This is the personal blog of Casper Moller, former CEO of digital marketing agency T-Viral. Here you will find random thoughts about marketing, my work and personal passions such as photography, travel, football and food.
I know I have banged on in the past about the need to ensure that your marketing efforts are integrated across all channels, whether they're digital or "old fashioned", to ensure you make the most of "cross-pollination" opportunities and increase brand awareness. However, it is also a good idea to double check that the left hand knows what the right is doing and vice versa.
This was really brought home to me today when I tried to sign up for a new promotion run by Tropicana in the UK, giving consumers the opportunity to collect cheap dining vouchers. A few weeks ago they distributed flyers to thousand (if not millions of households across the UK) inviting people to go to a URL and input a promotional code to collect your first point for free (additional points can be collected from the purchase of Tropicana juice and smoothie packs). There was just one slight problem... somebody seems to have neglected to mention that URLs after the domain name become case sensitive! This means that thousands of people who would otherwise have participated when receiving the flyer have probably just given up (if they are as web savvy as the person responsible for the copy). This is the kind of mistake that just shouldn't be allowed to happen. Thankfully, for the web savvy users, it is a case of just changing it around to lower case and "hey presto, it works!"
However, it does beg another question... Why do Tropicana want users to go to www.tropicana.co.uk/foodlovers when they then re-direct the user to the site: www.tropicanafoodlovers.co.uk? Surely it would have been just as easy just putting that URL in the promo materials - and avoid the case scenario in the first place...
UPDATE: Unfortunately it gets worse. When you try to register you get the following response:
Have agencies and brand owners just given up on quality control? I don't know, but there are too many mistakes in this campaign for my liking...
For once, I'm sitting and watching The Apprentice on BBC2 and I can't help but feel that it is great TV, but is so far removed from reality as is humanly possible. If TalkBack Thames, the production company behind the show, didn't pay the £100,000 salary of the winner, would any of these candidates even be considered? I personally doubt it very much.
As a marketing specialist, I found their efforts toe-cringing tonight. The right team lost, though, as the idea of posters with coloured backgrounds and full of text just do not work! Furthermore, the idea of trying to attract the gay community to a town with an older demographic was just downright suicidal in this instance. Imagine anybody trying to do that for Eastbourne. They would have been chased out of town faster than you could say "MY BAD!" I also had to laugh about the winning team as well as they, obviously, had no clue of how to work around the photos, where the backgrounds did not leave space for copy. Erm, I can think of two incredibly easy work-arounds off the top of my head...
I'm sure the casting process was great fun and it was all about un-earthing "TV talent", but I personally would not hire any of the current candidates. They can't communicate/sell/project manage or anything else, which would normally be required by somebody who pulls in a six figure salary, and I would not be surprised if the rumour that the previous winners who did stay on are on a MUCH reduced salary. It would be useful if these people actually had the skills to back up their annoying personality traits...
In summary, I guess it makes for great TV and for crap candidates who might be shooting themselves in the foot as all I see are some young and desperate people who are bordering on being delusional and which I, for one, would never even consider employing.
No, really it isn't (having tried to post this story for ages the question maybe ought to be "why is Blogger so ....?" ;-)).
Done well, Twitter can help your marketing efforts. Even though recent research has shown that there is a 60% drop-off rate within the first month, there is still a huge - and engaged - audience waiting to be tapped into. If you're still wondering whether Twitter is for you, I would recommend you read Syed Balkhi's excellent piece on why you should join and his follow-up to those who are already using it: 25 Tips to Increase Your Influence and Gain Followers on Twitter.
One of the key lessons from all of this, in my humble opinion, is really the key point that it's not about quantity, but quality. If you're selling a product or service, it's more important to have actual customers and/or prospects following you than it is to have loads of disinterested "followers" who think Twitter is the new MySpace and want to follow EVERYBODY. Look instead at how you can engage with your audience by adding value in your tweets, answer key questions and concerns and look at how you can build a loyal fan base who will give you good "word of mouth" to relevant others.
Recently Tesco posted the largest profits ever recorded by a UK retailer and thereby managed to buck a trend in times where one retailer after another is going into administration. Many people have probably wondered how they managed to pull this off and there has been a lot of speculation that as people are not eating out as much, taking fewer holidays, buying fewer luxury goods etc. this would increase Tesco's profits. However, I recently discovered the secret. It's got nothing to do with ANY of the above factors. Rather, it is a very creative use of one of the 4 Ps of Marketing, namely "Price".
Last week at my local Tesco, there was a special promotion where you could by two bottles of soft drinks for only £1.60. That does sound reasonable, and a lot better than paying £1 a bottle at my local cornershop.
The kicker, though, was that most of the products were priced individually at less than 80p (as low as 67p as seen in the picture above). I know that Tesco think its customers are mugs, but that's just taking the p....
The most expensive product I saw was 97p so if you bundled the cheapest and the most expensive the special offer would have given you the amazing savings of, er, 4p or 2.5%. Yippee! They probably hoped people would buy the Orangina at 79p a bottle and overcharge them on each one as we all know that margins are notoriously slim in retail.
Terry Leahy's business teachers at UMIST would have been so proud ;-). I've also realised that it doesn't really matter which supermarket you buy your food from as it all comes from the same place anyway. On this picture can see a bag of "Tesco" Organic Pears that I grabbed earlier in the week, with the pears having "Waitrose Organic" stickers on them. Briliant!
I had hoped, that I wouldn't need to write this post...
I'm actually quite a big fan of British Airways, but there are just too many things wrong with their Internet efforts. I have previously alluded to the problem that they keep on having expired offers on their web site, and since they have not done anything to remedy this problem I believe it is time to "out" them for this mistake.
If you're a member of the On Business programme (for corporate travel), you will probably always be looking at finding ways of earning points. The offers that they've run for the last few months included earning double points on fares and getting an upgrade from economy to either Club Europe or Club World on full fare economy tickets. The only problem is that (according to the current offers page) these offers both expired yesterday - on March 31st, 2009.
In this day and age, it really is not too much to ask that a company which continually runs offers like these, either set an expire date on the content items - or ensure that somebody pulls them off the moment they expire. In this case, the agency responsible for the site should clearly be looking at educating the client - rather than pissing off their customers - particularly as it seems BA themselves still have a long way to go in the marketing department when it comes to understanding "new" channels such as the Internet.
I have recently discovered, and fallen in love with, Stanley Bing's blog at Bnet: What Would Bing Do?
There are some absolutely classic letters from people and some very funny comments about how to survive in the modern workplace. Recent classics include, in no particular order of preference:
Pure class! And a great laugh at the same time. If you want to alleviate the tedium of a Friday afternoon before you kick back and do whatever at the weekend, there are worse things to waste your time on than reading any one of the above letters and answers
There is no point in me discussing the merits of the campaign or whether it is aspirational/historical (but doesn't say anything about the brand today) as all of this has been covered in-depth for months on so many different sites on the net. However, I saw something, which I just felt I had to respond to this as this truly is a fundamental question of understanding marketing/sales/advertising as we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century.
Earlier today, I just saw an article on Technovia, where they asked one question of the Virgin Atlantic 25th anniversary TV advertising campaign in the UK: why haven't the agency created an official compressed (i.e. high quality video version) for when it's spread online?
Now that's what I call a great, and truly myopic, point of view! The question is not why they haven't created some subset of some type of medium they don't understand. The question is why they haven't done ANYTHING to try and understand other media at all! As a modern advertising agency RKCR ought to have learnt by now that cross-channel effectiveness in media campaigns is REAL - and there is plenty of research to back that up (and there has been for years). Feel free to contact me if you want any data on this... In many ways, I completely understand the question - you have probably seen so many bad video compressions of it on everything from YouTube to anywhere else, but isn't it much more interesting to look at it in a broader perspective and ask whether or not this campaign is effective? Whether it's maximising its potential in relationship to the budget given? Whether it's effective in terms of brand building and direct response? Etc.
At the same time as this campaign broke at the beginning of 2009, the one campaign which had a comparable TV media buy was Comparethemarket with its Comparethemeerkat.com campaign - and the new cult hero of Aleksandr Orlov (see image below right). As this campaign was extended, at a relatively low cost, by creating a fun spoof web site; a Facebook profile and a Twitter profile which is updated - it allows for longer lasting relationships to be established. The Facebook fan page now has more than 255k fans (and more than 5k have been added today alone)!!! For years, I have been speaking about the need for cross-media integration in my seminars to clients (see a small taster at Slideshare) and I firmly believe that as Marketing Directors get smarter and require to see a higher return on (marketing) investment, they will start to challenge conventional wisdom of p*ssing money down the drain in traditional media. If the campaign had been slanted in such a way that e.g. 35% had been spent on the TV media buy and another 40% (for a total of 75% of the current media budget) had been spent on developing alternative channels and media spend in other channels - the effectiveness would probably have been just as great, if not even better.
As a marketing consultant (and one who has many years of experience on the client side) it is incredibly important for me to stress this point: you really need to challenge the agency on their old fashioned ways of doing things, particularly here in 2009 where we are seeing overall ad spend in traditional channels tumble in pretty much all developed markets. What possessed Virgin Atlantic to follow this strategy? Who is holding the agency accountable? And, perhaps most importantly of all, can we get some numbers to show whether the RO(M)I is there?
At the end of the day, if I look at the 2 campaigns next to each other, Compare the Market have really managed to benefit from all of the cross-media effectiveness they could hope for whereas Virgin's effort seems to be a completely disparate (and ego boosting for whoever signed off on it) brand building exercise, where they will find it very difficult indeed to validate any results coming from the campaign - and there is NO cross-channel integration (to the point where the video wasn't even available on the Virgin Atlantic web site for a long time and don't even know if it is now, but what is the point of checking at this stage?). Both of the campaigns are great examples of traditional broadcast advertising, but only one stands out and shows us the way forward for advertising in the 21st century. For the other, it means a brand owner - and an agency - need to go back to the drawing board and try and figure out what their relevance will be to their clients in the coming years.
As a very satisfied and long standing customer of British Airways, I decided to see if there were any benefits attached with flying their subsidiary OpenSkies, which flies from continental Europe to the US. However, the online experience proved so underwhelming that I couldn't be bothered to try and find the flights from Paris Orly to New York that I was interested in.
It all started out pretty badly when I typed in flyopenskies.com into Firefox (no "www.") and got the image below... It turns out that the security certificate is only valid for the site if the "www." is included(!) Not exactly rocket science to make sure that all subdomains and versions are put on the same certificate. This will take a techie about 2 minutes to sort out, but obviously the people at OpenSkies all still type in "www." when they type a URL (i.e. a web address for the layman) into their browser. Bad, bad, bad! The least they could do in the future is to get at least some half experienced web site users to test the site before letting it go live.
Unfortunately it got even worse when I then typed in "www.flyopenskies.com" and selected France as my country (remember that I was looking for fares from Paris to New York City). On the homepage I see an offer of 1944 Euros in Biz (their business class). Not exactly a great price compared to what I can get ex London, but that wasn't really the issue. The point was that I accessed the site at 11:05 p.m. GMT on February 10th (i.e. 00:05 a.m. in France on February the 11th) - and it states clearly "Book this before February 9th"!
If you decide to build a site using a Content Management System (CMS) there should at least be an option for the non-technical people to update it with expiration dates for stories and offers so it wouldn't even show up. If they update it manually, obviously the pride in their jobs is sorely lacking - or the people responsible for updating are not very process oriented (or worse...)
This is really not good enough. And the worst thing is that these mistakes should be so easy to spot and avoid if you put into place a proper procedure for:
Defining functionality of your CMS
Testing your site
Unfortunately, the example of the expired offer is also something which is incredibly prevalent on the BA.com web site when you log into your Executive Club (BA's loyalty programme) account and wish to see the offers. I would recommend a thorough review of the processes by which BA's web sites are built and maintained - from both a technical and a marketing/customer service point of view as it's very clear that there is room for improvement.
Have agencies and brand owners just given up on quality control? I don't know, but there are too many mistakes in this campaign for my liking...
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