Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

There are many situations where, from a marketing perspective, less is more. In these instances a smaller number of features improves a product. One is when you want to add a coolness factor. Examples:

• Take some of the modern shock absorption away from a motorcycle and you’ve got a retro “hard tail” ride.
• Take away the tell-a-friend feature from a product site and you may paradoxically improve the chance of pass-alongs in a younger demographic (see my prior post).

A more common situation is streamlining to reduce complexity, and thus improve adoption. Sometimes a handful of added frills — frills that R&D engineers and a minority of users may find irresistible — actually works against a product. Swiss Army knives have their fans, but most pocket knife owners prefer something less bloated. If they want a screwdriver or corkscrew, they’ll buy one.

The rule of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) applies equally well to software, because learning and installation time are two important constraints to adoption. This is especially true of software that you need to use with other users, simultaneously and remotely.

That’s why I was fascinated on Friday to learn more about a pared-down, lower-cost competitor of WebEx. This category of on-demand software product enables a designated host to share content with others during live web sessions. It’s one of the fastest-growing types of software provided by application service providers (ASPs).

And WebEx is this category’s leader. Their revenue growth has been 23% for each of the past two years and their reported clients now number more 20,000. Needless to say, WebEx has developed an impressive product. But it takes some time to learn, is a little overwhelming in its many features, and requires hosts and participants alike to download special software. That’s a vulnerability.

I was thinking of all of this Friday morning at 8 AM when I was riding the elevator to my appointment with Brevient. I was to meet with Lisa Noone to learn about their MixMeeting — an online collaboration tool for the needs of small and medium businesses.

Of particular interest was the prospect of meeting Brevient’s founder and CEO, Matt Lautz. He was still a teenager when he started the company (who can explain how the lad squandered the first 18 years of his life?), and in a very short time since, he’s created an impressive company with at least one product worth checking out. It truly promises to grab a good share of its market.

I didn’t have to wait long to wait to meet Matt, by the way. It turned out the unassuming fellow in the tee shirt riding across from me in the elevator was noneother.

I’ll know more about the product as I give it a test spin, but the demo was impressive in its brevity (thus the name?) as well as its implied promise of making presentations easier for both my clients and my account services team. The money savings with MixMeeting, and the fact that I’d be supporting the business of a literal neighbor, would be icing on the cake.

In a client meeting the other day, we were discussing with several individuals in the company their soon-to-launch international sites. The sites, which will have domain names in various European and Latin American countries, showcase the same streaming videos (with appropriate translations). So my team was asked a reasonable question: Will anyone have trouble playing the videos?

Even three years ago, this would have been a tough question to answer with confidence. Those were the days when you had to have separate formats for Quicktime, RealMedia and Windows Media. The answer would have been complicated and unsettling. Now, the problem is solved by presenting the videos in one format only: Macromedia’s Flash.

My reply: “Yes. Because they are presented in Flash, and because Flash is a universally accepted browser plug-in, you can be confident that everyone in every country will see them. After all, YouTube wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Flash!”

This was the first time I realized just how ubiquitous Flash really is. It’s true. I blurted out my YouTube declaration, but upon reflection, I seriously can’t imagine that the site could be so addictive if it weren’t for the ease with which you can view its contents. How addictive is it? YouTube is, as of today, the twelfth most popular site on the web, according to Alexa. That’s a lot of addicts!

When Flash emerged as a way to show rich content that was independent of browser type, I recognized its value for photography, typography and animation. But I never would have anticipated that it would be video’s “killer app.” Thank you, worldwide propagation of broadband connections.

And thank you, Macromedia.

In working with clients who sell to other businesses, I and my team are witnessing something I can only characterize as white paper fatigue. Remember when a truly well-written white paper that you could download from a corporate site was, although never truly a novelty, at least a welcome way to consume important information? Me too.

And it still is to some extent. I still find their contents valuable. The trouble is I’m spending less time reading and more time scanning. Therefore, the white paper has come to represent for me a workaday chore, not an opportunity to learn. Clearly others are in the same camp, because the offer of a white paper, when posed on a site or packaged in an email, is not as measurably compelling to our clients’ prospective customers as we have observed in the past.

There is an alternative, and I’m pleased to see it’s quickly on its way out of the “novelty” category of web site offerings. I’m talking about the audio white paper. AKA, the podcast.

Recent research reported in eMarketer.com suggests that the B2B audience is not just receptive to white paper content in this format: They want more of it. Here is an excerpt:

The respondents [in this survey of business and IT professionals] were actually enthusiastic about podcasting — and wanted more. Nearly 60% said business and tech information in white papers or analyst reports would be more interesting as podcasts, and 55% said they would be more likely to use the information if it were delivered in podcasts, rather than as reading material.

This same report showed how these are not just early adopters (from a statistical perspective) but are a growing base of business people who like podcasts, and use them both personally and professionally. This is encouraging news for companies who are seeking new ways to engage their target audience. 

As often happens with quickly emerging media trends, the challenge now becomes meeting this exciting opportunity — quickly — with content that truly takes advantage of the medium. Have any of my readers found strong examples of podcasted (and video!) white papers? I encourage your comments.

My work is the management of a decidedly mixed marriage. The business I oversee, which is part of an advertising agency (filled with your more traditional businesspeople), is chiefly populated by technologists. And we know how well these two groups get along. So it is my delight to report that for the most part, we all get along quite well, thank you. Visit us and you’d see a surprisingly high level of respect and productive collaboration between these two very different types of information workers.

Good thing, too. That’s what sets us apart in the interactive marketplace.

I bring this up because a friend, who is a very gifted programmer, had the following as his IM greeting today. It’s a link to a blog entry showing dramatically how wide and deep the chasm still is between the IT world and the “business world.”

The blog entry itself was interesting, and illustrates this ongoing mistrust. Moreover, the long list of comments it generated, which runs below the entry, starkly documents the passion of opinions on both sides. Man, the anger!

Every day I see the incredible things that can be accomplished when professionals of both disciplines work together. For this reason, I’m particularly saddened that much of the rest of the world has not yet found a way to agree on something that seems obvious:

Both parties — “techies” and “suits” — are invaluable.

Thanks to Seth Godin for reminding me today that many readers may have missed the hoopla on Chris Anderson’s long-awaited book, aptly titled The Long Tail. This is an important book for those interested in the future of marketing and business design. It reports on a paradigm shift that we all need to get our heads around, in a similar way that The 1-to-1 Future was good intellectual grounding for what was to come, when it arrived on the scene in the mid-1990s.

You can find other support for your studies on the Long Tail Squidoo lens. And for this resource as well I have Seth Godin to thank. He is the original “squid” of this fascinating and fast-growing user-generated reference site.

Success begets success. So I was not surprised when I learned this week that Quad Graphics has purchased a controlling share of OpenFirst. The company provides direct mail and digital printing solutions, but what has impressed me about them, ever since they formed ten years ago (under the name EPS) is their slavish devotion to database integrity.

I met the company’s president and CEO, Robert Kraft, shortly after they opened their doors, and what wowed me were stories about how they convert, merge and scrub the databases they use … as well as other ways that they use data, which I’ll get to in a moment. It should be common sense, but the programming and safeguarding that Robert described to me was something so thorough and ironclad that one might think he was talking about a nuclear power plant instead of a digital printing company. The reason for that is their chief technical officer, Chuck Olszewski. He’s an engineer who came to OpenFirst from the nuclear power industry. The guy is trained to prevent meltdowns … Exactly what a pricey and time-sensitive direct marketing program needs.

Okay, I know I’m gushing a bit, so I’d better give you an example of what impressed me back then, and still blows me away today. OpenFirst uses something called dataglyphs for at least one of their direct mail clients. It’s a way to embed a great deal of data, encrypted in a photograph or other screened graphic. This data is invisible to any observer other than a properly tuned scanner. To you or me, the photo looks perfectly normal.

What’s more, if you tear, stain or otherwise damage the image, you can still retrieve the data. Check out this dataglyph demo from PARC Research. You’ll be invited to use Photoshop, Paint or some other program to compromise the graphic that you create, and then see how accurately it pulls out and reports that graphic’s hidden contents. Incredible!

This application, which was originally created for the whole cloak-and-dagger-cold-war-passing-of-secret-information thing, is used by OpenFirst for a client who needs to get back from consumers information about them that is only available for use once the consumer has responded to a mailing. It’s a long story about how mailing list companies only consider their client owners of their data once the people on the list respond the direct mail message, but suffice it to say that this clever and private passing of data saves mailers a boatload of money.

And hey, it’s really cool.

Congratulations to OpenFirst. You’ve earned this opportunity to make yourselves and Quad Graphics shine even more brightly!

Legend has it that President Lincoln was asked how long a soldier’s legs must be to qualify for his Union army. His answer: “Long enough to reach the ground.” Whether this is true or not is unclear, but the truth behind it can be applied to a subject of heated debate: The copy length of marketing emails.

Melinda Krueger’s latest column addresses the debate with an extremely well-reasoned approach. She writes:

Use as much copy as needed to give readers all the information they need without a preconceived notion of what the “right” amount is. In some cases, you will get fewer clicks but more conversions (sales, donations, leads) from more copy-intensive e-mails, as they deliver more pre-qualified buyers.

She goes on to provide great tips for breaking up longer email copy to make it seem less daunting. Her point is right on, though. Don’t fret over the length of your email copy. Instead, make sure it is optimized for clarity, brevity (to the extent possible) and excitement.

Finally, don’t forget to test, test, test!

I attended a seminar on portable marketing yesterday, and was interested to learn that the most popular promotions using mobile phones are still using SMS — i.e., text messaging. I wonder, for instance, when the sending of photos or videos from our phones will figure into large promotions.

We were presented with several examples of promotions where texting was a major component.

In the more exciting of them, the key to success was the place where the user participated. In other words, it wasn’t just that the participant could play a game or request information from anywhere, it was that they could do it somewhere quite specific. For instance, the Van’s Warped Tour is offering the ability to get news on band line-ups and autograph opportunities via your cell phone. According to Cingular, the sponsor, participation so far is over 100,000 messages sent. All branded, I’m sure, with Cingular enticements.

And what could be more place-based than to be updated with what’s happening on the grounds of the very festival you’re milling about in?

That reminded me of what is still my favorite “place-based” mobile device. It’s a beautiful spiral chandelier that spells out the messages of people congregating under it, in animated, LED lettering.

Probably the only reason we haven’t seen more of this type of display is the demographics of texting. By far the biggest users of text messaging in this country are those under the age of 30. Two-thirds of all frequent text message users are between the ages of 15 and 35.

Which means that unless you’re organizing a very high-end prom, or are filming an episode of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, this device isn’t going to be a hit. You might as well hang a disco ball.

But I suspect the demographics will change fast. Especially with more executives of all ages using cell phones with QWERTY keyboards and large displays. I predict that it won’t be too long before I find myself under one of those chandeliers or something like it, watching the guests reveal — via SMS messaging — declarations of their silver wedding anniversaries and not their high school’s supremacy.

As Tom Peters famously put it, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. For too many years, network television executives have relied on incomplete and inaccurate measurements of viewership of their programming. This inaccuracy — plus the emergence of other, online ways to reach the same market — has finally come back to bite them, in the form of alarmingly soft TV ad sales.

This week the bulk of ad sales for the TV networks’ fall season has come to a close, and the reports aren’t pretty. I’m reading estimates that the major players will see a drop of 3 percent or more in sales compared to last year at this time.

Many think this is primarily due to the fact that DVRs now filter programming in 16% of American televisions. That means millions of viewers who would otherwise be exposed to advertisers’ messages have the opportunity of fast-forwarding through commercials.

What’s more, television viewership in general is down, regardless of whether a DVR is intervening.

Just as with other industries such as recording labels and movies, technology is changing the rules and causing the ad-driven networks to retrench, if only belatedly and with baby steps.

How? More technology. Nielsen Media Research, whose largest customers are these television networks, recently announced a comprehensive plan to measure electronically all TV viewers, regardless of video platform. With this initiative, called Anytime, Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2), Nielsen is developing technology that will measure viewership on the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other personal devices — all with the intent of eventually merging this data into its Nielsen National People Meter sample.

Other reports from last year described an even more aggressive “People Meter.” This one, the Portable People Meter, would literally be carried by participants in the sample like a PDA. It would pick up ultrasonic identifiers broadcast on television and radio, to meet the pesky challenge of measuring media consumption in taverns, gyms, airports and other public places.

I am fascinated to watch how these huge industries are confronting their eroding markets. A final measure of the level of erosion, and desperate nature of these attempts to win back ad customers, is that avowed competitors are joining forces in the fight. In the Portable People Meter initiative, radio listenership would be measured as well as television viewership. Arbitron, a fierce competitor of Nielsen and a leader in radio audience measurement, is a partner in the technology’s development.

Will these attempts be able to turn things around for broadcast media? It’s hard to say. Tom Peters would point out that they may be taking steps toward better measurement, but that’s only the beginning. Then these measurements must be put to use, to manage better the products being broadcast.

They’ll have a clearer view of their customers — one that’s closer to what database markers are accustomed to seeing right now. And that means they’ll be able to see all of the dissatisfaction and the defections, as they happen. Then what will they do about it? Now that will be interesting to watch.

In my observation about NetFlix as a purveyer of long tail media, I hinted at all of the other ways that online marketers are prospering with this new business opportunity, made possible by word-of-mouth, suggestive selling and virtual — instead of real — merchandise inventories.

I’ve since realized that so much of marketing technology can be heaped under this category that I need to add it as a tag, along with my intentionally general tags of direct response, database marketing, etc.

True, the term long tail has more than a whiff of a meme ready for replacement, much as how push technology in the early 1990’s crystallized into RSS, and how the overworked online communities, the other buzz of the 90’s, turned into what we’re now calling online social networks.

Regardless of what the phrase long tail becomes, it certainly has legs (why am I thinking of a lizard?). This Google Trends graph shows that in terms of searches and news coverage, it also has a fat end.