November 19, 2011
John Kottcamp
Facebook Advertising, social media
Blab, contextual advertising, Facebook, Facebook Advertising, real-time marketing, relevancy, social marketing, social media, social networking
Blab is inventing a whole new way to advertise in the social space. Traditional advertising invades the social space with product claims and brand slogans. It’s not surprising that people click on ads in the social space half as often as they do on websites.
Blab flips the traditional ad format on its head and leads with what people are talking about. Blab predicts trending conversations by target audience across Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums; auto generates and targets relevant ads before the trend peaks.
Blab is launching an automated ad creation and targeting platform to level the playing field for small medium businesses – giving them a cost-efficient way to run effective advertising on Facebook. Blab delivers 3X leads with custom-built contextual advertising and media placement requiring zero time investment from the small medium business.
Blab announced today that it has become a part of the Facebook Marketing API Program. Access to the Ads API is a significant pivot point as it allows Blab to further drive the power of relevancy as Facebook innovates advertising solutions.
“We have seen a dramatic shift in the power of data moving from key word search to natural language intelligence allowing us to unearth what the influencers in a category are talking about,” says Randy Browning, Cofounder and CEO, Blab. “Now it’s all about predicting tomorrow’s conversation and tailoring advertising in real-time to drive a whole new level of engagement.”
Browning says that Blab’s key difference is to think in passion categories and influencers. “Our hardest job was to build a self-learning engine that evolves the knowledge base on an hourly basis while being driven from the category perspective and not ours or our client’s.”
“If you haven’t thought of using Facebook as a customer acquisition channel, Blab makes it easier for you to start and will drive more leads than you’re currently getting in any other channel” says Malcolm MacGregor, Cofounder and CCO, Blab. “Blab’s relevancy ad solution helps businesses across the entire ad spectrum, from driving qualified awareness at a CPM of tens of cents to converting engagement at a rate of 20-40 percent.”
“Blab is just getting started”, MacGregor says, “we are currently working with 20 beta clients ranging from CPG companies like Johnsonville to car dealerships like Park Place Motors to sports companies like Lib Tech and GNU snowboards.”
Check Blab out at www.blabbings.com
November 10, 2011
John Kottcamp
Co-experience, customer experience
analytics, CMO, Co-Xperience, CRM, Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, digital agency, integrated marketing, Interactive Marketing, marketing technology, social media, social networking
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.
August 31, 2011
John Kottcamp
CMO, real-time marketing, social media
analytics, CMO, Facebook, google, integrated marketing, real-time marketing, social intelligence, social media, social networking, social trends, trend, Twitter
I’ve been reading a lot about trend identification and real-time marketing lately. I wanted to put the subject into some context. For the last year, I have been working with a new start-up, Blab, which is based on the idea that trends are what get people’s attention, that their attention is very short lived and that understanding trends is only valuable for marketers if they can act in real-time and leverage people’s interest in a particular trend.
Historically, in marketing, trend identification was the prevue of market research companies and typically involved a combination of quantitative (surveys, data mining and modeling) and qualitative research (focus groups and observation). The trends that were identified tended to be macro in nature and were described as the shift in ideas and conduct over time, most commonly measured in years.
The output of these processes were delivered to creative groups and agencies and used to create the “big idea” upon which a marketing campaign was created. They were designed to trigger emotional engagement, leaving a consumer with positive brand association. Validation came in the form of public acceptance, measured again through quantitative and qualitative metrics. Impact was independently measured, typically as a product of reach (the number of people exposed to the “big idea”) and frequency (the number of times an individual was exposed to the “big idea”.)
This methodology has been pervasive over the last half century and continues to be used by most consumer brands in conjunction with the creation and distribution of marketing messages across traditional marketing channels (Broadcast, Cable, Print, Out-of-home…).
Direct marketing provided marketers with access to specific and detailed data relating to who viewed a message and what action they took after consuming the message and outcome. This data driven approach has been applied to email, search, display, web and other digital channels. It has also allowed marketers to improve their ability to identify trends through data mining and modeling techniques, resulting in behavioral analysis leading to predictive analytics, which is intended to give guidance to a company as to when, where and how a consumer will be more receptive to their product/service offering. Like brand marketing, the insights delivered through this type of research are typically delivered to a creative group or agency and used to create a series of campaigns, targeted to like sets of audiences and addressed to identified individuals. Validation is measured by actual response behavior.
More recently, with the advent of social networking and the near ubiquity of Internet access, trend identification and validation has taken on a new meaning. Trends proliferate virally in a matter of minutes and hours rather than months and years. It is possible to spread a message via Twitter or Facebook to 500 people who each forward to another 500 almost instantaneously, reaching 500² or 250,000 people who by their voluntary social association share interests, attitudes and behaviors.
In this context, my company, Blab, has authored a specific and unique methodology and associated algorithms for identifying and validating these volatile and transitory trends in real-time, providing marketers with insight into the pulse of the culture at any given point and the resulting ability to contextualize their content to align with the appropriate topical trends.
Over the next few weeks, I will dig deeper into our ideas around how to identify trends, categorize them and then use that information to inform contextual content creation and publication.
August 9, 2011
John Kottcamp
CMO, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Uncategorized
#ForresterResearch, B2B marketing, Blab, CMO, Customer Experience, Facebook, integrated marketing, Real-time, social media, social networking, Twitter
Srividya Sridharan of Forrester Research, posted the question of “How real is real-time” on the customer intelligence community. I’d like to share my reply to her.
There are multiple areas of marketing in which real-time has a unique definition, it’s own importance and a set of tools, practitioners and process that enable it.
From a transactional point of view, real-time means being able to transact from start to finish with no latency. In ecommerce, this is a given, although it surprises me how many websites still ask the customer to submit a form, or call a rep. to get a quote, complete a transaction or get customer service. The Holy Grail of this type of real-time marketing is the complete integration of multiple channels including online, social and in-store. While some, mostly B2C, retailers have done a good job combining online shopping, order and payment with in-store availability and pick-up, this cross-channel experience has rarely been duplicated in the B2B world where sales are still driven by direct sales forces and represent long and complicated purchase cycles. for example, it’s still virtually impossible for a company’s procurement department to negotiate, transact and fufill an enterprise software licensing agreement online.
From the data perspective, real-time refers to the ability to collect and process data in real-time. Whether transactional or behavioral, it is usually focused on the online advertising, search, web or email experience and increasingly user generated activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There appears to be the most momentum in capturing and analyzing social data, which is created, distributed and reacted to in real-time, however most marketers, agencies and analytics providers are still trying to apply the same methodologies to social as they have used in the past to understand traditional channels like broadcast and print. Needless to say, the importance of frequency and reach is completely different when applied to multi-facted social relationships. it is is this area of campaign management and analytics that appear to be paying the most attention to trying to achieve real-time. It won’t be difficult to generate mountains of data, but the trick is having the resources to understand the data and most importantly use that data in real-time. There appears to be very little progress in brands ability to act in real-time.
And finally, the most important area of real-time, is the one most overllooked; understanding the customer in real-time. We spend a lot of time, technology and resources to understand what consumers did in the past and hope that will help us predict what they are going to do in the future. But we devote very little energy to finding out what’s important to a consumer in the moment and then being able to communicate with them in a manner that is relevant to them in that same moment. This is the real real-time Holy Grail and in an increasingly ADHD afflcited world, this is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging customers on their terms. This is why I’ve started my new company Blab. We’re all about relevancy and relevancy is both listening as well as creating and distirbuting branded content. Check our our website for more details about our approach, www.blabbings.com.
June 14, 2011
John Kottcamp
real-time marketing
Blab, contextual ad, emarketer, Facebook, Facebook Ads, real-time marketing, social networking, social trends
22% of local merchants in the U.S. have used Facebook Ads according to a report by MerchantCircle. And in a recent report from eMarketer, 60% of Facebook’s ad revenue is coming from small business.
This is impressive and surely should be seen as major trend, both for small business and for Facebook. However with Facebook ad click through rates nearly 50% lower than industry average, it begs the question of whether small businesses are getting a good return on their investment.
There was a lot of talk a couple of months ago when Facebook announced it was testing real-time marketing. In their case, the idea was to present ads according what people were posting about. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t address the need to contextualize the ads themselves. And this is the real problem for small businesses. Larger advertisers like Fortune 500 companies hire agencies to help them write the best headline and design the most visually engaging ads. Small businesses don’t have these resources and can’t afford them in any case.
However even large agencies do not have the ability to deliver Facebook ads that are contextual and certainly not deliver them in real-time. The future of Facebook advertising depends on solving these problems. Oh, and by the way, we at Blab think we have the solution.
March 1, 2011
John Kottcamp
Marketing Strategy, real-time marketing, social media, social networking, User-generated content
Adage, ashton Kucher, Blab, Customer Experience, integrated marketing, Interactive Marketing, justin Bieber, social influence, social media, social networking, social trends, Twitter
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, 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.
December 17, 2010
John Kottcamp
New Agency Model
agency technology, agency2.0, Closed Loop Marketing, Customer Experience, digital agency, integrated marketing, Interactive Marketing, marketing technology, marketing2.0, real-time marketing, ROI, social networking, social trends
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
June 8, 2010
John Kottcamp
CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, social media
agency2.0, Ascentium, B2B marketing, BMA, BMA Engage, Chris Borgan, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, digital agency, Eduardo Conrado, integrated marketing, Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak, marketing technology, marketing2.0, Motorola, social media, social networking, Twitter, web2.0
Flying home last Friday from the BMA Engage conference in Chicago, I was taken by the fact that my head was reeling from so many great keynote presentations. I attend and speak at a lot of conferences and while most have a lot of good content and networking opportunities, it’s rare that I find a set of keynote addresses that impress me, move me and most importantly, give me something I can act on when I get back to the office that will make my business better.
Several good cyber-journalists have already done a good job at recapping the entire event. Check out Barrett Sydnor’s “Top Ten Things I learned (or relearned) at BMA Engage 2010” or Sima Dahl’s “Personal Engagement: Bringing It Home” as well as exploring all the great content available on the conference site, www.bmaengage.com.
But at risk of contradicting my own first paragraph, it really wasn’t any individual keynote speaker or presentation that struck me, it was the underlying theme that permeated the entire event. From the body of work presented by Tom Stein of Stein Rogan & Partners, who won the B2 Agency of the Year award and Eduardo Conrado and David Srere’s “Engaging with Purpose” all the way through to Chris Brogan’s “Trust Advisor” and Jeffrey Hayzlett’s “Emotional Technology”, the single clear message I heard was that companies, brands and all the people who tell their stories, have to be honest, authentic and set the bar as high as possible in order to survive, succeed and prosper.
Eduardo Conrado, Motorola’s CMO, told us to throw out the mission and vision statements and get down to the heart of the matter that concerns both customers and employees, purpose. What is the purpose of the company? Why do they do what they do? This was echoed clearly by Jeffrey Hayzlett, the CMO at Kodak, who clearly stated that Kodak’s purpose is not to sell film (whose sales have dropped from $15B to $200m in the last 5 years), but to create memories. He showed videos of customers who said that in the case of a home fire the one thing they’d run back into the house for, would be family photos.
The highlight of the conference for me was Chris Brogan’s presentation from his book, Trust Advisor. His next to last slide was a simple illustration on the back of a blank sheet that says “Human Business”. To be successful, you need to focus of building the relationship first, “be there before the sale” and my favorite line of the entire conference, “bring wine to the picnic.” What could be more authentic than that?
April 21, 2010
John Kottcamp
Uncategorized
Closed Loop Marketing, Interactive Marketing, integrated marketing, Customer Experience, marketing technology, Customer Relationship Management, Metrics, digital agency, marketing2.0, agency2.0, web2.0, social networking, CMO, #Forrester, B2B marketing, Ascentium, Adage
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
April 7, 2010
John Kottcamp
Uncategorized
#Forrester, Adage, agency2.0, Ascentium, B2B marketing, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Experience, Customer Lifecycle, Customer Relationship Management, Dave Frankland, digital agency, integrated marketing, marketing technology, Sean Corcoran, social media, social networking, Vidya Drego, web2.0
The other week, a new report came out of Forrester Research, entitled, The Future of Agency Relationships by three analysts, Sean Corcoran, Dave Frankland and Vidya Drego. First, I highly recommend reading the full report if you have Forrester access. You can also check out Sean’s blog post, Marketers Must Lead Agency Change or read Michael Bush’s article in AdAge, Memo to Marketers: It’s Your Fault if Your Shop Flounders.
All the coverage does a good job of summarizing the changes to the way agencies should provide value to their marketing clients and more importantly to their clients’ customers, be they consumer or businesses. Forrester has identified three fundamental services they feel agencies must provide: Ideas, Interaction and Intelligence. They call it adaptive marketing. And they are sending a clear message to marketers that the burden is in their court to demand these services of their agencies.
I agree with the logic. Ideas will always be central, but if and only if, the ideas can be developed and converted into real, meaningful and engaging experiences for customers. As Forrester say, “Experiences become more prominent than campaigns.” Interaction is the process of converting ideas into experiences. And in general the process for interaction is what is changing most radically. Interaction used to be the consumption of messaging, mostly through traditional channels like broadcast and print. But today with the explosion of channels, devices and emerging media, interaction is highly dependent on technology to bring the “big idea” to life. And this is one of those areas where it’s the agency that needs to change more than the marketer.
Agencies can no longer hide behind the big idea or the visually arresting creative treatment alone. If they cannot provide experiences that they, together with the marketer, and most likely the client’s IT department as well, can build, execute, support and track, they will not be successful in a highly digitalized world.
And this leads to Forrester’s third “I”, intelligence. Customer intelligence is, or should be, at the core of every action, experience and program agencies promote, marketers adopt and businesses demand. While much of the process of coming up with the “Big idea” is still a very right brain, creative exercise, which demands talent, experience and the ability to communicate, it is the question of who do you communicate with, how, when and with what message that is at the heart of customer intelligence, or left brain marketing. Any agency that does not understand and value the role of data, research and measurement will not be able to deliver success to their clients. And any marketer who does not demand measureable success from their agencies will not be able to translate those marketing metrics into the business metrics that drive a company’s “C-Suite” and that will reward marketers with budgets, respect and a seat at the business table, which is definitely where a CMO should sit.
So, go check out the Forrester report and think about how it should impact your business, whether you are a corporate marketer, an agency or a marketing services provider.
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