Here it goes, eight sins of nu-marketing (bloggers/gurus/evangelists etc.), which, BTW, guilty as charged, I too, have committed some of these sins at some point in the past.

1. Sensationalism.

“The death of the TV!” “Twitter is killing the blogosphere!” “Facebook is killing email!”… it might be the sometimes staggering speed of the rise and adoption of emerging platforms (can you remember life without Twitter??) but time and again we seem to be living in our own over-dramatised world, making self-righteous sensationalist headlines that have no real hold in reality. New stuff don’t just kill old stuff it adds up to it. Everything changes, nothing is changing.

2. Dogmatism & sweeping generalisations

A by-product of sensationalism is dogmatism (or is it the other way around?). Time and again we fail to grasp the complexity of the new landscape. It’s easier to shout “it’s all about this!” (‘this’ being the buzz-word of the day: engagement, relationships, co-creation) than to scrutinise the context face the uncertainty, and admit the complexity. It’s exactly because ‘it’s NOT all about this’ that doing interesting, effective marketing is so damn difficult these days – life was just so much easier if it were all about this…

3. Falling in love with our own cliches and making them strategies

There is a vicious cycle of seductive analogies and catchy phrases becoming the headline of our strategies. “Starting little fires”, “actions not words” and “always in beta” are good examples. As Uri once told me these are not strategies, they are exactly the lack of one. Look around, there are more.

4. False Causality Assumptions (based on anecdotal evidence)

There is an odd assumption that if you only start doing (social media, digital, engagement marketing etc) you will start kicking ass. Example: If you have a company blog, you will have an ongoing dialouge with customers (see the false causality here?). These false assumption are, of course, based on / backed by anecdotal evidence. DellOutlet as an evidence that brands should be on Twitter. WhopperSacrifice as a proof that facebook apps are the way to do marketing (before these – X-Men 3 garnered 3.2 million friends on myspace as a proof that brands should have a myspace page – remember?). Meerkat as a proof that social media is the future of marketing. These are all great examples of great ideas that led to successful marketing NOT a proof that these platforms work. Moreover, they are usually too specific and context based to be anything more than merely a good story that is just too specific to be applicable to you.

5. Using staggering stats to make a case for nu-marketing

Strongly related to he previous sin. “450 million people on facebook!, 56 million tweets every day! Billion videos on youtube!, Million iPhone apps downloads every day!”. These are indeed fascinating numbers but what do they actually tell us? That Facebook is fast becoming hygiene social tool, just like email, that people are into each other more than anything else, that Twitter is the tool of choice for verbal diarrhea, and that the App store is about to become a massive graveyard for apps just as facebook did. What are the real, direct, aplicable implications for marketing? How does million of tweets can actually change the way I do brand and marketing communications is a much more complex story.

6. Ownership of ‘engagement’:

Directly related to sins #2 & #4 – since ‘it’s all about engagement’ and since ‘you have to use social platforms to engage with your consumers’ somehow along the way people forgot the fundamental difference between interactive and engaging and therefore took ownership of engagement. Just because it’s digital, social or interactive doesn’t make it engaging, oh no.

7. Taking learnings from digital brands and making them best practice for consumer brands:

This is one of my favourites. People using internet brands as best practice for marketing for consumer brands. Case in point: “The Widget Economy” – a very hollow marketing bloggers meme from 4 years ago that goes something like this: “it’s all about making it easy for people to take your content and put it on their personal social spaces. Look how many Flickr widgets are out there! you should create a widget that people can embed on their blogs!”. Other examples – ” gogle don’t do advertising – you too, should let the product do the marketing for you! ” or “it’s all about open-source these days, you have to let people build your product and market it for you! see how wordpress and google are doing it”.

8. Over chatter, under-doing.
Well, that’s not a sin as such, just the fact that it’s so damn easier to blog about the seismic change than to implement it in real business. How easy it is to write about “Agile Planning” or about “The future of advertising is great products that have marketing embedded in them” and how oh so difficult it is to implement it. There are probably 10,000 think-tanks for every single do-tank.

C’mon there must be more – what are yours?

When John, Anjali and few others tweeted about their votes for a Pepsi Refresh project I clicked through and in 20 seconds I was in a ‘standing ovation’ mode. Such awesome, admirable, bold, new-media-twitteratis-wet-dream of a project, a project we only dared dreaming about in a ‘what if’ blog posts when talking about the future of marketing
.

And here it is – Pepsi (fuckin) did it. They did not spend money on the annual advertising frenzy that is the Super-Bowl. Instead, Pepsi would spend $20 million funding community renewal events across the U.S. through the Refresh Everything platform. Check out all the details, it is beautifully executed, with healthy looking facebook community, some smart celebrity endorsement and all that. They seem to have ticked all the right boxes on a social-media-powered-campaign list.

R E S P E C T

Unsurprisingly it got loads of attention. Big guns praising as well as some early research findings showing the campaign has already paid off in terms of increased media coverage.

But the Nielsen report looks specifically at Super Bowl related conversations or so called ‘earned media’ so what they found is actually quite obvious – make a bold, well-orchestrated new-news statement and you’ll get talked about. And since Coke didn’t have anything major to stand out with around the Super Bowl frenzy, Pepsi got most of the attention.

But then I recalled the other (social) media frenzy that was around the Coke Happiness Machine viral (1.5 million view on the official video) couple of weeks ago and it got me thinking: in terms of talkability or ‘earned attention’,Happiness or Goodness – who wins the ‘conversation’? So I quickly configured a crude monitoring dashboard…

In the RED corner a $20K or so slippy idea. In the BLUE corner over $20 million bold initiative. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Volume of conversations since 1st of Jan 2010:

Here is what Pepsi ‘earned’ to date:

Here is what coke happiness machine earned to date:

If you are a cynical, purely ROI driven marketeer, the argument that the Coke ‘shtick’ has generated 10% of the media coverage of the Pepsi project with only 0.1% of the investment is enormously seductive. Yet it’s wrong.

This grossly inadequate comparison actually tells us a good story on the future of marketing. Both projects should be compared to all other brands who did spend millions of dollars on some pretty spectacu-lousy superbowl ads that no one will remember half an hour after the game (or generally brands that keep spending loads of money on insignificant, bland advertising).

If you want to get talked about your best hope is to try and do loads of small, cheap, surprising, awesome things like the Coke Happiness shtick AS WELL AS big, bold, game-changing initiatives. Everything else will most probably fall into the obscure world of uninterestingness (which, frankly, is where 95% of marketing communications naturally reside).

BTW soon enough, the idea of big brands spending loads of CSR money via a shouty crowd-sourcing initiatives will become old news. I bet you that the next big brand that will do something similar will get less than half the attention that Pepsi rightly enjoys with Refresh Everything (but that doesn’t mean that brands shouldn’t invest loads of money in making a change for good).

Think both small and big but most important is to think different. What say you?

This piece that got all marketing twitteratis drooling left me with half a smile half a ‘meh’. It’s an idea I bet has been on the minds of half the creative dudes in the world. It definitely was on mine. That’s not to say I’m hot because I don’t think this idea is hot.

It reminded me of an interesting blogversation with Andy on his old blog where he claimed that: “Very clever things on the other hand have become the new obvious”.

Recently I wrote that I fear that in 2010 we’ll see loads of obvious stuff that might work but isn’t really exciting and i think that this is the perfect example.

While I strongly believe in the idea that brands should be generous etc., when I see (or do something like that with my clients) I can’t avoid the feeling that, how shall I put it, this is the kind of stuff you do when you don’t have a better idea to earn people’s attention – you give away free stuff in a slightly cheeky way.

Now compare it to this one that also gives free stuff and as I write this post I think I understand why I liked it so much better than the Coke thing. The obviousness in the Ikea promotion comes as a surprise. It’s a sweet-bitter kind of obviousness you see in a simple original idea.

With the Coke thing there was no surprise, just obviousness.

What say you?

I gave them the expected stuff about the ways in which social-technological developments alter the balance of power and force marketing communications to re-invent itself. My overall argument was that we’re heading towards better relations between markets and consumers where bad products/brands won’t be able to be disguised behind clever marketing, witty taglines or flashy advertising and we can see a growing trend towards authenticity (truth and beauty) in communications.

You had to see the resistance! Put aside the fact that the audience were for a large extant left- leaning, Neomi Klein sort of a fans, there is still some things to learn from their perception of marketing – not as academics but as ordinary people/consumers.

Some of the arguments I’ve heard:  "marketing is essentialy evil", "advertising is loud and intrusive" "marketing is corrupt and manipulative", "Brands and corporations took over our public spheres" etc. Not that I didn’t know or feel it myself but still, the level of loathing and distrust between consumers and marketing communications is immense. People are just fed up with the sleaze and bullshit that governed marketing communications in the past 20 years (yes, we are making a generalization here but the fact that some brands are ‘good’ doesn’t change the overall perception of marketing as evil)

But there was some interesting argument that I took with me and was thinking about in the last few days. Martin argued (I hope that I re-state his argument accurately) that the appearing of a ‘jargon of authenticity’  in marketing and public relations, which are essentially opportunistic exercises, is very problematic and deserve scrutiny. Opportunism and existential authenticity  are moral concepts in tension. Authenticity, he argued, manifests itself persistently in the face of adversity; where the opportunist only sees an opportunity to change tack.

I think that if you leave for a second your critical views on consumerism society and the effective economy, you cannot dismiss the fact that markets and marketing where here from the dawn of humanity and as Uri once said, "Marketing communications, specifically, remain one of the most prolific, complex and powerful aspects of human sign activity."

Therefore, you cannot, to my view, regard marketing – a primal human activity / interaction – as essentially moraly flawed. From the early days of civilisation people were involved in production and trade of products and goods so that cannot be inherently immoral. But it might be true that in the 20th century, especially the last 40 years or from the beginning of mass commuications, marketing, to a large extant has become manipulative, corrupt and therefore unethical.

We now know that there is a growing trend towards authenticity and back to the good old days where if you have a good product, people will tell each other about it and you can expect good business… I want to believe that marketing communications is undergoing a real change towards openness, transparency, dialogue and enrichment and that authenticity, whether forced upon or genuinely pursued, will help consumers to regain trust and better relations with brands – after all they are here to stay so at least we should have some fun together…

UPDATE: In the same vein, read this thoughtful rant on brands in today’s Guardia

(pic via)

[pic via Liat Bar-On]

Now while I’m Dove’s #1 admirer for their campaign for real beauty and it’s accompanying self esteem fund, I think they’ve missed great opportunity to leverage the success of the evolution viral and engage their consumers in a compelling interactive experience that would neatly complement the effect of the film.

Technicall / technological obstacles aside, why Dove didn’t create a microsite, inviting people to play with photoshop-like features and to manipulate their own image like the film and then share with their friends or upload to their blogs etc?  And if this is not possible why didn’t they at least invite people with photoshop to upload and exhibit their own manipulations on Dove’s site?

One of the great challenges of brands in this new landscape is to align their marketing communications with consumers’ trends and desires, and this is a fine example how a brand missed an opportunity to synchronise its communication with the trends of creativity and sharing. There are too many forced User Generated Content initiatives but this one, to my view, could have worked wonders. 

Are these two means of marketing comms comparable?

pic via

How do you compare ROI for traditional media(apples) and new media (oranges)?  How do you compare ROI on airing TV ad (that cost you $3.5 million) to 100 million passive, largely uninterested viewers (its actually 75 million – the rest went to the loo or to grab another six pack) to 1.7 views on YT that cost you nothing and generated huge buzz and WOM?

Well currently you cannot really. The metrics of traditional media like reach and recall and brand awareness are all very problematic anyway without comparing them to any new-media comms tool, and marketing 2.0 is still at its infancy, so its partly common sense and mostly the way in which you believe different types of marketing communications work.

I think that while its true that you cannot compare the reach of Super-Bowl ad to 1.7 million views on YT, its the level of engagement with the marketing message that is matters here.  Richard Huntington said the other day: "All I am interested in is brand engagement and creative
persuasion and I don’t give a damn whether this is analogue,
digital or live". (Hear! Hear!)

We have more than one piece of research to show that people are tired of TV advertising when it is aired on TV but are quite happy to engage with the same content in their own time, when it was sent to them the viral way through friends -  not by way of interruption but by way of invitation.

The most important issue is the ability to reach people when
they are willing to engage with the message. Both TV ads
and YouTube videos are interruptive. One interrupts in the middle of a game or favourite show (bad!) and the other interrupts in the middle of work (good! or if not you have the choice to engage with it whenever you want to). Now when will you prefer to be interrupted? and by who?

So while Super-Bowl spot has a potential reach of couple of hundred of
millions, It is stuck between other ads and its on the perfect time for
me to go and relieve myself or get another beer while a link from a friend or a recommendation
from a trusted blogger has much better chances to get my attention and trust and to generate the E factor.

Another very important factor is the PR and talkability of your message. The YT spot and its viral effect was something to talk about. In the past two weeks it has garnered segments on ABC’s "The View," "Ellen," CNN, "Entertainment Tonight" and even Fox’s "Geraldo." It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad.

So perhaps now its becoming a bit easier to compare the apples to the oranges?

This quote is taken from a completely different context yet I think it neatly applied to the new era of marketing communications:

UPDATE (different angle on the story in a great post from Uri @ Marketing Babylon)

For example, we will soon have
the choice of either paying premium and receive the programmes we like
advertising-free, or we’ll be able to customise the advertising we receive and choose
the brands/categories we are willing to accept advertising from.

How would you like to receive your
TV advertising in the future?

Below you’ll find three options –
please choose one.

UPDATE: (25 October) BLOGPOLL IS DOWN AND SO IS THIS POLL – APPOLOGY FOR THAT.

UPDATE: (26 October) Last results that I was able to retrieve show (97 votes):

56%  prefer to pay premium price and get ad-free content/entertainmment.

36% are willing to trade some personal information in return to relevant, customised ads.

8% are happy as it is now.

Many thanks for your
participation. I really appreciate your help.