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#MediaPost Future of Media Conference Trip Report

Today I attended Media  Magazine's / MediaPost.com's "Future Of Media" conference in NYC.  NYU hosted the event at its Kimmel Center overlooking Washington Square; after lots of recent events in midtown it was nice to be in the Village for a change, especially on a sunny early-fall day.  To the fortunate folks living in the condo one block south:  admiring your rooftop garden and the sweet library below made for a great conversation starter at breakfast!

Ken Fadner, Joe Mandese, and the MediaPost team assembled a great panel.  Josh Quittner framed his kickoff question with what seems to be the Ur-point of departure for all recent conferences:  Apple's latest announcements.  "Is the future simply "three screens" -- small / smartphone, mid-sized / tablet & PC, large / TV?"  Very quickly, the responses tumbled out. "Yes!  And more: wearables!  Thermostats! Location-based marketing (plus ça change...)! Voice!  Device-based payments! (Biometric access to our devices, for greater security!)  More fragmentation..."

Someone -- I think it was David Verklin -- replied that the answer is to "follow the consumer".  At first it seemed like a bland answer.   But of course it's really the only way you can get a grip on where things are going:  think users and use cases.  Which users, and which of their macro life events and the micro use cases that go along with those, represent the biggest pots of potential value to act as muses for media innovators?  Someone else -- Bob Carrigan? -- suggested that in shaping experiences to address those users and use cases, "convenience trumps quality."  Echoing William Gibson's iconic "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed," Maria Luisa Francoli noted that, for example, we're already seeing mobile devices used as a vehicle for payments in Africa.  Riffing on that theme, Beth Comstock predicted that we'd see lots more investment in user experience over raw features in the coming two years.  

Now, the role of the media in shaping what's possible seems even more significant today than 47 years ago.  So Josh naturally segued to ask about what firms would dominate the landscape in the coming years:  "Certainly Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook -- but who else?"  On the one hand, the panel had no specific, answers: no candidate from the MSM world, no mention of Microsoft (stunning, since we still spend so much time with their software), no golden child(ren) from the Web's Third Wave (though Groupon and Zynga did get shout-outs at different points later in the conversation).   On the other, their comments together pointed out that Josh's Big Four all aspired to be platforms that allow others -- ten million, by Bob Pittman's counting I think -- to transform features into experiences that solve for the users and use cases mentioned earlier.  One question left unaddressed is how much of the "profit pool" in this vision of media futures goes to the API builders versus the API users.  From my perspective, it looks like "the stack" metaphor for software strategy now generalizes well to media too.

In the spirit of "You manage what you measure," one of the audience questions had to do with the metrics that will guide our progress toward media's future.  There's consensus, as voiced by Brian Monahan, that The Age of Sampling is passing, and The Age of Big Data is upon us.  David Verklin told a good story (even if it sounded slightly apocryphal, and his math seemed slightly off): "CNBC ratings recently went down 15%.  Why?  Two guys turned 55.  What could that possibly mean??  Well, the CNBC ratings panel tracks men 25-54 with certain other characteristics.  The panel had 32 people.  Two of those guys turned 55..."  Swimming briefly against the tide, Bob Pittman counselled "Some of this metrics stuff goes the wrong direction, you gotta help clients think like marketers.  When I ran Six Flags, I told my park managers, 'You have unlimited marketing budgets -- just give me a return.'"   Maria Luisa Francoli disagreed, pointing to attribution analysis as the way forward.  Pittman replied, "True, but that tends to drive you to direct marketing, "  She naturally countered, pointing out attribution analysis' whole premise is to put brand and direct investments on a common currency.   (For me, it's not whether you pursue greater accountability, but how...)

Josh: "Is social networking a fad?" Consensus answer: the genie's out of the bottle, the challenge is that social media is "broad but not very deep" in terms of how relationships are conducted and maintained there. David to Josh: "How many 'friends' do you really have?"  For me, behind this question, crucial to media firms and advertisers trying to capitalize on viral dynamics, is the question of how each of us "filter" the digital world, and of better filters as a worthy avenue toward media futures (the subject of the post I contributed to the conference blog).

What did I miss?  What's your synthesis?  Again, thanks for a great session.

 

#MediaPost "Future of Media" Conference in NYC Today

I'm at Media Magazine's / MediaPost's "Future of Media" conference at NYU's Kimmel Center today. (I contributed this post to the conference blog last week.)  Please say hi!  Trip report to follow.

Trip Report: Nashoba Learning Group 50 Mile Bike-a-thon / Saturday, July 23 #autism

This past weekend Cadel Evans rode to glory.  So did I.  Let's review the bidding:

• Cadel hammered until his quads burned.  I only had to tap lightly to achieve the same effect, and it took me many fewer miles.  Edge to Cesar.
• He struggled on L'Alpe d'Huez, with only two more fans (worried-looking at that) to urge him ahead than I had on L'Alpe d'Old Bay Road (Bolton, Massachusetts).   No one photographed my agony and stuck it on Flickr.  Another pour moi.
• To help him recover, Cadel had paid soigneurs massage his aching thighs.  I worked my cramps out myself.  Tossup I think, depending on whether you're frugal, or into the whole spa thing.
• On the winner's podium, a lovely model handed him his stuffed lion.  When I rolled in, my lovely wife handed me a turkey sandwich.  It was a good sandwich, and Cadel's a little old for toys like that, no?  Advantage me.
• Upon his victory, his domestiques cheered him.  At the end of my ride, William gave me a big smile and asked me to jump in the pool with him.  No contest.

Thank you once again to all our wonderful friends who were so generous again this year.  Regardless of whether your primary motivation was to support an incredibly worthy school, or to see me ride 50 + miles (including a wrong turn in West Concord) in 90-degree heat (and we both know who you are), we are very grateful!

Extending Marketing Integration to Agencies: The "Agency API" @rwlord #rzcs

My friends at Razorfish kindly invited me to their client summit in Boston this week.  It was a great event; they and their clients are working on some pretty cool stuff.  Social is front and center.  Close behind: lots of interesting touch / surface computing innovations (Pranav Mistry from the MIT Media Lab really blew our minds). 

In his opening comments Wednesday, Razorfish CEO Bob Lord made the point that for modern marketing to be effective it's got to be integrated across silos of course; but, further, that this has to extend to having agencies work together effectively on behalf of their clients, as much as clients responsible for different channels and functions need to themselves.

I've been wondering about this as well recently, and Bob's comments prompted me to write up some notes.

One observation is that *if* marketers are addressing agency collaboration, they usually start with an *organizational* solution that brings agencies together from time to time.   While this is great, it's insufficient.  To make entities like these effective, it helps to lay a foundation that *registers* and *reconciles* different aspects of what agencies have and do for their clients.  This foundation, realized through a simple, cheap tool like Basecamp if not the marketer's own intranet system, could include:

• a data registry.  Agencies executing campaigns on behalf of their clients end up controlling data sets (display ad impressions and clicks, email opens, TV ratings, focus group / panel results) that are crucial to understanding the performance of marketing investments, but are typically beyond the scope of what IT's "enterprise data architectures" encompass.  I'm not suggesting that agencies need to ship this data to their clients; rather, that they simply register what's collected, who's got it, and how a client can get it if needed.
• an insight registry.  Agency folks crunch data into fancy powerpoints bearing the insights on which campaign decisions get made.  It would be very helpful if these decks were tagged and linked from the appropriately-permissioned online workspace.
• a campaign registry.  Think http://adverblog.com, only for the marketer's own (and perhaps direct competitors') campaigns of any stripe.  A place to put creative briefs and link to campaign assets / executions that implement them.

These approaches are simple, cheap, and "many hands make light work".  Implementing them collectively as a marketer's "Agency API" would help marketers and agencies to "reconcile" their work, in the following ways:

• discover campaign conflicts and integration opportunities
• unpack possible disagreements into manageable bites to resolve -- data conflicts, insight conflicts, analytic technique conflicts, creative brief conflicts
• better prepare in advance of "interagency council" meetings

Of course the registries are not a panacea for inter-agency "issues" that a marketer needs to sort through, but they help to make any problematic issues more transparent and straightforward to focus on.  

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Marketing Zeitgeist: Winter 2010 #amab

Call me Ishmael.  Wednesday night I was on the tip of Boston's Fish Pier, attending the AMA Boston chapter's first panel of the year at the Exchange Conference Center. The title of the event was "Marketing 2010: What CMOs Are Saying".   Panelists included Harpoon Brewery's EVP of Marketing Charles Storey, Dancing Deer Bakery's VP of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Scott Miller, and Philips Healthcare VP of Global Communications Frank McGillin.  Collectively they represented a useful cross-section of the B2C-B2B spectrum.

Myles Bristowe, the chapter president and an old acquaintance from ArsDigita days, moderated.  Myles' first question was "How has the economy affected your marketing plans for the coming year?"  The consensus answer I heard, channeling Stephen Stills, was to "Love The One You're With."  Charlie talked about increasing purchasing frequency among folks who know Harpoon and are brew-istas.  Scott described plans to de-seasonalize their business by positioning DD products as gifts for occasions beyond end-of-year holidays, and to invest in database technology to do a better job of personalization ("It's worse to do personalization poorly than not at all.")  And Frank talked about how Philip's event-focused strategy would focus less on tallying leads and evaluating events as lead sources per se, and more on the quality of engagement of interactions (online and off), trusting that this will prove a better indication of the efficiency and effectiveness of their investment in pricey events.

In answer to where they are increasing and decreasing their spend, the panelists presented an interesting duality, combining a "going to the mattresses" reliance on channels they know and love (Harpoon and Philips both rely heavily on events) and a forward-looking focus on integrating the cross-channel experience.  Charlie talked about Harpoon's intent to "cut in new channels and go back to the core [events]", describing their marketing strategy as "experiential" (focused on music festivals, road races, bike races, and the like) with support for "enthusiast activities with a social component" where they could use social media to reinforce the investment in the event itself.  Further, Charlie talked about the importance of documenting these experiences -- storytelling -- to reinforce and extend the impact of the events themselves on brand affinity.  Frank talked about how Philips is working to ensure that they are trying to "get better synergy across channels, by understanding customer segments and their purchasing experiences."  Scott described how DD's D2C average order value and conversion rates are much higher in areas where thay have a presence in grocery stores, and how they are re-focusing on "harvesting cross-channel affinity" by targeting their outbound D2C investments into geographies where they have a wholesale presence / store distribution. 

More generally, Scott talked about how the ebbs and flows of supply and demand are also affecting where they put their marginal dollars.  He described how a couple of years ago, surging postage and printing costs had pushed them away from physical catalogs and toward email but also SEM in particular.  However, more recently, popular keywords have been bid up to the point where that channel has become less attractive on the margin.  Meanwhile, affiliates have matured to the point where they can be relied on more, and, related, Scott's seeing major ROI in their SEO investments -- every dollar invested there has
produced $95 in revenue.  Throughout, direct marketing generally and email specifically "still work".  As for social media, his experience so far has been that it's useful for supporting the brand, but it's not yet accountable enough to be looked to as a monetization mainstay.

Speaking of social media, Charlie and Frank echoed Scott's sentiment.  Charlie noted that Harpoon still relies primarily on a high-five figure house list for its email newsletter as the get-the-word-out cake, and its so-far-more-organic social media efforts as frosting.  Frank talked about how for Philips, their main investment so far in social media has been more focused on listening in established communities such as Sermo and Facebook's "Innovations In Health" group, rather than "trying to build the world's biggest online community of MRI enthusiasts."  In particular, he noted there's a genuineness of the feedback you get in these settings that the artificiality of focus groups and surveys tends to suppress.  And Scott talked about how DD is trying to "recycle" the listening it does through its call center's conversations with customers, where "everyone's got a cookie story -- 'I just want you to know that Grandma had one of your brownies just before she passed!'" to do online justice to this organic brand advocacy they're hearing everyday.

Another question concerned how measurable they find / are trying to make their marketing, and what that's meant to their business.  Scott described DD as very analytically driven, telling a story about how insights have transformed their business.  he described how they had observed that 92% of their orders were "ship-to-someone-other-than-buyer".  This helped them conclude that they weren't really a bakery, as the founders perceived, but a gift retailer.  So, they stopped taking pictures of the cakes, and started taking pictures of the packages for their catalogs! (Very memorable "data is the new creative" example, IMHO.)

The panelists were asked about the degree to which they are pursuing finer-grained measurement, and how much they are using testing.  Interestingly, they suggested that there were both cost and utility limits to what they could do.  Charlie noted that being two layers away from the customer made measurement beyond profit per case-equivalent a very expensive proposition for them. As for testing, Scott noted that with most of their sales concentrated in a very tight seasonal window, testing carried high risks that didn't rule it out, but made them more conservative about what to try.  Nonetheless, he noted that given the ease of fielding some tests they are now able to adjust what they do within this tight holiday window if they start very early -- right after Thanksgiving this year, for example.

I asked what campaigns by others they found memorable and gave them ideas for their own marketing.  All three panelists mentioned good ones. I liked Frank's best: he described how, before and during a major snowstorm, Volvo Boston had sent email weather advisories and reminders about topping up on windshield fluid.  Great example of indirect brand building through a useful service.

Afterward I chatted briefly with Paul Regensburg, President of Rain Castle Communications, which recently helped Unica re-launch its brand.  Paul noted a slightly less breathless tenor about "new channels" among the panelists than you'd expect if all you read were the trades.  We agreed that it's always different to hear directly from practitioners, especially when you ask them about everything they're grappling with rather than any particular channel effort or campaign.  The calibration was really useful.

(Finally, congratulations to Myles and his volunteer colleagues for the great work they've done building the Boston chapter to be the fourth largest of 78 in the country.  Last night's event drew well over 100 people, not bad for a frosty January weeknight.  Myles noted that 30% of ticket sales for the event
had come from their viral "Tweets For Seats" Program.)

New Year's Resolutions, 2010, Part I: Less Is More

Tony Haile was my gracious host last week for a short visit to Betaworks in Manhattan's meatpacking district.  Fascinating conversation (Thanks Tony!), more about that in a separate post to follow. 

Across the street from Betaworks' offices was this sign:

 

Hit me like a ton of bricks (no irony).  My gold standard for trying boil down what I'm doing -- and for that matter what anyone else I'm working with is doing:

• Clarity -- it's veal.
• "Promise" -- not just veal: quality veal.
• Accountability -- got a beef?  Talk to Dave.
• Brevity -- more questions?  Knock on #425.

Probably not the same epiphany for you as it was for me, and Seth Godin's got nothing to worry about to be sure, but nonetheless a high signal-to-noise moment for me given what's been on my mind.  Hope to use it to full effect in the new year.

MITX "What's Next": Mid-Year Digital Marketing Zeitgest Check (#MITXDT)

This morning I went to MITX's "The Current Digital Market and the Outlook for What's Next" event at Microsoft in Cambridge. The event was well-attended.  Before the  panel discussion, I enjoyed talking with Allen & Gerritsen CEO Andrew Graff, who helped us at ArsDigita, and iProspect CEO (and ex-Bain colleague) Rob Murray.  Andrew reported that business was surprisingly strong, and Rob validated trends toward multi-channel attribution analysis and optimization.  I also had the chance to meet Forrester's Shar van Boskirk briefly; the 5-year interactive marketing forecast of spend across display, search, email, mobile, and social she / they released yesterday, projecting digital to grow to 20% of an otherwise flat market, with social growing by a factor of five, sparked a spirited conversation on Josh Bernoff's Ad Age article about it yesterday.

Shar moderated a panel that included Dace Venture's Jon Chait, Fidelity Labs' (and Razorfish alum) Hadley Stern, and Razorfish Client Partner Kristin Marlow.  Jon's got a $75M debut fund focused on consumer marketing solutions; Hadley's job is to develop things for Fidelity customers that will be ready for prime-time in 12-18 months, and Kristin runs the Razorfish relationship with T. Rowe Price.

Shar's summary / synthesis of the panelists' themes:

• the marketing organization's function has been transformed into one of "conversation stewardship"; marketers need to take their efforts to plant and nurture conversations to where audiences are (e.g., syndicate, Hadley's main point), and be prepared to have it be a real 2-way communication (Jon's primary point). (FWIW, maybe "2-way" should be "n-way").
• There's a tight focus on performance right now; investments in data management / integration are taking precedence over investments in new media

Panelist comments I noted:

• Kristin: Interactive marketing budgets are on the sideline, waiting for performance to come back; what is getting spent is very close to conversion, and is very closely watched and analyzed
• Kristin: Quantcast is hot, people like the idea of being able to buy cookies  
• Kristin: Attribution analysis for display v search spending optimization is a growth area 
• Kristin: There's also lots of attention to the "on-domain experience" 
• Kristin: Lots of focus on social, because people think it will be largely free, but it's not
• Hadley: "97% of Fidelity's business is done online" [stunning stat, I'd be very interested to better understand how that's bounded / qualified] 
• Hadley: Given that, his big theme is syndication -- "Fidelity Everywhere" -- building applications for the desktop, iGoogle, iPhones, etc. that allow Fidelity customers to do what they need in the places they are most comfortable, which doesn't always mean coming to the website 
• Hadley: Fluid times -- "Feels like every six months we're trying to make big decisions without much information."
• Jon: Trend is toward 2-way marketing , most cost effective ways to maximize engagement with the right people. Seeing 5-14% CTR on display ads in these media
• Jon: The trend is real -- his portfolio companies serving these needs have had their strongets revenue growth ever since Q4 of last year 
• Jon and Kristin: establishing credible social presence takes commitment -- can't dabble.  
• Jon -- entry price for credible social media effort = $250k-350k/year, sustained effort will be seven figures / year
• Kristin: There's a tradeoff between engagement and scale [Note: my presentation at IBM Research on Monday was partly about how you reconcile the two]
• Shar: there isn't and won't be any fully integrated platform for marketing analytics and execution -- the key is to work with vendors who play nice with each other, through adherence to "open data"  

Questions I wished I'd asked:

• How much of decision-making by clients right now is based on modelling versus testing?
• Given the decline in unit prices for media, as well as lower creative costs, the cost of analytics and tracking for any given campaign are getting bigger -- to what degree are marketers factoring these into campaign ROI? [I'm not seeing that yet, but I suspect it will begin to become an issue in the next 12-24 months.  If in the past the medium was the message, the measure may well be the message in the future -- meaning what each target consumer experiences will be personalized based on complex algorithms drawing conclusions about him or her.]  

What did I miss? 

Recap: Carlson On Metrics

Last week I attended and gave a talk at "Carlson On Metrics", organized by Professor Rajesh Chandy  and the staff at the Institute for Research in Marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

Prof. Chandy on the "Why?" for the conference:

• "Many options, few certainties"
• "Lots of data, little information"

Here are some notes on the talks (comments very welcome!):

500 Mirrors: Channeling Light Into The Business of Virtual Worlds

I connected recently in NYC with my ex ArsDigita colleague and good friend Kevin Kelly.  Kevin is (among other roles) the CEO of 500 Mirrors, an enterprise-class virtual world platform provider, and was in town for the annual VirtualWorlds Conference at the Javits Center.

For the virtual worlds crowds, these are dark days, not unlike what things were like for the web generally in 2002.  After flying high in 2006 -- including making the cover of Business Week -- Linden Labs' Second Life, the poster child for the category, has hit rough patches on several fronts, including usability and, security, and scalability.  Electric Sheep, the leading interactive agency helping corporations build and pimp out their VW experiments, recently cut back its staff significantly.  And as most of us have seen, even mighty IBM, the corporate pied piper of the VW movement, has been advertising against its own efforts.  The remaining bright spots in the "classic" rich-client VW world these days seem to be in applications for kids:  Webkinz, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel -- virtual babysitters for kids that parents are willing to pay for, perhaps partly as diversions to keep them away from first-person shooters,  MMORPGs, or perhaps as training for earning the big bucks playing WoW.  Though 1300 people registered for the conference, things seemed quiet even for the cavernous Javits, with few attendees from big-name companies/ brands in evidence.

My overwhelming impression remains that this is an industry whose technological reach and ambition greatly exceed its grasp of imaginative use cases for which this medium is uniquely suited.  Kevin and 500 Mirrors' CTO and founder Bob Flesch get this in spades.  Kevin tells a story of a recent conference in SL that illustrates the state of things:

• with a limited number of avatars each island (server instance) can support, the conference inevitably had an empty feeling;
• lots of power and flexibility for moving around means too much power for newbies and the less experienced;
• P-bombings have been an unfortunate reality;
• functionally, the experience's complexity exceeds its theoretical information and communication advantages -- for example, it's hard to read expressions when an avatar -- if human -- is programmed by default to look ironic and bored, if hip.

500 Mirrors' name reflects an approach to scalability it has developed that has effectively solved population limits for any practical enterprise and even consumer scenario.  (Proof comes from production instances that unfortunately Kevin can't disclose without unpleasant consequences.)  On the usability front, Kevin and Bob are focused on providing more by enabling less -- pre-scripting movement sequences to get someone into the right place in the right space, for example, or by turning off flying, or by simply making it impossible to get trapped in a corner.  Finally, since each instance they set up for a client is isolated (whether hosted by 500 Mirrors or installed behind a client's firewall), attendees can't jump out to inappropriate places, and intruders find it harder to get in.

But the biggest insight comes from conceiving of use cases that make sense, and Kevin's got a separate business going that's nailed one of these.  More about this in an upcoming post...

Notes From Zurich

I recently gave two talks in Zurich at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut's 56th Annual Retail Conference and 7th European Foodservice Conference.  GDI, led by David Bosshart, is an old, established, and well-funded think tank that judging from the conferences has a very loyal, pan-European following among very senior executives.  Both were wonderfully intimate affairs where there were plenty of opportunities for interaction, in lovely settings with terrific food. 

Here are the notes from the retail conference that GDI published:

http://www.gdi.ch/index.php?id=1299

Here are some photos from the Foodservice conference (these folks know how to have a good time):

http://www.gdi.ch/61-80.1250.0.html?&L=1&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][fid]=15&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][record]=7305#7305