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Futurist CMO Conference: Unpredictability is the New Consistency

 

A lot has been written lately about the changing profile of the CMO, a role which faces an increasingly complex set of stakeholders and expectations (“10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs”) as it is engulfed by empowered consumers, big data, digital media pervasion, and accelerated technology innovation cycles. While CMO tenures have slightly increased to an average of less than four years, the role remains a hot seat. Technology savvy, analytics prowess, and strict ROI measurement are almost unanimously heralded as the key attributes of a successful marketing leader. The CMO is expected to be a business strategist, innovator, and change agent, while at the same time also acting as the brand evangelist, inspirational communicator-in-chief, and cross-functional collaborator. Tough one. How can today’s CMO succeed in times of hyper-connectivity when long-held beliefs are shattered, audiences are transient, and “software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen)?

The Futurist CMO conference, hosted by former Wipro CMO Jessie Paul and her indefatigable team in the high-tech cluster of Gurgaon, near Delhi, last week, discussed this very question. Paul Writer, the name of Jessie’s venture, is devoted to fostering the Indian marketing community, and provides online and offline forums for a lively exchange on emerging marketing trends. Their newsletter is a fantastic resource for marketing professionals worldwide, and the equally sophisticated conference gathered some of India’s brightest marketing minds (from brands such as Coffee Day, Citibank, Essar, Reliance, Godfrey Phillips, NIIT, Aircel, Makemytrip.com, IBM, and Capital Foods) for an exhilarating two days of thought-provoking presentations and panels.

In my presentation in Gurgaon, I took a slightly contrarian view, outlining the idea of Smart Brands to debunk the four big marketing myths of strategy, control, consistency and data. I proposed a super-flexible portfolio of readily adaptable initiatives instead of a single-strategy approach, argued for understanding marketing as a state of permanent crisis only to be tackled with a deliberate design for the loss of control; made the case for unpredictability as the new consistency, and contrasted Big Data with Big Intuition. My talk spurred an animated debate. One attendee objected: “If we follow your advice, we will never have a seat at the table.” But which table do you want to have a seat at, and at whose mercy? Our expertise runs broad not deep, and by the nature of our role we are comfortable with ambiguity and paradox, can make sense of disparate information, and turn data into meanignful stories. We are the "air traffic controllers" of the connected age, as Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy aptly put it. It’s time for us marketers to determine our own fortune and capitalize on our unique strengths: insight, intuition, and imagination.

Here's my deck on Slideshare: 

For a comprehensive write-up of the conference, check out this blog post by my colleague Mitali Darbari Prakash.

Photos from the conference (by Naina)

Press: 'More than 60 Percent of Google Searches Are From Rural Areas'

Image credits: AP (above), Naina (CMO conference)

On the Eve of Marketing 2.0, the Dawn of Marketing 3.0?

I’m en route to the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, one of the most respected gatherings of marketing executives presenting and discussing the latest trends in their field. In a way, the story of the conference is the story of marketing itself. The somewhat yesteryear name indicates that a few years ago, when Marketing 2.0 premiered, it was conceived as a forum for pioneers who were early on embracing digital marketing and social media. Times have changed. What used to be at the fringes of the profession has moved into the mainstream, and both program and attendees of Marketing 2.0 reflect that. That’s not a bad thing. Digital marketing IS marketing, social media IS media. You would think..

According to data from eROI and eMarketing & Commerce (eM+C), US marketers spent 13% of their online marketing time on social media in 2009, the second-largest share of any tactic. And yet, a recent eMarketer article claims that social media is still not fully integrated into the marketing mix and in many cases remains an ad-hoc activity that is siloed in the organization and under-budgeted. The level of integration varies vastly depending on the tactic. The publication cites research from marketing management firm Unica suggesting that a majority of voting features, product reviews, user-generated content and RSS feeds are integrated with other campaigns, however, less so social networking sites, blogs, or micro-blogs. Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, suspects (in an earlier report called “Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy”) that marketers often neglect an integrated strategy because they – mistakenly – believe that social media is easy and cheap, ignoring that “much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations.”

The full integration of social media is only a matter of time, but the next frontier of marketing innovation is not yet on the horizon. In many ways, we still live in a marketing 2.0 world: marketing programs that leverage social networks, blogs, mobile, Twitter, real-time conversations, social content, viral memes, crowdsourcing, and so forth have become the norm. Just this week, I had a meeting with the online marketing team of a leading German automaker, and it is hard to imagine anything that would be news to them. They have it all figured out, really, as have almost all big-brand marketing departments. Most of the conversations I have with marketing professionals these days are around tactical issues – budgeting, staffing, monitoring, and, of course, measurement, which is a sure sign of a market-wide saturation. In Gartner Hype-Cycle speak: social media has reached a plateau, and it will soon reach the trope of productivity, as the enterprise-wide implementation of social media collaboration tools is on the rise. You will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano (with Edelman), Francois Goisseaux from Beeline Labs (and his upcoming book on The Hyper-Social Organization), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

But where’s the next hype? Looking at the usual industry augurs, Forrester has produced some good thinking on interactive marketing (with its ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’: permission, proximity, perception, and participation), and BBH Labs clearly is the thought leader when it comes to the confluence of advertising, social media, and digital storytelling. But all that is an apt description of state-of-the-art practices rather than breaking new ground Augmented Reality and Transmedia may rise to the occasion, and there is the exciting possibility that the iPad finally enables brands to become full-blown publishers. And the whole notion of “Marketing with Meaning” has certainly introduced a new perspective, injecting the dusty CSR model with a more tangible and Millennial-friendly proposition of cause-driven social innovation. Chief Culture, Chief Experience, Chief Meaning, and Chief Convergence Officers and other variations are heralded as the manifestations of innovative marketing models, but at the end of the day all they represent was already stated – loud and clear – by the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999.

Notwithstanding the lack of new paradigms, the marketing function is definitely better positioned than it was a few years ago. It has benefited from the growing convergence of disciplines, media, and formats that shape today’s company-customer interactions: Product design firms are moving into advertising. Advertisers are launching product innovation offerings. Marketers employ design thinking. Design firms are adding go-to-market services. Innovation consultancies are selling iPhone apps. Interactive agencies take on mobile advertising. PR firms are offering branding services. And so on. While creative disciplines are converging, the modes of effective (digital) interactions are converging as well: the combination of real-time, social, mobile, location-based, augmented, and gaming elements are the secret sauce of almost every integrated program these days. Campaigns are becoming products (as just one example, look at AKQA’s recent launch of its Digital Products Group), and marketing innovation is evolving into marketing IT. Marketers, as the renaissance men of 21st century business, can be at the heart of this all, if they’re smart.

Fig. The Great Marketing Convergence

BBH Labs describes the tremendous opportunity ahead: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

Marketing is back at the table. Now it needs to demonstrate that it has the chops to innovate and really drive change in organizations.

The Remembering Self Reflects on Happiness and Morality at TED

TED conferences, you might think, are happy affairs. You get up early, meet the most fascinating people, listen to jaw-dropping talks (each followed by a standing ovation), have deep conversations, and party until dawn – and all of that for four days in a row, safely remote from your usual daily routine. The reality, however, is more complicated. The event is a physical and mental stress test, an emotional rollercoaster ride that challenges you with constant over-stimulation, extreme cross-pollination, and tidal waves of acceptance and rejection as you navigate the social networks in the conference’s “social spaces.” To slightly paraphrase Heidi Klum: “With one group you’re in, with the next group you’re out.” And yet you will never hear anyone who was lucky enough to attend TED come back and not rave about their experience. Why is that? Daniel Kahneman, the mastermind of Behavioral Economics, provided the answer – at TED2010: TEDsters are happy because they expect to be happy. Let me explain, or rather, let Daniel Kahneman explain.

The future as anticipated memories

In his talk, the first of the conference and for me the most memorable, Kahneman sharply distinguished between “being happy in one’s life" and “being happy about one’s life,” and fervently debunked the “myth of the one self.” Instead, he introduced two different modes of “self” – the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. Their notions of happiness can be very different, he stressed, so that happiness cannot just be viewed as a substitute for well-being. The lack of money buys you misery, as Gallup surveys regularly indicate, but an abundance of wealth, as often reported, does not necessarily make you happier. To illustrate his point, Kahneman explained why people relocating to California are reported to be extraordinarily happy – before they even move, their Remembering Self imbues their experience as a happy one, which indeed might make them behave happier and thus infect others with more happiness (Connected co-author Nicholas A. Christakis showed in another TED2010 Talk that happiness, like other emotions, is highly contagious and spreads like wildfire through social networks). While the Experiencing Self is in the moment (and might feel good about it), it is the Remembering Self, the reflective self, that qualifies experiences as memorable experiences. There are 600 million moments in one’s life, Kahneman stated – “the Remembering Self tells us which of these are relevant, meaningful, and worth remembering.” “We choose between memories of experiences,” he concluded; in fact, “we think of the future as anticipated memories.”

It is intriguing to think about the implications of Kahneman’s model for policy-making, business, and also design, especially with regards to product and service experiences. If designers followed Kahneman’s theory, they would design user experiences not only for the Experiencing Self but also for the Remembering Self, which puts experiences into perspective by inferring and deferring. You could also say: the Experiencing Self values usability; the Remembering Self attaches itself to a brand. Users are usually happy when the Remembering Self finds out that its anticipated memories (brand promise) match the Experience Self (user experience). Great brands connect the Remembering Self with the Experiencing Self to make consumers happy, inspire behavior change, and make the world a better place – not a simple feat.

Counting what counts

Speaking of simple, there are other gestalts of happiness: George Whitesides proposed the beauty of simplicity as one. In his definition, “simple components are reliable, repeatable, and predictable” – thus they can be “stacked” to create remarkable systems. “Academics like complexity and emergence. The real world wants simplicity,” he contended, and borrowed some of Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom: “When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”

Simple – in a good way – was also the happiness formula that Chip Conley, founder and CEO of hospitality chain Joie de Vivre, presented: “Wanting what you have divided by having what you want.” Gratitude plus gratification. Conley evoked the principles of Positive Psychology and re-imagined Maslow’s pyramid of needs as a new hierarchy of “survival, success, and transformation,” suggesting that we start “counting what really counts” – intangible values, spiritual fulfillment, and meaning. 90% of business leaders believe in the value of intangibles, Conley remarked, but the way we run our organizations does not yet reflect that – for we rely on myopic models and metrics: Pareto optimality, shareholder value, ROI, and GDP (of which, according to Conley, only 36%, is made up of tangible values). A metric for meaning, anyone? On the macro-economic level, the government of Bhutan has come close by introducing Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a new national currency that attempts to measure “quality of life” and “social progress.” France and other countries have begun adopting it. When will the first company implement its micro-equivalent?

Spiritually present during Conley’s talk was Enrique Peñalosa, who in his three years (1998-2001) as mayor of Colombia’s capital Bogota made “promoting happiness” the main directive of his governance, boosting the common good in a city characterized by vast disparities of wealth. During his tenure, he improved slums, built schools and nurseries, new libraries, and hundreds of parks and other pedestrian spaces. “We live in the post-communism period, in which many have assumed equality as a social goal is obsolete,” he once said. “Although income equality as a concept does not jibe with market economy, we can seek to achieve quality-of-life equality.”

Science and compassion

Quality of life may be a moral obligation not only for elected officials but for all of us. In this vein, Sam Harris, the zealous atheist, in his TED talk proposed a concept of “objective morality” that would make life better for everyone. In his eyes, the separation between science and human values is an illusion; for him there is only a rather artificial division between values and facts. “Belief is the default state,” as fellow TED speaker and professional skeptic Michael Specter, author of the book Denialism, observed. It was ironic though how Harris fell prey to his own convictions; his belief in the universal validity of “facts” is just that – a belief. ”Do the Taliban have any point on physics worth considering?” Harris asked. No. So why do we consider their views on morality? “Certain opinions need to be excluded from the discourse for morality to flourish,” he requested.

This is, frankly, a scary thought. If those scientists who present themselves as naïve believers in absolute, measurable truths were to determine the tenets of a universal morality, this would constitute a tyranny of science, with some very subjective outcomes imposed on the rest of us. Values need to regulate science, not the other way around. The essence of morality is “compassion,” as Schopenhauer put it: respect for the “other” – the other being and his/her values. Morality, per se, is an open concept with myriad interpretations. It needs to remain an ambiguous space that tolerates divergent values and opinions – if it doesn’t, the concept of the “other” will become obsolete. “Difference,” in other words “quality” (and “quality of life”), will fade, and “moral scientists” will fill the void with a regime of a default absolute morality.

But morality is relative, by definition. No one said it better than Oscar Wilde: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

Sometimes it just takes one true word to make you perfectly happy.

[Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson]

Forrester: Adaptive Branding and the New Four P’s of Marketing

Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."

A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

Further reading:

HSM Interview with Amazon’s former Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend on the four P’s of marketing

Ogilvy and Acision white paper on advertising in 2020

Jones and Bonevac: "Should We Be In the Advertising Industry?"

Dave Evans: "Social Business: the New Black" 

John Ellett: "Marketing has changed"

George Potts: "Political Campaigns: The New Paradigm for Marketing Organizations in the Social Media Age"

Rob Rose: "Stop Being a ‘Data Driven’ Marketer"

Top Social Brands 2008

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008

Economist Survey: "Understanding the Needs of the Global CMO"

Interesting survey on the needs and challenges of global CMOs, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

One of the conclusions: "Leading marketing executives must move beyond traditional advertising, marketing and brand awareness to a more transformative role, driving innovation across the entire business."

You can download the full report (pdf) here: http://www.eiu.com/sponsor/Google/GlobalCMO

Big Ideas, Smaller Audiences, and Too Many (or the Wrong) Metrics

Insights from the Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit) in New York

John Battelle's Conversational Marketing Summit, which debuted last fall with much acclaim in a more intimate setting in San Francisco, faced a challenging task with its second edition last week in New York. For starters, the speaker line-up was impressive, but two of the most important players of the social media web were noticeably absent: Facebook (which, to be fair, took part last year) and Twitter. Yes, where was Twitter, the epitome of online conversations? Or at least another micro-blogging service? Additionally, and more crucially, the program had to deal with what business lingo calls a "good problem:" the summit last fall had done such an excellent job establishing and exhaustively addressing the topic that it was hard for the NY program to offer new insights. Sure, the trend towards conversational media and therefore the need for conversational marketing has continued and amplified. So has the emergence of the distributed Internet, or in John Battelle's words: "To keep building our brands, we have to go to where the audience has gone." To conversational media, that is, as traffic data, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, suggests. The most successful new online brands are indeed conversational: Blogging service Wordpress, for example, experienced a whopping 202.2% traffic growth since last year, YouTube is up by 80%, Wikipedia by 28.3%, Facebook by 72.2%, and Flickr by 85.6%. Sites with tools, services, and platforms that enable conversations to thrive, are thriving themselves while the traffic to traditional properties (a.k.a. portals) stagnates or shrinks. "Too many advertisers buy impressions instead of making impressions," Matt Freeman of GoFish remarked. But despite all the momentum that conversational media enjoy, as far as marketers' best practices and tools are concerned, not so much has actually changed since the last CM Summit, and some of the panels seemed to artificially prolong a conversation that had already ended last fall (pun intended).

B2B = B2C²

Yet it was still an excellent program that Battelle and team put together. Focusing on the role of conversational media in building brands, the summit set out to find "the online analogs to the executions we so love in magazines and television." Beth Comstock, CMO of GE, was well-suited to provide answers, for she represents an old, venerable brand (the "Hillary Clinton of brands," as someone in the audience framed it) that is successfully adapting to the new branding paradigms on the web. Overseeing a $1 billion budget, she can afford to experiment. But it's not only the money, it's the latitude: "GE is a brand with the permission to do a lot of things," Battelle described it. Comstock spoke about the importance of "visual storytelling" and GE's continued foray into social media and conversational marketing. She said that the company should -- and will -- be more aggressive in embracing online conversations, further enhancing the use of embedded video ads and engaging audiences through multimedia content in all of its online channels: "The media plan is becoming the distribution channel." Comstock also made an interesting point about GE's investment in consumer marketing: in her eyes, it elevates the overall brand because it provides a strong umbrella for all of GE's B2B marketing. She’s on top of an emerging trend: at the end of the day, enterprise clients are consumers and have the same emotional needs (or as the saying goes, "B2B customers are consumers who have the luxury of having a company pay for what they desire"). On the engagement level, conversational media seem to increasingly force B2B marketers to think like consumer marketers and develop programs that connect directly with the customer -- through narratives rather than benefit statements and feature lists.

Will standardized metrics stifle innovation?

The most interesting debates throughout the two-day program centered on the elephant in the room: measurement. Most people in the industry would probably agree that the "end of the click" is near. CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) and CTR (click-through-rate) do not suffice anymore as go-to metrics for the effectiveness of brand-building display advertising campaigns. A recent report from Starcom MediaVest suggests that the majority of clicks being purchased are being consumed by unemployed, twenty-something, gambling, shop-a-holic, Internet addicts: "Heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, (…) heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites -- a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

Therefore the cry for new types of brand engagement metrics is getting louder: "There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available," said Starcom USA's Director of Connections Research and Analytics Grant Prentice. "Natural Born Clickers shows us that we can't count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy." "The success of online advertising can no longer be defined only by direct response metrics. Today’s brand marketers are focusing on an entirely different set of parameters," added John Battelle.

However, at present, there exists a plethora of metrics but no standardized set of measurements that lets conversational marketers prove the impact of their programs. "One of the greatest barriers that we've seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer. "There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form." Several companies and industry alliances have developed dashboard models seeking to fill that gap. Conference organizer Federated Media introduced its own product: the Conversational Measurement Toolbox, an open suite of campaign measurement, planning, and reporting tools across the three dimensions "engagement-amplification-equity," offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts.

Not everyone working on the creative side of the business is buying into the quest for a standardization of metrics. George Bennett, founder and CEO of branded entertainment firm Magic Bullet Media, contends that viral marketing campaigns are by nature unmeasurable, at least by standardized measures. In his eyes, viral content, by definition, spreads through paths that are outside of the marketer's domain and are therefore difficult to track -- and that's exactly how it should be. Well, probably not much longer. Video analytics firm Visible Measures announced today that it is launching a service that enables advertisers and agencies to measure the viral reach and audience engagement of video campaigns.Visible Measures' technology monitors user engagement in a given video stream, and its Viral Reach Database tracks video performance over 80 million unique videos across 150 of the Web's most popular video-sharing sites.

Let one hundred flowers bloom

Amidst the fixation on engagement metrics, Rich Silverstein, co-chairman and partner of advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, brought back the idea of the good old big idea: "If it's good, it will work. Nice ideas that are big and deep will go a long way." And even become a broader conversation, a cultural phenomenon, as proven by the recent Clinton vs. Obama Saturday Night Live spot (and a subsequent TIME cover), both of which were inspired by a Silberstein NBA commercial. Maybe a standardization of metrics would indeed stifle innovation and social media marketers' appetite for experiments. In the unregulated, fragmented social media space that we're in right now, anything goes, which may very well be a major factor for its vibrancy. Failure is always an option. Andy Markowitz from Kraft Foods quoted Guy Kawasaki: "Let one hundred flowers boom."

Steve Rubel, SVP/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital and author of the Micropersuasion blog, slammed the industry: "We've gone backwards. There's no standard. The TV screen has a number. A dollar is a dollar. Having a standard makes transactions work. IAB has been moving slowly, fearing, justifiably, that if they come down from Mt. Sinai with two tablets offering a Ten Commandments of metrics, they worry that things could change in six months and render any standard useless. Because there are no standards, all agencies are speaking different languages and no one has an answer." Yet he reminded the audience that "The social web is made of people!" and demanded additional qualitative metrics that measure the impact of conversational marketing on the other side of the equation -- the consumer. Social media, at its core, is about collaboration, he argued, and attempts to simply apply the old, quantitative templates of tracking marketing programs would fall short of capturing the essence of online conversations. They are no longer one way streets: "Consumers are tired of being treated like cattle." They'd know they were marketed to and expect substantial value in return for their permission, so Rubel. Consequently, metrics failing to measure the value of marketing programs for consumers would be one-sided and skewed. He also suggested rebranding "conversational marketing" as "collaborative marketing." "Conversations are just a means to an end," he said, and he finds them valueless as long as they don't have a positive impact on consumers' lives. That's a somewhat radical proposition, seemingly far ahead of its time: What would truly consumer-focused, impact-driven conversational marketing metrics look like? A good question for the next CM Summit, this fall, in San Francisco.

Advertising 2.0: The Nike Way

“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” says Nike’s Trevor Edwards. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

From a story in the New York Times: "The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life"

PR is Product Design: Ford's Social Media News Release

PR is a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face the daunting challenge of doing effective public relations when it's more and more the public itself that does all of the relating for you.

Enter the social media news release (SMNR), originally conceived by SHIFT Communications, a viable new format to spark and cultivate online conversations about a product. Todd Defren, Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, and other bloggers have been on the soapbox preaching about SMNRs for almost a year now. The list of companies that have used the SMNR includes Coca-Cola, BEA, SAP, Novell, and Belkin, among many other smaller companies.

And now -- hat tip to Geoff Livingston -- Ford has released an especially glowing example of a SMNR for its new 2008 Focus. It's quite a production and includes a vast array of social media elements. Flickr-sized Images, RSS feeds, suggested meta-tags, YouTube videos, PDF fact sheets, bulleted facts, and a variety of executive quotes make this release eye and conversation candy -- lavish yet informative.

Livingston writes: "This new social media news release takes the emerging form to a new level, and demonstrates that companies can reinvigorate, static and boring parenthetical form with dynamic content. The result: a virtual work sheet that any blogger, journalist or analyst can use as starting point for a story."

It is definitely a step in the right direction even though the release is not yet fully social media-enabled: it lacks broader social bookmarking capabilities, and it also does not allow the recipients to comment on the release itself and pick up the conversation right there. I also doubt that Ford has put their release out over the traditional news wires, as they still seem to lack the ability to handle this kind of rich multimedia package.

Questions for the Social Media Group, the PR firm that crafted the release for Ford (and is probably tracking this conversation): How do you measure its effectiveness? What would make it a successful release for you?

What the Masters of Marketing Have to Say – (Almost) Live from the ANA Conference

While my wife is actually in person at the ANA Annual "Masters of Marketing" Conference in Phoenix, I am following the transcripts of the “Marketing Maestros’” presentations on the ANA blog.

Here are the best ones so far:

Al Gore, Chairman and Founder, Current TV
Mary Dillon, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer, McDonald’s Corporation
Chuck Brymer, President and CEO, DDB Worldwide
Pam Hamlin, President, Arnold Worldwide
Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, Advertising, AT&T, Inc.
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft