1. A New World of Word of Mouth:Using Influence to Re-Invent the Impression Overview Bob Gilbreath, Chief Marketing Strategist, Bridge WorldwideTim Schigel, CEO, ShareThis Jim Price, President, Empower MediaMarketingJoel Lunenfeld, CEO, Moxie Interactive Case Studies
15. “If I listened to my customers they would have asked me to make a faster horse.” - Henry Ford “If baseball were measured like advertising, you would only count the pitches.” - Peter Daboll
Bob is Chief Marketing Strategist of digital agency, Bridge Worldwide, and he is the author of the new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your Customers by Marketing with Meaning
Sadly, my answer is that we have lost perspective on our roles as marketers and the opportunity that digital offers
This realization hit me recently when I was asked another question
An individual who works at a large, traditional advertising agency was working on a measurement plan for his client, and reached out to our digital agency to ask a difficult question…”What percentage of Tweets are seen?”As you might expect, this was part of an effort to measure and compare Twitter marketing across other, traditional advertising on the common demoninator of “Impressions”
It was quite a challenging request, and we shot a few emails around debating how this might done. You would have to adjust for many, many factors including…
The result of many hours of work would probably look something like this
And after spending a few hours thinking about we came up with the Answer – stop wasting your time dumbing down digital marketing to impressions.
Now, some people in our digital marketing world believe we must dumb our work down to the lowest common denominator of impressions. Last year Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer finally gave in and suggested we shift to this model. Young-Bean Song at Microsoft suggested that this is what our clients want us to do.
But sometimes our clients need us to lead them to a better solution. We need a solution that better fits what consumers want and what truly measures marketing impact
The main problem with impression-based marketing and measurement is that it fails to recognize the value of what digital innovation can bring
For example, you may have heard that this Old Spice commercial is a viral success. Over 7.5 million people have chosen to click, watch and share this on YouTube. But buying placement on the NCAA tournament brings a larger audience. Which is better?
Brands like Charmin, Kraft and Nationwide are investing in creating usefuliPhone apps. But if you look at these uses as an “impression” it would have a CPM rate of $1000 vs. $10 on Prime Time TV
Do you think Zappos succeeded because its employees secured broad Reach and Frequency through Twitter?
If we don’t move away from Impressions, digital marketing – and marketing overall – will fail
So what do we focus on? Here are two measures of success that can work right away
First, we can create engagement. There are many definitions, but they all basically mean that it happens when people choose to interact with the marketing you create.
For example, when people choose to watch videos on Redbull.com
When new moms share experiences on Similac’s Strong Moms website
When people create personalized Pringles cans
What’s special about engagement is…
The second major objective and success measure of marketing today is Sharing. Again, simply put, this is when people choose to share your marketing with others.
It happens naturally when people share what they are doing and ask for input from their friends
It can be encouraged. For example, we recently launched a coupon program for Healthy Choice, and followed up by asking people to review their entrees. Over 40,000 people took the time to share.
And sharing can be encouraged to solve a problem. For example, we developed a tool for Pearle Vision that allows people to upload photos of themselves with different glasses so that they can get fast feedback from their friends
What’s great about sharing is…
At the end of the day, none of us in this room got into this business so that we could follow the rules of the old, interruptive marketing model of the past
Now is our chance to adopt Engagement and Sharing as our model for marketing success, and change the model of marketing…for good