Why brands want agencies that collaborate well - Rebecca Lieb

Ten or so years ago, the big whinge in digital marketing was silos. Digital vets know the lament all too well -- digital was siloed off from print and from broadcast. Interactive never got to sit at the grownups' table. Campaigns never pointed anyone to the web page (hard to believe now, but it was certainly true then).

• Rebecca Lieb
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If all this were changed (the lament continued), digital would get its due. It would get more branding ad dollars and evolve far beyond email offers for nutritional supplements (which, of course it did).

Less than a decade later, digital advertising and media comprise a multi-billion-dollar industry. You don't hear a lot about silos any more. Yet I've begun to worry about them. Namely, that silos are springing up right and left within digital itself.

More on that later because there's another opposing view on this, from none other than Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola's VP of global advertising strategy and creative excellence.

In a discussion last week about what he looked for when selecting an agency, among other criteria he named the ability to collaborate.

"Digital brilliance has always come from understanding how to collaborate with very different types of thinkers -- storytellers, producers, and developers," said Mildenhall. "The digital industry has grown up out of collaboration. Traditional agencies have taught collaboration for the last decade, but they're only just now understanding how to practice collaboration. The rhetoric of collaboration is finally coming home as a reality."

Interesting thinking. Are we really good at collaborating in digital? The disparity of talents and personality types necessary to realize even the smallest campaign or digital initiative prompted the editors of this publication to ask me last week to write a piece on how to speak geek. It's not easy to bring right brain and left-brain talent together and make anything happen.

Meanwhile, digital's not getting any easier. Discrete disciplines are more complex by the week. Email, SEO, SEM, media planning and buying, creative, and analytics are just a few of the digital verticals that often require their own slew of specialists. New platforms are cropping up all the time, and have to be accounted for and made to work flawlessly, user-experience wise. (Tablets! Android! iOS!)

Bottom line: Increasingly, we understand less and less what our colleagues across the table actuallydo.

Another hindrance to collaboration? An increasing lack of clear boundaries and responsibilities as the lines separating advertising, media, content, and social blur smudge.

A digital marketing executive at a major healthcare company laments managing multiple agencies: one for social, one for display, one for media, and so on. Two years ago, she said, everything worked fine. Now, "They're all posting to our YouTube channel. It's a nightmare -- yet doing this is critical to each individual agency's performance goals."

So, who manages the collaboration? The rules that worked smoothly a scant two years ago are suddenly no longer applicable.

Another obstacle to collaboration is data. It's hard to get different teams on the same page if they aren't looking at the same data in the same way to work toward common goals, even if each team's point of departure is a different one.

All the above, as well as all future roadblocks to collaboration, will very soon have to be carefully considered and strategically overcome by the agencies that expect to remain competitive in digital.

Why? Clients have your number. Collaboration is explicitly what major brands say is the "No. 1 criterion for agency selection." A brand doesn't want its advertising agency telling it that the company can do social media, too. The brand wants the ad shop to work in harmony with the social team, and it wants the two to inform and enhance the other's efforts.

Easier said than done, and also easier when the shops expected to work in tandem are agencies of record (AORs), "part of the family," as one client-side executive recently put it.

Yet collaboration, and a deliberate attempt to avoid even the appearance of silos, seems a critical ingredient to becoming AOR nowadays.

Marketers struggle to harness social media - survey

 By Georgina Prodhan

LONDON | Tue Oct 11, 2011 12:01am EDT

Oct 11 (Reuters) - Marketing chiefs feel overwhelmed by the growing volume of customer data on websites like Facebook and Twitter, and while they realise its potential value they consider themselves ill-equipped to harness it, an IBM study found.

Only 26 percent of chief marketing officers track blogs and just 40 percent track any online communications, while 82 percent still rely on traditional market research to shape marketing strategies, according to the study.

A few top consumer brands, such as Coca-Cola , Nike and Starbucks -- are using high-profile social media campaigns to great effect to find out what their customers want and to communicate with them.

But most CMOs are struggling to prove that investments in social media marketing would yield returns, according to the survey of more than 1,700 CMOs published on Tuesday and carried out in face-to-face interviews from February to June.

"The perfect solution is to serve each consumer individually. The problem? There are 7 billion of them," said one CMO at a consumer-products firm in the survey.

Some 82 percent said they planned to increase their use of social media over the next 3-5 years.

IBM, along with other technology firms and big advertising agencies, is seeking to capitalise on the need of marketers to analyse data being created and shared on sites like Twitter and YouTube or by email.

Facebook has more than 800 million active users, while Twitter users send about 200 million tweets per day.

Such unstructured data, which are not collected in databases or documents, are difficult to understand using traditional computer programmes.

IBM estimated that more than 90 percent of all real-time information being created today are unstructured -- and has spent $14 billion in the past five years on acquisitions of analytics companies to fulfil that new demand.

"We have entered the age of the smarter consumer," IBM marketing executive Marcel Holsheimer told journalists at a briefing in London.

"Marketing is going to become much more an automated and software play than it was in the past. This is why IBM is now making the investment in this space."

Hewlett-Packard this month bought Britisih software firm Autonomy, a market leader in unstructured data search, for $12 billion.

GRIT Sneak Peek: The Top Emerging Market Research Techniques

Posted by Leonard MurphyThursday, September 8, 2011, 10:11 am

4 Comments

It's that time again folks! Analysis and preparation for publishing the latest iteration of the GRIT report is just about complete. As usual, I am so excited about the great findings in the study that I just can't wait to share them with all of my colleagues in the industry, so here is another sneak peek at what we found out.

It’s that time again folks! Analysis and preparation for publishing the latest iteration of theGRIT report is just about complete. As usual, I am so excited about the great findings in the study that I just can’t wait to share them with all of my colleagues in the industry, so here is another sneak peek at what we found out. The rest of this post is a combination of analysis by myself and Bob Walker of Surveys & Forecasts, LLC.

Compared to prior waves of the GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) study, the Summer 2011 wave is relatively compact. In addition to key issues that have been trended since the initial 2003 study, new questions on research technology, anticipated staffing characteristics and skill sets, and anticipated changes to marketing research methodologies and business models were asked. Specific probes on influential and/or authoritative industry organizations were also included. We investigated spending levels, the overall levels of optimism vs. trepidation, and how the industry perceives and is reacting to change.  Even the moniker “marketing research” itself was a subject of this most recent wave, along with the standard complement of annual GRIT tracking questions.

All of that and more will be detailed in the report, which should be published within the next week or two. In the meantime, we’re going to take a look at one set of findings: the top emerging research techniques. 

There has been a lot of debate about whether new technology adoption within market research, especially mobile and social media, is over hyped. Well, I think the latest data from GRIT tells us that although some techniques may be over-hyped when compared to current or planned adoption, that is unarguably NOT the case with mobile, MROCs, social media research, and text analytics.

As we saw in 2010, widespread experimentation with new research technology continues apace. Of the “techniques” ever used, the top items include online communities (aka MROCs) at 35%, data mining (32%), social media analytics (29%), text analytics (22%), andmobile research (at 21%). Interestingly, buyers/clients are leading the way here, with higher levels observed for online communities, social media analytics, data mining, and text analytics.

What is also interesting is that these finding were consistent with the 2010 results on projected use; meaning that participants in the study are following through with their implementation plans and are aggressively adopting new techniques to at least supplement and possibly to replace more traditional methods.

The chart below compares 2010 planned adoption and 2011 actual usage.

As traditional sources of respondents for consumer panels become more problematic (i.e., from a recruiting and attrition standpoint), clients and suppliers must apply new methods to extract consumer insights and bridge the gaps between traditional and new modalities. Despite the more aggressive adoption of social media, mobile apps, and online communities, far less use is seen for serious gaming, biometrics, neuromarketing, virtual environments, crowdsourcing, predictive markets, and visualization analytics; less than 10% of buyers or suppliers predict they will use these methods in the near future, relegating them to very niche positions within the broader industry.

The big news for 2012 will be the massive growth (in many cases almost doubling from 2011 levels) of social media analytics, MROCs, data mining, mobile (both quant and qual approaches), and text analytics.

In almost all cases client-side researchers are leading with utilizing these techniques, with suppliers lagging behind in their adoption (and therefore offering) these techniques. This indicates that either buyers will be centering their relationships around vendors who can offer these methods, and it is likely that in many cases that means they will be working with non-traditional suppliers, many of which may not even consider themselves within the market research space. This is certainly in line with current thinking of many industry leaders about the emergence of new competitive forces that are encroaching upon the traditional “insights” field.

The chart below shows the projected usage of merging techniques in 2012.

As part of our GRIT study, a parallel social media analytics study was also conducted, in association with NetBase, a study co-sponsor. For this exercise, NetBase used their social media monitoring platform to search public websites for comments about emerging methods– specifically, the frequency with which emerging methods terms appear, and the sentiment (positive or negative) associated with each one.  The intent of this analysis is to understand whether “online influencers” differ from self-reported feedback based on industry research, such as GRIT.

As you can see from the charts, the amount of buzz associated with Online Communities,Data Mining, Social Media Analytics, Text Analytics, and Mobile Surveys is proportionate to the percentage relationships seen in our GRIT sample (i.e., those who indicated that they have used these technologies in the past).

However, there is more buzz than actual use for Eye Tracking, Crowdsourcing, Virtual Environments, NeuroMarketing, Biometric Response, and Serious Games – that is, there is a lot of chatter about these methods, yet little use to date (most are well under 10%).

Here is the chart:

This indicates that marketing researchers are certainly thinking and talking about a multitude of emerging technologies, but have yet to figure out the ways in which they can implement many of them for marketing insights and business guidance. To understand this a bit better, NetBase also produces a quadrant map showing the “Brand Passion Index” for each of these emerging technologies. Here we see that most of emerging methods captured by the buzz algorithm are viewed favorably – at least in terms of liking – but that the two that seem to most loved are Mobile Surveys and Facial Tracking/Scanning. Mobile Surveys are one of the methods used most be our respondents (Facial Scanning was not asked in our list, but will be included in future waves). One emerging method was associated with more negative buzz: Neuromarketing – a method used by few (just 5%) in our GRIT study.

We read this as although there may be a disproportionate amount of “buzz” for some methods which have strong adherents or fans but little widespread usage, in most cases there is no “tail wagging the dog” phenomenon; the share of discussion around mobile, MROCs, social media research, etc.. is earned buzz. Researchers are using these techniques, are discussing their results online, and are planning to do more with these technologies in the near future as a result.  Of course this positive word-of-mouth is influencing others to try these techniques, but we see a distinct transition from early adopters to mainstream usage in 2012.

Automated sentiment analysis gives poor showing in accuracy test

2 June 2010 | By Brian Tarran

UK— Automated sentiment analysis is less accurate then flipping a coin when it comes to determining whether brand mentions in social media are positive or negative, according to a white paper from FreshMinds.

Tests of a range of different social media monitoring tools conducted by the research consultancy found that comments were, on average, correctly categorised only 30% of the time.

FreshMinds’ experiment involved tools from Alterian, Biz360, Brandwatch, Nielsen, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. The products were tested on how well they assessed comments made about the coffee chain Starbucks, with the comments also having been manually coded.

On aggregate the results look good, said FreshMinds. Accuracy levels were between 60% and 80% when the automated tools were reporting whether a brand mention was either positive, negative or neutral.

“However, this masks what is really going on here,” writes Matt Rhodes, a director of sister company FreshNetworks, in a blog post. “In our test case on the Starbucks brand, approximately 80% of all comments we found were neutral in nature.

“For brands, the positive and negative conversations are of most importance and it is here that automated sentiment analysis really fails,” Rhodes said.

Excluding the neutral comments, FreshMinds manually coded conversations that the tools judged to be either positive or negative in tone. “We were shocked that, without ‘training the tools’, they could be so wrong,” said the firm. “While positive sentiment was more consistently categorised than negative, not one tool achieved the 60-80% accuracy we saw at the aggregate level.

“To get real value from any social media monitoring tool, ongoing human refinement and interpretation is essential,” said the company.

The full whitepaper can be download online here. Get the lowdown on social media monitoring here.

Fun Facts To Know And Tell About Social Media In 2011

By Kip Knight & Dave Evans

• Social media and mobile devices are rapidly becoming a common way people engage with each other and brands; brand marketers need to be proactive about leveraging this accelerating trend

o   There are now over 500M Facebook users (with more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices)

o   There are over 90 million tweets per day on Twitter with millions of comments, complaints and recommendation about brands

o   Every weekday, there are about 7.5 million people tuning into Oprah vs. 43 million people play a Zynga game

o   P&G recently shifted the bulk of its daytime advertising from soaps to social media marketing campaigns

o   Online advertising is predicted to set a new record in 2011, growing 14 percent to  51.9 billion, up from  45.6 billion in 2010

• Social media is now much more than just marketing…it’s about the whole business (i.e. customer support, product development, etc)

o   Leading companies who have bet big on social media (such as Dell, Ford and Starbucks) are now integrating social media into all facets of business  (including crisis management)

o   A recent global survey indicated only 29 percent of companies even have a social media policy – this is a very dangerous position for a company to be in given the damage one untrained employee can now do to a company (even with the best of intentions)

• Social media is turning into a major “listening platform” for brands

o   Technology is enabling us to convert millions of online comments into an on-going tool to measure consumer sentiment (and dig into the “why” and source of this sentiment) in close to real time

o   This will NOT replace the importance of in-depth consumer understanding (such as in-home visits) but helps enhance understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace

• Companies should have a global game plan and strategy to stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving social media space

o   A company needs to be integrated into overall business strategy (not just marketing); they also need to utilize social media as a primary way of listening and responding to their target consumers(as well as monitoring what’s happening with competition and category) as a core competency

o   Companies need to make a  time and budget commitment to developing a strategic framework,  in-depth training and robust online tools to ensure their teams are prepared for managing their brands (both offensive and defensive) using various social media platforms

Social Fatigue?

July 24th, 2011 • social media • 6 Comments

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With the recent launch of Google+, marketers are excited to have a shiny new social network. Even though brands aren’t technically allowed on Google+ yet, some (likeFord Motor) are setting up personal profiles to get started and the marketing world is buzzing with possibilities.

When thinking about opportunities, it’s important for brands to remember that the message is more important than the media. The quality of the conversation is more important than the quality of the platform.

A couple months ago, I shared Andrew Blakeley’s “Social Consumer” experiment where he “Liked” every brand that asked him.  His conclusion: “My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed crammed with nonsense, to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends.”

Even as marketers excitedly brainstorm how to reach consumers on a brand new social network, many consumers are tiring with how brands are reaching them on the current ones. An antisocial brand that uses social media is still an antisocial brand. A content strategy must come before a social network strategy.

The arrival of Google+ is a good time to revisit and reevaluate how our brands interact with consumers. It’s not enough for communication to be good for the brand. It has to be good for the consumer.

Tom Fishburne

What Dell can teach your company about social media ROI

By Jesse Stanchak on July 18, 2011 | Comments (3)

How is your company determining the return on investment for its social media programs?

At the recent Corporate Social Media Summitin New York City, Richard Binhammer, Dell’s head of social media and corporate-reputation management, said the equation is a little more complicated than simply calculating money in and out. As social media programs evolve, they require a more sophisticated understanding of their benefits, he said.

A few lessons from his talk:

ROI is about more than sales. From many other companies, that would sound like a dodge, but Dell is one of the few companies that’s able to say it uses Twitter as a direct-sales tool. The company hasn’t announced an update to that sales figure in many months because it is thinking about ROI differently, Binhammer said. It’s not only one number because it isn’t only about sales; it’s also about increasing business value, he said.

Remember that social media are only another tool. The problem of social media scalability becomes apparent once you realize that businesses can’t win over a fan one time and then move on, thinking that they’ve made a fan for life. Social media aren’t a channel for pushing communications; they’re a tool for managing relationships. “Control is not as successful as influence,” Binhammer said.

Social media can transform your business. If you aren’t taking into account a network’s ability to affect your brand’s communication strategy, product development and customer service, as well as its sales and marketing potential, you’re not seeing the full ROI of social media. Done properly, social media can increase the value of every part of your organization that affects customers. Organizations shouldn’t be asking how social media are making them money; they should be asking how social media make an organization better. That means social media shouldn’t be run by any one division; they need to be part of every aspect of an organization, Binhammer said.

How are you using social media to increase your organization’s value?

Image credit: jpa1999, via iStockphoto