From my first day’s report: Greetings from South Africa: Howzit?

Racial Marketing

This could partly be because I’m a GenX American which means I was raised on a healthy dose of white guilt my entire life so take this with a grain of salt. Almost all the advertising I’ve seen, here in Africa, contains white people. The notable exception right now is the World Cup promotions which obviously strive to represent a global mix. In the US most advertisers try to skew their ads to represent the area they’ll be displayed in. This means if you go to Atlanta you’ll see more African Americans on billboards than you will in Idaho. But in South Africa this doesn’t seem to be the case.

According to the Wikipedia, South Africa is 80% black and 10% colored (not totally sure what that entails) but only 10% white. That’s the complete opposite of Boise, Idaho where I grew up. But the advertising isn’t much more diverse. I’m willing to bet it’s because there is still a huge gap between the haves and the have nots and advertisers are playing to their audience. I bet if you look at the color make up of the middle class and up you’d see a radically different mix than the general population.

This isn’t a knock against advertisers or the country and it’s people, just an observation that the country World still has a long way to go.

I asked one of my Joburg coworkers about this observation and her comment was that while apartheid is over, there is still a long way to go culturally for equality and that the middle class is predominantly black so there probably should be more diversity in the advertising than there is.

This is obviously a constant concern for American marketers. It’s so predominant in our industry that sometimes I wonder if we go too far. When was the last time you saw corporate stock photography that only had white males in it? We’re all so used to the stock image that has a young black man an Asian woman, usually one person who looks about retirement age, the unidentifiable mixed race person and maybe a white man. There are of course other variations of this, just change around the race age and genders. But we all know that it’s very calculated. Most of us have all of those people in our office but the photo’s are so staged and everyone of course is models so they look too nice.

I just wish we could get to the point where we didn’t have to think about it because it just wasn’t an issue. But like I said in my other post we still have a long way to go.

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Why do advertisers feel the need to measure their results against the way they bought the ingredients? I am of course talking about my favorite whipping post, the CPM.  Just because you buy media based on CPM doesn’t mean you have to measure results based on CPM. The same goes for the world of search and the PPC.  And why on earth PR people feel the need to adopt an ad equivalency model just boggles my mind.

I don’t blame advertisers for selling their ad inventory by CPM. They’re one ingredient to the full marketing meal. But it’s only one piece of the picture.

Whats worse is when I see marketers applying the same metric to social media. I have actually seen marketers take a social media disaster and call it success because of the amount of reach that their nightmare of a campaign achieved.

In fact any single metric is worthless!

We are beyond the point of showing metrics for social media. We can show you all kinds of metrics. The next step is to create a scorecard showing the net results of all the efforts.In that score card will be things like CPM, unique visitors, comments, shares, downloads, purchases and whatever else you’re measuring.

This is the difference between buying individual ingredients and buying a meal.

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Image via Wikipedia

The fight for social media just got turned up to 11. There’s a lot of money at stake and everyone wants it. Ad agencies and traditional media will be doing their best to make advertising look and act more like social media.

This is sad to me because I don’t think anyone owns social media. Each discipline brings it’s own unique perspectives and strengths to social media.

Overall this reinforces my belief that there should not be separate marketing and PR disciplines inside companies. As social media drives digital convergence, Marketing, PR, and Advertising need to be working together not being territorial. That means everyone needs to be willing to sacrifice their sacred cows and work for what’s best for the customer and the company.

Pepsi to Skip Super Bowl Ads in Favor of $20M Social Media Campaign

That could be changing. For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not have any ads in the Super Bowl. Instead, the company will be spending $20 million on a social media campaign it’s calling The Pepsi Refresh Project.

Rather than spending money on a Super Bowl ad, Pepsi will launch the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13, 2010. At that time, users can submit their ideas to Pepsi for ways to refresh their communities, making the world a better place.

It’s also important to note the social innovation angle. I hope this isn’t just an afterthought but core to the effort. Ultimately the Mashabe article points out that it’s all in the execution. I for one hope Pepsi pulls this off. I think it’s the right move.

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What will the future of social media look like? You just need to look around because “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”

In rapid order I came across three articles that help paint that picture (all emphasis are mine):

Marc Meyer rightfully points out:

So I ask you, what is next? Social Media as you know it right now, will not be recognizable in the next 3-5 years. Think long term.

Chas Edwards discusses the success of Digg ads and hints at the future of advertising filtered by (and I’ll throw in co-created with) their customers:

Digg Ads: It’s Just the Beginning

As marketers perfect their skills as web publishers and invest more aggressively in content creation content about their products and services, as well as general content that might be useful to their customers it creates an opportunity for better advertising experiences: ads we don’t feel the need to block, skip or ignore. Digg Ads, we hope, will give those marketers a real-world proving groun” a place to measure their success in making content that’s relevant to their customers.

Now combine that with the LA Times story about how Google Wave (and many of the technologies coming out that are similar) could transform reporting:

Collaborative reporting: You may notice that double bylines aren’t very common. That’s because trying to co-author a news story stinks.

The process usually [...] result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.

We’re not going to e-mail our co-writers with every new lead and minute detail we dig up. But if we’re sharing a virtual notebook, we can scan through …

… or search the newest findings as they’re logged, make comments and highlight our favorite bits.

Then, when it comes time to write, we can rearrange and discuss the story’s flow in the same software. Thanks to the openness of Wave, collaborative pieces between bloggers could become more common.

To be fair collaborative, real-time or (what Shel Israel calls) Braided Journalism, has already been happening but it’s primitive compared to what is to come.

• Imagine for a minute that this blogger collaboration doesn’t have to be limited to bloggers or journalist writing for the same publication.
• Imagine that the story was reported on in real time in the public as it evolved.
• Imagine if the readers were invited to participate it the reporting.
• And finally imagine that marketers were invited into the journalism process and their contribution was judged for the value it added not the value of the ad buy.

What do you see now? I see a new business model for journalism. I see relevant advertising. I see a world in 3-5 years where journalism and advertising are better than anything we’ve ever had before.

As I think about this new model I think of the idiocy behind pay walls and intrusive advertising and for the first time in a long time I’m optimistic for the future of both advertising and journalism.

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Remember in the post dotcom area of marketing how “creative” was the must have buzz word for all ad shops? Good creative is still important but it looks like marketing is about to be taken over by nerds (I mean that in a good way). There is no shortage of data on the Web. Most of it is useless to companies because it’s all turned into noise.

Helping companies make sense of the data that’s out there and gain real business insights is the next big wave. If you’re a number crunching, 0’s and 1’s kind of person you’re next job may just be in marketing.

There’s a lot happening right now in the data analytics and measurement space. And apparently yesterday was the day to announce a major partnership.

1) Of course last weeks big news was Adobe buying Omniture. My favorite part of this announcement was the reactions it elicited. I ran a Twitter search through Twendz and the top two reactions were “Wow” and “Weird.” This is obviously a huge deal. The main reason people build ads in flash is not just because of the cool interactive possibilities but because you can embed analytics in them. (On a separate not I think this is why Google is finally pushing so hard on display ads).

I think this news must have spurred everyone else that was working on deals to announce what they had planned because this week has already seen a flurry of announcements.

2) Apparently being acquired but Adobe wasn’t enough big deals for Omniture. Less than a week later they announce a major partnership with Comscore.

This relationship between Omniture and ComScore will enable organizations to unify their online and panel-based audience measurement information, providing more consistent and more comprehensive standard metrics. With the combined offering, publishers and advertisers will be able to automate data integration and reconciliation, eliminate the need for publishers to implement time consuming multiple data collection methods and reduce the labor-intensive steps needed to deliver unified audience measurement.

This is a huge deal for advertisers. There is so much data available to online advertisers but the problem is that it lives in so many different places. If Comscore can help not just validate the numbers you’re getting but help streamline the delivery of that into one place (your Omniture analytics dashboard) then marketers jobs just got a lot easier.

3) Facebook has confirmed that they will be partnering to provide add data to Nielsen. The specifics of the detail haven’t been announced yet but are expected today. I imagine this will be the first of many deals we see by Facebook as they look to leverage the fact that they have the largest walled garden in social media.

4) Lastly, while not completely but still mostly related, the NYT has announced that they are looking to develop a Twitter search product to find commentary on specific topics. This makes sense for a few reasons. First- they own About.com so they have some search capabilities. Second- if more and more news is being broken, shared and reported on via Twitter it only makes sense that a news company would want to stay on top of that.

It makes sense that most of these announcements are aimed at advertising. They’re the ones that are hurting the worst. They’re desperate to prove their value, but you better believe that the other marketing disciplines have plenty up their sleeves. This is just the first signs of what’s coming. This is going to be a very active space the rest of this year.

Update: More evidence of the ad industries urgency -WPP’s Sorrell: We Can’t Fire People Fast Enough To Keep Up With The Collapse In Ads

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There’s a new wave forming for marketers and advertisers: Crowdsourcing your companies marketing efforts. As companies get over the whole loss of control thing, many will embrace what seems to be a huge opportunity. From wiki’s to advertising campaigns companies jumped on this early gold rush hoping to save millions on their marketing efforts.

Almost all of these efforts fail. From failed ad campaigns, to countless abandoned corporate wiki’s, companies have been left scratching their heads why crowdsoucing happens constantly across the Web, even building startups like into multimillion dollar companies but corporate marketing seems unable to tap into the trend.

It’s Not About You. It’s About Them.

Most corporate efforts are focused on the companies needs. It’d be great to have a product wiki because we don’t want to spend the money building the resource ourselves. It’s be great to not pay very much for our design creative when there are so many talented amateurs out there.

That’s great for you but what do the people get out of it? At best you throw some small token at them like swag or maybe a little money. Woo-freakin-hoo. Pardon me while I hold back my excitement.

Always, always focus on the customer and you’re far more likely to succeed. Certain brands can get away with this because they carry enough clout that people  want to be associated with them. I have a sneaky feeling these brands fall into what Alan Wolk calls Prom King Brands.

What efforts work well? The one’s that solve the customers pain point. Can you enable the customers to do something they’d already like to do? Is there a resources the customer wants that you can help them build? Sometimes that will line up with your company needs and sometimes it won’t.

Your entire company exists to serve a market need. Why should your marketing be any different?

What about you? Are you looking to tap into the crowdsourcing wave? Have you in the past? Any tips you’d like to share?

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Merge. Keep Moving.

In the 1920′s there was a lot of foundational work done in PR and Advertising that set the stage for market acceptance of the two industries. This early disciplinary work enabled both industries to take advantage of the new channels that developed in the late 40′s and 50′s when Radio and Television became household appliances and forever changed…. well everything.

Over the last 15 years we’ve seen the Internet fragment Marketing nearly beyond recognition. Besides PR and Advertising you have Direct Marketing, Digital Marketing, Interactive Marketing just to name a few and then you have variations of each of these plus hundreds of touch points and overlap between all of these disciplines.

But large corporations have typically had two internal Marketing groups; PR and Advertising (I’m excluding product marketing and sales on purpose). Each company has struggled with where all the sub-disciplines should fall and now with social media blurring the lines between all of these even further I have to ask if it still makes sense to have separate departments?

I think over the next 5-10 years we’re going to see a huge roll-up happening inside large corporations with there no longer being PR on one side and Advertising on the other. It will just be Marketing. I personally think this will be a good thing in the end but it’s going to painful for PR and Advertising agencies during the process.

[Update] T-Mobile (a client) has even done away with internal vs external comms. PR and HR (as related to communications) are focused on “vertical” – B2B, Channel, Corporate – and are responsible for communicating news, changes and announcements both ways.

photo credit dno1967

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The ad is their own. It’s even says “Shameless self-promotion” in it. This is obviously trying to help people connect with people they already know, which brings value to the whole network, FriendFeed and the user. What’s missing is the ability to like and comment on it. This is something I wish they enabled. Maybe they were afraid of the conversation that would ensue.

Conversational Advertising

If this is the way of the future for FriendFeed it brings up some interesting possibilities. Depending on your network some items don’t stay around very long which means you have to wonder about value.  Users also have the ability to hide any content on FriendFeed so it would be very easy to block ads from having to be seen.

However if ads were enabled with likes and comments we could see the first true conversational advertising. Unlike Facebook which enable you to thumb up or down ads, imagine the ability to leave comments on ads that your entire network could see and comment on as well.

It would take a very brave brand to jump in to this space. You are leaving your company and your advertising wide open. However if companies approach this as an opportunity to engage the FriendFeed community instead of advertise to them the engagement ROI could be huge.

If you’re wondering what the FriendFeed community thinks about it you can see Louis Gray’s thread on it.

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Chris Brogan has a post about his support and use of sponsored posts. ReadWriteWeb takes a more traditional advertorial approach.

Information, not ads, important to consumers – Blogs & Content – BizReport

…consumers are finding advertorial type content, articles/reviews and other forms of custom media more appealing that traditional advertisement. Nearly 75% of consumers noted in the report that compiling product information from a variety of sources rather than a simple advertisement is more appealing to them.

The bottom line is that if users get value, publishers get revenue and companies receive an appropriate return then this will model will continue.

I think that why people like Andy Sernovitz are concerned is because of the potential for abuse. But honestly anytime money is involved then there is the potential to abuse.

While I remain somewhat neutral (I think it’s in the implementation) on the topic I should note that right now, I would not recommend my current employer or future clients use this method. It’s too big of a hot button and I think there are better ways to achieve the goals a company would have in pursuing these tactics.

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I think it’s interesting that Yahoo has been able to succeed where Google has failed with the news industry. Instead of trying to be disruptive, Yahoo is just doing what it does best: get clicks on content.

Whatever the newspaper industry ends up looking like after everything is over this could prove to be an important advantage for Yahoo.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium Keeps Growing

Yahoo’s newspaper strategy has seen success because, unlike Google, it never tried to get into the business of selling print ads. Instead, Yahoo focused on helping newspapers get more traffic to their Websites.

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