Posts Tagged ‘agency’

I didn’t notice this until about halfway through the Super Bowl when Gary Vaynerchuk pointed it out. It seemed despite the millions of dollars big brands spent on Super Bowl ads this year, not one (at least that I saw) specifically directed people to their Facebook pages. Maybe it’s because my “day job” is now mostly consumed by social media, but this strikes me as incredibly obtuse. And possibly downright irresponsible on the part of their agencies.

At some point someone should’ve mentioned to Dennys, “Hey, you know you could probably spike your fan count by a couple MILLION in one night. Sound good?” That they didn’t either means a) nobody brought it up, or b) it was shot down by someone with no appreciation of the impact of such things. Or maybe they just don’t care about Facebook. I think a big factor in this is that “traditional” agencies still haven’t the first clue how to advise their clients on social media. This even includes a lot of digital agencies that only want to sell a client a website.

Throughout the game, I was reminded of when I first got into this gig. Around 1998 I built a website for a prominent local real estate agency in my town of Marietta, Ohio. At the time, I wasn’t doing anything very advanced, and the realty listings were powered by a third-party Perl script. I think I got a couple grand from the whole shebang, but it was 10 times better than what I was replacing.

Once the site launched, I made a lot of recommendations to them about how to promote the site. I pitched the usual stuff, but what I really hammered on was that they were insane if they didn’t put their web address on every single “for sale” sign on every property they had listed. They’d nod and acknowledge it was a good idea, but they never ever did it. I left Ohio in 2006, but my gut says they probably still haven’t taken my advice.

And here we are in 2010, the future, for pete’s sake, and clients are still compartmentalizing their media. This is our website and this is our broadcast ad, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Stunning.

It should be pointed out (as was pointed out to me), a couple spots included Facebook and/or Twitter logos. That’s great, but they were small and in the last tenth of a second of the commercial. Notice all Sears ads now have social media logos? WTF? Do you expect people to touch their television screen and go to your Facebook page?

What Denny’s (and others) should have done was had a clear social media call to action. Yes, we’re doing free breakfasts, but you have to become a fan on Facebook to get it. Or, tack on something extra, like become a fan and get a free cappuccino to go with that free breakfast. As of this writing, the Denny’s Facebook fan page only has 25,000 fans. In my experience with Facebook-based promotions (where Engauge helped take a brand from 900 fans to 100,000+), I’m sure they could’ve multiplied that by a factor of ten or more tonight, easy.

Not sure when these agencies (or brands) will get with the program. As much as Facebook makes me roll my eyes sometimes, I cannot deny it’s become a force to be reckoned with. And it won’t be long before no brand can afford to leave it out of their strategy.

That said, as long as there are agencies bungling through this, firms like Engauge will continue to show them up.

I recently came across a search engine marketing report from predictive marketing firm [x + 1]. The report shows that the majority of SEM professionals gave a low rank to the performance of SEM (a ranking of 1 – 3):

While the report doesn’t clearly explain why SEM practitioners are dissatisfied, I can guess as well as the next person that it is due to the growing efforts required to run an SEM campaign. Eric Schmidt actually highlighted this fact during Google’s recent quarterly earnings Q&A session (for Q2 2009):

“Starting roughly [at] Christmas, people were spending more time searching and when they purchased products, they were purchasing products of less value. Furthermore, when they did so, the whole process just took more time.”

Since it takes longer for a visitor to complete a purchase, SEM professionals are pouring over more data in order to attribute a sale to an SEM campaign. Unfortunately, only 10.3% said they consistently saw lift rates above 20% so they’re not seeing the results that they desire. Clearly, there are plenty of professionals that are “testing the SEM waters” without much success but their continued dissatisfaction may lead to abandonment of the practice. Additionally, the report goes on to explain that companies continue to invest in SEM: almost half 48.6% said the economy had no impact on their SEM budget. For now, companies are investing because there are success stories where SEM grew the top line. But as with SEM practitioners, companies may become dissatisfied and cut SEM budgets if they don’t reach their ROI goal at some point in time.

And one final point. Before you decide to put your entire weight behind this report, you should note that:

• The number of respondents was not revealed. While the report states that “half of respondents … have decision-making authority on spending and allocation of search,” the report said how many people actually participated so there’s no way for one to determine if the findings truly represent the attitudes and concerns of most SEM professionals.
• There’s no context to the findings. While the report provided a snapshot for March 2009, there was no mention of prior findings so there was no easy way to determine if attitudes have changed over the past six months to a year.

While the findings are interesting, I am looking forward to seeing more valuable data from [x+1] in the future.

Well, I am finally writing my first posting as an author of the new Engauge blog.

So many in our industry are full of anxiety in the face of this volatile economy and changing media landscape.  I think it is the most exciting time ever to be in this business.

And so I hope this blog will express my enthusiasm, optimism, and faith in the power of our creativity, strategy and sound execution to grow our client’s brands.

I am certain of our destination.  

The agency that will create transformational ideas that move someone to act.

The agency that will be superior at melding great creativity with accountability.

The agency that can celebrate the different cultures needed to be excellent at brand advertising, direct marketing and digital communications while having excellence in collaborating together.  

In short the agency that clients need in these challenging times.

I hope I can give some valuable perspective on how the forces in the marketplace will influence our journey together. Of course much of the time I will be just passing along some observations in life from family to fun to politics and maybe some good humor.

And I hope I get some comments back. Because, I know I will learn from hearing from all of you.  I already learn from working with you every day.

Until the next time.