A few random notes from the conference I attended yesterday…
It’s been good to hear just about all of the speakers today saying that the customer is now in control, not the marketers. Hooray, the penny has dropped!
Over the last few months, Intel has moved 70% of its marketing spend online, however most of the speakers (including Nike, Coca-Cola and Dulux) still think that the traditional above-the-line channels have quite a bit of mileage left in them yet and are planning their campaigns to be cross-media. But I guess they would be, given the subject of the conference. Nobody seems to be doubting the trend of marketing moving online however.
Some interesting perspectives on multidisciplinary teams: Nike have restructured all of their marketing away from product lines (apparel, shoes, equipment) to individual sports (football, running, etc) and within each of these areas, they work across all media. Conversely, Coca-Cola have separate teams for each type of media. Dulux also try to be quite tightly integrated – they came up with a single cross-media theme (“We know the colours that go”) then planned their campaigns across the different media around that.
Nike have an interesting approach of getting their creative agencies working together, in a what sounded like slightly forced arranged marriages, bringing talent in digital and traditional media together for particular campaigns, which they reckon leads to the best creative results. Looking at some of the stuff they’re been pumping out (Nike+ etc) you can see how this approach could work. I think I’d quite like to be paired up with a more traditional marketing agency and see what sort of cross-media ideas we could come up with.
Nike also try not to get too bogged down in business cases for the campaigns because a lot of the work builds the brand, which is hard to measure. They have a mantra: “If you build the brand, the business will come.”Another theme is around being useful to your audience – something you’ll hear social media bods like us rattle on about endlessly. However they weren’t referring to being useful within the online networks where their target audience hangs out, but around their brand promise. For example, Nike have moved away from “We sell running shoes” to “We can help you to succeed at running”, and Dulux moved away from “We sell paint” to “We can help you to get the right look”.
The chap from Dulux concluded with these tips for successful campaigns:
- Invest the time getting the strategy right
- Get the customer insight right (they spent a lot of time really understanding the customer journey of planning the decoration of a room to figure out where the customer wanted help etc)
- Come up with one simple media-neutral idea (“we know the colours that go”)
- Create simple, motivating objectives (“1 million requests for colour matching charts, across all media”)
- Measure
- [and our old favourite!] Continually review, revise, iterate and improve
One final point about customer reviews from UBISOFT. When they released the game Assassin’s Creed, the user ratings online scored higher than the reviews in the magazines. The lesson? Don’t be scared of allowing customers to review and rate your products online. Providing you’re not selling shoddy goods, people are kinder than you might imagine.
