Atomic Direct, LTD

Media Post reports yet one more study (link here) that shows that time shifting doesn’t hurt TV ad effectiveness. So after a decade of the ad business seeming to “wish” for the end of TV advertising, it clearly hasn’t happened. Even more interesting, the Advertising Research Foundation discovered a year ago that ad effectiveness may even have increased after the introduction of the DVR.

My own experience at home confirms this. When there’s an ad that matters to someone in my family, we can now rewind to make sure we know what it says (movie release date, specifics about a product, details about the upcoming news, etc…).

And it’s beneficial to advertisers to know that they can reach, for example, Daily Show demographic that can’t watch at the typical broadcast time. That just adds to the target audience.

And so, TV remains, for the forseeable future, the fastest and strongest way to introduce new products to a large market.

For more on this topic, read this article (link here) I wrote for Response magazine summarizing the ARF research’s TV findings.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

It’s holiday time – when good cheer arrives from people you’ve worked with all year. When old friends get back in touch with you. When it’s great to be reminded of the relationships you’ve built and to touch base with people you haven’t had reason to contact in the past bit of time.

And so, I love the business version of the holiday card tradition. That’s right. You remember physical cards. They are printed (that’s p-r-i-n-t-e-d) with a process that involves applying ink to paper. It’s a really interesting process if you haven’t ever seen it.

Even better, it creates an item that spends longer in someone’s consciousness than the average holiday Tweet (.0005 nano-seconds) or the average holiday mass eMail (.0010 micro-seconds). It fully “engages” the recipient because it’s physical. (To be clear, that means NOT displayed on a 3D TV – but something that really exists in 3 dimensions.)

Sadly, this year the holiday card is scarce. My trend-spotting hasn’t found a single reason. Some businesses seem to think they are being “green”. Some businesses may be choosing frugality in recognition of economic hard times. But a great many seem to have opted for the low-hassle/low-impact e-card.

Don’t send ME an e-card. I’ll never know you did because I delete Holiday Spam without reading. Scary thing is that online action lets us THINK we’ve done something – even though we most often haven’t as online holiday actions are forgotten at a very rapid rate.

Then, there’s donations. Over time I’ve become quite turned off by the “we’re donating” notices. Certainly the theory is based on wholesome action. Yet something still strikes a wrong note.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I have no connection to where the donations are going. Perhaps it’s the fact from many companies the notification of their donation is self-aggrandizing. Perhaps there’s an underlying suspicion that these companies only donate in order to get more business – not because they really care.

And in the strangest donation ploy I’ve seen, this year we received a donation oriented card – except the company wasn’t donating. Instead, it asked us to donate on their behalf to their specific charity. What? Is that supposed to be “authentic” or some other highly hip silliness?

Here’s the thing. The simplicity of a physical card has presence. A physical card communicates far more than an ecard. And it’s meaningful to the recipient. At an average cost of $1 to $4, it’s probably the single most cost effective way to have a brief touch with the people involved with your company. And even better, it sticks around.

So next year, when your company decides to Tweet it’s holiday greetings, perhaps you should remind them that Tweeting would be fine if customers were automatons. But there’s nothing like a physical card for communicating with individuals.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

In the late 1990′s, the tech industry hype machine went into over-drive telling us that the web would replace retail and become the biggest sales channel for every product on earth.

Of course, it didn’t happen. Today, brick & mortar retail dominates purchases – and does so while using the web as one of many communication options and as a small, but important, sales channel.

What’s the hype machine telling us about advertising? The same hype machine has re-emerged and is leaping at social media, viral campaigns, and online video as the magic that will rescue the web from a minority role in advertising. (This would, of course, bring all those juicy advertising dollars to the company’s and their VC’s who are behind the hype machine.)

Once again, these broad claims are bunk. And, with beautiful irony, the theory of web dominance in advertising breaks down because of what the hype machine also tells us is the web’s biggest strength: nearly infinite segmentation.

Web users sign on, search through a small number of search engines, then scatter around the web faster than particles pushed outward from a supernova.

Web advocates have rightly noted that this makes the web ideal for targeting – claiming that online promotions can have laser-like accuracy. (This accuracy requiring, of course, various forms of passive and invasive tracking of your every online action.)

Segmentation and fragmentation are two sides of the same coin.

If all we expect of the web is a highly targeted minority role in our marketing mix, then the web has segmentation. Or if you are selling a niche B2B product to a technical audience (like IT), then the web offers segmentation – and highly valuable segmentation.

But segmentation becomes fragmentation when we consider the idea of replacing advertising’s biggest gun: television. When compared with TV, web audiences are not merely fragmented but shattered into billions and billions of tiny shards. TV’s opportunity to move millions of consumers to action simply doesn’t exist on the web.

Consider it this way. If on it’s best days TV creates a power of 100, on its best days the web creates a power of 1 to 5. As a minority share of an integrated marketing plan, this “1″ is important. But no matter how hard you try, the web’s 1 can never replace TV’s 100. (Or print’s 75; or direct mail’s 30 or radio’s 60 or outdoor’s 40 or…)

Sadly, if web advertising is all you’ve ever known, crawling around to gather enough shards to create micro-segments from nano-segments might make you think you are doing something big. (After all, it’s a lot of work and mere busy-ness can easily mask ineffectiveness.)

But if you have travelled the much wider world of traditional advertising, you’ll realize it’s impossible to use online shards in mass advertising to create anything more than a very nice minority role. (And here I should note that Apple is just one example of a savvy advertiser who knows this and relies heavily on TV while using internet advertising in a limited role.)

But heck, many web investors don’t want to hear this. And, just so, they’ll fire back. With what? Probably a Forrester research report showing an astronomical 20 year growth curve for the NEXT web invention – perhaps location based search engine optimization delivered via socially viral online video with a twitter core hosted on a cloud. Yup. That’s the ticket.

It’s time for the ad biz to grow up and confront the tech machine’s hype with advertising reality.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Social media experts have spent the last few years telling us how hard it is to calculate the value of social media connections to monetize their efforts. I’ve read their posts and articles with high interest – because we all want to learn where social media has the most substantive value.

But it’s time to realize there is no hidden magic to social media. The fundamentals for estimating the value of social connections are the same fundamentals that have been used in direct marketing for over a century – lessons Claude Hopkins reveals in his writing about mail order advertising in the early 1900′s.

Consider a post I read the other day. It was published in a major national media business newsletter. And it suggested (surprise surprise) that mere viewings might not reflect any business value for online video.

Didn’t anyone learn marketing basics? Of course mere viewings don’t mean much and we know that without an intensive direct marketing background. It’s part of basic communication theory – something we teach in the “Introduction to Advertising” courses at Portland State University.

Truth is that when you have a bar that is far too low for consumer engagement, then everybody gets engaged and nobody ever gets married.

So let me suggest a new rule: Before you can call take on the title of “social media expert”, you have to take a direct marketing class. Here’s some of the lessons that would be taught in that class:

- Mere consumer action has no value. Quite often, in direct marketing, reducing the number of consumers who act will increase your net profit. I once had a campaign that drove leads at $25 each. We modified the creative so that it chased unqualified leads away. The lead cost doubled to $50 per lead, but the net revenue result was 5 times higher – that’s right FIVE times higher.

- Attracting people with entertainment often attracts thrill seekers who won’t become valuable consumers. The subscription folks have known this for decades. Heavily incentivized introductory subscription offers always generate the highest number of new subscriptions…and the lowest number of long term subscribers. So if you are attracting social connections with “cool video” (like the Old Spice campaign last summer), you’re not likely to see any business result (which is exactly the end result of Old Spice’s 2010 campaign according to the AdAge analysis).

- Marketing IS all about selling product and it pays to be honest about this. Selling doesn’t just happen – to get sales you will someday have to ask for an order. So it may feel great to start with noble intentions to use content to get engaged consumers who seek connection with your brand, but you have to sell something at some point. Worse, what consumers hear from these noble campaigns isn’t at all noble. Too often content is used as a “bait and switch” to sucker people into connecting with a brand. By contrast, direct marketing profit history suggests that if you are honest up front about your intentions, consumers respect you for it and you will generate higher revenue in the long run. (Consumers KNOW we’re in the business of selling things. So it frustrates them when we try to suggest we’re not.)

- It’s easy to raise expectations so high that your company can never meet them. Let’s learn from loyalty efforts. Programs around the world claim: “We’re your best friend forever – just tell us what you want.” But no company can deliver what this implies. So, with the exception of coupon clippers who belong to lots of programs, the average consumer has probably found at most 4 or 5 loyalty programs that deliver what they consider significant value. (For me, having joined 30 or 40 loyalty programs, only a few programs deliver any value – United MileagePlus, Delta Skymiles, Amex Rewards, Avis Preferred, and, um, uh…I don’t have any more.)

So let’s cut through the social media BS. There are already hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and reports created by hard working (and very smart) direct marketers that lay out the fundamental models for analyzing the impact of social media investment. It’s well past time for them to be applied.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Media Daily News recently published an article by Wayne Friedman covering key statistics about viewing of advertisements.

It shows a striking truth: 63% of people say they ignore all internet ads while only 14% say they ignore all TV ads. And even more interesting: young consumers (18 to 34) ignore banner ads much more than they ignore TV ads.

The statistics in the article are from a specific study (I’ll let Wayne’s article give you the details). These numbers are confirmed by those reported through observational research: Web ads are ignored at very high rates.

Truth is, it makes sense. Think about it – do you pay ANY attention to ads on the web, mobile, Twitter, or Facebook? (The only reason I do is as an advertising guy to see who’s losing their money by paying for that space.)

New media advocates are shameless in the things they claim for the web – even going so far as suggesting all anyone needs is the web. And they yell so often and so loudly that they often drown out sanity and reason at even the most sober of companies.

And if anyone suggests they’re wrong, they always fall back on the idea of change – that the young & hip ignore everything but the web so if you want a future you’d better do everything they say. But the statistics don’t support them. And practice doesn’t either.

Truth is that for all the unusual capabilities of new media, it isn’t strong enough to build and maintain mass markets. Two reasons…

1. New media are all specialized meaning they work best reaching smaller and smaller fragments of markets.
2. New media are very poor for reaching out to people who don’t know why they’d care about your message. Once they know about what you have to say, you might begin to have some web success even though they remain highly fragmented.

In other words, if you have a new product, it’s generally dead via web unless you can use the web to get…um…well…traditional media like the TV news guys to report on it.

If you want more proof, read my post about how online companies are increasingly turning to offline advertising – because they can’t get enough success otherwise.

Then look at your own balance between online and offline advertising. It’s likely that a return to using offline advertising in a smart way will improve your company’s economics.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Marketers are encouraged to fill websites with exotic videos made with the most expensive production value. But too often those videos aren’t useful to consumers. And most manufacturers can’t afford them if they have extensive lines of products.

So how can you create online videos for your product line with today’s tight margins? Let’s focus on one critical situation: when online retail or online catalog sites display video to someone looking at your product. (This video is often perfect for in-store use as well.)

Learn What a Consumer Needs by Considering How They Find Your Video.

In the vast majority of cases consumers follow the same path. First, they browse the site to find your product or arrive at your product on the website with search (local or global). In other words, they’re focused on finding a product much like yours.

On that catalog page for your product they find a small list of important things about the product, photo’s, a range of specifications, and the price. Somewhere on the page they finally see your video after clicking an embedded link.

So think about it. Before the consumer gets to your video they already know a lot about your product and have made quite a few shopping choices. That means they need a very specific type of video. But fortunately, one that can be made on a smaller production budget.

How Do You Make Effective Online Catalog Videos?

A few simple rules should guide the content you create. But most importantly, choose what you show and say to respect the things your consumer already knows about your product. Other thoughts:

Focus on the things that need moving picture – not the things that are better said on the printed page. For example, specifications are better on your web page – not in the video. Instead, deliver visual demonstration that shows consumers what they’d never understand any other way. With tools and hardware, for example, the simple act of a hand picking up a product answers important questions for consumers because it puts key features in context.

Don’t ignore the simple demonstrations. Consumers often need to confirm what’s written with simple visual demonstrations. And don’t let your product teams cut them short just because the producers (who aren’t your customer) think they might be dull.

Use animated graphics to show how your product works and reveal what’s hidden. These animations are much more important than animated logo’s. (Yawn!) And don’t cut the animations short. Nothing bugs me more than an animation that only runs for 1 or 2 seconds.

How Do You Make Online Catalog Videos That are High Quality AND Cost Effective?

This is your the more difficult challenge. Trying to do too much on a budget that’s too small wastes your money. At the same time, many production options will break your budget on just one video. Here are some thoughts.

Avoid the “default” choices of production companies. Most video producers approach every project seeking to create the same thing: an expensive stand-alone video with lots of bells and whistles your consumer doesn’t need.

Hire professionals who understand how to create this specific type of video. The web is filled with video footage where we can’t see what’s going on or where the video doesn’t enlighten us. YouTube seems to have engendered a wealth of bad angles and bad lighting shot from too far away (or too close) with too much clutter in the frame. Remember, just because someone CAN shoot video doesn’t mean they should.

Focused on the visual demonstrations that drive sales. And make sure you know what sales points you need to make and what objections you need to overcome in the video. Then work with your agency or production team to find the best ways make that happen.

Make a baker’s dozen. One web video usually can’t cover the product lines offered by most manufacturers or retailers. So shoot many at the same time. With related products, my team has become quite skilled at combining shoot days, props for demonstrations and edit resources to create these retail videos at high quality but for much lower prices per video.

Having said all this, effective video isn’t cheap. If anyone claims they can shoot a group of effective, high quality sales video’s for much less than $4,000 per video, you’re not likely to be pleased with the result.

The Online Video Age Offers Tremendous Opportunity

With wise choices, manufacturers can get the effective and high quality video they need for very reasonable prices. Even better, these videos can make the different between failure and success. But you must stay focused on knowing the mind of your consumer and making the smart choices that delivers the video that leads them to buy your product.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett