Marketing Week 2009

Planning is well underway for the annual Marketing Week conference/love-in at the Holiday Inn in Adelaide - with the theme of 'A Marketing-Led Recovery' likely to generate a fair bit of interest both here and interstate.

Whether touched by the GEC/GFC/FinancialArmageddon or not, many businesses are seriously questioning the currency value of traditional marketing methods and looking for more measurable ways to connect with today's customers - whether in a B2B or B2C environment - and SA's flagship marketing event is a good place to get a rounded view on some of the opportunities available.

Marketing Week's speaker list is fairly impressive, with a lot of focus on consumer research and accountability to follow up last year's digital bent. I even heard a couple of comments last year that the event should be renamed Digital Marketing Week - which is kinda puzzling. Specialisation and niche markets are one thing, but as an industry we need to stop treating 'digital' and 'traditional' as two different animals. There will always be a place for both - digital may be on the steeper growth curve, but ultimately all clients want to know is how to make meaningful connections with their customers, regardless of the channel. And that's what Marketing Week is all about.

And in the theme of traditional marketing activity, there's a fat business lunch on the Friday. Got your tickets?

A Marketing-Led Recovery

It's been a little while since our last post, perhaps a function of increased activity in the marketing sector - specifically the digital and direct marketing sector - over the last couple of months. It provides food for thought - are people turning to more accountable methods of marketing because of the GFC, or is it simply a continuation of the trend of the last few years? Logical thinking dictates that remaining visible in a time when everyone else is slashing budgets, means cut-through should improve. But the age old question is where to direct our efforts?

Recent consumer preference research from Open Mind showed consumers still prefer to receive marketing information via personalised direct means over any other form. Email was the big improver since the benchmark version of the study in 2003, with newspapers and television showing the most rapid decline.

The study, commissioned by Australia Post, supports a move towards information-based marketing at the expense of broadcast media. Perhaps not surprising given the sponsor, but the research group and its methodology is well regarded, and it importantly offers the comparative benchmark against the same survey framework from five years ago. Trends + Statistics = Guidance.

So at the risk of sounding self-serving (being in the information-based marketing industry and all...) I'll sign off for now, but with Marketing Week coming up and a recent lecture by MercerBell principal Nic Mercer reinforcing the issue (150 marketing bods at a breakfast in Radelaide - who would have thought?!) it seems like a topic that's not going away any time soon.

Skill Up in a Downturn

It's that time of year again. In case you've been ignoring all those new year notions of self improvement for a month or two, it might be worth checking out the ADMA Certificate in Digital Marketing (of for that matter, it's original sire, the Certificate in Direct Marketing). Both are related, and having been through each of them I can honestly say both are worthwhile.

With all the hoo-hah about the technology, people often forget that digital is really just a pure form of direct marketing - the same basics apply. (As Phil Smith from IdeaGarden pointed out in last semester's course, all digital is direct, just not all direct is digital...yet..)

I also caught up with Phil's business partner Jenny Williams (p.s. the ideagarden blog is worth a read) at the ADMA board meeting in sunny Glenelg last week where part of the focus was on building on ADMA's strength in the digital space. Much is often made of industry bodies being very Sydney-centric, but I think the fact the meeting was here in Adelaide is testament to the association's commitment to supporting members and marketers from around the country.

And back to the education focus of this post, both Certificate courses start next Wednesday and run for 14 weeks if anyone is wanting to make their marketing dollar a little more accountable!

Media planners twitch over new publically accessible stats tools

A few years ago I brought to the attention of a certain Media Agency the growth in online media buying in the US and Europe, allowing advertisers to access inventory on tv, radio  and in newspapers  and magazines.


Now digital publisher, Social Times , has released a new tool that allows you to look at the demographics of Facebook users in real time across countries.

Just a few minutes playing with the tool you can see the power of open accessibility to statistical data, made easy through a simple interface design.

Retail ads coming through a widget near you. Cannes Cyber Gold Winner Uniqlock

Its inspiring to see some of the beautiful work picking up gongs at Cannes this year, particularly in Government and Retail categories.

There's no doubting the judges decision on Cyber Grand Prix and Cyber Gold winning campaign from Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo.

From Creativity Online, "We put an incredible amount of thought into the Grand Prix this year," said Cyber Lions Jury President and TBWA Worldwide chief digital officer Colleen DeCourcy. "I don't think it's possible to overthink the Grand Prix ever, but this year we decided we wanted to be forward facing and try and figure out what we wanted to hold up as an example of what we really viewed as progressive work."

Progressive might be an understatement when it comes to Uniqlock, which hinges on an unusual clock widget that synchronizes sound, time and live action dance video—all while showcasing Uniqlo's threads.



Retail can often be thought of as screaming discounts and catalogue inserts, but as the Uniqlo example demonstrates the blurring of the lines between technology, creativity and media continues as innovative companies extend their brand's activities beyond geographic boundaries, through exceptional digital work.

And if you think its only relevant in the high-end Japanese market, then 68,000,000 views of their clothing range in 209 countries just might make this one of the most-seen retail ads EVER.

Media Cost - $0.00

Strategic digitally-led creative idea - Priceless.

Information overload? It may be your fault...

If your like me and you don't know how you're going to get away from the fact that your email inbox is just never going to empty itself, and your blog posts need responding to, and your Twitter feeds need a read, and your Facebook status needs an update, then you'll be delighted to hear from Clay Shirky, Author of "Here Comes Everybody", as he addressed the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. (Lance Armstrong also spoke of his pending return to cycling)



Using some terrific personal anecdotes from acquaintances experiencing the dilemma of the blurring of the lines between public and personal life in the Post-Facebook world. He identifies that it is not the overload of information that is the problem, moreover the failure of the various systems, (technological or human), that lead to information overload.



With a philosophical approach to describing the evolution of the publishing model since Guttenberg, Shirky highlights that information overload is not fixable by putting a linear publishing model solution onto a non-linear (Facebook) publishing world.

The reason why it is popular is because it offers something new.

The old guard need to recognise that now new solutions need to be found.

More from the summit via BlipTV here. (Australian bandwidth limitations considering).

More on Clay here .

Many Happy Returns (on Investment)

With the growth in Social Networking, widgets, onlinePR and the search behemoth, many pundits have predicted the death of email as a marketing tool.

Not so, according to the latest economic impact study from the Direct Marketing Association in the US. While Email ROI seems to be slowly declining, the DMA estimates that marketers earned $45.06 for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008. And while this might drop to $43.52 next year, its still so far in front of the rest of the pack that you can understand why most marketers are fighting tooth and nail to keep the CFO's hands off the email marketing spend in the current economic downturn. An article from Direct magazine comments further - you can read the rest of it here.

Even if email remains the holy grail of DM, its not without its challenges. Email Service Providers once relied on relationship management with the major ISPs to make sure their servers (and their client's email efforts) stayed off the spam blacklists, but the proliferation of web-based email accounts with auto spam feed back loops (FBL) and the automation of the spam reporting process, means that deliverability has become a bigger challenge than ever.

Sender Reputation (find out your email server sender score at www.senderscore.org) is now the biggest challenge to email deliverability, and it gets more complex when the different ISPs and webmail providers use a different mix of content and reputation scores to decide whether to deliver the email.

So just when you thought email was easy, think again. . So, read blogs, download reports, talk to your agency and work hard at keeping your content fresh and your list current. Email marketing will be an ongoing - sometimes fairly labour intensive - process of improvement. But at $40-odd dollars back for every buck you spend, the rewards look worthwhile to me.