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.

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.

For the U.S, Digital Is Now Mainstream

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Follow me @minicooper

iPhones, DVRs, and navigation guides are thought of as devices for the early adopter. Or at least they used to be. Forrester released the results of its latest annual Consumer Benchmark Data Overview Report, which concludes that the use of digital devices has become a mainstream part of every day life. This finding, which is critical to how companies plan their product and marketing plans for the coming year, holds significant power in terms of where marketers spend their money during the rest of 2009 and into 2010.

In this year’s report, we segmented consumers by lifestage, to help marketers understand the distinct use of digital technologies to reach young singles and couples, young families, older families, and older singles and couples. This lens provides some very interesting consumer insights into how  technology behavior changes when people transition between different stages of their lives. Which devices do they own, and how many of them, what are they buying and not buying, how they are using the Internet and even how they’ve structured their digital home. .

The New York Times has a write-up of the report this morning, click here to read the article.

Read more about this report and its methodology on our Consumer Market Research blog, or if you are a client link directly to the report here. Click here to get access to some additional consumer insights related to this report.

Also, note how Marketers can put this data to use:

To get a deeper understanding of how to use this report to refine your media mix, Forrester's Marketing Leadership analysts will be applying the results of this survey to our Media Allocation Tool. For more insight into this tool, please contact me via email at dcooperstein-at-forrester.com, or @minicooper on Twitter.

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