New Research!

While Going Digital 101: Process languishes unhappily in my drafts folder, I thought I’d post a quick update on some new-ish studies that I’m going through now. Once I process them, I’ll make relevant adjustments to the stats page.

For the interested, though, I’m noting the sources directly in the post.

Cartoon Network has updated its New Generations study of children with 2009 data. The study goes into the media consumption habits of 1000 children aged 7-14 through interviews with them and their parents. I found the .pdf file on Scribd.com, it’s downloadable through this link (registration needed):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21743809/2009-Filipino-Kids-Lifestyle-Cartoons-Network-Survey

I’m also looking for a study published by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC). It’s called “Internet Access and Use by Filipino Schoolchildren” and I learned about it when it was featured in an article in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. It’s also referred to in their October newsletter, linked here:

http://www.aijc.com.ph/newsletter/october_2009/back_page.html#literate

While some of the findings are in the newsletter and in the Inquirer article, I’m looking for the full study. If anyone has a .pdf they’d be willing to send me, please leave me a note in the comments section.

More soon. Apologies for the delay between posts; I’m adjusting to a new job.

The Stats Post

Hang on for another Going Digital 101 post, folks. Those take a little more time to write, and rest assured that I’m working on the second post in the series.

Edit: the stats post has now been made a permanent page and should be available through a link on the main menu bar.

When Comes… the Onsumer!

I’ll take a break from the theory stuff to share a story or two. (Also, I lost an argument. You’ll understand what I mean in a little while.)

One of my favorite people is Pepper Feraren (@pepperfer on Twitter), with whom I worked for over a year at Ogilvy. He was a planner who was very good at digital stuff. We got along like a house on fire. We stayed close friends even after he left to take a job at BBH Singapore, keeping in touch through Yahoo Messenger and World of Warcraft.

Half the things I learned about digital marketing, I learned from our chats. Pepper’s quite fun to talk to, and the conversation tends to flow quite freely whenever we’re together. I always walk away with new knowledge.

Earlier today I was debating with him about the central thesis of Al and Laura Ries’s book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR (the link goes to Amazon). As I understood it, the central theory of the book was that advertising had lost its credibility with the modern consumer and was therefore unable to fulfill its role of primary brand builder. The authors cite multiple examples of award-winning, creative advertising that were unable to “move the needle” and sell product.  Al and Laura Ries argue that the role of primary brand-builder should therefore go to PR instead, as PR’s role is primarily concerned with reputation and credibility. (There’s more, but that’s not essential to this story.)

The book I liked... that lost me an argument. Boo.

In response, Pepper linked me this Nielsen study (note: direct .pdf link). Released in October 2007, it says that not only is traditional advertising more trusted than online advertising… but Filipinos (and Brazilians) have the highest level of trust in their advertising in the world (67%).

So, yeah, I lost that one. You traditional advertising guys can relax now.

So now I need to push one of Pepper’s terms.

If you don’t know, Pep loves to make up new terms and get them into the common vocabulary. By far his most successful effort is “MOMOL”, which he made up as part of a bet with one of the Ogilvy creatives. (For the non-Filipino speakers, MOMOL is short for “make out-make out lang“, which basically describes a very casual physical relationship.) MOMOL was so successful that it was the title of a movie released in 2007, and I still hear it from my friends today.

His new term, which I’ve now got to get “out there”, is Onsumer – the always-connected, Internet-savvy consumer for whom most answers are one Google search away. We all know someone like this (I’m one.) When I’m not online through a wifi connection, I have my cell phone browser ready.

Onsumers are interesting. They have a high affinity for technology but they’re bored easily. Novelty is important to the Onsumer, and if you show him something he’s never seen before, he’s more likely to be engaged. Run-of-the-mill is not good enough for the Onsumer.

Whose market is the Onsumer? Apple, for one. Technology companies in general want to sell to Onsumers – most Onsumers are gadget fanatics, as gadgets are the enablers that allow them to be online in the first place.

Are there any more Onsumers out there? Let me know – Pepper and I have some questions we’d like to ask you.

Going Digital 101 – The Roles We Play

By far the most common sentiment I get when talking to agency folks about getting their agency into the digital marketing game is, “We really want to, but we need help.” Usually these people are looking outside their agency for talent – young, hotshot creatives with some experience putting together a Web site, or maybe hardcore IT people who don’t mind giving up careers with IT outsourcing operations to work in vibrant, creative work environments.

Talent is all well and good, but there are so many things to keep in mind when going digital. With that in mind, I’ve prepared this series of posts for those of you in this situation. This is distilled from a bit of experience, a lot of observations, and even more theorycrafting about the best ways for a traditional advertising agency to go digital.

I want to start with processes, but let’s make it simpler and start by talking about roles.

In a traditional ad agency (above or below the line), the entire business is built around one process intended to bring a creative communications solution to bear on a business problem. Every agency deals with this process in a different fashion, but in general the roles are common throughout the entire industry:

Planners take the client’s business problem and identify a key insight (or several) that will be essential to the creative solution.

Accounts people facilitate the processes by representing client’s interests in the agency. The best accounts people bring in the client’s business context so that the creative solution is really tailor-fit to the client’s need.

Creatives take the key insight and concept and develop one or more executions of the solution.

Producers take what the creatives develop and make it real – in most cases, they shoot TVCs, etc. etc.

This is, of course, very simplistic, and by no means completely accurate. But these roles serve to illustrate the process at the heart of an agency – of taking a business problem and crafting a creative solution.

It’s been said that digital is just a medium. For the most part, it’s true. However, digital has quirks all its own. Like other below the line activities, digital needs more infrastructure to work properly. A Web site needs server space to function. Someone needs to purchase a domain name, configure DNS servers, prepare email lists, and take care of the thousand little details that, if not addressed, can cause the entire project to fail.

Allow me to introduce a few new roles to the roster we’ve already identified.

Information architects handle a lot of the back-end work that goes into Web site design. You won’t need them for banner ads, but they’re absolutely essential for Web sites. IA specialists figure out how information needs to be stored and processed on a site. To facilitate communications, they develop site maps and wireframes to illustrate concept hierarchies and site usability.

Interactive producers aren’t just programmers, in the same way that your TV producer isn’t just a guy who knows how to use a camera. A really good interactive producer will have a recommended Web host and domain name registrar, and can troubleshoot buggy code. In my experience, the best interactive producers also have a long list of phone numbers of freelance developers and development studios that they can call on.  Bear in mind that even if your agency has an affiliated development studio (some do), every project has its own conditions that may make it impossible to engage the affiliate. For example, one such project I worked on required the use of ASP .NET, a Microsoft-owned programming language not very much in vogue here in Manila, and definitely not in the repertoire of my pool of usual programmers. It took a little while to find a good developer willing to take the project on.

Database specialists are the guys you turn to when it comes time to get into your Web site’s back end. Even if your site doesn’t require people to log in, it’s possible that you will need to use a database to store site content. Most Web site hosting includes a database for free, so there’s no need to get one separately. (If you’re storing half a million users’ worth of data, though, you may want to take that database offline instead.)  A good database specialist will have a lot of experience with SQL, the Structured Query Language, which is the language used in talking to most modern databases.

Since we’ve already talked about programming and programming languages, let me split up programmers into several categories. Take note that I use the terms programmer and developer interchangeably, although one is arguably not the other.

Flash programmers develop in a program called Flash. It’s a wonderfully visual tool for developing immersive Web content like games and interactive banners. Flash developers should code in a language called ActionScript. Their end result is a Flash file that you can embed on a Web site. (Best practice note – developing the entire Web site in Flash makes tech-savvy people laugh at you.)

Script programmers develop in a scripting language, usually PHP (ASP, ASP .NET and JSP are also possible). Or sometimes even HTML, the base document format that is used by the World Wide Web. Scripting languages are much more popular, of course, because plain HTML can’t manipulate anything, but some projects need plain-jane HTML. These guys should also know a bit of Javascript, which is a script of a different kind (Technical difference – PHP and its ilk are run on the server, while Javascript is run in the user’s browser. Each of these has a different data security profile.) Ideally, your script programmer should also know how to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS – a technology that affects how Web pages are presented in a browser. Unlike Flash developers, scripting-language developers produce Web pages and full-on Web sites.

The products of most of today’s IT and CS programs should be able to program in both Flash and a scripting language (usually PHP), but take note that these are different skillsets – as different as art and copy. It’s possible that your great Flash programmer will be terrible at programming in PHP, and vice versa.

Now, these are roles, not jobs, so it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to take on a role as part of their job. I’ve seen project managers take on the accounts work while acting as interactive producers. And creatives everywhere develop site maps without needing to be trained in hierarchies and usability.

So far the only role we’ve completely displaced is that of producer, and even then some projects need one (to shoot Web video, for example.) So the traditional video producer still has a role to play in our new digital age.

This was a pretty long post, so I’ll cut it here. The next time I post on this topic, I’ll talk about processes – specifically, how agency processes need to shift to accommodate these new roles.

Platforms Aren’t Just For Politicians

Every digital property is a platform for <X> to do <Y>.

This is important, and is at the heart of today’s Internet. It’s so important that I’ll write it down here again for your reference:

Every digital property is a platform for <X> to do <Y>.

Let’s break that down into its component parts.

‘Digital property’ sounds a bit vague and legalese. I prefer ‘digital asset’ myself, but the term most often used is ‘Web site’. Unfortunately, the concept I’m going for is bigger than ‘Web site’, so it’s not enough. A banner ad is a digital property. A Facebook account is a digital property. A URL, Twitter feed, RSS feed, email, or Yahoo Messenger status message are digital properties.

A platform is an enabling tool or technology. But you already knew that.

In marketing communications, the “to do” portion tends to express itself as “to communicate”.  Agency people will interpret “<X>” as the client, while “<Y>” is the client’s message.

Every digital property is a platform for a client to communicate a message.

This would be easy if the Web followed the rules of engagement of the offline world, with media scarce and therefore expensive. But it doesn’t. A Web site costs peanuts to put up. You can sign up for an email address for free. Ditto for a Facebook or Twitter account.

The Web democratized communications by providing abundant, low-cost media for pretty much anyone to share a message. That means that every Tom, Dick and Harry with an axe to grind can be and are online, sharing with others their message of how much your client’s product or service sucks.

Every digital property is a platform for a disgruntled customer to communicate a message.

Traditionally, companies have struggled to drown out the noise of competing messages (other companies’ advertising) through a bigger media spend.  But being louder than the competition only worked when media was scarce and the alternatives few and far in between.  Today, shouting louder than the guys complaining about your service is a terrible strategy. Advertising your great service when many, many others are decrying it as terrible and overpriced makes you and your client look ignorant and foolish.  You can’t move the needle when your market is pushing back.

Whether we like it or not, the burden is now on client and agency to be open to feedback and accountable for their actions.  This is a huge paradigm shift.

When a service does not work as advertised, your client might not want to hear about it, but potential customers definitely do. Unfortunately, given the way clients and agencies are set up, it’s often the agency’s responsibility to monitor (and sometimes respond) to negative feedback, usually with scant preparation or resources.

Unfair to agency? You bet. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I’m going to come out and say it here: working for a client who refuses to be accountable and open to feedback is trouble. This is as true in the ATL world as it is in the digital world, but it has more teeth in the digital world because of the nature of the Internet.  Internet denizens bite back, and they know how to hurt a client – by savaging his credibility and reputation.

If, on the other hand, you can persuade your client that communication is no longer one-sided and that openness and accountability are the order of the day, his brand might just have a chance at flourishing online.

After all, the Web is a platform for a brand to communicate with its consumers. And vice versa.

The Name of the Beast

There are a number of terms that agency people use to refer to the discipline I follow. I’m particularly fond of a few of them and I thought I’d open this blog by talking about them. Like the proverbial story of the three blind men and the elephant, each of these terms describes a different aspect of the discipline, and all of them, however vague or in vogue, are correct. Which is, in my opinion, a fine indicator of the depth of this field.

The term I encounter the most often is digital marketing. Kent Wertime of OgilvyOne Asia-Pacific has coined his own term similar to this, digimarketing, which strikes me as a rather clever way to avoid the difficulties in understanding what makes digital marketing, well, digital. Digital refers, of course, to fingers. In recent times, however, it has also come to refer to data stored in computer systems by virtue of the data’s storage in discrete values (1s and 0s), as perhaps an extension of the idea of using one’s fingers to count.

Despite the prevalence of this term, I’m not particularly fond of it. The term digital is inextricably entwined with modern technology. The implications for digital marketing, therefore, are that this is a form of marketing that makes use of modern technology. (But even the term modern is suspect. Text messaging has been around for twenty years now – Wikipedia suggests that it was developed in 1989. E-mail and the Internet are also children of the seventies.)

I have more affinity for another term not so much in vogue today, interactive marketing. Interactive is simple – it’s an attribute that describes what happens when the viewer or audience attempts to manipulate the communication. Traditional media (radio, TV and print) are static. A Web site or banner ad don’t have to be.

Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no mention of technology in this term, which eliminates it right off the bat for most practitioners. The truth is, marketing communications don’t have to be digital to be interactive. Flyers with tear-off stubs are interactive, but there’s no technology involved.

I use the term Internet marketing for people not involved in the industry. It’s a slight misnomer since not all digital marketing is done over the Internet (mobile marketing, for example, isn’t). It also carries nuances of e-commerce, that is, selling products over the Internet, and that isn’t necessarily part of the job.

New media marketing is a broader term and properly covers the appropriate media. (Never mind, again, that these new media aren’t exactly new!) Like Internet marketing, new media marketing takes a medium-centric approach to describe the scope of the discipline. It’s no less valid than the other terms, but it’s not a term I use with any frequency.

So we have some aspects of the beast under study here: it refers to content stored and distributed through computer systems, it responds to the actions of its audience, and it is primarily concerned with distribution over the Internet and other new media.

It’s by no means a comprehensive definition, but it will do for now.