Archive for the ‘SDMA’ Category

Launching the Rainier Advisory Group

Posted: September 7, 2010 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, online marketing suite, Rainier Advisory Group, SDMA, Strategy, web marketing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

After nearly 5 years, I’m leaving Ascentium and starting my own consultancy, Rainier Advisory Group specializing in helping companies navigate the complexity of the marketing technology landscape.

I’m very proud of the success I’ve had growing Ascentium from a small technology consulting firm into the 5th largest independent digital agency according to AdAge and being called out with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the country by Forrester Research in their 2009 Forrester Wave® of Top Interactive Agencies.

Now is the time to move on and focus on my real passion of mastering cross-channel customer experiences through the integration of the technologies that are helping transform the marketing landscape from search to analytics, lead management to CRM and everything in between. With the maturation of cloud-based services, today’s marketer is faced with a myriad of choices and almost no one to help navigate not only the applications and services themselves, but how they fit into an integrated cross-channel strategy, Forrester calls Digital Brand Orchestration.

I believe that my combination of executive experience on the client side for Lufthansa, T-Mobile and Gateway, agency consulting experience working with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Lexus, and Ford as well as start ups like Marketfish, Quasar, and Surveyanalytics as well as my thought leadership and speaking engagements for organizations like Forrester Research, the DMA, Digital Hollywood, Mirren New Business, The Integrated Marketing Conference and MarketMix, position me well to provide the strategic consulting services needed by leading companies, marketing service providers and advertising agencies.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like more information or if you know of any firm in need of my services.
I will also be devoting time to my commitment to our industry in my capacity as past president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Business Marketing Association chapter as well as lecturing on digital marketing at local institutes of higher learning.

Most of my contact information remains unchanged, with the exception that I can now be reached at john@rainierag.com or jkottcamp@gmail.com . Today I have also launched my new company website, www.rainierag.com . Farewells are always sad, but new beginnings are even more exciting. I continue to wish everyone at Ascentium continued success and I look forward to sharing new stories with each of you in the near future.

Digital Agencies are proving they’re ready to lead

Posted: November 13, 2009 in Ascentium, CMO, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, SDMA, social media, social networking, Strategy
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

I read a very good and insightful article in today’s Adage, “Why Digital Agencies are Indeed Ready to Lead” by Jacques-Herve Roubert. I agree with his contention that Digital agencies are indeed ready to lead and as he points out, our company, Ascentium, is demonstrating that in fact with our relationship with Precor, but also increasingly so with some of our other accounts who are looking for to us for ideas and strategy and their traditional agencies for mass advertising.

The reasons for this are many and you pointed out some really good ones regarding where the energy, ideas and innovation is coming from. But the basic underlying reason is rooted in the business model of the big traditional agencies more than anything else. The traditional business model is based on revenue streams from media, not direct billable hours. This means that to be successful, agencies were forced into thinking about media as the prime distribution channel because that is how they make money. Digital agencies are not boxed in that way and as a result, they are able to look more broadly across channels and take a more customer-centric approach to communication than a media or product based approach.

Devotion to gathering customer intelligence across multiple channels online, offline and emerging social channels and then applying that to create customer experiences which produce trackable and measureable results is the key to our success at Ascentium and I believe that same can be said for the other great emerging digital agencies cired as well, like AKQA and TribalDDB. The big agencies are saddled with the innovator’s dilemma and while it won’t be the end of them, it certainly erects a big speed bump to innovation.

Social Media, forget the hype and forget the technology

Posted: August 26, 2009 in community marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, SDMA, social media, social networking, User-generated content, Web 2.0
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

There was a full article in the Seattle Times this morning about social media. It’s amazing that a major media outlet either just discovered social media as a topic or there wasn’t enough new news to fill the dwindling number of printed pages. But let’s not get on the subject of newspapers and why most journalists seem to be more afraid of social media than taking steps to become the leaders of it.

What I want to talk about is not newspapers and not about what social media is, isn’t or what its good for. I don’t know and I’m supposedly an expert on the subject for my agency Ascentium. What I do know is that I don’t want to see, hear, blog, tweet or otherwise spew about the definition of social media and how it’s going to change the world, or at least our way of thinking about the world. Been there, done that.

It’s time to focus on the reality, not the potential of social media. Look at what Twitter is being used for politically around the globe. See how the Huffington Post has already redefined journalism. And as marketers, let’s start talking about the work we’re at our companies or for our clients. Let’s see what is working and what isn’t. And let’s define success, not at the nebulous level of “building brand awareness” or “increasing reach”. Let’s apply real metrics to determine the ROI of a very broad array of activities, campaigns and applications that we lump under the category of social media.

As president of the SDMA, we created an editorial calendar of the coming year’s series of monthly events. The kickoff event, to be held on 09/09/09 at the Bellevue Hyatt was listed in our working calendar as social media. From there, we went about selecting a speaker(s). It was easy to find some really smart people who could pontificate on social media. In fact, last week the Seattle Social Media Club had a great presentation on “What the f**k is Social Media?”
But we’ve tried to set the bar higher. Our moderator, Blake Cahill, of Visible Technologies, a social media expert in his own right, reached out to his considerable network and looked for marketers who were actually using various social media techniques and asked them for examples of what is and isn’t working in the very real world of corporate marketing.

The result is a great panel representing brands including Alaska Airlines, Comcast, REI and PCC Natural Markets who are willing and able to talk about what they have learned about social media.

So if you’re interested in going beyond the hype and seeing what social media can really do when applied by top marketers, come join us on Sept. 9, 2009 at 5:30p at the Bellevue Hyatt for the kick off event of the season of the SDMA.

Welcome to a new season of the SDMA

Posted: August 21, 2009 in Ascentium, SDMA
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

In addition to my role at Ascentium, I have been privileged to be elected president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA, and as we kick off our new 2009-2010 season of events I’d like to welcome back all our members, colleagues, friends and everyone that has an interest in the marketing profession.

We’re in the home stretch of summer. Our sub-baked brains are shifting from vacation to back to school, from playing hooky on a sunny Friday afternoon to getting the next proposal out the door. In other words, the fun’s over. But wait a second! Just because it’s no long 103 degrees outside, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to. The SDMA is here and it’s time to kick off another great season of speakers, events, networking and the continuation of our exploration into the art and science of modern marketing.

Last year we debuted a new tagline for the SDMA, “thinking outside the mailbox” in recognition that direct marketing has evolved into integrated marketing. We’ve taken the expertise direct marketers have gained in the areas of targeting, segmentation, analytics and ROI and are applying it to email, online advertising, search and social media. We’re extending brands across multiple new channels like mobile, branded content and the Web. And all while remembering that traditional media and direct still make up the lion’s share of marketing budgets and are evolving just as much as the new media is coming on the scene.

This season, the SDMA is going to mix things up a bit. In response to our success last year in Bellevue, we’re going to host some events on the East side and some in Seattle. We’re going to experiment with different formats including thought leader interviews, competitor panels and bring you real-life case studies showing how companies are using new ideas as well as re-inventing established methods to produce tangible and measureable results for their businesses. For this year’s calendar, visit www.sdma.org/events

In addition to our monthly events, we are partnering with the PSAMA and the Social Media Club to produce the region’s premier marketing conference, MarketMix 2010, to be held on March 10, 2010, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Mark your calendars today.

If you haven’t checked us out in awhile, visit our website at http://www.sdma.org, our groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, or even better, join us for our season’s kick-off on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 5:30-8:00p at The Bellevue Hyatt for our evening event, “Transforming your Marketing and Customer Relationships with Social Media – Real Tweets from Real Practioneers at Leading Northwest Firms,” with panelists from Alaska Airlines, REI, PCC and Comcast. To register, visit, http://www.sdma.org/events .

Looking forward to seeing you and having your participation in another great year for the SDMA and for the marketing profession in the Pacific Northwest.

On behalf of the entire SDMA board,

John P. Kottcamp, President