Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

digital marketing

Kill It On Twitter And Linkedin

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Twitter and LinkedIn form, along with this blog, the backbone of my inbound marketing program. Easily, 90% of my qualified leads (2-3 per week on average) come from my social media marketing. The other 10% come from speaking engagements and networking / referrals.

Kill It On LinkedIn

I just found the LinkedIn marketing expert Stephanie Sammons via her podcast interview on Social Media Examiner. In the podcast she discusses the marketing benefits of the fairly new LinkedIn publishing platform with the host Michael Stelzner. You can now publish on this platform to reach LinkedIn’s zillions of members. Cool right? Listen to the podcast and then check out Stephanie’s blog Build Online Influence. I could say more but, like me, you are probably ADHD so just do these two things.

Note: I am going to be publishing an in-depth overview of how advertising agencies should be using LinkedIn soon. Stay tuned or sign up for my weekly newsletter below to make sure you see it.

Kill It On Twitter

There are lots of tools to help you get the most out of Twitter. Just Google “Twitter tools” and you’ll see bushels.

StephSammons s profile Twitonomy

One of my favorites is Twitonomy. When you listen to the Social Media Examiner podcast, Michael will start with a quick overview of this great tool. To give you a very clear, visual look at its value, I did an analysis of Stephanie’s Twitter feed and include the full page to the left. Wow, this tool goes deep. Learn about it, play with it and then start to use it to help manage your Twitter expertise. I do and I recommend it to all of my advertising agency clients.

Now, go a bit south on this page and sign up for my newsletter…. thanks.

Post Advertising: Big Data And Small Data

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Ten years ago I wrote a brilliant (yes, it was and is brilliant) white paper on how even big marketers like Nike and Disney fail to manage / love / re-market to their customer base. This fail still going on across industries. However, I’d like to think that understanding the value of CRM has advanced.

Below (after I force you to read my 2004 white paper “Get a Grip – The Marketing Power Of Managing Customer Relationships”) I will introduce you to one of the best posts / insights into how marketers should be starting to use big data for CRM C/O the Marketo blog.

[If you have any problem seeing the SlideShare doc below, you can find it right here.]

First My Take On Small Data & Nike & Disney

[slideshare id=13759471&doc=getagrippdf-120725210347-phpapp01&type=d]

OK, Now For Big Data and Marketo

This is without question, one of the best marketing blog posts I’ve read in a long time. DJ Waldlow’s post, “If You’ve Got It, Use It (Data, That Is)”, deconstructs his weekend experience with Fandango to illustrate how to use big data to customize / ROIize marketing. Oh, lets toss in realtime cause like big data you are becoming obsessed with this too. These are generally good things to be focussed on.

Here is DJ’s conclusion:

Big data is all the rage. The potential to do something interesting with that data to create more personalized user experiences is ginormous. However, if you don’t have the resources – human capital, financial capital, etc. – to leverage big data, start small. As described above, Fandango is using some pretty basic data they have about me to personalize my experience across channels (app, mobile/SMS, web, and email). It’s simple, yet incredibly effective.

Back to the top (ala Nike) — Big Data? Just do it. Or, at least start to think how to start to use it. I bet some of your clients are.

1 Reason To Pitch French Advertising Clients

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One of the better weekly newsletters I get is from the long-time-insight-rich-website Six Pixels of Separation. As the website says:

TWIST IMAGE PRESIDENT, MITCH JOEL, BRINGS YOU DIGITAL MARKETING AND MEDIA HACKING INSIGHTS AND PROVOCATIONS FROM HIS ALWAYS ON/ALWAYS CONNECTED WORLD.

Twist Image is a digital agency with offices in Montreal and Toronto that kicks most digital agency’s marketing butt and, as you can see, has a blog that adds value and drives agency awareness. Interesting fact… the agency website does a location lookup to personalize the home page. In my case, it knows that I am in Mexico right now. Nice touch.

Twist Image

OK, Back To Pitching French Clients

The blog has a guest feature called: Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention. This week it points to the news that the French government has dictated that management can’t email employees after work hours. In France that means after 6PM. Here is the post along with a link to the CNET News article.

French say ‘non’ to work email after 6 p.m. – cNet. “Ahh, who doesn’t want to spend their entire childhood and teenage years studying in an old school education institution that is making young people miserable, feeling inadequate and, ultimately, forcing them into a regiment of memorization of things they should never need to remember? I see this often when you look at more traditional European countries and their non-progressive school curriculums The good news? You get to graduate and become a ‘fonctionnaires,’ (if you live in France). A place that makes insane rules like this. I have a better idea: why stop at email? Just shut down the electricity for all fonctionnaires so nobody has to do anything? Alternately, you could just say, ‘hey, what if we let these adults make their own rules and attempt to find their own balance? Wow, what decade are we living in? How stupid do we think that people are?” (Mitch for Hugh).

My take…

  1. France is fucked up. I am not a small government guy but please… can’t people run their own lives? Are the French babies that need coddling?
  2. Recent press has discussed France’s issue of losing talented digital / programming / entrepreneur / creative class types to countries where they can do their thing in a pro-business environment.
  3. It must be a sign of the times when management (this means some of you) has to be told to let people live their lives. I never emailed my staff after 6PM. I am a really good, understanding, caring pro family guy. I didn’t need laws to be act like a decent person.  🙂

If French agencies are going to work at say 80% of capacity then go and get business from the French clients that need 100% agencies. Hello Peugeot. That said, you will need to have a French language website like Twist Image (it helps that they are in Quebec where the government dictates that they need a bilingual website.) Hmm… is there something about French speakers?

Bon chance!

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Advertising Age & Web Marketing ala 1997

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Ah, the joys of doing an Internet search on yourself. Here is an oldy but goody editorial I wrote for Advertising Age in May, 1997 on advertising agencies not getting into digital marketing fast enough. Remember… this is from 1997. I left Saatchi & Saatchi in 1995 to put newspapers online for Advance Publications. Yes, I invented the Internet with my friend Al. If you are an Advertising Age subscriber, you can see the editorial here.

Opinion: Have agencies lost their footing in Web marketing?

I’m worried that the advertising community is getting behind the curve when it comes to the Internet. Most clients are ahead of their agencies in understanding the value of Internet marketing–I know, because they’re coming to us to design their programs.

What’s holding agencies back? A love of proven media and maybe some myths.

1. Advertising agencies cannot make money planning and producing Web advertising.

Agency profits, strangled by clients during the past 10 years, don’t leave much room to dabble in new low cash-flow technologies. It’s easier to plan and buy TV.

However, almost every client is now marketing on the Web. Since the Web seems a bit better at direct response and promotion than brand building, I think it provides agencies with a great opportunity to grab from these other ripe budgets.

2. The only folks making money on the Web are pornographers.

Dell is selling $7 million worth of computers online every week. New Jersey’s Planet Honda has sold over $1 million worth of cars and parts off its site. Condomania is selling $1,000 worth of condoms every day off of a $10,000 Web site.

3. Banners do not work.

I worked in advertising for over 15 years, and the only time I could swear on a Bible that advertising had any direct effect on sales was when my airline client’s fare ads sent people to the counter. Now, when I look at my advertisers’ banner statistics, I know exactly what worked and what didn’t.

4. Web advertising will not work for mass brands.

Why not? Both men and women buy pasta, and when they’re online, they’re not using other media. Use the Web to leverage some of that mega co-op spend out there. Imagine a banner that says “50¢ off pasta today at A&P” and also links to that “brand-building” Italian odyssey site the creatives want to build.

5. The only big-time advertisers on the Web are large Web sites or technology companies.

Advertising follows the eyeballs. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users; TV, 13; cable, 10; and the Internet, five. That’s why a recent scan of “high-tech” Web advertisers included Rockport, Levi’s, Visa, Gatorade and Godiva.

6. Push is the future.

Maybe familiarity with broadcast is why the new “idea” of push is so beloved by the advertising industry. Pull is the power of the Internet. It may be hard to learn how to turn it into an advertising tool, but it is intrinsically more powerful and consumer-focused.

7. PointCast is push.

OK, I do like push. But sorry, guys, e-mail is the push God. E-mail is easy to use, it’s low-tech and highly targeted. There are more than 35 million Americans (70 million worldwide) using e-mail every day, while there are only 1 million active PointCast users. Pick one.

Peter Levitan is president of Advance Publications’New Jersey Online.

So, was I right? I was certainly opinionated. I am still.

Coca-Cola And The Future of Advertising Agencies

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download (1)Today’s Wall Street Journal article, A New Marketing World Requires New Skills, gives us a sweet opportunity to get into the head of Joe Tripoldi, Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer. Joe shares what he expects from his marketing organization as the world of marketing makes some dramatic and fast-paced shifts from old-fashioned brand-building to digital marketing.

This deep look also provides client-side direction for advertising and digital agencies to better understand where the world of marketing is headed. Not that any of this informations should be news. However, it is reinforcement for the way all agencies should be thinking in March, 2014. Thinking means designing agency services and hiring the right talent for the future. If Coke wants analytics, digital, social, mobile and gamification expertise — all clients will eventually want this and agencies need to plan accordingly.

“The biggest issue for CMOs today is the critical need to ‘re-skill’ their marketing organizations and build new capabilities in areas like big data/analytics, digital, social, mobile, gamification and design.

“This is not just about hiring a few subject-matter experts, but building a depth of knowledge leaders and practitioners in these critical new competencies. If they don’t, marketing organizations will be stuck with traditional 1980s and ’90s brand-building skills in a 21st-century world of an ‘always on’ consumer. The times, they are a-changing.

“You cannot slide over people in your current organization because they have loosely dabbled in these areas. You need to go to the millennial marketplace for ‘natives’ who have lived and breathed these disciplines for much of their lives. Individuals who have passion for connecting brands with people in new ways.

“The talent is out in the marketplace, you just have to be creative to source it in nontraditional ways through communities or networks. Then you have to understand that you may only retain these people for a short time, but the positive, disruptive impact and the knowledge they can impart on your organization is game changing.”