Consumers' Favorite Online Brands

[Posted by David Card]

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Google remains consumers' favorite online brand, with Yahoo! and Amazon not far behind. In the minds of their fans, the top online brands exhibit very traditional attributes such as trustworthiness, helpfulness, and relevance, all at the expense of more-predictable tech-friendly characteristics such as innovation and speed.

Direct-to-consumer brands in categories including media, retail, financial services, and travel — and consumer electronics, given its technology angle — should position themselves against competitors' weaknesses and deliver their brand messages through site experiences that complement offline marketing.

Forrester clients can follow these topics further in this report (behind the paywall).

Millennial Teens Are More Brand-Loyal Than You Think

[Posted by David Card]

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I'm hosting a panel on Millennials and TV at the Future of Television Conference later this week. I'm sure we'll talk about social media. And you might be surprised to see that one segment of the Millennial generation - today's teens - are perhaps more brand-loyal than you think. They just like to try new things more than adults do, and they depend on friends' advice more.

From a Forrester report (behind the paywall) on teen coolhunting:

Sixty percent of online teens say that when they find a brand they like, they'll stick to it, a figure that's just about the same as for online adults. However, nearly two-thirds of teens are willing to try something new. And three times more teens than adults say they're influenced by what's hot.

Two-thirds of online teens surveyed said they tell friends about products — that's almost twice as many as adults — and more than 70% of teens use social networks regularly. So it's critical for marketers to understand how to best use social networks to reach teens and to help them spread the word. Tapping into entertainment users, who are also cross-category influencers, is key.

If NBC Joins Comcast...

[Posted by David Card]

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According to Ad Age's math, if Comcast buys NBC Universal, Comcast's advertising revenues would go from 7% of its total take to over 20%. Most of the potential synergies described in the piece could be done via thoughtful deals rather than by acquisition, and plenty of pundits don't like the potential combo. But think about how that increased importance of advertising might affect Comcast, and the industry.

Talk of advanced TV advertising is back in the air, courtesy of Comcast, Cablevision, Hulu, Canoe, etc. But it's going to take a pretty complicated value chain to deliver on the promise of addressable set top boxes and interactivity. While the networks - and agencies - are the ones that most need to re-invent TV advertising, they have a lot of bad habits entrenched behaviors. Will TV innovation - and industry power - come from Internet power players (Google, Microsoft)? from startups? from the guys that actually have the set top boxes and distribution pipes?

If Comcast's ad business suddenly triples in importance, it has a serious incentive to innovate.

I'm working on a report on what measurement techniques will cross over from online to TV and vice versa, and I'd like to hear your opinions on how this will shake out, and when.

Remembering MySpace

[Posted by David Card]

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Chatting with board members at a major apparel company last night, a few mentioned a story on NPR's Morning Edition about the social divide between young Facebook and MySpace users. I've been skeptical before, but am converting.

Marketers who want to reach mass audiences, especially mass youth audiences, should monitor this. And they shouldn't leave MySpace out of their plans. It still has a big, loyal audience. And it's beefing up its entertainment content and ad sales, while trying to copy Facebook's social communications features. Compared with Facebook, MySpace offers at least equal targeting capabilities and more places - e.g., its home page, video section, MySpace Music - where large numbers of users congregate.

Of course, we've been watching MySpace work its way toward 21st Century entertainment portal-hood for some time (report for Forrester clients). It still has a ways to go. Forrester clients can also read our recent report on teen coolhunting with social network sites.

What Does Windows 7 Have to Do with Showtune Parodies?

[Posted by David Card]

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As usual, Microsoft gets no love from the commentariat. It's sponsoring a branded content variety show on Fox created by Seth “Family Guy” MacFarlane that will feature Windows 7 integrated into the programming. What does Windows 7 have to do with bawdy animated show tune parodies? I guess we'll see. Pundits are arming for bear.

I'm a fan of modern integrated campaigns that incorporate branded content and social media. If I ran Microsoft's initiative through Forrester's evaluation tool, I suspect it would come up a little short on exclusivity, relevance, and creating a feedback loop for analysis. But it's poised to go viral. Whether that's a good thing or not...

Forrester clients can read our report, and work with us on using the diagnostic tool to evaluate their own campaigns.

Coolhunting with Teen Social Networkers

[Posted by David Card]

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Two-thirds of online teens surveyed said they tell friends about products — that's almost twice as many as adults — and more than 70% of teens use social networks regularly.

So it's critical for marketers to understand how to best use social networks to reach teens and to help them spread the word. Forrester created a new audience analysis framework based on what teen social network users said were their motivations for using them. It turns out they use social nets for both communication and entertainment. (For teens, communication is entertainment.) Compared with adults, there are more entertainment-driven teen social networkers.

Tapping into those entertainment users, who are also cross-category influencers, is key. Social networks can be a hub for cross-media "cool" and a launch pad for modern integrated campaigns.

Teen Social Networker Types

Forrester clients can check out the report here.

Media Meltdown Creates New Mandate for Integrated Marketing

[Posted by David Card]

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The Media Meltdown of fragmented audiences and broken media company business models is disrupting traditional marketing strategies and partnerships. Marketing leaders must work with their teams, agencies, and media partners to update their vision of integrated marketing in order to counter the effects of the meltdown and to harness social media. Tomorrow's integrated marketing:

• Is multichannel
• Uses branded content
• Employs social media
• Creates a feedback loop that ideally will enable on-the-fly message and media tuning

Forrester clients can dig deeper into the analysis, and test their own integrated marketing programs for post-Meltdown fluency with this report and its diagnostic tool.

Post-Meltdown Integrated Marketing

A Post-Meltdown Media Business Model

[Posted by David Card]

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Marketers looking to tap into the long tail via organic search - rather than via a paid search campaign - ought to take a look at Associated Content. Remember About.com, the network of "guides," or semi-pro content experts, now owned by the New York Times Co.? Associated Content is built along the same lines. It's a loose collection of articles written by freelancers that can provide inexpensive, contextually relevant ad inventory alongside content with some of the authenticity of UGC but none of the risky elements of unsupervised conversation.

Advertisers include familiar brands like Frito-Lay, P&G (Febreze), Sprint, and American Express. Marketers can buy exclusives on content collections like health & wellness and green, and Associated will put together custom sponsorship packages to deliver branded experiences. Marketers could consider Associated as a potential alternative to ad networks or blog networks.

Associated's secret sauce as a media business - besides its low-cost content creation - is its own content yield management system. That helps it figure out what kind of articles will do well in terms of popularity and ad revenue generation. Associated often pays contributors up-front for content (as well as a revenue share based on traffic), and has an assignment desk where it bids out topics that could be advertiser-sponsored. It's also working on syndication deals with mainstream media partners who need a ready-made library of evergreen how-to or best-of content. Associated needs to beef up cross-promotion and user retention, and probably should do more than SEO to help seed two-way distribution. But it's an intriguing model for post-Media-Meltdown media.

• TechCrunch company profile
• Mediapost article
• Forrester report (clients-only) on models for monetizing digital content

Media Meltdown: The Forecast

[Posted by David Card]

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Forrester's ad spending forecast, which may be conservative in its projected declines, shows TV declining 4% this year, with cable holding up much better than broadcast. Targeted TV spots and interactive ads on the big screen could raise CPMs but remain in limited trials. Newspaper spending will continue its double-digit decline, and magazines will be down 7%. Online advertising will be up 10%, but that's driven by search; display will barely be up. While online is bigger than radio and magazines, its $5 billion net growth in 2008 and 2009 won't replace the $3.7 billion TV and $13 billion print declines. We're forecasting a mild TV recovery in 2010, and accelerating online growth, but that's entirely dependent on a still uncertain economy.

Clients can read these reports:
What the Media Meltdown Means for Marketing
Interactive Marketing Forecast  

Michael Jackson Memorial Service First Take

[Posted by David Card]

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If you're reading this in realtime, you really should tune in for a few minutes. This is big like Princess Di or OJ or Obama.

A couple of observations on the media phenomenon:

• If this were a few years ago, it would be AOL and Yahoo leading the online coverage. Now, it's the broadcast news networks and CNN. AOL links to TMZ and Yahoo to ABC.com. Changing of the guard?
• I am more than a little skeptical of UGC's "value" for news coverage (outside of local), but the Facebook feed integrated with the CNN video stream - a la Obama acceptance speech - is wonderful. Much more valuable than the lame CNN commentary (Lou Ferrigno interview??), you get the full spectrum of respect, sadness, and snark. Probably in a mix representative of the mass audience.
• ABC and CBS are doing the Facebook feed thing, too. All have banner ads but no video ads. CNN's is a house promo right now. ABC and CBS are better at providing links to other relevant content including video from earlier in the day. NBC-MSNBC and Fox News are just streaming.
• It may be the way CNN is programming it, but it appears there is more action on Facebook than on Twitter. Another guard-changing?

Whatever you think of Michael Jackson as an artist, a person, or a celebrity, you can't deny he has a huge global following. Growing up in the South, I observe only that he was the first black popstar that tween white girls could like, too.