Blog Posts By: Julie Baker

The 2010 Forrester Marketing Forum focused at a high level on adaptive marketing.  What does that really mean?  Responding to the market, performance based decision making, or understanding and integrating emerging platforms such as social?  Triple yes, and the Forum covered them all.  But all of these tactics, while making a marketer more efficient, may not necessarily make them more effective. 

The healthcare industry made up less than 1% of the total online ad market in 2008. But as patient populations migrate to this information rich channel, that outlook is quickly changing.  Healthcare is now projected to be one of the highest growth industries in interactive over the next 3-4 years, alongside CPG, Media & Entertianment and Automotive.

Ty Amad-Talylor, founder and CEO of FanFeedr (a real-time personalized sports feed), made the rounds last week with an article he wrote about the rise of prestige as an online monetization model.  Another damning article about the value of today's CPM, making the case to replace the ad model with alternate payment platforms based on some sense of social hierarchy.  But in reality, new mechanisms such as this also create yet another way to place relative value on a user that will ultimately translate into back into ad $.

Most marketers typically have mountains of data at their fingertips but often struggle to translate the stream of reports in their in-box to actionable outcomes for their business.  These reports often reflect the competing interests of internal stakeholders.  That's why when overhauling your measurement system we think it's critical to start by focusing the organization on one critical business metric.... one that marketing, sales, finance, and customer service can rally around.  This might be a customer value or share of wallet metric, something each member of the organization feels it can move the needle on. Your entire framework should cascade from this clear corporate priority.

AOL spins off from Time Warner while Comcast picks up NBC.... as they both look to re-brand and boost ad income.

The debate continues.  Or resurfaces, as the case may be.  Now that ad revenue is tanking again, content publishers are revisiting their model. This pendulum has been swinging for almost a decade. The answer is not admonishing the ad model.  And it certainly is not arbitrarily walling off content.  Access to premium content...stuff you can't get anywhere else...should be paid.  And paying for it doesn't necessarily mean your experience will be advertisement free.  Engaged users who pay for content are that much more valuable to advertisers. 

We work with a fortune 100 financial services company that has over 10 million customers and a strong focus on marketing through their call centers.  We were working with them on a contact management strategy for their high value segments, with particular emphasis on the call center where they'd been unable to translate some of the analytics insight they'd rolled into their direct mail and online programs. Call center reps were taught to sell, sell, sell and this mentality was actually hurting the firm with their most valuable customers. 

Yahoo! announced at Ad Week in NYC this week that it will spend $100M on a global brand campaign to connect with you (I mean, Y!ou).

At the conclusion of Ad Week, Shelby Bonnie, former CEO of CNET and Chairman of the IAB, makes a bold statement. The CPM model is flawed. Now that Shelby is no longer beholden to his stockholders it's time to kill the CPM...before of course, it was almost time but not really because CNET was already in trouble and struggling to sell a whole bunch of new brand format ads to make the internet seem more like television and keep the CPM alive. While I actually don't disagree with his logic...especially the part about there being no natural constraint online as there is with tv, print, and radio causing impressions to be essentially meaningless these days...he offers no real solutions in his scathing assessment of this enormous industry crutch. 

In my first post on the subject, I talked about how challenging it is for companies to link marketing activity to financial impact and identified the need for a customer-centric measurement system.  Now, let's see it in action.

We work with a financial services client that has three different lines of business-organized around product and channel-all talking to the same valuable customer with no knowledge of the other's activity. The result is more than 50 contacts to any one customer in a given year. That's close to one contact a week. But it isn't just the sheer volume of contacts creating saturation and decreased performance; it is also the lack of a coordinated effort to understand who the customers are and where they are in the buy cycle for a given product, relative to their lifetime value.

When sales are down, people ask questions. The answers are generally a litany of conjecture about what's behind the fatigue in the list, leads, close rates or market conditions. Despite the flying conspiracy theories, no one in the organization knows exactly what's causing the decline, and fingers are pointing.

Dell announced this week that they've made $3M on Twitter. They were smart enough to harness this one-to-many communication network at virtually no cost to deliver significant revenue to their outlet stores.  They're capitalizing on a surprising statabout tweeters - the top 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% account for about 30% of all production. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.  Advertisers get that.  Anderson Cooper gets it.  Does Twitter?

Customer Data Management. Customer Intelligence Management.  Data Intelligence Management.  The notion of using customer data to drive investment decisions has propagated many organizational names and acronyms over the last few years.  Customer Intelligence Officers were crowned, integrated task forces were formed, and dedicated publications multiplied.  Why?  Because data = $.

Online marketing trends come and go, but none take permanent root without a supporting data strategy.  That's right, a data strategy.  It really is that simple.  No behavioral targeting tool, ad serving platform, or marketing automation solution is worth much without it.  They are blunt instruments without an underlying analytics engine to chart the course.  And I don't mean the 12TB of data streaming directly out of your web analytics tool into some poor analyst's lap, but a true understanding of how to distill and parse that data into something meaningful and, wait for it ... actionable.

In this economic environment, we're all struggling to get more out of our current investments. My husband and I live in Marin County, CA where double-digit real estate value growth is the norm. While the rest of the country is staring down drastically declining home values and possible foreclosures, our community has dropped from an average single-family home price of $1.3M to a meager $1.1M in the last year and is facing mere single-digit growth projections in the next fiscal. Let's just say that Marin County is as good as any place to live out the uncertain times that lie ahead. So while a few short-sighted neighbors post "for sale" signs, we are investing in finishing out our attic and laundry room to get the most out of our existing space, knowing this will pay immediate and future dividends.