Hasta La Creative!

Money can’t buy you love. If you need proof, here it is. The average cost to run a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LIII on CBS this Sunday is $5.24 Million. That’s an increase of 96% since 2008. What’s not increasing is the quality of the communications. Let’s take a look… Star power isn’t helping […]

The post What’s Playing Between Plays this Sunday appeared first on Adpulp.

Business results. ROI. Clients love it; ergo, agencies must provide it to remain essential. Enter the Warc 100, an annual ranking of the world’s 100 best campaigns and companies, based on their performance in effectiveness and strategy competitions. The rankings are compiled based on the winners of 87 effectiveness and strategy awards from around the […]

The post Tame Your Lion And Pencil Worshipers, Effectiveness Is The New Black appeared first on AdPulp.

The agency business in being pounded by a sea of rough and tumble changes today. Agencies are struggling to get lean and nimble, and MBA-toting bean counters are key to this reformulation. Unpopular though they may be, agency CFOs are nevertheless in high demand, says Jay Haines, CEO of global executive-search firm Grace Blue. One […]

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“When you’re planning on getting online traffic, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis in order to understand your current standings to work towards a maximized ROI,” says online marketing expert and author of 90% Of All Internet Businesses Will Fail Danny DeMichele. A cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a systematic way of thinking about whether the cost is greater than the benefits or the other way around. Naturally, you will have a higher return on investment (ROI) if your cost is less than the benefits you enjoy from it.

The purpose of a CBA is to determine if you have chosen a sound traffic strategy. It also allows you to compare one form of traffic-generation against another, helping you to decide which one is the best.

You need to use a CBA to determine what your online traffic is costing you. Then, after that determination, you need to maximize your return on investment by either lowering cost or increasing benefits or both if possible.

Here, then, are six tips from the expert himself designed to help you maximize your ROI.

First, decide on your optimal traffic-generation plan. One common myth is that there is something called free traffic. If you are not paying to send visitors to your website with money, you are still paying a price—your time. Some examples of traffic that costs time, but not money are blogging, social media networking, and forum marketing. Alternatively, you may simply choose to pay for traffic with money and spend your time on other aspects of your business. Three examples of traffic that costs money, but not time are pay-per-click ads, Facebook ads, and solo ads. The one you choose depends on whether you have more time or more money. Once you’ve decided how you’re going to get traffic, you have to do a CBA. If the benefit outweighs the cost, then you have found a sound traffic-generation method.

Second, determine your business goals. You have to have a clear list of goals to be successful in business. Otherwise, you will not know whether you are breaking even, winning or losing. Why, for example, are you choosing your current business model? Why should people buy from you? What makes you stand out in your niche? What would you like to happen after customers buy from you? Do you have a plan to upsell, create new products, etc. In other words, you have to determine ALL your outcomes. The greater your level of clarity, the better your ability to measure results, the higher your level of business success will be.

Third, decide on how to get the first click that will lead to a conversion. There are many ways of getting people to know, like, and trust your business, ranging from simply developing a steady stream of top-class content to creating an opt-in form with an ethical bribe and an autoresponder sequence.

Fourth, decide on how to call your traffic to action. In your niche, decide where to put your calls to action, and test to see which ones work the best.

Fifth, simplify your path from traffic to conversion. Once you have developed your traffic-and-conversion plan, then figure out, through testing, how to improve the CBA of each element. Ultimately, you want to make it as simple as possible for someone to go from hearing about you to buying your products.

Sixth, measure, experiment, and tweak constantly. The Internet is always evolving, as is e-commerce, so stay abreast of changes, improve the way you measure your results, and continue to experiment. Constantly try to improve your existing processes.

The post What is Online Traffic Costing You? Six Tips To Maximize Your ROI appeared first on AdPulp.

Generally speaking, clients across the board are not impressed. They want results and all ad people have to peddle is their sacrosanct creativity.

That’s the news from The Fournaise Marketing Group (c/o Warc, which interviewed more than 1,200 chief executive officers and decision makers around the world for its 2013 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program.

A full 78% of CEOs thought agencies were not performance-driven enough and did not focus enough on helping to generate the business results they expected their marketing departments to deliver.

In addition, 76% felt agencies talked too much about “creativity as the saviour” while not being able to prove or quantify it. Indeed, they believed that agencies were frequently opportunistic in claiming credit for results that could be attributed to other factors such as the product, sales force, channel or pricing.

So much suspicion fouling love and respect’s nest. Can we agree that we are all creative people? If we can agree to this basic tenet, I think we can make progress.

The truth is ad people can be aloof, disinterested and bitchy. Meanwhile, clients can be blind to basic realities, particularly as it relates to the value of their product or service in the marketplace. Bad clients can also be coarse and needlessly demanding. What we have here are two groups of highly opinionated “professionals” talking over and at each other from their respective sides of the polished Rainforest wood table.

You can blame the money involved for part of the hostility problem. If the client wasn’t “risking” millions and their own professional reputation, it wouldn’t be such a scary transaction. But it is scary, which means we must bring more empathy and compassion to the proceedings.

I think ad people would do well to bow to the pressure the client is under, and clients will absolutely get better work and results from the work, when they cop to the difficulty involved in making truly moving brand communications on a consistent basis.

[UPDATE] John Winsor of Victor & Spoils, arguing for new compensation models, notes in Harvard Business Review, “While some in the industry wish that we could remain as creative free spirits with our clients as patrons, clients are becoming so squeezed — and so focused on ROI — that that model isn’t sustainable.”

The post CEOs Not Pleased With Creative Snots Who Pack No Data appeared first on AdPulp.

Fact: When it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one.

Jake Sorofman, an analyst with Gartner, supplied the cold hard fact above in a Harvard Business Review article.

It’s the kind of fact that my friend Bob Hoffman likes, and likes to use to convince CMOs and other innocents, that digital is a good place to experiment but to move metal or sell cheeseburgers, stick to broadcast.

Oddly, TV isn’t all that easy to measure, whereas digital initiatives are all about measurement. From Sorofman’s article:

…with digital techniques, everything is measurable. Feedback loops tighten, segmentation becomes microtargeting, and optimizations can happen on the fly or even in real time. The relationship between investment and impact becomes correlated and causal — and the CMO becomes accountable down to the dime and moment by moment. Light dawns on the marketing spend! This transparency is powerful when quarters are turning into dollars for the business — but potentially perilous when the opposite is the case.

Knowledge is power. Let’s not deny a core principle. But can we entertain that not everything in advertising or the universe is knowable? Can we allow for magic to happen? Is there a line item for magic? There needs to be, because a brand is so much more than a series of A-B tests, performed ad infinitum. A brand is the grand sum of experiences people have with a company. A brand is customer service, product and look and feel.

Sorofman reflects on imagined days gone by. “Like Mad Men’s Don Draper, the CMO became the master of the soft-shoe performance.”

I don’t argue that there are charlatans in every line of work, but I do contest that knowing what works is an act of some kind. Knowing where to put a word, where to place a support beam in a house, or where to make an incision during surgery, are all practical skills that also require intuition and a deft touch.

I have no issue with Quants storming the CMO’s office, or my own office for that matter, but let’s keep some perspective and our eyes on the prize. Brand building is a human enterprise, and humans are observed from every angle, yet continue to surprise.

The post Marketers Are Brand Architects And Building Brands Takes More Than Math appeared first on AdPulp.

“Are you right or left ‘brained’?” (Not sure? Take a  test to find out.)

The right brain/left brain theory was pioneered by psychobiologist Roger Sperry in the 1960s. His research postulated that the right eye and right hand were connected to the left brain (actually, the left lobe), and vice versa. Each lobe interprets information in a different manner; the right lobe is visual, processing information intuitively, while the left lobe is an analytic, sequential processor. Although unproven, testing has shown that visually creative people tend to be “right-brainers.”

Right Brain Design, located in New York, is much like any other Madison Avenue ad shop, with one major exception: The agency does not physically exist. There is an agency website that seems authentic, and the client list includes work for actual companies, including; Estée Lauder, HSBC, JCS Tradecom, RPD Media, and HartLee Industries. However, there isn’t an employee profile page, nor is there a nifty contact page including directions from major airports.

So, what’s the deal?

Right Brain Design, founded in 2000, is an agency without walls. Although the agency technically “exists” in New York, it’s really a global web of advertising and marketing professionals. Yes, global. The innovative business model was implemented by Catherine Wachs, the agency’s Creative Director and Principal. Prior to Right Brain, Ms. Wachs spent her career creating and producing work to promote some of the nation’s best-known brands including: Ruby Tuesday Restaurants, Kraft Foods, Advil, Gold Bond, Dannon, Breyers Ice Cream, IBM, and many others. She has served agencies of various size, ranging from smaller, creative boutiques to WPP.

So, why Right Brain Design?

“[A]gencies are becoming giant dinosaurs that take up a lot of room and cannot adapt their business models quickly enough for this new economy. Whereas it took a large team to do a national advertising…it now takes only a few people narrowcasting…”

Narrowcasting is the process of sending information to a specific group of people, such as a fertilizer company targeting an online gardening community. The best examples of narrowcasting are electronic mailing lists, where messages are sent to individuals who subscribe to the list. Yet, this is but one of the agency’s unique traits.

Right Brain Design’s success partially stems from their unique ability to build customized, strategic teams equipped to meet diverse client challenges. The scope of work determines which creative disciplines are engaged, streamlining processes and eliminating waste. Thus, Right Brain Design maintains a high degree of flexibility over agencies that lack creative advertising services or are unable to compete on an economic level. Communicating mainly via Skype and IM, the agency’s overhead is minimal, increasing client ROI in comparison to agencies with real estate.

After nine years of operation, it seems that Right Brain Design’s right-lobed thinking was the right approach, putting them right on course for continued success.

Jeff Louis: Strategic Media Planner, Project Manager, and New Business Account Coordinator. His passion is writing. If you would like to get in touch with Jeff, please leave a reply or follow the links: www.linkedin.com or www.twitter.com.