By Linda Forrest
If there’s one sure way to turn prospects off, it’s to oversell. This is true in sales and in marketing. If you overhype something, you’re sure to disappoint. Case in point, last week’s iTunes announcement from Apple.
When Apple told the market that November 16 would be “a day you’ll never forget,” hopes were high. Would Apple announce that it had finally convinced the major record labels to play nice with one another and introduce a subscription-based approach to music downloads along the lines of what Netflix offers for movies? What could it be that would warrant such a bombastic statement? Surely, the announcement would have to change the face of music downloading forever in order to live up to the hype?
As everyone who is not living under a rock now knows, the announcement was the addition of the full Beatles catalogue to iTunes. As the surviving band members and their Apple Records label had resisted digital downloads for a long time, with a lawsuit or two along the way, this was big news for Apple. But “a day you’ll never forget”? Hardly. Actually, scratch that – it is a day I’ll never forget because I was heartily disappointed when the news didn’t live up to the hyperbole Apple had used to preview this announcement and a perfect example of the old adage “don’t believe the hype.”
While Apple is crowing about the 2 million songs downloaded in the first week, this seemingly impressive figure is modest when compared with the still-held U.S. sales record set by N’Sync in 2000 for albums sold, which was 2.42 million. In modern terms, country phenomenon Taylor Swift sold 279,000 digital copies of her full length album in the first week.
Not only was the addition of the Beatles catalogue to iTunes not a day that will enter the history books, but it hasn’t even performed that well. Sure it was a personal triumph for Steve Jobs, a huge Beatles fan who fought long and hard to get rights to offer the catalog, but it was the latest in a series of PR missteps for the company.
What can we as B2B tech marketers learn from Apple’s folly?
This is in fact a topic we’ve visited before. Way back in 2008, Leo called out Rogers for its hyperbolic ways and at the dawn of this blog, I wrote about how inmedia gets the best results for its clients when it presents information to the media in a definitive, easily understood way that doesn’t include spin or hyperbole. The same holds true today. Traditional media won’t tolerate it and social media definitely is suspicious of it, so you’ll be doing yourself and your clients a disservice by employing it.
B2B tech is famous for using egregious hyperbole in its marketing efforts. A recent howler from CIO documented the 10 most exaggerated tech terms, a list that included “leading vendor,” which is a battle we’ve fought more than once with clients. Leading how? If your news is indeed first, or better, or leading the market in some way, define your terms.
Ask any journalist and they’ll tell you that their garbage cans, virtual and otherwise, are filled with hyperbolic marketing material, which they didn’t read past the headline that overhyped the subject matter that followed unread. Don’t let your materials end up on the trash heap because you needlessly overdid it.
By Linda Forrest
Let’s face it: there’s a delicate balance between cool and commerce. New media arrived on the scene like an irreverent, insouciant prat, thumbing its nose at the “old” way of doing things, and this includes marketing. That new media would spell the end for traditional media has been a much ballyhooed topic these past few years. While the death of traditional media has been overstated, the adoption of so-called 2.0 communications modes certainly shook things up from a marketing perspective.
No longer are customers – whether B2B or B2C – content to have information solely pushed at them, rather they want to participate in the meaningful exchange of information and, in most instances, pull the relevant information to them. It’s up to marketers to make sure that the pertinent information is available on all channels that make sense, and to respond quickly to reputation-threatening information.
One thing that most definitely hasn’t changed is that businesses need to make money in order to survive. Twitter is no different.
Having survived for several years on no revenue, it was time for the company to fish or cut bait and so it took a page from its media predecessors and started to sell advertising. No longer was one’s Twitterstream the providence of the free-thinking and radical sticking it to the proverbial “man.” It became a marketing channel like any other, where companies, for the right price, could promote their Tweets to prospective customers.
While users might complain loudly about this interruption of their streams by corporate raiders, or roll their eyes at the suggestions for who to follow, Promoted Tweets represent a great opportunity for brands, and here’s why.
The recent noise level on Twitter reminds me of MP3.com in its heyday. It was a free-for-all where there was so much content and no way for content creators to effectively market their wares. As a result of the amplification of everything, it was very difficult for users to hear anything. With the adoption of a Promoted Tweets option, there’s a mechanism for brands to rise above the noise. The reputation management opportunities presented by Promoted Tweets are phenomenal.
Examine Twitter’s old way of doing things. Let’s say a brand experiences a potentially damaging incident that effects numerous consumers. The brand could issue a Tweet that suggests they’re working to rectify the problem, what reparations are underway, where users can seek more information, etc. Problem is, with no way to make those Tweets “stick” to the top of the Twitterstream, they can be quickly overtaken by user-generated Tweets with relevant keywords and hashtags that contain potentially negative and damaging information. With Promoted Tweets, brands willing to pay the associated price can control their messaging on the channel, at least to some degree.
In my personal opinion, the suggestions for who to follow, just anecdotally, don’t pass muster, at least yet. Safe to assume that I will never follow AT&T’s @shareatt. Ever. It really makes me wonder what I’ve ever Tweeted that got me put on that list…
Product placement, when done poorly, is hideous. Agreed. The same will be true on Twitter. Brands looking to use this advertising (and let’s not mince words; this is advertising) to its fullest potential, should, as with any other channel, use it wisely. Target relevant information to actual prospects and customers. Spamming will get you nowhere.
Many are quick to jump on this initiative as Twitter having “sold out” but it will be interesting to see if indeed this move will save or destroy Twitter in the long term. With consistent revenue coming in and with brands able to better use the channel as part of their marketing budgets, my money’s on save.
By Linda Forrest
Comedian/talk show host Jon Stewart recently established his Bartlett’s entry in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity when he said “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” We as B2B marketers can take good counsel in the core message of this quote, even if his intention was to calm the political diaspora in the increasingly bipartisan U.S., something quite removed from our day-to-day activities.
At its simplest, this quote, when assessed in a marketing context, signals the great importance of two things: 1. strategy and 2. messaging and positioning. The lessons that can be learned on both fronts can have significant impact on your bottom line.
On the strategy front, if you bombard the market on all channels with little concern for which modes of communication are most effective for which types of messages and in which formats, your marketing effort is less likely to be successful than if you target your efforts around specific activities that have been proven effective. It’s this last point that highlights the importance of measuring the efficacy of your marketing activities; if you don’t measure the impact of your actions, how do you know if they’re effective or not?
With the advent of new media, and its ongoing widespread adoption, B2B companies need to keep in mind the importance of strategy as they contemplate and deploy marketing messages using novel channels. Just because a channel like Facebook exists doesn’t mean that it’s right for your market insofar as being an effective marketing channel. There’s a lot of hooplah around social media; many people and organizations get swept up in the hype and engage on these channels without doing the proper analysis up front. We’ve written about the perils of leaping before you look with new media. New does not mean better. More does not mean better. If these marketing activities are not appropriate for your business, then select others that are. Evaluation of all of the channels available to you and then selection of the most effective – and those that will offer the most compelling ROI – is essential to marketing success.
As businesses build and maintain profile in their respective marketplaces, they need to be clear about what they’re bringing to the table. You cannot be all things to all people, or, in Stewart’s words, amplify everything. Rather, your messaging and your positioning in the market needs to be clear, the customer pain that you’re solving well communicated and your market-facing messages, whether on so-called new or traditional media channels, consistent.
As evidenced by how much people are talking about Stewart’s speech, words matter. Select them carefully and communicate clearly. Your business will benefit from your judicious choice of both the language you use to promote your company and the channels on which you communicate those messages.
By Linda Forrest
I’m torn about Disney’s new “Let the Memories Begin” marketing initiative that utilizes real families’ photos and videos as a means to market their theme parks. Regular folk can upload their “memories” to be used royalty-free in any manner of marketing that Disney sees fit.
Full disclosure, I’m a Disney nut. By total coincidence, I may or may not be listening to the Walt Disney World soundtrack as I type this. My husband and I got married at Walt Disney World (no, Mickey didn’t perform the ceremony), and we travel to the Happiest Place on Earth as often as we can.
Like almost every other family that visits a Disney park, we come home with hundreds of vacation photos and videos of ourselves having a wonderful time, of our young son meeting his favourite characters, of the scenery and of events like the fireworks, parades and so on.
I definitely see the appeal from a consumer standpoint of having our pictures projected onto the castle, or to see our perfect wedding recognized as the ideal, to have our son’s beautiful smile as he met Mickey posted near and far for everyone to see. But from a professional standpoint, I fear the trend of “reality advertising” will not stand the marketing industry in good stead over the long term.
As a self-proclaimed casualty of the music industry, where copyright interests (read: revenue streams) in sound recordings fell by the wayside as illegal downloading became more pervasive, and as a watcher of all things media, where my television is filled with either unpaid or modestly rewarded people I could also likely see at the grocery store, I perceive this shift to a more “socialized” advertising approach setting a dangerous trend.
The fact that a large company with multi-billion dollar revenue has effectively found a way to circumvent spending money on creative content will, in my opinion, not bode well for the marketing companies that provide similar services to clients that most likely don’t have the same budgets as Disney.
This predicament reminds me of a fairly recent construct in the music business, that of the 360-degree contract that incorporates many of the revenue-generating activities of artists – artist management, recording, touring and merchandising – under one contract managed by one company. When the Madonnas and Robbie Williams’ of the world signed the first of these contracts, it scared the bejeezus out of me and I was convinced that the trickle down of this would negatively impact artists.
While I give full marks to the enterprising companies that came up with this approach, predominantly record companies that saw their revenues shrinking while artists continued to make money from live performances and t-shirt sales and discovered a way to get their hands into those pots, it’s the artists who suffer the financial repercussions. Who cares if Madonna’s giving up a percentage of her t-shirt sales when she’s got money to burn; it’s when the contract becomes the industry norm covering independent artists who rely on that t-shirt money to fill their gas tanks or their hungry bellies that the truly insidious nature of the agreement is realized. Williams himself later went on the record saying that his signing of this sort of agreement had been a bad idea that stifled him creatively. In fact, he compared his contractual obligations, ones that ran counter to his artistic integrity, to “slavery.” Harsh words indeed.
In the marketing and advertising realm, the internal teams at Disney or their multi-million dollar agency will not feel a pinch. But when mom-and-pop shops start to decide they can take these matters into their own hands rather than deal with professionals, our industry will suffer and we’ll have yet another obstruction to eliminate on our road to selling our services.
By Linda Forrest
Close to three years ago now (where does the time go?!?!?), we blogged about PR’s bad rap.
According to ADWEEK, results of a recent Gallup poll suggest that our stock has increased of late (at least in the eyes of those questioned.) An inherent flaw in the poll is that it lumps together advertising and PR, the differences between which warrant their own blog post, if not an entire blog altogether. But, despite that major criticism of the industry categorization, the numbers still indicate that our industry isn’t as hated as it has been in the past.
Yay?
One-third of respondents to the survey voiced a positive opinion of the advertising-PR industry. This over and above various industries whose reputations are dismal, according to the poll – oil and gas (thanks, BP!), banking (thank you, mortgage crisis!) and the airlines (where someone thinks this is a good idea.)
One commenter, Sven, clearly doesn’t have a good opinion of us, however: “The fact these dark witches try and spin the banking, airline, pharmaceutical and oil companies is worse than being a politician.”
This raises an interesting point: aren’t we PR practitioners in part responsible for how the public perceives these industries? Is their bad reputation our failing? Or is their bad behaviour or shoddy customer service their own business and PR has little to nothing to do with it?
