Category: advertising

Friday Five: Global Marketing Summit wrap-up

It’s Friday — huzzah! — and as good a day as any to wrap up comments from the Global Marketing Summit. Here are five more takeaways from that event:

  1. I’m not as digitally savvy as I thought I was. At the opening of her talk, Google’s Maureen Schumacher gave us a 25-question quiz to gauge how “digitally connected” her audience was. I scored a lowly 13 out of 25, because I don’t have a Slingbox, a wireless network at home or a Second Life avatar; I’ve never bought or sold on eBay or watched a mobisode; and I don’t own an iPod (although I have two other mp3 players). On the plus side, I do text, blog, buy music online, use a VoIP phone and IM at least once during a typical day. Schumacher said 20 percent of the MBAs who apply for jobs at Google routinely get 20 or more points on this question.
  2. That eye-slitting scene from Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (YouTube vid) is just as disturbing today as it was when i first saw it in a college film class. A couple of ad guys showed the eye-slit clip as part of a session on shock advertising.
  3. I can see the value of shock advertising for certain non-profits for raising awareness (.i.e., about AIDS or the dangers of smoking) but I’m having a hard time seeing how shock advertising might translate to the higher ed sector.
  4. The most fascinating session of the day was one on advances in neuroscience to predict how consumers might engage with a brand in a TV ad. This session was presented by representatives of two Boston-based companies: One to One Interactive and Innerscope, an MIT Media Lab spinoff. The presenters discussed their research on using a “smart vest” that measures a subject’s heart and breathing rates, skin conductance and motion, combining those readings with eye-tracking measurements to determine how a subject reacts to a test commercial. As an example, they showed us a test they did for Heineken and overlaid an “engagement map” to show when the audience was most engaged. This white paper offers more details on the technology behind the research. It’s fascinating work, even if it does sound a bit like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange.
  5. An executive from MTV — Todd Cunningham, the senior vice president of brand strategy and planning — talked about how that megacorp manages to think globally while marketing locally. He referenced MTV’s “Circuits of Cool” research into what role technology plays in “coolness” for young people. He ended with four suggestions for maximizing the role of technology in young people’s lives: 1.) associate with the things that matter (make sure the technology enables or supports those things); 2.) make it easy to make the right choice; 3.) help consumers manage their future occasions (a la Facebook); and 4.) make your brand experiences time well spent (people want simple experiences; avoid “feature creep”).

Let that be the end of the matter. The Global Marketing Summit is now officially a wrap.

From the Global Marketing Summit: Greg Stuart on ‘What if we were wrong?’

Things are starting to get back to normal around here, so I can finally begin to process my notes from the Global Marketing Summit I attended at the end of February. Due to a crisis back on campus, I only got to attend the first full day of the summit, but the sessions I attended offered a wealth of information about marketing.

First up was Greg Stuart, the co-author of What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds. (We got a free copy of the book during the conference, courtesy of LSF Interactive. I’ve read the first few chapters, and plan to post a review here once I finish the book. Stuart discussed the research behind What Sticks — an “experimental design” approach to testing marketing, similar to what drug companies do. Through their research in cooperation with 30 major companies, Stuart and co-author Rex Briggs extrapolate that about 38 percent of all U.S. advertising — or $112 billion of the $295 billion in ad spending — is wasted.

That finding led Stuart to pose the obvious question: “What if we were wrong?” Wrong about our assumptions that we know what works with marketing, that is. And if his research is on the mark, we’ve been wrong for quite some time now.

So, how did this happen? Why is so much money wasted on advertising? According to Stuart, it has to do with missing the mark on the three “Ms” of motivations (why customers buy a particular brand), messaging and media.

  • 36 percent of advertisers missed the target on their customers’ motivations.
  • Another 31 percent of advertisers got the message wrong. (47 percent missed one or both of the motivations and/or message.)
  • A whopping 83 percent of the media mix somehow missed the mark. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was sub-optimal.

To turn things around, Stuart suggests that organizations:

  • First, get universal agreement to goals. What are the outcomes? What does the organization hope to accomplish, and what will success look like? Stuart and Briggs found that only one of the 30 companies they studied had universal agreement in place before embarking on an ad campaign.
  • Have a backup plan — a Plan B. Tied to that, have a way of knowing when Plan A isn’t working so you can quickly switch to Plan B.
  • Know the value of each and every dollar.

The amount of money higher ed spends on advertising is a mere pittance when compared to the corporate world. Still, we could benefit from this insight.