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.

Help Shape Our Upcoming Marketing Leadership Research!

One year ago, our panel of Marketing Leaders told us they were dissatisfied with their current media strategies: 71% had a hard time measuring the effectiveness of their media allocation, and 52% were struggling to drive a fully consumer-centric media plan.

 

How have those trends changed in just one year?

 

To find out, we have launched our latest Global Marketing Leaders Survey. The results will be published as part of our ongoing series of documents regarding choosing the right media mix.

 

Interested in the results? All you have to do is become part of our Global Marketing Leaders Panel. The panel includes 476 senior marketing executives like you. Just click here to join our panel and participate in the current Global Marketing Leaders Online Survey.

 

In addition to media allocation strategies, we will also cover the following in this survey:

• Shifts in media budgets;
• How companies embrace marketing innovation;
• How senior marketers make marketing technology decisions.

The survey should take about 15 minutes to complete.

 

In exchange for your valuable time, we will:

• Send you the results from this research before its official release date.
• We will also provide you with access to a free piece of research of your choice, once you have completed the survey. The reports we are offering include:
  A: "The Media Meltdown Makes Integrated Marketing An Imperative", by David Card
  B: "The Broad Reach Of Social Technologies", by Sean Corcoran
  C: "Use Online Communities For Strategic Insight", by Lisa Bradner

If you have any question at all, please drop me an email or comment here.

Successful Integrating Marketing For Consumer Goods (and My First Doc as a Marketing Leader)

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Twitter: @minicooper

This morning my first new document at Forrester went live since 2002. I remember the thrill of having a whole new set of things to talk about at business meetings when those reports came out. Having shed my history as a Telecom and Retail expert, I am now more firmly focused on the issues that face Marketing Leaders, as they try to marry traditional and interactive marketing efforts.

This first report is a quick study on how low consideration brands, like soap, snacks, and sinus meds can be relevant online with some case studies from brands -- like Suave and SunChips

-- that worked with consumers (clients, see the report here: “Integrated Marketing Strategies For Low-Consideration Brands“). It builds on a theme that Forrester calls “borrowed relevance” in which brands can become relevant provided the message ties well with the content and the medium it is presented in – be that television, banner ads, branded content sites or social media efforts. The key is to integrate marketing carefully across channels, so that indirect marketers of consumer goods can engage their consumers in discussion and brand promise, and still drive them to the store to purchase. The right integrated message will drive interest, and ultimately sales, if crafted correctly.

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

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  

Media Meltdown: Online CPMs to Zero?

[Posted by David Card]

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Last week at the Marketing Forum, Forrester COO Charles Rutstein challenged a couple of us media & marketing analysts to answer the question, What happens when online CPMs get so close to zero that they make ad-supported businesses unsustainable? He drew scary charts on a napkin.

It's true that online media has been nearly overwhelmed by an onslaught of inventory -- there's something like 80% more online ad space, a lot of it from social media, than there was a couple years ago. CPM-CPC "arbitrage" is being squeezed. (It's harder for a branded online media company to sell impression-based inventory to a network who targets it and resells it on a click-through basis.) Prices are being forced down across the board.

This is not all good news for marketers. If brand-name media companies can't make it online, it'll be pretty tough to do brand-oriented marketing, and difficult to construct integrated cross-media campaigns. Targeted remnant inventory can't do everything.

But for all the macroeconomic forces of "infinite inventory," some ad space -- and some audiences -- are worth way more than others. Cut clutter, experiment with new formats, and know your audience really, really well, is the easy advice for online publishers. Build out a marketing platform that's flexible in terms of targeting and in incorporating data from many sources. Encourage comparison. Add other sites' inventory to your own. Pit your salesforce against multiple ad networks to see who can best monetize some sections of your site (but hold back the best stuff.) Engage marketers and agencies deeply (even while you're trying to steal some agency functions.)

How can online publishers work with marketers to create win-win solutions? Let me know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, here are some relevant Forrester reports available to clients:

Six Ways Publishers Can Boost CPMs
Advertiser Hot Buttons
What Agencies Want from Online Media

What Does the Media Meltdown Mean for Marketers?

[Posted by David Card]

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The Advertising Age headline reads “Future May Be Brighter, but It’s Apocalypse Now.”

 

CBS, the number one TV network, saw its ad revenues decline 13% in 2008, and that was before the recession really took hold. CBS’s radio business was down 12%. The former home of “must-see TV,” NBC had two shows in the top 20 for the week of March 30, and they were both ER. Unfortunately they were the series finale and a retrospective. NBC will be replacing its 10PM line-up with a Jay Leno strip because it’s cheaper than producing dramas and sitcoms.

 

It’s one thing when the Rocky Mountain News stops printing. But the venerable New York Times might have trouble making its debt payments, and is threatening to shut down the Boston Globe if its unions don’t cave. Meanwhile, Oxbridge Communications’ Mediafinder says that 335 magazines launched in North America in 2008. But 525 folded.

 

The most recent Forrester advertising forecast is the Jupiter model from December (we're updating it as I type). We were projecting negative five-year growth for US “off-line” -- i.e., not online or digital -- advertising as a whole. The total spending on print and radio will be down double digits in 2013 versus 2008. TV will be down double digits this year, but will eventually start to grow again, probably in 2011.

 

Clearly, ad-based media companies are scrambling.

 

But what does this mean for marketers?

 

• Hits still matter. Sure, media’s fragmenting, but the Super Bowl and Amercan Idol still pack ‘em in. They’re not cheap to produce, or to buy. Joint sponsorships, crafted early in programming development, will gain traction.

 

• All media is multi-media. Audiences are demanding their content on whatever screen they want. Some media brands have good multichannel stories (ESPN, CNN, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, the Wall Street Journal). But online is dominated by pure-plays like Google and Yahoo, who don’t have cross-media capability.

 

• Integration might get harder. So if you want to do cross-media integrated campaigns, you’ll have to pick your partners well. Otherwise it’s up to media buying agencies that generally lack creative thinking about engagement, or online ad networks powered by robots. That’s fine for direct marketing, but how do you do engaging branding?

 

• Social is the biggest thing in media. And no one really knows how to do it yet. How can media companies harness their fans’ creativity, use them for promotion, for distribution? There are early examples of fun “meta media” -- media about media, like Television without Pity, TV.com, Rotten Tomatoes, and, yes, reviews on Amazon and Netflix.

 

• Dis-intermediation seems unlikely. Agency “studios” have pretty much flopped. Creating great content is an art and a science, and I remain skeptical that popular entertainment and information media can be created in-house. And even then, it still needs a distribution channel. The current media industry value chain may have some loose links, but it doesn’t feel like it’s ready to be replaced completely.

 

• Branded entertainment is a must. Which brings us back to deep partnerships and co-sponsored content. In order to create win-win-win content  -- good for marketers, good for programmers, good for audiences -- it feels like marketers and media companies have to get together sooner in the process. Not every network can be HGTV or the Food Channel, where product promotion and placement is a natural. It’s going to take more than getting Jack Bauer to use a Sprint phone and a Cisco router.

 

I’d like to hear what you think. Stay tuned: I’m working on a series of reports on how marketers should handle the media meltdown. And check out my “Future of Media” panel at Forrester’s Marketing Forum in Orlando this week.

What's On Media Leaders' Home Pages This Morning?

[Posted by David Card]

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Last night, colleague Nate Elliott tweeted about a cool Apple rich media ad on ESPN's home page. That inspired me to take a quick morning tour around major media sites, to see what everyone's doing. The unscientific homepage summary below shows who's doing branding deals, and gives some hints at how tough things are for different segments. Sports site are rockin'. Traditional news media and portals at least have fixed-placement sponsors that own the page for the day. CBS seems to be doing something interesting.

Portals and Social Networks

• Yahoo - fixed placement AT&T rich media ad
• MSN - fixed placement Clorox ad
• AOL - fixed placement Disney rich media ad
• MySpace - rotating a lot of house ads, a couple rich media, one that integrates a sweepstakes with the MySpace page promoting Dreamworks' "I Love You, Man" movie
• Facebook - no home page. Rotating Match.com ad on my page

News Sites

• CNN - rotating rich media house ads
• MSNBC - fixed placement (?) spot for an online weightloss program. Possibly contextually targeted (there's a story on weight loss)
• Yahoo News - no ads above the fold
• Wall Street Journal - fixed placement IBM rich media ad
• New York Times - fixed placement VW rich media ad

TV Network Sites

• CBS - interesting integrated ad/programming rich-media promotion with AT&T, a lead sponsor for March Madness, that rotates with house promos
• ABC - no traditional ad units. Rolls video automatically, and shows TV spots every three clips or so
• NBC - rotating rich media ads
• Fox - rotates some rich media units with house ads

Women's Sites

• iVillage - rotating rich media units for mostly online-only advertisers, but some traditional advertisers (Procter & Gamble)
• AOL Women/Lifestyle - rotating rich media, traditional advertisers
• Yahoo Shine - rotates rich media, house ads, and smaller text units. Some are targeted

Sports Sites

• ESPN - rich media takeover by Apple that's integrated with the site's overall design (not content this time): the ad "interacts" with ESPN's nav tabs, etc.
• Yahoo Sports - rotating rich media ads, some targeted
• CBS Sports (Sportsline) - frequency-capped rich media takeover by Pontiac, later visits show Pontiac sports-related sweepstakes
• Sports Illustrated - fixed placement rich media Mobil ad that has Nascar news tie-in

 

Mobilizing, Part II

[Posted by David Card]

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If you're a marketer or a media company thinking about mobile audiences, here's a little perspective. (See this report.) While there will be plenty of on-the-go laptops with broadband access in the US, they'll be dwarfed by the number of 3G mobile phones. Broadband phones will reach critical mass -- 15% to 20% of the population, 40 to 50 million users -- if not mass-market reach, by 2010.

That means marketers should remain experimental, focusing campaigns on mobile experiences that are small-screen and SMS-like and that take advantage of local and social information. 3G coverage will vary by carrier, and by region, so you'll get reach in major metro areas first. And of course, the demos will skew a little young, but you knew that. Learn from SMS more than from the Web, and don't forget what worked back in the bad old days of dial-up walled gardens.