60% Of Advertising Spending Was Wasted In 2008
January 21, 2009 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in all-media marketing effectiveness tracking, released that 60% of all advertising spending it tracked around the world in 2008 failed to deliver the results expected by their marketers and can therefore be considered wasted.
Specialized in tracking, measuring and auditing the real-time performance of marketing and advertising campaigns deployed in both traditional and online media, Fournaise used its proprietary marketing effectiveness tracking solutions to measure the ability of the advertising campaigns to generate both direct and indirect engagement with their target audience, and therefore their ability to boost the advertisers’ Profit & Loss (“P&L”) through:
- Increase in retail traffic;
- Increase in sales;
- Increase in leads/prospects captured; and/or
- Increase in positive target audience conditioning.
Through the campaigns it tracked across offline and online media, Fournaise revealed that while the average Marketing Wastage Rate (”MWR”) in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry is 65%, it falls to 47% in the business-to-business (B2B) industry.
“We noticed that the majority of B2B marketers are very focused on making their campaigns deliver hard, tangible results, i.e. leads or prospects that they can convert afterwards. On the other hand, the majority of B2C marketers tend to rely heavily on the old and traditional model of brand building: by mainly going after awareness and recall through expensive and impact-driven media buys, they hope to deliver more sales and/or in-store traffic down the line - a fundamental mistake nowadays given the high level of advertising clutter, which leads to high levels of wastage” says Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.
To help their company successfully ride this recession storm, Fontaine believes marketers around the world must overcome 4 challenges:
1. They must first pull their head out of the sand, get out of their comfort zone and accept their reality once and for all: their job as a marketer is to grow their company’s P&L, nothing else;
2. They must change their approach by starting to be much more bottom-line-focused and embrace P&L-related key performance indicators: every single advertising spend must be tracked and must deliver tangible results;
3. They must be prepared to handle the truth, to take the necessary action to adjust their plans and to move their budgets to where the results are coming from in order to achieve the highest yields, real time – even if it means to cut or reduce the areas that they spend on out of tradition; and
4. They must start thinking like business owners and treat their budgets as if it was their own money. Would you agree to give away 60% of your own money every month without getting anything back in return?
Top 5 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions
January 1, 2009 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
With the beginning of a new year I thought it timely to suggest my top five marketing New Year resolutions for 2009:
- ROI, ROI, ROI! There may be some great sounding marketing tools coming out this year, just remember that the only thing that matters with a marketing campaign is that you make more money than you spend!
- Stay true to your brand’s mission. Do you remember the reason you launched your company? Return to your roots and your clients / customers will thank you for it.
- Create Raving Fans out of your customers. This can be accomplished by obsessively executing on what advertise.
- Work ON your business instead of IN your business. It’s easy to get caught up in the fast to day issues of your company. However to truly develop your business into a thriving organization you will have to develop looking term strategies that fuel innovation and growth.
- Always remember to not sweat the small stuff, and then remind yourself that it’s all small stuff.
Multi-Channel Marketing
December 22, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
Many organizations struggle to optimize online and offline marketing campaigns across an ever increasing number of new marketing channels. Silos of information reside in separate channel-centric technologies, and distributed marketing efforts, from both internal groups and external relationships, add organizational challenges to managing multichannel marketing efforts. Most of all, the proliferation of sales and marketing channels has made multichannel campaign performance difficult to track and monitor.
According to a new study published by Aberdeen, Best-in-Class companies are 1.5-times more likely to address these challenges by utilizing next-generation solutions that enable cross-channel optimization across an enterprise.
The report reveals how top performing companies currently execute multichannel campaigns to extract maximum value from their marketing investments. By combining organizational capabilities and marketing technologies, Best-in-Class companies are able to positively affect return on marketing investments and customer profitability.
“Traditional multichannel marketing is largely a function of delivering multiple separate campaigns across multiple channels,” explains Ian Michiels, Research Director at Aberdeen. “Best-in-Class companies are executing structured, collaborative cross-channel campaigns, and they are deriving extraordinary results from these tactics.” The top challenges organizations face when implementing a multichannel marketing campaign are data integration problems created by disparate systems, the lack of technology to centralize multichannel management, and the organizational challenges associated with department silos. “The challenge of executing, measuring, and optimizing multichannel marketing has far reaching implications that affect marketing performance, measurement, and customer retention and acquisition.”
What’s Your Marketing Risk IQ?
October 23, 2008 by OA Group · 1 Comment
What's Your Marketing Risk IQ?
Marketing is a risk intensive endeavor, there is a wide ranging risk vs. reward matrix which can bring even the most innovative experts to their knees. So why am I telling you this? It’s because I want to describe the OAG marketing mechanisms and illustrate how they each minimize risk while simultaneously maximizing the reward. Below is a basic walk-through of each service:
1. BlogSpur
The BlogSpur service is a multi-faceted social media marketing service produces long term results with minimal risk. The OAG Social Media and Search Engine Specialists dramatically increase a brand’s online web presence through blog postings and social media syndication. The fees are minimal compared to hiring a blogger and the service produces industry leading results.
2. AdSpur
AdSpur is a performance based marketing service. This means there is little to no risk for you as an advertiser. You only pay when you receive an order, lead or visitor.
If you are looking for your company to receive online or offline press exposure, a strong PR push is required. This does have a higher risk compared to the BlogSpur and AdSpur services since the fees are higher and there are no guaranteed results. However the rewards are potentially exponential. Several companies such as Facebook and YouTube built their businesses purely on a solid public relations and press outreach strategy.
In the current economic condition of the nation, it is key to make every penny of your marketing dollar count, so choose wisely and let us help you create a marketing solution that fits your situation.
Why Can’t I Choose?
July 10, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I don’t think I will be able to hold my frustration if I hear about another company trying to monetize social networking traffic. Ad networks such as Social Media and VideoEgg have probably done the best job in the industry up to this point with running campaigns on Facebook and the other social networks out there. However this post’s focus is different.
Is there an easier way to make money for social networks?
Most ad networks try to differentiate themselves by building targeting mechanisms into their service. If you’re in the online marketing industry, you’ve heard terms such as:
- Behavioral targeting (Blue Lithium)
- Contextual targeting (Google)
- Rich Media (Tremor Media)
- Along with a slew of others.
And what is the goal of each of these technologies? Getting the right ad, in front of the right user, at the right time. And as great as each of these marketing tools are, I personally believe that none of them are right for social networks by themselves. And I know I’m right because no one has been able to successfully monetize a social networking portal. And so my question is this:
Why can’t I choose my ads as a user?!
I think it’s a fair question and I haven’t seen any large social network attempt this approach. Let’s walk through how this could work practically: As a user, Facebook brings up a page on the screen the next time you sign in. This page would say something to the effect of,
“We at Facebook want to make sure that you have a great experience every time you log in, and we don’t want you to have to see ads that are irrelevant or annoying to you.” You then choose 1 or 2 verticals that interest you from a list on that page, categories like: auto, faith, finance, gaming, health, technology, travel, et al.”
Now all ads shown on Facebook would be user initiated and would have a much higher level of engagement since the user actually CHOSE the ads they are being shown. These ad units would increase dramatically in value since vertically themed ad networks are generating incredibly higher advertising rates than the other forms of interactive ad units. So hopefully these social networks will wake up realize that giving more control to their users will actually generate much more revenue.
The Social Media Ego
July 1, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I was considering what the writing options were for this first real blog post, and I decided I wanted to discuss what is the root motivation behind all of these social media mediums such as: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. And since I am a fan of each of these services I believe I am well suited to self analyze why these companies are capturing our minds and dominating our daily lives.
How Much Do You Love Your Online Voice?
This post is not going to discuss the technical specifications of any of these ‘Web 2.0′ services, there are literally thousands of blogs that have daily dialogue in regard to the social media world. However I have found very little discussion about ‘Why’ these online applications have captivated our collective psyches.
As our culture has become more and more introspective, simply put, I believe we have fallen in love with ourselves. I think that if we could run on a beach into our own arms we would do it! And with this new found love of self we have come to the, probably mistaken, notion that we are all geniuses. And we all feel that our ‘deep thoughts’ need to be shared with the world. It’s interesting to have observed the evolution of social media, see below for the time line:
1. Dating sites
We first began with ‘looking’ for other people to spend real world time with, these individuals should have common interests with us and the end goal was: physical, emotional, etc.
2. Myspace
We then moved to online social networking with Myspace (a former dating site). Myspace made it easy to make ‘online’ friends, 99.9% of whom you will never meet (hopefully).
3. Facebook
For as innovative as Mysapce was, it was mainly a static site that profiled the interests you typed into it on the day you signed up. Facebook introduced an entirely new world of connectivity when they launched the ‘News Feed’ service. The News Feed service allowed for people to track when you upload new photos, shared a link or video, and changed your ’status’.
4. Twitter/Friendfeed
Taking Facebook’s News Feed process, services like Twitter made it quick and easy to share literally every part of your online self. They allow for you to share links, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, and status updates - many times on a dynamic basis. The majority of users on these services don’t even pay attention to the other members of the community, each of these social media mechanisms are completely ’self-centric’.
So do you see the evolution? Starting with individuals searching for others online, we have migrated all the way to users being satisfied with being the talker in one sided conversations. Our inherent selfishness and narcissism, combined with technological advances, have led us down this path of egocentricity. So where are we going next? I don’t know, but I can promise you that there will be millions of opinions crossing the web, and all of them will be right (at least in one person’s mind).
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