He warned marketers there was a risk of “scoring an own goal” if they do not use mobile properly. Eyre said that mobile is the first device which is tailor-made by the user, who can populate it with their own apps to create a personalised device.

The event also included presentations from Shazam, FT, Google, Twitter, O2 and featured presentations on the ‘Rise of tablets’, ‘How mobile is driving social media’ and ‘How brands are making the most of mobile’.
In contrast to other media, such as TV or radio which define a user’s experience and slot advertising into it, Eyre said, in mobile the experience is defined by the user. He noted at the same mobile can be “a richer, more rewarding” experience, but its personal nature made it a “special place, demanding special care”.

“If brands are not to be resented in this highly personalised space they must blend, not distract, but be part of a suite of apps,” he said. “I define and invest so much of myself in this device, I don’t want it hijacked. Brands can join in, but not invade.”

To illustrate his point, he referred to recent comments made by Stefan Olander, vice-president of digital sport for Nike, reported in Marketing, about the need for brands to add value to smartphone devices, instead of thinking about selling inventory.

He suggested brand sponsorship of apps is an effective way to engage with consumers in mobile rather than advertising through banners.

“Don’t think about advertising, think about ‘mobilising’,” hesaid. “It is important to be embedded in this way of thinking, so you can laugh a contemptuous laugh when you see a competitor try and do it in banner.”

His comments reflected those made earlier at the conference by Claire Valotti, managing director of O2 Media, who said mobile is less about the device and more about “connectivity”.

She said: “When you think about connectivity it opens some far more interesting conversations” and enables brand to make “life easier and add value” for consumers.

Valotti said that is is one of “the biggest challenges” is “to get more brands to get in mobile.”

Andrew Fisher, chief executive of Shazam, discussed results from the ITV partnership with Pepsi and Cadbury the first brands in the UK to enable the audio-recognition app in its ads.

He said 50,000 Shazam tags were activated by viewers of Britain’s Got Talent at the weekend, even though the service was not pre-marketed and it was the first time many of them would have seen the service in advertising.

“This is an inflection point in consumer behaviour, where they are more comfortable and less resistant to new technology.”

“Consumers are moving far faster than any of us can imagine,” he said, “and that represents a huge opportunity for all of us.”

Article originally published by Marketing Magazine: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/bulletin/dailynews/article/1132685/?DCMP=EMC-BreakingnewsfromMarketing

More and more television networks, radio stations, print titles, and outdoor billboards are competing for attention, and new marketing channels pop up every day, from apps to publicity stunts and beyond. The number of places we hit people with marketing messages these days is growing a lot faster than the number of eyeballs that can take them in, and as a result audiences (and attention spans) are becoming increasingly fragmented. That reduces the chance any message has of getting through.

Even sales channels are fragmenting beyond the online vs. bricks-and-mortar divide to which we’ve become somewhat accustomed. Desktop and laptop purchases are giving way to shopping via smartphone—at a time when many companies don’t even have a mobile website, to say nothing of e-commerce capabilities. Add inflation to the mix (even with 2-3 percent increases, the wonder of compounding is working against you), and fragmentation can shred what once was a healthy marketing budget.

The good news is that there is a powerful way to overcome fragmentation: integration. But don’t be deceived—it’s more difficult than it appears.

Integration is not simply slapping a common tagline onto all your ads, using a single color palette, or force-fitting a message that’s suited for one medium into another (great television commercials rarely translate well to outdoor billboards, which in turn are very different from online banners).

Integration means communicating a consistent identity from message to message, and medium to medium, and (more importantly) delivering consistently on that identity. It requires not only the identification of a powerful, unifying strategy and compelling voice for your brand, but the discipline to roll it into every aspect of your organization—from advertising to sales, customer service to customer relationship management programs (and beyond). It’s not for the faint of heart.

Sometimes we run an exercise in which we ask clients to recall the taglines of the world’s 10 biggest advertisers. Some respondents get a handful correct, but by and large everyone fails the assignment (underscoring the point that slogans aren’t the answer). But one company’s tagline participants often do recall: McDonald’s (MCD).

It’s not because of the money the fast-feeder spends—the other nine top advertisers spend as much or more. It’s because McDonald’s has maintained a singular focus since 2003—so long ago that the famous pop music heartthrob named Justin who helped launch the campaign wasn’t Bieber, but Timberlake (remember him?).

To fight off fragmentation effectively, everything you do to attract, convert, retain, and engage your customers should be integrated. If your brand isn’t woven beyond your marketing efforts into your human resource practices, your training programs, even your compensation and employee evaluation metrics, you’re leaving opportunity on the table. You’re also risking backlash, as spurned or burned customers use Facebook and Twitter to make their complaints heard. It’s vital to deliver consistent signals in everything you do.

That raises a question: If fragmentation is so damaging, and integration such a powerful counterforce, why don’t companies implement an integration strategy more often? It’s not for lack of understanding, desire, or even intent in the minds of most marketers. It’s for lack of perseverance.

Put simply, integration takes time. It’s not easy to integrate a brand into a wide suite of processes, materials, and messages that have been shepherded by different people, driven by different objectives, and brought to life in different places within the organization. Many companies simply don’t have the time, money or patience to see it through.

Beyond that, integrated branding takes time to soak into the marketplace. Consumers just don’t pay attention as much or as quickly as they used to. Research of hundreds of growth companies found that the average advertising campaign lasts approximately 2.3 years and that companies that maintain healthy growth over time tend to have longer-lasting campaigns, while those that struggle tend to change direction more frequently.

That’s exactly what’s happening in the cola wars. Coke has remained focused and consistent for years and is winning market share, while Pepsi recently fell to an embarrassing No. 3 (behind Coke and Diet Coke). As a result, PepsiCo recently announced a significant increase in marketing spending and has spent the better part of a year in extensive research and deep introspection.

Advertising Age reports that over the past nine months a core team of Pepsi marketers “scoured the globe for inspiration, looked to the past for insights, and sought to understand what precisely made Pepsi different from Coke. There were exhaustive focus groups, in-home ethnographies, quantitative and qualitative studies, and cultural immersions in markets as diverse as Argentina, Australia, United Arab Emirates and Russia.” The brain trust at Pepsi appears to be taking the correct steps to right their brand’s ship, but as it does, it shouldn’t neglect the need for and power of long-term integration.

Neither should you (and all the more if your budget is a bit less than what McDonald’s or Pepsi spends!). Find a time to gather together as many different expressions of what your company says and does in one place, then make an honest evaluation. If it doesn’t all connect for you in some meaningful fashion, it won’t for your customers and prospects, either.

If your strategy is weak or off the mark, you may need to do what Pepsi is doing and reexamine everything. But it may be that your problem is more a matter of execution. If so, your enemy is entropy: Everything in the universe (including your brand) tends towards disarray, and in that case your role is to be gravity. No one else is going to hold it all together.

Not so long ago, it was enough to have great strategy and a big idea. Today, even the best ideas have a hard time getting off the ground as consumers’ media and purchasing options—not to mention their attention spans—grow increasingly fragmented. While perfect integration is unachievable, companies that do the best job of harmonizing all their marketing efforts have an advantage.

You may have noticed a lot of news recently concerning how personal data is used by large internet publishers such as Google, Apple and Facebook, for either improving service or as a pervasive and targeted tool for advertising.

It seems that the desire by the internet giant to simplify and blend some current 60 privacy policies into one is (currently) falling fowl of EU regulators.

There has been a huge amount of publicity about this, but buried deep in this news is a far more potent change that is already law and comes into effect within the EU (yes, which includes the UK) on 25 May 2012 – the EU cookie law.

As there has been no clear directive by the government on how best to adhere to this new law, it is important to understand the fundamentals of the policy, what the effects are for your site and what you must do to comply. To make this easier, we have broken this down into a simple Q&A:

What is the new EU cookie law?

To give it its official title, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, will be taking effect on 25 May 2012. Most sites use cookies to track visitors and information on the visitor. The main part of the new legislation will require website owners to gain consent from users before a cookie can be stored on their computer. The type of cookie being used and what the cookie is for must be made clear before the user gives consent.

This European directive is being driven in the UK by The Information Commissioner’s Office or ICO. On the ICO website it clearly states:

Cookies or similar tracking methods must not be used unless the subscriber or user of the relevant terminal equipment:

(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and

(b)  has given his or her consent.

You can find out more from the ICO website.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a very small text file that is placed on a website user’s hard drive. The information the cookie contains is set by the website and it can be used by that website whenever the user visits.

There are a variety of different cookies. Here are a few:

Session cookie – also known as transient cookies. These are stored on the user’s computer until they leave the website, at which point they are deleted.

Stored cookie – Where the cookie is downloaded onto the hard drive and used to identify a visitor whenever they return. The lifetime of this cookie varies from website to website but 30, 60 and 90 day cookies are common.

Flash cookie – If you are viewing video or visit sites that use Adobe, there may be small files downloaded when you watch a video.

Why does a website need cookies?

The information stored in a cookie allows the website to identify you when you visit and present information accordingly. Below are some examples of cookie usage:

‘Remember me/ Keep me logged in’ – If a website has functionality available only to signed-in users it can be frustrating for them to log in every time they visit. In this situation a cookie allows the user to return to the website and be taken to their account immediately. Example: Facebook – can you imagine filling in your details every time you visit?

Preferences – Some websites allow you to set preferences on the look and feel, content you want to see and functionality you don’t need. A cookie may be used to ensure your preferences are remembered when you return (please note this is less common these days, where preferences are stored in the database rather than on your computer)

Shopping baskets and recently viewed products – An e-commerce website such as Amazon tries to make the shopping experience as easy as possible for users by storing the contents of your shopping basket and products you’ve recently viewed without you needing to be signed in so that as you browse the site you don’t lose everything you’ve done. These cookies are usually short-lived and may exist only while you’re on the website or for a few hours after you leave.

Analytics / website usage tracking – Many websites rely on analytical software to record how people arrived at the site, what they did while they were there and how and when they left. While this might sound a little ominous, the website owners are not able to identify individuals; there’s no way to know what a particular user viewed, only that an unidentified person did view that particular page.

This information is used to improve a website and ensure the visitors are able to find what they need as quickly and easily as possible.

Third party advertising services – Some advertising platforms that display their adverts on websites in their network make use of cookies to track whether you’ve seen a certain advert and whether you clicked; however like Analytics, you remain anonymous – the service does not have access to your individual information, only that someone on your computer saw or interacted with an advert.

In truth, it is this type of cookie usage that has driven the push for an EU cookie law as it’s unfortunately open to abuse.

What type of cookies run on your site?

Though this may seem to be an obvious question with an obvious answer, the truth is that many site owners and publishers do not know. If they do know, they know the basics or make assumptions of what cookies are used.

The best way to determine the cookies your website creates for users is to carry out a full audit. Record cookies that are created, identify what they’re for and decide whether they’re critical to the functionality of your website. Be sure to include third party services that create cookies, such as Google AdSense, AdWords and Analytics – while you may not be responsible for creating these cookies, they are delivered via your website.

How to comply with the law

Firstly, we would like to stress that at the moment there are no official guidelines on how best to adhere to the new law – this has been left open for interpretation by individuals and their websites so the guidance provided below is based on the information currently available, is subject to change and should not be considered definitive.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that there has not yet been confirmation as to what the penalties will be for failing to comply with the new law. MTM will bring you updates and news as and when we have them.

Asking for permission

This is essentially what everything boils down to – getting permission from the user before placing the cookie on their computer without misrepresenting its purpose or your intentions with the information that results from the cookie. So how can we ask for permission and what’s the impact likely to be?

If we use this as our guidelines there are a number of ways we can approach the problem depending on the number of cookies that your website uses. In the case of our website, we would be required to ask permission for Analytics tracking as soon as someone arrives at the website.
This addresses a few problems

1. We have asked permission to add Analytics tracking cookies, explained how long they will exist for and that they cannot be used to identify the individual. We’ve provided the option to accept this cookie or reject it depending on how comfortable the user is with us collecting this data.

2. In the opening line we are linking ‘cookies’ to the corresponding Wikipedia page, should the visitor be unsure of what a cookie is.

3. To remember what the user has selected we must add a cookie (catch 22!) – but if they are not happy with this we give a final option to close the box.

Of course the issue with this is the box will appear on every page that the user visits – hardly ideal.

Now that’s probably not the most aesthetically pleasing way of solving the problem, but it gives you an idea of what is possible and this method should be suitable for one or two different cookies, but what if you need to ask permission for more – very likely if you run an e-commerce or service-based website.

In this example, the site has managed to ask for permission, explain what each cookie/set of cookies is for and given the user the ability to choose between them or choose none of them – meeting all requirements the EU cookie law sets out.

Take note of the wording used in the example above – you’re asking the user for something so it’s important to be nice about it and make it clear they have a choice. A formal tone of voice with little explanation of what they are able to choose is likely to put people off.
Do I have to explain each cookie?

While you must provide information on all cookies you wish to create it is not necessary to do so next to a request of permission – linking to a privacy notice that includes the information is also acceptable. However, we do not believe this to be as effective and by hiding the information on another page you are making the visitor work – remember you want something from them not the other way around. It’s much easier to click ‘No’ then go and search for an explanation on another page.

Possible exceptions

The ICO has suggested that cookies vital to the correct operation of your website may not need prior permission before being added to a user’s computer, however this is not confirmed. Those that may fall under this category are shopping basket cookies, where the visitor must be able to store their items in a basket as they navigate through the website.

How big an impact will this have?

It’s fair to say that when given the choice many people would rather not allow you to collect data on their activities and so we must inevitably accept that there will be reduction in the amount of data available through your analytics package and all other third party tools. The ICO itself implemented a similar permission-based technique as explored in the above screenshots and the result was a 90% drop in visitors being tracked by Google Analytics – that’s nine in 10 who declined the cookie.

If you run a website that provides a service or sells products, the impact of this is potentially massive. As marketers as well as business owners, we rely on this data to make educated decisions on how to improve the website and to refine the conversion funnel to grow sales. With a 90% reduction in available data these decisions will be far from informed.

We must therefore make the permission process as effective as possible to drive the 10% of opt-ins up as high as we can.

What can I do in the short term?

Carry out an audit to identify all of the cookies that may be added to the computer of a visitor to your website, whether they are created by you or a third party such as an ad network. Where possible, you should stop these being created or limit their creation to only when they’re strictly necessary.

Where a cookie is required to allow you to achieve your business goals you must ask permission to add them, even cookies vital to the operation of your website – at least until the ICO can bring some clarification on the matter.

We would also recommend keeping up to date with the ICO and any announcements it makes which may offer more official guidance on the subject. You can find them at http://www.ico.gov.uk/.

To summarise, at the moment there’s no clear directive on the best way to comply with the new law so everyone’s in the dark, to a degree. It’s worth keeping an eye on the big online retailers and website publishers to see what they are doing. Meanwhile, stay tuned to for updates and announcements as and when they happen.

Further information:

AboutCookies.org
Cookielaw.org
Google Groups
Out-Law.com

‘SoLoMo’

Definition: SoLoMo is the blend of social, local and mobile. It represents the growing marketing trend of targeting consumers based on their current location with content or promotions designed to be shared via social networks.

‘Plussification’

Definition: Plussification (also spelt ‘plusification’) describes how people signed into a Google account will get personalised search results featuring pages shared with them on Google+. It means higher search rankings for pages shared via the +1 button.

‘Likeonomics’

Definition: The idea is that people want to buy and do business with brands that they ‘like’. The inventor of this idea, Rohit Bhargava, says that companies can measure the contribution of being ‘liked’ to the economics of a brand.

‘Tradigital’

Definition: Tradigital is the fusion of traditional and digital. When applied to marketing, it effectively means applying traditional principles of marketing and branding to the digital space in order to gain competitive advantage.

So what does make a great marketer – particularly in the current, difficult environment?

In the good old days, marketers were the unsung heroes of B2B companies. They sat in the background with a low profile, keeping their heads down and getting on with pumping out campaigns, organising trade show stands, managing databases etc. Few, if any, were stars – that was left to the sales team, or the MD.

But the credit crunch plus the digital revolution created a ‘perfect storm’. The consequences for B2B marketers were more pressure, less time, less budget, more fickle clients, greater scrutiny and interference from the board, and more stressed and agitated sales and finance people.

To cope with this new environment, as B2B marketers, we have to change. In today’s world, they must be ‘always-on’, visible, accountable, measurable, approachable: leading and innovating rather then reacting and following. And they must be willing and able to embrace new opportunities, of which there are many – including new technology, new ways of working and changes to think and act strategically. So specifically what skills and attributes does a B2B marketer need to survive and thrive in 2012? Here are my top ten. In order to succeed, B2B marketers must be:

1. A polymath – in other words, good at many things. A jack of all trades (and probably a master of a couple of those). That includes so-called ‘traditional’ and digital marketing disciplines.
2. Pragmatic – willing and able to change, responding to changing needs and demands.
3. Engaging – they must be excellent communicators, with anyone and everyone, across the organisation. That includes everyone from the boardroom to the call centre.
4. Technologically adept – analytics, automation and social media monitoring must be your new best friends.
5. Passionate – really believe in what they are doing and why, and in their brand and the organisation that they work for. Lip service won’t do.
6. Convincing – able to sell ideas and concepts, and rally others to their cause.
7. Robust – they must be able to justify and prove their decisions and actions.
8. Collaborative – able to work with other key stakeholders in the organisation, such as sales, IT and finance, where necessary.
9. Dogged and determined – able to keep going in the face of adversity.
10. Inquisitive – interested in new tools, techniques, insights and ideas. Marketing will continue to change, and practitioners must change with it.

In 2012, more than ever before, marketers must stand up to be counted. I truly believe that marketing is the organisation that has the best opportunity to deliver real and lasting change for the organisation. It’s up to individual practitioners to embrace this opportunity. For those that are up to the challenge: it will probably a tough but – for most – an ultimately rewarding year. Those that aren’t should probably leave now.

Published with permission from http://www.b2bmarketing.net/

MTM is pleased to announce the launch of MarineGuard’s new website. Designed to give the company a web presence in line with the business’s size and stature.

The new site is part of a wider marketing and PR drive for MarineGuard.

To view the new site, visit www.marineguard.com

Speaking after his keynote speech at Facebook’s first marketing conference in London on Tuesday (28 March), Bosworth said: “It has to be a long term play. You can’t just make the number of fans go up to win.”

Bosworth said brands “have to be much better at producing good content” to get noticed on the site and compete with messages from users’ friends and family, citing Burberry and adidas Originals as good expamples of brands doing this well.

In TV advertsing, he added, brands also now have to compete harder to catch viewers’ attention.

Bosworth said: “It used to be with TV you could buy a captive audience, but now people can tune out more easily […] you have lost that captive audience and you have to compete.”

At the event’s press conference with David Fischer, vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Facebook and Joanna Shields, vice president and managing director of Facebook, EMEA, the issue of fan numbers was also raised.

Fischer was asked about comments made by Diageo’s Phillip Gladman at last week’s ISBA conference, where the marketer said brands should abandon social networks if they are unable to build communities of a million consumers. Fischer replied: “There is no prize for having the most fans [but] fan acquisition is important”.

He said Facebook does not put a number on expected fan acquisition, as this number depends on the type of business and customer base, but stressed that brands should adopt the “always on” approach and ensure they have a “sustained relationship” with fans.

Shields agreed, adding, “engaged fans are as important as numbers”.

The event was the first of its kind for Facebook in the UK and attracted around 500 marketers and agencies.

Mobile ads: spend up 157% to £203.2m

Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are understood to have boosted investment in mobile advertising, in an effort to reach what internet analytics company comScore claims are the 58% of Britons accessing content via apps or the mobile internet each month.

According to annual figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), UK adspend on mobile media – including search, display and video – surged 157% year on year to a total of £203.2m in 2011.

The IAB claims this growth has been fuelled by the rapid uptake of apps and social media, the availability of cheaper data packages, and more consumers using their mobile devices to access the web while watching TV.

For the first time, retail is among the top-spending mobile sectors, accounting for a 12.3% share of total spend, compared with 5.5% the previous year.

According to the IAB, this leap is driven by the rapid growth in m-commerce.

It claims 24% of consumers have bought a product or service via their device, while 38% of respondents to its Mobile Online Journey study on January have used their phones in store, while 55% of them have conducted an internet search in-store.

FMCG brands have also increased their share of total mobile adspend in 2011 to 14.4%, from 11.8% in 2010, making it the third-biggest spending sector after entertainment and media (23.2%) and telecoms (14.9%).

Both sectors overtook finance and automotive, which had previously been major spenders in mobile marketing, for the first time.

Finance brands dropped their investment in mobile advertising by 81% in 2011, accounting for 10.3% of the total spend. The previous year, finance brands boosted their mobile ad spend, making it the second-largest sector, with an 18.6% share for 2010.

Technology brands significantly boosted their investment, to account for 8.4% of total share in 2011, up 180% from the previous year.

Richard Brooke, communications buying manager at Unilever UK and Ireland, the UK’s third-biggest advertiser last year, said mobile marketing was “likely to play an important role in the company’s marketing” as it seeks more ways to engage with consumers on the move.

“As the penetration of smartphones continues to increase among consumers, so, too, has the value and significance of mobile marketing,” he added.

A Tesco spokesman said: “We are responding to customers who tell us they like to receive information from Tesco on their phones and looking at how we use mobile technology in the marketing mix, alongside more traditional communications.”

Jon Mew, director of mobile and operations at the IAB, said that improvements in measurement and ad formats over the past year were attracting spend to mobile.

He said: “The availability of sexy, interactive rich-media mobile ads has made them more appealing to brands and consumers, and that is really driving FMCG and retail spend.”

He said that because mobile spend was “still quite small” compared to brands’ overall budgets, it was difficult to pinpoint where growth in spend was coming from, particularly as mobile was often treated as “experimental” budget. He added it was unlikely to be digital, because it was seeing strong growth.

Online adspend figures are out in the next few weeks and it is predicted that total digital media spend was more than £4bn for 2011.

Mobile search attracts greatest spend

The majority of spend is going towards search (66%), which increased 145% year on year to £134.3m, while display has grown 196% to £59.4m.

While many industry experts have predicted the death of the mobile app, the study shows investment in app advertising is still healthy. The study showed that more than half of the total display inventory (54%) is coming from mobile apps, while 46% of display adspend is on browser inventory.

The study only includes paid-for media and therefore does not take into account the amount brands are investing in branded mobile apps.

The growth in display was largely driven by standard display formats, such as banners and text links.

It also showed that SMS and MMS advertising grew threefold, to £7.6m, up from £2.5m the previous year.

Mobile video advertising still has a relatively small share of adspend, at £800,000, but it has grown fourfold from 2010, when brands invested just £200,000 in pre- and post-roll mobile video ads.

With 4.1 million Britons now owning a tablet computer, according to comScore in January, the IAB has measured tablet-specific advertising spend for the first time. It found that £2.4m was spent in 2011.

According to comScore data for January, 18.8 million of the UK mobile audience (38%) accessed social media via a device in the three months up to January 2012, which is a 35.6% increase year on year.

Mew said that with Twitter stepping up mobile advertising and Facebook poised to enter the market, it was “really good news” for the mobile industry.

He said: “With 50% of consumers’ time on the mobile internet spent on Facebook alone, if Facebook was to have more opportunities for brands, this could really accelerate spend.”

Article originally written for Marketing Magazine

Apple unveiled its latest iPad last week to the usual media fanfare and, as many expected, the new features were incremental improvements that look set to consolidate Apple’s dominance of the tablet market.