Belgium's Agencies on Strike (Kinda)

In an interesting twist, Ad Age reports that Belgium's creative shops have taken down their websites in protest at client-side marketers ignoring 'pitch rules' negotiated by the industry some time ago.

Spiralling pitch costs are point of industry debate globally, and following talks a charter was penned containing 'rules of engagement' to make the process fairer, including things like clients inviting no more than 3 agencies to pitch for work, and contributing to pitch costs where reasonable.

Its sounds like things haven't panned out as expected, and agencies have taken the unusual step of taking down their sites and replacing them with a linked open letter that takes people on a journey from one site to the other to read the whole thing. You can start it at Famous, and continue from there, or if you're short of time, I've posted screen grabs below. Interesting stuff, and no doubt going to get tongues wagging around the world - what do you think?

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

 

ADMA Awards Making Waves

Not many people know this, but ADMA is far and away the largest marketing industry association in Australia. Historically, perhaps unfairly, seen as the less sexy side of marketing discipline, the industry has really hit its straps in recent years and the recent ADMA Awards highlighted how far the organisation has come. A black tie affair on the Pyrmont wharves in Sydney attracted over 800 of the industry's guns from both agency and client-side, and the awarded work was bloody inspiring. Make sure you check out the website to get a look at the winners. There's perhaps not as much performance/effectiveness information as I would like - participating companies are usually (understandably) pretty cagy about campaign financial data so only the judges get to see the full breakdown, but we know effectiveness is one of the main criteria for many of the award categories.

Clemenger Proximity scooped the Grand Prix with their 'salad made of plate' (catch mUmbrella's article with the full award list here) along with around a dozen other awards to make them a clear winner with daylight second.

All the winning campaigns were notable for the fact they weren't stereotypically DM campaigns, but were great combinations of creative strategy and multichannel execution. Top marks for innovation should go to Tequila CD Russ Tucker and the TBWA gang for their augmented reality campaign for Nissan. Amazing stuff - check it out here.

Closer to home,  congrats to Lauren Halliday from SA Lotteries for picking up the state Young Direct Marketer of the Year award. I also wrapped up this semester's ADMA Digital Marketing certificate course with the exam on Wednesday night - hopefully one of our graduates will pick up a gong or two in years to come. Already looking forward to next year.

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.

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.

Digital Marketing Course in Full Flight

We're just over half way through the ADMA Certificate in Digital Marketing course, and after last night's great chat with Shai Coggins of B5Media fame, it struck me that we've been pretty fortunate so far.

Our small class allows for a pretty interactive (pun?) session each Wednesday, and the guest lecturers we've shared the boardroom with read like a who's who of new media.

Shai has just returned from BlogWorld Expo in Vegas, and is a global expert in the development of communities (and commerce) through blogging. We had Lee Hopkins take us through managing corporate conversations online, as well as the subject of both his PhD and his passion - Second Life. Our own Anthony Coles made sense of the myriad paid media channels available online, and ex OgilvyOne MD Phil Smith held sway on the topic of Digital Strategy. Next week we've got Kevin Wohling from search technology leader eChannel, to be followed by ex Fosters senior marketing exec Georgia Rasmussen's guidance on database and CRM strategy.

Only 6 more weeks to go, and with some of the shared insights from the sessions so far I'm expecting some pretty good strategic campaign plans as part of the student assessments (they get to take a fictional product launch and make it a household name through the - well argued - use and execution of digital marketing strategy).

Heaps of healthy debate, lots of lessons learned, and expert opinions a-plenty. Now I'm starting to wonder what next semester's course will hold.

When marketing goes full circle.

Planes are great to force you to read things. Whilst sitting on CX104 on my way to Hong Kong, I managed to eat up Geoff Livingston's Now is Gone  in which Executives and Entrepreneurs get a primer on Web2.0.


The foreword was written by Futureworks CEO Brian Solis, who highlights the evolution of communications that we are going through, and indeed the Darwinian, "Survival of the Fittest" regarding changing skillset of marketing professionals.

They have Podcast  a few of their discussions, but what struck me the most about his observations were how similar they were my mantra to our guys that:
Listening is marketing
Participation is marketing
Media is marketing, and
Conversations are marketing

Markets, like the flourishing Farmer's Markets, ARE conversations.

The growth of new SOCIAL media are just an evolution in democratising our markets so that We The People are in control.

Blog smog

I'm forever adjusting my radar between the global phenomenon of inter-connected conversations facilitated by the Internet, and the microcosm that is the South Australian marketing community.

The tsunami of change has to eventually crash upon our shores.

Our isolation and ignorance is not a unique phenomenon though, as new findings from the Technorati "State of the blogosphere" report highlights.

I remember it was only a couple of years ago while I was doing some consulting for Starcom that we had a representative from Google in to share with the planning team some of their products and services offerings.

"I never click on links on Search Engines", was the defensive cry from the room.

Well someone does.

Business Week this week just published its Top 25 "Web's Most Influential People " report, and although they're only No 5., they talk about their key task managing the breakneck growth of the company, now comprising more than 18,000 employees and expecting $16.2 billion in sales this year - up 53%. 


Even the declining economy has not yet seemed to slow its dominance in Web search and search-based advertising. 


But that very success is creating challenges, namely a backlash against their increasing power online from competitors, advertisers, and government regulators. Now, their main job will be convincing the world they mean it when they spout their informal corporate motto, "Don't be evil."

iMedia Brand Summit distant memories

Wow, a week goes fast these days.

This time last week I was cramming to get jobs out the way before I rushed off to the Blue Mountains for the iMedia Brand Summit. My last post was about the presenters from Tuesday morning, and its now Monday after already.

I loved Jenny Williams' summary of the greatest challenges for the industy - motivating change.

It is however still all about the creative idea and with the lines blurring between media, creative and strategy, that idea can come from anywhere - its just about the conversation that helps we service providers gets to the core of the business challenge.

The challenge for many marketing service providers today though is that despite the "20+ years" in the industry, they don't have the same value proposition in the fast-changing digital media landscape.

Jenny provided a great example of a simple stone-masonary business leading the charge with his use of web 2.0 tools to grow his business beyond the yard he's working in and into Education, (for those that haven't seen it, he's using Ning as a platform - something we've used on a few solutions this year).

And as a great Jedi once said, "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side". It is certainly time for clients getting advice on this space from traditional agencies to look around for more qualified help.

The Summit format offered many opportunities for conversations with peers in the Australian Digital Marketing industry and I had a great chat with Christian Bartens from Datalicious in the break. A very clever dude doing some amazing things with data and analytics.

Sat in on a few 'spotlight' sessions after lunch.

Fionn Hyndman from DGM gave a tannin-impared presentation on customer acquisition strategies. Their speal is that they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Deal Group Media Plc UK. To quote the website, the company's principal activity is the provision of online marketing services through the mediums of performance based marketing, search engine positioning, optimisation and marketing services, including the provision of competitive intelligence gathering services.

Ian Gardiner from Viocorp showed the crowd why their business has doubled in size in the last 12 months. Their tools are driving some of the best examples of integrated video content in Australia.

Nice to be representing them West of the Blue Mountains.

Trolling through my notes from the Summit, there were many "Nuggets" that I hoe to share over the weeks ahead.

More iMedia moments

"Stay relevant" said Dave Cormier from StrongMail. Stay relevant, test & monitor, keep things in balance and add a sence of urgency to your email.

"Grow or go" said Mehrdad Baghai of Alchemy Growth Partners in an awesome presentation that highlighted the elevated discussions of the corporate strategists considering "Where to compete", vs the day-to-day dilemas of most marketing practicioners worried more about how to execute. Granularity of growth a great book if you want to purchase.


"Know your customer, digitally" professed Anthony Goldman of NextDigital. A challenging thought for those of us not skilled in proctology. Pretty good overview for his Ten Commandments for digital strategy. The 4 P's have become 10 P's in the uber-complicated digital world.

Ed Smith from News Digital Media cracked open the 2nd day with his inspiring presentation on the global trends from his recent visit to Cannes. Whopperfreakout and HBO Voyeur campaign blowing people away with its scope and breadth.

And wrapping up Tuesday morning was Jenny Williams from IdeaGarden nailing the need for internal organisational change and a commitment from industry to bridge the skills gap.

Awesome crew.

iMedia Brand Summit is all action

The iMedia Brand Summit kicked off in the Blue Mountains last night with Mark McCrindle from McCrindle Research giving a very entertaining overview of the changing social landscape, and how that is fundamentally affecting how brands connect with consumers.

Of note were the key trends of a post-life stage, post-structure, post-linear and post-rational society.

Shifts from the drawing to Tradition to a drawing to Innovation. From Reputation to Recommendation. Sit and Listen, to Try and See. Long-term needs to Short-term wants. Content, to Process. Authority, to Authenticity, and from Tech IQ (a given), to Emotional IQ.

These changes best reflected by an observation of a friend of his trying to offer a Gen Y-er a job. Highlighting the generational gap the Boomer saying "You're ignorant and Apathetic", to which the Gen Y-er said "I don't know what you mean, and I don't care"...

Good luck to us all.

Some interesting downloads from his site.

No Such Thing as an Average Joe

When it comes to discussions about email marketing I often get asked the same question: What is the average click through rate?

Without wanting to be too flippant with the standard 'piece of string' comparison, its important to get past what the Average Joes (or Joneses) are up to. Benchmarking is one thing, but in the world of digital media the cost of entry is so low, and the quality of measurement data so high, that there's no real excuse for not putting a toe in the water and creating your own INTERNAL benchmark. Then all you need to do is test some variables, look at the results, and apply the information in a cycle of continual improvement.

In a blog post at Email Insider, Jordan Ayan notes that 'industry average' metrics can be so broad a range as to be totally useless, and that companies should look in their own backyard to find that starting comparison. Trust your own stats, and improve on them from there.

The Adelaide Crows Inner Circle

Fanatical Adelaide Crows supporter, Rebecca, had a real MCB (Money Can't Buy) experience on Saturday when she belted out the Crows team song arm in arm with the players after a nail biting win against the Western Bulldogs.

Rebecca was one of more than a thousand punters who risked the life of their mobile phones in a deluge of biblical proportions when she texted her entry in the Carlton Draught Text'n'Sing promotion at AAMI Stadium.

Via Media was engaged by the Crows and Fosters to manage the interactive side of a test campaign that looks like running through to season 2009 after positive feedback from club, sponsor and fans alike. With co-operation from partner 2moro Mobile, Via Media set up an inbound mobile number to capture entries, before bouncing back an unexpected voice message from superstar Crow Nathan Bock, thanking fans for their support and asking for help to get the Crows over the line in what was a tense final quarter.

Not quite the Big Ad, but targeted, relevant, timely, contextual, engaging communication. Maybe just what Fosters was after?

Marketing Week Goes Digital. Finally.

Last week saw the Marketing Week roadshow hit town, and refreshingly, 'Digital' got it's fair (i.e. dominant) share of the speaker calendar. Themed The Marketing Revolution, 'non-traditional' communication was collectively endorsed as the future of marketing, effectively giving advertising agencies as we know them the life expectancy of a needle-sharing Baghdad mortorcyclist.

Our own CEO Anthony Coles had two speaking spots, IdeaGarden's Jenny Williams painted the big picture in her inimitable way, and industry leaders like Matt Baxter (of Naked fame) and ex Singo's MD Phil Smith underlined the opportunities available to marketers who embrace the changes we're seeing (and thanks also to Phil for adding a guest spot at our ADMA Digital Certificate course to his list of presentations - a rare opportunity for an appreciative audience).

I'd like to think that Marketing Week has galvanised a few people who've been meaning to 'join the revolution', so it will be interesting to see who in Adelaide steps up, and who falls back into the comfort zone of yesterday. Telling times ahead...

Google Adwords Makes a Few Changes

You might have seen some news on changes to Google's Adwords service.

In a post on the company blog, Google has advised that changes to the Quality Score metric means that ads will no longer be tagged 'inactive for search' if they don't meet a minimum bid value. What does this mean? Every ad will now remain live regardless of their maximum bid settings, but it's unlikely to have much/any positive effect on your campaign given the ad is still unlikely to rank on the first page or two. Google will also introduce a metric that indicates the minimum bid value required to be on the first page of paid listings, effectively aligning their metric to a marketing objective, rather than a nominal active/inactive setting. Quality Score will also now be applied dynamically at the time of each search, rather than in batch on setup, to enhance the user experience and ad relevance for people using the search engine.

In a nutshell, be aware of the changes but don't expect any revolutionary difference in the way you use Adwords. You still need a high Quality Score (relevance) to keep bid values low, and still need competitive bids if you want those valuable rankings near the top of the list. Pretty simple, eh?

Read more on the detail here.

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements

ADMA Digital Certificate Kicks Off

Last night was something of a watershed moment for digital media education in Adelaide - the intro session to ADMA's certificate in digital marketing.

Part of Via Media's charter, and the reason for our involvement with the course, is using education to bridge the disconnect in SA between companies "knowing we need to do digital" and them actually doing it.

There's belief in the potential of the media, but - without the baseline knowledge required to develop a strategy - uncertainty about where to start. And that translated with the group last night. The key takeout was that digital marketing IS direct marketing, and while I expected a few eyes glazing over with the statistical analysis that comes with 'DM', it was evident that Digital offered these marketers accountability and clarity, as well as the chance to be creative.

A marketing campaign with looks AND brains? Maybe not such a rare creature after all...

Certificate in Digital Marketing in Adelaide at last

The Australian Direct Marketing Association announced today that they would be offering their Certificate in Digital Marketing in Adelaide, facilitated by Via Media.

The nationally accredited 14 week course will be run in the evenings, and starts on August 13.

Throughout the course students will work together to learn the key concepts and principles of digital marketing and how they apply across the myriad of media channels available, from simple email campaigns, to website project management, to leveraging social networking tools and online advertising.

Via Media has been pushing to bring courses in this space - that run regularly in the Eastern States - to the SA market. The recent cancellation of the B&T Digital Bootcamp program was the latest disappointment.

“Too many of these courses don’t head West of the Blue Mountains” says Jason Neave, ADMA State Councillor and facilitator of the digital course in SA. “Access to a recognised certificate course in SA is imperative for local organisations if they want to remain competitive nationally, and internationally. The program is standardised across the country, and students get to mix with other local practitioners and learn from case studies from Australia’s biggest brands”.

“There is a huge need for this in the local market”, says ADMA Education manager Alex Pye, “and ADMA’s role as the premier industry association in this space is to help SA companies re-skill in order to participate.”

More information is available on the course from the ADMA site.