The BTL Life

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Great viral, great browser.

Superb viral campaign by BBH to highlight the speed of Google Chrome. A compelling reason for downloading and trying it. If you have not see it yet it means you are not part of the 2 million who have see it in the 1st week - then see it here;

Also see the making of the viral.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Understanding the effectiveness of events.

Most brand promotion initiatives, esp. the once that are done in an “event” format, have a very vague measurement matrix and most of it is anecdotal in nature.

Here is a tool which enables real time measurement of the success of the brand initiative on preset enabled parameters – EventPulse.

Never undertake another brand initiative without building in the required measurability. Watch the screencast above or visit here or visit www.pulsesuite.com for a demo and a conversation with experts.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The next level of b2b marketing strategies.

Every now and then one gets fascinated by the success of a particular marketing technique. Today was another such day (and there have not been too many of them recently :-))

Lead generation strategies for B2B clients is something that me and my agency has been involved in for the last 16 years, and have done tens of hundreds of end to end initiatives and yet for me to get goose bumps to see yet another lead gen initiative is quite remarkable.

I just witnessed my team undertake a purely online, by invitation, highly interactive, highly technical, yet cost effective session with over 254 (earlier twitted number was wrong) delegates from over 8 countries. While my team members have been doing this for a while, I had to be in the same room to understand and appreciate the success model.

The session had over 450 registrations a day prior and the session host had indicated to me that she would expect 50% attrition.

What was wonderful to see was;

Such a large number of participants / delegates, who were in for the “love” of the subject. They were not there to “network” but to “learn”. A lot of physical seminars turn out to be peer networking events.

The program format gave the option for the delegates to simply drop-off if the session is not of interest – and yet the attendance stayed constant. In the age of “conversational marketing” this session was a great example of a two way dialogue between the panel and the attendees and it was not forced.

The participation was from managers and sr. managers of large and medium enterprises and from major cities as well as the slightly distant locations. The entire rational of bandwidth were really a non-issue. (The experience of my team members has been that India and China have not just the highest delegates, but also the maximum questions come from these locations, although local language has to be used in China, Thailand & Korea)

The session lasted for over an hour and the drop rate was less than 6% from start to finish.

The 45 minutes of tech presentation was followed by 25 minutes of Q&A – better quality questions then most physical interactions. And guess what drop rates was still 6%!

The panel of speakers was the best of breed and from locations far away – they needed to spare only about 3 hours in all to reach out to audiences across 8 countries without ever having to get on a plane.

There were enough “I need to know more” and “get a rep to meet me” notes at the end of the session for me to assume that the ROI would be high on the investments in this session.

The format, bring with it huge advantages of reach, scale & interactivity, is also non-intrusive, the content has a much longer “shelf-life”, is more measurable and track able in terms of delegate interaction (pre, during and post) and at the same time far more cost effective as against other lead generation models for B2B marketing.

I believe the way we undertook / undertake the process is a b2b marketing best practice and I will create a process note and insights over the next few weeks and put it here for all to read / follow – in the meanwhile, if you need to understand more on this do drop in a line.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Marketing is like cricket.

Business Standard's Strategist is carrying one of my articles today. I had written this note (over two months of the IPL fever) on the similarities on the evolution of the game of cricket and the evolution of the behavior of the consumer.

You can read the article here.

The note is why a smart marketer has to evolve to stay relevant to the changed consumer and that you either play by the rules of the audience or you perish.

Do let me know your views.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Little Red Riding Hood - RETOLD

What a wonderful project.

""The brief told us to do a classic ad to be printed in the magazine "Filter". The target group was swedes in ages 15–30 years. After some thinking and researching, we realized that a small ad in a small magazine wouldn´t do that much of a difference.""

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

The video takes you through the most memorable day in the life of Little Red Riding Hood and along the way, you learn all sorts of details. Like the air resistance experienced by a Volkswagen Type 2-61 Minibus at 43 MPH as measured by Volkswagen GmbH in 1955. Or the wildlife density of the Hundred Acre Wood, showing a surge in the rabbit population. Not to mention the nutrition facts of Grandma with a total caloric value of 10,000 kilocalories. :-)

Monday, April 12, 2010

Cost per contact is high. Really?

When compared to traditional advertising media, experiential is often overlooked and under-rated because of a perceived lack of reach, or high cost per contact. While there is the basic logic of "counting your reach" vs "reaching those who count" and the quality of the "engagement", even in terms of reach experiential engagement scores high.

Another bit from a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, shows that Experiential Marketing has effective reach well beyond consumers directly impacted. When considering sampling costs “per person impacted”, be sure to account for the amplification benefit.

Experiential Marketing - leads to trials.

If you are trying to get consumers to try a product / brand that they do not normally buy / use - do not rely on your ad campaign to transform behavior.

Recent results of a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, where they asked consumers what influences them to purchase brands they don’t normally purchase, and which of the tactic has the greatest impact in that switch gave the following results;

While 52% by way of Experiential Activated and hence more one on one marketing is exciting - what is even more impressive is that this has stayed consistent over the last 15 years - where-in there is so much of a change in the media consumption pattern.

Nice to note, promotion is another 20%.

Awareness driven communication, does drive sales, but only to the extent of 24%.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Twitter integration into Google search results

Integration of the real time twits into Google search results in my view does three things;

1. gives a new reason for brands to not just be on Twitter but ensure they are monitoring conversation on Twitter, not just of the brand but of the entire eco-system.

2. it brings together the twittering "elite / few" to a searching "majority" and hence cannot be ignored.

3. has an amazing effect on the search engine optimization of any brand / site. In fact majority of 1st page search results seem to be from the social media space, with Twitter leading them all. And it is a lot faster.

Also there is a wonderful way of integrating twitter results specific to your google search into your results for every possible subject. Read here about Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Screencast of MarketPulse

MarketPulse is a superb last mile effectiveness measurement tool. It helps a brand understand how it is performing with respect to various consumer touchpoints - when compared to it's own benchmarks, or when compared to it's competitors.

It also allows a brand to understand the performance across geos and store types.

Check out the screencast of MarketPulse;

If you have problems of screen resolution and are only seeing half a screencast above :-) - please visit this site.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Engagement & reaction.

Wonderful engagement & it's amplification amongst the general audience. Done for Samsung NX10 World Creative Imaging Competition.

Just loved it for it's effectiveness and simplicity of the idea. Loved the reaction of the audience at the end and their move towards their cameras to record the moment for sharing.

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While on the site, do check out the chopper and the popcorn and of course the wonderful pics.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Digital Gets Physical

I am a firm believer in that Online marketing and On-ground marketing need to and should go hand in hand. The amplification of "great brand experiences" is best achieved by creating online buzz. Also in this case it is not a chicken & egg situation, it can / should work both ways.

It was therefore a pleasure to read this article in Adweek pointing out how digital mediums are reshaping the way marketers are connecting with their consumers to drive action.

What is really interesting is the absence of typical paid media.

"The Skittles campaign is part of a shift in digital away from users merely sitting in front of computer screens to using new digital tools to affect behavior in the physical world. The growing sophistication of smartphones is driving the creation of these location-based services, which promise to morph the Web from a solitary experience to a ubiquitous connector in the real world.

This evolution has major implications for brands, giving them the possibility of tracking the success of digital campaigns to the store level and changing how they market to consumers. "

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

What type of ads work best on social media platforms.

As time spent on social networking sites increases, (and we know that visiting social networks is the 4th most popular thing that folks do online - ahead of checking their personal emails) advertisers are willing to invest higher percentages of their budgets into campaigns targeting users on those platforms.

However, all the traditional theories & knowledge on how consumers react to ads & hence the effectiveness of ads is out of the window.

Psychster Inc.& Allrecipes undertook a study to determine which kinds of ads are most effective and whether the platforms advertisements appear on make a difference.

Download the PDF from here.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Greenpeace vs. Nestle

This is a wonderful analysis by Olivier Blanchard on the SM PR war and it's learnings for a brand (in this case Nestle) in his post - How to make sure your Facebook page doesn’t become a PR trojan horse.

Please read the full article here.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Brand ahead of demand? Are you crazy?!

I share and completely understand the anguish faced by Joel Harrison, the Editor of B2B Marketing. I can empathize with him when he says

""
I was staggered and aghast when chair Richard Perry asked the audience for their view on brand versus demand: what did they think was most important? The response pretty overwhelmingly, was in favour of brand – at least two thirds of the audience voted for it. To be quite honest, I was staggered by this response. ""

Please read his full article here - Brand ahead of demand? Are you crazy?!

What is amazing is that normally there are the two extremes - one set of folks who are focussed on only the brand - what I like to think of as guys focussed on ROE (return on ego), while there are other set of guys who are extremely focussed beyond ROI - they want actual conversions and sales from the agency.

Middle path is the sweet spot. Engagement to drive trails and positive conversations.

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