Constant Change

The State of Viral Marketing

Marketing Sherpa has released the results of a recent study on the state of viral marketing. The study, conducted among the 237,000 members of Marketing Sherpa, is based on almost 3,000 responses and covers both B-to-C and B-to-B respondents.

Some topline results:

• Viral marketing is much more prevalent among consumer marketers than business marketers. Of those considering themselves 'very experienced' viral marketers, 72% are B-to-C while only 28% are B-to-B marketers.

Virginia Tech - An event like no other

The tragic massacre last week at Virginia Tech University remains first and foremost a deeply personal tragedy for the families and friends of the dead and injured and for the Virginia Tech family of students and faculty. But it was also an event that now clearly delineates between how the world used to be and how the world is evolving in terms of communication and journalism.

The previous watershed moment in communications and journalism occurred on January 16, 1991, the start of the first Gulf War. That evening I and millions of people around the world sat riveted in front of our television sets as we listened and watched CNN’s Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman broadcast live from suite 906 at the Al Rashid Hotel as the first bombs began to rain down on Baghdad.

Fast forward to the terrible events of April 16, 2007,

How to Make Youtube Your Own TV Network

Here's a great 'TV campaign' from a company called Blendtec that never ran on TV but has nonetheless been viewed by millions of consumers. And like many truly creative and effective ideas this one was developed by pure happenstance:

"Will It Blend?" was the brainchild of George Wright, Marketing Director at Blendtec, and Blendtec's Founder and CEO, Tom Dickson. George Wright recalls the birth of the idea: "Tom likes to run non-standard things through our blenders in the demo room to test out their strength. One day I wandered in to the demo room and saw sawdust on the floor. Tom was testing out the blenders again, this time it was a 2 x 2 jammed into the blender to see if he could destroy the blender or the 2 x 2." That gave George an idea: why not post those demonstrations of "extreme blending" online. The trick to creating a viral campaign George reckons is to make it funny and worth watching. They went to work creating the videos back in the fall of last year, starting with five videos: "Don't Try This at Home Blending." They built a companion microsite to go with it—WillItBlend.com—and sent an email to all employees to pass on the word of the videos and the Web site.

Tom has produced 45 videos,

Pepsi Design Challenge

Pepsi is the latest brand to get onto the 'user-generated content' bandwagon in a real big way:

"Feeding into young consumers' desire to discover and personalize, Pepsi is offering all consumers a chance to design a can and win 10 grand. It's all part of the beverage giant's 2007 initiative to make its product new and exciting by changing the design 35 times throughout the year, letting consumers design a billboard for the company, which is up in New York's Times Square, and now offering its can as blank canvas. The winning design will appear on 500 million Pepsi cans in national distribution, the company says. Beginning this week, consumers can access the "Design Our Pepsi Can" promotion at, uh, designourpepsican.com.

Pepsi is providing all the tools one needs from templates complete with all the legal mumbo jumbo to a wide selection of design elements and an easy-to-use online interactive design program. But it's also leaving the field open for users to use their own design programs and introduce their own artwork. Although the top designs will undergo a first selection by an in-house staff, the eventual winner will be picked by consumers.

Although Pepsi may be the biggest soft drink marketer offering this high profile chance to some budding designer it is not the first. There's this funky off-beat American soft drink brand - Jones Soda - that has made consumer generated labels a mainstay of its marketing policy for years now. And in that sense, Jones Soda does a better job of involving its users on an on-going basis than what Pepsi is doing with her promotion gimmick.

What do you think?

Win-Win With Microsoft

Microsoft announced a new initiative this week to help boost the number of PC users worldwide by a whopping 1 billion by the year 2015:

"Microsoft Corp. plans to offer heavily discounted versions of Windows and Office for use by students in developing nations, as part of a new push to increase computer usage -- and its own footprint -- around the world. The company says it will sell a software suite containing those programs and others for $3 to government initiatives that distribute subsidized PCs to students in India, China and elsewhere. The suite will also be available to government programs that supply computers to low-income students in developed nations, including the U.S. The software suite won't be sold at retail. Under normal circumstances, Microsoft extracts huge profits from its flagship products. The reduced rate is meant to lower the overall cost of supplying the computers."

Bill Gates is announcing the "Microsoft Student Innovation Suite" today in Beijing, along with other new and expanded initiatives aimed at increasing computing in developing nations. As part of the effort, Microsoft also will announce a goal of doubling the number of PC users around the world, adding 1 billion more people, by 2015. In launching the initiatives, the company is stressing that access to PCs can improve education, job growth and economic conditions in developing nations."

Top 10 Most Effective Corporate Websites

Bowen Craggs & Co has released in conjunction with the Financial Times the results of their study exploring the website effectiveness of the world's 60 largest companies (20 largest per region - America, Europe, Other):

Pos	Company	Country	Score (max 280)
1	Siemens	Germany	219
2	Royal Dutch Shell	Netherlands/UK	209
3	BP	UK	207
4	Nokia	Finland	203
5	AstraZeneca	Sweden/UK	200
6	Total	France	200
7	IBM	US	199
8	ING	Netherlands	197
9	UBS	Switzerland	194
10	General Electric	US	191

What's fascinating here is that of these top 10 only two are American companies and the rest are European. In the 1990's and early 21st century the American's had a clear lead on the Europeans when it came to accepting, introducing and exploiting Internet. It appears that the Europeans have made an incredible comeback in the last three or four years.

The study ranks each company's website on eight different characteristics: construction, contact, serving society, serving investors, serving the media, serving jobseekers and serving customers. The results are shown globally, per region and per characterstic.

After free registration, you can download the entire report in either pdf or excel format.

You can also watch one of the study's authors in a 2.5 minute summary interview on ReutersTV.

Most Searched for Brand Names

A recent analysis of brand search terms released by Hitwise shows the top ten most searched for brand names in 2006:

1. myspace
2. ebay
3. yahoo
4. mapquest
5. craigslist
6. walmart
7. google
8. target
9. match.com
10. bank of america

The results are based on the search behaviour of a panel consisting of 10 million American Internet users and excludes pornography searches.

Two things here catch my attention. In the first instance, only three of these top 10 are 'real world' brands. This is another indication of the rapid growth in strength of 'virtual' brands in the lives of consumers. Secondly, I really can't understand why anyone would still search 'myspace' for example instead of directly surfing to 'myspace.com.' This is even more perplexing when people search 'match.com' for example. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that this is an American sample.

What do you think?

Integration Is On Marketers' Minds

The American Association of National Advertisers recently published the results of its annual research surveying what's on the minds of its members:

The changes from 2006 to 2007 were slight. Marketing accountability or ROI (return on investment) had topped the list for the previous three annual surveys. Integrated marketing communications was in fourth place a year ago. This year, integrated marketing was top of mind--getting 116 votes--while accountability got 114. In third place was what the ANA calls "aligning the marketing organization with innovation."

I remember in 1985, integrated marketing initially began to become an issue for general ad agencies. I was an account executive then with Leo Burnett in Chicago and had the fortune to become involved in our somewhat uphill struggle to integrate database marketing with our brand advertising practices. In 1996, I had the same integration frustration at Saatchi & Saatchi in Amsterdam but then we called it 1-to-1 marketing - database marketing + Internet.

Maybe it's taken 20 years for this idea to crawl its way to the top or maybe it's like what the French say, "Plus c'a change, plus c'e la meme chose." I just get a sense of deja vu all over again. In either case, I am sometimes amazed how slow our industry can be when it comes to true innovation.

What do you think?

How Are Businesses Using Web 2.0

A recently released global study from McKinsey provides insight into how companies are using Web 2.0. A few highlights:

• More than three-fourths of executives who responded to a McKinsey survey say they plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration, such as peer-to-peer networking, social networks, and Web services.
• More than half say they are pleased with their past Internet investments, though some regret not boosting their own capabilities to exploit technology. More executives said they should have acted faster than slower.
• Retailers, who consider their companies cautious investors in the past, are stepping up their pace today. Similarly, many executives in emerging markets such as India and Latin America intend to move more quickly to capture the perceived benefits of these technologies.

Download the full PDF here.

Onward Online Dollars

An article in Wednesday's UK Gaurdian newspaper highlighted a new high-water mark for online ad spending:

Advertising spending online overtook national newspapers' share of the pie for the first time in 2006 as companies continued to chase a growing web audience.

Britian is the first country to see this happen but other countries may not be far behind. According to the article, online spending jumped 41% in 2006 giving it an 11.4% share of advertising spending versus 10.9% for newspapers. Online ad spending globally is just under 6% of total ad spending and in the US that figure is 7.5%. Another salient figure in the article is that Internet has overtaken radio as the #2 most consumed media.

An American Internet Pioneer Pioneers Anew in Amsterdam

There’s a young business venture launching on the Valeriusstraat here in Amsterdam which is worth watching for two reasons. In the first instance, this company’s business and business model is intriguing and potentially ‘disruptive’ in the context of the ad agency business. And secondly, the founder is one of America’s most successful and well-known Internet business pioneers.

Spotzer Media Group

Welcome to the Spotzer Media Group founded by Andrew Klein. In its own words, Spotzer Media Group

… is pioneering a “ready-to-air” online approach to video advertising that will make it easy, fast and affordable for local businesses to buy and personalize pre-produced video commercials. Advertisers will also work with Spotzer to create media plans and purchase air or media time on television, websites, narrow casting screens and other media through its Web site, Spotzer.com

In other words,

No More Mister Nice Guy - the Gloves Come Off

Just a few days ago we wrote about the three failing strategies media companies are employing when it comes to their copyrighted material on YouTube. Well Viacom has now made her long anticipated move to strategy four - suing the pants off of YouTube and Google.

As Investor's Business Daily so colorfully puts it:

"Viacom on Tuesday dropped a coconut on YouTube, the 800-pound gorilla in Web video sharing, with a $1 billion lawsuit charging "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws and "massive intentional copyright infringement."

Viacom says it has identified 150,000 unauthorized clips of its copyrighted programs that have been viewed what the lawsuit calls "an astounding 1.5 billion times." That's just a fraction of the violations, because YouTube hides content from being easily discovered, Viacom alleged."

This is clearly going to be a long, drawn out and very expensive lawsuit. And the opinions are divided

Let Your Users Do the Talking

When people discuss user generated content, one often thinks of user generated advertising, YouTube vids and MySpace profiles for example. According to Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice, the most prevalent form of user generated content is online customer reviews of products and services.

Bazaarvoice's experience shows how powerful user reviews can be in e-commerce settings:

User Generated Agency Review

Here's one for the Guinness Book of Records in the chapter client - agency relations. We recently wrote about this year's crop of Superbowl ads focusing on the premier of some user generated advertising. One advertiser, Careerbuilder.com apparently wished they had also used some user generated advertising. They didn't, instead relying on their agency Cramer-Krasselt for their commercial. Careerbuilder was so peeved that their commercial didn't make the top ten cut in a relatively small-sample viewer survey that was highly publicized in USAToday that they decided to put their $50 million account up for review. Now it was the agency's turn to wish that the client had relied on user generated advertising perhaps. In any case the agency review on this basis so peeved the agency that Cramer-Krasselt promptly resigned the account. You can read all the gory details here.

Would this be a good trend for the business - user generated agency reviews - or is this just a case of some Careerbuilder bruised egos gone mad?

Bricks Bite When Bytes Bite

In a recent American study, 41% of research respondents claimed that a frustrating online experience would make them less likely to shop at the retailer's physical location. A year ago this number was only 28%. In addition, 59% of the respondents said such a negative web experience negatively affects their overall perception of the retailer/brand.

As e-commerce and web use in general have become an ingrained part of the consumers' repertoire, this study shows how inseparable the web experience has become from the total brand experience.