The Adaptive Marketer

What’s Your Super Bowl Ad Strategy?

So, most of you will read this after the big game has been decided.  Whatever the outcome, as has been said before – I’m sure this year’s Super Bowl was a series of interesting and hopefully entertaining commercials periodically interrupted by a football game.

Super Bowl advertising has, of course, been around since Super Bowl I when the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.   The first really famous ad was a Noxzema ad featuring Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett.  As a side note, you’ve got to check it out – it’s a gas.  Joe Namath saying he’s “gonna get creamed” and Farrah singing breathlessly.  Aaaaah the 70's!

Are You Selling Bibles Or Religion?

Well I think we can all agree that this last week was a good week for buzz.   We had, of course, the almost completely frantic, breathless rumors leading up to Wednesday's Apple announcement (you might have heard they launched a new product).

That was followed up with the equally buzzworthy State of the Union address; which was (by many accounts) one of the more interesting SOU speeches in recent years.  When was the last time a Supreme Court Justice mouthed off during one of these.

Certainly, the social media universe as well as the main stream media were all excited about both.

But was there a unifying thread for us marketers?

A Disturbance In The "Audience Measurement Force" - Why Jason Calacanis Is Wrong

Usually when we talk about Web traffic and measurement – it’s a pretty dry topic.   But Jason Calacanis – just threw down the gauntlet by calling for a boycott of comScore.  I certainly agree with Jason on many things - but this time he's wrong.

Basically what raised the Mahalo CEO’s hackles was a recent announcement (and update) by comScore that they plan to launch a new measurement methodology to attempt to produce better, more accurate numbers.    The new service will cost $10,000 in the first year (there’s a $5K implementation fee) and then $5K for every six months if the customer wants to continue to receive the hybrid data.

Who Wears The Red Shirt In Your Landing Party

You all know the Red Shirt phenomenon yes?   If you don’t, not to worry, I’ll wait here while you go earn some geek cred.  Okay, yes, it’s from Star Trek – starting with the original series and a tradition continued into many of the other television shows and movies.

It basically starts with Kirk, Spock and McCoy agreeing to beam down to a planet's surface to investigate some anomaly.  To accompany them, they enlist an ensign, a security detail or some engineering officer.  Whatever their “department”, they are inevitably wearing a red shirt.   There’s a wikipedia article on this.  And, of course you can’t miss the Family Guy treatment of it.

So... What does this have to do with marketing....

DM Radio - Customer Analytics

 Today, I was honored to appear on Information Management's DM Radio - on a show dedicated to Customer Analytics.   This was a CRM focused episode and we discussed the current state-of-the-art aspects of measuring success with CRM strategies.   My segment (which was third) was to discuss Social Media and how it has started to affect CRM strategies and measurement.

If you're into CRM, and Measuring CRM, It's an informative one hour to listen to - and there were some incredibly smart people on there including  Mark Angel of Kana, Lisa Pierce from Strategic Networks, John Strabley of Quaero and of course the Hosts, Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson.

Some of the key things we talked about over the hour:

• Lisa Piece told some stories about how telecom companies are struggling with customer service - and how the vast majority of people who buy a smart-phone call in at least once to customer service.
  
• Mark Angel, the CTO of Kana, discussed the changes (and specifically the pace of change) he's seen in the CRM space over the last couple of years.
  
• I talked alot about the Social Media space and CRM - and how some social media analytics companies are building better "filters" in order to provide enterprises with better ways to monitor their customers online.
  
• John Strabley of Quaero capped it off by pointing out that really the customer has been lost - and that the focus on a "back to basics" strategy is what's needed.   

Then, to cap off the last ten minutes we had a lively roundtable discussion and exchanged some great ideas....

If you'd like to listen to it - it's available as a stream or an MP3 Download (Registration Required).