Digital Influence Mapping Project

How AI and Machine Learning May Apply to Marketing

Most of the talk about current use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing cites what the 4 Horsemen are doing or likely doing. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have digital, data and automation at the heart of their businesses. They have the skills and the culture to make the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence a core competency.

Meanwhile, many marketers still struggle just to get their customer data source in order never mind speculating on how AI might improve the customer experience and/or the profitability of these customers. The hype curve of AI creates this nervous energy for marketers. To not do anything in AI seems wrong. On the other hand, to leap in expecting it to solve big, hairy 2018 problems also seems naïve.

I would recommend creating a simple ‘road map of exploration.’ Andy Betts (@andybetts1) has a useful post and diagram (above) counselling CMO’s to start planning in 2018. For once, it’s okay to start learning and exploring vs. jumping into action. I have a ‘bias-for-action’ like most marketers. We want to learn by doing. In this case, I want to pick and choose the pilots and proof-of-concepts (PoCs) while not derailing my marketing and customer service operations who already have a pretty full agenda next year. I will start by defining use cases where AI may have a positive effect on marketing.

 

Five Use Cases for AI in Marketing

Show the right, next call-to-action – Are people looking for a home-plus-valuables insurance quote? Trying to get answers about coverages in the weeks leading to an insurance need? Winterizing their home before jetting off to Florida for the season? These are pretty simple states but often hard to detect amongst the unknown visitors to your digital properties. Knowing the next right action to suggest and guide them is hard.

Propensity modeling used to be the answer. Defined as “a statistical scorecard that is used to predict the behaviour of your customer or prospect base,” propensity modeling works best when you know a bunch about the person. Think rich customer databases vs. a few Web clicks from strangers on your Web site.

Would you rather have a “scorecard” or a really smart robot (i.e. AI)? Imagine paying attention to the patterns of visitors to your site and all of the content they consume. Imagine if you could reliably predict/understand what they are trying to accomplish and you were able to deliver just the right calls-to-action on their screen. No more junking up their view with every possible choice they may consider. No more agonizing over Web site navigation models. With AI, you could understand what they are after and just give it to them.

 

Identify more accurate and actionable “look-a-likes” – Finding more prospects that look like your most valued customers and then selling them your product is generally a good thing. Most of the social networks have offered look-a-like audiences for a few years now. And given their facility with data and AI, these models will get better and better (and be worth more and more to advertisers).

As brands build their own audience pools for advertising, we need to find ways to use machine-learning and AI to identify more precise matches for our most valued customer. Just finding people in the same demographic or even the same interests as your current customer base isn’t enough. What if you could find more or less perfect matches for your top 20% most valued customers? And what if you could overcome the problem of “diminishing audiences” (when your target is so narrow you cannot cost effectively market to them) and engage them with just the right offers? AI could make that possible.

 

Automate market research and performance insights – We need a steady flow of timely insights about our customers (and prospects) and the performance of our marketing efforts. Currently, this process is so manual my bones ache thinking about it. If I think about all of the effort we are spending just automating a dashboard –a visualization of performance data, I have to laugh.

I want my performance AI to find patterns I would never recognize and draw insightful connections that help me market today and tomorrow.

When will my little machine-learning robot sift through all of the online panel data on a particular group of customer-types and reveal something I didn’t know to ask it for?

 

AI-generated content - I am less interested in teaching a robot to create a compelling article or video, than using AI to generate relevant content at a scale that is prohibitively expensive otherwise.

Let’s say you serve the small business market with a solution that lots of different business types could use. But small businesses want to buy a solution made for their business-type. If they are a dry cleaner they want a solution provider for dry cleaners. If they are a dog groomer or an art supply store, same thing. How can a solution provider create content for hundreds of small business types?  

Discovering how AI can “learn” your existing content and then assemble industry-specific content to create something of value and relevance to the dog groomers and art supply store owners is the trick.

 

Solve customer problems conversationally – AI-driven chatbots are the most popular customer experience application judging by the number of companies offering chatbot solutions. Still, they remain in their infancy.

Get a computer to consume a “corpus” or body of data, teach it some lessons and “walla!” you have a way to quickly get personalized answers for customers and cut down on the overhead to deliver said answers.  This is the type of solution that can serve both customers and prospects and will take sustained iteration and use to make very valuable.

These are just a few of the use cases on my road map of exploration in AI and machine learning. What’s on yours?

 

Good resources:

3 Ways AI Will Affect Marketing - Smart Insights

The CMO’s guide to AI’s marketing impact for 2018 - MarTech Today

How Will Artificial Intelligence Impact Digital Marketing in 2018? – NextWeb

8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence – Content Marketing Institute

10 Ways to Use Chatbots for Marketing and Sales – Entrepreneur

 

 

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Why Agile Marketing is New and Important

I have seen a lot of “new and improved” marketing POVs –guerrilla marketing, disruptive marketing, social media marketing, “Marketing 4.0”, “Growth Hacker Marketing,” content marketing, performance marketing and more. Some are onto something. Social media marketing was a true shift that really started around 2004 with the publishing empowerment of the individual. It gave marketers a way to make sense of changing customer behaviors and the shift in attention that undermined the effectiveness of marketing-as-usual. Some of these new marketing concepts won’t take hold in any big way but may successfully sell a book or two.

Agile marketing will be a significant shift in how marketers run their teams. It is as much about how we develop high-performing marketing as it is a response to changes in customer behavior. Agile marketing offers a way to apply the best of account planning and performance marketing to a discipline that can no longer sustain the stratified, agency teams of the eighties.  It is a way to work smarter, cheaper and better. Yes, all three.

 

Account Planners Gave us Customer Insights

Account planning introduced the notion that deep customer knowledge – from psychology to where and how people spend their time – could add intelligence and effectiveness to the unknowns of marketing. That model saw the rise of the “planners” in marketing agencies, first in London, and soon across the world. These were the guys and gals who ingested customer research and insights to design marketing programs that, hopefully, produced results. Planners came in many shapes and sizes – account planner, communications planner, brand planner, “connections planners.” Born in 1965 in London and Australia, brought to the US by Jay Chiat in 1982, the planners most often were the voice of the customer in marketing.  They had ways of mining insights from quantitative and qualitative research which often included anthropological excursions that looked as much like deep undercover assignments as anything. They were thorough.

The future of planners and the bigger agencies they sit within is in question. Not because they aren’t good or relevant. More likely it’s because they have only one piece of the puzzle – moment-in-time customer insight.

 

Performance Marketing Brings Real-Time Instrumentation

When customers shifted to digital shopping, buying and influence, performance marketing was born. Suddenly we had actual data behind customer behaviors. Direct marketers discovered they could tweak and optimize their marketing to drive up effectiveness and drive down marketing cost (e.g. cost-per-click) based upon what the buyer actually did. This real-time instrumentation was taken to extremes by the ‘bottom-of-funnel” ecommerce marketers who only cared for an efficient cost-per-purchase. 

Performance marketing seemed to overcome the age old ‘Wanamaker Problem’ of determining whether marketing was producing a result or not. It favored a ‘last click’ analysis which doesn’t reflect the complexity of the buyer journey – all those soft touches in the weeks of research leading to a purchase. More recent improvements in tracking a buyers experience across devices and even online and offline touchpoints may strengthen the richness of performance marketing. This may give a view of what content and experiences provide an “assist” to a sale. That is if we can weight these touchpoints in a way that reflects how the actual customer weights them.

Performance marketing-thinking drives us to get marketing materials into market faster to see how they will perform. We don’t want to overinvest in those assets as we fully expect to optimize – drop, add, change them – based upon actual behavior.

 

Software Development Popularized “Agile”

Meanwhile, software development had evolved from the careful, planned approach that mimicked factory work – moving the process along an assembly line – to one that was more nimble, more responsive to feedback and ultimately relied on teams to be more “agile.” The long development process of traditional software tended to veer away from user needs either because the research phase was so removed in time for the release of the software or, more likely, no research in the world did a good enough job of anticipating how customers would actually interact with software applications once relased. Best to get a ‘pretty good’ version of the software done and out quickly by a multidisciplinary team. Agile teams work in sprints with small teams achieving incremental progress towards and on top of a ‘minimum viable product.’ Get that MVP in hands of actual users and see what resonates.  (Get more on the history of agile development from Gary Police)

 

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing combines lessons from the quick, collaborative approach of agile software development with the reliance on insights from the planners and the use of response data in performance marketing to create a way to plan and execute marketing that is fast, responsive, and measured.

Here’s a definition: Agile marketing assembles small teams that represent makers and planners and equips them with customer insights to work collaboratively in short sprints to develop marketing content, tools, and plans that are tested and optimized for effectiveness and efficiency.

Here are a few more:

“At its core, Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time” from the Workfront Blog and Andrea Fryrear

 

“Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.” From McKinsey Insights and David Edelman, Jason Heller, and Steven Spittaels

 

“A mindset and methodology that transforms culture and operations so you can execute more efficiently, champion the customer, and achieve better performance through a data-driven iterative approach.” From CMG and Russ Lange.

 

Is Agile a Strategic or Tactical Approach?

These definitions of agile marketing don’t preclude the value of big, pivotal insights about customers that can inform strategy. Still, we cannot build cathedral-like marketing programs that are carefully crafted prior to ever seeing the light of day.

Agile marketing may be a new way of being more customer-centered when behaviors and channels are changing more quickly than the last half of the prior century.

Agile may be a better way to develop marketing strategy and to execute once you have a strategy. The choice to work in a more nimble, responsive way could be its own strategic choice to remain relevant to customers. The concept of agile emerged from an operational mindset – how to make software development better – better result, more efficient.   It’s a leap to apply new operating methods for software to contemporary marketing. Still, something has to change. The over-architected marketing strategies of yesterday that required a whole ecosystem of marketing agencies to plan and execute will disappear. Those agencies are fast-evolving as they look to better ways to deliver value to the brands and companies they once worked for.

Internal marketing teams need ways to cut costs of marketing as that marketing is now being evaluated as a revenue-driver and not simply as brand-building.  As marketing gets more technical and data driven, we need collaboration methods that bring creative, data-geeks, UX wizards and storytellers together.

Agile marketing methods may just be the way forward.   

 

(image from Twin Cities Obedience training Club) 

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4 Things I Learned at the 2016 ANA Digital & Social Media Conference

The ANA held its annual ANA Digital & Social Media Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado this past week. I continue to be impressed with the quality of the content and programming from this organization. The staff is smart and energetic. And hats off to Michael Donnelly, Global Head of Digital Marketing at Mastercard. He has played host at these events and earnestly looks for opportunities to strengthen the experience for members. 

There were some important lessons or reminders from this year's event. here are 4 of them:

 

The ANA initiative around media transparency is a powerful call-to-action for advertisers (us)

Bob Liodice and Bill Duggan, ANA leaders, held a session that profiled the June report ANA produced in partnership with research company K2 on Media Transparency. They then segued into the just-released set of recommendations for brands.

The net takeaway is that the rise of complex ad trading desks and technology has led to practices that are not transparent to the buying brands including, but not limited to, rebates being paid that do not make their way to the actual advertiser and a ‘layer cake’ of fees from 3 or more providers involved in serving ads. Interestingly, new ad tech startups are springing up that promise to deliver greater transparency and direct service to advertisers (minus the agency trading desk) and remedy some of the ‘black box’ practices that have developed.

Interests not aligned: allegiance to outdated contracts

Bill and Bob make a powerful case that the business priorities of the agencies (in service to their shareholders) and the marketers they serve are not aligned. Agencies hide behind ‘contract compliance’ but fall short of serving the best interests of their clients. Contracts are outdated and not well understood inside the client and they lack the necessary transparency and audit clauses.

Rebates are widespread and often don’t get delivered to the advertiser

The research and conversations with ex-media company leaders reveal that rebates from publishers often track back no further upstream than the agency. Without transparency, there is no way for the advertiser to know that their money is going ‘elsewhere.’

Advertisers must take a more active role in managing media

Many advertisers have not supervised the media practices of their agencies with enough care. Many do not have contemporary contracts in place. The ANA has packaged a set of recommendations as well as a ‘best-practice’ media contract that features the clauses we all need to be looking for.

See the Media Transparency Report

See the Media Transparency Recommendations

 

Big brands like Gatorade are auditing their media to understand viewability, effective-targeting, and fraud

Kenny Mitchell, Head of Consumer Engagement for Gatorade, shared terrific creative work including a Snapchat filter that allowed people to superimpose their own head shot with a super-realistic video of the Gatorade “dunk”, the ritual wherein the winning team coach gets doused with a cooler of Gatorade.

But more importantly, he shared the media audit they performed on their 2015 digital media. This was very timely based upon Bob Liodice’s call-to-action around media transparency. Kent reported that 50% of their digital ads were viewable. 24% were delivered against their targets and they suffered about 3% of fraud. The audience was quiet and no doubt brand marketing leaders are torn about doing their own audit with the prospects of revealing poorer performance than one of the world’s largest advertisers (Pepsico). I believe we all want to know which part of our advertising is even being seen by the right people.   

See a video of the Gatorade Dunk re: clever, native use of Snapchat

 

Brands w/purpose like American Greetings can “punch above their weight”

Alex Ho, Executive Director of Marketing at American Greetings (and formerly at Progressive Insurance), shared a powerful POV about having a purpose-driven brand and how leveraging cultural tensions allows him to achieve great marketing results with highly creative, 360 programs. Alex shared 3 programs, none of which had big media TV support but had great impact (e.g. mid-journey work driving sales lift). He works in a 360 fashion with Mullen making sure that PR and marketing are working in service of the Idea.

American Greetings is all about helping people make connections. Their core business – greeting cards – has not receded despite the media-driven death knell (“print is dead,” “greeting cards are dead,” etc…). He focuses on identifying the cultural tension via research that he can then address in marketing programs. The hunger millennials have for authentic experiences and a way to connect to their true friends beyond the throngs of Facebook friends led them to their “Analog” pop-up at SXSW. Alex is a great reminder that powerful communications still starts with the idea (born from a cultural tension, born from insight).

See this powerful activation at SXSW re: cultural tension of digital and hand-crafted, personal

See this inspiring video re: gratitude for moms #worldstoughestjob

 

 

Established brands can learn a tremendous amount from the disruptors in the collaborative economy

Jeremiah Owyang, a seasoned analyst, formed Crowd Companies two years ago to track and report on the rise of disruptive businesses from AirBNB to TaskRabbit to Lemonade and so many more. He devised a framework to better understand who they were and what their actual disruption was. Then he formed the Innovation Council which pulled together the world’s biggest brands from Mastercard to Allianz to Nestle and many more. These brands wanted to be exposed to relevant startups and, more importantly, they wanted to share experiences and ideas for innovation with other brands.

Jeremiah suggests that brands don’t have to merely innovate by waiting to buy Dollar Shave Club for $1b. And he recognizes the challenges of brands establishing innovation centers or outposts in Silicon Valley (ironically, he was on his way to the opening of Henri@Nestlé in San Francisco, a digital platform that will allow startups and entrepreneurs to pitch projects to the company in response to "innovation challenges" that Nestlé is looking to solve).

Brands can innovate in three ways:

• Transform their product brand into a service (as Dollar Shave Club did; as BMW did with their Drive Now, cars as service in Europe)
• Create a marketplace (imagine an insurance carrier providing a network of home contractors to help make homes safer)
• Establish a platform (as U-Haul did with the U-Haul Investors Club which allows individuals to invest in U-Haul vehicles thus expanding their fleet and, more importantly, establishing the most effective way to drive loyalty

See more about Crowd Companies and the Innovation Council

See the Collaborative Economy “Honeycomb” Infographic

See the emerging P2P Insurance Startups

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Three Essentials of an Impactful Brand Content Program

Tons of advice tell brand marketers how to hijack the skills of great content publishers on behalf of their product or service. “Make it share-worthy” by studying how Buzzfeed does it; tell authentic stories; choose pictures worth clicking on; and so forth. It’s not that this advice is wrong although often enough it is simplistic and obvious.

Content marketing needs to serve a business goal, first and foremost. If a marketer’s only motivation were to create the most popular or engaging content, she might likely steer content into territories that do nothing to further business.

To actually impact business, three essentials emerge: strengthen the brand, improve business results, and serve the customer (or whomever your end users may be). Understanding how your content program is informed and driven by all three can ground your program in service to your business and, yes, in service to the customer.

Strengthen the brand

So much has been written about building brands. So much of that knowledge transcends mediums and techniques. I remain a true believer in David Ogilvy’s POV on marketing and brands. I also like Marty Neumeier’s simplification of understanding brands.

The only distinction worth making about content marketing and brand-building is that content should demonstrate the brand position and values not claim it like advertising often does. If your brand is meant to help small business run their business then the content ought to help and not simply state that is your position. Look at Chase for Small Business. Their content aims to actually give small business owners information on how to do things and to inform decisions. They share lessons from other business owners like these newsletter marketing tips from TheSkimm

Know your brand position: the territories of content that brand that to life and demonstrate the brand in-action.

 

Improve business results

Are you trying to find new customers? Retain existing customers? Cross-sell? All three? Do you need to raise awareness of your brand and solutions and become known in a market you are just entering? Drive consideration and favorability? Are you a direct-seller with ecommerce sales goals? Whatever your marketing goals that actually drive positive business results, designing your content marketing program to be measurably in service of those goals is just good business.

Look at Blackrock. They are an investment company with clear points of view from their experts about how the business behaves globally. Their blog features POVs on “global market intelligence” from actual Blackrock investment staff.

Blackrock is well known in the investment community. Larry Fink is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He started the company and shares his POV routinely. Now, a broad collection of thought leaders at Blackrock share their insights via content. That builds trust, consideration and favorability.   Take a look at a typical article, this one by Richard Turnill, Chief Strategy Officer on “How to prepare for the low return environment ahead.” No doubt these guys are experts and have a particular view based upon their position managing so much money.

Clearly this blog is in service of marketing goals to increase consideration and favorability for Blackrock. With the right tagging and ‘view through” measurement, they are likely following how the blog drives financial advisors and investors to investment solution content on Blackrock.com and other valuable actions.

Whether this content shortens the buy cycle, improves preference and trust amongst financial advisors and, therefore, their recommendations of Blackrock, or even drives actual demand from investors, it is in-service to the business.

 

Serve the customer

The biggest shift for marketers through content marketing is to actually become much more customer-centered. It sounds simple and obvious really. My experience tells me that it is a lot harder for some businesses to actually change their practices to be more customer-centered. Businesses have old ways of feeling connected to the customer; anecdotes from sales professionals, customer surveys or traditional research. These are all great sources but we need to go further.

For content marketers, that means mining search engine data to understand what people are really concerned about, listening via all of our means including social media conversations, and examining content performance data to see what truly engages people and what they deem ‘share-worthy.’

Coldwell Banker has developed a rich content marketing resource via their blog. No doubt it attracts and serves agents as much as homeowners. One look a the collection of “Seller’s Resources” and it seems clear that they are listening to key homeowner questions about staging, increasing value via energy efficiency, and radon concerns and then creating useful content.

 

Even as you tune up your team to adopt all of the best practices of great content marketing, make sure your content program is grounded in who your brand is, the business results you must achieve and the constantly evolving needs of your customers.

Great content marketing practices:

11 Things to Consider When Producing Great Content for a Native Advertising Piece

3 B2B Marketing Strategies to Create Content in “Boring” Industries

4 Things Effective Enterprise Marketers Get Right

 

 

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Marketing and sales should be closer disciplines. Too many organizations manage them separately and end up engaging prospects in very different ways.  There is a lot of wisdom in using very similar content in integrated marketing programs as in your sales engagement. Each connects with prospects and customers at different phases of the journey.

By listening to prospects and customers through conversations, social, search, formal research – we can get a clear sense of what business problems they wrestle with long before they need our products. That's what we create content to address. 

We deliver useful, compelling content that helps them understand and even solve business problems before they buy or before they are even in shopping mode. We use digital marketing techniques – increasingly targeted delivery, native contextual placement and more to reach more of the right people. We don’t know they will all become customers of ours but we know they fit a profile and share an affinity for the topics that intersect our business and theirs.  

We use much of the same content in the sales engagements between the field force that interacts with independent agents and the customers they both serve. Historically, these engagements include a lot of face-to-face meetings. Increasingly email and, now, LinkedIn extend that relationship between those moments. Sales people (field + agents) learn a new cadence to connect with prospects and customers more often. Relevant content makes that outreach a welcome one.

 

Examples of relevant content

Supply Chain Pressure Test – this is a simple diagnostic, light-interactive, that helps mid-sized manufacturers think through their exposure for supply chain risk. It drives them towards a conversation with their independent agent or with their carrier (us)

Plastics Manufacturing Trends – we recently attended the NPE2015 trade event. This brought together some of the most innovative next technologies for plastics manufacturers. By highlighting what we saw there, we can help manufacturers who attended or who did not start to recognize some of the trends that may have an impact on business risk.

The top 5 manufacturing workplace injuries – simple, practical articles like this one that include a visual, can help manufacturers better understand safety issues and take steps to reduce their incidence in their shop.   

 

Designing around the buyer journey

We want to build preference and even drive demand beyond the typical insurance renewal cycle. That means looking at a complete ‘buyer journey’ and finding ways to be of-use even when a person isn't in an active shopping or buying phase.

The digital content marketing efforts – delivering content via a web site and promoting via email, social channels and content-oriented advertising serves a purpose all along the journey but is particularly useful in the front third and back third. Sales engagements happen adjacent to and including the conversion phase. Using similar, expert content in both efforts will earn relevant awareness, achieve necessary efficiency and connect sales and marketing at a time when they are stronger together than they are apart.  It also "sells"

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11 Ideas Driving the Modern CMO

Being ‘modern’ sounds quaint. It’s one of those baffling descriptors used for architecture and even art that more often than not describes something created a long time ago. But the simple definition of modern means “of, relating to, or characteristic of the present or the immediate past” and “involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas.” It’s neither futuristic nor anchored in a naïve, Worlds Fair-image of the near future.

The modern CMO is about using the tools of today, sometimes in new ways. This isn’t about Google Glass, neuromarketing or even the Internet of Things. We are talking about near-term realities – the increasing precision in targeting communications, shifting to a “pull” strategy via content marketing, and combining data with creativity to be more relevant to people. Since people’s daily field of vision is hopelessly cluttered with commercial messages, media choices and the routine celebrations of family and friends (just judge your Facebook newsfeed), marketers must earn a place in people’s lives by delivering value above messages or at the very least delivering exactly the right message to the right person at the right time to be of-use.

The modern marketing organization looks and behaves differently, as well. It’s not an advertising factory. Nor is it the loose collection of marketing and communications disciplines intended to intercept people from “360 degrees.” All disciplines must be data-driven or, at least, data-informed. Data tells us how marketing really works. We design communications programs around how journalists use information. Content marketing sparks sharing or the data tells us it isn’t relevant. We optimize the effectiveness of digital advertising by pulling data-connected levers in near-real-time. Integrated marketing doesn’t just connect marcom disciplines long overdue for alignment, it ensures they are responding to similar data, insights and, ultimately, the customer.  

Now marketing must be reconnected with sales. These cannot be two, separate functions each in denial of the other’s relevance or contribution to business health and profits. If we care about our customer first and are committed to becoming increasingly customer-centered, then we need to be wise about the entire buyer (or customer) journey – from before they even know us to when they are a valued customer in their tenth year of service.

This is about what it means to walk-the-walk today of the modern chief marketing officer and organization. While ‘digital’ is certainly a part of that experience as is data, speed-to-market and so much more, it is not defined by any one of these. The job of the marketing organization, in the appropriated words of David Ogilvy, is to “sell or else.” How a leading marketing organization does that today is very different than fifty years ago.

11 Ideas Driving the Modern Chief Marketing Officer & Organization

Embrace new digital behaviors – No question that the growing ability to move information across digital networks has and will change our behaviors profoundly. We shop differently. We trust differently. We make decisions differently. In some cases these may be small, additive changes (we still look to an insurance agent to explain our choices even while we research those choices ahead of time via Google). In some cases these will be fundamental and disruptive changes. Predicting which will be which or the speed of change is hard.  One tip for actually understanding these changes better? Embrace these new habits within your organization. Employees should be encouraged to interact with the brand and its customers online. How else will we understand these new digital behaviors if not by practicing them ourselves?

It’s a buyer’s journey – Hoping to romance and sway customers at the point of purchase alone will not win. We need to recognize that buyers telegraph their intent earlier and earlier in the journey towards buying something. And that their/our needs are different when we are understanding a problem or need, gathering information or are actually ready to buy. Marketers must adopt the fundamental principle of designing marketing around the customer journey. Understanding what a prospect or customer is trying to get done or decide that leads to initially discovering your product is a very different proposition than prompting them to pick your product now. 

Mining data for insights and actions – Big data, little data – what we really need are more actionable insights from data and ways to trigger actions based upon data and insights. Data science is hard. While it takes more geeky collaborators than the creatives who bring advertising ideas to life it is hardly an exact science nor does it need to be. Direct marketers believe the customer can be instrumented to the point of becoming a truly predictable wind-up doll. Or more accurately, they live and die by the numbers with little concern for the prospect or customer save for the action they wish to stimulate. The modern CMO never loses sight nor compassion for the customer. They see data and insights as a better way to empower a test-and-learn marketing machine. 

Designed for testing and agility – Building a marketing organization that can plan and create fast while turning on a dime isn’t as it easy as it might appear. It takes the A/B testing methodology of direct marketers, the ability to create content, not just advertisements, quickly and in response to data, and the discipline of deciphering performance immediately. Think about how that affects review and approval cycles. Creative and content are now never “perfect” but simply ready-to-publish. In short, it changes everything.

A culture of collaboration – No one discipline rules the roost and the only way to ‘punch above your weight’ in a world gone made with ad spend is to plan integrated programs and get every discipline to work together. Planning models can help. Fostering a culture where people are rewarded for collaborating with a method of working by which the best collaborators become the best marketers makes all of the difference.

The addressable individual – Not all that long ago, we talked about building addressable audiences. Brands did that through their social channels and through partnering with mysterious companies in the ad stack that could create and maintain custom audiences. Meanwhile, the customer experience team defined an ambition to treat every customer as an individual promising to deliver increasingly personalized services relevant to the individual. The addressable individual – whether they are an existing customer or a prospect – is clearly where we are heading. That means thousands or millions, depending on your business, of micro-segments and ultimately individuals getting customized treatment from the brand. What IBM and Salesforce label “the connected customer” where we evolve past segments to addressing individuals will require a lot of technology and technology mastery to execute.

Being of-use – With an onslaught of media choices, channels, shows, messages and more, the one thing none of us have enough of is time. Marketers cannot hope to sell through interruptive advertising. It just won’t break through. We need to learn how we can be of-use to people such that we deliver welcome value. Great content, better or more complete service, personalized value and even discounts, even new products can all address genuine consumer needs. We can shift from an annoying “push” model of marketing to a “pull” model where even our marketing becomes a welcome contribution.

Content marketing – Content is at the heart of the “pull” ambition for brands. Can we create useful and/or entertaining content that connects with people at the right moments in their journey as customers (customers-to-be)? Most organizations can create the white paper, the how-to video series, even the entertaining content partnership (or more realistically, the content ‘sponsorship’). Building a content culture and machine inside the marketing function is a lot harder. As with many good ideas, the devil is in the doing (or the details of the doing). Applying a data-driven approach where speed-to-publish matters more than creating the one perfect communication is hard. It’s not just a process shift with different job functions (e.g. editors and writers) but a culture shift as to what gets approved and out the door.

Reducing friction – It is difficult to draw lines between a marketer’s job and those directly responsible for a seamless and friction-free customer experience. As marketers shift from pure ad messages to creating content that is valuable to prospects and customers alike, they inevitably will think about ways to reduce the friction people experience when doing any kind of business with a brand. It can be reducing a few button-clicks in a process, standardizing form design, providing some useful how-to content. Every service interaction has the potential to strengthen a relationship and drive advocacy or do just the opposite.   

Relentlessly accountable – Building brand for brand’s sake only makes sense in the most marketing-centric of companies. For most other companies, we want to know how marketing drives sales-related metrics. That requires getting more complex attribution models, combining online and offline data, and subscribing to the customer journey planning model. Most modern marketers know they need a “dashboard” – that magical interface that funnels all marketing and sales data into some natural synthesis. Fewer start by designing the measurement model that will facilitate marketing investment decision-making and performance optimization. This step ensures that the dashboard displays meaning not just data.

Building belief – Marketing’s role inside the enterprise is changing. As it becomes more accountable and data-driven, it will be seen with less suspicion and envy within the enterprise. That’s the long view. CMO’s, like any business leader, need to build belief in their fresh view of modern marketing in order to galvanize peer support. That’s what leads to thoughtful budget increases and informed decision-making. 

 

(image from Tron software art c/o cargocollective.com)

Content Marketing Designed to Help Behavior Change

Brands who want to get the most out of a content marketing program ought to embrace a user-centered approach to developing and delivering that content. The content and the channels that deliver that content should be designed around prospect and customer intent. What do people want to get done, what decisions do they have to make towards an end, what questions do they have.

Design around that not around what you want them to know about you. Good user-based design will always communicate the latter by “showing” not “telling.”

The ultimate utility and the hardest to deliver against is helping to foster behavior change. Helping people stop smoking, get exercise, manage their money, and so forth. In the property and casualty business, we want to help people lead safer lives. So much of that job is in people’s hands. It is the actions big and small they can take to reduce hazards around the house or risks related to driving.

 

Content to Drive Change: Aetna

Aetna recently released the 11 Initiative by Aetna. To inspire people to reduce or stop smoking (and therefore improve health and health premiums), they created an experience and a content aggregator on Tumblr. The experience (concepted with Ogilvy) revolves around a publicly placed machine that will dispense a rich 11-minute experience for every cigarette surrendered. The core pretense is:

“A recent study found every cigarette you don’t smoke could add 11 minutes to your life. So let’s talk about how you can make the most of them.”

The experiential rewards include petting dogs, a private magic show, seeing acrobats up close and personal. These are essentially the plot lines for online videos to drive relevant awareness of the program.

Users at the Tumblr site are encouraged to post what they would do with 11 extra minutes. For anything displayed on the Aetna site a clear moderation layer helps select the constructive suggestions vs those that may crop up off site.

The 11 Initiative is well integrated into their social channels and has taken over the cover photo on Facebook and Twitter.  The one place it falls down is their Web site. It is completely absent. I suspect that has more to do with how hard it is for companies to make easy-to-update web sites rather that a strategic preference to keep it off the site.

Practically speaking, this content initiative will not reduce smoking. Aetna knows this. But it may inspire people to take that step that will help them stop. It also telegraphs what Aetna is about – wellness. And it gives them a platform to communicate other important topics like key concepts in health insurance coverage. They have taken a big health problem and built a well-integrated program to raise their voice and the voices of customers around it.

 

 

 Content to Drive Change: Prudential

A year or so ago, Prudential launched The Challenge Lab. There are 5 challenges from “I Might Live How Long?: Uncovering why we have trouble imagining a longer life and how that can affect our financial future.” to “I Want it Now: Discovering why we want things now and how that behavior affects our finances later”

It’s all about making us more aware or mindful of our own behavioral economics. What makes us tick or, more accurately, what keeps us from saving for retirement.

This is a terrific site, if a bit cerebral for the average insured. There is a section on risk entitled, “It Won’t Happen to Me: Exploring our tendency to be overly optimistic and how it affects our long-term financial plans.” In each case, professor Dan Gilbert unpacks the issue in about :50 of video. The content is fairly light and leads you down the page to product/service calls-to-action. This is about helping people get smarter, possibly inspired to change and taking an action by connecting with Prudential on retirement planning or other services.  

They remain committed to this platform. I am working hard not to call it a ‘campaign.’ That word seems so inextricably linked to ‘ad campaign.’  “Bring Your Challenges” is a creative platform that adds meaning to the brand and gives them permission to talk more regularly with people about financial decisions that are too often “one and done.”

The extend the program into Facebook and YouTube amongst other platforms. 

In this case their TV ads do extend the BYC creative concept reinforcing Prudential’s role to help people do what they can – even if that means overcoming some of their most basic human tendencies – in order to save and watch out for their future.

 

Two user-driven approaches. Two “big platforms” that say as much about the brand as deliver tangible value to prospects and customers. Two programs helping people do what they need to get done and make the decisions they need to make.

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Idea Bar #15: Crowdsource Fleur Pellerin's Reading List

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Idea Bar #15: Crowdsource Fleur Pellerin’s Reading List

I love reading fiction. Trouble is, I just don’t have that much time to read. I squeak in a bit each day but I am too embarrassed to admit how many pages (paragraphs?) I manage before I fall asleep. I am reading Roberto Bolano’s 2666. It is 893 pages long. Ask me in 2016 if I am still reading it. That’s why I am none too shocked to hear the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, admit she hasn’t read a novel in two years. According to the NYTimes,

"As France was celebrating its latest Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano, the nation’s minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, shocked the nation’s literati by admitting in a television interview this week that she had not read his novels or any others for the last two years."

Dear France, What Book Should I Read Next?

What a perfect circumstance for Fleur Pellerin to launch a crowdsourcing project to select the next book she will read. By letting the French people nominate books and then have them vote to move them up the reading list, Fleur Pellerin could remedy the problem – the Culture Minister must read French books to represent – and engage the country in a lively book-loving debate.

The list could become cultural homework for foreign students visiting France. It would elevate French authors in the world’s eyes as the crowdsourcing would happen on this lovely international Web we find ourselves on today. It might even jazz up the culture ministry's Web site which interestingly won't tranlsate via Google translate. 

This is such a forgiving and positive idea. It doesn’t come close to the ‘just asking for trouble’ that Walter Isaacson will go through asking “the Internet” to edit his next book. Certainly more meaningful than Buzzfeed’s What Book Should You Start Reading Next? Roulette.

In all fairness, Fleur may not end up with the read that is right for her as she would if she used the personalization filters of Which Book. But as culture minister, she must represent. The biggest risk in the whole crowdsource-the-next-book-she-reads is that the French-speaking Twittersphere will point her towards de Sade's The Misfortune of Virtues vs. Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person.

But if Marissa Mayer can crowdsource her son’s name and if Bon Iver can crowdsource his next tattoo, certainly Fleur can crowdsource the pile of books that sit on her night table.

Seize the opportunity!

 

(and see all of these other crowdsourcing examples and a list of terrific French books already in tranlsation via the French Embassy)

thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press for the beautiful picture.

Hacking the Brief: A New Service for Brands and Agencies

Hack the Solution

Watching the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London this past weekend, I was reminded about all of the live collaborative creative sessions that I have been a part of over the last several years. (BTW Infected Flight - a way to visualize and track disease spreading won.) From Facebook Publishing Garages to creative “hacks” at Ogilvy to more technical hackathons like the TechCrunch event. There are two types of compressed collaboration in these examples. One challenges a team against other teams to develop a promising solution. TechCrunch Disrupt London had 80+ teams staying up all night to pitch their solution.

The other model combines a disparate group of people to think through a problem and offer solutions. In Facebook’s Publishing Garage episodes, the media company (that’s what they are), brought business problem owners (brands) together with creative and technologists to define a content strategy and then create content emblematic of that strategy.

All of these examples are pulling people together in a compressed collaboration to sketch up a solution.

How about we do the same thing to bum rush the brief.That's a service brands and agencies could embrace.

 

Hack the Brief

We have a terrific Marketing Brief where I work. A bunch of seasoned marketers took the best of the best and distilled it down into a document that lays a terrific foundation for any creative work. My favorite parts are the fields that tell us what we want people to actually “do.” Second favorite section is where we inventory insights or, more often, potential insights.

The brief is not magic. But what goes into it can set us up to do some awesome work with a network of creative and often unlikely partners.

Let’s bring people together to hack together a terrific brief. Rather than just leap to tactical ‘what-ifs,’ let’s get creative people of all types together to build the brief together. If possible, we would carve up time to then have disparate teams – brand and partners, tech and creative, business and communications – brainstorm ideas to fuel a future ‘hack’.

If I were creating a broad video strategy to drive goals around relevant awareness, engagement, sales enablement, actual sales and lead gen, for example (let’s say I had both a sales and direct channel to satisfy), I would invite:

 

• Business owners from within the brand (both business and marketing leaders)
• Digital agency strategists & creatives
• Google & YouTube creative and media strategists
• A complimentary multichannel video network partner (e.g. Fullscreen)
• Video innovator, e.g. Outrigger Media (their innovative OpenSlate and Vnetic make them strong players)

 

Read how they were applied to an UGG of Australia program here – “To build essentially its own YouTube "network," Palisades tapped Outrigger Media’s OpenSlate, a tool that assesses and scores 220,000 YouTube channels based on measures of influence, content quality and engagement.

The platform assigns a SlateScore that filters out suggestive content or profanity. Advertiser demand for OpenSlate drove the rollout of a tool allowing media planners to curate their own premium content networks from among approximately 70 million ad-supported YouTube videos. That tool, called Vnetic, rolled out in June.”

 

 

Homework & Structure

All good things come in thirds. And all good things require prep and structure. This ain’t your mother’s unconference.’ The first third of the day is building the brief together. The second third of the day is group brainstorming on solutions. The final third is spent on read outs and refinements.

Team participants come in with the following as a very good strawman:

Challenge Statement: In 1-2 paragraphs, we should be able to capture the spirit of what we are trying to do with enough notation to reflect guardrails or conditions we need to work within.  

Objectives: These should be clear business objectives against revenue or value-related goals. This is the green fees of any good brief and confirms that we understand what drives our business and

Audience: This is the second most misused field mostly because we rarely get beyond some key demographics. The trick here is to adequately describe who our audiences are such that we know their major common life needs (e.g. paying for college, buying their second house), their most contemporary drivers and barriers when it comes to our products and services, and how they get their information.

Actions: What do we want people to do? What action do we want them to take as a result of our communications?

 

All team participants come in with ideas on the following to share and build with the team:

Insights & Disruptions: Okay, this is the most misused field. Insights are hard to uncover. They take a good creative mind and meaningful data. Finding 3-4 potential insights about our audiences and the role our products or services can play in their lives is key to the hack. This is what collaborative creative teams will chew on.  

Channels: What channels have we already committed to and have infrastructure around? That’s not to say that we shouldn’t innovate on channels. The hack should go wherever it needs to.

Success: Define what success looks like from KPIs to qualitative evidence.

 

All of that happens in the first part of the day. Then the group breaks up into manageable 8-person, cross-disciplinary teams to brainstorm solutions (volume, volume, volume). Finally, these teams come together to share their ideas. Very little refinement has happened. We are saving that for the after party.

The After-work is the Real Work

At the end of the day, you have a terrific brief. Business owners have demonstrated buy-in. An eclectic group of strategic and creative thinkers have come together to strengthen the brief and start the process of thinking creatively. And finally, valuable partners are given a brief they can get creative on over the next few weeks to come up with some awesome ideas.

Getting teams to work together on the brief and the solution can unlock creativity from how we define the challenge, itself, to the actual ways we aim to meet that challenge. 

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New Media Favs #1: BBC World Service

Remember when the term “new media’ referred to CD-ROMs and such. I made quite of few of those and remember the term being applied to this new form of interactive media. A few chapters later – the Internet, social media and the shrinking newspaper industry – and new media can be applied to those media companies that are transforming.

I remain sensitive to the pain of news media businesses – especially those that grew up inside newspapers. Still, I am excited about new models of journalism that are coming out of all that. Following Neiman Lab helps in discovering many of these new trends and experiments. I see quite a few media and journalism companies creating new, valuable experiences that transcend the very platforms they deliver on.

 

 BBC World Service

The BBC World Service does 3 things that really energize me and make me genuinely curious to tune in, follow and access online.

 

Outside Source w/Ros Atkins

I love the pace, the social-connectivity and the global reach of the morning (ET USA) Outside Source radio show that I listen to most days. First off, the hosts (Ros Atkins is my favorite) run the program like fast paced jockeys – pulling in reporters from the World Newsroom (above), interviewing people – regular people – on the ground in Gaza, Edinburgh or Iraq, and moving quickly between sources. As the program name suggests, they are trying to curate and expose us to many sources of information. The bias of the non-reporters shine through but that only makes the program richer. This caters to my ADD-like brain.

They connect very closely with social media. Ros is frequently driving people to individual reporters’ Twitter feeds, pulling off a report from Twitter and driving folks to get more information online. This inter-connectivity is not forced. It is natural. I started with radio and am now connected online with @BBCRosAtkins and @BBCOS.

 

BBC Trending

A team of folks at BBC World Service comb through trending topics in social media and build stories (#BBCTrending). Their radio story about the Lady Alba videos supporting #YesScotland drove me online to learn more. Sure, sometimes it seems as they are late to the party. I had seen the Spiderdog videos a few weeks prior but BBC Trending told us more about the polish creator of this and other provocative video series (like the creepy Slender Man).

While this practice of mining social media for stories may seem mundane in today’s world, I rarely see it as a built-in practice for news programs originating in other media. BBC Trending just does a great job. They have their ‘trend journos/hunters’ actually tell the stories during the radio program. Sure, their web site is dated but they probably suffer from the same IT-stranglehold that many big organizations suffer from.

 

 

BBC Pop-up

A pair of reporters are driving across the US as we speak to capture and tell the stories of the mass of people who actually live in the ‘fly-over states’ that make up the heart of our country. I don’t care if it’s a bit “stunty.” I love road trips. I love grassroots storytelling. I love the town hall they held in Boulder, Colorado to ask people form the community what stories they ought to tell.

BBC video journalists Matt Danzico and Benjamin Zand are also telling their stories on Tumblr. And that blog looks like it will be gorgeous as they accumulate stories. This effort stems from the BBC Video Innovation Lab. Here’s a bit of why they chose to go on the road to Boulder:

“In the 21st Century, creating video for television from cities like Washington, New York and/or Los Angeles is definitely an effective way of reaching traditional media consumers in those markets. But if you’re also trying to reach younger generations in Colorado, for instance, why not create gripping video from the state that’s of interest to a global audience?

And now you’ve not only provided interesting programming to your traditional audience but you have also sparked the interest of an entirely new community as well.

Do that for one month at a time. Post your videos to local social media. Move cities. Repeat.

Yes, BBC News has 44 foreign bureaus in a heap of cities around the world. But the world has nearly 3,000 cities with a population over 150k. So why not create a mobile bureau that can embed itself in a community and then relocate easily?”

Like I said, I love a good road trip. And I love interesting storytelling from people who seem so genuinely curious about the world.

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