Posts Tagged ‘Interactive Marketing’

Driving Conversions is what it’s all about

Posted: April 22, 2013 in customer experience
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I recently published an article in Chief Marketer about driving conversions through increasing the relevancy of content entitled, Drive Conversions by Making Interactions More Relevant

Customer experience evolves into Co-experience

Posted: November 10, 2011 in Co-experience, customer experience
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Most companies define customer experience as bi-directional brand interactions; the prospect reacting to an ad, a first time buyer, or a customer interacting with customer service. With the advent of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices and fundamental shifts in the purchase process, traditional customer experience is being replaced by co-experience.

Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

Popularity and Influence are not the same

Posted: March 1, 2011 in Marketing Strategy, real-time marketing, social media, social networking, User-generated content
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I read a thought provoking article in AdAge this morning by Matthew Creamer. The title, “Your Followers are no measure of your influence,” does an excellent job of debunking the notion that just because you have millions of followers on Twitter, you are automatically an influencer. But I think that Matthew missed the larger point that there are genuine influencers in every community whether online or not. And that there are different categories of influencers representing three kinds of publishers; editorial, brand and peers.

The Justin Biebers or Ashton Kutchers of the world are not significantly different than the Hollywood hucksters of generations past. For anyone who can remember Orson Wells pitching Paul Masson wines, there is plenty of evidence of celebrities trying to convert their popularity into influence. They leverage their own personal brands to add a cache to what they are promoting; branding 101. These people are professional or editorial influencers and to which also belong most politicians, journalists and analysts. Regardless of your aesthetic, political or social beliefs, it’s hard not to acknowledge this class of bloggers, Tweeters and authors. And it’s hard not to understand that no matter where they come from, they are advancing their own or their sponsor’s agendas.

There’s another class of influencers who are exerting their presence of the Web and across social media; brands themselves. Within every category, there are competing brands that are generating content aimed to influence the conversation about and the perception of their brand and the products and services associated with their brand. And like the editorial influencers, they unabashedly have their own agendas.

So what does that leave? The rest of the social world made up of individuals who demonstrate their influence by their expertise, their ability to communicate and the authenticity of their messages. These are our peers, like the best Mommy bloggers, leaders in various forums; what Augie Ray of Forrester Research calls, Mass Influencers. This group which amounts to around 6% of the online population generates 80% of the influence impressions.

All these different categories of influencers can be leveraged by marketers, both to disseminate their content, buoyed by the influencers own credibility, but also as a means of understanding what consumers are genuinely interested in.

At Blab, http://www.blabbings.com, we understand that if you don’t first understand who the “influencers” really are and what is the nature of their influence, you won’t be able to use them to give a lift to your marketing efforts, regardless of channel.

A new advertising agency model?

Posted: December 17, 2010 in New Agency Model
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Current advertising agencies make revenue based on a service model charged by number of employees it takes to deliver an agreed scope of work. All IP, thinking and work an agency does on behalf of its clients belong to those clients. Agency long term value is based on reputation, a portfolio of clients’ work and knowledge residing in individuals who might or might not leave.

There is no current ability to build massive data storage populated with agency owned data regarding what’s important to people, how they interact and make decisions. There is no ability to break down the FTE heavy structure and process inherent in making money to action campaigns in 72 hours or less. There is no ability to scale beyond tens of clients. There is no ability to use data collection to normalize between channels and determine a predictability regarding where and how to best spend marketing funds.

Agencies today develop client rosters based on cultural fit, revenue limitations, geographic limitations, reputation. Agencies don’t identify specific categories and set out to become experts in these categories as a cable broadcaster might, because there is no way of amassing long category term IP.

Agencies do not build and curate influencer communities within specific categories with the purpose of creating a category network that is ripe to consume and proliferate publishing.

….. but what if an agency were to throw the rule books out, starting with the business model and organizational structure

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
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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.

It’s getting harder to be an independent agency

Posted: April 27, 2010 in Uncategorized
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AdAge magazine just released its 2009 annual agency report today, ranking all the top agencies by revenue and grouping them according to what may be dying distinctions like advertising, direct, media, digital, search and PR. Overall agency revenues were down 7.5%, “the sharpest revenue decline in the 66 years Ad Age has produced the Agency Report.” Although digital agencies overall faired a bit better, statistically gaining 0.5% over the previous year.

But what I find more interesting than anything else is that digital agencies, once considered the mavericks, the outsiders are now about as mainstream as possible if for no other reason than almost all of the top twenty agencies are owned by much larger agency holding companies. The true independents are becoming rare indeed. It started a couple of years ago with Publicis gobbling up Digitas. They have since acquired Razorfish as well. Blast Radius is a part of WPP and the #3 digital agency is IBM Interactive and we know nothing speaks independent more than being a part of IBM.

In fact of the top 20 digital agencies, only 5 are not owned by a much larger company. And of those, Sapient has merged with Nitro, Rosetta bought Brulant and iCrossing appears to become a part of the Hearst empire.

What does all this mean for independent agencies, for marketers and for consumers? Well, sitting in one of the top five remaining independent agencies, Ascentium, makes me feel like I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back and I’m waiting to hear the M&A types pounding at my door. And perhaps that might not be a bad thing from a financial point of view.

Although for many us who have done both the big agency and the startup, we know why we went for the small option. It’s more fun, we get to work the way we want to and it frees up our creative juices. Frankly we produce better work because we feel like it. That’s the reason a lot of corporate marketers are turning more and more to independent and specialty shops; that’s where the ideas, the new technologies and the partnership mentality come from.

And finally, what about the consumer, do they care where marketing campaigns and experiences come from? Maybe not, but according to the latest from Forrester, watching advertising ranks lowest among consumers as a measure of influence, purchase intent and loyalty. And it’s the big guys who still make most of their money from these forms of traditional push advertising. So go figure.

I’m proud that Ascentium has made it to the #5 position among independent digital agencies this year. And I hope that demonstrates both our preference for going it alone and for our clients’ preference to work with an agency who considers their clients their partners, not their holding company.

CMOs Need Technology and need our help

Posted: April 21, 2010 in Uncategorized
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Increasingly CMO’s are being brought into the technology buying process as technology is becoming even more intertwined with today’s multi-channel, multi-device world of marketing. And it’s up to us in the agency world who call ourselves trusted advisors to come to their aid.

It’s impossible to be a successful chief marketing officer (CMO) without becoming engaged in the understanding and decision making regarding technology. In a recent Forrester Research study, “The CMO’s Role in Technology Decisions”, David Cooperstein states that while “traditionally, marketing leaders treated IT as a foreign land that had a native language they didn’t speak… today’s marketers can’t afford to be lost in translation because digital channel embed technology in everything, marketing and the multi-channel customer experience are inextricably linked and fewer resources require strapped marketers to use technology to scale.” In other words, CMOs don’t really have a choice, either they need to learn the language of technology or they will not be able to compete in today’s digitalized, mobilized and socialized world of the interactive, integrated customer experience.

So who can help CMO’s learn the language of technology? Most (55%) look to their own IT departments , even though “strained” was the most common word to describe the typical relationship between CMOs and CIOs . And in smaller numbers, they look to their traditional agencies (21%) and management consultants (17%) for support. But almost half are looking towards their interactive agencies (49%) and their marketing services providers (44%) . And it is this audience that I believe has the responsibility to take the lead in helping CMOs navigate and make the smart business decisions that make the difference between leadership and falling behind.

But even within the worlds of the interactive agency or the marketing service providers, there are still large gaps in understanding what technology means for marketing and how to make the most of limited resources and the rapidly changing world of the customer experience. Most interactive agencies are either focused on online advertising or the increasing diversity of rich applications for platforms like Facebook or smartphones. While marketing service providers continue to concentrate on the silos of their own product’s capabilities despite the expansion of technology communities like Salesforce.com’s Appexchange or Omniture’s Genesis program.

At the risk of drawing the ire of my agency colleagues, I see the greatest opportunity in the hands of the emerging marketing practices of marketing consultancies like Accenture Interactive or McKinsey or the consulting arms of research organizations like Forrester or eMarketer. If CMOs have to be able to understand how technology will help them in the achievement of their business goals, then they need help from someone who first understands their business, their customers and how the complexity of the customer experience across all touch points can be influenced, optimized and in the end monetized.
And so it’s up to all of us in the agency world to embrace new roles as not just stewards of the brand, but as, business consultants who look equally to the worlds of creative, big ideas and technology as the best way to add values to our clients, the CMO. Because if we don’t step up to the challenge, someone else will.

1 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey
2 Forrester Research, 2008 Partnering for Success: The CMO-CIO Relationship
3 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey

Ascentium Names first Chief Client Officer

Posted: March 3, 2010 in Ascentium, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy
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I am proud to welcome the newest addition to Ascentium’s ranks, David Blum who has joined in the newly created role of chief client officer. David has joined Ascentium after leading interactive for Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, the Bay area advertising agency, named small agency of the decade by Adweek.
Not only does David bring tremendous talent, energy and experience to the job, but what is more important is what it represents to an agency like Ascentium.

Over the last few years, Ascentium has been steadily building a reputation as one of the nation’s leading digital agencies, producing great work for client’s like Microsoft, T-Mobile, Cisco, Precor and Samsonite. But being the best digital agency is only a milestone on the road to helping redefine what agencies should look like in the future.

At our core, we are an experience agency. We meld passion for big ideas with an obsession for performance that produces engaging experiences, not just on the Web, but across multiple platforms, channels and devices. And to do that, we need to take from what traditional advertising agencies do best; own the “big idea” and manage account relationships and fuse that together with what digital agencies are known for; innovation leveraging emerging channels, technologies and customer behavior.

David Blum’s arrival at Ascentium will help us do that. His experience at BSSP helping to win major AOR accounts like Priceline, Allstate, Greyhound, Columbia Sportswear, Chipotle, Epson and Radio Shack coupled with the work he did managing Razorfish’s web development group in Seattle. Give testimony to Ascentium’s commitment to going beyond digital and leading the evolution into a true Experience agency.

Check out the article in today’s Adweek online about David, www.adweek.com.

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
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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.

Look beyond Websites and start thinking, Integrated Digital Experience

Posted: October 18, 2009 in Uncategorized
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My company, Ascentium, was named by Forrester Research, as one of the top web design agencies in the country last summer. It was an honor and I think a fair reflection of some great Web sites we’ve been building. But at the risk of diminishing the importance of Web site, I believe we’ve entered a new era, when producing a great web site is not enough to have an effective web presence and to keep up with your customer’s digital experiences.

The other week, I had the privilege of speaking at the first annual Integrated Marketing Communications conference in Kansas City. My topic was the introduction of the Integrated Digital Experience concept. Its premise is fairly simple and does not represent rocket science. But like most important concepts, its not the understanding that’s difficult, it’s the implementation that’s hard.

I’ve uploaded my slide deck to SlideShare and in future posts, will begin elaborating on what IDE means and what are some easy steps to making it happen. Check it out at http://www.slideshare.net/jkottcamp/the-digital-experience .

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