ICDM White Paper

Looking for our white paper as referenced in this month's 53 Degrees? Download available below - drop us a mail or give us a call if you have any questions.

ICDM White Paper.pdf

'Cool Checklist' Campaign Fails Targeting Test

Why is it that the public sector just can't do advertising well? Efforts to promote the Manchester transport plan failed miserably, as we've already noted in this blog. But there are plenty of other examples of shockingly bad ads that fail through poor execution or lack of understanding.

In the 'poor execution' category falls a police advert displayed across London a few years ago telling people to beware of terrorist threats on the tube. Unfortunately, due to the use of a comma in the place of a full stop, it instructed people to do absolutely nothing if they identified a suspicious package.

Now we have this highly flawed campaign. No-one's arguing with the premise behind it, but the execution is hopeless.

Being in our thirties, none of us at the Lever can claim to be 'down with the kids' any longer. But if we were to be asked to come up with a campaign to target this generation, I would hope we could come up with something more in tune with the times than the 'cool checklist'.

Both the choice of media and the content of the message show a lack of understanding of the target audience. That understanding is one of the most vital components in the success of any marketing campaign. Sometimes budgets (and timescales) don't allow for deep research, and that may have been the case with this advert. But this just shows how badly taking a cursory glance at your prospects can fail you.

The success of content driven marketing campaigns is particularly dependent on an understanding of the target market. That's why all our campaigns start with detailed workshops to force our clients to focus on niches and help us to build up a detailed profile of their audience. This doesn't have to be an expensive process, nor hugely time consuming. But it does ensure that the campaign delivers maximum bang for the client's buck. And it helps us to avoid missing the mark as the 'cool checklist' so clearly has.

Creative is not important

Choosing the right digital marketing partner is an important step for your business. The web is the world's largest marketplace. Digital forms of communication are the primary interface for many businesspeople and consumers. You need to be sure that the partner you choose can help you be seen in that marketplace, and more importantly, convert that visibility into sales.

It is this last part that trips up many digital agencies, and the people trying to choose between them. The adage that a picture says a thousand words has never been truer than when applied to the selection process for a marketing agency.

People are swayed by pictures. In this case, designs for how their websites or digital campaigns might look. They have an emotional response to images that is hard to engender with reasoned, logical text. This emotional response often becomes the basis for selecting an agency.

This is wrong. It's like choosing a flight based on the attractiveness of the cabin staff. You have no idea about your destination, or the capability of the plane to get you there. Choose an agency based on the initial creative they present and you risk taking your business in the wrong direction, or nowhere at all.

This isn't sour grapes. We win on design too, and we're not about to turn down the money. But we'd rather be chosen for our brains than our looks. We want to win because we can make a real difference to someone's business. Because we understand the challenges they are facing, and put forward a real solution. Not because we put forward the prettiest pictures.

What is 'Online PR'?

Good question. Some of its practitioners have been around for almost a decade (perhaps more) yet most people still don't know what it is.

It helps to start with clearing up a common confusion between 'public relations' and 'media relations'. PR is a broad set of tools and approaches designed to influence the outcome of a decision. It might include lobbying politicians to get a change in the law; it might mean getting a seat at the table at a standards body to ensure the chosen standard meets your needs; it might mean managing the communications with a community cited near the construction of some unpleasant new industrial building.

Much of the time though, people say 'PR' when they mean 'media relations'. Media relations is a small subset of PR. In the simplest terms, it is about securing the maximum amount of positive editorial coverage for your organisation, company, product or service, usually in an attempt to increase sales. The flipside of this is managing any negative coverage, but this is a challenge rarely faced by most companies, for whom the biggest threat is not a damaging front page splash but total indifference.

In transferring their skills to the online realm, most PR practitioners have focused on the media relations aspect, believing that they can and should try to treat bloggers like journalists. This is a valid option, and - with some tweaks to the approach - can be successful. However it is a very limited assessment of the scope of 'online PR'.

We use what we would call 'online PR' as part of any digital marketing campaign. The first step is to establish what you want to achieve. For us, it seems a waste to just generate 'noise' in the digital world, when it is so simple to track the success of that noise in creating leads. So we establish goals and ensure our client's website makes it easy for prospects to fulfil them e.g. a maximum of three clicks to close them in some way, whether it is a sale, subscription to a newsletter, blog or feed, registration for an online community, or at worst, the download of more information (usually after leaving their details).

Then we apply 'online PR' tools to create interest. These include:
- Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (we separate the technical and copy tweaks you can make to your own website (SEO) from the work you do to enhance its profile (SEM) - e.g. link building, PPC)
- Blogging (great for SEM - as you'll know if you found this blog by looking for 'content driven marketing')
- Social network interaction (e.g. we're targeting LinkedIn groups for a new client campaign)
- Audio/Video (professionally produced video shorts can be very cost effective if distributed via YouTube; podcasts and webcasts can deliver great results, even from small audiences)
- Other social media (we're currently trying out Twitter to see how it drives traffic to one of our personal blogs - check out the feed down the left at http://www.bookofthefuture.co.uk)

You could include more tools, but that's all these different media really are. The reality is that the fundamentals of online PR are the same as they are offline: write something interesting and people will want to read it.

Create and post content that rewards, educates or entertains. Do it via a medium that makes it easy to find. And make sure that whatever it links to gives you a measurable result. That for us is a decent definition of online PR. But you could also call it intelligent, content-driven marketing.

The definition of cut-through

Unfortunately the majority of advertising these days is tired and boring. But just occasionally you get the magic combination of creative agency, brave client, and good timing. Check out this Australian advert from hair removal firm Veet.

Genius. Not only does it give everyone a grin but it gets forwarded around the world, so becoming a powerful viral campaign, multiplying the value of the ad spend a thousand-fold. Note the way the scan is artfully angled to look amateurish. Do I see the hand of the ad agency at play, or have I just been in marketing too long?

Either way, just goes to show that the content for a content-driven campaign can come from any part of the marketing mix.

Manchester says 'no': a massive marketing failure

After months of campaigning it wasn't even close. In every single council district across Manchester, people voted to reject the £3bn Transport Innovation Fund investment, and the congestion charge attached to it. This came as little surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the debate. The referendum was lost by the 'Yes' campaign months ago.

The 'Yes' campaign entirely failed to communicate the benefits of the TIF bid to voters. The volume of paper sent out was massive but the presentation was too complex and the detail too great. In marketing terms, it was all about the features not the benefits. Nowhere were people told how the bid would benefit them specifically. The only attempts to simplify the arguments were the insipid adverts, no match for the starkly negative messages of the 'No' campaign.

With the 'Yes' campaign mired in detail and unable to translate the investment plans into real-world benefits, the 'No' campaign was given an easy ride. But it was still conducted well. On a fraction of the 'Yes' campaign's budget, the 'No' campaigners managed to focus the entire debate on the congestion charge rather than the planned transport improvements. The moment that the debate in the media became focused on the charge not the investment, the vote was lost. In the current financial climate the emotive adverts about the potential costs for drivers had an amplified effect. Without them I think it would have still been a 'no'. With them the result was overwhelming.

I'm not saying the 'Yes' campaign was easy. Far from it. But this is one marketing campaign with a very clear, very public metric of success. And the figures speak for themselves. This campaign failed.

Fluid intelligence: Do grads have the right stuff?

I am returning to Lancaster University on Wednesday for the Alumni Careers Fair. It got me thinking about the skills that I will be looking for when we come to recruit our first graduate. My thoughts were further stimulated along this line following a chat with Katrina Delargy, CEO of TIYGA, an interesting start-up based at Daresbury Innovation Centre.

Katrina raised the issue of 'fluid intelligence' versus 'crystalline intelligence'. These are terms created by psychologist Raymond Cattell and developed in partnership with John Horn. Fluid intelligence describes the innate ability to think abstractly and solve problems. Crystalline intelligence is learned through teaching, practice and experience.

Historically we as a society may have placed equal value on each form of intelligence, perhaps even the balance on the crystalline. Certainly the theory behind the switch from O-Levels to GCSEs was to increase the emphasis on reason over learned facts. But today there is arguably much less value in learned intelligence, since the sum of human knowledge is available via a search engine. What is valuable is the ability to interpret that knowledge quickly and use it appropriately.

This doesn't devalue experience completely. I can make much more intelligent guesses about the right approach in various situations based on experience; doing something many times over almost invariably means that you do it faster and more efficiently. And there are certain key skills that have to be learned: arithmetic, grammar, and spelling being particularly important for this industry.

But beyond these basic skills, I don't expect a graduate to have much experience and I am unlikely to be swayed by what experience they do have unless it is a fine margin between two candidates. Rather I am most concerned about their level of aptitude, and most of all, their willingness to apply it.