The Adaptive Marketer

What Does Your CEO Need To Know? Stop Proving - Start Improving (Part 3)

Yesterday we discussed how focusing on a process for your digital marketing will empower you to take control over your strategy.   But, once you've got a process, and you've discovered and convinced your CEO to invest in that process - you've got to have a way to measure it.   What does success look like?

There's a lot of talk these days about why it's so important to be a data driven marketer.  Software vendors will extol the ability to achieve a "high return on investment".  We strive to prove our case using ROI from every campaign.  We are buried in statistics such as "Cost Per Lead" and "Cost Per Acquisition", "Traffic Cost", "Page Views", "Followers", "Retweets" etc.. etc... And this is absolutely wrong-headed..  If you're using your Analytics to prove something - then you're using Analytics incorrectly.

The Future of TV Will Not Be Televised.

On Monday, January 4th 1954 the New York Times ran a story entitled "Television In Review: NBC Color."  It was a review of one of the very first color television live broadcasts - that of the Tournament of Roses Parade held on New Year's Day.

One of the most fun and fascinating things about that article is that how the reviewer laments the limitations of the new technology.  In one passage, he says "another difficulty is...the size of the picture... roughly 12 1/2 inches.  Since it is necessary to sit much farther away than from a black and white set, one wonders how big a color tube will need to be to be practical..."

Wouldn't that reviewer be amazed by the 150 inch flat screen plasma that sit in homes today.

It's sometimes hard to remember that there, indeed, was a day when there was a difference between "color television" and "television".  Today, it's just Television.

Three seemingly unrelated things happened this week that I think move us into a similar phase with content related to television and the Internet.

Let's look at each quickly:

CMO? There's An App For That

There's a wonderful scene in Wall-E.  All humans are aboard a ship, where computers and robots take care of every need.  It's made the humans lazy, apathetic and blob-like.  Then, after Wall-e has helped to discover that there is actually plant life growing on Earth, the Captain of the ship decides that it's time to go back.  He argues with the Computerized Ship Autopilot - an unpersonal red "eye" computer.

The Captain: "Nothing. That's all anyone on this blasted ship has ever done. Nothing!"

Autopilot: "on the Axiom.. you will survive."  

Captain: "I don't want to just survive. I want to live." 

Now, don't get me wrong.  I love technology and I love Computer Science engineers. I've worked with them almost my entire career. In another life I wanted to be a developer -  with a focused passion for reducing things down to their most simplistic and most efficient state.  Where everything can be simplified down to an algorithmic state.  There's a "law" for everything.  I actually really do get excited when an engineer shows off how he's accomplished something in one line of code that used to take ten.

But two things struck me last week...

Hope - An Inconvenient Marketing Idea

 I'm posting this in participation with Blog Action Day.  This is, as their site states "an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day."

The goal is to raise awareness about a certain topic, and centralize everyone's topic on one day.   Bloggers are encouraged to incorporate whatever it is they normally talk about into the theme.  This year's topic is climate change.

So... I wanted to write about hope.... 

The Death Of "Digital" Marketing & The Birth Of Something New

In the summer of 2006, scientists announced they had manipulated two different butterfly species and created a third, distinct species.  This success was very different from hybrids, which evolution tends to dislike.  An example of this is the mule - a sterile hybrid bred from a donkey and a horse.  Now, the mule is a successful hybrid - useful for carrying equipment and kicking field goals in Disney movies  - but is itself a reproductive dead-end.  No, this in fact was a new species that would evolve on its own.

The same thing is happening to digital marketing....

Omniture/comScore The Bigger Deal? Who Needs Accuracy, When You've Got Consistency

I think comScore's partnership with Omniture may actually turn out to be a bigger deal for online marketers than the Adobe acquisition.

No doubt, it's been a big couple of weeks for audience measurement.

First off, Adobe buys Omniture, and not but a few days later, comScore and Omniture announce a partnership to launch a unified audience measurement system.   If you missed it - basically they are combining comScore's method of analyzing data by measuring a panel of users, and Omniture's method of measuring data collected by the browser.  

But why is this a big deal?

Marketing Is NOT The New Finance

I've been reading about all the excitement around the Adobe/Omniture acquisition.  And, I've noticed that in discussions with clients, partners and among much of the coverage, there's been a resurgence of the phrase that "marketing is the new finance".   This seems to be a sentiment that many are attributing to the reason why Adobe, so focused on right brain solutions, would acquire a purely left-brained focused company.   Ann Lewnes, SVP Corporate Marketing for Adobe was quoted with this phrase back in June at the CMO Leadership Forum in reference to how marketing is relying on ROI and measurability.

But I really disagree...

Adobe & Omniture - First Impressions: It's All About Rich Media

Well, it would seem that we're back to the wild and wooly of technology deals.  Adobe must have taken Bernanke at his word today when the Federal Reserve Chairman said that the recession is probably over.  Adobe promptly whipped out their check book and just like that  - acquired Omniture for $1.8 Billion.

This is a big price tag - basically offering Omniture share holders a 24% premium.  Somebody wanted that bright shiny object in a bad way.

But why?

Content Marketing - Let's Not Take It Personally

So, this last Friday I was working with my team - talking about "personalization" because a prospective client was asking about it.   For as long as I can remember, I've had this gut feeling that the topic of "personalization" and Web marketing always seems to come up right around the end of the third quarter and into the fourth of every year.   So, this weekend to test my gut instinct, I went out to Google Trends and I searched. I was truly amazed at what I saw. In fact, it does come up every fourth quarter.  Go look for yourself - it's like clockwork. There's a huge spike in interest in "personalization" every fourth quarter for the last four years.  I wish I had the same gut instinct about my fantasy football draft coming up.  But that's a different blog.  

Comet Size: 2 football fields. Scar size on Jupiter: The Pacific Ocean - Value of Jupiter as Solar System Hoover: Priceless

Well, it was a good day for the planet, as we discovered through the Hubble telescope that Jupiter did us all a favor, and hoovered up a comet that no one had known was there.

Apparently now Microsoft users are becoming the new demographic to pick on as a new study came out - and first talked about how Bing users are more susceptible to ads than the rest of the "smart" people on the Web.  But then, a paragraph later they just chalk it up to "big numbers".  

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