Like many who grew up aching for Saturday’s trip to the pic'n'mix counter, it was sad to see the great Woolies brand hurtle into the abyss - but hardly unexpected. Woolworth's thrived on an offering a mile wide and an inch deep; the most generalist of high street retailers with branches large enough to have something for everyone, but too small to have choice. Woolies wasn’t simply on the high street, it was a product of the high street retail model. That's why its success online is far from guaranteed.
]]> 10 years back, a web presence could have transformed that offering, but today Woolies is head-to-head with Amazon for media, iTunes for music, John Lewis for household goods… How can their toy store have only 2 soft toys? …their electrical counter only 10 cameras and 3 PCs? Why should DVD buyers switch to a site with no social media or recommendation engine? Today’s shopper lives in a world of massive choice and limitless information, but Woolworths ‘2.0’ doesn't yet compete or differentiate.• Woolworths.co.uk has just launched as a web-only retail business
• BrandRepublic.com
• Austrian marketing directors are missing a trick, a big trick
• Over 5.5million Austrians are online and many are heavy internet users. On average they’re spending over 16 hours a month on the web and clocking up around 2000 page views. That’s a massive audience and yet much of the time they are being missed.
• The solution’s simple - do the maths: Audit where your consumers are spending their time and where the brand is spending it’s budget. I’ve been helping marketing directors audit their media effectiveness for over 10 years and there’s usually a massive difference between where the audience is and where the marketing money is being spent.
• Online newspapers and online media have gained massive audiences in Austria, and as marketers think about how to get the most value from their advertising they need to be looking intensely on the web
• Why? Internally, many brands rely on research about their consumers that has failed to track the massive role the web now plays in their lives
• Here in the UK it’s over 22 hours per person per month; 20% of advertising, but that still behind where most consumers are
You worked as a brand manager for the telegraph.co.uk back in 1995. How was it in the digital publishing industry 15 years ago. Was it easier to find a business model. What has changed?
• It’s about digitally native publishing; using the core strengths of the web to create content that really works.
• Success in digital publishing isn’t simply ‘copying and pasting’ from other media, that’s only a starting point. I hate the copy and paste model because many media groups sit back and think ‘job done’ once the material is online. The web is such a richer publishing environment than that: archived editorial reports should be linked from today’s news, readers should be commenting on stories, People should be adding their reviews and ratings to films the newspaper reviewer has written, video should be part of the story telling, tagging and personalisation should be in every publishers’ platform.
• Website publishers need to view their website as a brand in its own right: it needs love and attention, with marketers nurturing traffic and building awareness of the site
• Remember, the consumers are in control
• That’s why so many brands use online media – it’s not simply about getting clicks from Google, it’s about building awareness in the consumer’s mind
Print vs. online: What are possible developments?
• Online builds on the brand values of print journalism
• The web doesn’t replace journalism, and that’s why newspapers need to be investing heavily in their digital teams: digital channels will be the future drivers of revenue in newspaper groups, but only for the newspaper groups that continue providing quality
• Comment and analysis: this is the battleground for newspapers. It’s no longer about the race to break a news story, it’s about what the story means for its readers
• Newspapers also need to be investing in the key classified advertising sectors: job, property, motoring, travel etc
• Newspapers need to be the home of a community online
Digital brands: How do you create and manage a digital brand. Is this very different from an "analogue" brand?
• The rules of branding have not changed, but the techniques and channels certainly have…
• Consumers are now part of the marketing process, that means brands need to engage with the consumer effectively; brands need to fundamentally rethink the way they connect with consumers and create content consumers want to receive
• And they need to change their media mix to reflect where consumers spend their time; in Austria this probably means reassessing the role of television in the media mix, questioning the real level of impact, looking for whether the advertising has the impact and cut-through that it did ten years ago
• Too many brands spend too much attention on television, chasing audiences that have moved online
• TV can still play a role, but it’s probably a smaller role
• Just look at where your audiences are today
You say that the digital networked society is still at the beginning. Where's that evolution leading?
• It may seem crazy, but these are the early days of the digital networked society.
• Most content is still offline
• Most social networks are not yet digital; at most they’re in a mobile phone address book
• Most consumers are not using new generation mobile handsets (like the iPhone or the Nokia N97) to access the web
• Most people still have to pay for web access
…as these all change, the scale of the shift in audiences and their focus will be massive
2009 is a not the best year to be a marketing director. Consumer confidence shattered, spending fragile and finance directors rightly paranoid about everything the firm commits to. The bitter irony is that against that bleak backdrop, marketing directors are expected to deliver the impossible.
]]>Blogs, online communities, social media and then social networks: they have permanently changed marketing. In this new landscape brands are in a constant dialogue with customers who increasingly play critical roles in advocacy and recommendation. The brand is only one guest among millions and the challenge for marketers is that while the rewards may be great, the risks are greater.
]]>I would also like to mention the excellent presentation from Danny Meadows-Klue of Digital Training Academy. Danny’s presentation was broken down into 10 digestible tips when it comes to promoting a brand using Social Media.
]]>Such educational features included five big name keynotes all attracting huge crowds keen to hear the latest industry ideas and trends. Over the two days Google, Facebook, Saatchi & Saatchi, Oracle and Danny Meadows-Klue enticed a total of 2,462 attendees. Each session was also streamed into a second theatre following a stupendous turnout.
]]>The session was chaired by Danny Meadows-Klue the founder of the Digital training Academy - and I was struck the very first thing Danny said which was ‘consumers are ahead of brands’. I also video interviewed Danny and he repeated his remark that consumers are ahead of brands - and always have been.
]]>Danny Meadows-Klue is the newly appointed Commissioner for the DMC, the self-regulatory body created by the marketing industry to oversee standards in the direct marketing industry. In this industry interview he explains why it's everyone who needs to play a part.
]]> When you were asked to join the DMC, what was the biggest pull factor?Digital channels fuse the power of genuinely personal dialogue, with the scalability and reach of broadcast media. Our generation of marketers are creating the framework for an entirely new way communications work and it's a privilege to play a part in this. Back in 1994 I was bitten by the digital bug and have thrown my energies into this industry ever since.
In 1995 as the manager of the UK's first online newspaper (www.telegraph.co.uk) I was able to play a role in helping develop the models for how online content and entertainment could work: the role of hyperlinking in journalism, the power of archives in unmasking truth, and the new business models for digital media brands. From the start it was clear that the UK could only be a world leader in online content, if the investment was there; and that meant persuading the advertising industry that the web was worth it. So that's why a few of us came together to form the Internet Advertising Bureau in 1996, and then later the European parent body. I must have helped launch or accelerate over 20 digital trade associations and industry initiatives around the world since then - from New Zealand to Mexico - but the UK remains the world's undisputed leader in online marketing.
Back in the late 90s I realised the importance of self regulation, working with the CAP and the Advertising Association on early self regulatory frameworks. As the industry matures, self regulation becomes even more important. It's not simply that consumers deserve a fair deal, but with the shift to the web from the high street, the scale of trading and marketing is shifting to become the dominant sales channel. As industry, if we don't get our practices right then government will be forced to step in: trying to make up our shortfalls with legislative frameworks that are likely to be at best, restrictive and most likely inappropriate and quickly outdated. To play a part in helping develop and apply a framework that's fair to industry and consumers is a privilege.
Is digital DM still something of a Wild Wild West?
It can be. Digital marketing can be fantastically empowering for consumers and incredibly efficient for brands. But there's a big bridge to cross between the theory of what's possible and actually getting it right. Many companies under-invest in digital marketing skills or the operational resources needed to get things right, and that's where mistakes are made. As a marketing trainer, I've led team at www.DigitalTrainingAcademy.com in 25 countries, showing brands and agencies how not to make mistakes, but there's more work to do. Many firms stumble because they lack the insights of best practice, others are operationally under-resources for online marketing. And in spite of ecommerce being 15 years old, most firms have a way to go before getting it quite right. Yet for those who do (and for their customers) the rewards are great.
The results from the QCI (Quarterly Complaints Index) have indicated a high level of compliance in the industry, do you think that the recession might threaten this as companies realise consumers are more vulnerable in some ways?
It's going to be a tough 18 months for the marketing industry, and particularly challenging for client side marketers who are pressured by greater accountability and smaller budgets. Consumers have less money to spend and they're looking for wiser ways to spend it - and that means looking to the web. At www.DigitalStrategyConsulting.com we're still predicting that this year web advertising will be significantly bigger than television in the UK, and rise over 20% as the rest of the ad industry falls. Search engine marketing will continue to take half all web advertising spend and benefit even more as marketers gravitate to its accountability. As for the value of email and website building, this will continue to swell, but the lack of data means spend can't even be quantified.
What's your message to marketers?
Getting self-regulation right means all of us working together. The DMC - and the rest of the self-regulatory network - needs your active engagement, enthusiastic compliance, and explicit support. If industry doesn't get this right, it doesn't get a second chance.
The Chair introduced Mr Meadows-Klue who had helped to develop the Daily Telegraph’s web sites, acting as their publisher in the 90s before setting up the Internet Advertising Bureau and helping to develop new forms of online advertising. Online advertising was a difficult and important issue since the informational value of a broadcast commercial was a lot less than of a return path Internet commercial and it was in those diminishing values that the problems lied for ITV and other broadcasters.
Note that there is a 60 slide presentation and that the commentary in these notes is a summary of what was said alongside the slides.
Mr Meadows-Klue said that the monetisation of the Internet was inevitably about the advertising model. He intended to present a short summary of the journey of internet publishing, a journey the entire media industry was on and explain how this was a journey without clear road maps. It had been only 1994 that the first web banner had been created. The medium of internet publishing was continuing to evolve and advertising was the driving element in the business model for free to air content.
However the form and the structure of advertising was also continuing to evolve at a pace far beyond the speed at which most web publishers or brand advertisers could comfortably cope. He explained how Google had recently celebrated its tenth birthday and around the same time they had announced that they had indexed one trillion web pages.
Meadows-Klue sees these as still the early days of digital media and the really big changes in society and media not yet arriving (in spite of the massive changes already in place). Online advertising was growing in every market and the UK had been the world leader since the start in terms of digital advertising. The UK had a higher percentage of advertising budgets going into online media than anywhere else in the world. The figures for the first half of 2008 showed that almost 19% of all advertising were spent online, and that the web would be overtaking television by the first half of 2009 in terms of total ad spend levels. In terms of the overall size of the market clearly it was a thunderbolt at the heart of the media industry because this was not simply a migration of advertising from one channel to another, but an evolution of the form and structure of advertising itself. A new type of marketing was emerging and (citing Facebook and social media applications) the traditional language of advertising as paid-for media space seemed to break down in those new environments.
Meadows-Klue went on to explore some of the key trends in advertising, giving his opinions on the nature of change…. Everyone seemed confident of this migration from ‘interruptive advertising’ models such as television commercials to the new forms of engagement that create consumer participation. But few seem aware of the painful challenges of globalisation as a paradigm shift in a market where suddenly every piece of content in theory was accessible to everybody anywhere in the world. In terms of the marketing paradigm shift we had moved into an era of conversation with brands, which created enormous challenges in advertising approaches, and ultimately how clients spend their budgets. There was a democratisation of the production of media, and as part of this within advertising, a way consumers can become co-creators of advertising content. Consumers select exposure to advertising with consumers in control of what they see in a way it had never happened before, and a new equality between brands and consumers.
Within YouTube new behaviours for advertising consumption could be found: the idea of media snacking of bite-sized content, packets of 3-5 minutes that people may digest over a coffee break or on their mobile phone. It also means that advertisers were competing for the divided attention of their consumers rather than the undivided attention. The LightSpeed research showed how more than 28% of Britons said that daily they both simultaneously surfed the Internet and watched television. At a very simple level there were new approaches to online advertising around the notion of blogs and marketing content generated by brands. Here the relationship between advertising and content started to meld into one. But in a more democratic environment it meant consumers could also be in the same space as for example retailers. Citing examples from consumer blogs about the Tescos chain, the notion of who owns control over the conversation between consumers and brands had changed. It was against this background that the advertising industry had to face new challenges.
A look back at the first ever television advertising in the UK from 1953 and the evolution which followed suggested that online advertising today was in its early days. This commercial is accessible online in the workspace created for people who want to follow up on this talk. The banners advertising format that dominated the Daily Telegraph in 1994 was just one tiny component now of a much richer digital advertising mix. In the UK over half of all online advertising spent went into search engines and that helped quantify the nature of what we where seeing as a marketing tool.
Consumer’s use of media is changing. They’re now part of media in a way never before possible. Thinking about the issue of consumer participation and engagement and the way consumers were taking a key role in writing their history of the world it was often shocks like the harrowing events from July the 7th which helped trigger the step change of media consumption and forced the media industry to behave differently. Wikipedia became one of the hubs of media content for that day with many news organisations taking their feeds and knowledge out of blogs and Wikipedia services.
This was fundamental to the advertising debate because it showed how advertising was changing. It may be that Amazon were doing this 10 years ago quietly with involving consumers and authors in the marketing of books and reviews. There may be a very long history of this but now there was the language to describe it. ‘Web2.0’ and ‘social networks’ and ‘social media’ epitomise the new models and techniques available.. As an example, Marmite’s brilliant media activity on Facebook is not entirely clear if this should be classified as editorial, marketing or advertising.
The brand’s relationship with the web reaches for beyond their own website. Brands thought about the web space rather than the website and the number of different touch points they had with consumers often took their messages back into the consumer’s environment. These ideas may seem like just whispers of new techniques and technology, but these and the other trends the team at Digital Strategy Consulting track could be elements of mainstream marketing within 10 years.
Another trend is how the notion of geography had been marginalised in this environment. Most places had relatively easy access to most content all of the time, the notion of the customer could often be as ambiguous as the location of the retailer or the advertiser and cross-border trade had become a synonymous part of the fabric of these markets. In search engines ‘relevancy’ was rarely driven by geography. So if geography and its boundaries were hard to enforce (or even identify) then it was worth thinking about the journey that marketing had been on to try and understand where this was heading.
Digital tools have accelerated the death of mass indiscriminate marketing. There has been a journey from ‘one to all’ in the marketing discipline which had become first ‘one to many’ and was moving towards ‘one to one.’ An example of this is how what began as individual email to all of us eventually became truly unique, personalised advertising. The economics had changed in the cost of production and the precision of targeting. Against this background it was important to think about how people craved individuality and how data-based, net-centric, consumer marketing would permanently change each consumers expectations.
In terms of the progression of change, all of what is described here was true with the ‘fixed’ Internet that we know in the home or office. However the mobile Internet just accelerated it at a rapid pace, and created the so-called Martini culture of “anytime, anyplace, anywhere”. That meant consumers were in a different mind-set, with different spaces providing access to marketing and content in different ways, a different size of screen display and different tools and techniques. Post the arrival of the iPhone the real mobile Internet had begun. The iPhone generation enjoy easier access and a more pleasant reading environment.
Summing it up this meant that the scale of change is being underestimated. Trends in digital media typically took much longer to impact than commonly expected but were much greater when they arrived. In terms of advertising content and advertising formats and structures those early days of banners and static media were now just a tiny part of the digital market. In the long run content creation, blogs and the ways in which brands could be discovered, plus how video was now converging which those environments, will be as important in the marketing mix. These new trends were driving the growth and would dominate industry and regulatory discussion in the 18 months to come. The first day of the online banner may seem like many generations ago and yet it was only fourteen years ago that it had been launched.
The Chair thanked Mr Meadows-Klue. He was putting forward a world where the value of traditional advertising clearly changed, as there was a shift of value into more interactive areas. He asked Mr Meadows-Klue what this meant for the world they currently knew and how an advertising supported broadcaster should deal with this. Mr Meadows-Klue said that advertising spend migration happened at a vast scale. His team had been talking for a while now about a massive migration of up to 30 or 40% of total advertising being redistributed, allocated into some form of Internet advertising. There was obviously an enormous budgetary pressure on existing broadcasters. He said this with great concern, because having spend fourteen years in the Internet media industry, he still loved traditional broadcasting and appreciates the content, quality and value those broadcasters create in the media industry. The challenge was that most broadcasters simply had not woken up to the scale of the risk fast enough or appropriately enough to defend themselves. In that sense he feared that many broadcasters were horribly exposed as this advertising spend migration continued to quicken.
In terms of the nature of online advertising it was perhaps most appropriate to see it as a fusion of all other forms of advertising, such as radio, television, outdoor advertising, sponsorship, PR or social discussion, all fused in this new environment. That meant that in a way the advertising we were seeing online now was just like the advertising of early television. A lot of advertising was still in the “radio with pictures” era. All he could do at the moment was to give some snapshots of where the industry stood and some examples of best practice; his views shouldn’t be misread for where the changes will stop, simply where we are today.
Ms Lighting said that one of the most interest areas he had been talking about seemed to be the potential of individual marketing, because in terms of traditional broadcasting that seemed to be the crux of the challenge. What intrigued her was that individual marketing was balanced between being a fantastic feature and resource and a potential breach of privacy. It was this kind of balance of how much information they all wanted to give to the net and while it may be very useful in some areas, in others it could be very disruptive. She asked Mr Meadows-Klue what research in this direction was being conducted at the moment.
Mr Meadows-Klue said that this was one of the fundamental debates around data protection and what the consumer-value exchange was that they were going to have for the next ten years. In a data-driven culture, the information that we chose to allow third parties to be able to work with was an incredibly complex issue one he felt went far above and beyond straightforward data protection issues. Meadows-Klue sees an implicit contract between the real data owner (the consumer) and the person they grant access to their data. This contract is best seen as a value exchange between the consumer and the company when they gave permission for their data to be used. The exchange needs to be fair and companies can quickly lose confidence from consumers. When that happens the consumer will tune out, rejecting communication. This was therefore not an area that had an immediate research answer or solution.
In terms of the relationship between individual marketing and mass marketing, part of the challenge of the first decade of the web was the promise of one-to-one marketing and the pain of actually trying to deliver it, because of prohibitive cost, lack of data, systems that would not scale and a lack of models in the marketing industry to be able to assimilate this properly. This threshold seemed to have been crossed now. Amazon may have trailblazed in true one to one marketing and they were now moving into an environment where real one-to-one marketing channels became possible. They were just at the beginning of this story and the research brief needed to be a permanent one.
Mr David said that he had talked about how advertising moved from one platform to another and how its nature changed. What Mr Meadows-Klue had not talked about was which gatekeepers or power bases controlled these changes. Was it still the broadcaster or the aggregator who got to control the advertising or might the content provider or the consumer get to control the advertising?
Mr Meadows-Klue said that this question was at the heart of the changing power structures. Advertising spend migrated, but it did not necessarily migrate to the same companies or even the same types of companies. He gave examples: direct marketing spend may move from certain traditional direct marketing channels such as postal direct marketing or direct marketing out of newspapers to email and search engines. There was a natural shift of budgets but also a shift to different brands. Many of these tools might be at a global level, rather than at the level of a national provider, or they may be directly backed by the brand itself as the brand becomes a media owner. Examples included work from BMW and other global leading brands, who created content which was so compelling, they could begin to build their consumer-marketing relationship themselves. In that sense there was a migration in the form of communication.
In terms of issues of control, consumers themselves have more control over what they see than ever before. As a publisher I know that we lived and died by the success of pages to hold the consumers attention at that moment. The debates about advertising-editorial ratios seemed redundant. It was very clear that if you had too much advertising, consumers would leave faster than anything. That was the truth every web publisher had to live with. Consumers had the ability to filter incredibly fast and make judgment about the advertising they see in a way they have not before. Switching brands became so much easier as well, because everything is just a click away, rather than going back to the newsagent and taking something different off the shelf or scrolling through the television channels. In this sense there was a migration of control to the consumer, a replacement of the ownership of the gateway by new gatekeepers and a new balance between gatekeeper, band and consumer.
Mr Davies said that with all the talk of migration of advertising revenues and consumer interests there was a real danger of thinking of these kind of things in isolation from traditional media, whether that was television or other media. The big question was how traditional businesses integrated with all of these new opportunities. They were doing work, for example, on how out-of-home media impacted on how people search online. Different media sometimes had similar challenges and that was where a gap in peoples’ understanding often lay, but it was important to realise this to be able to unlock all the opportunities that had been discussed.
Mr Meadows-Klue said that it was great to hear that. He always felt uncomfortable about the slow pace with which many media owners in the UK had woken up to challenges that to be fair were pretty clear even a decade ago. Having spent 15 years in the digital sector and much of the time coaching management teams in how to tackle this, he was frustrated by the way traditional media firms moved so slowly, letting newcomers take their markets and audiences. Inside the Digital training Academy or by directly helping to write the strategies for media groups, it was clear that a lot of these ideas should have been in place a long time ago. He was concerned about this, because it meant that many traditional broadcasters and publishers who in the past had the most powerful of brands and exceptional content, had been so late to the market place that they had missed the opportunity of really owning the relationship to the consumer in the new market. And that relationship would have been fundamental to their longer term revenues.
The Chair thanked Mr Meadows-Klue. This debate was about how one integrated all of this and it became increasingly a question of being inside or outside the coral in the sense that television advertising and recorded music were outside the coral were value was being made.
Several reports were distributed to participants, an online workspace was created by Mr Meadows-Klue and those interested were invited to see more at www.DigitalStrategyConsulting.com or by emailing Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com
]]>Is it my imagination, or has the number of sponsored supplements in Media Guardian increased since the “demise” (TM Roy Greenslade) of Press Gazette?
Oh well: I suppose that these things are a fact of journalistic life — a bit like moral hazard in the banking profession.
The latest one is an 8-page sponsored effort underwritten by the Internet Advertising Bureau — the trade body that represents Britain’s digital ad agencies and keeps us in a state of perpetual admiration for the sector’s soaraway growth rate.
]]>The Direct Marketing Commission (DMC), the independent regulator for the UK direct marketing industry, has appointment IAB co-founder Danny Meadows-Klue to its board of commissioners.
Meadows-Klue’s appointment aims to strengthen the DMC’s expertise in the regulation of online advertising, email, social media and emerging digital platforms.
]]>The Direct Marketing Commission (DMC), the independent regulator for the UK direct marketing industry, has appointment IAB co-founder Danny Meadows-Klue to its board of commissioners.
]]>The Direct Marketing Commission (DMC) has appointed Danny Meadows-Klue, former president of the IAB, to its Board of Commissioners.
The trade body said the appointment will its expertise in the regulation of online advertising, email, social media and emerging digital platforms.
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