Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

Macro-Economics and Macro-Emotions

Another interesting article I ran into while cleaning out my inbox. Biometric monitoring research firm Innerscope tracked people’s emotions through vests that capture heartrates and other signals of emotional engagement while they were watching Super Bowl Ads. The objective: to see which ads got the biggest response from people. The results were interesting. The winners were Career Builder and Cash4Gold.

People are scared poopless by the economy and it’s impacting the ads we pay attention and react to. I’ve written before on the macro-emotional trends that dictate everything from the stores we shop at to the searches we launch. And now, it’s even edged in on the Super Bowl. What is interesting is that this is a self perpetuating trend. The economic news scares us, we spend less, the economy gets worse because no one is spending, the news gets worse… well, you get the idea.

Also saw CITI Analyst  Mark Mahaney at Covario’s InflectionPoint Summit in San Diego, who gave us an update on macro economic trends. The short version is..more bad news. He did have a silver lining for search marketers though, which lines up with what we’ve been seeing. Budgets from other channels are migrating into search. Mark gave us a quick and admitedly non scientific calculation of the categories most at risk, Yellow Pages, Print and TV, showed a total potential of $120 billion up for grabs. Of course, total migration is ridiculous. Search doesn’t work unless something is creating awareness, which creates search inventory. But still, that’s $120 B in ad budget that’s going to be scrutinized pretty carefully over the next year or two. It does make you think how much of that might leak into search.

Along the same lines, just got a preliminary glimpse at the SEMPO State of the Search Market Preliminary results. What we’re seeing seems to support Mark’s theory. Can’t go into specifics right now, but if you’re at SMX in Santa Clara next week we’ll be sharing some preliminary findings. I think I’m scheduled on Day One for that session. Drop by if you have a chance.

Google Evolves Back to its Core

First published January 22, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about how the economy will sort out winners and losers even faster. This week, a trio of news releases seems to confirm that search, and Google, in particular, will be a winner. Unfortunately, almost no one will recognize that they’ve won.

Reports out of AdGooroo and Covario show that search is still ticking along better than ever. AdGooroo has Google and Microsoft on track for the best Q4 in history. Apparently, despite the gathering storm, people still search and still click on ads. And, relatively speaking, there’s been minimal impact on search ad budgets. We saw a lot of advertising budgets hold the course for 2009. This was a good news/bad news scenario. The good news was, budgets weren’t cut. The bad news was that planned increases, in some cases aggressive increases, were put on the shelf.

So, are there smiles in Mountain View? Not according to a MediaPost  article from yesterday. Google is jettisoning every piece of financial baggage it can, drastically cutting costs to keep the financial boat upright in advance of the earnings report (due out today). The latest cut? Google’s newspaper business.

What Does It All Mean?

By any sane analysis, Google is doing very nicely, thank you. Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst quoted in the MediaPost article, expects to see 23% year over year revenue growth, with 14.3% growth expected for 2009. In the rational world, that would be cause for popping Champagne corks and backs bruised from vigorous patting. Given the performance of every other company on the planet, double-digit growth is nothing short of miraculous. But in Google world, it’s an “all-hands-on-deck” disaster. True, Google’s stock price has retreated to levels not seen since 2005 (Psst.. stock tip: Buy!), but the financial engine is ticking along very nicely, thank you.

What is happening is a bit of natural selection and forced evolution at the Googleplex, and although this will be painful, it will be very healthy in the long term. Google is picking its winners and culling the losers. At the same time, its strategists are redefining themselves into a sustainable business model. I suspect Eric Schmidt and CFO Patrick Pichette have stolen a page from Rahm Emanuel’s book: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The economic freefall and irrational pessimism of analysts gives them the opportunity to impose some logical constraint on the overexuberance we saw from Google in days gone past. Google was going to reinvent everything, from advertising to telecommunications to sustainable energy. Now, it appears Google realized there’s more than enough in its core mission (organizing the world’s information) to keep it busy for the foreseeable future. I always thought that the starry-eyed idealism was commendable but not sustainable. Google is growing up.

Think Search is Strong Now? Just Wait…

In the meantime, think for a moment how search has positioned itself. Despite one of the worst economic years in recent memory, Google showed 23% growth in revenues. During the same time period, every other economic metric went into free-fall. Consumer confidence plunged to its lowest levels ever. Retails sales and online sales both hit the skids. Let’s not even talk about home sales. The Dow Jones is down 40% in the past year. The economy didn’t just slow down. It screeched to a halt. But in this same time, search kept plugging through without a hiccup. Did the astronomical growth continue? No, but 23% is pretty damn good in anyone’s books.

People kept searching and clicking on ads. In fact, according to AdGooroo and Covario, they did so more than ever. The only thing impacting search right now is the sheer fear of advertisers who are being assailed on all fronts.

Understandable? Yes. Rational? No.

So, when we hit bottom and start climbing out of this economic black hole, search will have consolidated its position as the most accountable of marketing channels. It will form the basis of a new marketing model: consumer-driven, immediate, measurable, effective, interactive. And Google will be the most powerful player on the block. Best of all, the company can do it without worrying about selling newspaper ads, redefining America’s power grid or colonizing space. All Google has to do is focus on helping people find what they’re looking for.

 

The Importance of Touchpoints – every Touchpoint

I got an iPhone on Thursday.

This post has nothing to do with the iPhone..everything to do with where I got it. Being in Canada, Roger’s is the only carrier that has the iPhone. Roger’s is particularly clueless when it comes to brand integrity (perhaps rivaled only by Air Canada in my home and native land). And this was made abundantly clear to me.

I went to a local mobile store. While the store is run by a licensee, the branding is all Roger’s. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Roger’s store. I walked up to the counter and what appeared to be a 13 year old with a five o’clock shadow who managed the store siddled over to wait on me. His assistant, a petulant female, rolled her eyes and went in the back.

I currently have a Roger’s plan, put in place almost 4 years ago. At the time, I put a plan in place that would cover my somewhat limited data needs. To be honest, I don’t really monitor the bills and my assistant finally showed me one. I hit the roof. Because my device now syncs with our mail server while I’m in Canada (I’m on another plan when I’m in the US) my data traffic has increased substantially. Here’s the details of the plan I was on..get this..25 Megs per month for $25 bucks..and 5 cents a kilobyte for overages! 5 cents a kilobyte! My relatively modest data needs were racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. Was I stupid for letting it go? Absolutely. But obviously Roger’s was perfectly happy to leave me on the stupidest plan in the world and rake in the money. That’s their bad.

So, after hitting the roof, I decided to change the plan. Roger’s plans are still highway robbery, but at least Apple forced them to ease the data plan usury in order to get exclusives on the iPhone. Now..I could get 1 GB of data monthly, plus a limited voice plan, for about $70 a month..all in. I could get an iPhone (which I’ve been salivating over for some time) and still save hundreds a month. I still had to deal with Roger’s, but to be honest, their competition is no better (Twitter recently had to discontinue SMS notifications in Canada because our mobile carriers are uniformly stupid). So, hence my visit to the local store.

I informed Skippy, the wonder manager, of all this and he said, “Well, I can get you set up with the iPhone dude, but I can’t change your plan. You need to call Roger’s to do that”.

“Why?”

The answer was painfully incoherent, but it came down to Roger’s not trusting their licensees (remember, this is Skippy’s take on the situation) and trying to lock me into a package that maximized profit for them and minimized usability for me. Skippy walked me through the routine (with many interjections of “Sorry dude, Roger’s makes us do this”) and, as we were wrapping up, pulled out the check lists to make sure he had done all the things he was supposed to. By this time, I was looking for the nearest exit to escape. Yes..you had shown me how the iPhone works. Yes, you explained all the nickle and dime charges imposed on me. Yes, you explained how Roger’s repossesses my home if I cancel early. Yes, you explained why the writing on the contract might not be what I actually get. Just let me go home.

And then, the final straw.

“Okay..you’re probably going to get a call from Roger’s to make sure I did my job right. I only get my points if you answer that you were ‘definitely satisfied'”

“Sure”

“No..I mean it. That’s the only answer that will give me the score I need. Will you answer that.” At this point, I swear to God, he gives me a photocopied sheet of paper with the right answer printed on it, circled with a check mark beside, just to jog my memory for the call. “You will say ‘Definitely Satisfied’, right?”

At this point, I was either ready to beat my self to death with my shiny new iPhone, or burst out laughing. Skippy was on the verge of tears. I could have launched into an explanation of how this was not the way to ensure customer satisfaction (but the irony is, he does this with every customer and it probably works most of the time. Whoever thought up this approach had done their psychological homework) but that would have cost me more precious hours of my life. I smiled my best paternal, sympathetic older dude to younger dude smile and said, “Sure man.”

Obviously, Roger’s is trying to police the quality of these licensee touchpoints through these ridiculous QA checklists and follow up phone calls, but it made the entire experience bizarre. I think a better approach would be to create reasonable plans, be proactive with existing customers in moving them into the right plans, be more transparent and fair with promotional deals, insist on better hiring practices and provide more value to customers. If they did all these things, their brand integrity could survive the odd fumble in the hands of a Skippy.

Evolution in the Face of Adversity

First published January 15, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I am an unrepentant Darwinist, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone who reads my columns on a regular basis. The whole topic of evolution and emergent behaviors in complex systems constantly fascinates me. As Steven Johnson pointed out in his recent book, “Emergence,”  the theme of patterns rising from complexity is  ubiquitous and could well define the 21st century.

The World is a Cruel Place – Get Over It!

One of the most interesting things about evolution is that the pace of evolutionary change picks up in the face of adversity. The more hostile the environment, the faster the wheels of evolution roll and the quicker we adapt. Of course, we do so in a pretty ruthless way. The weak get culled faster. There are no consolation prizes in this lottery. Winner takes all. Richard Dawkins didn’t call genes “selfish” for nothing.

Which led me to apply the rules of biology to our current marketplace. We are going into what may be the most hostile environment for marketers in recent memory. Expect losers to die faster and winners to adapt quicker. But it’s just such an adverse environment that ultimately decides the survival of the fittest. After all, our marketplace is just one more complex system where emergence again plays out.

When the Going Gets Tough

We’ve seen the groundswell of change wash over marketing in the last decade or so. Inexorably, the digital sea change has already started to determine winners and losers, but when ad budgets were fatter, there was more room for everyone. Now, as those budgets are dramatically scaled down, advertisers are forced to make tough decisions.  Channels have to prove themselves against tougher standards. There will be fewer winners and more losers and the evolution of the marketplace will pick up dramatically.

In the end, this will be good for most of the digital marketplace, especially search. Already with our client list, we’ve seen tough budgeting decisions dramatically impact more traditional channels but leave search relatively unscathed.

Scarcity Eliminates Stupidity

Another outcome of the financial meltdown will be that only the smartest marketers will survive. A few years ago, I remember someone from one of the largest advertisers in North America once saying to me, out of frustration with  their marketing program, “We’re so big we can afford to be stupid.”  No more. Today, only the smartest will survive. Size is no longer a guarantee of survival, nor a justification for stupidity, as we’ve seen in a number of particularly painful examples.

Smarter marketers will make smarter decisions, including the painful ones.  They will be ruthless about culling out the losers. Which means chronic mediocrity will become acute failure;  the mortality rate will rise substantially. This will drive our marketing models into the future much faster.

Strategies for Survival

How do you emerge on the winning side of the Darwinian lottery? Based on what I’ve seen, you won’t go far wrong if you concentrate on the following:
–    Accountability for and transparency in delivering on advertising objectives.
–    Understanding the intent and behavior of your target market.
–    A ruthless focus on efficiency in getting the right message to the right person at the right time.
–    Effectively leveraging a fundamental understanding of how the marketplace is shifting due to technology.
–    The ability to map out the most effective prospect touch points, and strong integration between all the channels found at these touch points.
–    The ability to collect and utilize all possible intelligence sources.
–    An ability to brutally assess the reality of the environment and execute quickly and effectively against these realities.

It’s the last of these factors I’d like to focus on for my final thoughts on this topic. In a hostile environment, negativity comes with the territory. The winners will seek out negativity as an important indicator of the true situation and will use it to adapt. In this case, the fittest will see things as they are, not as they wish they would be. In coming months and years, the difference between these two viewpoints will be critical.

Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?

Marketers are falling over themselves in their rush to the digital landscape. Social media is SO hot! But not as hot as behavioral targeting. And if you think that’s hot, wait till you see what you can do with mobile!

The Digital Dogpile

blow-dandelionMarketers desperately scramble over each other, grasping for a tenuous handhold on some emerging tactic that gives them, however briefly, a fraction of an inch advantage over the competition. New digital marketing directors prove their worth through their savvy of online technology. They cut their teeth on Facebook advertising and put Powerpoints (or, because they’re uber-cool – Keynote presentations) together on the immense potential of the social graph.

Churn is the norm in digital marketing. And marketers are the worst, whipping the industry into a froth because they get all breathless about the latest thing. My inbox gets a hundred emails every single day talking about how freaking cool everything is and how we’re stumbling to figure out the importance of everything. If you’re not an early adopter…scratch that…if you’re not a bleeding edge pioneer, you’re a hopeless loser. The pace of marketing testing and adoptions just keeps spinning faster and faster.

Step Away from the iPhone

Stop! Take a breath. Relax for a few minutes. Get outside and breath some honest to God fresh air. And don’t take your iPhone with you. Because here’s the scoop Kemosabe, all the technology in the world is useless until your audience figures out how to use it. And here’s the nasty little secret. Humans love bright shiny objects but we’re pretty slow when it comes to figuring out how to jam it into our already busy lives. Until that happens, your nifty online strategies will never be anymore than a pointless treadmill jammed on overdrive. You can run as fast as you want, but you’ll never get anywhere.

I do financial analyst calls every quarter and the last question on the call is always the same: anything else we should be looking at? Apparently, technologiosis (or technitis, or technophilia, take your pick) is contagious. My answer is usually the same..wait till people figure out how to use it.

Think about the buzz that’s been devoted to social networks and, more recently, real time search, in the last 2 years. That’s 2 years of foaming-at-the-mouth marketing buzz about how this channel is:

A) the savior of marketing
B) most effective connection with consumers
C) coolest technology without an identifiable purpose
D) biggest waste of time on God’s green earth
E) all of the above

The Geekiest Guy on my Block

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how to use social media in a meaningful way in my life. I have a Facebook page, I tweet, I have a Linked In profile, a Trip-It network, just to name a few, making me the geekiest guy I know. Maybe not at an online marketing show, but if you ever visit Kelowna, take a walk with me down my block and I’ll prove my techno-geek status is several Trekkie parsecs ahead of anyone else. I suspect the same is true for you. And you know what? I have no frigging idea why Facebook is important or why I should log into my profile today. It’s cool, but it’s not useful in an every day kind of way. And if I, who spend over 10 hours a day online and have a network of friends and colleagues that span the globe, can’t jam Facebook into my life in a useful way, how is the average techno-pleb going to?

As far as I can see, most of things marketers salivate over fall into the same category..digital candy that tweaks our dopamine supplying pleasure centre but serves no real, sustainable purpose in our lives. This puts it in the same category as 95% of my iPhone apps, 99% of the computer games on my laptop and the Wii my nephew got last Christmas – an obsession for approximately 27 hours, an occasional pastime for another 36 hours, then something we ignore for the rest of our lives.

The one difference, at least in my experience, seems to be teenagers. Most of things that seem to be passing fancies to us do seem to become useful in the lives of the average 15 – 23 year old. But, as I said in a previous post, when you look at what the live of a high school or university student looks like and what they want to do, a Facebook suddenly makes sense. For me, not so much.

An Eyeball is an Eyeball, Right?

So, even given this notorious degree of fickleness, why should marketer’s care? Eyeballs are still eyeballs, right? Even if the eyeballs we’re capturing this week will be completely different than the eyeballs we capture next week. This approach only works if you consider your market a faceless blob of unleashed consumer potential. If you actually want to get relevant messages to real people with real needs, the logic starts to break down immediately.

Effective marketing depends on reliable targeting. And reliable targeting depends on established patterns. And established patterns depend on sustained behaviors. And sustained behaviors depend on things we find useful. Otherwise, we’re marketing via fad, condemning ourselves to spending our professional lives and our client’s ad dollars chasing fluff in a hurricane. Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing.

I Miss Frank Cannon, PI

movies_070708_cannonMarkets have to stabilize in order for us to understand the individuals that make up that market. Also, brand relationships need a stable environment, allowing them to germinate and flourish.

When I was a kid, Kraft always sponsored Cannon. When you tuned in to see William Conrad somehow roll his fat old carcass out of his Lincoln Continental and pick off a sniper 3 miles away on a mountain top with his trusty .38 revolver, you could depend on Kraft telling you how to cook Mac & Cheese in every commercial break. Much as the entertainment value may have sucked (beggars with 2 channels in the Canadian prairies can’t be choosers) you knew Kraft would be there and Kraft knew who they were talking to. The audience had stabilized.

Until things pass through the temporary obsession phase to something that adds real value to our lives, we can’t consider advertising on these channels as anything more than an experiment. The trick in picking the right digital channels is not to look at the eyeballs they’re attracting today, but in how these things might be used in real, practical ways. That will give you an idea of how real people might be using these things next week or next month, when the technoratti have moved on to the latest bright shiny object.

Zappos New Business Model: Have Insight, Will Respond

A story this morning in Adweek about Zappos reminded me of a recent experience with a client. I’ll get to the Zappos story in a moment, but first our client’s story.

This customer wanted to set up a client summit at Google’s main office in Mountain View. Attending the summit were not only their search team but also some highly placed executives. The reason for the summit was ostensibly to talk about the client’s search campaign, but it soon became apparent that the executives were looking for something more. They had specifically asked for someone to spend some time talking about Google’s culture.

Throughout the day, Google paraded a number of new advertising offerings in front of the team. While the front line teams were intrigued, one particular senior executive seemed to be almost snoozing through the sales pitches for Google’s new advertising gadgets and gizmos. It was only when the conversation turned to Google’s business practices that the executive perked up, suddenly taking volumes of notes. It made me realize that sometimes, it’s not only what we sell that has value for our customers, it’s what we are. I chatted about this recently with someone from Google, saying that their corporate philosophy and way of doing business is of interest to people. I urged him to find a way to package it as a value add for customers. While he agreed the idea was intriguing, I think it got relegated to the “polite jotting down without any intention of acting on it” category.

Now, back to the Zappo’s story. That’s exactly what they’re doing, taking their customer service religion and packaging it so that thousands of businesses can learn by going directly to the source. Zappos Insights is a subscription service ($39.95 per month) that let’s aspiring businesses ask questions about the “Zappos way” and get answers from actual Zappos employees.

The service, said CEO Tony Hsieh, is targeted at the “Fortune 1 million” looking to build their businesses. “There are management consulting firms that charge really high rates,” he said. “We wanted to come up with something that’s accessible to almost any business.”

It’s a pretty smart move. There’s no denying we’re going through a sea change in how business is done. And I’ve always felt that there’s a impractical divide between consultants and businesses that are consistently implementing every day. It seems like you can either do, or teach, but not both. Amazing stories such as Apple, Google, Southwest and Zappos have shown that innovation with culture is as important as innovation in what ends up in the customer’s hands. Zappos is trying to blend the two in an intriguing revenue model.

Al Ries Slight Off on GM’s Brand Woes

Who am I to disagree with Al Ries on branding? No matter, I’ll take a swing at it anyway.

In AdAge, Ries takes GM to task (may need a subscription) for not creating strong brands, which in turn was triggered by an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch“. The WSJ article places the blame on Detroit’s failure to understand the nature of the Japanese competition:

“Just as America didn’t understand the depth of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, Detroit failed to grasp — or at least to address — the fundamental nature of its Japanese competition. Japan’s car companies, and more recently the Germans and Koreans, gained a competitive advantage largely by forging an alliance with American workers.”

Ries disagrees:

“Nowhere in this entire article is a mention of Detroit’s failure to build powerful brands. Rather the blame is placed almost totally on problems in the factories.”

I have to say, I side much more with the WSJ on this one. Just where, I wonder, does Ries think brand comes from? He seems to think it’s somehow seperated from what happens on the factory floor…that brand is somehow magically concocted in a Madison Avenue boardroom and lives and thrives independent of the crap that comes off the assembly line. It’s a troubling throwback to the arrogant assumption of marketing control that I believe is at least partly responsible for the situation we currently find ourselves in: you don’t have to worry about being good, as long as your advertising is. Consider the examples of successful brands that Ries uses as examples:

“It seems to me that the fundamental nature of Detroit’s Japanese competition is its ability to build brands. Toyota stands for reliability, Scion for youth, Prius for hybrid, Lexus for luxury. “

It’s not a marketing ploy that has determined that Toyota stands for reliability. It’s superior quality control. I question Lexus’s exclusive claim to luxury, or Scion’s claim to youth, but their success in both markets comes directly from the appeal of their products and an acceptance of this by the target market, not by any particular marketing genius. And the success of the Prius as the definition of hybrid comes from engineering excellence and the ability of Toyoto to make it into a practical vehicle. This isn’t marketing, this is just being better than the competition.

Ries seems to suffer from the delusion that brands can be unilaterally built. In the hyper connected reality of today, brands can, at best, be mutually agreed upon. Brand is a label that is connected in the cortex. All the advertising in the world can plant some mental seeds, but if the reality doesn’t connect, those seeds wither and die. It wasn’t Detroit’s ineptness in advertising that killed them, it was their ineptness in every single aspect of their business.

The hole that GM (and Detroit) has dug for themselves has been built over the last 40 years. And contrary to Ries’s opinion, Detroit has been extraordinarily successful in creating brands. Consider the cultural legacy of the Mustang, the Corvette, the Cadillac, the Jeep. These are brands that were once rich with meaning..with mental connections that resonated and rang true with enthusiasts. But the meaning has been eroded away because the products didn’t live up to the promise. And the reasons had nothing to do with advertising, it’s was squarely rooted in what came off of the factory floor, and everything that contributed to it: shoddy workmanship, antagonist relationships with workers, squeezing vendors for every last cent, arrogant management, lack of respect for customers and poor service in the dealer network.

What is true is if the product doesn’t deliver on the promise, word spreads much quicker now. And perhaps that was the final nail in Detroit’s collective coffin. The new connected marketplace allowed us to call bullshit in a way that is heard much further and much louder.

It’s not that Detroit can’t build a brand. It’s that they just can’t build a very good vehicle.

Brands on Search: Connecting during Consideration

First published November 20, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about what brand can’t do on the search results page. Today, I’d like to talk about one of the many things that brand can do on search.

If brands can’t build an emotional appeal on the results page, they can certainly reinforce their presence at just the right time. This was at the heart of our brand lift studies. Remember, we use search when our intent is squarely aligned with researching a purchase. We’re actively looking for information. And the appearance of brands can be a powerful influencer in these types of searches. Here are some of the surprising and not so surprising things we’ve found in our many brand lift studies:

There is brand lift that comes from dominating the top of page. The biggest question for our first study was, how valuable are those top-of-page slots? If you own the organic position, do you need to buy the top sponsored spot? Is there lift by owning both spots? The answer is yes, to both. The lift we saw in most metrics was well into double digits, significant for marketers. You gain a bigger share of mind when you own more top-of-page real estate. But that’s not all…

You lose brand awareness when you’re not there. For generic keywords, even if you have a strong brand in a category, if you’re not in a result set and your competitors are, your position of dominance will start to erode. In fact, we’ve seen people looking for dominant brands in a result set when they weren’t present, and their confidence in both the quality of the search results and the brand position started to erode. Often, it’s the biggest and strongest brands that are the least concerned about their search visibility. This arrogance could wipe them from the consideration set of many prospective buyers.

Competition on the results page is a good thing. If domination of a results page is good, total domination must be better, right? Well, no, actually. We found more engagement with the top-of-page results when there were a couple of well-known competitors, and engagement led to an overall lift in brand awareness for the test brand. The reason has to do with the intent of the user. If a user is launching a search looking for alternatives to consider in a purchase decision, a results set with only one brand isn’t a very good match to that intent. The user will spend less time considering it, because their confidence is lower. But a results set that brings back two or three well-known brands is a better match, resulting in more engagement. Of course, you’re now competing with those brands, so effective messaging, positioning and landing page strategies become more important. But you already knew that, right?

Top sponsored ads are read more. Top organic placement is a beautiful thing to have, but our studies have shown that people actually spend more time reading the top sponsored ad. This doesn’t make the top organic placement any less important. It’s a default choice for many users. But the fact is, people take the time to read the title of the top ad, just because it is an ad and people will spend more time deliberating before they click. People are less wary with an organic listing, so a quick glance is all that’s needed to click. Marketers can use this to their advantage to reinforce their marketing message in a top sponsored ad (often not an option with organic placement) and drive clicks to a tailored experience.

This covers the brand benefits of search for the well-known brands, the ones that jump out at you in a results set. But what if you aren’t fortunate enough to be a category killer brand? Can search still work for branding? The short answer is yes. The longer answer will have to wait until my next column.

Search Branding: A Problem of Metrics

First published November 13, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This whole question of branding in search came about because of a rather fuzzy definition: what exactly is brand lift? How do you measure it?

This was the problem we wrestled with when we did the first search brand lift study for Google and Honda. Failing anything better, we did the standard tests of aided and unaided message and brand recall. I’m not a huge fan of these metrics, because I don’t think they adequately capture the neural basis of brand. But given the nature of the study (which included a survey and some eye tracking) it was our only feasible alternative.

What is Brand Lift?

Before I talk more about the metrics, let’s talk more about the concept of brand lift, as it’s central to the argument. What is brand lift? As measured by brand recall metrics, it’s awareness of the brand. But actually, it’s to see if a concept of the brand is lodged in working memory immediately after exposure to the brand.

So, let’s walk through this a bit. We create different search results page scenarios with variations of exposure in our test brand, including a control with no exposure. We create scenarios that set up a reasonably natural interaction and scanning of the results page. And, at some point after this interaction (usually immediately following) we ask participants if they remember seeing a brand on the results page. We start with an open-ended question (unaided) and then provide a randomized list of brands to see if they choose the test brand (aided). We then measure variance against the control, correlated with the nature of the exposure.

Given this framework, we did find brand lift. Significant brand lift. And in one aspect, this is great news for marketers. The fact that a brand remained lodged in working memory is a very big win for search in capturing consumer attention. I’m going to be talking about why this is so in the next column. If we equate brand lift with engaged attention and carving a (temporary) niche in the prefrontal cortex, the study proves there’s a strong connection with search.

Brand Lift is in the Eyes of the Beholder

But this is where the metrics get fuzzy. Brand lift seems to be many things to many people. This is why ARF decided that we needed a new metric and started down the road of defining engagement. But the problems that soon plagued this endeavor highlighted the inherent challenge. Our engagement with brands is not a one-size-fits-all, measurable occurrence. Brand relationships, like all relationships, are complex and shifting. There are many degrees. In additional, there’s a question of modality, based on context and intent. My relationship with a brand, say Apple, can be significantly different if I’m shopping for a new laptop for work than if I’m helping my daughter with an iTunes download. Advertisers want a single, simple quantifiable number that defines our brand relationship. Such a beast doesn’t exist.

So, how do you measure lift? What is lift? Is it a temporary lodging in working memory? Is it a long-term strengthening of the synaptic connections in long-term memory? Is it firing up the limbic systems that are our emotional gatekeepers, getting a lump in our throat when we see a tearjerker ad? Is it digging out our deepest primal drives when we see attractive women hanging around guys on a golf course, implying the beer they’re carrying around (but, of course, not consuming) is the reason the women are volunteering for caddy duties (Yeah, like that takes place in the real world)?

We were asked to prove brand lift on the search page, and we did, by one metric. It’s an important metric — a vital one, in fact. But when advertisers hear brand lift, they all hear different things. The definition of brand lift seems to be in the mind of the beholder.  Ironically, I’ve been reading a book that’s taken on the impossible task of explaining quantum mechanics to me. The mind numbing problem with quantum mechanics is that the physical nature of something isn’t defined until it’s observed. Until then, it’s a probability wave. I’m suspecting the same thing might be happening with brand metrics. They don’t take shape until someone tries to define them. There are just too many variables.

A Call for Consilience

The problem with branding is that marketers don’t know what they don’t know. They have learned marketing and the art of pushing a message out, but very, very few marketers have taken the time to understand what happens on the receiving end. They know nothing about cognition, emotional tagging, the formation of memories or any other workings of the human brain. Only now, with the consilience that is beginning to happen in the academic world, are we applying neuroscience to marketing.  So, marketers are desperately trying to apply a universal metric to something that largely defies measurement, and the marketers don’t even know why it’s not working.  They’re getting numbers they can plug into the dashboards, but no one is sure if they’re indicative of what happens in the real world, or, more accurately, our neural representation of the real world.

Democracy Reborn Nov. 4, Thanks to Online Campaign

First published November 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Even as a Canadian, I was amazed by what happened the night of Nov. 4. History was made in many, many different ways. And for that reason, I’m interrupting my series on Search and Branding, just for this week.

 

Obviously, every journalist and pundit will be falling over themselves talking about the historic implications of this election. Democrats and Republicans alike were gushing and seemed a little speechless about the implications of Barack Obama in the White House. I have my own feelings but that’s not what this column is about. For me, this election was fundamentally historic for another reason. It changed forever the fabric of democracy in America.

Three years ago, I sat in a hotel conference room somewhere (it might even have been Chicago) and heard Dana Todd, then the President of SEMPO, say that search would be a very important factor in the next election. I smiled to myself, because I had been watching the somewhat ham-fisted use of online tactics in the election that had just ended. I thought to myself, “Why do these candidates fail to understand the fundamental importance of online? Don’t they understand that this provides an amazing new platform for democracy? How could they be so clueless?” The one candidate that did seem to grasp it was Howard Dean, but unfortunately, Dean’s campaign had other challenges that eventually overcame his online momentum.

I mused further: “What would happen if you took the lessons learned from the Dean campaign and fielded a candidate with a campaign that fully ‘got’ the power of virtual connection?” My guess would be that it would be incredibly effective. Yet I had no idea how earthshakingly important online strategies would prove to be.

Unknown to me, two people — Jascha Franklin-Hodge and Joe Rospars, the architects of the Dean online machine and co-founders of Blue State Digital — were already making plans for 2008. The candidate? A junior senator from Illinois who had just rocked the Democratic National Convention with a stirring speech: Barack Obama.

I watched the entire process unfold, and at each step, I was impressed with the grasp of online momentum, its nuances and social connections. With Franklin-Hodge and Rospars as architects, and with the help of a very Net-savvy staff, Obama’s campaign built an online momentum that shocked Clinton’s handlers in the primaries and eventually rolled over McCain as well.

Yes, there were many factors that led to success, not the least of which is the candidate himself, but I can’t help thinking that this campaign managed to crystallize it in a brilliant way online. Obama navigated the currents and eddies of online buzz masterfully, creating mini-campaigns of intense interest and passion, mobilizing votes and raising money — lots and lots and lots of money. He (with his campaign architects) understood the fundamental connection of online: reaching many, hearing from many, one at a time. It was a campaign launched and won by we, the people.

On November 19th, 1863, another politician from Illinois gave what was intended to be a few impromptu remarks at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa. Lincoln finished that speech with these words: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On Tuesday night, there was a new birth of democracy, the culmination of an election that used a new technology to bridge millions of gaps between Washington and the people, to erase decades of division, estrangement and alienation. Yes, it was a brilliant campaign tactic, but it was more than that. It was an understanding that people needed to reconnect with their President and to have their voices heard. It was true democracy. No matter what your political affiliation and your feelings about Obama the man, you have to feel hopeful that somebody in the White House finally “gets” the Internet and its awesome power to connect and effect change.