Bet On Always Addressability Now, Not Later

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Emily Riley

I read some  deceptively warm and fuzzy advertising riding on the subway this morning courtesy of our nation's top soft drink manufacturers. Together they have reduced calories of drinks in US schools by 88% by offering more low- and no-calorie options. "Gee," I thought, "I'd like to learn more." So as I exited the subway, I took out my phone and searched "no calorie soft drinks." The top link broke the spell; an article on msn exposing the same risks that no calorie drinks have of their sugary cousins.  My first thought was, "Well that isn't any better for our nation's children." My second was, "What the #$&?! Do these companies take me for a complete fool? Don't they know that I have the world's knowledge at my fingertips??" Apparently not.

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The Right Way To Globalize Your Interactive Marketing Programs

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Nate Elliott

I have a tailor named James.

Well, I say I have a tailor, but in truth I’ve only commissioned one item – a jacket – and it’s not done yet. I had an initial fitting about 10 days ago, and I’ll collect the finished article next week.

I decided to find a tailor because I was tired of off-the-rack suits that never fit quite right. So James took more than a dozen measurements. We talked in detail about sleeve lengths, and lapel widths, and how I liked my jackets cut. And once he’d made a sample, I tried it on so James could get the details just right. I expect it’ll be a perfect fit.

When you look at your company’s marketing efforts from one country to another, how well would you say those programs fit? In the past year I’ve worked with a bank, a consumer goods manufacturer, and a pharmaceutical company that are all struggling with how to globalize their interactive marketing programs. And while most of them had a couple different issues holding them back, there was one common theme: The global programs rarely fit the local markets.

Local interactive marketing managers tell us they’re also tired of shopping off-the-rack — in their case, being handed one-size-fits-all sites and strategies that aren’t tailored to their markets — and that they usually don’t have enough resources to make the proper alterations. The result is a choice between using ill-fitting global programs that don’t meet local needs or creating cheap one-off local efforts that don’t meet global guidelines or standards.

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Facebook Needs To Take Marketing Seriously

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Nate Elliott

My colleague Melissa Parrish and I have been thinking about the Facebook IPO. Our thoughts:

The world’s biggest social network will complete its initial public offering in a few days, with a valuation based largely on its strong history of innovation. But we have to wonder: Will Facebook ever focus any of that innovation on helping marketers?

After all, Facebook is fantastic at introducing great new features and services for its end users. The moment another social tool gains the interest of enough users – whether it’s Twitter’s rapid public chatter or Foursquare’s location-based check-ins – Facebook updates its own site to offer similar features to its legions of users. We’ve rarely seen a company borrow from its competition as quickly or as well as Facebook. And that focus on better serving end users has seen Facebook grow quickly over the years, even in the face of consistent privacy concerns.

But as good as Facebook has been at evolving to serve consumers, that’s how bad it’s been at serving marketers. In the past five years Facebook has lurched from one advertising model to another. Remember when the site charged marketers to host branded pages? Or when every page featured banners from MSN’s ad network? (You may choose to forget Facebook Beacon; Mark Zuckerberg would certainly prefer you did.)

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Facebooks Needs to Take Marketing Seriously

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Melissa Parrish

My colleague Nate Elliott and I have been thinking about the Facebook IPO. Our thoughts:

The world’s biggest social network will complete its initial public offering in a few days, with a valuation based largely on its strong history of innovation. But we have to wonder: Will Facebook ever focus any of that innovation on helping marketers?

After all, Facebook is fantastic at introducing great new features and services for its end users. The moment another social tool gains the interest of enough users – whether it’s Twitter’s rapid public chatter or Foursquare’s location-based check-ins – Facebook updates its own site to offer similar features to its legions of users. We’ve rarely seen a company borrow from its competition as quickly or as well as Facebook. And that focus on better serving end users has seen Facebook grow quickly over the years, even in the face of consistent privacy concerns.

But as good as Facebook has been at evolving to serve consumers, that’s how bad it’s been at serving marketers. In the past five years Facebook has lurched from one advertising model to another. Remember when the site charged marketers to host branded pages? Or when every page featured banners from MSN’s ad network? (You may choose to forget Facebook Beacon; Mark Zuckerberg would certainly prefer you did.)

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Engaging Your Ultra-Connected Customers

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Melissa Parrish

Back in March, I hinted at my discomfort with the way SoLoMo has come to mean technology-focused, reductive marketing campaigns usually solely focused on the “check-in.”   But the reason people want to talk about SoLoMo is because of real trends in consumer adoption of technology and advanced technology behaviors. Those of you who were at Forrester’s Marketing Leadership Forum last month know that this thinking evolved into what we’ve been calling the Always Addressable Customer — a topic that I haven’t stopped talking about since we debuted it. For those of you who haven’t yet heard the term, the Always Addressable Customer is someone who:

·         Owns and uses at least 3 data connected devices

·         Accesses the Internet multiple times per day

·         Goes online from multiple physical locations (for example: home, work, in the car, and at the mall)

These customers require marketers to think differently about their programs if they want to be effective. Always Addressable Customers don’t stop to think about their devices or “technology solutions.” Rather, technology is simply how they live their lives and get stuff done. It means that you can now reach this ultra-connected audience wherever they are, but more importantly, wherever and whenever they need you. That “need” is key here: I’m not talking about your ability to bombard your customer with irrelevant messages. I’m talking about how you can now provide true service and value to your customers whenever and wherever they need it. 

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Looking Forward To A World Ruled By The Viewable Impression

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Joanna O'Connell

Ad impressions will drop by 50% or more. CPMs will increase commensurately. ComScore 500 publishers will finally get the respect they deserve and recapture market share from their junky ad network rivals. Consumers will start noticing – dare I say liking? – display ads. Display will no longer be the red-headed stepchild in the shadow of direct response rival search or brand rival video. That's what we can look forward to in a world ruled by the viewable impression standard.

Why am I on my high horse about viewable impressions? And why do I think it's such a big deal for the industry? Well, we in the display advertising world have a real problem, and it's been plaguing us since the earliest days of the medium: how to think about, understand, and make sense of the true value of a display ad impression. Our initial answer, back in the late 1990s, was to say, "Let's just measure what we can – clicks!" and our addiction to the click-through rate (CTR) as the key measure of display advertising's success – or more often failure – was born. We should all be kicking ourselves for that, and I know many of us are: We took a brand new marketing vehicle, ripe with promise and untainted by the rules of marketing channels that came before it, and turned it into a cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel direct response mechanism.

Who did this serve? No one.

It didn't serve publishers, who were – and still are – under constant pressure to prove that the display banners they sell in their premium, proprietary environments have intrinsic value.

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Boost your content ecosystem with video

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Online video content in actionWhen I picked online video content marketing for my inaugral Forrester research report I knew it was a hot topic and an area of growing interest for interactive marketers. But even I was surprised when our data identified that for consumers branded online video content is as engaging as display advertising (read the report for more on this data).

I can guarantee that if I got a group of interactive marketers together in a room and asked for a show of hands comparing how many have a display strategy vs. how many have an online video content strategy, the display hands would vastly out number the video content hands. Seeing the levels of consumer engagement for video outlined in our research (and these days it's all about engagement right?) will hopefully make many brands start to sit up and take the medium seriously.

But how to use online video content?

When you talk to marketers who use video online it can feel a little more art than science. People enthuse that video "can work better than text" but struggle to validate or quantify how that can be. And most successful viral marketers seem to rely on gut instinct to create the next social video hit. No wonder the majority of marketers stay in the pay-to-display area of online video, never exploring content itself.

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From Advertising to Advice - Intelligent Marketing Agents

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Alan Turing sculpture at Bletchley ParkBefore the clouds, webs, and distributed networks people had to create their own spaghetti of logic inside a single building using machinery that looked like props from Doctor Who. Spurred by the need to crack the ‘Enigma’ naval communication codes during the Second World War Alan Turing developed an electromechanical device called the Bombe which played a major part in defusing the war. 2012 is the 100 year anniversary of the birth of Turing and he is rightly considered to be the father of computer science and Artificial Intelligence. Turing had both a wonderful and terrible time of it and his life story is well worth a wiki.  

The British genius didn’t just advance computer science using valves and wires. He is almost as famous for his thought experiments concerning how we may build machines and computers that can engage in intelligent discourse with humans. Could machine responses fool us into thinking that they were sourced from a human? To answer this question Turing developed a methodology to test the validity of the machine generated responses, fans of Science Fiction are likely to recognize this as the inspiration behind the ‘Voight-Kampff’ test administered by Deckard in Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner.’

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Q&A With Jermaine Dupri, Grammy-Award Winning Producer, Hip-Hop Artist, And CEO Of So So Def Recordings And Global 14

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Christine Overby

Celebrity and marketing go way back. That said, yesterday's celebrity endorsements are giving way to something more complex, sometimes complementary, and sometimes competitive -- witness classic alcohol brands fighting for shelf with Barrymore Pinot Grigio (Drew Barrymore), Mansinthe (Marilyn Manson), and 901 Tequila (Justin Timberlake). Celebrities are in familiar water with social networking, having long created content and acquired fans. Yet that relationship is changing too, as for some, setting up Facebook pages gives way to building their own communities in the same way they've built brands. The best example of this today is Jermaine Dupri and his new social networking community Global 14. Later this month to explore this initiative, I'll be sharing the stage with JD (never thought I'd type those words!). Here's a sample of what we'll discuss at the Forrester Interactive Marketing Summit in London: 

CO: What made you decide to set up your own social network, as opposed to using public tools like Facebook?
 
JD: I wanted and needed to speak to the millions of people who have been listening to my music for the past 20 years. As I studied the power of the “celebrity follow,” I decided that Facebook didn’t sound like what I was looking for. I wanted my own community where I could tap into the power of the celebrity follow. The difference between creating your own community and finding friends on someone else’s network is like night and day. My own network is a place where being a member really matters – a place that is just as much yours as it is mine. 
 
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Hot Off The Presses: Forrester Wave™ For Interactive Attribution

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Ari Osur

So how was your winter?  I hibernated, holed up in a cave studying the interactive attribution category.  Like a freakish, human Punxsutawney Phil, I emerged – but unfortunately I saw my shadow and hit the snooze button. According to tradition, this means that we are subjected to more cold days ruled by the "last click" measurement standard.  And we're still stuck in those cold days:  even among marketers we surveyed who work with an attribution provider, 28% indicated that they still rely on "first click" or "last click" to assign value to their interactive marketing activities.

Now for the good news:  the thaw is coming and we’re optimistic that it will be permanent. I’m excited to announce that The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution Providers, Q2 2012 is now available to help you select the right partner and learn more about attribution. In it, we discuss how momentum is accelerating for the interactive marketing community to dismiss "last click" and employ advanced attribution, the measurement of the partial value of each contact that contributed to a desired outcome.

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