Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

On the last day before a holiday weekend, I thought I’d talk about something that’s important for us marketers but also fun. Or at least it should be. The topic of improving slideshow presentations has been covered wonderfully in the past, but there are some great new perspectives you should be checking out, to keep your Powerpoint decks in check.

(With so many co-workers starting the holiday early today, one of the stalwart few who will be with me in the office today joked that he’d bring Mimosas. From that last riff you’d think he’d followed through on the threat!)

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders gave a wonderful presentation to Google recently on better use of email. His 50 minute presentation (the video is below, and here’s a podcast of the talk) was as fun as it was practical. In response to inquiries, he shared his Powerpoint tips in a recent post. Although I should mention that he is the second person this week to let me know that Keynote has it over Powerpoint, if only because you can look at your speaking notes on your computer’s monitor while the audience sees the projected slide.

In his tips on better slideshows, Merlin mentions Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule: “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.” This reminded me of another slideshow presentation form (I say form, just as poetry has its classic sonnet and haiku forms). I’m thinking of the form called pecha kucha.

Pecha kucha was invented four years ago in Tokyo by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture. They created it as a way to attract people to an event space they’d set up. They wanted a freeform presentation environment that wasn’t hackneyed. Sort of an un-poetry slam.

Here are the rules for a Pecha Kucha night: A number of presenters (usually 14) each does a slideshow of exactly 20 images, each lasting exactly 20 seconds. That puts the total runtime at 6 minutes, 40 seconds. The topics of the presentation vary widely, but the presenters are primarily artists and designers. These events have spread, to take place in major cities around the world. I’m tempted to attend the next one in Chicago, in late September.

According to an uncited entry in Wikipedia, this 20 slides, 20 seconds each form has been adopted in some corners of the business world. It allows for a brief, disciplined presentation of ideas, with questions withheld until the end and no room for meandering on the part of the speaker. It’s all in the service of avoiding “death by Powerpoint.” Those who know me well are aware that I dislike using Powerpoint, and try whenever possible to present with a simple MindManager mind map. Or just write out my ideas into a Word document (there, Microsoft, at least you get some of my loyalty!) and speak without visuals. It’s all in the worship of one of my business heros: Edward Tufte.

For my friends reading this in the U.S., have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend, devoid of Powerpoint — unless you like that kind of thing!

Physicists tell us the universe is ever-expanding, a concept that can make the mind reel. Advertisers trying to reach their target audience know this feeling well, as media alternatives continually fragment and multiply. One solution: Forget about media as we would ordinarily think about them and look to the places your market congregates as the medium itself.

I’m only a recent convert to the power of out of home advertising, but that only seems to make me more of a zealot. Here are three examples worth filing away in your new media mental database:

• Billboards that greet you by name — Tested last year and rolled out in the April of 2007, the Mini Cooper Motorby program is ingenious. Have owners register online, and receive a free key fob. When that key fob gets within 500 feet of a billboard, it triggers a personalized message. The billboard is 5 feet tall and 33 feet wide. My only questions: What are the results? And how are they translated to a true ROI?
• Virtual billboards, Second Life-style — If an ad is on the side of a building, but that building is on Second Life, is that an interactive ad or out of home? A little of both, because it is far more interactive (try clicking through the side of a real building without getting injured or arrested), but has the same ambient quality of the real world. The biggest down-side: Ads are everywhere in Second Life.
• Literally touch your consumers as they drink their coffee — Coffee cup sleeves have come of age. According to BriteVision, an industry leader in their production and distribution (they have their own ad network of coffee shops), the average consumer spends 49 minutes with their “Ad-Sleeve,” what an average recall of the ad at two-thirds (65%). The biggest up-side: Since many cafes offer WiFi, providing a URL can help measure effectiveness and reach an upscale segment of consumers. You can also include a phone number or short code for a mobile marketing play.

The reach and creative potential with out of home are a couple of reasons it is growing when other media types are stagnant or shrinking. According to the OAAA, revenue for out-of-home advertising so far this year has increased by 7.9% (within a rounding error of the growth seen last year, and the year before). This projection for 2007 is based on spending in the first six months of the year. The graphic below shows prior growth.

All of this is great news for brands that want to make a difference. There are many ways to truly involve consumers — some quite high tech, some that are extremely “out there,” and some that are frankly both. It all makes for an interesting ride with plenty to see and do.

When is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page the same as a page containing a map of the site? The answer is they’re always both FAQ pages.

No one visits a site out of random curiosity. Everyone has an agenda. And ideally, both the navigation of a site (as manifested in the site map) and the FAQ page address these user agendas.

Every link of a site map promises an answer. Every section of a site is another category of frequently asked questions.

The Takeaway:

Ideally, an information architect is responsible for designing a site’s map. Conversely, content managers working closest to the customer should be responsible for maintaining the FAQ page, and the answers provided. These two functions should be talking to each other regularly to make both of their contributions the best that they can be.

How often do you come across an account of the same new, breakthrough idea from two different sources within 24 hours? That happened to me this weekend, and even if I had just seen it once I would have found the idea extraordinary. First, I read how Offermatica provides a content management solution that helps with multivariate testing of offers and copy. From what is learned, customized content can be delivered in real-time, based on behaviors. Offermatica CEO Matt Roche describes a novel application of this tool in a MediaPost blog interview:

[With the client site, MusicFriend.com] when someone comes to the home page [from a search engine] we know nothing about them, so they get the home page. What if we repeat the keyword that they searched on to get there, just show similar information? That increased the conversions. We repeat your keyword so you have a connection. Then we install affinity targeting that says when you go to the drums section and come back to the home page it will show you more drum offers. It increased the conversion rate in double digits on all the categories where we did category affinity.

The emphasis was my own. Double digit conversions?!? What a great trick.

Then I read Todd Friesen’s piece describing the same technique, in the July, 2007, print edition of Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA — and yes, it’s also a MediaPost publication). Phrased a different way, it suggests the same brilliant strategy:

… Did you ever notice how most brand traffic lands on your home page? Even product terms that contain branded verbiage often get a home page ranking ahead of a product page. Most home pages are pretty generic and usually run creative speaking to a straight brand message or weekly deal. How do you refine that on the fly to positively impact conversion? With a good multivariate tool, it’s relatively simple.

Some tools have the ability to recognize a search engine referral and identify the search term to define the creative displayed in the marketing modules on the home page. SEO managers then populate the “hero image” with a product related to the search and then load the complimentary products into the secondary marketing modules.

It is standard practice to do something like this with pay-per-click ads. We create customized landing pages that repeat the keyword phrase used in the search. This idea extends that landing page mentality to organic search results.

There is conjecture that the radio was invented in several places around the world at the same time. I suspect there will be similar arguments as to whom originated this simple and elegant way to improve the user experience for people arriving from search engines. All I can say is, I’ll glad I learned about it at all, so I can begin testing it with some of my clients.

Any readers who are already using this technique?

When marketers first realized that user-generated content was a major force to be reckoned with, the next logical question was hard to answer: How? Widgets have emerged as a serviceable start in our attempt at benefiting from this phenomenon.

Widgets allow people who have online social network profiles (such as MySpace or Facebook) — or who blog — to insert something useful that happens to be pulled from someone else’s site. Probably the most ubiquitous widget is the YouTube video player you see embedded in so many web pages. Another example is from the freshly minted widgets at BuyCostumes.com:

Spooky, boys and girls.

Widgets are catching on for two reasons:

1. They make a home-grown page more interesting — and more useful
2. They allow those displaying them to help enhance their own image through the use of the brand

That latter point is important. If you have a strong brand, it is strong because people feel good about using it, and probably feel like their own image is enhanced by its use. Whether it’s as simple as the difference between a Coke person versus a Pepsi person (versus a Red Bull person!), a brand tells the world more about the person who consumes it.

The widget above probably doesn’t say much, except that I enjoy the Halloween holiday (and I do) and wanted to show that in an interesting way. But I can imagine BuyCostume’s “Sexy Costume of the Day” widget gracing many profile pages, and saying something fun and provocative in the process.

From a marketer’s standpoint, widgets are a simple and measurable way to grab a small corner of the user generated content juggernaut. Most click through to a brand’s landing page, but others can conduct transactions (at least leading up to a sale) right within the site.

The future will see these widgets becoming far more useful and flexible. I’m also predicting an entirely new set of metrics will arise to measure their branding and sales effectiveness. In the meantime, they are definitely making the web a more interesting place, for both consumers and marketers.

As I write this I’m looking at a sample of a mailing I developed for a client in the mid-1990s. Designed for a major college textbook publisher, it promoted five psychology texts with titles such as Lifespan Development; Fifth Edition, and Human Development Across the Lifespan; Second Edition. The technique used in this piece is proven to boost response. It relies on a thoroughly researched phenomenon that these same psychology texts might have even mentioned in a chapter on the subconscious.

So you’d think the recipients of this mailing – all heads of psychology departments — would be immune to the ploy. They weren’t. This mailing, like the one produced before it for another text, broke sales records for the client.

This reminds me that we are all human. Which means poets still understand us better than scientists. We may think we know what makes us tick, but the fact is, our full operating instructions are yet to be published. We’re still discovering our secrets, and some of them are real corkers.

Marketers, for better or worse, are watching each new chapter of these psychology texts as they are written. We’re following this research with rapt attention. At least I – for one – can barely tear myself away.

Although the technique I’m about to describe has been well-documented, I’m going to posit a theory for why it works that I’ve not read elsewhere, and it could blow your mind. It certainly did mine, when I “connected the dots” and realized the clinical research that has been done on consciousness since the ’60s may have accidentally collided head on with a direct response trick-of-the-trade.

Direct Response Is Darwinian

Whether or not you subscribe to Darwin’s Origin of Species, you have to agree that in matters of both bacteriology and direct response, natural selection is real. Direct marketers “kill off” test mailings that don’t do as well — in fair competitions – as existing (”control”) mailings. In a similar manner, mutations of bacteria don’t get the resources that they need to reproduce when competing against existing, superior strains within a shared host. Both are examples of survival of the fittest.

I can’t speak for bacteria with authority, but I can about direct marketing, and this mailbox meritocracy means pieces you would guess should be as extinct as the dodo bird remain to sell another day. They survive because they are oddly, inscrutably effective in the return on investment they generate.

I’m thinking specifically of mailings that have such things as stickers that the reader must remove and affix, or cards that must be pulled from their perforated moorings and returned, or those clear, tinted plastic windows that must held to the eye to unscramble a message. All of these techniques require reader participation. Why do they survive? All of them use up valuable resources. None of these gimmicks are cheap to produce and distribute.

What if typical response rates for your offer are 2 percent? That means the response-boosting technique you test must get an incremental ”lift” that pays fifty-fold its overall cost just to break even.

Do you remember the Publishers Clearinghouse mailings? Tightening sweepstakes laws and changing demographic trends have made these mailings less common — and some would say those that remain are a public scourge. But these mailings used the same technique that I used with that textbook mailing, and are still used for many other mailing categories.

My wife used to call the Publishers Clearinghouse mailings “grown-up busy boxes” — they required the tearing off of stamps, the moistening of them, and the affixing of them. Sometimes there were dozens of stamps. There were also other enclosures that readers needed to get a pen to fill out, for “another chance to win.”

It was all so much work! And so much expense!

In direct marketing there is a constant imperative to “cheapen the package” with every new version of a mailing you produce and mail. But the expensive complexity of tactile involvement (as I’ll call this henceforth) remains, because response rates always outweighed the cost. Why?

The Subconscious As Unruly Child

Some theorized, even before there was research to back it up, that our hands have a closer connection to our subconscious than to our conscious mind. It kind of makes sense. It’s not our “thinking” brain that allows us to win tennis games, or public debates. In most cases, the person who over-thinks — or insists on using conscious thought at all — loses.

So could the tactile communication used in many direct mail pieces be seducing our subconscious minds? Could this technique be sweet-talking our subconscious, at our mind’s “back door,” while our conscious mind is blithely keeping vigil out front?

Experiments that began 40 years ago suggested this very theory, when they discovered that signals from our brains to our hands to consciously move them actually showed up after the movement had been accomplished. Here is how the groundbreaking research, spearheaded by Benjamin Libet, was boiled down in a review of his book Mind Time: The temporal factor in consciousness by Steven Rose of New Scientist Magazine:

The core of Libet’s findings can be simply summarised. If I sit on the edge of my bed and decide to wiggle my toes, the brain processes necessary for the wiggling to occur begin about half a second before I am aware that I have made the decision. Libet finds this troubling; if the brain processes precede my sense of having made a decision, what part does my conscious decision making play? Who indeed is the “me” that does the “deciding”?

This is a classic research finding, but one that remains unchallenged — and unnerving! Where is free will in this equation? That question was posed anew by neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran MD, PhD in an episode of RadioLab, an outstanding science podcast series by National Public Radio.

When I’d first read about this work, I wondered why direct marketers weren’t jumping up and down with glee. They knew that their tactile engagement technique often worked against all odds, like ungainly bumblebees that aerodynamics engineers insist cannot fly but persist in doing so.

Here was our explanation!

Our subconscious minds reach the mailbox milliseconds before our conscious minds do. Once there, they tear into the mail and pretend to do our bidding. Until, perhaps one or two times out of a hundred, they pull a minor mutiny. They respond.

What happens when the conscious mind catches on? Interestingly, in research where subjects are actually watching their own brain scans, as their hands act unbidden, they invent reasons for doing what their hands just did. ”I meant to do that all along!” they announce with a certainly that is belied by the timing of their actions. If anything, they simply invented a plausible rationalization.

Mr. Grabby In Room 415

Those who have brain injuries sometimes experience this more explicitly. I had read of these stories, but six years ago saw it for myself. Days after a dear friend had a stroke, his numb arm and hand rebelled. “He” grabbed objects (and passing nurses!) to his conscious mind’s horror.

Is it possible that the conscious mind – even in a perfectly healthy person —  is like a parent who wheels his child through a grocery store? With the parent oblivious to the child, the pair wend their way through the aisles. It is only when they arrive at the check-out that the embarrassed father sees the items in the basket that he never dropped in there, and rationalizes to the clerk why he’s purchasing them. “You can never have too many Animal Crackers!” he says as he stacks them nervously on the check-out belt.

The difference is we’ve been living with this unruly child our whole life, and our bodies have set some limits on what the kid can get away with (or thus goes Libet’s theory). This half-second-later override avoids a world of anarchy, where far too many nurses are groped. But this audacious behaviour of the subconscious is permitted — and instantly rationalized into something actually “intended” – enough times to boost the response rates of mailings that invite tactile improvisation.

Do we all have a Mr. Grabby waiting to help us open our mail? I invite those of you in the direct response industry to pipe in. Do you have an alternate suggestion?

The first marketing class I ever had in college taught me the AIDA model of advertising. You may recall it from your studies. It’s still used today, lo these many years later. The AIDA model goes like this: Once you attract Attention, you must generate Interest, create Desire, and enable your market to take Action. Do all of those things and you’re golden.

Back then the only way you could actually measure any of these (except for the last A, which was making a sale) was by employing expensive and time-consuming research. The web changed all that. It allows us to measure each of these steps — except for that pesky thing called Interest.

Until now, the interest that people exhibit in a site’s content has been impossible to accurately measure through current techniques. What has changed? I and my team have come up with a workable solution — a simple way to plug the hole in that famous AIDA acronym.

We’ve found a way to reliably measure web visitor interest.

That’s a bold statement, but here’s why I make that assertion. After analyzing a critical mass of data from the site of one of our largest clients, I can say with confidence that we have a metric that is the rarest of creatures. It is a measurement that arms content managers with real, actionable feedback about the changes they’ve made to web content over which they have responsibility.The metric is called CII: Content Interest Index. I’ve been wrong more than once in my career. Sometimes I’ve been wrong in spectacular ways. But I firmly believe from what I’ve witnessed that this is a unique and valuable tool for managers of many types of sites.

The CII is most valuable for those who manage large amounts of product and service information, delivered over a site with a content management system (CMS) handling a ton of impressions. Volume is really key. The biggest constraint of this metric is it requires high levels of traffic to the pages being measured.

The graphic above is a sample from an analysis for a client — who will remain anonymous — who manages that critical mass of traffic I was referring to, and has provided two year’s worth of data to analyze. In the graphic, the CII illustrates to a single content manager how five product pages are doing, this year compared to last. Specifically, it shows that for two of the pages, CII has dropped in real numbers, while in all five cases page views have risen.

These CII comparisons help a content manager optimize pages using real feedback provided directly by the user (through the measurement of two behaviors, as described below). In the hands of the right content manager, CIIs for the pages managed should progressively climb, as a positive feedback loop continues to reward well-targeted content. It’s the equivalent of a public speaker talking to real audiences, and getting real applause (and real yawns), as opposed to merely guessing at what people want to hear by speaking to an empty room.

How is CII Calculated?

As this white paper (a PDF file) on the CII explains, this is a simple metric that can be built into just about any web site. Here is how it is described there:

The CII counts instances of a page’s “Printer Friendly Format” or “Email a Colleague” icon receiving a click. This observes what are arguably the two most common ways that visitors save or share information - either through printing or emailing content. To factor out a page’s level of overall readership, the sum of clicks is divided by page views.

Page views still come into the equation of analyzing CII, and they are excellent measures of the first A of a site’s AIDA. In other words, the number of people who view a page can be a proxy for the amount of attention you have to play with for that page. It’s your opportunity to shine (although some notable web media experts are taking exception with the use of page views at all).

As the white paper explains, the D of AIDA can also be measured using existing web metrics, because desire is exhibited as prospects circle your product or service more closely — and more often — investigating things like delivery options, pricing variables and means of payment. And, as with the “real” world, the online marketplace has always measured the A — as in action, well. This is a transaction.

That leaves interest as something without a good yardstick. Until now.

Please read my white paper before commenting. But please. I want to hear your thoughts. I’m out on a limb here. Was it worth the climb?

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, recently posted his reservations about the commercial potential of Linden Lab’s metaverse, Second Life. (Check out the many comments, by the way. I praise him for his willingness to stir a hornet’s nest.) The main reason for Anderson’s pessimism: Lack of traffic to the virtual storefronts and office spaces. Does this mean we should all forget the Second Life “land rush” ever happened? I don’t think so.

Yesterday I heard Steve Ennen, VP, Digital Business Strategies at American Business Media, speak at an online marketing summit. He pointed out that we should look at the potential for marketers in a “Third Life, Fourth Life or even Fifth Life.” I would agree. Especially if the next platform can be one that doesn’t require special plug-ins or players. Online, experiential marketing is here to stay. And a whole generation is growing up having spent a significant portion of their young lives on gaming platforms very similar to Second Life.

In the future, favorite online communities may well become these consumers’ first lives.

You’ll find more information on Second Life in this and associated entries.