Cobble Hill Interactive: Digital Sales & Marketing Consulting

Scott Donaton’s latest article over at AdAge touches on something I wrote a while back, after the Agency.com fiasco.  He astutely writes (emphasis is added):

As with ads in any medium, those that work are those that start with an insight, show an understanding of their target audience, and have an authentic, relevant connection to the brand. Those that don’t smack of having been produced because someone wanted to do a viral video to please himself, his boss or his board. They’re the commercial equivalent of YouTube videos of kids falling off skateboards.

I couldn’t agree more. Too bad the insight part is the key, and plucking those off trees isn’t exactly a viable strategy in 2007.

A new Ad-Age article offer strategies for winning at Panama, namely:

Instead, marketers’ focus will shift from managing their bids to
managing the entire conversation with their customers. By improving attributes such as the relevance of keywords, ad copy and landing pages, advertisers provide a better user experience while having an positive influence on their own ad costs.

Panama certainly raises the stakes for all those who have yet to realize how critical true Customer-centricity has become (let’s not forget transparency either).  With the added competition, it’s nice to have a methodology to follow…

From today’s Monday Morning Memo:

Your website architecture dictates your customer’s experience.
Architecture has nothing to do with graphics. Did your website have an
architect? Or was it designed by the programmer? By the graphic artist?
By you?

A programmer asks, "Does it function?"
A graphic designer asks, "Does it ‘feel right’ and represent us well?"
An owner asks, "Does it say what I want it to say?"
An architect asks, "Did the customer find their answer?"

Read the entire memo (and while you’re there, you just may want to subscribe and start every Monday with 5 minutes of insights that will quite simply knock you on you @ss)

Those of you who don’t regularly spend time hanging out on the Web Analytics Forum (tsk, tsk, there’s a ton of great stuff over there) can be forgiven if you haven’t yet heard of the Center for Digital Democracy, or their formal complaint to the FTC requesting an investigation into “the online marketplace.” You can read all the dirty details by downloading the PDF directly from their site, or you can spend 5 minutes reading the rest of this post, and decide to skip it altogether.

To whet you’re appetite, take a gander at some of their tastier sound-bites [Note: I did not say ‘meatier.’ 😉 Emphasis is mine.]

Consumers entering this new online world are neither informed of nor prepared for these technologies and techniques- including data collection and mining, audience targeting and tracking- that render users all but defenseless before the sophisticate assault of new-media marketing

Followed by:

Collectively, these five areas [note: areas previously noted are: Analytics, Targeting, Segmentation, Mining, and the consolidation of the industry] represent the foundations of an entirely new online environment, one in which engagement gives way to entrapment, in which personalization impinges on privacy. It is an online environment, in short, that threatens to turn the traditional media equation on its head- a media that consumes us.

Thought you had travel far and wide, wait in long lines at Barnes & Noble book signings, or spend 6 figures in consulting fees to have breakfast with the Brothers Eisenberg?  Think again… or rather, just pop on over to the Crowne Plaza in Times Square NYC next Thursday @ 7 AM.  Bagels are on us (and our good friends at WebSideStory and Responsys too) but seats around the table are limited, so please do register in advance at: http://www.websidestory.com/promotions/eisenberg/register.html

For those of you outside of NYC, I guess I lied (sue me 😉 you do have to travel far and wide… unless of course we’re coming to a neighborhood nearby.

1. Get yourself a YouTube, Digg, Flikr, del.icio.us, furl.net, or __________ (insert your favorite online popularity tool here) account.
2. Get out your handicam, pen, digital camera, blogging software, word processor, or __________ (insert your favorite communication tool here)
3. Find something to say that’s relevant, salient, and transparent to such a mass audience, it overcomes each visitor, infects them (er, eh, like a virus 😉 in such a way they can’t quite articulate, at their core they just have to pay it forward.

I’m sorry, did my title lead you to believe this would be easy? (Ya, fancy little lists give that impression. It’s no wonder why the business section of your local Barnes & Noble is littered with them.)  Not only is it not easy, but more to the point (and sarcasm aside now), it’s also not possible to create a viral campaign in advance. A campaign becomes viral due to the energy the campaign consumes in the wild.  It becomes viral due to factors outside of its control. You simply don’t set out to create a viral campaign.  I’ll say it again, only louder (and with the sarcasm switch turned on again):

You don’t create a viral campaign, simply because you wish your campaign would be viral.

Likewise, you don’t ascend to the homepage of Digg, simply because you’ve written something you wrote simply to get there.

If you swing for the fences, you’re much more likely to strikeout than you are to hit a homerun.  But if you aim to make contact, you just may hit one out of the park.  When planning your marketing communication strategy, please do remember to keep your eye on the ball.

Care to share your thoughts on the topic?

PS – Care to know what the driving point for this little rant was? Contrast the following links from AdAge. 

The first, being yet another story around the Agency.com Subway pitch (the irony here is that the industry at large created the viral effects, not the campaign itself.  Had this video been a campaign for a mom and pop shop, trying to win the business of the largest car dealer in Bismarck, North Dakota, the blogosphere would have never heard of it).

The second, being yet another story around the pure viral steamroller that is Snakes On A Plane. Never will a movie make more with less, and they’ve all but acknowledged publicly, they certainly didn’t greenlight the film with this in mind. Have they capitalized on the CGM efforts- absolutely (and all indications are, they’ll continue doing so) but to suggest they planned it this way is laughable. Enjoy, and safe flying 😉

PRWeb, our partner in applying Persuasion Architecture specifically to the world of Public Relations announced it was acquired yesterday.  We couldn’t be happier for PRWeb founder David McInnis.  Not only is David an incredibly nice guy, he’s one of the smartest guys around, and I’m not just saying that because he’s a partner.  He’s revolutionized the PR game, giving a direct-to-consumer angle that didn’t previously exist, and tying it into search engine optimization better than virtually any SE "expert" in the space today.  Congrats Dave, you deserve it!

Today’s leading story on ClickZ:

http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623082

Anyone doing PR just may want to take 5 and read the article.

“How do you use search to introduce the right buyers to the right sellers when it’s not a frequent transaction of a commodity?” The responsibility is the sellers! . We invented Persuasion Architecture to present the answers the buyer seeks. Chapters 19-21 of “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark” tell you how…

Planning Persuasion Scenarios is the core of Persuasion Architecture and it ensures that that seller will leave a relevant scent of information based on answering each buyer’s questions, addressing each need, each motivation, and even each buying preference. Whether the sale is complex or simple, whether the buyer is late or early in the process, whether the buyer is knowledgeable or ignorant, high price point or low, it doesn’t matter. The seller must account for each customer segment and each angle of entry that customers may take as the need for your product arises.

It isn’t easy, it’s a lot of work. Every touchpoint, every page, every keyword, every marketing communication must be accounted for . Persuasion Architecture handles this complexity.

In today’s landscape the seller is the only one with papable incentive to do the work of Persuasion Scenario planning, so it is unlikely that search or any other middle party will get too involved in solving this. And sellers selling these types of transactions simply can’t afford to wait for search technology to solve this problem for them.

Can you?

Read Seth Godin’s entire post.

Advertising will always be with us. There will always be products, services, and circumstances that will warrant the use of advertising. Still, there can be no doubt that advertising as it is, as it was, must and WILL change dramatically.

It all compounds into one simple dynamic. Customers are ignoring marketing, and today’s advertiser is paying more for less return on their ad dollar. The old advertising template is broken, the carcasses of failed ad campaigns are piling up. The success of our new book is only one indication.

Another nail in the advertising template’s coffin comes to us courtesy of usability guru Jared Spool, whose research also confirms this with a loud echoing shout. Customers not only ignore advertising, they develop techniques to do so.

Ouch.

Who can afford throwing more money at old school advertising and idly wait for their cats to bark?

Volunteers? Anyone?