Marketers including Diet Coke, Burger King, Adidas, Stella Artois and Nike are finding out what we’ve been known since 2007 – live content is not only an authentic way to connect with your audience online, it’s also a highly effective one.

We did our first live banner broadcast in 2007. This was the first time that live content had been carried in a widely distributed online media plan via a banner that was served across more than 12 leading media properties.

In 2008, we continued to innovate on the use of live content in banners, launching an interactive live banner that allowed users to submit questions to GE CEO Jeff Immelt in real-time. Mr. Immelt in turn answered the questions live. Combining live content with interactivity in a distributed manner proved highly effective – t hat effort reached a simultaneous viewer count in the hundreds of thousands and generated hundreds of inbound questions.

Heading into 2009, we wanted to take the idea of a live banner and make it even more interactive. We did that by launching the first-ever socially-enabled live banner broadcast. This one-hour live event allowed users to comment right in the banner space alongside the live video and inspired over 4K comments. That is what we call “socially-enabled media”.

Using live content in the banner is a highly effective way to engage the audience, but it does require experience and precise planning to do it effectively. From developing key word lists for profanity filters, to rehearsals (you can never have too many rehearsals), to working with media properties and ad servers – it takes a lot of coordination to make it safe for clients to innovate without looking foolish.

It appears live content in banners is here to stay (we were surprised not to see it in the 2008 elections frankly – note, any free-spending politician looking to amass a targeted audience and deliver a customized message please call us). Live content is just like any other content in that it must be relevant and meaningful for the audience in order to be effective. While going live brings with it a certain amount of risk, it’s that risk, that possibility that brands will show their flaws that allow brands to be “real”, transparent and authentic.

Webcasts have been a part of the web marketing world for a long time, but driving an audience to a website to view content is not as effective as bringing the content to them in a way that complements what they are trying to do. The best live experiences will ultimately do that – provide a compelling and relevant interaction with content I care about. In our work with GE, we captured the attention of C-Level executives where they were – the top news and financial sites – with information they cared about.

It’s an exciting time in our industry as it pertains to live banner content. If you’re company is considering using live content in banners, Beeby Clark+Meyler would welcome the opportunity to discuss our experience and how we might be able to help you reach your goals.

One quick observation based on the number of conversational marketing and social media programs presented: The demise of display advertising (yes, the banner ad) has been greatly exaggerated.

Nearly every conversational marketing case study presentation that I was able to observe had a significant display advertising component to provide program reach and recruit participation. How can this be? Haven’t we all been hearing from the industry pundits that display advertising is dead and that social media is where budgets need to migrate? It appears that display advertising (as well as TV, print, and other media) was a key ingredient to what the conference organizers were positioning as successful examples of conversational marketing.

That display advertising would be a key recruitment point for conversational marketing programs makes perfect sense to me. Many marketers, however, are being forced into making a false choice due to the poor reputation that display advertising now has and the industry-wide hyper-focus on social media. The choice entails cutting display and moving those budgets into social applications and conversational programs almost exclusively. This typically results in dismay at the scale of participation within nascent conversational marketing programs.

Alas, it’s not display OR social media…it is display AND social media. Actually, it’s more like multi-media AND social media, as many of the most impressive conversational marketing case studies presented at the Federated Media Summit featured an array of media outreach, including TV, leading to highly conversational experiences.
The take-away in all of this is that Scale and Efficiency do not necessarily have to be abandoned when pursuing conversational marketing initiatives. It is more a matter of coordinating high reach media, including display, with conversational opportunities to obtain branding and influence goals. The current digital media discussion of display vs. social is false. Properly structured, all media can be conversational.

Regards,

Michael Clark

The closer I got to the booth the more I realized “Hey, after New Hampshire’s Dixville Notch and Heart’s Location, I’m going to be one of the first American’s to vote.” As I got more excited I thought; “Why not take a photo of my ballot and send it wirelessly to my facebook account?”

I thought it would be cool in this day of “always on” to share my experience with others – as it happens. Unbeknownst to me, within minutes, my sister-in-law in Brazil, who is a journalist, saw my post on facebook. She forwarded my photo to her friend who is an editor at terra.com.br which is Brazil’s most popular website (5 million unique visitors a day), and the photo of my ballot became the lead story on terra.com.br homepage. It now lives here.

This got me thinking about what constitutes “viral?” It’s a request we hear a lot from clients; “We want something viral.” But it’s been my experience that it’s never something you can plan for, unless you pay for it like Dan Greenberg suggests but that just means it really isn’t viral at all – it’s advertising. And that renders half of his points meaningless.

People want to know what the “rules” are to make something viral. The answer is simple. There are no rules. Of course you need a great idea which is in your control, but more than that you need opportunity, timing and sometimes just plain luck.

November 4, 2008 6:06 AM

November 4, 2008 6:18 AM

November 4, 2008 10:10 AM

Translation:

Title: Democrat photographed ballot in ConnecticutA fanatic democrat, a citizen photographed his ballot in the state of Connecticut, which was published exclusively by Terra Magazine. The ballots in the US varie according to the state. On the picture above, you can see the person’s choice for president, congressman and part of the Education Comission in Connecticut. The US citizens attend during this Tuesday the polls, that can became the biggest in the history of US.

(The remainder of the article explains how the system works.)

1. 7 of 10 web analytics packages that we come across are improperly installed or simply not set-up to provide any meaningful reporting.
2. Website content development efforts are pursued with complete disregard for search engine optimization best practices.

These two seemingly minor tactical operational details have become a proxy for poor strategic marketing planning in our current era of rapidly evolving media consumption. Where there is tactical smoke there is strategic fire, unfortunately.

Analytics: The first issue seems obvious. Measurement and analytics suites (Omniture, Web Trends, Google Analytics, etc.) simply cannot be properly deployed without some sense of what to measure. Since an obvious balanced scorecard or other framework of marketing contribution is frequently not present, most website analytics packages are installed “off-the shelf” or “straight out of the can”. In very few cases will this approach provide the data needed to determine whether a marketing strategy, at least as it relates to the role of a company’s digital assets, is driving strategic intent. It is difficult for anyone to take strategic planning seriously when measurement is not in place.

Given how much time and resources companies spend on the front end of “strategery”, we suggest starting small on the back-end to recover some value from these exercises. The last agenda item at each digital strategic planning session should seek to answer these questions:

• What three things will we measure to determine that the strategy is working?
• What is the standard or target that must be achieved for each measure?
  (This should be stated as a ratio or specific numerical value.)
• How specifically, must your analytics tools be deployed to capture this data?

At the next quarterly planning session, add three more measures. Pretty basic, yes?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer just a technical exercise…it is more a reflection of what the target audience wants which make it much more of a communications concern. Website development, therefore, should be treated by marketers like media planning. Media planning efforts spend a great deal of time examining:

• a Target Audience,
• their Information and/or Media Consumption Habits, and
• the most efficient means to Intersect with the target as they consume information/media each day.

The usual marching order from the marketing team to the web development team is:

• “Make sure the site is optimized for SEO”

When adopting a media planning mindset, the marching orders for SEO would be:

• The target audience(s) for this website are X, Y, and Z.
• The specific problems/challenges that this audience has that our products/services address are A, B, and C.
• The target audience articulates these needs in their own language utilizing the following 50 phrases…which must appear within the content of the website.

As my colleague, Stuart Meyler, frequently answers when clients ask him how they can rank #1 in Google: “Simple. Just develop what is widely agreed to be the freshest, most compelling content about the subject on the web…then you’ll rank #1.”

C’mon people, wasn’t that the topic of conversation in 2002? It’s time to move on. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing – the fact that agencies are still trying to figure it out or the fact that the industry still sees this as a topic of discussion.

I’ll let you in on a little secret – you can explain all you want about what your agency does and how your agency does it but none of it matters. Why? Because clients don’t care about our problems. All they want are solutions that solve their current business challenge. Period. They don’t care if your traditional art director’s feelings are hurt because some younger interactive whiz kid delivered like he never could.

How about we just all agree to focus on the agencies that have figured it out? How about we stop classifying creative as traditional and interactive? How about, as my friend Alan Wolk pointed out at The Toad Stool, we aspire to be architects for our clients and not contractors?

Solutions that solve a client’s business problem can have a million points of entry or one. Solutions are ideas. And the agency with the best ideas wins. It’s that simple.