Trad Agencies Must Narrow Their Interactive Credibility Gap
by Ellen Siminoff, Friday, March 30, 2007
Source: mediapost
BY NOW YOU have probably read about the new Forrester report, "Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency," that sheds light on the widening capabilities gap between traditional ad agencies and the smaller, specialized digital shops when it comes to new media marketing. If you haven't yet seen it, the report placed the spotlight on the demand from marketers expecting their agencies to deliver expertise in emerging areas, such as search engine marketing and interactive advertising, and marketers' growing discontent with their agencies. The report identified technology being at the heart of the skill gap that appears to be growing and leading to marketers' dissatisfaction with their agencies of record.
Traditional ad agencies' relevance and growth is at stake if they don't adapt to the changing needs of their clients and the shift of marketing dollars to new channels. What are commonly called "below-the-line" marketing strategies are becoming much more mainstream in reaching the desired audiences with right message through the right medium. It sounds obvious, but the Forrester report uncovers marketers' doubt that Madison Avenue is adapting to the changing landscape.
NOTE: If the Forrester report doesn't convince you, then also consider a recent study <http://www.centerformediaresearch.com/cfmr_brief.cfm?fnl=070105> by Evalueserve for Sapient that found only 10% of the more than 100 CMOs and senior marketers surveyed in the U.K and U.S. "seek to partner with large advertising agencies for their online marketing."
Last summer, I penned a column for Search Insider that dealt with this very issue, and in particular how it relates to the SEM space. I talked about the requisite for traditional agencies to expand their SEM offerings and the demand from clients to integrate it into their overall campaigns.
Never was this more apparent than this year's Super Bowl ads. Very few big brand advertisers used their million-dollar plus investments to drive consumers online to continue interacting with their brands and maximize spend. According to various media reports, Pizza Hut and Salesgenie.com did a solid job providing a call to action to viewers to head online to continue the dialogue. In fact, in a recent Advertising Age article, Reprise Media's Peter Hershberg noted that Pizza Hut smartly used paid search to send people to a Pizza Hut-branded YouTube channel rather than its own corporate site.
It was disheartening for me, if not selfishly as an SEM executive, knowing that there was so much that other big advertisers could have done to extend the reach of those ads beyond the 30-second or minute TV spot. Also in the same Advertising Age article, Anne Frisbie, vice president of category at Yahoo Search Marketing, commented that she felt Super Bowl marketers could have done a better job bidding on search terms and could have milked more out of the TV ad buys if they'd coordinated search campaigns better.
As I have written before, and many of you know, these specialized digital media capabilities don't appear overnight, nor are they easily grown with a few new hires. It's a trial-and-error process that takes a lot of work and experience. It also takes lots of data (and I'm talking terabytes) and sophisticated, scalable technology that can handle all of the different "what-if"/tradeoff scenarios, particularly if your campaign consists of thousands and thousands of keywords. Unlike the typical ad buy for impressions, search is a dynamic marketplace with many factors (prices, competitors, variations of keywords, time of day/day of week/month of year, seasonality, copy, usability, etc.).
The Forrester study referenced the notion of "media-agnostic thinking." The report's author, Peter Kim, was quoted in the media saying that it is crucial for big agencies to be able to counsel their clients on the hottest and most effective marketing channels. But we all know you simply can't be all things to all people. In fact, clients expect and want best-in-breed services that can come only from multiple agencies. In that same Evalueserve survey I referenced above, 68 percent of those surveyed said they prefer to work with multiple agencies because of the benefits of specialization.
So the most effective way for big agencies to gain expertise, as I suggested previously, is through strategic partnerships with specialized shops. Building new capabilities -- in particular, technology -- from scratch takes years and tons of money. With the right partners, the traditional agency can seize more of their clients' spend and more importantly, retain/grow business by being able to offer services in the emerging channels through strategic partnerships.
I believe the best solution for agencies is co-opetition where everyone wins -- especially clients, who get what they need/want from their agency of record, i.e. best-in-breed services.
Ellen Siminoff is CEO of search engine marketing agency Efficient Frontier Inc. She can be reached at ellen@efrontier.com
http://news.com.com/MTV+goes+4D+with+virtual-worlds+push/2100-1043_3-6171474.html
Story last modified Thu Mar 29 06:17:48 PDT 2007
NEW YORK--It already has one of the most valuable brand names in television. Now MTV is hoping it can repeat that success as a marketing leader in virtual worlds.
That was the cable giant's message during a three-part keynote address Wednesday morning at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference here.
The company is calling its new cross-platform strategy "4D." Essentially, the approach will attempt to combine content from MTV Networks' television shows with fully 3D virtual worlds and then put it all through a feedback loop in which people can interact with TV personalities and create content that becomes part of the shared experience.
"We really believe that this is going to profoundly change the ways that brands like MTV interact with their audience," said Matt Bostwick, senior vice president for franchise development at MTV Networks' Music Group. "There's no tight storyline you're following. It's an open experience."
Already, MTV has launched two branded virtual worlds, Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Hills. These take the story lines of hit shows Laguna Beach and The Hills, respectively, and weave them into a large, public 3D digital environment in which users can meet the shows' stars, or "live" the lifestyles of the programs.
Now, MTV is preparing to unveil Virtual Pimp My Ride, a virtual-world version of another of the network's hit shows.
Playing on the notion that the three TV shows take place in Southern California cities, MTV has created a virtual "highway" that will make it possible for users of each of the three virtual worlds to visit the other two.
The environments were created using Makena Technologies' There.com platform, but each are closed off from the general There.com virtual world.
The MTV keynote was among the early sessions of this two-day conference, the first of its kind to bring together major media companies and virtual-world platform developers in a bid to advance marketing in 3D environments. The most talked-about virtual world at the event is Second Life, but other players, including There.com, Entropia Universe, Whyville and platform developer Multiverse Networks, are also on hand.
MTV seems particularly enthused about the way it's leveraging its virtual properties as advertising media. And to a room full of major media executives eager to hear how they too can make money in virtual worlds the words of Bostwick and two other MTV executives were very good news.
According to Bostwick, more than 600,000 registered users have signed up for Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Hills in just six months, and the company expects that number to rise to 3 million by the beginning of December.
Dream metrics for advertisers?
He added that the metrics for the two virtual worlds were an advertiser's dream: 64 percent of users come back regularly, users visit 1.4 times per week for an average of 37 minutes each time, and users have so far logged more than 72 million minutes in-world.
Earlier in the keynote, MTV Networks Executive Vice President Jeffrey Yapp said that according to the company's internal metrics, 99 percent of users of its virtual worlds are exposed to branded content, and as many as 85 percent voluntarily interact with those brands.
"What's in it for you guys?" Bostwick asked. "Our ad model is to take people from the current exposure model, which works well (on TV), and to go from seeing an ad to interacting with your brand."
He then showed a series of slides illustrating what MTV, as part of its 4D TV concept, is calling "4D branding."
Among the images were those showing avatars using branded cell phones as a tool for communicating in-world, as well as kiosks where participants can examine digital images of real cell phones. He also showed a series of shots of avatars buying Pepsi-branded drinks and riding Pepsi-branded hoverboards and scooters.
In addition, he explained that the designers of Virtual Laguna Beach had built in a Pepsi-branded "skills ladder" system in which users had to complete a series of tasks, each of which earned them "Pepsi points."
"They became status symbols," Bostwick said. "You couldn't buy them. You had to earn them."
And lest anyone argue that users of virtual worlds don't want to be marketed to, especially not by major real-world brands, he pointed out that one out of three Virtual Laguna Beach users had interacted with some form of Pepsi-branded content. There have even been active forum discussions in which users asked others how to get ahold of that content, he said.
Ultimately, MTV and other media companies at the conference are banking on an explosion of interest in the medium to drive a corresponding surge in ad dollars.
To juice it up, MTV is focusing intently on how to bring more of its content into virtual worlds, making it one of the leading media companies in the space.
For example, Bostwick explained how a cast member from one of the network's shows could do a live TV event, then go straight in-world to interact with avatars. Later, he suggested, users might be able to create video content in-world that could make its way back onto TV.
"We really feel like this programming bridge between TV and virtual is really important, particularly for taking mainstream users into this context," Bostwick said. "But the link to TV is the starting point, not the ending point. We really think where the fourth dimension comes in, where TV leaves off, is the people. Traditional chat rooms and social-networking sites feel so yesterday when you come into a virtual world."
He said users of MTV's virtual worlds had so far used 6.4 million emoticons, initiated 2 million chats, accepted 320,000 invitations to chat privately, and added new people to buddy lists more than 92,000 times.
"Our goal is to let them create their own storylines and content," Bostwick said. "We think this will come full circle when the content flows from inside our worlds onto the screen."
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
