Month: July 2014

In a world where we crave to be impressed and engaged, brands are struggling to really connect with their customers. More and more brands are seeking out the medium of video to connect with their customers, says Emily Tate (pictured).

Let’s start off with the breakdown of what we are talking about:

Video marketing that engages viewers with creative, emotive and unique campaigns.

Video that tells creative stories that deliver awareness.

Video that creates engagement with the brand.

Regular engagement allows you to build loyal customers as well as data to create a better brand experience for everyone. Video and interactive video can enable the viewer to feel as if they are a part of the company and allow them to feel like you are catering to them.

“Engaging and interacting with consumers is paramount when it comes to video, and a big component of this interactivity is meeting the demands of an increasingly mobile consumer,”  – Willem Schngel, global digital manager of Philips Consumer Lifestyle.

Take a look at Maybelline’s ‘Big Eye Beauty Adventure’. It’s a great example of how video can be used to provide multiple emotive pathways within the video format.

Your audience is picky

The main reason why video is making such a splash may be sitting in your hand as you read this. Be it a smart phone, tablet, TV, or gaming console, the internet has changed the way we view content by connecting people from all around the world in a split second. Though now, due to this high speed connectivity, we are picky in what we want to see – we only want to see the content we desire anytime we want.

To the dismay of marketers and advertisers everywhere though, this is can cause a problem. It is no longer sufficient enough to film a broad commercial based on generalisations, or to send one video out to the masses hoping it reaches someone. Now, advertising must be tailored to the audience in hope of engaging with them.

The power of big data and video

Big data have provided vast insight into what certain people, groups, age, and sexes search for, how frequently, and items that they might like. This is valuable information to marketers as big data provides real time marketing optimisation, programmatically targeting users and serves information to the right user at the right time.

Big data makes it easier for our ads to target the right people at the right time increasing the percentage of people who will stop to watch in an overcrowded marketplace.

This provides for full engagement with new interactivity opportunities in digital media. The aim of video is to ease the path of faction for the consumers – to make is as easy as possible for them to click and by your product. Past delivery methods have been passive – a waiting and wishing game – now the control is seemingly placed in the hands of the consumers so they can choose what they want to watch and how they want to experience it. The campaign works to create a relationship between the customer and your brand as a two-way dialogue.

Let’s get scientific:

There are certain characteristics that as viewers we love about video. Wittiness, joy, good vibes and feelings and all things that can make us smile and feel.

The left hemisphere of our brain is the side used for logic, analysing, and mathematics or aka the “thinking” side. The right hemisphere of our brain is the emotional side. This is where we hold our precious moments. This is the direct line to our heart and where all stimuli are triggered. That being said, would it not make sense that we would want to trigger the right side of people’s brain? That way we pull them into the heart of the company, to reach a more personal level and ideally a more memorable level.

In the example of Photoshop Live – Street Retouch Prank. Photoshop really displayed its power in this setup. What do you think they would have done to you if you were standing at the bus stop? View it here.

The power of Interactive video

Let the customer lead the way. This is the idea behind interactive video. Enabling consumers to shape the way they consume your content you can offer a more customised experience for them. Letting the information that is most relevant to the user advance to them faster.

Audience engagement skyrockets when viewers feel as if they are the ones calling the shots (we all love to feel as if we are in control). Brand experience will be higher as well for both you and your viewers. This is the beginning of a strong brand loyalty and 360-degree relationship that is destined to succeed. The outcome could come with side affects of more products placed in shopping carts and smiles popping up all around.

MTV recently put out Death Grip – Gif Me More Party. MTV didn’t stress their brand or products in the interactive video but rather showed that they know how to have a good time. Giving their majority viewers, ages 16-28, a way to escape into someone else’s life. Gif Me More Party gives you the ability to watch through not just one, but multiple people’s observations of what is going on during a pool party. See the project here.

Our attention spans are shortening and we want our every need to be catered to as customers. Interactive video directly caters to those needs. It can take us away and give us control.

I hope that after looking at these inventive campaigns they can inspire your own creative outlook and creation. Engaging your audience is one of the most powerful things you can do for your company and brand. Time to get started and make your imprint in this growing new market.

Email Tate is marketing manager, Phink.

From increasing customer expectations to an always-on approach to brand engagement and the inexorable rise of real-time engagement via mobile and social media, marketers face a fast changing and challenging environment. With senior management placing serious pressure on marketing to contribute to growth strategies, how are marketers planning to respond? What are the priority developments? What skills are required? And how, critically, can marketing exploit this fast growing mass of customer data to deliver measurable business value?

The Digital Marketing Insights Report 2014 from Teradata and Celebrus Technologies reveals a clear focus on personalisation and the use of real-time data over the next two years. However, given the emphasis on measurability, performance and bottom line value, why is the vast majority of organisations failing to exploit the latest generation of sophisticated analytics?

Here, Katharine Hulls (pictured), VP Marketing, Celebrus Technologies, discusses the limitations of aggregated data, including web analytics, cites the need for a robust data foundation and calls on organisations to look closely at the value of journey mapping, golden pathing and affinities analysis.

Marketing Priorities
The marketing team is under ever greater pressure to demonstrate fast and tangible return on investment. According to the latest Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and Bloomberg Marketing Confidence Monitor, many businesses are heading into 2014 with “aggressive” growth ambitions. Not only does growth dominate the management agenda for half of all organisations but 42% report an increase in management buy-in and more appetite for investment in innovation and new business practices, products and people.

So how are marketers planning to respond? For many, the sheer diversity of choice and challenges is overwhelming. While the focus is clearly on enhancing the customer experience, where should activity be prioritised? Creating a Single Customer View (SCV) to improve omni-channel marketing; delivering real-time personalisation solely within the online channel; or exploiting analytics to deliver deep customer understanding and enhance the customer experience?

Whatever route the marketing team decides to prioritise, managing data remains a major concern. According to The Digital Marketing Insights Report 2014, commissioned by Teradata and Celebrus Technologies, organisations are struggling with data: data storage (36%), data quality (23%) and making the data actionable (15%) are the biggest challenges facing the marketing team.

Future focus
Personalisation in all its forms certainly dominates marketing strategy, with the research revealing that while only 21% have a SCV today, a massive 57% expect to achieve this goal within two years. The value of this deep customer insight is clear, with 70% of those with a SCV gaining better customer insights and 60% improving targeting.

However, creating the SCV is just the start – and with the push from management to deliver tangible results, analytics is becoming an increasingly relevant and sophisticated discipline. Done well, analytics can significantly enhance marketing effectiveness and profitability and a growing number of organisations are gaining significant advantage from the provision of an analytical view across multiple sources of data and multiple channels.

The research reveals that today disappointingly few organisations have extended the use of analytics beyond web analytics into areas such as journey mapping, golden pathing and affinities analysis. While almost three quarters (72%) actively use web analytics to support digital marketing efforts, other analytics endeavours have far less penetration, with around only a third using Voice of the Customer (36%), customer journey analysis (35%) and segmentation (34%). In addition and perhaps surprisingly, efforts that have a social media focus are also poorly represented in the results, with analytics to measure engagement and influence (20%) and sentiment (8%) both enjoying limited adoption.

Furthermore, while attribution is increasingly an issue for marketers, just two-fifths (41%) use campaign attribution tools. Yet, with diverse media driving sales across multiple touch points on the path to purchase, measuring simply first or last touch is not good enough. So why are organisations failing to examine attribution in the depth required to make it meaningful?

Embracing analytics
The main problem is, as cited frequently in recent times, a lack of analytics expertise within the business; although companies also cite a lack of time and structural issues with data. However, the value of analytics is clearly recognised, with over half (51%) planning to invest in a dedicated in house analytics team within two years.

Certainly, the value is clear to those organisations that have already invested in both the right tools and expertise: almost three-quarters (71%) cite better customer targeting; over half (58%) improved conversion; with 51% confirming improved marketing personalisation and 51% improved customer experience.

These results tie in with the experiences of clients who are exploiting advanced analytics – from the use of golden path analysis to improve the customer experience and conversion rates, to the use of affinity analysis to identify the products that are browsed and purchased together. Organisations are using these new insights to enable journey improvements by, for example, detecting paths to churn, identifying site and basket abandonment patterns and attaining advanced individual customer level insight.

Journey analysis is also being used to optimise processes. Determining how customers flow through digital channels reveals bottlenecks, repeated steps and inefficiencies – such as web interactions followed by customer phone queries – and significant drop out points. By re-engineering processes, customer experiences can be significantly improved, leading to better retention and cost efficiencies. There are also many opportunities to improve the return on investment (ROI) from spend attribution to identifying fraud in real-time and behavioural based pricing.

Conclusion
Analytics is far from the heartland of traditional marketing activity for most organisations. Yet in an increasingly growth oriented economy where marketing is expected to step up and make measurable contributions and inform on-going strategy, analytics is becoming an essential component of the marketing skills base. Furthermore the shift away from the exclusive use of web analytics also focuses the attention on the overall data strategy – not least the continued challenges of managing data storage and customer data quality. The continued dominance of web analytics and use of aggregated data can cause both data quality issues and actionable data challenges because the data is not designed to support modern marketing requirements, such as omni-channel customer insight and one-to-one personalisation.

So where next? For any marketing manager trying to determine the direction of investment, creating the right data foundation has to be a priority. Without a solid data strategy in place, marketers face a long, difficult and tortuous path to achieve the required depth of customer understanding and quality of multichannel customer experience. With the right foundation, the organisation will be well placed to exploit a raft of innovative tools and techniques – from real time personalisation to sophisticated analytics.

Katharine Hulls is VP Marketing, Celebrus Technologies.

Wayne Morris (pictured) examines how event organisers’ continued reliance on paper-based methodology could take them from prints to paupers. For a more regal ROI, the digital medium is King.

It may be 2014 and the developed world is going mobile crazy, but some industries are still clutching stubbornly onto the quaint delights of good, old-fashioned print. There is a well-worn mantra that ‘there’s nothing quite like holding a book in your hands’, or the ‘visceral act of physically turning a page’ is both a nostalgic and, in some cases, a practical viewpoint. But sometimes, the shortcomings of print are woefully exposed by the ruthless efficiency of digital media.

A prime example of this can be seen at events all over the world, where event organisers manfully persevere with print to convey crucial communications – and are, as a result, often betrayed by its lack of agility in responding to unforeseen but predictable change. The approach commonly manifests itself in the countless printed Events Guides that document incomplete, inaccurate or outdated event information. And, with a cruel domino-like effect, the static limitations of paper cascade into many other key aspects of event management.

For the beleaguered event planner, the arrival of the Guide at least authenticates the Disney fairytale: “Someday your prints will come.” They will. Normally about a month before you actually need them, and the same day your keynote speaker pulls out. It’s far from a fairytale ending.

In the real world of 2014, print’s charming, but surely mobile is the smartest approach?

Paper? Scissors? Stone-age!
The paper-based Event Guide is at odds with almost every strategic objective an event planner faces; it’s expensive, it’s inflexible, it undermines attendee engagement and, from a sustainability point of view, it puts a carbon foot right into organisers’ environmental responsibilities. Worse still, from a delegate perspective, it’s often heavy, unhelpful and out of date.

So perhaps it’s time to cut it? With ROI their most important metric, event organisers who persevere with familiar but outdated methods are flagrantly haemorrhaging the value and opportunity that disruptive technologies can provide. It starts with the printed guide, but it goes far beyond a simple brochure.

Scrap paper
Surprisingly, when it comes to event organisers’ use of mobile technologies, it seems the jury is still out. A recent survey of event planning and management executives reveals that 63% of global events still don’t leverage a mobile application. But, with global smartphone penetration continuing to rise, and predicted to exceed 1.2 billion users in 2014, the pressure on the event management sector to exploit the medium is intensifying. Undeniably, whether managing consumer expos, corporate/B2B events and meetings or freshers’ fayres in higher education, the benefits of optimising attendees’ communication channel of choice are significant.

Mobile applications can deliver ROI to all event stakeholder groups; event organisers, exhibitors/sponsors and attendees. For organisers, the reduction in print costs alone should provide sufficient incentive – and, for companies that host numerous events, the annual savings a mobile platform can generate are potentially significant. That the approach also ticks a box for companies’ sustainability obligations is a welcome ethical by-product.

In addition, digital tools bring an agility that print can never provide; in the dynamic event environment, mobile gives organisers the opportunity to respond to changes and make schedule amendments in real-time. Too often, brochures are out of date long before the courier has delivered 2,000 of them to the warehouse. The real-time accuracy of digital content has obvious knock-on benefits for attendees, who themselves are under pressure to ensure they maximise their time at the event; delegates can navigate events and plan their days effectively and, with the additional connectivity that digital communications provide, they can also engage and interact with fellow attendees.

In fact, engagement is a critical objective for all modern events. Mobile technologies not only present a platform for networking, matchmaking and lead retrieval, they also allow traditionally passive attendees to evolve into active event participants; social channels, crowdsourcing and interactive polls are among many collaborative activities that can be built into mobile applications. These can only enhance the attendee experience and build long-term brand loyalty. From a commercial perspective, such connectivity supports exhibitors’ primary objective  – lead generation.

Mobile applications have a utility and value right across the event life-cycle – enabling attendees to be wise before, during and after the event. This intelligence begins from the moment an individual signs up for an event, and keeps them informed throughout the whole experience. Mobile provides users with real-time information on delegates, speakers and exhibitors – and presents a channel for promotion, education and interaction at every stage.

The powerful combination of mobile tools to support registration, itinerary management, appointment booking and interactive communications means that organisers are able to capture real-time data to monitor activity, evaluate trends and measure ROI. This data can help inform product development and strengthen a brand’s value proposition. Moreover, organisers can use real-world data to enhance commercial negotiations with potential exhibitors and sponsor for future events; with stats to support optimal stand location, likely footfall and delegate analytics. Getting customers to re-sign for the following year is a perennial challenge. Real-world data can help both you – and them – prove ROI.

From prints to pauper
The benefits of mobile are therefore clear – so why is it that only 37% of the market are optimising the opportunity? Perhaps popular misconceptions over the cost and speed of implementation are holding the market back. But those fears are unfounded. The most effective white-label platforms allow event organisers to create a mobile guidebook within two hours. They deploy easy-to-use content management systems that allow anyone in an organisation, irrespective of their IT prowess, to upload content using simple drag-and-drop methodology and APIs into their own pre-existing event data, such as schedules. They’re quick, intuitive and accessible –  and, crucially, they’re affordable. The smartest platforms offer modular pricing, ranging from free to enterprise, meaning that every business from an SME to a large multinational can benefit from their undoubted economies of scale.

Conversely, perhaps it’s just age-old apathy for change – or a perception that this is something that can be built in-house within an already overburdened IT infrastructure – that prevents some organisations from progressing and often leads to them being overtaken by more visionary businesses.

In the competitive global events market, organisers will continue to face significant challenges as the pressure on margins – as well as the battle to attract attendees – intensifies. The most proactive organisations are those that have realised that it’s no longer enough to compete on the calibre of a speakers’ programme or the prestige of a location, it’s time to compete on innovation.

Mobile technology is a disruptive innovation that is helping event organisers drive operational productivity and efficiency, enhance the attendee experience and measure ROI. Progressive organisers across all sectors are moving away from restrictive paper-based methodology, and are leveraging mobile to transform events and increase engagement. For those who aren’t, the journey from prints to pauper may be slow but inevitable. But, in 2014, it doesn’t need to be that way.

Disruptive mobile technology is offering businesses the chance to revolutionise processes and positively redesign customer experience – simply, easily and effectively. The winners will be those that embrace the opportunity and partner with organisations that can help them deliver the fairytale ending.

Wayne Morris is GM EMEA, Guidebook.  

Procurement wants accountability, but marketing wants creativity. Is it possible to give them both what they want at the same time? It is, argues Andrew Woodger (pictured).

The traditional agency model is changing. That’s an opening sentence likely to put off more than a few readers. After all, haven’t we all heard it all before? The fragmentation of traditional media, the arrival of digital, the latest recession or downturn . . . whatever the catalyst happens to be, the refrain is the same – the agency model either is, or has, to change to reflect the new circumstances, the new skills sets required, the new pressures being imposed by external forces and clients alike.

Agencies are like chameleons. As the pressures shift and slide, they adapt, exploiting new opportunities and developing new ways to part clients from their budgets. So it’s no surprise that with most large businesses now involving procurement departments in the appointment of marketing suppliers, the spotlight is once again on the way that creative agencies service their clients.

On one level, this sounds like a recipe for conflict. The agency wants to generate big ideas and show the client new ways to develop their brand and attract more customers. They achieve those Big Ideas by employing the best and brightest creative talent – and the very best talents don’t come cheap.

On the other side is the procurement department. They also want to see more customers coming on board and staying on board – but to do this by squeezing every last pip of value out of every penny spent. The agency wants to be bold and increase the client’s marketing investment – procurement wants to minimise that spend.

However, the clever agency chameleons are more likely to see the opportunity in all this. Equally, procurement departments will also understand that by finding ways to engage with agencies collaboratively, the end results will be better for both parties. Smart agencies will also see this as an opportunity to improve their own working practices – while still being able to get the most out of the client-agency relationship. By embracing change and looking for the opportunities to drive it forward, both sides stand to gain.

So what of that all important ‘creative’ edge? Those vital brand assets which agencies create and marketing departments encourage? I would argue that this does not change one little bit. Creativity is something brands want and good agencies deliver. Good agencies are full of brilliant, talented creative people – that’s what draws the clients to them. They love those creative bright sparks, because they are the people who ultimately turn the base metal of ideas into marketing gold.

But the translation of that creativity into marketing assets is where greater efficiencies are most likely to be found. Every Big Idea has to be turned into something practical – from a new website to a hard-hitting advertising campaign – and it’s here that procurement and agency can come together for the mutual benefit of both parties.

Art work is a commodity – and a measurable and manageable one at that. Both sides can gain by each taking steps to improve and streamline this aspect of the creative process. Take Purple’s work for Mitchells & Butlers. M&B have more than 1,600 pubs and restaurants serving 130 million meals and 420 million drinks every year. Working closely together, Purple and M&B created an in house studio for the company. M&B can quickly and efficiently develop a new campaign or idea – and Purple provides the people and the facilities to deliver this as efficiently as possible by ensuring that the studio is fully utilized. There are major wins for both parties – and everyone gains something important from the relationship.

The catalyst on this occasion is the drive for greater efficiency. The solution is one which benefits both parties without either side having to make uncomfortable compromises. The agency is encouraged to continue providing its creative input, the client has a way to optimise the value of the creative output. The ‘traditional model’ is changing yet again. This time it’s changing for the better – and who – client and agency together – wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

Andrew Woodger is data and planning director at the Purple Agency.