Source: ANA / Forrester
Seventy-eight percent of marketers feel that TV advertising has become less effective in the past two years
New York, NY (March 22, 2006) - A new survey, released today by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR), found that 78% of advertisers feel that traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years. The survey also found that marketers are exploring emerging technologies to help bolster their television advertising spend.
The joint survey asked 133 national advertisers about their attitudes towards TV advertising and what impact new technologies, such as digital video recorders (DVRs) and video-on-demand, will have on their TV advertising budgets. Those surveyed represent more than $20 billion worth of advertising, including marketers from Charles Schwab, Colgate, Dunkin' Donuts, Johnson & Johnson, Mattel, Pfizer, and Verizon.
"As DVRs look to climb above 30 million households in the next three years, advertisers are finding themselves forced to reconsider their media mix," said Josh Bernoff, Vice President, Forrester Research, who presented the findings today at the ANA Television Advertising Forum in New York. "Television networks continue to publish research that traditional TV advertising is potent as ever, but national advertisers aren't buying it and are seeking alternatives to enhance their budgets and move them beyond the customary 30-second spot."
Key highlights of the ANA/Forrester survey include:
- Almost 70% of advertisers think that DVRs and video-on-demand will reduce or destroy the effectiveness of traditional 30-second commercials.
- When DVRs spread to 30 million homes, close to 60% of advertisers say that they will spend less on conventional TV advertising; of those, 24% will cut their TV budgets by at least 25%.
- While 55% say that their top executives are closely watching changes in TV advertising, most advertisers have not experimented with advertising on DVRs (49%) or video-on-demand (44%).
- Eighty percent of advertisers will spend more of their advertising budget on Web advertising and 68% of advertisers will look to search engine marketing.
- Advertisers are also looking at alternatives to traditional TV advertising and will spend more of their advertising budgets on: branded entertainment within TV programs (61%); TV program sponsorships (55%); interactive advertising during TV programs (48%); online video ads (45%); and product placement (44%).
- Ninety-seven percent of advertisers agree that the TV industry will need new audience metrics - other than reach and frequency - to report commercial ratings, not just program ratings to effectively measure TV advertising.
"The television industry as we have known it may be challenged on a number of fronts, but continues to attract a significant media investment by ANA marketers," said Bob Liodice, President and CEO of the ANA. "As new and traditional media alternatives compete more aggressively for a share of the media pie, and marketers look to improve consumer targeting, reduce costs and enhance accountability, television is aggressively responding. With technology-based advances in addressability, enhanced television options, Internet convergence (IPTV) and branded entertainment opportunities, television is likely to continue as the dominant part of the marketing mix."
A full report on the survey findings will be available in the near future through Forrester Research (www.forrester.com). This is the third ANA/Forrester Research survey of advertisers on this topic. Previous surveys were fielded in 2002 and 2004.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Beyond the 30 Second Spot: Marketers Adding Alternatives to Television Advertising
5 Lessons to Learn from a World-Class Small Business Website
5 Lessons to Learn from a World-Class Small Business Website
By Newt Barrett On December 5, 2008
Kevin Mannion’s Sky Road Consulting helps publishing companies survive intensely difficult times by inventing new ways of serving their customers and of generating revenues.
His website does a superb job of conveying what he does, why it’s important, why you can trust them, and how he can help. You may not be in Kevin’s business but you can certainly learn fundamental content marketing lessons from his website.
Kevin and I were colleagues at CMP Media in the 1990s when even a small print publication had revenues exceeding $10 million and profits of 30 to 40%. That was a very good time to be in the business. Today, both buyer and advertiser behavior has changed so dramatically that it is a very bad time to be in the publishing business. This is where Kevin rides to their rescue with his services–and perhaps, by content marketing example, to your rescue as well.
5 Content Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from Kevin’s Site
Enable your Web visitors to understand precisely how you can help them within a few seconds of their arrival on your site. Kevin begins with a clear statement of what his company does: “Sky Road Consulting helps online and print publishers develop successful business strategies, build powerful brands and grow profitable sales with complex accounts.”
Demonstrate your understanding of the unique challenges that face your target customers. Kevin lays out what he described says “3 Keys to Online and Print Publishing Success” he uses clear headlines that introduce a descriptive paragraph which in turn links to his detailed ‘full perspective.’ For example, number three is “Audience Knowledge: the Publisher’s Greatest Marketing Asset.” Of course, this is a fundamental content marketing tenet that you must apply to your own marketing and which, ironically, publishers often fail to exploit.
Provide relevant and valuable content that engenders trust among your visitors. For each of his 3 Keys to Success he provides a detailed exploration of the issue paired with a solution. Although you will likely be inclined to hire Kevin based on the trust that he engenders, you learn enough from his targeted content to begin work on developing solutions on your own.
Make sure your information structure and user interface are simple and logical. The organization of Kevin’s site couldn’t be more simple with its focus on those 3 Keys that are accessible and visible right on the homepage. He also makes it easy to take the next step by clicking on a “read full perspective” button. Then visitors are invited to take the next step to view the solution and then to contact the company. Although, it may seem intuitively obvious that this kind of simple and logical structure is essential, too few sites are able to accomplish it.
Highlight right up front who you are and what it is that you do. Also on the homepage are simple boxes–one about Kevin and one about the specific services that his company provides. In each case you are encouraged to click so that you can learn more about either Kevin or about his services. Your visitors want to learn about you without having to work hard. When you make this process easy, you make it a heck of a lot more likely that they will want to do business with you.
You can bet that it took Kevin and his team a long time to develop simple targeted messaging and a clean, intuitive design. As we all know, it’s usually very hard to make things easy. Whatever time it took, the payoff for Kevin and for his visitors is obvious. Because his website does such an outstanding job of communicating his fundamental value proposition and his understanding of the issues that face his customers, online prospects can comfortably trust that he can help them solve even the most difficult of challenges.
You can and should do exactly the same thing. Although Kevin may have made a substantial investment in building his website, you do not have to make a huge investment in dollars to achieve comparable impact. You will, however, have to invest serious time and thought in the messages you want to convey the ways in which they should be conveyed.
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Marketing's Biggest Challenge
Marketing's Biggest Challenge
By Christopher Kenton
It's not a matter of jumping on the latest trend. Rather, it's the need to define a role and goals in a world transformed by technology
Some people collect salt shakers, some people collect vintage cars. I collect definitions of marketing terms -- the meanings of words like "marketing" and "brand" -- that I find in books, on the Web, and in conversations with colleagues and clients. I know, it's the kind of hobby that should come with a pocket protector, but it's one of the few ways you can track the evolution of the marketing concept and keep it grounded in a historical perspective. This is something marketing as a profession desperately lacks.
Take, for example, the definition of "brand". You can see important shifts in the meaning of the word, depending on the date and the source. Advertisers often describe brand as being "an image in the mind of the consumer," something to be influenced and manipulated. Product marketers often talk about brand being "a promise of value to the consumer," something owned and safeguarded by the company. In more recent years, in part due to the rise of interactive media, brand has been increasingly defined as "an experience" and "a relationship" between the company and consumer.
SHIFTING SANDS. The shifting nuances of a word like branding may seem rudderless, subject to the rise and fall of various marketing specialties and mediums, such as the tremendous influence of advertising and television during the boom of mass markets after World War II. But if you follow the trajectory of words like "brand" and "marketing," you can learn a lot about where the concepts have already been, and where they may be headed.
About 100 years ago, marketing meant distribution. It literally spoke of the process of getting your products to market and into the hands of the consumer. Over the years, as business trends have come and gone, marketing has also been understood to mean promoting, selling, positioning, targeting, branding, innovating, and much more -- as well as all of these notions at once. It is this fluidity in the meaning of marketing that is both its source of power and its undoing--it can change rapidly to leverage changes in the business environment, but it can also become bogged down in dead-end paradigms that languish for years.
While many books have been written about the history of advertising and PR, I'm not aware of one good book on the history of marketing that has been written since the 1970s, before the modern age of database marketing and the Web. If you look at the way marketing is practiced today, you can see that lack of historical perspective reflected in its weakness for passing fads and gurus. In fact, it's become nearly impossible for many marketers to tell the difference between a fad and the kind of trends that reflect the deeper currents of marketing's evolution. You certainly couldn't take the pulse of marketing by looking at businesses -- the organizations, methodologies and frameworks are as fragmented as if marketing had been invented in the 1990s.
CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES. This fragmentation is one of the main reasons marketing today faces such a credibility gap, and it highlights an ironic shortcoming of the marketing profession: its inability to position itself effectively and compete for market share in the boardroom. You might think that marketers who dispense costly strategic advice on how to position businesses and create competitive advantage would be particularly adept at positioning the practice of marketing, locking down its taxonomy, and building the profession's credibility. Unfortunately the cobbler's children have no shoes. While it's easy to find common ground in principle about the function of marketing, the actual practice of marketing belies a spectrum of beliefs. At either end of the spectrum you'll find two camps, the Big View and the Small View of marketing. The Big View of marketing is what you'll read in marketing textbooks, or what you'll hear from marketing consultants. It's marketing's view of itself as it stares lovingly at its own image reflected on the surface of the pond. In the Big View, marketing should have its hands in almost everything a business does, from establishing corporate strategy to building products and maintaining customer relationships. It's notable that in this view, sales is a sub-domain of marketing, one small slice of the strategic customer life cycle.
Unfortunately, the Big View is what marketing should be, not what it has managed to become. If, one day, marketing can take up this mantle, it would be well for business. But the general failure of marketing to hold all of these reins and steer businesses to success supports the Small View of marketing. This is what you'll read in general MBA textbooks, or what you'll hear from most CEOs. It's the rest of the company's view of marketing, as marketing stares lovingly at its own image reflected on the surface of the pond. In the Small View, marketing is little more than lead generation and promotion. It's a general repository for creative types who live inside their emotions and believe in intuition. In this view, marketing is a support function for sales, providing leads -- which are rarely any good-- and support materials, which never include what the customer wants to hear.
RHETORIC AND REALITY. This is the dead-end paradigm in which marketing languishes today, and it's not only bad for marketing, it's bad for business. Amazingly enough, businesses know it. How many times have you heard a senior corporate executive state that his outfit isn't a sales organization, it's a marketing organization? Sure, it's a marketing organization once a year, when it sets strategic goals to penetrate segmented markets in order to deliver customer satisfaction at a profit. The rest of the year, however, everyone still goes out and pursues whatever sale can be dragged over the doorstep -- even when that sale means the company will be blown off course by making commitments it isn't even remotely organized to fulfill.
You can blame businesses for this, but I lay the blame at the feet of my own profession. This is marketing's fault. This is the fault of a profession that has simply lost its bearings in a world that changed too rapidly. It can no longer provide effective leadership. How can marketing find its bearings again? Personally, I'm collecting definitions of marketing terms to get a breadcrumb view of marketing history and see where things might be headed. Here's an overview of what I've found so far.
The history of marketing shows very specific phases of growth, from distribution to merchandising, salesmanship, branding, advertising, database marketing, one-to-one marketing, and now, electronic marketing. There are a few clues in this history to the bigger pattern. First, marketing has always had a symbiotic relationship with technology. From the early days when getting your product to market required new forms of transportation, to radio, television, databases and networks, marketing and technology have always worked hand in glove. Second, the effect of this relationship between marketing and technology has been the steady reduction of the distance between the company and the consumer. In the early days, the company and customer might never cross paths, except by way of a physical product. Today, customers can increasingly buy products, obtain support, and interact directly with the manufacturer.
THE CHALLENGES. If you look at these two trends together, it says a lot about where marketing is coming up short today. Marketing and technology are natural allies, but while technology is in a phase of rapid acceleration, marketing is lagging behind. While some marketers have made effective use of new technology, far too many marketers are still just figuring out how to browse the Internet. There are many areas where they should be working together to reduce the distance between company and consumer, including the continuing evolution and deployment of effective customer-relations-management (CRM) tools -- an area still solidly in the hands of IT alone, just like a piece of software.
As the economy slowly stirs back to life, businesses need to examine their own definition of marketing. We need to understand the notion of profit as central to the meaning of marketing, and therefore demand greater accountability. We must understand the historical dependence of marketing on technology and, therefore, demand closer ties between marketing and technology teams. We need to understand that the tightening relationship between businesses and consumers is integral to success, and therefore demand a greater emphasis on customer experience as a core marketing function. Most of all, we need to understand that marketing plays a critical role in the success of every business. When marketing doesn't measure up, simply limiting its charter doesn't solve the problem if the very definition of the concept is weak.
Internet Marketing Basics
Internet Marketing Basics
by Peter DeLegge
Whether you have recently been given responsibility for getting your business on the Web or to handle a pre-existing Web site, there are some general truths (at least in this consultant's eyes) that you should strongly consider.
Do not consider the Internet simply as a place to put your brochures in electronic form. Do not make the mistake of treating the Internet as if it is simply an advertising medium. The Web has more in common with the telephone than print. It is different from traditional media in many respects. Even Internet advertising requires a different approach than off-line advertising. Exploit the Web's unique qualities to provide a richer experience for customers and prospects.
Find out what your competitors are doing on the Web. Spend a few days checking out how your competitors are using the Web. Analyze each site. How does the site help tell the world about that company's products or services; is it easy to use; is it enjoyable to use; does it add value to the company's customer service; is it integrated with the company's other marketing efforts.
Create an Internet business plan and live it. Before starting your company's Web site project, determine measurable goals and objectives for your company's site, establish milestones. Make them both qualitative and quantitative. This may sound obvious, but planning is one of the most neglected areas of corporate Web site management. Your Internet business strategy should be an extension of your company's existing business strategy and well-integrated with everything your company does off-line.
Don't be inconsistent with your off-line brand. Make sure your Web site experience is consistent with your brand image. For instance, is your brand known for superior engineering and being easy-to-use? Make sure your Web site experience is consistent. A recent study found that corporate Web site email responses are highly informal and unbranded.
Email marketing works, but be careful. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with customers and prospects online. It can also be effective as a direct-marketing device. My advice to B2B marketers, in most cases, do not rent email lists, build your own. Do not rent out your list. Never spam, under any circumstances. Let email subscribers know in advance how often you will send messages and what type of content they can expect. Make messages as targeted as possible; relevancy keeps people listening.
Be sure your Web site is integrated with your company's other marketing activities. Don't make the mistake some traditional companies do and create an Internet effort that is disconnected with your company's off-line efforts. Your Web site should be connected with your company's off-line efforts. This means more than throwing the company Web address in your ads.
Segment and target. Even without sophisticated personalization technology, the Web allows you to easily target your messages, making them more relevant to users. Find out who they are in the least intrusive way possible and then talk to them more personally.
Use your company's Web site to enhance customer service -- especially for prospects who may be researching. The Internet allows your company to stay in touch with its customers and provide them with answers to questions they are likely to ask. Make sure your site makes it easy for your customers to find what they want and communicate with your company. A good corporate Web site helps current customers and develops new customers too. Consider real-time online help systems.
Make your site an information resource for its target markets. Becoming a trusted resource of high quality information for your customers is of tremendous value to your business, in addition, it can help win your company free press and word-of-mouth/mouse.
Do user testing. If you have the budget, do usability testing prior to launching your Web site. Bring in an expert usability group -- don't merely rely on the company that developed your site, bring in another, unrelated usability testing firm. If you cannot afford to do formal testing with a usability group, I would recommend you bring in a usability expert and afterwards, test with several of your customers.
Care about privacy. Even though most users don't bother to read privacy policies, studies show they do care. My guess is that this will only increase over time. Make sure you have a good privacy policy and a privacy statement on your site that is easy to find and customer friendly. Build your privacy policy around your customers' concerns. When it comes to email, never send out unsolicited email (spam), it not only damages your reputation and could get you into hot water, it also has extremely low response rates.
Be ready for inquiries. Most corporate Web sites are horrible about responding to email inquiries, don't let yours be one. Also, be ready for international business inquiries, even if it means telling visitors you don't handle out of country orders.
Outsource areas your company does not have expertise. If you plan on getting real value out of your Web site, outsourcing its development to the right firm is critical. I would recommend that you find a firm with marketing experience, not just designers and computer programmers. Remember that a designer's expertise is in design, a programmer's expertise is in programming and an Internet marketer's expertise is in Internet marketing.
Keeping up with the rapid changes of Internet marketing is a full time job. Find an expert and use him or her. Concentrate your efforts on running your business or handling your professional responsibilities.
Promote Your Web site. There is a popular misconception that Web sites do not need to be promoted. Consider that some of the Web's biggest successes spend about 75% of their advertising budgets on non-Internet media. Having a Web site is like having a toll-free number that's not listed in every phone book...you need to work hard to drive visitors to your Web site. As with any other media, it costs money to make it a success. Plaster your Web site address (URL) everywhere you can -- at trade show appearances, on business cards, stationary, in ads and everywhere else you can think of.
Use Internet advertising where it makes sense. Internet advertising has been pushed as a direct-response device, but the B2B process is far more complex and longer than with B2C. Where a B2C ad may attempt to get a consumer to make a purchase, this is not realistic for high-ticket B2B items. Instead, B2B marketers should consider using Internet advertising to reach targets that regularly use the Internet at the places they often go with ads that feature things like white papers, research, Web seminars and other information that is likely to be of strong interest to prospects.
Give it away free. For B2B marketers, the Internet provides a great opportunity to provide your target markets with high quality intellectual capital that can help position your company as a thought leader in the minds of your target markets.
Continuously analyze your Web traffic and other e-metrics to learn and improve. Find out how people are getting to your site and what they're doing once they get there. Any good Web site statistics software package will tell you how many people are going to your site, what pages they're viewing, what search engines they're coming from and more. If you're using a Web development firm, make sure that they review this with you on no less than a quarterly basis. Find out what's working and what's not. Redesign your site to make it more effective for your users and for reaching your desired objectives (e.g., get leads, sales, etc.). Integrate your on-line and off-line information to provide a more complete picture of customers and prospects.
Peter De Legge is an Internet Strategy and Marketing Consultant with over 10 years of marketing and e-business experience, primarily in the business to business arena. He has held marketing, advertising and e-business strategy positions from medium size to the Fortune 250. To learn more about his services, visit his Web site at http://www.businessmarketing.net.
© Copyright 1999, Peter De Legge. All rights reserved