Night On The Town With WWE

So, face it - as an interactive agency, there are some perks that come along every now and then. The latest adventure was a M2I's group outing to fantasy land....Wrestling fantasy land!

Thanks to WWE.com and our online sales rep Stacy (she was the BEST hostess ever) for the opportunity to witness in person one of the top U.S. spectator sports.

You know the saying, you learn something new every day? Well, here's my learnings from the field trip...

1. I got a totally different perspective of wrestling fans. From my observations, I would guess the demo is: Middle America: 18-54, Middle Income, Single Men and Married Couples w/ Children, High Propensity for Brand Loyalty (Am I even close Stacy??)
   
2. Giants DO exist....check out these guys...I am having nightmares that Kane is coming for me and that Batista wants to be my friend
   
3. I knew that I was being drawn-in and wrapped up into the soap opera when I heard myself yelling "Bring It On!" and chanting for the defeat of someone dressed like J.R. Ewing in speedos. Again, the nightmares continue...

Happy Hump Day Everyone!!

My first few weeks here...

This is the fourth week for me here at Mediatwo…I feel that enough time has passed for me to intelligently post a few of my thoughts thus far, so here goes…
In the past month I’ve relocated my family and started a new job. I came from a large agency up in Detroit where I worked on multi-million dollar automotive accounts. A bit of culture shock was certainly expected when I accepted a job at a small agency with accounts a bit smaller than Ford. But I’ll chat more about that in a minute…
My choice in coming to Mediatwo was an easy one. I was invited to come visit MediaTwo in April while I was on the job hunt. I was welcomed by a friendly group of Interactive savvy folks. I got the agency introduction, agency tour and was able to sit and talk with the media group and compare what they did to what I did and see if a match was to be made…
As you can assume by me posting this blog, a match was made and I joined the group. What a smart bunch! And for the culture shock…..everyone here knows what they are doing! The Interactive account folks actually know Interactive! And better than that, they are experts at it! My media peers are hands down some of the most knowledgeable in the industry. The design folks are equally as talented and unique. I love the format…In order to work here, you must know, or be highly motivated and interested in the Interactive biz. The expertise and knowledge that this agency holds is remarkable and priceless. I love how I can engage in a free and open conversation and can almost always count on someone to have feedback on any comment, issue or concern that I have. The productivity that I’ve seen in the past couple weeks has blown me away! When everyone “gets it”, things move faster and much more gets accomplished. At a large agency, I felt like half the job was educating my peers with what I was thinking, feeling, and trying to get accomplished. Here at Mediatwo, that is one step that need not be taken. Things move fast around here, good thing I was ready to swim on day one!
I can see that I will learn tons from my peers here at Mediatwo, and I look forward to teaching them a thing or two from my past experiences back in Motown. The atmosphere here is open and with my hunger to always learn and grow, this seems to be a great fit for me.

Google Ad Planner

There has been a lot of hype around the launch of the Google Ad Planner. Many questions have surfaced; Will it replace ComScore and/or QuantCast? Is Google trying to steal agency business, etc., etc., etc.....

Well, I've gained access to the Beta for Ad Planner and I am here to voice my opinion. First of all, I don't see it replacing anything or anyone - I'm sure most online strategists will agree - the more the merrier. Each tool - @plan, AdRelevance, Hitwise, ComScore, QuantCast, Alexa, QuantCast and Google Ad Planner all have their role to play in a media strategy. A good media strategy takes information from all of these sources into account and looks for the most effective way for the advertiser to achieve their online marketing goals and objectives.

Once the strategy is in place, the media plan itself should be based on data (and a pinch of planner intuition). First there is the publisher data -placements, pricing, creative formats. Next, publisher data needs to be paired with forecast data; either from historical client results, Media Two historical results or planner experience. Once the plan is compiled using the numbers, it is usually clear which pubs have a shot at being successful in meeting the goals.

Most importantly, no online direct response campaign should be left alone, the real work is "after-the-buy ". This is where the best interactive agencies distinguish themselves and where Media Two prides itself. Third party ad serving provides the data, but it takes human experts in interactive to continually optimize the campaign.

So, my opinion, Google Ad Planner is just another tool, use it to compile your research. It will never replace the human factor that is necessary to run a smart online marketing campaigns.

Everybody's Doing It, Why Aren't You?

I have been thinking recently about Media Two Interactive, our current clients and future clients. This reflection involved me asking "What Advertiser Would I Want to Work With", as well as, "Who Do I Think Media Two Can Help" take their business to the next level. It is somewhat the same question, but there is a difference. I was able to put together a solid Top 10 list of companies that I would love to help grow their business online. This list read like the "Hobbies and Interest" section of some online dating site (Interests - Golf, Fitness and Wellness, Technology, Long Walks O... ok, not that). So, if anyone from ClubCorp happens to stumble across this blog, call me! We could do great things in the online space, as two of my passions come together, Online Marketing and Golf.

As for the second question, Who Can Media Two Help? That's simple, any advertiser who is not spending the industry average of 10% of their marketing budget on the Internet. The trends speak for themselves (Online Ad Spending Should Grow 20% in 2008). Online ad spending has already surpassed Radio in the overall marketing mix (Internet to Surpass Radio in 2008), and will soon leap Magazine advertising. The time is now to get onboard.

Maybe you handle your online marketing in-house or maybe your longtime agency handles your "one-off" online initiatives. That's fine, but if you marketing mix doesn't include a 10 - 20% budget allocation to online marketing, then you're a candidate for expanded efforts. With one of our most successful clients, Media Two grew their online budget from less than 1% in 2006 to 49% in Q3 2008. I think that's worth repeating. 49% of the total marketing budget went to online in Q3. So, jump on in, the water feels great!

MOBILE MARKETING with a catch...

Although I hate to push Nick's "Thank You" blog down the page, I wanted to share some thoughts on Mobile Marketing and how it translated to one of our most direct response clients. As a sidebar, Nick is right. Media Two gives all the avenues for personal and professional growth. But Nick, don't sell yourself short, you already possess the skill set foundation of a media strategist, but you just may not know it yet or give yourself enough credit.

Ok, back to Mobile Marketing. It seems like everyday I peruse the industry news and there's always an article on Mobile Marketing and how to best utilize it to reach your audience. So, after multiple exposures, I decided to take notice of this article in iMedia Connection called Top 5 things to know about SMS advertising. Obviously, Mobile offers several formats to advertising, but this article focuses on SMS (Short Message Service) or text messaging. As I'll always preface an article I reference by saying that most of these industry articles are written by an expert in the particular channel being discussed, as it should be; however, most of these articles, like this one, are written from the publisher side. So, take this agenda into consideration and I'll show you what I mean later on.

The first three points of the article of excellent and very true. The channel does offer mass reach, easy implementation and enough targeting to be "in the ballpark" with your target. From a direct marketing standpoint, this is all we need for a test (get an aggressive out clause first). And this is exactly what we did for one of our clients, and the results were mixed, hence the reason for the blog.

In the article, Zaw Thet's first point was "big reach, and audiences are already opted-in". Both are true, but... The reach is dictated by the cost model you negotiate with your mobile partner. In our case, we negotiated a Cost Per Call program, which offered a massive amount of reach, and to be honest, a little bit of spam too. However, the benefits of a performance cost model on our ROI outweighed this negative. The other part of the statement, "audiences are already opted-in" is loosely accurate, with the key word being loosely. Very loose, almost deceptively loose. This is what I mean. Let's say I'm watching an NFL draft special on TV and see something asking me to text a shortcode to a number to receive draft updates to my phone. I'm not going to be able to watch it live, so this is perfect for getting my fix. Well, some conditions apply in small print on the TV screen that I may or may not have seen. In our experience, the user does not see this and just focuses on the shortcode and number to text it to. So, what they don't know is they've "opted-in" to receive sports alerts AND ADVERTISING. Also, within this fine print is their OPT-OUT language, which I'm guessing, most of the time, the user isn't paying attention to that either. So to continue my example, I get my draft updates to my phone, but I also keep getting sports updates well past this event and pretty much whatever else the mobile partner wants to send to me, including ads. And unfortunately, I can't remember how to make them stop (opt-out). Listen, I understand and am fine with the process described, but that's because I'm in the industry. Think of the general public. Two months from now, they have forgotten that they signed up for draft updates, they are getting addition text messages which they think are random, advertising is included, and on top of all that, it is costing them money if they do not have unlimited texting. So, this is exactly what happened in our case when we thought that "audiences are already opted-in". Within our ads, we included our 800 number to call to schedule an appointment, and we had a number of these types of complaints where users didn't have any idea where or when they "opted in" to receive these messages, and unfortunately, the CSRs were not able to help them because of their lack of recollection. So, you, the advertiser, are left cleaning up the mess of a flawed sign-up process and a consumer that doesn't pay attention. Fortunately, we were able to put a process in place to combat these occurrances and still show strong results, so we would do the program again.

We all know that targeting is a key component of any media strategy, and mobile is no exception. Zaw offers two great ways to achieve this, content and messaging. In our case, we used a performance cost model, which made the content targeting less important, although we were able to choose some verticals to test. The copy or message targeting is an excellent point with him saying "one size fits all ad copy is one of the most common reasons for poor campaign performance." Now, I don't know if this is the "most" common reason, but it behooves any advertiser to heed his advice.

Lastly, I'm not disagreeing in the last two points, because I do think that the channel can be an excellent CRM tool to build a relationship with your consumer, but the idea of "participation media" goes against at least 2 of his first three points. These custom games and surveys to engage the audience does require legwork, lacks reach, and what Mr. Thet fails to mention, is expensive, meaning more commissions for him, which is part of the reason why it conveniently made it's way into the article.