For those of you that follow my blog on a consistent basis – there will be some radio silence over the next few weeks as I hit the pause button in my social media life and hit play on my every day life. I’m getting married today! We’re off for a honeymoon after – back on in 2 weeks…. Thank you for your readership!
Being in the media business, this is a question that I get quite a bit – from peers, from vendors, and yes – from my agencies. Being any agency of record for Intel is not an easy task. We are a very demanding client and our pace of business is extremely fast. We are also very results oriented and measurement driven, something you would expect from an engineering based company. As a result we are accutely interested in the ROI of every campaign we launch. Today I came across an article on MediaPost that discussed how ad agencies need to evolve to better meet their clients needs and deliver a ROI-positive advertising approach. Below is the summarized list (not in priority order), the full article articulates the details behind each tenant. Personally – the two that matter most to me are #1 and #5 – both are top priorty for me as I work through campaigns with my agency partners.
1. Become partners with your clients
2. The creative talent must work hand-in-hand with the analytics team
3. Don’t think you have to sacrifice the brand on the altar of results
4. Members of the creative team should review and analyze results regularly
5. Include performance goals in the creative brief
The consumer wanting a mobile computing device has several options before them – at multiple price points and feature sets. Depending on their usage model, the device they choose may vary. If they are interested in a small form-factor device that they can easily carry with them to simply connect to the internet and surf the web, a netbook may be the best choice. For more compute intensive activities, a CULV (consumer ultra low voltage) machine could provide a mid-range price point option for consumers that don’t need the full features of a high end notebook or laptop.
As an employee of Intel and an avid user of mobile computing technology, I think the choices available are outstanding. As a shareholder, how do I feel about the potential cannibalization of higher ASP SKUs by lower price point devices? Again – I think choice is good. People will purchase the proper device for their needs. Sometimes that will mean that they are the proud owner of a top end notebook for their high octane computing needs, and will also purchase a ‘companion’ device such as an Atom-based netbook to take with them to satisfy their portable web surfing jones. CULV based machines are set to debut in June and provide an “…opportunity for upsell” as Sean Maloney stated at our investor meeting earlier this month. He continued on to state “We can reach new price points and we can also get paid for it.”
The way I interpret this: identify the market/customer needs, provide a choice of solutions to satisfy those needs, evolve your product line to improve upon past generation offerings, and finally continue to innovate to ensure you’re exceeding your customer’s and the industry’s expectations.
As you are probably discovering from some of my previous posts, I am an ardent basketball fan – even maintaining interest after my beloved Celtics exited in the last round. TNT has been feeding my basketball jones with their ‘40 games in 40 nights‘ campaign – tag teaming with ESPN to bring the fans every moment of NBA action coast to coast. During this time, Nike has broken out a new advertising campaign. Kobe vs. LeBron with the implication that a finals meeting between the two is a ‘sure thing’. These commercials have been running non-stop for the last couple of weeks.
What’s interesting, however, is that during last night’s game between the Nuggets and the Lakers, none of the three installments ran. Could it be that with the Cavs down 2-1 to the Magic and now the Lakers series with the Nuggets tied at 2-2, ESPN is getting nervous that the pre-ordained Kobe/LeBron finals is in doubt? When the doubt creeps in, the advertisements wane. Good lesson for advertisers – don’t take anything for granted and be careful not to limit the runway for your campaign. Regardless of the outcome – these are some really creative spots… ‘Chalk’ (below) is my favorite. As a fan – I’m still rooting for them to meet.
As we’ve seen this year, Twitter adoption and usage is exploding. The site and tool is outpacing major news publications in unique visitors on a monthly basis and every day a new usage model or add on is coming to market to take advantage of the fervent growth of this micro-blogging service. Tools and add-ons around a service are great – however the real value is in your followers. Chromatic published a ‘Top 10″ report on how to “Keep Your Precious Followers on Twitter”. Very useful and spot on. Here is the summary list, visit their site for more comprehensive details.
1. Be Consistent with your Tweets
2. Quality is Greater than Quantity
3. Separate Accounts for Personal/Family and Professional/Business
4. If Posting Links, Provide Commentary
5. Balance Self Promotion with Sharing
6. Maintain Good Twitter Etiquette
7. Avoid Controversial Topics
8. Interact with your Followers
9. Direct Message Etiquette
10. Try to Tweet on a Daily Basis
I’m a sports nut, and a HUGE Celtics fan. I’m also a big fan of great advertising… HP’s ‘Personal Again’ spots are fantastic and I always stop the fast forward on the DVR to watch them. Their newest installment features Boston’s own Kevin Garnett so you can bet that I rewound it a few times to watch. KG – I guess all that free time with your knee injury was not ill-spent. Now – get back to work and let’s bring that trophy back to Beantown in 2010.
Our commitment at Intel is to build cross platform social campaigns – using all mediums available to us, including print, broadcast, and out of home vehicles. We’ve started already with the launch of our new campaign ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow‘ by bridging our out of home placements with our web presence (we took over the Times Square Nasdaq and Reuters boards with the a request to text in your view of ‘Tomorrow’ that is then displayed on our website). In addition, we have a very active social stream through Twitter, YouTube, and our Consumer Blog. Starbucks has done something similar in their new campaign – leveraging offline media to bolster online communities.
It’s well known that Starbucks does not embrace traditional advertising. For this effort, they’ve strayed from that tenant by placing large format posters in 6 major cities across the U.S – taking their campaign off line and to the streets. However, true to their commitment to social media and their community (see yesterday’s post), they’ve also integrated social sites and tools like Twitter (183k followers), Facebook (1.5M fans), YouTube, and Flickr – counting on their active community to extend the campaign message through earned media.
From today’s NY Times: Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online at Starbucks said Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. “It’s the difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”
Well done Starbucks – you’ve recognized the correlation between paid and earned media. I’ll watch your new campaign with interest….
Getting feedback from your customers to improve your business is ALWAYS a good thing. The problem – marketers often times think they know their customers better than customers know themselves. Not true, and now that the tough economic times have hit, several prominent marketers (and even a publication like Business Week is not above getting story ideas from their readership) are understanding that consumer outreach is a necessary and relevant component of their business model.
Two companies with vastly different products and demographics that are remarkably similar in their approach – Starbucks and Best Buy. The tagline on the My Starbucks Idea blog is “Help shape the future of Starbucks – with your ideas“, while Best Buy’s Idea Xchange touts:
“We’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our business and are asking you to help us by sharing your own ideas, voting for ideas you like, and discussing them with the rest of the community.”
These are great examples of two companies who understand that the very foundation of their business, the customer, is a valuable asset to them as they prepare new market offerings – both in product and services. From my perspective, more marketers should be following their lead or face the danger of losing share to competitors that do.
From John Battelle today – officially launching his search to fill the top Executive Leadership position at Federated Media:
“It’s time to take it to the next level. FM is no longer a scrappy startup, and while its leadership team is deep and experienced, we’ve come to the conclusion that to take the company to the place we all know it can go, we need an additional leader on board.So today, I’m announcing that I’m officially launching a search for that position. It used to be you did this in private, but we live in the world of social media, and one of FM’s mores is transparency. I want to honor that value today.
So let me be clear: I am in no way leaving the business. This new leader – the title will depend on the person – will be responsible for running the business – taking all reports and managing to our plan – but he or she will be working very closely with me.”
I wouldn’t expect anything less from one of the leading companies in this space. Good luck with your search John – hopefully you’ll document this process on the social web along the way.
I, being in my nascent stages of Twitter usage, apparently have very little Twitter Cred…but get some love on Google – see my results. What I find baffling is that neither service does a good job of selecting ‘portions’ of the search term. For example – search ‘Veneski’ vs. ‘dveneski’ vs. ‘David Veneski’ and you get vastly different results. Logical or did I just ‘mis-brand’ myself on Twitter?
You can quickly see how you rate through a service call Twoogle. Since there is a big debate these days about Twitter Search being more ‘real time’ relevant than the results through Google, this is a pretty interesting side by side comparison of the search capabilities of each medium.