Boyle’s Stop-Start Ten Commandments

Ten ways the ad industry needs to transform, according to JWT’s Sean Boyle

Editor’s Note: JWT’s Global Planning Director, Sean Boyle, was the bad-boy beau of the ball at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) “Transforming Advertising” conference in San Francisco last week. With wit and an Irish gift-o’-the gab, Boyle presented his “The Stop-Start Ten Commandments”—five things agencies need to stop doing and five things they need to start doing. It made the room so pregnant with nervous laughter—because only the truth is funny—that we asked him to write an excerpt for us. Listen up, creatives and agencies.

1. Start Telling the Truth
To each other.  To our clients.  About our brands.

2. Stop the Bloody Politics
Because we’re an industry run by bankers, it is the conniving crowd pleasers rather than the cream that tend to rise to the top. A general rule: in most agencies, those with vision who “get-it” are bullied and undermined at every turn by those with no vision, who don’t.

3. Start Having Fun Again
We used to be the envy of the salary-man. Why have we let it become so serious and dull?  The greatest work ever done in our industry, has always come from places where people like each other and enjoy—really enjoy—playing (and partying) together as a team.

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Demystifying Mobile, Part II

Think of mobile marketing as Web marketing 1.0

In the second of a three-part series, Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy at Yahoo!, shows that the best way to keep mobile marketing on-track in to keep it simple. For Part I, click here.

Many advertisershave, to put it simply, over-thought their mobile strategy. One agency pitched us this amazing (but complex) mobile site and app that would generate leads for a financial client. After listening for ten minutes, I asked if the client had a call center. “You know, it is a phone… they can call you, and thereby utilize that massive investment your client has already made, instead of spending hundreds of thousands more.”

Yeah, it’s not sexy. But who cares? It’s quick, cheap and can generate valuable leads. It uses all the tools already available to the marketer—in this case, the call center.

You can’t always get want you want (via mobile), but you can get what you need
Don’t try to get all your prospects’ data on mobile in one fell swoop. Try to get just what you need for the follow up, such as an email address. You don’t have to get your customers to fill out a long registration through mobile alone. Use all the channels. Do “acquisition light” (just an email address, for example) and then follow up via email with the registration, offer details, a brochure, whatever.

Agencies should be looking to maximize the lessons they develop for their clients. The smartest agencies I see out there are able to talk to clients about the average duration of visits users make to a mobile site, the number of pages consumed each visit, the cost per unique visitor and so forth.

Mobile and the retro Web
Try thinking of mobile today as the 1996 Web all over again. What were we doing then? We had a simple test matrix that mapped offers and placement. You “ran broad” at the start, evaluated performance using the rudimentary analytics solutions of the day, and then you optimized—and learned very quickly worked and what didn’t.

If I were an agency working on a campaign in the mobile space, I would design a test matrix like this:

1. Full registration in mobile: Target 25 percent of impressions to smart phones with “qwerty” keyboards.  Although I strongly doubt at this point that many people will “form fill” in mobile, it’s important to test and get your baseline for comparison.

2. “Smart” email grab:  Target 25 percent against smart phones, but this time the landing page should just be an email grab. Measure the engagement in mobile, and also the final completion via email. How does mobile registration compare to follow-up registration via email?

3. “Dumb” email grab—Target 25 percent against “non-smart” phones. What is the response rate from users who have to “triple tap” info into a device?

4. Call center—Target your last 25 percent at “non-smart” phone users who you think will use the call center to connect with you. (Actually, you should also target your smart phone users the same way smart phones for data consistency. You get the idea).
 
That might not be very cool and sexy, but it is very insightful, and you can layer different forms of device, demo, geo and behavioral targeting targeting on later stages, once you have defined broad benchmarks.

In short, keep the ideas simple, run simple test matrixes and accumulate as much knowledge as you can.

—Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo! 

Next up: Paul talks about the importance of good measurement in mobile, and channels Douglas Adams.

Demystifying Mobile, Part I

Four questions to ask before getting into everywhere advertising

In this, the first of a three part series, Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy at Yahoo! explores some basic questions that advertisers should ask themselves before diving into the mobile marketing space.

In my role as Yahoo’s director of mobile sales strategy, I’ve met many clients confused by mobile advertising. But just because it’s mobile doesn’t mean that the laws of advertising have changed.  In fact, mobile advertising today follows much the same pattern and rules as traditional and Internet marketing. Below are four simple rules that I tell our mobile advertisers when considering and creating campaigns in the mobile channel.

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Search or Display? Mobile or PC? All of the Above

Agency professional talks about finding the right mix in advertising

Kazi Ahmed, Account Director at Media Contacts, recently talked with Yahoo! about trends agencies are experiencing in the digital advertising space.  Keep reading for his perspective on topics such as the shift from offline to online advertising, mobile advertising trends, and innovative targeting ideas.  Media Contacts is an interactive arm of Havas Digital.

How do you and Media Contacts/MPG view the much debated relationship on overall campaign performance between search and display? From your perspective, how important is upper funnel activity to driving these online or offline conversions?

Our clients are sold on the idea that search generates results, no question. Where we struggle a bit is getting clients to understand that much of that performance is often being driven with the help of a display campaign. In other words, you need to fill the top of the funnel to ensure that a steady stream of conversions are driven via search at the bottom of the funnel.

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