The Power of Influence

Ford's Jim Farley Says Recession Was a Blessing for Digital

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- That severe nosedive the economy took wasn't all bad for Detroit. Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing at Ford Motor Co., told attendees at Advertising Age's Digital Conference today that it was actually the best thing for automotive marketing, especially on the digital front.

 "Everything has to work in this economy," Mr. Farley said. "If the economy hadn't dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did. Our production quality online is better than our broadcast."

That experimentation is led by what Mr. Farley calls the democratization of marketing. "It's the most important transition we are making," he said. Ford has been a big advocate of turning the brand over to consumers, and not just in the digital space. The automaker's TV spots featuring real Ford owners have been well-received.

"I can tell a story in 15 seconds now on TV, but I want customers to tell our story," Mr. Farley said. "That's what digital has shown us: how to earn credibility among consumers."

Mr. Farley said the company is also rethinking the way it approaches media planning. "If you look at a normal traditional media spend, it involves using traditional media when our cars are ... arriving at dealerships," he said. "Then we spend big on traditional broadcast media to get frequency." Mr. Farley said the more involved he got in making upfront media buys the less "right" it felt.

Spending shift
The Ford marketing chief said the new paradigm that media owners and clients have to get used to involves spending a lot more money in post-launch with new partners. "Yes, we still need traditional media partners and integration will become more and more important," Mr. Farley said. "But then post-launch we can't just go away. We have to allocate [social and digital] resources because these different resources change the content and the dialogue of the product after the launch. It's much more manageable, and it impacts how we build the product."

Mr. Farley said it also completely changes the company's relationship with its media partners as well as the creative process. He said if an agency wants to partner with Ford, it needs to think differently because the car maker launches products in a different manner.

"We're about the person, not the website or channel. I'm not interested in advertising on a little box because what's important is what's in the box, not the box itself or wherever it is," he said. "The idea is to impact the experience. The box is just a window into a whole other world of experience if you do it right. We want to take that stupid little box we were forced into as advertisers and blow it up and change the way we interact with the customer, and we want it to be around the experience."

The company is also focusing on "executing" the brand globally. He said Ford sold all of its other brands including Volvo so that the company and consumers would focus solely on Ford-branded products. He noted that Ford has been losing market share for 14 years straight in the U.S. but managed to gain some back in the last 24 months.

"We shrank the company to make it grow, and to do that we transitioned our marketing, especially in the digital space," he said. "One out of every four dollars we spend is on digital, but we totally transformed how that money is being spent. We spend it mid-funnel. We're transitioning most of our digital spend to convincing consumers they should put Ford on their shopping lists. And the evidence shows we have made some great strides, and we are starting to see consumer sentiment change. We have a long way to go, but the quality sentiment is changing."

[via Advertising Age]

Heavy Drug Ad Spending Doesn’t Pay Off

The pharmaceutical brands which spent the most money on TV advertising in 2009 did not make the biggest impression on viewers, according to data from The Nielsen Company.

Despite the recession, the top 10 prescription drug brand spenders invested $1.1 billion on national TV commercials, compared to $1 billion in 2008. The top six brands spent more than $100 million in TV advertising last year, led by cholesterol drug Lipitor. Erectile dysfunction drug Cialis by maker Eli Lilly was the second-highest spender followed by Abilify, an add-on treatment for depression from Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and Cymbalta, a drug for major depression disorder.

Top Four Most Recalled Ads Weren’t Top Spenders
Nielsen data on consumer recall of 2009 TV drug advertising indicates that the drug brands which spent the most money airing TV commercials did not get the most return on their advertising dollar. The top four most recalled ads were two spots from Flomax, a drug designed to combat urinary difficulty associated with enlarged prostate, HPV vaccine Gardasil, and anti-depressant Pristiq, a newcomer.

None of these four brands made the top 10 list for TV advertising spending last year. Erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, which was ranked number nine for TV ad spending, got its money’s worth by tying for fifth place in viewer recall with blood clot inhibitor Plavix.

In turn, Plavix, which had the fifth-highest spending total, came close to breaking even on its spending by obtaining the number six ranking for viewer recall. The only brand among the top four spenders to make the top 10 viewer recall list was Cialis, which tied for fifth place with Alzheimer’s disease drug Aricept and rheumatoid arthritis drug Orencia. No other drug brand on the top 10 list for TV ad spending in 2009 made the top 10 list for viewer recall last year.

Drug Ads Get Longer
Due to stricter Food & Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, TV ads for prescription drugs have been getting longer in recent years, which has slowed the rate of increase in TV advertising spending by prescription drug companies. However, the prevalence of 60- and 75-second ads on the most recalled list demonstrates that a properly designed longer ad can still resonate with viewers.

Few Consumers Trust Pharmaceutical Ads
In addition to attempting to improve viewer advertising recall, pharmaceutical brands should also work on improving consumer trust, according to a recent Harris Poll. Only 18% of poll respondents 18 and up found pharmaceutical advertising most trustworthy compared to ads from four other major US industries. In contrast, 29% of all respondents 18 and up ranked pharmaceutical ads as least trustworthy.

[via Marketing Charts]

Running 2nd Social Media & WoM full day workshop 7th April

Back by popular demand the organiser puts it .... blush blush

Anyway - I'll running my Social Media & WoM Marketing workshop in KL again - details here Download Social Media & WoM Workshop by Ian McKee

Social Media Revolution

Not brand new but still good!

5 Social Media Secrets for 2010

Social media took a wild ride in 2009. The mainstream press fell in love with Twitter, Facebook grew aggressively and a new wave of companies starting taking social media seriously as a business tool. Below are 5 secrets to staying on top of it all in 2010

1. Pay Attention to the Metrics
You can't manage what you can't measure. Chief Marketing Officers are going to pay more attention to metrics and tie in social media more directly to overall business goals, not just web-related goals. When starting up new project agree on what the metrics should be and what goals are appropriate.

2. Scale Good Habits
As you grow, make sure you match your structure, policy and guidelines to your organization size. What works with 2 people won't work with 20 people. All in all your structure should encourage good habits. Your entire team should be motivated to respond quickly, post consistently and talk like a human. Speaking of policies and rules...

3. Have Rules, But Trust People
As your social media strategy matures, you'll add in more rules and guidelines. However, you can't have a rule for every situation. You need to trust your team. Lead by example, don't manage with rulebook.

4. Creativity & Personality Trump Big Budget
Social media is definitely one of those areas in life where more money doesn't always win. Two of the most powerful ingredients in social media are creativity and personality. They are the key to having a viral message and to being a trusted resource. They are also essential to discovering useful strategies and tactics. You can't be afraid to try something new or go against the grain.

5. Listen Listen Listen
Don't focus so much on you and your message. Put that farther down on your To Do List. Focus first on your customers. Hear what they are saying, see what they're up to. Once you've been able to connect, and figure them out, then see how you can help.

Hat Tip to the SlideShare Team

Forbes cover a great case study on how Threadless built a community.  Interesting points made are that it is more about quality than quantity - and that quaity communities are grown organicaly, not by campaigns and media spends.

Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless

Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week.

The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers--and to keep its community engaged.

Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.

Forbes: You stress "community" over crowdsourcing. Why?

Balzer: Crowdsourcing is antithetical to what we're doing. That's because crowdsourcing involves random sets of people who suddenly have a say in how the business works, but that's not how Threadless operates. We've got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren't random people, and they aren't producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another--ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they've spent hours interacting on our site. People who do that aren't jumping into a random crowd. They're part of the community we've cultivated.

How does Threadless use social marketing to promote its business and to generate sales?

Like other businesses, Threadless launched before Twitter and Facebook. We've embraced both sites by injecting our personality into them. We send out news to people when new T-shirts are available and information on new sales when they start. We also tell customers about the music playing in our warehouse and about the interesting people stopping by our office. The investment in Twitter has bumped our traffic. Sales from Twitter alone are in the high six-figures.

What advice do you have for other companies looking to build their social media strategies?

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

The other key is that we act like humans on our own site and social networking sites. We act like we're interacting with our friends, posting videos of our employees talking about their favorite bands. It's not all direct promotion; it's human.

How do you keep your consumers engaged?

For us, the idea of fostering creativity is a key one. We offer design challenges. A timely example of that is that we ran a design contest around the Las Vegas consumer electronics convention, CES. The challenge we posed was to get consumers to submit designs that highlighted innovation. We looked for a theme that we knew our consumer base, who tends to be interested in tech and the Web, would love. We've done other challenges asking people for ideas on zombies and monsters, because we've seen from the forums and other popular T-shirts that our customers are interested in monsters.

The takeaway: Know what interests your consumers and build on it.

What are limitations for the business?

The community anchors us to a certain extent. They've got perceptions of who we are and how we'll act. They determine our future. With that said, they are receptive to seeing Threadless grow. We've been exploring retail distribution and we've asked our designers (who are the employees and customers) where they would feel comfortable selling and buying the T-shirts. We thought the options would be limited based on their answers, but we've found a sincerely open-minded group that is eager to see growth.

We've also learned that an important part of expanding is giving credit to our community members. We started selling specially designed iPhone cases last year and were very deliberate about our packaging. Each case gave descriptions of the product and its designer.

What was your best-selling T-shirt design last year?

It was a design called "The Communist Party" that featured Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, in party mode. The designer was Tom Burns of Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Brands are moving budget to social media marketing at the expense of traditional media such as print and TV

Chances are your overall marketing budget was hit hard by the economy in 2009 and the prospect of recovering a substantial portion of these funds in 2010 is not very likely. Still, there is good news for social media marketers.

This chart shows that social marketing will benefit from significant budget increases in the year ahead, regardless of what industry your organization is in. What this chart doesn’t show is where these increases will come from.

As a relatively new and rapidly emerging tactic, social media is generally funded by either increasing the overall budget or, more often than not in the current economic climate, by shifting funds from other marketing line items to social media.

Social marketing budgets are growing at the expense of other tactics and a deeper dive into our 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report will show you which ones and to what extent.

Download SocialMediaMarketing2010 exec summary

The human factor will account for nearly 60% of social marketing expenditures next year including staff salaries for blogging, content development, social monitoring, etc. Another 20% of the budget will go outside the organization to agencies, consultancies and other social marketing service providers.

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.

A Good List of 10 ... "How Social Media Changed Our Thinking"

Of the many lists done at this time of year  - thought this was one of the best ....

 

Ten Ways Social Media Changed Our Thinking in 2009
by David Berkowitz , Tuesday, December 22, 2009 From the MediPost Blog

All the top trend lists this year have been a blur. There's lots of talk of Twitter and Michael Jackson, but I wanted to dive deeper and think about what we really learned. In many ways social media managed to change our thinking about what happened, what's going on, and how the world's changing.

I'll focus on 10 ways in particular. Not all are exclusive to the past year, but many of the milestones from the past 12 months may well shape how we perceive the road ahead.

Democracy: The Green Revolution, Iran's populist attempt to reject the summer's election results, was a global eye-opener for how a tool like Twitter -- so easily dismissed as frivolous -- could change the world. The result may have been underwhelming, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintaining power -- but for those who saw the tweets from Iranians, often retweeted wildly, it will leave its mark. Contrast this with other movements, such as when Philippines voters used text messages to mobilize and oust President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The Philippines revolution followed a peer-to-peer model. In Iran, though, the tweets were largely public, and instant commentary on those tweets was publicized further, shattering the barriers between those who were taking part and the spectators hanging on every character.

Death: We now mourn in public. Michael Jackson inspired millions -- billions? -- to grieve openly. Myself, I stayed silent on Jackson but had to express public disbelief over Billy Mays' passing. As I write this, friends and strangers are opening up about Brittany Murphy. The self-expression becomes more problematic when it gets personal, as a Floridian mom learned when she tweeted about her son drowning. This led to the headline " Twitter played no role in drowning of military_mom's son Bryson." We don't yet know how to grieve publicly, and many such as military_mom will learn that others aren't ready for it. But in time, perhaps even by this time next year, stories like this won't be newsworthy.

Sales: Dell has tracked over $6.5 million in revenue to Twitter. There are several  morals to the story: 1) It's possible to track sales from Twitter. 2) It's still in its infancy; Dell earned $61 billion last year, so its Twitter sales will barely cover the Post-it notes used at the 75,000+ employee company. 3) Those are only the direct sales, and every time the press reports on Dell's model, some consumers will go to Dell's outlet site without bothering to check what's happening on Twitter. Bottom line, though, social media is making an impact on sales, and this year we finally started to measure that effect in earnest.

Searching: Google, Yahoo, and Bing committed to giving real-time search valuable real estate in their results pages. Sometimes it will be higher up and sometimes further down, and it will surely be much bigger than Twitter, but now it's here. Most people aren't going to think to search Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare, but they will visit Google or Yahoo or Bing, and they'll access the real-time links if they're relevant. We're still learning when it's relevant, but there's little doubt now that it matters.

Local marketing: So, how did you find out about that restaurant? Did you see a special for mayors on Foursquare? Did a friend check in via Gowalla and share it as their Facebook status? Were you walking down the street with your iPhone out while you augmented reality with Yelp's Monocle or Urbanspoon's Scope? Okay, augmented reality may be more gimmicky, but the social services are starting to help people find each other -- and help people find local hot spots. The fusion of mobile, social and local started to create real opportunities to change consumer behavior. What was true for early adopters in 2009 will apply to the fast followers in the year ahead.

Celebrity Access: In January, Ashton Kutcher joined Twitter. He was followed by Ellen DeGeneres in March and Oprah in April. We got to see what they saw, from Chris Brown's view of 90,000 fans in Manila to Chad Ochocinco's view of his opponents' football field. Vin Diesel posts a couple of times a month on his Facebook page, where he has over 7 million fans. And after Kanye West started a new Internet meme by grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, he apologized on his blog. Yes, we have ghost tweeters and plenty of opacity, but now that fans have this direct, personal, and occasionally even unfiltered access, it's not going away.

Fan participation: This summer, two amazing events happened in the arts world simultaneously. Here in the U.S., the rock band Of A Revolution (O.A.R.) crowd-sourced song lyrics on Twitter, crediting fans for their contributions to the song that became "Light Switch Sky." Meanwhile, London's Royal Opera crowd-sourced lyrics to an opera through Twitter. In the process, Twitter became a curation tool, and both curators here used other forms of digital media such as blogs and online video to further engage fans. Want to hook your fans? Give them a stake in the content.

Gift giving: Thought you were doing something special for a Facebook friend by giving them one of those little icons as a gift? How about giving them something they'd be really excited about, like an MP3, a charitable donation, or a "gourmet feast" gift basket? Yeah, that last one runs $85, but they are your friends, right? Today, those goods are provided through the Real Gifts application. Tomorrow, it may well be Amazon. What I'd really love to see is gift recommendations tailored to recipients' profile interests right when you're sending something virtual or physical.

News-sourcing: Journalists were among the first to embrace Twitter. Will they similarly lead the charge with Google Wave? They're starting to, anecdotally at least. Mashable loves covering these stories, from the Seattle Times posting a Wave to find a suspected cop killer to town squares hosted by the Austin American-Statesman. Google Wave itself may or may not be the platform of the future, but it's opened the door to news ways for the media to interact with their audience.

Gaming: In November 2009, over 6 million gamers (and their loved ones) bought the blockbuster "Modern Warfare 2." That same month, about 70 million gamers played "Farmville." I know I'm stretching comparisons here, but the notion of what a blockbuster game is continues to shift. Is it a game that millions of people pay $50 for right when it comes out, or a free game played by tens of millions of people, where a small percentage pay small sums over time for in-game upgrades? There's room for both models, and there's room for new thinking on what a successful game is.

That's just a taste of how our thinking changed this year, and it only leaves me hungrier for the new perspectives ahead in 2010.

How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded

Here (from Australia's Mumbrella) is a great case study of the dangers of letting your tradditional agency (in this case Saatchi & Saatchi) design and run a Social Media campaign.

This comes back to the point I blogged about before - earned media requires a differnt mindset from bought media .... Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi  lerned this in public.

"......Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.  

It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.

And as Saatchi & Saatchi has demonstrated, it now goes without saying that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.

For Toyota, I still think that running a live social media pitch with the five competing campaigns was a good thing. Even without this week’s events, it will have learned a lot. And by doing it in the public arena, the entire marketing industry got to learn too.

Where it went wrong was in giving too much leeway to an agency with little apparent social media experience and seemingly too little risk control to accompany that.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that another agency on the shortlist was Oddfellows, a long term partner of Toyota. A traditionally based agency, Oddfellows didn’t have the hubris to claim to be able to understand social media on its own. It partnered with social media agency The Population.

Saatchi & Saatchi apparently decided it could fly solo. Rather like many media planners think they’d make a good creative, I wonder if Saatchis thought social media was easier than it was.

It began to go wrong for Saatchis very early in the process. For starters, a film competition is such a tired idea. There was no twist. The brief was simply: make a film featuring a Yaris, and win a relatively small amount of money.

The accompanying Facebook page felt that it was being moderated by somebody who had just discovered the internet, and was catching up on the last few years’ memes. It posted links to the likes of the OK Go treadmill music video, the Johnnie Walker Robert Carlyle ad and “Guy catches glasses with face”. All great virals, but also familiar to anyone who’d spent much time online in the last year like the target audience. It didn’t position the Facebook group as somewhere to go to catch the latest and hottest.

No wonder then that as rival agencies’ Yaris campaigns began to get up stream, the Clever Film Comp got stuck on the grid. Facing the embarrassing prospect of no entries, the agency abandoned the idea of genuine user generated content, and with it what many would consider social media authenticity.

It forwarded this email to production house contacts:

From: Rob

Subject: Clever Comp

Hey creative people

I’ve got something that you’ll (or your housemates, brothers, sisters, artistic friends etc will) be interested in.

It’s a film comp in aide of promoting Toyota Yaris.

“A film comp? I don’t have the time!” you may say, but listen up. So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December. Voting is done on hits and comments so if you’re in first you have a huge advantage. And you don’t have to make an ad, just put a Yaris in somewhere a la the ‘number 8′ or ’spring’ in Tropfest or something

First prize is $7,000. $3,000 for second and $1,000 for 3rd. At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand.

Details are in the attachments. If you win, I’d love an all carbon fibre road bicycle for Christmas.

Cheers y’all.

-Rob

As a result, this skewed the entries. If you promote the competition as an ad agency to your production house contacts then what you’re going to get back are slick would-be commercials, rather than short films. This was, as we now know, to prove important.

It certainly suggests that by this point the agency’s aim was to avoid the embarrassment of having very few entries for its contest, rather than to run an authentic, engaging competition.

.... "  more

Tom Fishburne of BrandCamp Nails it Again