Thursday, 30 April 2009

Welcome to social-media message overload.

The constant barrage of invites to sign up for this group or download that app are starting to wear on social-network users, presenting big challenges for the brands and marketers who are looking to use these sites to aggregate fans and cultivate relationships with customers.
Nearly a third of social networkers say they are fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications, according to research by the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. That means marketers will need to work harder and keep innovating if they want to harness the consumer power of social networks and persuade people to join their sponsored sites or pages.

When asked "What do you dislike about social networks?" by far the highest response, at 31%, was that there are too many invites to install applications, followed by 16% who said "when advertising isn't relevant to me." Slightly more than 5% complained about messages from brands and another 5% actually lamented the addictiveness of social networks. About 12% said they had no complaints. The research showed that 7% of respondents sign up to find out about brands.

"From a marketer's perspective, social networks look brilliant on paper," said Alistair Beattie, head of strategic planning at AKQA, London. "It's a switched-on crowd with a huge amount of time who hold brands close to them. The difficulty is that they regard this as their space. We have all become our own source of entertainment. ... But there is a resistance to being advertised at in our own spaces."

Keeping spam down
Amy Kean, IAB senior marketing manager, said, "Despite [social networking's] popularity, this study shows that respect for the user is just as important in social media. Users will not respond to spam or irrelevant advertising." And controlling those intrusions will have to become a higher priority for social networks, said Union Square Venture's Fred Wilson at Ad Age's recent digital conference.

"One of [social networks'] biggest costs is 'environmental mediation,' or keeping the bad people at bay," Mr. Wilson said.

AKQA had success with a Marmite group on Facebook. The savory spread's advertising message is "Love it or hate it," so the group works well as a discussion topic for social networkers. Fans post recipes, discuss weird and wonderful ways to enjoy the sticky black spread, tell tales of conversion to the taste and share frustrations about not being able to purchase it outside the U.K.

Too often, Mr. Beattie said, advertising on social networks is "still a traditional interruptive approach where brands are piggybacking on content that people value."

The IAB research found that exclusive content, which appeals to 28% of social networkers, and a genuine interest in the message, which attracts 37%, are the keys to a positive response from consumers on social networks. And because only 5% say that they actively dislike messages from brands, there are big opportunities for marketers who can hit the right notes.

"To be popular, brands need to have a personality and be someone that people want to be friends with," Mr. Beattie said. "The guiding principle is to offer things that are not available elsewhere, things that give social kudos or bragging rights. Brands are part of the fabric of people's lives and ultimately most are happy to be identified as friends of a brand."

The IAB study of nearly 2,000 internet users also showed that social networks are taking on extra relevance in the current economic climate. Forty-one percent of members say they now place even more value on ratings and reviews from family and friends on a social network. Mobile social-networking is also on the increase. Updating social-network sites via mobile handsets is increasing, with 25% of all respondents logging on to check or update their pages.

Property management by JJ Homes in Surrey

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

"A large majority of web-users (79%) demand...

...something of value in return for heeding ads, whether that 'something' is pure entertainment, a relevant message or access to learning something new.

Says Yahoo Europe's vp of marketing Kristof Fahy: "Consumers are overwhelmed with the constant flow of information they receive on a daily basis."

"So businesses need to convince them of the relevance of their messages in order to gain their attention. This means that on line marketers need to think hard how to better target and engage with their time-poor audiences."

Understanding Interactive Marketing Communication.

With a better understanding of the nature of Interaction allows us then to give a more precise definition of the process, that is:
“With Interactive Marketing Communication:

the reader/viewer is actively encouraged to

take careful note of what is being taught him,

learn rather than be taught the message, and

then give tangible evidence that the lesson, in

this case the advertising/marketing message,

has been learnt.

Interactive Marketing Communication ensures

that the initial message receiver anticipates

and then subsequently evidences a response

using a predetermined mechanism.

Sunday, 26 April 2009

How advertising & consumerism affects society, the economy and the Environment.

Consumerism is economically manifested in the chronic purchasing of new goods and services, with little attention to their true need, durability, product origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and disposal. Consumerism is driven by huge sums spent on advertising designed to create both a desire to follow trends, and the resultant personal self-reward system based on acquisition. Materialism is one of the end results of consumerism.

Consumerism interferes with the workings of society by replacing the normal common-sense desire for an adequate supply of life's necessities, community life, a stable family and healthy relationships with an artificial ongoing and insatiable quest for things and the money to buy them with little regard for the true utility of what is bought. An intended consequence of this, promoted by those who profit from consumerism, is to accelerate the discarding of the old, either because of lack of durability or a change in fashion.

Landfills swell with cheap discarded products that fail early and cannot be repaired. Products are made psychologically obsolete long before they actually wear out. A generation is growing up without knowing what quality goods are. Friendship, family ties and personal autonomy are only promoted as a vehicle for gift giving and the rationale for the selection of communication services and personal acquisition. Everything becomes mediated through the spending of money on goods and services.


It is an often stated catechism that the economy would improve if people just bought more things, bought more cars and spent more money. Financial resources better spent on Social Capital such as education, nutrition, housing etc. are spent on products of dubious value and little social return. In addition, the purchaser is robbed by the high price of new things, the cost of the credit to buy them, and the less obvious expenses such as, in the case of automobiles, increased registration, insurance, repair and maintenance costs.

Many consumers run out of room in their homes to store the things that they buy. A rapidly growing industry in America is that of self-storage. Thousands of acres of land good farm land are paved over every year to build these cities of orphaned and unwanted things so as to give people more room to house the new things that they are persuaded to buy. If these stored products were so essential in the first place, why do they need to be warehoused? An overabundance of things lessens the value of what people possess.

"You work in a job you hate, to buy stuff that you don't need, to impress people that you don't like."

In describing today's accelerating changes

the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

Friday, 17 April 2009

Up until a few years ago advertising was the province of a privileged few...

to the passive many. Now the ownership of moving images has passed into the hands of practically everybody and the articulation of moving images has passed into the hands of everybody with access to a phone, laptop or digital camera. We can now have our say.

In essence, the behavior of the audience is moving from passive to active participation so that TV watching or listening to radio in the future will be a very different and less sedentary experience than it has been in the past 80 years.
Ultimate power isn't with brand owners or even with broadcasters, and most certainly doesn't exist with the Advertising Agencies at all! It's with the viewer. And it's the on/off switch!

Game playing fundamentally alters your relationship with your customers and effectively cuts through all the problems experienced by marketing programs at the same time allowing customers to have their say.
TAG IS THE BEST FORM OF SOCIAL ADVERTISING MEDIA!

Thursday, 16 April 2009

Social Advertising Media - SAM

The Television Advertising Game

The multi media show that is all about your Commercials
But people just love to watch it!

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM YOUR ADVERTISING?

ROI, with TAG each program is independently researched.
Increased customer involvement with your brand(s)
Establish contact between your Brand(s) and your customer.
Actionable valuable customer feedback
All of these benefits would be ideal for me

YOUR BRANDS BENEFIT

1. TAG will provide your brands with a unique vehicle that is not available to competitors. (Category exclusive)
2.TAG positively change attitudes and behaviour to featured brands,
leading to measurable actual sales, both immediate and ongoing.
3. Your Brands will experience a valuable ROI as measured through
Independent research.
4. A Multi-media programme using print, television and Web 2.0 with
multiple response mechanisms; Telephone, Print answer card, online

Do you agree that the most important thing in brand marketing these days is ROI?

TAG is specifically developed to bring ROI to your brands.
How does TAG do this?
By involving your customers with your brands.

AN INDEPENDENT EVALUATION OF TAG BY CITY INSIGHTS AND NOP
Through our experience in testing the effectiveness of TAG programs we have found:
There are major positive changes in brand knowledge & understanding brand values.
Purchase & future purchase intention increases.
Store data such as AC Nielsen or irInfoscan, show positive sales uplifts.

“From my experience of evaluating heavyweight ad campaigns over the years, TAG programmes have consistently shown to be more effective. “ Ian Blythe, NOP. 

“TV advertising per se, never seems to invoke the same level of ‘image shift’ and rarely do we see such changes in future purchase intent.” Simon Hudson, City Insights.

TAG... a totally accountable marketing programme

Wednesday, 15 April 2009

The No 1 task for Business: Reinvent Marketing & Advertising.

Hopefully lessons will been learnt from the crisis, do not try to rebuild business on the principle that Marketing & Advertising are always right!

The words "60% of all advertising, globally is wasted" were splashed yesterday across the marketing papers. This kind of unanimity in the trade press is not coincidental — "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" the advertising community do-nothing mentality was taken to its logical extreme by the preparation of $3 million ads for the Super Bowl by advertising agencies apparantly totally unaware that they are all well past their sell by date.

To have any hope of repairing the damage left behind by the highly dishonest and incompetent banks, big business must first convince the majority of the population that they are really capable of fixing the problems.. Not only are we trapped in the worst recession in living memory. but behind all this lurks a horror even more shocking; the entire marketing/advertising-economic model of free enterprise, rugged individualism, creative advertising and marketing is broken beyond all hope of repair.
Marketing/Advertising on which the Western world built its seeming success seems to have completly broken down. How else can one describe a situation in which all of the country's main financial institutions and many of its biggest industrial companies are effectively bankrupt and on government life-support?

Well TAG is the way forward because it makes your customer the very centre of your business!

Tuesday, 14 April 2009

At TAG we insist there's a solution:

"Better advertising. More informational. More entertaining. More beautiful." And TAG leads the way to a latter-day Creative Revolution, that is.

Professor Clemons went on to say

Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

* Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.
* Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.
* And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor

Lets work together to make your Clients marketing communications work like never before! Contact Paul @ paul.ashby@yahoo.com

HE ALSO SAID...

Advertising will fail:

The internet is the most liberating of all mass media developed to date. It is participatory, like swapping stories around a campfire or attending a renaissance fair. It is not meant solely to push content, in one direction, to a captive audience, the way movies or traditional network television did. It provides the greatest array of entertainment and information, on any subject, with any degree of formality, on demand. And it is the best and the most trusted source of commercial product information on cost, selection, availability, and suitability, using community content, professional reviews and peer reviews.

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again.

But we at TAG have found a way and we've got over $5m of independent research to show you how much more effective our technique is...wanna see some? Contact Paul @ paul.ashby@yahoo.com

Professor Eric Clemons said What?

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

Hey we have already been there – done that – and we have over $10m of independent research which proves how much more accountable TAG is...what to see some research? Then Call Paul Ashby on 01934 620047 or email: paul.ashby@yahoo.com

Monday, 13 April 2009

Would you like to get results like these?

Professor E.L. Roberto PhD Coca-Cola Foundation Professor of International Marketing.

Reviewing the £5 million of independent research Prof. Roberto concluded on the cost efficiency of this technique:

• The TAG participating advertisements generated recall scores that are more than 50% productive than normal advertising.

• The effect on purchase intention is just as impressive if not much more. All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably
inexpensive budget.

• One TAG client revealed that for its participating brand, its quarter television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its
TAG budget of $0.5 million.

• This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in TAG events in other countries.

Should we advertise on Social Media?

"With regard to Social Media and its’ suitability as an advertising medium, we must admit to having some concerns. More and more we discover that in the fickle world of online social media, yesterdays fashionable meetings points, like for example, Twitter, become so over-commercialized as to be unrevivably “expired”.

The example of Second Life is a classic, as you probably know, Second Life was to be advertising’s salvation and even the government set up shop there, the early adopters have already moved on and Second Life is facing a corporate backlash and media commentators alike. Second Life has been “virtually abandoned” by “normal people and businesses”. This according to Deloitte’s director of technology, Paul Lee.

The way we view Web.2 is somewhat different, we create your own Social Media “Event”, and your business lends itself perfectly to that creation, and then seamlessly work with a combination of Old & New Media to invite your customers in to tells us what they think of you. Thus placing the customer right at the heart of your business. This results in a greater involvement and understanding of what you stand for leading through to a greater number of people buying.

As we have invested over $10m in independent research, as the examples shown elsewhere in this blog, we are confident that we could produce similar results for you.

Saturday, 11 April 2009

Just what are the problems with Social Media?

Once "The Ad Man" gatecrashes the party and corporate marketers are inevitably a long way down the adoption curve - the kudos rapidly evaporates.

This explains why the assumed valuations of Social Media Companies are often built on greater financial chicanery than Bernie Madoff's tax return.

In to-day's market whatever supposed "next big thing" our digital culture favours in any moment faces an ever more accelerated journey to obilivion!

CREATE YOUR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA THEN MAKE IT DELIVER SEAMLESSLY USING OLD & NEWMEDIA AND ABOVE ALL ELSE UNDERSTANDING THE WORD "COMMUNICATION"

What is Interactive Communication?

It invites the consumer to respond to or comment to the brand and the brand message
It is a very effective means of mass communication.

It is not media dependent- can work in press, TV, internet, radio and outdoor
It utilises programmed learning techniques.

What does it do? It changes behaviour
Because of the effectiveness of communication it changes peoples behaviour- for example
they could switch brands, they could buy more, they might change the way they vote.

But above all else it understands the human need for COMMUNICATION!

The suits come to Social Media. Now that’s the kiss of death!

Advertising Agencies, having all but destroyed a perfectly good Old Media are set to do the same with Social Media!
In the fickle world of online chatter, yesterday’s achingly fashionable meeting points are rapidly acquiring the appearance of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s’ headquarters.
Already Twitter, becoming bogged down with fake PR tweets as well as fake advertising tweets, so much so that already the kids dismiss it as tired! And are moving on.
As soon as the buzz of innovation starts to fade the “cool” but influential people move on quicker than you can send a tweet.
As witness by the Old Media experience, essentially Commercial Television, Advertising Agencies are loath to change a medium that was to them, a money-spinner. Despite the fact that it was non-accountable. Now they are deserting terrestrial TV without even realizing that they could have made it far more effective & accountable, but they didn't understand the word "communication".
And now Agencies are rushing onto Social Media ignoring the fact that, as in the past, people don’t want their advertising in whatever form. The difference here is that they can easily move away from advertising in whatever guise, you have only to look at the experience of Second Life, that was to be advertising’s salvation. That’s why the early adopters have moved on!

CHECK OUT THE AGENCY CREDENTIALS & MAKE SURE THAT THEY REALLY UNDERSTAND THE WORD “COMMUNICATION”

Friday, 10 April 2009

Finally the truth that dare not speak its name is beginning to emerge!

The age of the 30-second TV commercial is over.

There’s a lot of hand wringing on Madison Avenue these days. Companies like Virgin Atlantic are concluding that advertising on TV is too pricey and the effects too difficult to measure.

The industry must adapt to a coming world where consumers enjoy total control and will no longer tolerate tedious commercials that hold them hostage to messages they care nothing about.

There are still a lot of people in the business that don’t accept what is about to happen. That is myopic. Perhaps it is time for the advertising and TV industries to get contact lenses, because the latest research suggests that trouble lies ahead.
ABOVE ALL ELSE UNDERSTAND THE REAL MEANING OF THE WORD "COMMUNICATION"!

Sixty Percent of Global Adspend is wasted!

As much as 60% of all tracked advertising expenditure world-wide during 2008 failed to deliver the results expected by its marketers and can therefore be considered wasted.

The key criterion by which campaigns were measured was their ability to boost the advertiser’s bottom line via increases in:

* Retail traffic;
* Sales;
* Leads/prospects captured; and/or an increase in positive target audience conditioning.

While the average Marketing Wastage Rate (MWR) in the business-to-consumer industry is 65%, it falls to 47% in the business-to-business industry.

The majority of B2C marketers tend to rely heavily on the old and traditional model of brand building: by mainly going after awareness and recall through expensive and impact-driven media buys. They hope to deliver more sales and/or in-store traffic down the line – a fundamental mistake nowadays given the high level of advertising clutter, which leads to high levels of wastage.

SO SHOW THIS TO YOUR AD AGENCY NEXT TIME THEY WANT YOU ON THE BOX!

The Television Advertising Game

The multi media show, all about your Commercials
and people just love to watch it!



TAG will provide your brands with a unique vehicle that is not available
to competitors (category exclusive).

TAG positively changes attitudes and behaviour to featured brands,
leading to actual sales, both immediate and ongoing.

Brands experience a substantial ROI measured by independent research.

TAG breaks through clutter and involves customers with the brands.

A request to the reader/viewer to watch and pay attention to an advertisement,
substantially increases the numbers who do so and the amount of time they watch.
Wilbur Schramm, Harvard Business School

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM YOUR ADVERTISING?

An ROI on my spend, that is fully accountable?
Increased customer involvement with my brand?
Establish trust between your brand and your customer?
Valuable customer feedback that you can develop?
Or would all of these benefits be ideal?




AN INDEPENDENT EVALUATION OF TAG BY CITY INSIGHTS AND NOP
Through our experience in testing the effectiveness of TAG programs we have found:
There are major positive changes in brand knowledge & understanding brand values.
Purchase & future purchase intention increases.
Store data such as AC Nielsen or irInfoscan, show positive sales uplifts.

“From my experience of evaluating heavyweight ad campaigns over the years, TAG programmes have consistently shown to be more effective. “ Ian Blythe, NOP. 

“TV advertising per se, never seems to invoke the same level of ‘image shift’ and rarely do we see such changes in future purchase intent.” Simon Hudson, City Insights.

Marketers must "learn how to connect"

with consumers to make an impact on websites like Facebook and MySpace, replacing traditional advertising methods with an interactive approach.

Most marketers see the importance of securing a presence on these portals, but are hesitant to invest in an unproven form of media.
Consumers are spending increasing amounts of time using social media, marketers also need to become "skilled and effective at social communication."

Brands' involved in social networking need to avoid classic advertising strategies, and wait "to be invited in" instead.

AND ABOVE ALL ELSE PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE REAL MEANING OF THE WORD "COMMUNICATION"

Task No 1 for Business: Reinvent Marketing & Advertising.

Hopefully lessons will been learnt from the crisis, do not try to rebuild business on the principle that Marketing & Advertising are always right!

The words "60% of all advertising, globally is wasted" were splashed yesterday across the marketing papers. This kind of unanimity in the trade press is not coincidental — "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" the advertising community do-nothing mentality was taken to its logical extreme by the preparation of $3 million ads for the Super Bowl by advertising agencies apparantly totally unaware that they are all well past their sell by date.

To have any hope of repairing the damage left behind by the highly dishonest and incompetent banks, big business must first convince the majority of the population that they are really capable of fixing the problems.. Not only are we trapped in the worst recession in living memory, but behind all this lurks a horror even more shocking; the entire marketing/advertising-economic model of free enterprise, rugged individualism, creative advertising and marketing is broken beyond all hope of repair.

The post-advertising age is under way.

This isn't about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of them are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition -- or any transition at all -- from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd.
However if we start with the same erroneous beliefs that allowed us to screw up with Old Media, we will screw up New Media as well!

START BY UNDERSTANDING THE WORD “COMMUNICATION”