Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

Dec 21 2015
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Advertising, Business, Digital Strategy, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Social Media, Strategy

#sometrendit2016: The Only 2016 Social Media Trends You Should Read

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As the year approaches the end, it has become an annual tradition for me take a look at crystal ball and share my views with Kurio Social Media Agency on the next year´s social media trends.

For those adapt at Finnish, I recommend reading the whole report. If you are not interested in the predictions of 28 other Finnish digital marketers, you can also jump straight to the most important ones (mine) below.

Before I go into my answers, I have to quote myself from the last year:

I have to say that I have not been interested in social media as such for a long time. Do not get me wrong. Social plays crucial role in digital business. But I seldom think digital as a separate entity either: digital is air. Digital, mobile and social should be a part of every business. Sometimes at the core, sometimes playing supporting role and sometimes playing no role at all. Strategy is about deciding what to do, but even more importantly what not to do. If you are thinking social media as a separate unit you are missing the bigger picture. 

The dominance of digital universe goes well beyond our traditional silos.

And here are the bold/boring predictions of 2016:

  1. 1. Biggest Social Media Trend in 2016?

Internet will be build more and more upon instant messaging. We have moved to the latest phase of Internet: the Age of Messaging. What is most interesting, who will be the master of that era? If previous phase was the Age of Social and Facebook was the undisputed king, is it able to keep its lead? Currently it seems with the dual-strategy of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger that Facebook will continue to dominate.

2. Social media platforms to look out for 2015?
Last year I was speculating about anonymous messaging and those services were not able to live up the hype. On the same speculative tip, I would keep an eye on live-streaming platforms like Periscope. It is easy to recognize the opportunities Periscope can bring to the brands. Bigger question is will they be truly interesting to actual users?

It is worthwhile to keep an eye on WeChat, because what it does today in China, Facebook will do in western world tomorrow with its Facebook messenger.

3. Biggest challenges in doing social media marketing in 2015?

The huge portion (probably somewhere around 3/4) of sharing in social media is so-called “dark social”. This means that social media listening gives one-sided and even totally faulty picture about what people are really talking about. People share where the brands play no role.

This is great for consumers, because brands are not ruining your conversation or begging you to like them. It makes our work way more difficult. Established channels like FB and YouTube are 100% paid media. To some IM services you cannot get even when you are paying. There is no such thing as earned media anymore.

4. Social Media Buzzword, which hopefully disappears in 2015?

Content marketing.

Despite all the hoopla about native advertising and new content agencies, the division of labor is simple. In Internet there is only good (or bad) content or good (mostly bad) ads. Ad agencies have shown that they cannot truly create content and content marketers have not been good at creating ads (which essentially move products of the shelves). There is role for both counterparts, but it is utter stupidity to think that you could replace one with another. Or that one agency could be great at creating both of them.

To see what I have been predicting in previous years, see the following links:

Social Media trends 2013

Social Media trends 2014

Social Media trends 2015

 

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Dec 09 2015
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Advertising, Business, Digital Strategy, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Uncategorized

Obey Your Data

For various reasons I have been reading quite a bit about big data lately. Based on everything I read and the experience, I have come to three conclusions:

  1. It does not matter anymore why something happens. It matters that it happens.
  2. In life there is no such thing as certainty; therefore you should just aim for high probability.
  3. Correlation trumps causality.

“In many cases, the deeper search for causality will take place after big data has done its work, when we specifically want to investigate the why, not just appreciate that”
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Kenneth Cukier (Big Data)

I would say that in our industry knowing why is more of a philosophical question. Examples show that when you just work on what you have (data) and act on that, the results are better. If data shows that it works, you don´t really need to know why it works. It might be interesting from academic point-of-view, but should not matter when doing marketing for the people.

There is still aversion against data in our industry. Maybe it is because logically thinking people generally don´t gravitate towards advertising (and why our business models are so antiquated). For lack of better data, we have tolerated egomaniacs (disguised as gurus) in our industry for too long.

Advertising is not a rocket science; it is just a data science. Just like everything else in this world.

We have self-inflated view of how difficult our work is, but eventually we will be replaced by algorithm. Gut feeling is not necessarily bad if it is based on experience. I.e. if you have done thousand display campaigns you know anecdotally that call-to-action button should be red. Too often, someone just wants it green because it is his favorite color. And person with no experience could say the right thing just based on the right data.

Experience will trump stupidity.

Data will trump experience.

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Dec 01 2015
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Advertising, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Uncategorized

Sex is The Killer App

“Pornography was the unacknowledged “killer app” of the World Wide Web, not to mention the printing press, photography, and video before it.

The vibrator was the first handheld electrical device, predating the cellphone by century. Scooters took off in postwar Europe, particularly Italy, because they let young couples get away from their families.

Facilitating dating was surely one of the “killer apps” of fire when Homo Erectus discovered it a million years ago; and equally surely, a key driver of increasing realism in humanlike robots will be the sexbot industry.

Sex just seems to be the end, rather than the means, of technological evolution”

Pedro Domingos (Master Algorithm)

Sometimes the most basic needs are driving the consumer behavior. Many marketers fail taking into account those animal urges that still largely are driving us. As marketers try to stay politically correct, they will come up with lukewarm insights that are not really rooted in true human behavior. Tinder is growing in conservative countries like Indonesia & India, although it has not been that widely acknowledged. Humans are always humans, no matter where you are from.

People are driven by lust, hunger, jealousy and greed. Your brand might not be about those things, but if you fail to understand the real motivations you will not be able to make the connection with your audience.

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Nov 16 2015
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Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Strategy

Advertising is Just A Shortcut For Product Selection

“Brands are not the rich sources of differentiation marketers like to think of them as, but short cuts through the complexity of decision-making.”
Ian Leslie

I have been fighting against the lofty term engagement for a long time.

There is time and place for marketing activities that are not only aimed at reach. However, they should be approached like investing and with the notion that those activities will most likely fail. In terms of majority of marketing budget, you need to focus on top-of-mind. There are too many alternatives out there to every product imaginable so as a consumer you cannot be bothered. You want to buy your stuff and focus on other more important things in life. Advertising provides a shortcut for product selection. Therefore it is crucial to keep reaching people all the time, be consistent and be different than your competition.

In your next social media seminar there will be an annoying social media guru waxing lyrical about engagement. On that instance, close your ears and keep in mind these essentials:

1.Focus on light buyers.
Like professor Andrew Ehrenberg nicely put it: “your customers are customers of other products, who occasionally buy your products”. If you are doing consumer goods, you are mass product and you need to do mass advertising.

2.Focus on socially inactive audience.
1% of the people actually create content, while 99% are lurkers. Not all your activities should be focused to lurkers, but majority. 1% rule applies to general content in Internet. People who are creating content about your brand are on your payroll or they are crazy. Or both.

3.Focus on being focused.
Marketing directors and advertising agencies have short attention span. They feel the need to fix something that is not broken. They feel the need to tinker a brand that is in good shape. They want to innovate when they should stick to their guns. If you want people to remember you, you have to be consistent.

If you will keep your focus, you will be doing effective advertising.

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Oct 01 2015
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Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Planning

Anatomy of An Insight: Sizzl

Moving at the speed of culture has been the catchphrase for many marketers lately.

Oscar Mayer is one of the brands, that has turned that phrase into brand behavior.

Internet has love affair with bacon

Internet loves bacon. Actually there are more bacon-related conversations than there is chatter about Kanye West, Tom Cruise and Lady Gaga combined. They have been the bacon brand that has been capitalizing that eternal love for bacon. Oscar Mayer has done Bacon alarm clock and bacon branded content. Now their newest app will help you to find your true love (for bacon):

Insight: Tinder has become mainstream in the mating game*. When selecting for a potential partner, what could be more important than his or her preference of bacon?

Tinder for bacon-lovers

Tinder for bacon-lovers

Will people really start to use this app?

Probably not, but at least it grabs headlines and increases the brand love among bacon-loving Internet. The brand´s behavior online underlines their belief and dedication to bacon. And that is a noble mission.

*When I started dating my now-wife, we weren´t even on Facebook. We had to rely on real-life Tinder: going to bars. Kids have it easier nowadays.

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Sep 30 2015
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Business, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Strategy

What My Disdain for Grateful Dead Can Teach About Branding

Music has played crucial part of my life. It started with hiphop and heavy metal and has throughout the years expanded to almost every possible genre. One cult band that I have however never truly understood has been Grateful Dead. The hippy band is know for their marathon gigs like this:

I am not the biggest fan on The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa or Bruce Springsteen, but I still can get why people love them so much. I noticed that Grateful Dead was doing their farewell gig (to celebrate their 50th anniversary) on this July and that prompted me to again test some of their material on Spotify.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zip.

I totally fail to realize what makes people to devote a cult following to band so bland. Maybe it is because I don´t do drugs or have not been part of the hippy movement. On the other hand I don´t gangbang, but I still truly enjoy and find resonance in N.W.A.´s music. Grateful dead remains as a big enigma for me and to many others as well.

Grateful Dead

Some old hippies

“We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”
– Jerry Garcia

But why would I care about Grateful Dead? Or why would Grateful Dead care about me? I am not their core audience. If you are selling licorice, you don´t need to care about people who don´t like or licorice. This is the fault that many marketers have. They mistakenly believe that their target audience is everyone, which is hardly ever the case. If your target audience is everyone the individual purchase is small. When you have focused audience, you can ask for premium price.

Brands get super touchy-feely when blogger outside their target audience says something negative. It does not matter at all. Focus on your cult following. If you want to create a cult around your brand, you have to also alienate the non-brand followers. For deadhead, there are only “we” and “they”. If your product is only meant for alpha-male blokes, why should you worry about offending women ot vice versa?

“In the 1960s, Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses across all industries use today.
– Brian Halligan and David Meerman Scott (Marketing Lessons From Grateful Dead)

Although listening to Grateful Dead is equivalent of water torture, I have to applaud their business acumen. They were never high on the charts, but were able to focus on small devoted and lucrative audience. They kept the loyal customers happy and did not waste their efforts on trying to get new and fickle customers. Funnily enough, there are at least two books dedicated to business lessons from Grateful Dead.

Brands spend much of effort on parity. They want to make their brand easy to compare with other brands. That is the main fault. If you create your own category, the customer has only two choices: either buy or not. Love it or hate it. Ambivalence is not an option.

“They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.”
-Bill Graham

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Sep 28 2015
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Advertising, Insight, Marketing Strategy

Why Advertising Still Matters?

Just when you thought that all the advertising is lacking the feeling, media innovation and overall passion, you come across to this fine out-of-home execution from Sheffield.

ooh

I assume that Lisa did the strategy and concept for this. This has important lessons for us professionals as well:

  1. Content: Don´t write for the masses. Write for the one person in mind. The succinct and sharp message trumps the visual gimmicks.
  2. Context: Know your audience behavior and habits and tailor your message according to that. Do not only generally target traffic, know whether your audience is on their way or way back from work.
  3. Go big or go home: With small media budget, it is better to invest in one big thing than to spread yourself too thin.

Great example that even traditional advertising can still move and surprise.

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Sep 23 2015
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Business, Digital Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Strategy

Will Ad Blocking Be The New Napster?

Apple has basically failed at the ad business and they are trying to ruin it for everybody else.

– Jeff Jarvis

Google owns the web. Facebook owns the social. Apple owns the phone. That has been the technology world order for a while.

Now that order is about to shake.

The discussion about ad-blocking has been a hot topic, because the new iOS 9 has ad-blocking features for Safari mobile browser. The strategy for Apple is simple. This is full-frontal attack towards Google. Google hosts majority of the ads in “the normal web” with other Apple rivals like Facebook and Microsoft. Apple does not play the browser ads game. However they are serving ads in iOS applications that they not “surprisingly” block. Also conspicuously Apple launched their news service at the same day as it allowed ad-blocking.

It remains to be seen how things escalate, but the following three things are certain:

  1. Widespread ad-blocking will kill publishers

The casualties of war between Apple and Google will be the content publishers. They are already losing $22 billion of revenue this year because of blocking of the ads. If content publishers are not serving the ads for the content you are consuming, they are not getting paid. If you are not getting paid eventually you go bankrupt. As the piracy shows people do not really want to pay for content, so advertising has been the only way to bankroll the content production. Only 11% in US and 6% in UK have paid for online content. So subscription model online does not really work, although people are advocating for it. Even creator of popular ad-blocker Peace, pulled the ad-blocker from App store because he had regrets:

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

–Marco Arment

Not all of the creators of ad-blockers have surely similar regrets. Even without Peace, ad-blockers have been the most popular paid apps in the new iOS 9.

  1. Generally online ads have been of bad quality

Ad-blocking is already more prevalent than ad-skipping on television. Ad industry should take some responsibility of the horrible, low quality and invasive display advertising as well. Advertising in web is democratic, which is great to certain extent but also has been the core problem. When amateurs do, it is quite often amateur quality. In TV there has at least been some quality (of varying degree and based on channel).

As people have not noticed online ads, they have become more and more invasive and making the user experience worse. Even people from the industry are skipping the ads. Therefore I actually believe more in longevity of pre-roll advertising format than the banner on the long run (although I still think there is much room for creativity when doing banners). Nevertheless, both of these can be blocked so you don´t need to necessarily endure either.

  1. Traditional online ad industry will face the same future as music industry

If ad-blocking will become the norm that will essentially kill the display advertising, as we know it. We can debate whether it was good or bad, but essentially Napster and then after the legal counterpart iTunes and Apple Music killed the music industry, as we knew it. Today´s music business is much more nimble and record labels are playing lesser role than before. Music has not disappeared anywhere though.

Killing the category is only lucrative for the killer. Apple has been the giant killer many times (helps when you are giant yourself), so I doubt that they are hesitating in trying to bring competitors (namely Google) down by any means necessary. For the consumer the fall of online ad industry does not really sound too bad. Generally all of the people (hell, even publishers) find ads annoying. Expect that those annoying ads pay for the content production online like mentioned above (and print media is almost dead already). In every change there is opportunity for innovation. Pagefair is actually serving “non-intrusive ads just for your ad-blockers”. Talk about contradiction in terms.

Modern digital marketer has to follow closely how the situation with the ad-blockers will evolve and act accordingly with your media mix. Native advertising will seem likely winner in this new era. Will that result in better content or just more bad editorials? My fear is the latter.

By the way, I don´t block ads. Maybe just to show solidarity to publishers and to be true to my profession. On the other hand I don´t tolerate sloppy and invasive ads either. We need to improve so that people would not want to block those ads on so alarming pace.

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Sep 17 2015
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Advertising, Insight, Marketing Strategy

When Advertising Just Makes You Angry

When you work in advertising, you mostly become numb to advertising. Occasionally you are awed of great executions and seldom something makes your blood boil. There are two reasons when advertising makes you angry:

  • The execution is so shitty, that it is disgrace to our whole profession.
  • The product is immoral and the whole belief behind it is faulty and harmful.

This ad falls into latter category.

snakeoil

Kids should play and not drink brain-enhancing snake oil. This advertising underlines what is wrong with the education at the moment. The idea of success is really narrow-minded, only celebrating white-collar specialists. When you prepare your whole life to be a banker, it is highly doubtful that you will suddenly become Steve Jobs. It is also sad that only occupations in the list are really boring ones. What kind of sadist wants their children to become IT manager or accountant? Children should dream of becoming astronauts instead of dentists, for goodness sake. For kids to practice sports and participate in cultural events would be way more helpful than the strenuous tuition and placebo drugs.

I spent my childhood and early teens (what the hell; pretty much whole my life) listening to hiphop and playing basketball. That did not prevent me to get in to good university, graduate and become “respectable” contributor to society. I did not need to take performance-enhancing study drugs to achieve this and I doubt anyone else really needs either. Although my background on paper looks the typical business school born and bred planner, I have found all the extra-curriculum activities being much more helpful in my career than my actual studies. And I truly focused on my extra-curriculum activities. But I work in advertising, which hardly constitutes as a real work. At least it is not as desirable job as engineer to put to your Omega-3 oil advertisement.

Learning things by heart is easy and therefore excelling in school does not require extraordinary talent. When we force our children to conform early on, they will never regain their curiosity. Without curiosity there is no new ideas and without them there is eventually no growth in society. When there is only one right and very narrow view of success, we will just grow a generation of dull robots.

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Sep 15 2015
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Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Social Media

Vertical Videos Are Here To Stay

“It’s not necessarily that vertical is better, it’s just that it’s how cellphones are commonly viewed.”
– Shaun McBride, Snapchat celebrity

Human behavior is interesting. You would assume turning your phone to watch a video on optimal size would not be too hard task, but it is. Based on my anthropologic research on trains in Singapore practically everyone is looking videos having the phone on vertical position. Mobile phones are designed to be used vertically and we spend already 30% of our screen time in vertically oriented devices. It is just natural that majority of videos are watched on vertical position as well.

How brands should address the rise of the vertical video?

1. Start native vertical video production
We will see a rise of vertical-first video production. Snapchat has already been advocating the brands to start create video content vertically. In Snapchat vertical videos are more effective, portrait videos have up to 9x more completed views than landscape ones. Will this create some kind of new way of video storytelling? That remains to be seen, because we have not yet realized all the possibilities of vertical video. Could the story be different from horizontal and vertical point-of-view?

Portrait is definitely not the best format for longer-form content as our eyes are aligned horizontally, but majority of the content consumed on smartphones is already short-form. There are certain apps like Vervid, which are designed to bridge the gap or more traditional horizontal video production and the snapchat generation. When YouTube and Facebook will introduce vertical video ad units, it really starts to make sense to start creating vertical-first content.

2. Enhance your horizontal videos to fit the vertical ad formats
More interim solution would be to create horizontal content, but utilize the blank spaces to showcase display ads or maybe offer promotions. This works especially when you have horizontal asset, no money for vertical-first production but still want to engage audience in Snapchat. Here is a demo of that approach:

94% of website visits in smartphones starts in portrait mode, so it only makes sense that brands take advantage of vertical video. Changing behavior is hard, tapping into existing behavior is easier and usually much more lucrative as well. Popularity of portrait video is another example on how you cannot separate the technologic shifts and media behavior from your creative thinking.

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