Interview originally posted on CMO.com on March 16, 2011
eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey and McCann Worldgroup EVP Vipin Mayar recently sat down with Jeff Pundyk of CMO.com, to discuss their new book, Digital Impact: The Two Secrets To Online Marketing Success. The co-authors urge marketers to embrace the opportunity to think creatively about content and to tie those efforts to business outcomes through metrics.
CMO.com: Let’s start with the media landscape. What has changed, particularly as social has grown, and how should CMOs think about that?
Geoff Ramsey: The media landscape has changed dramatically, and there are a number of reasons for that. CMOs needs to account for every single dollar that is spent in media, and they want to know where the most efficient spend is. There’s an intense pressure to account for those dollars. The second factor is the consumer has been enabled by technology—like mobile devices and social networking platforms—that are literally sucking away time from all other activities, including traditional media. And, obviously, marketers need to be able to follow them along. We want to be where the customer is, but we also need to have a very different mind-set because a standard pop-up or intrusive advertising is not going to have any kind of effect or can even be deleterious to your brand if you’re not careful.
Total media spend in the U.S. peaked in 2007 before the recession across all channels. We predict that we will not see that aggregate 2007 spending level for the foreseeable future. There are three reasons for that: increased focus on accountability; increasing fragmentation of media, [which] means marketers need to go after smaller and smaller audiences and tack them together to create enough reach; and there’s a lot more focus on owned media or earned media, where we’re putting content out there where no money exchanges hands.
CMO.com: Isn’t owned media expensive to create? Is it a case of the dollars shifting to production?
Vipin Mayar: Our belief is that if a company does earned media well, it’s much more efficient. The question is, how do you do it well? How do you attract people to your content so the cost of creating the content is efficient?
GR: The ratio of production dollars to media is higher in this model, but it’s more efficient in the long run if you create that great content so they come to you.
CMO.com: So the net is less expensive. Can you talk about how a consumer brand can create a trusted relationship around its content?
VM: The fact of the matter is consumers don’t trust advertisements. Before you even talk about content and the fact that the content should be value-add and should resonate with the audience, one of the key pieces is, where does the consumer see the content? The whole notion of the content sitting on your Web site is old-school. Content can sit anywhere in the distributed ecosystem. In fact, the more you can be in a third-party site and have it be a fully immersive experience that doesn’t require the consumer to go to a destination site, but stays within the familiar confines of a trusted third-party environment, is one really effective point in getting trust.
GR: Trust is critical to a brand. While there is a diminishing trust in advertising and advertising messages in general, on the other hand there’s a new relationship that is being formed between consumers and brands. What social media does is provide a layer of transparency over brands and consumers. Consumers today through social media can find out all kinds of things about products. So there’s a new relationship being established that is based on a more transparent view of trust. Increasingly, instead of throwing an ad in front of somebody to directly sell product, it’s better to create an experience that creates value above and beyond the product itself. You’re engaging the consumer to spend more time with you, and you’re subtly moving them along the consideration set closer and closer to your brand.
VM: There are three factors that are really critical as far as the content is concerned: unique, useful, and fun and entertaining. Those dimensions really get people to engage with the content.
CMO.com: May I ask about what’s not on this list? The product.
GR: It can be about the product. For instance, you create a series of how-to videos on how to use your product best [by] those who have purchased the product and can serve as really good marketing for those people who haven’t purchased the product yet. But there is learning involved. There is value. It’s not just pitching the product.
VM: Consumers understand most of the product sets. By talking about those things, it’s a very basic expectation of the consumer, which will not get you to break through engagement. Here we’re talking about something that’s truly differentiated, which comes from going beyond the product and really creating an experience.
GR: The idea is to transcend the product. You are reinforcing trust and creating a positive experience around your brand, even if the use does not involve the product itself.
VM: What we’re saying is that if you just do a great job in explaining the product, you’re not really creating differentiated, engaging experiences. In some ways it’s assumed that you will have good product characteristics. The content needs to emphasize the value and the experience around the product.
CMO.com: This is a real shift. What are the implications for the role of the agency, and how are marketers receiving this? It puts a different kind of onus on marketers.
GR: It certainly raises the bar for creative excellence.
VM: I think the standard by which content should be evaluated should be re-evaluated. It’s not about something that looks pretty. It’s about what value creation it’s doing. And in some ways the ultimate might be, can you almost create a whole new business model with the content itself? I’m not saying you would charge people for the experience, but you’d have the ability to do that as well.
GR: That’s one of the litmus tests. Could you charge for this, even if you chose not to?
To read the rest of the interview on CMO.com, click here.
To order your copy of Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success, click here.
