Have a great holiday and see you when I get back!

Unfortunately, algorithms can’t build great brands.

Shawn wrote a nice piece on how the early pioneers of web advertising created the problems the medium has today in that everyone thinks advertising is an algorithm.  It’s nice to see some folks pushing back, intelligently, on the problem:

Early internet companies and digital gurus have attempted to change the fundamentals of advertising by promising a world of measurability, interaction and precise targeting. The first 15 years of online advertising was littered with portals, ad networks and pay-for-performance “spray and pray” advertising. It was a direct marketer’s dream: buy billions of squares and rectangles on the web as cheap as you can, add some basic audience-targeting parameters and presto! You’re considered a successful internet marketer.

This method worked in the beginning when online-media consumption was under 10% and great brands were still built through offline channels (e.g., newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, etc.). However, with the average person now spending close to 35% of his or her media consumption time online, the facade and fallacy of online marketing “success” is quickly crumbling. Brands are being forced to use the internet for positive brand-building experiences

Advertising is much, much more than technology or the algorithms technology creates and we will do ourselves well to remember that as we collectively mature Digital OOH.

Great “truths” that he relates as well that fit into our world.  I especially like # 3 and #4:

Today, marketing executives I speak with, who have collectively spent billions in online advertising, recognize certain truths:

1. You can’t build a positive brand identity by simply buying billions of squares and rectangles on unknown websites; in fact, littering the web in this manner will, in almost all cases, hurt your brand more than it will help it.
2. Creativity is still everything.
3. The environment in which your ad is seen is more important than how many of your ads are seen.
4. The decline in offline-media consumption has left a void in helping advertisers build strong brands.

These executives are turning to the web but find the digital industry’s focus misguided and the fundamental brand-building tools lacking.

On #4, many advertisers I work with are running into the problem of finding “voids” in their plans in coverage because of faltering traditional media and fragmentation.

Whereas advertising awards used to be really easy at Cannes, consisting of…um…just TV creative, today’s advertising doesn’t look quite the same as it did in days of yore. As the article states:

The blurring of lines for what’s an ad is obvious in the competition for Lion awards at the 56th International Advertising Festival this week. Entries in the 11 ad categories range from faux ads and products to marketing that combines a live event, social networking, film and outdoor.

Did you read that right?  Yes, that said OUTDOOR and SOCIAL NETWORKING.

Integrated programs that combine the effects of a multiplatform and multi-touchpoint campaign are what’s winning awards these days and what marketers feel is hot and worthy of conversation - NOT TV (well…it depends what agency you work for and how stuck on living in the past they are)

Where awards get won, creatives usually follow and I’ll be looking forward to seeing the Cannes results and entries over the coming years.  Maybe I’ll even be allowed to attend 

Worth the quickie read and exploring some of the submissions

Andrew’s/Ad Age’s Art of Outdoor can be found here.

While the focus is in no way really digital for the Art of Outdoor, Jonah Bloom did a follow up piece and made some great observations, many of which (ahem) have been covered in these pages over the last year or so (cmon…it’s good for the ego every once in a while ).

While it’s nice to see people start to take notice of things in our space, it always has a heck of a lot more impact when it shows up in a respected rag like Ad Age.

Some of the comments I like (although you should read the whole thing:

Yet, for all this change, outdoor’s biggest asset today may be that as audiences on every other channel are split into ever decreasing fragments, it can still operate on a mass, broadcast level.

so today’s out-of-home efforts are increasingly often integral parts of bigger digital campaigns. Indeed, it might seem somewhat odd to an industry outsider who was unfamiliar with the latest phenomena — such as brands emblazoning billboards with just their Twitter addresses — to note that outdoor is enjoying a renaissance right now, driven, at least in part, by digital shops. Creatives are clearly enjoying the ability to link the mass-market power of a poster to the personal power of the internet.

Even with this digitization and integration of the medium, simplicity remains the essence of great outdoor — which is why it is often cited as such a pure test of a creative’s skill. Can you distill the essence of the sales or brand message into a single, instantly understandable, affecting image? (The answer, in the case of so many of the campaigns within these pages, was “yes.” What could be simpler than TBWA’s “The world’s thinnest notebook,” for the Macbook Air, which was accompanied by a side-on shot of the product, or BBDO’s “Get a world view. Read The Economist,” accompanied by an ostrich’s head emerging from the sand?)

While it’s great to see folks take notice of social and mobile in Outdoor applications, it’s even nicer to see someone talk about the renaissance of outdoor as a medium, especially as they pull in Digital into the mix and credit creativity and challenge coming to the creatives who so often pooh-pooh Outdoor and especially Digital OOH in their efforts.

As I said a while ago, Digital OOH let’s creatives be creative again and I look forward to more folks in that arena taking a closer look at the space and what they can do with it.

Great article Jonah!  And thanks for noticing!

The “Canoe” venture between the 6 top cable cos. has not only had the air let out of it’s tires….it parked in the wrong hood and got jacked.

As the CEO of Canoe said:

Canoe CEO David Verklin recently told Multichannel News, “We were trying to use 20th-century technology to enable a 21st-century, advanced advertising product.”

Even as recently as last month there were comments about how they were driving forward and touting how successful and advanced this would be for the advertising market for cable operators.  I even saw some comments from Network TV operators that were going to try and emulate the system or at least try to.

I wrote about addressable advertising back almost 2 years ago and this project in particular. I was watching it closely as this level of targeted advertising coming to market for TV in the next 12 months could skew interest back away from Digital OOH and into the waiting broadcast groups once again.

Apparently I don’t have to be so concerned

I’ve had this conversation with many after recent announcements have come out on the mobile marketing front. I’m very cautious when talking about mobile and where it will go and how we need to be cautious in its introduction into the culture and execution of Digital OOH’s success.

Case in point? Look at the Internet.  While Internet advertising has grown by leaps and bounds and makes lots of people very rich, the fact of the matter is, because it went to a “success is a click-through” model (aka direct response) as fast as it did, it leaves 100s of millions of dollars on the table as click throughs rarely actually lead to the execution of a “sale” that is trackable.  As today’s Ad Age article from Hernan Lopez details on a statement from Randall Rothenberg:

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has called for a “creative renaissance” on the internet, which he said has been “an unthinking hostage to a direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands.”

While I’m a big proponent of Mobile in Digital OOH -warning: registration required- (actually I’m a proponent of its use in many places with the right solution and thought process behind it), I’m very hard on the idea that it be used for any form of true “measurement” in the space.  This is for a couple of reasons:

1. It takes the all of the onus off the need for a quality product and brand strategy around the product and puts it on the Digital OOH medium.
2. It takes all of the onus off of creative agencies to understand how to use our medium and execute quality creative strategies that attracts consumers in the first place
3. Calls to action and value to the consumer are typically terribly weak even when #1 and #2 ARE addressed, further putting the onus on Digital OOH to perform better for potentially crappy products with bad creative AND add no value to the consumer experience
4. I’ve already seen this happen in the Internet ad business who decided to move to click based measurement ALONE and they never got out of that funk and it is now affecting their ability to be considered anything but “DR”

Don’t get me wrong.  Mobile can be used as an INDICATOR of success, it’s just that it should never be considered the SOLE test of a Digital OOH’s campaign’s success if we value long term growth of a successful new medium. i.e. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My company, ADCENTRICITY, was actually founded on many of Erwin Ephron’s theories and comments - hence our approach towards Path-2-Purchase and Point-of-Purchase based continuity programs and strategies.  Erwin is considered the founder of recency theory who, as Hernan stated in the article in answering an advertising paradox:

Consumers act on ads for products they’re ready to buy and ignore the rest. That called for a shift in scheduling, from flighting to continuity; being off the air was “like being off the shelf.

Basically, you never know when someone is going to be ready to buy your new tube of toothpaste so you have to have continued, targeted advertising in order to best support ongoing sales and profits as consumers become more receptive as they become more prepared to make a purchase.  In the Digital OOH world, this also means that if a consumer is not ready to buy a product and the call to action is weak then they definitely won’t engage with you via mobile, further downward skewing mobile measurement.

I especially liked one of Hernan’s supporting comments on this front:

advertising can work in subtle ways. It can boost profitability, even for large brands in developed markets, which are normally sluggish and rarely see sustained sales increases. Advertising is not as weak as it seems, just difficult to measure.

Unfortunately, in today’s world to many, something that’s difficult to measure, is too difficult to sell to the new CMO…the CFO - the guy who is willing to pay for something he can see today - not down the road.

Fortunately, there are studies like those referenced in the article from comScore, that are showing display ads online (not clicked) with real world purchases.

We as an industry are not quite there yet.  Much more research has yet to be done on this front to prove this type of behavior, although we’re already seeing these forms of results.  What I will say, however, is don’t be so quick to abandon all of the other forms of success measurement (3rd party brand/recall based studies, sales lift, campaign activity lift, etc, and most importantly CASE STUDIES) in favor of a medium measurement solution that could significantly harm your agency or network efforts going forward.

Mobile will be a very important part of our medium going forward and help shepherd in an era of consumer behavioral grooming and brand loyalty and connectedness, you just have to know how to use it and when in order to effect the results - both short and long term - that you want.

Last point that Hernan referenced in his article was one on the creative front to make ads in mediums work for you best.  I wanted to address these in lieu of my earlier comments on creative and strategy in the medium:

1. They are entertaining and amusing;
2. they are visual rather than verbal; and
3. they say something important and meaningful about the brand being advertised

More recently, he added the expression “rational arguments enclosed in emotional envelopes”

Choose your mobile strategy wisely!

Nokia was the last company to do this to WPP I believe and they outright said no and the business was pulled.

Wonder how long they will stay their current course and push their clients off by refusing to go this route?

The last company I mentioned who did this to its agencies was Coke, which I reported on a little while ago. As I said in the other post, it’s a tricky system to implement.

To WPPs defense, they also want to extend payment beyond 30 days which WPP has been a defender of.  For Unilever to try and hurt their vendors (which would include folks like my company) in this type of economic climate is low.

In the latest incarnation, CBS in the UK is dropping in WiFi based interactivity via iPhone to control and interact with elements on the screens.  This could be the start of some seriously cool apps and could get some of the facebook/iPhone dev crew thinking WAY beyond the small worlds they currently have to exist in.

More can be found here: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7015400336

While his understanding was “ok”, I was not very surprised at the fact his eyes glazed over when I started discussing social and mobile integration at retail with him.  On the media side of the business he:

1.) Didn’t actually know enough, in depth, about the environments we were talking about.

2.) Had never realized you could try and extend social media beyond a Facebook page or that all these screens are connected to the Internet

3.) Didn’t know that you could use mobile as an actuator for campaigns to further the brand conversation.

On one front, I’m a little glad I’m not one of his brands. His understanding of anything beyond his silo was very limited.  On the other, the stuff I’m talking about above, you can do NOW.  This doesn’t even touch what we’re up to next and where DOOH is going.

So I was keyed to a video that typifies media involvement 5 years from now that will be available for the more advanced DOOH networks in years to come and if media and creative agencies have issues with how advanced or different Digital OOH is today….what does this mean when the capabilities in the video below become ubiquitous?

this ain’t your mamas newspaper baby!

Thanks to Alexander, Head of Strategy over at Leo in Frankfurt for tipping me to this and glad to see you’re musing on it.

I had to laugh at the reference to Tweets in Newspapers though.  That’s like reprinting the comments at a 1985 water cooler conversation in a prestegious medium - my how things have changed!