the “near by me” feature on Google Search but in a native application. The same content is used for Google Maps to be more accurate.
• speaking of which, the Google Maps for Android version has mobile maps including driving directions, traffic information (even transit directions for trains, metros and busses!) to the same directory of (local advertisers’) places (and even your favorite skiing resort)
• Google Maps “starring” (adding places to favorites) of local places are now synced from your mobile maps (both iPhone and Android) to your pc’s maps
• and are pushed in the Personalized Suggestions for Maps

I can hear you think out loud: not everyone has a Google account  and not everyone uses all those features Google offers. Both are true, but concerning the former: 173 million people have Google Mail accounts up to date (even more have a Google account)  and Google Buzz is one of those tools that will boost this number even further. More and more people subscribe on YouTube and create google accounts at the same time. Etc. The latter is also true. This is called the participation inequality:

• only little people “create” the web (1%?),
• some “enhance” the web (7%?) by including content in their blogs, adding comments or likes
• others “share” the web (15%?) with their connections on their favorite social platforms.
• all other people are “surfing” the web (or “lurking” as Jakob Nielsen called it in 2006) and reading what the others created, enhanced or shared.

In short:

Google wants more people to “create”, “enhance” and “share” content using Google accounts – starting with listings where the money comes from: those from adwords advertisers. Because more ratings, means more relevant content for all the “lurkers” out there.

But there is more…

Why Google Buzz is not an anti-Facebook move

Google Buzz launched yesterday. A beautiful product (in our opinion) but according to most Twitterati rather lame. I won’t try explaining what the service does, I’ll let you watch this (less than 2 minute) YouTube movie which explains it all.

Is Google Buzz the Facebook killer? No. Is it a Twitter replacement? Not at all. Will you start using it more than you use your other channels? Probably not. Actually, most certainly not. So it is lame? As a Facebook-killer, Twitter-replacement or attempt to replace your favorite channels? Yes, definitely. But we started this article with mentioning what Google has been up with all along: their search engine. And Google Buzz is about improving search results, adding social results.

A brief recap of recent history:

• Google made its search more realtime by adding instant news and Twitter results as well as updates from platforms as Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca.
• Google has its Google Profiles for some time now, enabling every Google user to create an up to date overview/profile of who he is, which services he uses etc. Including the partner services that make the web more realtime. Including the open standard platforms such as Flickr or own platforms such as YouTube.
• FriendConnect, integrated in over 170 million websites, enables people “enhance” and “share” the web on a daily basis easier than ever before. Integrated in Blogger, Joomla and Drupal and growing its features (and presence on sites) every single day.
• Google Social Search (youtube movie) – introduced late 2009 and released January 27, 2010 – makes your search results more social by adding results from your social circle grabbing your connected google friends’ social contents. If you have a Google account, check this page which gives an overview of your connections found directly on Google (only 4 in my case – little friends of mine use gMail apparently or have set up Google Profiles), on the other hand I have set up a Google Profile and linked over 20 social services I use occasionally. Including my Twitter accounts, of which updates are crawled from about 416 people. From those people, friends’ links are indexed and secondary info is found for over 916 additional connections. This makes my social circle a set of about 1336 trusted people/sources. Social circle results appear now on Google Search results.
• UPDATE 11/02: I currently have those figures, after using Google Buzz since yesterday night (< 18 hours).
  
• Google Buzz enables 173 million gMail users (because that is the number of accounts according to Comscore) to get in contact with their social circle’s updates and make the participation inequality’s “sharing audience” of about 15% grow, creating more relevant content, enabling Google to detect better than ever before what a user’s most deepest wishes and intentions are. Enabling their social search to be even better than before, driving traffic to their local search advertisers as Google Buzz is mobile-enabled and creates additional content (to be “shared”, “enhanced” and mainly “lurked at” by all the lurkers out there (déja-vu)).

In short:

Google Buzz is NOT the facebook killer some people want it to be, it is however a very cool social extention to make the web more social and create additional value for its adwords business. Because when we said “Google has been focussed on search results all the time, you can read this as: focussed on advertising value“. Means to an end and stuff…

Google’s Next Move?

Hard to predict.

My two cents? Start social conversations and request for friends’ input from the Google search homepage. If I was looking for a restaurant near Ghent today Google would show me

• local business results,
• pushing those with coupons on top,
• add user opinions from a realtime Twitter search
• add friends’ opinions from my social circle
• and – not to forget – show related adwords next to my search results

What if the next move could be to actively ask my social circle for their opinion, right from within the Google homepage – integrating it perfectly with Google Buzz? Vark.com, prepare to get bought by a Google that wants to launch its “Social Help” feature…

UPDATE: I wrote this article two days ago (wednesday 10/2) and yesterday (11/2), it was announced that Google has bought Vark.com (Aardvark). Or they listened to me, or – more likely – they have been planning this all along, which underlines the theory stated in this argumentation.

Anyone who has been working in publicity for – say – the last 20 years, definitely already has heard someone drag up this story.

Selling lawn mowers to flatdwellers.

If you’re going through any trouble or spend any money to try and sell a lawn mower to flatdwellers, you’re not particularly bright. The reason is blatantly obvious: no matter how resourceful a salesman you are, no matter how hilarious an entertainer you are, you will never ever sell that lawn mower. Not to flatdwellers. Because flatdwellers are no idiots. Neither is any other consumer.

Nevertheless, trying to sell lawn mowers to those who will never draw benefit, is exactly what advertisers pig-headedly are still wasting most of their money on. They try and fob off baldies with shampoo. Canal boats with the Bedouin. Disposable nappies with the childless. Porn with priests. Although the latter may seem like a business model in its own right, you’re no idiot either: you got the point.

How come? Everyone knows you’d better not bother people with stuff that will never be of any use to them, isn’t that right? People are no morons. And no advertiser is capable of bending anyone’s free will.

Carpet bombing your marketing message.

But then again: up until a couple of years ago, advertisers really had not much of an alternative. The only option to create awareness or merely get your product sold, was to carpet bomb your target group with your marketing message and hope you hit as many of them as possible. Undoubtedly, you are familiar with these marketing tactics. They’ve been baptized the “Spray and Pray Approach”.

With this approach, it is crucial to build up as much stopping power as possible in order to cut through the clutter. So maybe, possibly, consumers would stop and listen to you. That stopping power, that potential to cut through the clutter could only be achieved by a –everything but mediocre– creative idea.

However, the ‘Spray and Pray’ model is terminal. Because, not only has an alternative emerged, it proves to be both valid and solid.

Society has adopted new behaviors.

The past couple of years, we have all become extremely techno-dependent. Both at home and at work. A recent study by Synovate tells us that in Australia, the States and Western Europe, 9 out of 10 people rate the internet as ‘completely necessary to their lives’. We communicate in totally different ways than only a couple of years ago. And if we change the way we communicate, we change society. It is obvious that, now that society has adopted new behaviors, marketing communication has to adapt in order to remain efficient.

In the fifties, the time when television got its breakthrough, one used to say that thanks to this ‘invention’, advertisers could step into people’s living room. Today, thanks to social media in general and particularly social media on the mobile platform, advertisers can enter people’s lives. Always. Everywhere. With highly relevant messages based on profile, time and place.

Creativity is secondary to relevance.

You’re on to me. Today, relevance is what determines the stopping power of your marketing message. First and foremost. Albeit that the creative idea is still important, it has become secondary to relevance. Whoever still clings to the idea of the omnipotent creative idea, is putting the cart before the horse.

Advertisers’ number one priority is that the marketing message is completely in the consumer’s line. At the right time, under the right circumstances. If that is the case, and only then, the creative idea can possibly make a difference.

Is there immediate cause for copywriters and art directors anywhere in the world to start worrying? To the extent they do not have jumping brains – i.e. brains affected by the online way of thinking – most definitely. Yes.

The first node to reach vast networks.

Online is where you get to know people. By profiling. It is the place where the receiver of the message is not the final destination of that message but the first node to potentially reach vast networks. With tuned messages with regard to profile, time and place.

Whoever understands this, understands the true meaning of it. The center of gravity has shifted. Your internet strategy has become the heart of your communication. The people in charge of communication at Coca-Cola (expedition206), Ford (FiestaMovement) and Samsung (Mobile Explorers) are no idiots. We know we’re repeating ourselves, but neither are you.

The Future is Online and Connected

If you didn’t catch our drift yet: we believe the future – also the future of advertising – is online and connected. Five existing technologies, the one already somewhat more wide-spread than the other, add up to the future of advertising. We discussed where the social web (I don’t think we need to introduce Facebook.com?), the pervasive web (or the Internet of Things – Nike Plus connects even your shoes to the internet!), the semantic web (Wolfram Alpha is doing amazing things with today’s web data), digital enhanced life (advanced augmented reality if you like that more like Microvision’s wearable displays) and affective computing (yes, we will even know how you feel if Smartex can pull it off) will lead us in a few years from now.

We concluded our last session with some key figures from both Charlene Li’s EngagementDB report (July 2009) and last week’s released Synovate’s global survey about digital dependency and some possible next steps for your company.

In a world where the consumer decides whether you – the advertiser – is in or out and where your brand is what consumers say about it, you only have  two options: you either invest in media and/or in content. Today, media no longer means paper, media means people. That’s why investing in content definitely is the better option. We showed several examples of companies already bringing this insight into practice: Coca Cola has recruited 3 young people to travel around the world as happiness ambassadors in 2010 with it’s Expedition 206, Samsung  has recruited about 60 people to report on  the Vancouver winter games with the brand new Omnia 2, and Ford rolled out a brilliant social media campaign called “Fiesta Movement”.

If at this time you are not  ready yet to invest in content, but do care for some social media efforts, we discussed some options for investing in media. We showed examples of social ads or the somewhat more expensive engagement ads (on Facebook) and a deeper Netlog integration by means of games or Netlog skins.

We concluded with some screen captures of the AdNerds listening tool (more info soon!). It is currently being used by Telenet and it is almost ready to be rolled out for our complete client base. If you want to stay informed about our social media tools (there are more in development), feel free to drop us a line (info@adnerds.be).

This enormous change had an enormous impact on our brains and how they are wired. We all grew “jumping brains” as a result and as soon as we are in a connected world (pixels instead of paper for instance), we operate by other rules: we no longer want to pay for content, especially not when there are ads involved. We have no problem with Google putting ads next to articles with the same content (although newspapers put advertising as far away from the editorial content about the same subject).

As AdNerds, we believe that putting digital in the center of your marketing communications is the only way to be successful in the future. Offering digital solutions, based on traditional insights can be fun for sure, but it’s not a long-term, viable solution. Digital solutions based on the understanding of hyper-connectivity, both technologically AND on a personal level (the network effect!) is what will make you stand out, what will make sure your campaigns are successful, have that ROI you are looking for.

The session gives an overview of applications that are hot – and those that are not. We end with an exercice on how a digital view on newspapers can make up for a viable business model with additional revenues for publishers, without the need for major changes or getting rid of paper.

Hope you like it, your comments are highly appreciated…

In the first session we discussed how major companies are changing the approach of their corporate websites in order to face the steep decline of visitors. Visitors, who are all floating towards the social web, are spending most of their spare time over there instead of on your (and your competitor’s) brand sites. Smart brands are syndicating their content to the places where consumers are spending time (Kraft Foods), they are integrating with the “source of evil” – social media platforms – (Ben&Jerry’s), aggregating social and user generated content on their websites (you got to love the Skittles example) or they are really tapping into consumer’s daily lifes (WiskIt enables you to erase unwanted Facebook pictures, how useful is that?) and connecting with them on a very personal level (the Nike+ platform).

You can find all slides underneath and pretty soon, we will update those slides with the audio file recorded during our session. We welcome any feedback on the slides or the session in the comments.

You decide what you want us to do. There is only one thing: you will be competing with your fellow-FollowFriday visitors and will need to persuade us with your briefing. Enter all requested details below because that will determine if we pick you to be the winner!

Joshua Davis definitely rocks.

Joshua Davis

If you haven’t heard about Joshua Davis yet, you’re missing out big time. The 38-year-old-skateboarder is interesting to look at: he can no longer possibly cover his tattoos with clothes. He is really funny and entertaining. And he’s got a very interesting and inspiring story to tell. Not to mention the fact that he’s a great artist. He was trained as a painter, teaches art in NY, draws in illustrator and has Flash randomly generate art with his vector drawings in an über-controlled way. Well, kinda.

You’re in luck: his session was recorded.

Cross-device Campaigns for Deeper Brand Engagement.

Richard Lent of Agencynet struck a chord with me. I can always appreciate someone who speaks his mind, refuses to show commercials because ‘he hates disruptive advertising’ to promptly and exclusively focus on the stuff that really engages consumers.

You can watch his session here.

Reaching users on social networks and mobile devices.

Of course, Adobe had some of it’s own people host quite a few sessions. I attended the session by Mich Green about ‘Adobe Flash Platform Services’. The idea of having an app store scattered all over the internet in order to get relevant apps to a much broader audience faster really appealed to me. And the idea of cross promoting apps really sparked of a couple of very usable ideas.

You can watch his session here.

Read ‘The Fun Part (which was interesting)‘.