OOOOOhhhhhh Shiney Beads! Me Me Me!

When doing Hot Hits back in the day for Mike Joseph, at boot camp he always stayed in our face about each live break being referred to as “a relate”.  He never called them a break or whatever… only “a relate”.  Obviously, that meant whatever we said had damn sure better relate to the target audience in the moment or we’d never get out of boot camp and wind up back on our old stations somewhere.  You had to know and understand the target audience well enough to relate EVERY BREAK to build a connection to that listener one by one.  We had to earn their trust every day break by break.  There was never a throw away time n temp, never a simple call letters/title/artist… every break was a relate or you didn’t deserve to be in Hot Hits in a top 5 market.  Two boot camps and two different Hot Hits stations in two different top 5 markets, I still agreed with Mike on that and to this day that fundamental of the medium hasn’t changed for truly successful stations.  Lots of time and effort went into researching the audience and Philly was amazingly different from San Francisco, but the audience weren’t there to listen to me, they were listening to hear a reflection of what the station meant to them.  When I read this piece from Advertising Age this morning, it brought back that broadcast basic of making the connection with the listener every single break – oops – relate (sorry Mike).  Good reminder that it’s not just us, it’s a part of the fabric of life and our intercommunication at many levels.  See you in New Orleans!  Enjoy.         Garry Leigh      Snafu Consulting
Connect More, Advertise Less
What Mardi Gras Parades Can Teach You About Human Nature

Posted by Tom Martin on 01.21.09 @ 08:55 AM
Tom Martin
Here in New Orleans, the Christmas decorations have given way to the Mardi Gras decorations, which got me to thinking about an old blog post I wrote a few years ago about connections.
As I sat on the neutral ground one year during Mardi Gras helping my kids yell for and catch beads, toys, etc., I had an epiphany. Here we were, in the middle of what can only be characterized as organized chaos, and amidst the yelling, screaming music, an interesting thing happened — we made a connection.

As my 3-year-old (at the time), Hayes, sat slumped in his ladder, fast asleep (poor thing was sick), I was doing my best to keep him from being hit by a flying bead while also catching him a few trinkets so when he awoke he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun. And then a float stopped in front of us and on the top deck some 20 feet away a young woman (I think — not sure as riders are masked) made eye contact, gave a quick little frown and then reached down and launched a huge stuffed animal, but only after assuring she had my attention and that I realized she was throwing to Hayes. I caught it and waved a thank you to her and then she was off. Mission accomplished. I was a good dad.

Now if you’ve never ridden on a Mardi Gras float, you can’t fully understand how unique this situation is. As a rider you can’t hear anything but a constant swell of screaming and yelling. Hundreds, thousands of people screaming for your attention in hopes you’ll “throw them something mister.” Add to this the fact that you’re on a moving platform, it’s dark and maybe you’ve had a cocktail or two, and it is hard enough to pick people out of the crowd that you are looking for much less make a random connection. But it happens.

In fact, this same thing happened a dozen or more times as the parade continued to roll on. I didn’t know these people, they didn’t know me but they felt something. A connection. For a fleeting moment, a personal connection was made and the nameless rider put down the 25-cent plastic beads and tossed an item that costs them (Mardi Gras float riders pay for the stuff they throw out of their own pockets) not an insignificant amount of money.

Why?

And that has gotten me thinking. About this idea — connection — the simple human need to connect to others. Powerful. Powerful because it causes people to do things, feel things and act on those feelings. Powerful because connection lives beyond the transaction and creates feelings and memories that last. Powerful because in a world of hyperconnectivity, consumers have never been less connected to brands.

At first I thought it might just be me, but then one night I read a report of Anderson Coopers’ coverage of Mardi Gras that year — he rode in Endymion, a Super Krewe, the big parades that you see on TV. He remarked: “Rolling on the float late at night, I realized Mardi Gras is not about the beads or about Bourbon Street. It’s about making a connection, one person to another.” And it hit me. Anderson was right. He had captured the essence of Mardi Gras but more important he had captured this powerful human insight, one that I’m sure can be used to create more powerful and effective work. People really do want to connect. But as advertisers, we need to give them something worthy of connecting too.

So the next time you sit down to write a brief or review concepts, ask yourself if what you’re doing is advertising or trying to connect. If it is the former, try again. Who knows, you might just get rewarded with a nice prize for your efforts.

~ ~ ~
Tom Martin is president of Zehnder Communications, with offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He can be reached at Tom.Martin@z-comm.com. Follow him on Twitter: @TomMartin .

Welcome To Self-Employment And It’s All Good!

The day of the gold watch after time served with a single company is long gone and the project-by-project employment model has now been the norm for much of America for years, so why do we in broadcast and marketing so lament moving on to the next project? Maybe because we feel that all of the time and effort we put into the medium itself has somehow been wasted? Traditional media’s mutation to both new and emerging media platforms is necessary and natural, although challenging to each of us and to our individual skill sets.
Radio, from programming to sales, has always been an intensely personal medium for the producer as well as the consumer, so it stands to reason we all take any change very personally. Any good sales person has cultivated deep relationships with their clients and has thereby lived the ups and downs of each client’s business cycles and strategic decisions, good or bad for years. Sales people feel just as much loss from those relationships being severed as an on-air personality no longer being able to share in the daily life of each listener.
We are all being forced into making deeper decisions on our own path to success and relying less on any one company’s employment.
So lets try to separate ourselves from the emotion of the moment, and look at the bigger picture of starting our own business. Of course, this process begins with building a business plan for you own new company.
(From the myownbusiness.org site)
Does Your Plan Include the Following Necessary Factors:
* A sound business concept
* Understanding your market
* Healthy, growing and stable industry
* Capable management
* Able financial control
* Consistent business focus
* Mindset to anticipate change
* Plans for online business
We all need to be able to do our market research and build a model that will be in demand not just today, but into the future far enough for us to develop the skills and gather the capitol we’ll need for the next business cycle and then the process begins anew.
Now is the time for all of us to embrace our newfound independence and do everything possible to control our own destiny and no longer be working at the whim of some investment company and their momentary valuation of our worth to their strategic market play (most of those models crashed and took billions of investor’s capital with them).
Since deregulation began with the subsequent “right sizing” of some of the most creative minds in broadcast, we should do as many of them have and go about creating and building the next platform for the delivery of entertainment. As the number crunchers in San Antonio are literally executing their vision of corporate value for the next five minutes, so should we develop our own individual plan for the next several years and begin it’s implementation about right NOW! Research thoroughly, plan well, work hard and just as you always have, do it BIG! Let’s get started!     -     Garry Leigh          Snafu Consulting

Is Your Company Run Right Or Left?

Now that the left brain linear thinkers have come in and rewired all of your systems for maximum efficiency and cleaned out all of the right brain people who are impossible to valuate and are thus expendable, what is left for your ability to maintain the creative connection between your brand and your primary consumer?  Placing a real value on that creative link is very difficult without some hard metrics and I think we are now getting closer to having the numbers which justify right brain approaches and staff.  HBR has articles going deeper on the topic and this article from MediaPost really does speak to the absolute necessity of not only maintaining but growing this creative connection for your brand.        Garry Leigh at Snafu
Media Metrics: Hate to Burst Your Bubble
by John Gerzema, Monday, December 1, 2008, 12:00 AM

As if sub-prime mortgages, failing hedge funds and institutional bailouts were not enough for 2008, there is yet another crisis brewing on Wall Street. Only in this case the assets cannot be traded away or hedged against inflation. The financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them think they are worth.

We examined brand and financial data from “BrandAsset Valuator” (BAV), the world’s largest study of consumer perceptions of brands. We’ve invested more than $ 115 million dollars and each year we interview 500,000 consumers in 44 countries. We’ve tracked consumer perceptions of around 40,000 brands since 1993.

And the numbers tell a story of Main Street offering a very different view of brands than Wall Street. While brand value increased 80 percent in three decades, among 2,500 brands we studied across 14 years of data: brand awareness declined 20 percent; brand quality eroded by 24 percent; trust in brands declined by a staggering 50 percent. And 85 percent of brands were either stagnant or declining in brand differentiation.

Looking outside our research, we saw signs of the Brand Bubble in other studies. Jack Trout and Kevin Clancy’s research for the Harvard Business Review found that 90 percent of 42 product categories had lost differentiation over time. Leonard Lodish and Carl Mela, also writing for HBR, reported that consumers are 50 percent more price sensitive than 25 years ago. Further signs of this worrying disconnect emerged as we examined the extent of the gap between business and consumer perceptions of brand value. Among Interbrand’s top 100 most valuable brands, 45 percent were actually declining in consumer perceptions according to BAV.

This isn’t a brand problem, it’s a business problem. Shareholder value is at risk. Today, brands account for 30 percent of the market capitalization of the S&P 500, or almost $4 trillion dollars. The 250 most valuable brands are worth $2.197 trillion dollars, which exceeds the GDP of France. Even the world’s top 10 most valuable brands are larger than the market capitalization of 70 percent of U.S. public companies.

Why does the Brand Bubble exist? I believe the changing nature of media and technology has caught brand management off guard, while at the same time the importance of creativity has risen among consumers, raising their expectations of brands.

Blowing Up

In the span of just six years brands have come up against a convergence of forces.

First there’s the fragmentation of everything – of channels, choice, modes and mediums. The highest rated show in America, All in the Family, had a 34.0 HH rating in 1972, compared to 14.6 for American Idol in 2008. This means not only are there a myriad of new competitors, it’s no longer possible to build a brand on the back of mass media, the way we did in previous decades. Brands must now aggregate audiences through micro-communities and tailor their appeals through bespoke channels.

Second, because of social media (collaboration, communication and sharing, social networks, applications and consumer generated media), consumers trust each other more than brands. A Mediaedge:cia study found that 76 percent of people rely on what other people say versus 15 percent on advertising, and 92 percent of people now cite word-of-mouth as the best source for brand information. Universal McCann found that 74 percent of global Internet users write reviews online, while 75 percent of people consult blogs before they buy, according to Bazazarvoice. Brands have nowhere to hide.

Third, personalization (of products, experiences, mass customization and micro-addressability) means there are no USPs anymore. A brand has a myriad of potential appeals and avenues to be personally relevant. This new paradigm is still difficult for many marketers to grasp, but micro marketing will be paramount to future competitive advantage.

And finally, portable content (RSS, podcasts, video, widgets/gadgets, mobile, slingbox) creates a redefinition of place. Enabled by unlimited storage capability, content is now instantly accessible and easily shared, meaning that consumers no longer distinguish an off- and online world. Marketers have not caught up to understanding this fluidity. Active listening and response is difficult in most organizations that are not yet “marketing nimble.”

All of these forces accelerate the decay in brand equity. As the power has shifted from institution to individual, brands are commoditized in compressed periods of time. Consumers are simply quicker to punish uninteresting and stagnant brands.

The Rise of Creativity

At the same time these forces have also unleashed a marketplace thirst for creativity. Today, consumers are not only citizen journalists, they’re amateur filmmakers, art critics, design mavens and content syndicators. In this creative renaissance, where consumers expect even inexpensive products to be “cheap chic,” they demand that brands continuously surprise and delight them. That’s why brands with what we call “energized differentiation” (continuous movement, momentum and direction) – outperform the S&P 500 by almost 30 percent in our modeled fund.

What’s interesting is these energized brands are blue chips like P&G, GE and Colgate, who are innovating beyond advertising, such as in product development, corporate social responsibility and sustainability. And there are low interest category killing brands like Geico, Simple Human and Method, who are effective at layering messaging and creating an ethos out of a seemingly commoditized product. There are high-energy brands effectively utilizing design and environments such as Pinkberry, Muji and Uniqlo. And there are brands like Zappos, Innocent and Ikea, for whom creativity in attention to corporate culture and core values resonate with consumers, who see them as more innovative and offering higher quality products and services.

The Brand Bubble is very real and yet, at the same time, it is avoidable. As researchers, economists and planners, our team concluded that brand value is dividing along the lines of creativity: A smaller number of highly creative and innovative brands are creating disproportionate value in our study. What’s their secret? Each is unleashing a continuous stream of marketing creativity, product and service innovation, design, advertising, social media mastery, media experimentation and CRM. They teach us that today, everything is marketing and only creativity matters if a brand is to hold its value in this rapidly transforming and unforgiving marketplace.

Internet Passes Print For News

sign of the times in 2008.

Internet Tops Newspapers As News Source, Still Lags TV
by Erik Sass, Yesterday, 7:43 PM

The Internet is now the most popular source of news after TV, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which released its year-end roundup of news media consumption last week. While TV is still king of the hill, its steady decline in the face of Internet competition bodes ill in the long term.
In 2008, 40% of the respondents said they got most of their national and international news from the Internet, versus 35% for newspapers in 2008. The Internet’s share is up from 24% in 2007, while newspapers also increased slightly, from 34%. The long-term trend is even clearer: the Internet’s share has more than tripled from 13% in 2001, while newspapers fell by almost a quarter–from 45%, in those six years.

(The figures add up to more than 100% because Pew accepted multiple responses to account for ambiguity in its survey of 1,489 adults from December 3-7. Although Pew did not explain this ambiguity, it might include respondents citing online newspapers or TV news Web sites alongside the traditional medium itself).

Although print newspapers–especially big metro dailies–appear to be locked in an irreversible long-term decline, newspaper Web sites have had big increases in audiences. In October 2008–the last month for which data is available–newspaper Web sites attracted a total of 68.97 million unique visitors–up 64% from 41.96 million in October 2004. The October 2008 figure represents 42% of the American adult Internet-using population–up from 28% in October 2004.

TV still takes first place as a news source, claiming 70% share in 2008–but that’s down from 74% in 2007, and a peak of 82% in 2002. Significantly, the percentage is lower among adults under the age of 30, who have taken to Internet news enthusiastically. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in this age bracket said TV news was their primary source, while an identical percentage tapped the Internet. That’s a big change from 2007, when 68% of people under the age of 30 choose TV, versus just 34% for the Internet.

Mobile Marketing Metrics

I have now read so many executive summaries of the Nielsen Short Code Marketing Study that it’s easy to simply accept the quoted metrics and accompanying analysis. Are you convinced and are you seeing the same conversion rates and interactivity as the examples?

Before we bury everyone of our core constituents in a campaign, let’s make sure it is employs a strategic vision which takes into account all of the positives and negatives of each particular medium utilized. One recent study showed high burn factor on TV creative did more to harm the effort than the impression did good for the brand. No matter how much a message resonates initially, we all know each medium has it’s own very individual shelf-life for a message or tactic and a successful campaign will deploy very different messages and duration thereof for each particular medium. Mobile marketing or text message marketing is very much the same but the experience is so new to most, that we are really creating (or in some cases destroying) the environment and boundaries for this special new interaction between our brand and core customer and need to tread very carefully as we go to insure it’s future value.

I know we all say that hey… we’re not spamming anyone, but does the person on the other end of our message feel engaged and pleased to have received it or, increasingly numb to seeing something from us and thus we are actually eroding the value of the medium for all? I really fear many of us are doing the latter simply because we need to get another message out this week or there is a deadline approaching or maybe an event looming, so we’re not connecting with our customer with anything of real value to keep our side of the conversation going. Remember, to have a conversation both parties have to voluntarily engage and stay engaged until we communicate.  When we ask for the opt-in lets make sure we set a realistic expectation for the interaction and meet or exceed that level every time.

I guess what I’m saying is I’ve attended enough parties this Holiday Season and witnessed so many conversations with no real communication that I want to keep my damn phone out of it. It is a special place reserved for me to invite special friends to actually share something of value with each other. If that’s not a part of that equation, it better not be on my phone! I understand the psychology of texting being an option chosen because we don’t want to have to emotionally engage the other party completely and it is chosen to instead lower the importance of the exchange to a few sentence fragments with no real and lasting weight. The most magical text messages to me though, are the ones that not only prompt a response with a smile, but which force us to upgrade the conversation to something on a more personal level. Making us want to commit time, money, travel or any real consideration to continue an interaction is the metric that counts and if it’s not the goal of your next mobile marketing message, DON’T SEND IT but put it on a billboard or email it to me! Remember, at least as much thought, planning and creativity should go into the mobile medium as into any other if we are really committed to adding it to our arsenal long term (and we should be). So, did you hesitate before you hit send? Thanks!
Garry Leigh
Snafu Consulting

Fundamentals – Not So Much

Been listening to a lot of local radio and noticing that format basics are no longer required and, in fact, are almost a luxury now?  

The simplest radio 101 communication fundamentals just don’t fit into the schedule of announcers voice tracking way too many stations at once, and there just isn’t time to be aware of their landscape market to market.  At least that’s what one might surmise.  

I think it really comes down to management just settling for less because our jobs and perspectives are just so different now in this consolidated less is more world.  If we programmers don’t require more from the staff, of course they will do less and only a precious few will go the extra mile to separate themselves from the crowd on-air.  It has always been that way and that’s why the hiring process can seem so long and tedious as the search for the one in a million self motivated communicator becomes a real challenge.  But it doesn’t stop at hiring the right person.

I remember when we first heard Bobby Bones and could immediately tell he would do any amount of work and prep to win.  It showed in every facet of this show; every character, every bit, every element.  After meeting him, we came to learn that Tommy Austin had created an atmosphere in which people wanted to learn more, experiment more broadly and achieve greater success.  I think the real key to Bobby and Tommy was allowing a talent to fail on occasion as a bit went flat or too long, or a character just didn’t gel in the show.  Failures didn’t require a huge postmortem but did require a thoughtful consideration of what worked and what didn’t, so the mistake wouldn’t be repeated and the show would be better for the experience.   

Allowing missteps when training racehorses is not something that comes naturally, but you have to let them breathe and assess the track occasionally to know how best to attack it and their competition.

How much time do you spend working with your talent on growth and learning the fundamentals?  How do you handle failures?  Do you allow enough room for not just chomping at the bit, but to open up and flat out run…or does that require too much maintenance?  

Pick some format basics and make them fundamental building blocks and lets get back to teaching, grooming, and fostering talent which is prerequisite to growing audience.  Just ask Tommy and Bobby.  

 

Garry Leigh

Media Battle?

Traditional vs. Emerging?

(as published this week in Consultant Tips on AllAccess.com)

In digesting some new research from Sapient on social networks, mobile, search and other forms of emerging (or non-traditional) media, and building marketing plans to utilize them, I was reminded of my first days in broadcasting back in the 1970s. Questions I never got adequate answers to then remain today, 30-odd years later. What measurements best sum up our interaction or relationship with our audience … and are they remotely accurate? Arbitron, Pulse, callout, Predictor, focus groups, results at remotes … come on, my compensation is tied to a metric and I need one that works. Of course, none of these have really been able to gauge the special bond that occurs between core listeners and all that makes up their favorite radio stations. The most successful and memorable stations go beyond anything measurable and into simply sharing in, and of, the day-to-day life of a listener.

There are no metrics for trusting Kidd Kraddick’s opinion on whether I should volunteer my precious time this weekend to help a cause benefiting people I’ve never met in a town I may never visit, but he communicates the need for a Habitat Home in New Orleans so strongly that I do change my schedule and thereby change my life for the better forever. Time Spent Listening, P1, core listener, cume, cost per point, reach and frequency, number of clicks, time spent per page, unique visitors, number of hits … none have any relevance in this equation. Explain to a buyer or help them explain to the client what this bond is, and why it blows research out of the water.

Now, add the ability to build out the personality of a station with other forms of entertainment via our site or other social networking sites. In fact, let the listeners build a mash-up or two relating to their experience with the station — it’s music, our town, the personalities — and then let them save it to virally spread to their friends, thus giving it a personal endorsement, and you have the strongest marketing campaign possible, but one impossible to measure.

It started with a relationship developed through traditional media, moved to social networks, mobile and probably e-mail, plus was downloaded to at least one, if not several devices for continued interaction in the future. That’s spectacular by any measure. Let’s not think of this as Traditional vs. Emerging but rather Traditional + Emerging = more and deeper engagement with our medium via other media. We are the common thread in the fabric of the daily life of a connected listener — and if that’s not the goal, the form of measurement is irrelevant and so are we. It’s time to get engaged. Your listeners already are.

Garry Leigh