Microsites can dilute brand equity

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008
 
As search continues to grow, advertisers are seeking ways to use it to support their other marketing efforts – recognising the interdependency between search and other media. But in doing so, many are breaking some of the basic rules of advertising and hampering their own efforts to make search work for their brand.

Company websites are often massive, templated affairs that don’t lend themselves to the creative, flexible demands of a short-term campaign, and so many marketers deal with this by setting up campaign microsites to address this limitation.

But the problem comes when enthusiastic marketers create new web domains for campaigns.

A domain is key brand asset – boots.com, Sky.com, tateandlyle.com; all of these companies recognise the importance of having the web domain for their brand.

But all of these companies have launched microsites under separate domains to support short term objectives.

The difficulty here is that the focus of communication becomes the domain, rather than the brand itself – relegating the brand name itself to the second tier, and making it subordinate to the needs of the campaign. The objective becomes to promote the campaign itself, rather than the brand – not an inconceivable idea, but one to be approached with caution.

From a communications point of view it’s also a matter of consistency. Whilst this isn’t true of Double Diamond or Smash, campaigns (and straplines) usually have shorter shelf lives than brands, and we have to think carefully before we deviate from making the brand the hero.

But it’s much worse when you try to promote these sites using search.

In paid search, whilst you can prevent competitors bidding on your brand terms, this is harder to achieve with straplines (though you can if they’re trademarked). Type ‘quote me happy’ into Google, and whilst Norwich Union is listed in the paid for results. But so are two aggregators, insurancesite and Adrian Flux – both selling competitive products.

And to compound the loss, whilst Norwich Union have registered www.quotemehappy.com, they haven’t secured www.quotemehappy.co.uk, which continues to direct traffic away to other insurance companies.

So using campaign-specific domains creates problems in paid for search. But natural search is a much bigger challenge.

The spiders that crawl the web creating the index for search engines are programmed to evaluate websites against a set of criteria which determine how highly those sites appear in the ranking for particular search terms.

Four of the most influential criteria are; how long a site has been in existence, the quality, depth and relevance of information on the site, how many websites link to it, the quality of those linking websites.

So setting up a campaign microsite on a new domain runs counter to the way search engines work.

Compared to a brand or company website, campaign microsites tend to be shorter-term affairs –often even for a promotion with a finite and brief shelf life. Natural search rankings take time to establish, so are less effective as a promotional tool against transient activity – particularly if that activity offers little that will cause a spider to prioritise it.

And it does. Limited content, few links from other sites and competition from the brand website tend to push these sites to invisibility down the search rankings – expertatboots.com, boots’ site to promote their professional expertise, ranks 4th in google behind the boots.com brand which takes the first 3 places even when you search for ‘expert at boots’, and fails to make page 1 in either the paid or natural listings for any of the product areas featured on the home page.

Campaign microsites can fulfil short-term objectives and be a valuable means of circumventing corporate inflexibility. But when they’re given their own domain, more often they dilute brand equity and perform poorly in search. They might look attractive in a conventional advertising sense, but they frequently fail to deliver in digital terms.

Digital predictions for 2008

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


2007 was a rollercoaster ride. The rise of Facebook, the Doubleclick acquisition by Google, the continued boom in both online advertising and e-commerce – the sheer pace of growth continued to keep us all on our toes.


As January gets into full swing, it’s a good time to think about the trends for 2008. If last year was anything to go by, there’ll be no shortage of material, so I’ve picked four that are going to define the coming year.

IPTV

Christmas has seen the BBC pushing its iPlayer software heavily on TV. The system lets viewers watch BBC programmes over the internet up to seven days after broadcast, and it’s a great (free) product.

But as this column has discussed before, it’s just one of several IPTV platforms – Sky and Channel 4 have their own, whilst ITV streams its programmes on the web. This makes watching TV online clunky and over-technical, with different software required for Eastenders and Coronation Street, and no common programme guide.

Kangaroo, the BBC’s joint venture with Channel 4 and ITV is expected to put paid to these obstacles, bringing these operators’ channels together with others on one software platform – one observer commenting that it could do for IPTV what Freeview did for digital TV.

And it comes at an opportune moment – according to the OECD, the average speed of UK broadband connections is 4Mb, and over half of UK homes have broadband – providing a critical mass of users that could see IPTV take off this year.

Mobile web

Poor battery life, duff devices, worse software and cripplingly high costs have conspired to keep the web firmly in the home or office.

But all of these are set to change in 2008. Not just better phones (Apple’s iPhone is the first usable mobile web browser – coupling a good device with excellent software) that make using the internet on the move a reasonable proposition, but also the success of ultra-mobile PCs.

At the same time, the mobile networks have introduced fixed-price access (largely responsible for the growth in fixed-line internet access), and WiFi hotspots (many of which are free) have become common. With longer-range technologies like WiMAX are starting to become available, we’re going to see the web unplugged in 2008.

Transparency spreads

A lot of attention has been focused on how brands will be affected by the transparency the web demands, but 2008 will be the year that transparency comes to politics.

We’ve already seen how bloggers have taken enthusiastically to the task of keeping our representatives in order, but technology is set to change the availability and meaningfulness of data. Earmarkwatch.org puts a flag on every location earmarked by the US Congress for defence spending – straight away, you can see which states are benefiting from federal investment, and which are losing out, and applications like this could change (not just for the better) the level of understanding we can have of what is done in our name.


Regulation

2007 saw the US Federal Trade Commission grant approval for Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, doubtless aware that the deal bolstered a substantial export opportunity for US business. But will the competition authorities in Europe take the same view? They were tougher on Microsoft in the past, and may be less inclined to support Google here, as the search giant’s share of the business is close to 90% in both the UK and Germany.

What is significant is this. ‘New’ media isn’t new anymore, and regulators are starting to wake up to the power it wields. By 2009, internet advertising is widely expected to have overtaken TV in the UK, and that scale makes it a big business that government won’t be able to keep its hands off.

The sense is that digital is outgrowing its adolescence. Government and business are sitting up and taking notice, even if they’re still scratching the surface of what will be possible. 2008 is going to be a growing up year; the year that digital starts to become the establishment.

Step forward the Geek Marketer

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

The Geek Marketer will inherit the earth – or at least the marketing department.  A new breed of marketer is bringing together a marketing background with a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology – a cross-disciplinary hybrid that’s able to span the traditional divide between digital and marketing.  

Steve Rubel, who first identified this new strain of marketers, writes in his blog that dozens of Fortune 500 companies are appointing geek marketers to take control of an increasingly complex, digital world.  They’re recognising, he says, that as technology transforms business, these people have a key role to play.

The rise of digital media has raised enormous challenges for organisations, as demands are placed which cross functions and skill sets within them.  Marketing has borne the brunt of this, as for many businesses digital has opened up a direct communication channel with their consumers.

As this evolved, marketers have been faced with more data, and more ways of using that data.  From cookies to behavioural targeting, from RSS feeds to dynamic keyword insertion, technology has rapidly brought massive and increasing complexity to their roles, and companies that have been able to master this have created competitive advantages for their businesses – leaving others behind.

But whilst businesses have wrestled with the fusing of technology and marketing, digital has brought other skills together as well.

Increasingly, the traditional role of the media agency is changing.  Media agencies are organisations who use consumer insight to fill holes in other people’s media.  They use relatively shallow levels of consumer understanding to determine where they should place the messages they’ve been given, but have no influence on what should be said.

But in digital, the lines between creative, content and media have become blurred.  Consumer insight no longer is the sole responsibility of the agency coming up with the TV ad – instead it’s coming from those who understand how an audience relates to its media.  And executing on these insights is no longer a straightforward process either.  

Now, ideas cross between the creation of content – be it advertorial, widgets or social networking programmes – ‘traditional’ creative ideas involving advertising, and media ideas.

When the Talk to Frank drugs advice programme wanted to extend their reach using the internet, they did it not by running advertising to drive teenagers to a website, but by working with MSN to create a bot - a computer program that’s capable of responding to questions in everyday language posed about drugs.  They knew that over 50% of teens used instant messenger every day – it is their ‘natural’ environment – and within 12 weeks over 250,000 teens had added the FrankBot to their buddy list, having over a million conversations with it, and asking over 20m questions.

This isn’t a media idea, and neither is it a creative idea.  It’s a hybrid of both, with technology added in.  It would be relatively easy to discover that teenagers have very high usage of instant messenger.  But a normal media/advertising response to this would have been to place advertising into this environment – filling the holes in someone else’s media.

Instead, the creators of this programme reflected the way their audience used this medium.  They embedded themselves in their consumers’ usage of IM, making themselves a part of that consumption pattern, and the result was a 17x increase in the number of conversations they had with teenagers.

So the ability to fuse the disciplines of technology, marketing, media and creative is a potent driver of effective communication – but it can only be delivered by people who have an understanding of the digital habitat and of the ways and norms of the people who live there.  

Whether you call this marketing, advertising, media or technology, this hybrid approach is increasingly important as businesses seek to engage with customers in the digital age.  And as this happens, step forward the geek marketer.

The year of the mobile?

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

Every second of every day, according to the CIA world factbook, 2.4 babies are born. It’s a busy old world, you might conclude, and you might leave it at that.

For numbers like this to mean anything, they’ve got to be given context. We need a benchmark – something to give us a sense of whether this number is large or small. So here’s one.

Every second of every day (in the third quarter of this year) 23 mobile phones were sold.
Now aside from the obvious conclusion that every baby has around ten mobile phones, that’s a big number. In fact just shy of a quarter of a billion handsets were sold in Q3 by the top 5 manufacturers.

Every year we look at the rate of growth and the increasing smartness of devices and believe the coming year will be the ‘year of mobile marketing’ (confession: I’ve been guilty of this too).
So will 2008 finally be that year?

To reach the tipping point, there are three factors needed to drive audiences online. Flat rate data access, smart devices and worthwhile content.

2007 saw mobile operators move towards charging a flat rate for internet access – a model that’s expected to lead to a surge in usage. The year also saw the emergence of much improved devices –Nokia’s N95, which offered 3G speed web access (when the battery hadn’t run out) and Apple’s iPhone, which wowed reviewers with what many saw as the first really usable mobile web device.

Driven by these developments, the number of UK mobile internet users has risen 30% in the last year, to 16m in October. Google tops the list of sites visited in the UK, followed by Orange and the BBC.

But the numbers remain tiny in comparison to fixed web consumption, and media usage on the mobile internet remains a niche activity.

But whilst the consumption of media content has remained limited, what has emerged over the past year feels very much like the early years of the internet, as more and more applications are launched.
This year has seen Westminster City Council convert many of its parking bays to payment by mobile phone (saving all that insecure cash collection), Transport for London’s Cabwise scheme lets you text a short code and get the phone numbers of two cab firms local to where you’re texting from.

You can microblog through Twitter, flirt through flirtomatic, instant message with people, Check prices when standing in a shop, download a map showing where you are. There are even SMS-enabled rat traps.

Nokia have just launched a test using a phone with built-in oyster card to pay for tube and bus journeys, and with a stored-value card to make small payments.

Using a mobile phone to make payments is already commonplace in Japan, where phones are also used to scan barcodes (QR codes) in newspapers – providing a return path for print advertising and a common means of distributing coupons.

So what is the significance of all these apparently unconnected things?

The emergence of mobile as an internet device isn’t going to be driven by media content. As with the internet, there was no ‘killer application’ – rather the gradual accretion of thousands of useful things; email, banking, dating, share trading, news, shopping, online TV, search. As these services gathered, individual users reached their own tipping points – they weren’t driven online by one service, but often by the addition of one application to the existing weight of services.

So 2008 isn’t going to be the ‘year of mobile’. There isn’t going to be a moment when we wake up and everything’s mobile. Instead, the coming year will see the accumulation of more and more services and applications offered through mobiles.

So mobile success over the coming year isn’t going to come from advertising – it’s going to come to brands that bring value to consumers by providing stuff they’ll use.

Digital Immigrants

At the recent IAB Engage conference, there was a lot of talk about whether digital consumers are different from other consumers, and views came from both ends of the spectrum.

One view, put forcefully by Roisin Donnelly from P&G, is that the digital consumer is not a different species that needs to be treated in isolation – “online people are exactly the same as offline people”.  She went on to say “we must adopt a consistent approach focusing on the consumer”.

There are others who think that digital changes the game.  Josh Spear from Undercurrent believes “Marketers are playing by an entirely new set of rules in the web 2.0 landscape”.

So does the fact that internet users also watch TV and read newspapers make them the same as people who don’t use the internet?  And have the rules really changed, or just the place we apply them?

Back in 2001, a US educational software designer called Mark Prensky wrote an influential paper called “Digital Natives, DigitalImmigrants”.  His thesis was that people growing up today are immersed from an early age in a digital way of life, based around the internet, video games, mobile phones and instant messaging, and that this was changing the way they thought – and more than this, the way their brains were wired.

To Prensky, people who didn’t grow up in this environment see the world differently – and when they become immigrants to the digital world, their newcomer’s accent shows.

Printing out email, needing to print a document to edit it, bringing people over to show them a website instead of sending a link – these are all examples where a digital immigrant’s accent is a giveaway. 

I recognise this myself - as the sole digital person at a big agency some years ago, I was asked by a creative team to make tapes of a website – and despite protestations that this was missing the point, I had to sit there surfing whilst a technician transferred the site to videotape.

Prensky’s concern was as an educationalist – that a generation of people with heavy immigrant accents were teaching a generation of digital natives, and that their worlds are incompatible – natives with their non-linear, multitasking, instant gratification culture faced with immigrants from a linear, focused and longer-term world.

A variety of studies have demonstrated that kids multitask in a way that their parents simply can’t understand.  The Kids’ Leisure Time 2 report found that 2-12s spend a quarter of their leisure time doing two or more activities at the same time.  In 2006, a large-scale media consumption study by KFF found that 21% of young people’s media time was spent multitasking, whilst if they were doing their homework on a computer, 65% were doing something else at the same time.

But it isn’t just the ability to manipulate information that marks a digital native out as different.  A Gallup poll shows that only 15% of 13-17s think downloading music (breaching copyright) is morally wrong.  Rushworth Kidder, at the Institute for Global Ethics believes kids think “It's not like stealing, because nothing is missing.”

So there’s lots of evidence that there are differences between those who were ‘born digital’ and those who weren’t. 

But they all eat Pringles and watch TV don’t they?

Perhaps so.  But whilst on the surface some behaviours might look similar, their motivations and expectations of brands can be quite different.

They are less tolerant of being sold to, expect us to be ethically upstanding (whilst not expecting the same of themselves), and to have their voice heard when they want to express themselves.  They consume information differently – faster, non-linear and multitasking, and driven by instant and frequent reward.

So whilst it remains that a brand can only remain ‘true’ if it has a consistently communicated proposition, what’s got harder now is that we have to execute that communication in ways that are different at a fairly fundamental level.  And for that, you need to speak like a native.

Demographics is useless

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007



For more years now than any of us can remember, demographics has been a fundamental building block for marketers and the media folk who serve them.

Working on the assumption that people with similar age and social class exhibit similar behaviour, marketers use demographics as a shorthand – young/old, up/down market.

I’m hardly the first person to point out that this is a gross over-simplification of what we flatter ourselves to consider the most complex animal on the planet.  But demographic information is an aggregated view that’s intended describe a group’s characteristics – it’s not intended to predict an individual’s behaviour.

So herein lies the problem.

Whilst knowing that one group is more likely to buy our product than another allows us to target them and thereby increase our chances of success, we recognise that within that group there will be a substantial number who won’t respond to the message for one reason or another.

We’ve grown to live with this compromise – and entire media planning and trading systems have grown up around it.

There must be a better way.

Of course there already is, and the biggest exponent of it, Google, already makes more money in the UK than ITV.

Google’s success is based on relevance.

Advertising is bought against keywords – terms that users search for – and of course these keywords describe the interests of the searcher.  Each keyword has a bid price, dependent entirely on demand, and the whole system is automated from Google’s side.

The genius of all this is that consumers get ads that are directly relevant to their search, presented to them exactly when they’ve just indicated their interest in a topic.  And the content costs Google nothing.

It’s not surprising then that when Facebook launched an online advertising system, it looked to search for inspiration.

Their new advertising system imports many of the features that made Google successful – self-operation, combined with credit card payment that makes it easy for small businesses to participate.  An auction allows demand to influence pricing, and you can target around interests, based on groups that users belong to.

But it’s gone much further than this.  Social Ads allow ads to be served to friends of users of your site.  If I buy a book on your site (assuming I’ve arrived via Facebook’s beacon system), my friends can be shown an ad – “Andrew Walmsley rated this book 4/5 – buy it here” along with my picture to emphasise the personal connection.

And where only individuals could set up pages before, Facebook now allows companies to set up pages, forming the basis for promoting their products and services.  Reflecting this, users don’t ‘friend’ these pages, they become ‘fans’ – an important distinction.

So what have Facebook created?

Social media has challenged marketers, because there isn’t a clear role for brands in the space.  For many consumers, brands’ presence feels like an intrusion into personal space, so success in this area has principally been limited to entertainment brands.

Facebook have achieved three things.  They’ve found a distinctive way of carving out a place for businesses to coexist with people in a social network.  They’ve established a means of promoting brands that’s derived from the interactions (and transactions) of people.  And they’ve created a clever way of targeting people that reflects their interests and behaviour.

The great thing about the online media space is that nobody can be quite sure what use this is going to be to anyone.  Facebook have given us a big box of toys, and it’s up to us to figure out what to do with it.

Google and Facebook give us a glimpse of the future, and it’s a future where demographics will no longer be the means by which we understand audiences and no longer the currency by which we trade them.  There’s no place here for the compromise that demographics force on us, and it’ll change both advertisers’ and consumers’ expectations across the media world.

Second Life and corporate hubris

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

You don’t have to be close to the news to know that the internet’s doing pretty well these days.  More than half of UK homes have broadband, 14% of advertising spend is expected to be online this year, the IMRG reports online retail was up 80% in July, and my mum just celebrated 10 years online.

Wind back a few years though, and it was all gloom and doom.  Dotcoms dropping like flies, and investors running away from the internet sector like crowds in a Godzilla movie.  Lycos (bought by Terra Networks in 2000 for $12.5 billion) sold for $95m in 2004, eToys, Boo and Kozmo all went bust, and AOL Time Warner quietly dropped the AOL from their name.

Vast amounts of cash were burned in the boom and its subsequent bust, and the world’s investors reacted against their losses by vowing never to darken the internet’s door again.  But as it turns out, their knee-jerk rejection of the internet was as irrational as their embracing of it was exuberant.

Because every day of every month as the crash continued, more and more people got connected to the internet.  Eventually, business re-adopted the internet and started to make money out of it, and now investors can’t get enough.

But this rosy outlook isn’t universal.

After the initial excitement and irrational exuberance that marked the first two years of Second Life, the voices of the naysayers are now coming to the fore.

The recent ban on gambling in-world led to the biggest bank in SL, Ginko, closing its doors after a run on the bank.  Starwood hotels announced the closure of their Hotel, and others are left wondering whether it was worth all the effort.

A quick visit to American Apparel reveals it to be closed permanently for business, the Reebok store is empty.  Leo Burnett’s treehouse was vacant, shops and other commercial environments have virtual tumbleweed blowing through them.

So was it all just one big PR stunt, or have we just hit a digital speedbump on the road to next-generation media?

What drove these businesses into Second Life was the feeling that there was new area of the economy opening up.  People were spending time there, and importantly they were making money – SL’s first millionaire (that’s in real-world US dollars), Anshe Chung, emerged last year having made her fortune principally in real (is that the right word?) estate.

Few companies really believed that they would earn huge returns.  What piqued their interest was the potential that these alternate worlds might offer in the future.

Second Life isn’t alone.  World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, There, and now the Lord of the Rings are amongst dozens of virtual worlds where millions of people spend hours of their time.

They’re trading with each other, fighting each other, marrying each other.  Their lives spill in and out of these virtual worlds, and when you talk to someone who spends time there, their language is that of someone who regards it not as a game, but as a part of their life.

For some time now, it’s been possible (in a lab) for a person to control a computer game directly from their brain.  Now, a study at UCL has shown that someone who is prodded in the chest at the same time as this is done to their virtual self can associate that sensation with their virtual self rather than the real one.  The applications for virtual environments like Second Life are obvious – making them more immersive, more personal and more real.

So the likelihood is that we’re underestimating the potential impact of these ‘games’ on humans.  Understanding more about these phenomena is both fascinating and important, but what’s happened in SL has been more about corporate hubris than about targeted learning – it’s hard to see what Telecom Italia expects to learn from operating a racetrack in SL, other than that nobody wants to go there.

There are big lessons to be learned – but you don’t necessarily need to buy an island to learn them.