Rethinking Armstrong's move to AOL
Hit "reset" and forget everything you've read about Tim Armstrong leaving Google for AOL. Take a leap of faith and believe he was not brought in to take the company public on its own, or paint this house and then sell it to another media company. Armstrong at AOL makes sense on many levels. From TimeWarner CEO Jeff Bewkes' point of view, this is a logical hire to keep AOL within the company and connect its fate to TimeWarner's myriad content brands.
Bewkes has been through a few top dogs at AOL. One, Jon Miller, came in with a very impressive resume on the ecommerce and entertainment content lines. His strategy did not drive revenue. Now Bewkes is looking at a company that has media assets occupying very different stages of their lifecycles. Movies and cable are still prime. One of the most troubling assets is a huge stack of print magazines of varying profitability and viability. Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and even the flagship Time have had a tough time maintaining readership and revenue. Readers have moved online, but TW has cut too many deals to make the internet a value-add for print sales. Revenue migration has lagged.
McKinsey blesses Twitter usage for suits
If there's a bastion of stodgy business thought, it's McKinsey & Company, where deep consulting reports have long ridden the leading edge of globalization, innovation, and management thought.
McKinsey has never been exactly dialed in to online innovation...until now. Without much fanfare, McKinsey has embraced social media, making it safe for MBAs around the world to tweet and retweet.
Customer engagement index plunges 15%
Customers are not happy. And unless you are an ultra-high end brand, they're checking out of their attachment with you...and telling each about it via social media channels.
Those are some of the results of the PeopleMetrics second annual Customer Engagement Report. It shows that when it comes to value and emotional connection, one man's search result is another man's luxury suite. According to the survey, consumers connect emotionally to brands that provide value, and that emotional connection has dropped 15% over 2007.
New projections show lower internet ad spend
The online ad business was worse than thought last year, and it will be worse than projected this year. Brighter days will have to wait until 2010, according to recent data updates.
The first comes from Barclays Capital, which had already checked in with bad news last December. Over the past year the investment bank has gone from predicting 16 percent online ad spend growth (October report) to a six percent rise (December) and now pegs online ad spending calls for a 2.3 percent increase over last year to $23.7 billion. This joins recent reports from Bernstein Research's prediction that global online ad spend will grow only 5.9 percent, and Veronis Suhler's call of 4.9 percent
Ebay bets with its head, not over it
Back in the days when OffTrack Betting was popular in New York City, the ad tagline said "bet with your head, not over it." It may be uncool to say, but eBay's recent conservative retrenching is a solid strategy. A little boring, maybe, but at least the company is betting with its head.
CEO John Donahoe told a group of analysts Wednesday that the company is going to focus on its original mission, which is ecommerce auction. No more eBay Express. No more plans to compete with Amazon for the overall ecommerce business. Donahoe was roundly trashed in the blogosphere. While it might not spike its short term stock price, it's the right move. With Skype and PayPal in its tent, eBay is positioned to play very well in the most active markets. It has communication infrastructure, payment infrastructure, and auction infrastructure. Right now anyway, no one is a serious threat to that trifecta.
Ruining the fantasy of customer ownership
Lot of talk this week about who owns the digital marketing customer. Brands and ad agencies claim they own the customer's data. More than a few panelists at Thursday's Digiday sessions said that if the customer is paying a network or site for interaction privileges at that moment, then that site owns the customer. To all those who say they can own the customer, here's a newsflash: no one owns the customer.
Nor does anyone rent the customer or loan a customer. Any company that thinks they can own the customer, or the customer's data, or the customer's digital experience, has a weird type of business neuroticism. That neurosis might be best cured through a little reality therapy. The reality is, customers may pay you time, attention, and revenue, but they give you no more than that. The goal of internet marketing is to create the opportunities for that attention and revenue.
Mobile marketing moves toward brand future
A concordance of today's Digiday Mobile conference would show the most often used phrase as "not fully baked." But despite the business models and infrastructure issues that still need time to mature, mobile marketing is progressing toward a brand-driven future.
With a new major Dockers iPhone campaign breaking tomorrow, the conference provided some insight as to the profile of brands that are consistently engaged in mobile campaigns of some kind. Whether it's SMS text, WAP sites, banners, or proprietary apps, the brands involved are impressive. Adidas, Nike, Coke, Paramount, P&G, and most every other major brand were either involved in or planning a mobile campaign, according to the agencies assembled. Razorfish's emerging media VP Terri Walter told the conference that it handles more than 200 mobile clients and AdMob handles 200 a month.
Ford revs up social media solution
Ford's social media director Scott Monty might have thought he was off to a safe start with a little audience participation during a recent conference presentation. "How many people here," he asked, "have ever driven a Ford?" Most of the audience raised their hand. "Now how many of you would buy one?"
And the room froze like a rusted carburetor. "That's the problem," he said.
The solution? Part of it is in a social media program that Monty believes will restore some of Ford's lost "humanity" as a brand and continue to put some distance between Ford and the two other Detroit carmakers, Chrysler and GM. "Somewhere along the line," said the company's digital and multimedia content manager, "we lost our personality. We can gain it back with social media."
Nokia exec looks to emerging markets
From an American and continental perspective it's easy to think that "we are the world" when it comes to mobile phone usage and marketing. Jeremy Wright, Nokia's global director of brand solutions, looked to reset that misconception during a presentation at Digiday's mobile event on Thursday. Seems there's more to mobile than Facebook, iFarts and text messages for emerging markets.
With more than four billion mobile phones on the market, Nokia has also positioned itself as a content provider and mobile network infrastructure owner. Wright sees different attitudes developing among the global perception of devices and advertising.
Fortune 500 flunks organic search efforts
The world's biggest companies are failing at more than their profit performance these days. A new report from SEO measurement company Conductor finds that organic search results from the Fortune 500 would hardly rate a good MBA project. In fact, the report says "as a whole, the group is still doing a very poor job of ensuring that their ‘money’ keywords are represented in natural search." It found that only 20.82 percent of Fortune 500 keywords rank within the top 100 search results, as measured during the fourth quarter of 2008.
The lesson Fortune 500 companies are learning is that paid search buys exactly that: paid results. The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $51 million per day on 88,792 keywords with relatively little to show on organic results, according to the report. And many of those keywords were consolidated in a few industry verticals and in a handful of companies.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
