WavyBrainy

1. Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing  mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it’ll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a teradactyl is downright dangerous.
2. Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
3. Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women’s Suffrage and the internet, they’re all fads anyway.
4. Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
5. Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. Afterall, it’s your job to cultivate talent internally.
6. Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you’re on top of this new fangled stuff, but don’t do anything about it.
7. Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
8. Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency’s job is to suck up and take orders.
9. Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
10. Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.

Sheer volume of web traffic, as we pointed out in our article on Bounce Rate, doesn’t tell you whether visitors had a good time at your site, learned anything, or absorbed key messages about your brand. Although there are some exciting new analytics tools that monitor the quality of engagement, you can get started by investigating the average time visitors spend on your site and per page. The underlying assumption is simple. If people like your page, they’ll spend time with it. If they’re bored silly, they’ll move on. Here’s what to look for:

1. What’s the Average Time Spent on the site as a whole?
2. Compare directories on the site, e.g. your about section vs. products. Where are visitors spending the bulk of their time on your site? Does that match your web strategy?
3. Are your visitors spending time on critical pages, e.g. product overview, pages that differentiate you from your competitors, etc?
4. Sort pages from highest to lowest Avg. Time Spent on Page. What’s performing well, what’s not?
5. Are there pages that drive a high percentage of viewing that don’t directly advance your business, e.g. the photo gallery with everyone popping brewskies at the office tailgate party? These pages are valuable, but keep in mind that they could be distorting your view of your site’s overall performance.

Use this information to build on content that already engages your visitors, and improve or eliminate pages that don’t.

Depending on your company’s industry sector, the economy is either recovering or getting worse at a slower rate. As budgets are finalizing for 2010, we’re staying true to the advice we offered our clients a year ago. Here are a few main points:

1. Invest to increase brand awareness and surpass larger competitors. Reap the rewards during the real recovery!
2. Improve your website and web marketing operations to achieve higher conversion rates. If you need to re-design, do it now before the market heats up.
3. Social media is not a fad. It’s a cost-effective way of building customer relationships and bypassing some of the expense of traditional media. Get involved.
4. Introduce new products and innovations now while market noise is lower.
5. Negotiate hard for lower media rates. The market is soft, and unsold inventory is just gathering dust.
6. Think niche. Social media, blogs and Twitter allow you to build customized channels and target pockets of highly profitable customers.

For additional information, download Ideopia’s white paper on“Marketing in the Recession”.

A bus stop ad that recognizes faces and a print magazine carrying an embedded video chip are the latest examples in the trend of merging new and “traditional” media.

CNET’s Caroline Kennedy reported that CBS will use a video chip ad with a 2.7 millimeter-thick screen embedded in select issues of “Entertainment Weekly” magazine to launch its fall TV season. The unit has 65+ minutes of battery power and carries 40 minutes of video. No details on cost, but WOW!

Slightly closer to the earth, a bus stop ad for Amnesty International makes fascinating use of facial recognition technology. It’s an ad for a domestic violence awareness campaign themed “It happens when nobody is watching.” The video shows a man abusing his wife until a hidden camera detects a face. Then it pauses, and the couple stops fighting.

1. Be a follower. It’s great to be number 1, but it might be smarter to watch and learn as competitors expend their resources developing a product and a market, then trump them with a leaner, more targeted product.
2. Make mountains out of molehills. What are the stories behind the little differences in your product or service? Are you fanatics about the smallest part in your product? Do you have a rep that would drive 1,000 miles to meet with a customer in a diner in Minot, North Dakota? The answer could be your next marketing strategy or ad campaign.
3. Benchmark against the best not just your competitors. It’s easy to get lulled into complacency when you consider your marketing programs versus the competition. But what if your company was up against Coke, Nike, Apple, Microsoft, or McDonald’s, how would that change your approach? Could you use the same tactics and strategies?

We’re declaring August National Co-branding month, because we think it’s a great antidote for marketing budgets stretched to the breaking point. Co-branding, which, in English, means getting together with other companies to create awesome promotions you couldn’t pull off individually. By pooling internal marketing resources, visibility on existing advertising, blogs and web sites, you and your co-branding partners can minimize out-of-pocket expenditures. Apply creativity and your partnership could also benefit from free buzz. A few tips:

– Consider organizations with soft assets, e.g. non-profits with large mailing lists.
- Don’t automatically eliminate a competitor. Parts of your business may be ripe for collaboration.
- Think about what will wow your customers.
- Be clear about your objectives: awareness, loyalty, straight-up sales.
- Put it in writing: marketing plans, budgets, ownership agreements, timelines, and take it down to Judge Judy to get it notarized.

Search ads on the web give you a rare opportunity to learn what copy your prospects are responding to in real time. This knowledge is hard won through continual experimentation, trial and error, and occasional thumb sucking. We say share the wealth. For example, we recently learned in our eVitalize web campaign that “Fix up your underperforming web site” beats “Cost effective web marketing strategies” five to one. Understanding how your target perceives your product benefits not only gives you ammo for search, but better ways to communicate through sales and other copy created for the brand. Conversely knowing how an effective salesperson formulates his pitch can inform better keywords and ad copy. The trick is to share and bust through compartmentalized suppliers and internal departments.

You may have noticed that “Consumer: The Next Generation” is much more concerned with the social, philanthropic and environmental values than its predecessors. This explains the rush by some companies to align themselves with non-profit organizations and causes to “get me some of those values.”

Consumers are becoming increasingly cynical about cause related marketing, especially when there’s a disconnect from the cause and the company’s actions. For example, a company that manufactures toys that contain carcinogens supports breast cancer. Level of engagement counts, too. Donating 25 cents of every cereal box sale to the disease du jour is great, But, without educating employees, suppliers, and website visitors, the involvement, consumers may perceive the involvement as being purely utilitarian.

For a different perspective on cause related marketing and how it may actually harm the cause of philanthropy, see Angela Eikenberry’s article, “The Hidden Costs of Cause Related Marketing” in the Stanford Social Institute Review.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_hidden_costs_of_cause_marketing/

Is Your Current Ad Agency a Bit Stale?
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I was checking out our search placements yesterday, and I came across this hilarious ad from another agency. The combined years of experience gambit is common with many services companies. It seemed particularly funny here, because it was linked with “freshness.” Besides, we all know companies out there that defy Darwinistic logic to survive even though they totally suck. Also, are we talking one, old dude here, or 40 interns? C’mon guys, it’s the intertube era. What can you do for me now?

Integrating web sites, landing pages and emails into your trade show plans is a very cost-effective way to build excitement, identify hot prospects, and schedule your staff’s time in the booth. A few ideas we’ve used successfully include:

1. Email and web promotions related to a new product that requires redemption at the trade show booth.
2. Scheduling in-person demos online and capturing mobile messaging information to send reminders.
3. Multi-part teaser campaigns – sometimes prohibitively expensive in print – that create buzz for new products.
4. Product specific landing pages that prospects can visit after the show. Downloadable information and video demos keep your brand top of mind, and out of the trash.
5. Rapid and customized email follow-ups to everyone who visits the booth.
6. Search and/or banner advertising scheduled around show assets.