Blog Posts By: Julie Baker

Everyone's talking about customer engagement.  And for good reason.  The notion goes beyond the last decade of CRM-focused tactics and demands that marketers not only engage their customers, but understand how to measure that engagement.  And, translate it into real value.  Customer engagement is only one variable that contributes to the overall value equation, but it is without a doubt, the most vital attribute from which marketers can build on existing value.  

As eMarketer recently reported, internet radio is in the midst of tremendous change. Its young, highly engaged audience is expected to double over the next four years thanks to smartphone streaming and in-car Wi-Fi.  More access means more diversity, allowing listeners to personalize playlists and consume content across platforms.  As an example, Pandora allows registered users to create personalized stations around a favorite artist, song or composer.  This registration information, coupled with content affinity and consumption patterns opens up a great opportunity for marketers to target this audience with increased precision and relevance.  Sounds great, but does it work?  Just as with other highly engaged online audiences, the answer thus far appears to be yes.  And apparently, the result has compounding effect.

In Part I of this series, we covered the first phase of turning your data into $.  While this series has focused primarily on the media industry, allowing us to cover the multiple revenue streams unique to that business model, the experience I'm sharing also applies directly to any organization that's building or trying to improve their CRM capabilities. 

Once you've laid the groundwork... (1) development of the data environment (2) completion of a preliminary segmentation, and (3) delivery of a basic roadmap to improve and automate targeting capabilities, you are ready take it to the next level.

A few weeks ago Forrester released a case study on our efforts with client ESPN to maximize their audience data to drive marketing revenue.  That prompted a post outlining what we believe to be the four fundamental drivers of value in the media industry, categorically (1) data volume, quality and value (2) targeted ad packages that are easy to sell (3) value models that prioritize your CRM efforts, and of course (4) the right supporting infrastructure. 

The most critical advice we can give is, do not be overwhelmed by the amount or distributed nature of your data. You have to build on what's in place first, and in some instances you can have an actionable segmentation within 12-16 weeks. The consolidation and analysis of existing data alone can produce immediate insight while you lay the foundation for more scalable programs and packages.  For instance, if you have minimal self-reported audience data to work with, there is still valuable information about behavior, affinity, and level of engagement in your anonymous data that can be used to deliver distinct segments of value.  But how?

Adobe announced at the Omniture Summit last week that it has received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for a new report within Adobe SiteCatalyst endorsing the following metrics: Page Views, Visits, Daily Unique Cookies, and Time Spent on Site. This accreditation means that these four metrics are also IAB compliant, finally setting an industry standard for engagement and ideally changing the conversation on digital currency from this point forward.  This is important recognition for an organization like ESPN, that has been using daily uniques and total minutes as their primary yardstick for some time.  I look forward to others in the industry trading on more than just volume!

We have partnered with ESPN for over four years to build a Fan Relationship Marketing (FRM) capability and culture within the organization.  What does this mean to them?  It means maximizing audience data to drive revenue growth for the benefit of marketing, ad sales, and editorial.  That's a tidy little sentence with a tremendous amount of team effort behind it.  But it is achievable, with the right plan, focus and discipline. 

Let's start with key drivers of value and Forrester's recent case study on our joint efforts. Then, in a series to follow I will cover the "what" and "how" of getting started.

Or perhaps more importantly, you are what you say you are. And that is, a digital powerhouse that captures more male fans 18-34 than 39 basic cable networks. In fact, the only digital properties that can claim more "total minutes" generated by this audience are Google, Facebook, all of the Yahoo sites combined, and all of the Microsoft sites combined. 

What has ESPN done here?  As the prolific Don Draper likes to say "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."  They can't compete with Yahoo on uniques, so they're creating a new currency.  While the rest of the industry continues to trade on reach alone, ESPN changes the conversation entirely with a new metric called "total minutes".  Uniques x time spent.  An engagement metric that speaks to the brand advantage of content consumption across platforms and bucks an industry perspective that often devalues audience duplication.

"Abridged" versions online?  What a bad idea for the online reader and the publisher. Instead of full stories, Time Magazine's online readers get an abridged version (a puny little paragraph) followed by three possible upsell suggestions: 

1. You can buy the issue on the iPad... that's helpful, thank you, when I am currently reading the article on a clunky old PC and needed yet one more reminder that my digital world is limited.
2. You can buy a Time Magazine subscription... why would I buy a print subscription when I am currently consuming the content online... yes, that would be great, please mail me the magazine so I can read the full article in 7-10 days.
3. Or you can buy a digital Time Magazine subscription... but I only care about this one article, I don't want a whole subscription... so why not make a few bucks by allowing me to just pay for the article... or how 'bout a day pass where I might discover more of your great content and possibly consider subscribing to the digital version?

No, that makes way too much sense.

The 2010 Forrester Marketing Forum focused at a high level on adaptive marketing.  What does that really mean?  Responding to the market, performance based decision making, or understanding and integrating emerging platforms such as social?  Triple yes, and the Forum covered them all.  But all of these tactics, while making a marketer more efficient, may not necessarily make them more effective. 

The healthcare industry made up less than 1% of the total online ad market in 2008. But as patient populations migrate to this information rich channel, that outlook is quickly changing.  Healthcare is now projected to be one of the highest growth industries in interactive over the next 3-4 years, alongside CPG, Media & Entertianment and Automotive.

Ty Amad-Talylor, founder and CEO of FanFeedr (a real-time personalized sports feed), made the rounds last week with an article he wrote about the rise of prestige as an online monetization model.  Another damning article about the value of today's CPM, making the case to replace the ad model with alternate payment platforms based on some sense of social hierarchy.  But in reality, new mechanisms such as this also create yet another way to place relative value on a user that will ultimately translate into back into ad $.

Most marketers typically have mountains of data at their fingertips but often struggle to translate the stream of reports in their in-box to actionable outcomes for their business.  These reports often reflect the competing interests of internal stakeholders.  That's why when overhauling your measurement system we think it's critical to start by focusing the organization on one critical business metric.... one that marketing, sales, finance, and customer service can rally around.  This might be a customer value or share of wallet metric, something each member of the organization feels it can move the needle on. Your entire framework should cascade from this clear corporate priority.

AOL spins off from Time Warner while Comcast picks up NBC.... as they both look to re-brand and boost ad income.

The debate continues.  Or resurfaces, as the case may be.  Now that ad revenue is tanking again, content publishers are revisiting their model. This pendulum has been swinging for almost a decade. The answer is not admonishing the ad model.  And it certainly is not arbitrarily walling off content.  Access to premium content...stuff you can't get anywhere else...should be paid.  And paying for it doesn't necessarily mean your experience will be advertisement free.  Engaged users who pay for content are that much more valuable to advertisers. 

We work with a fortune 100 financial services company that has over 10 million customers and a strong focus on marketing through their call centers.  We were working with them on a contact management strategy for their high value segments, with particular emphasis on the call center where they'd been unable to translate some of the analytics insight they'd rolled into their direct mail and online programs. Call center reps were taught to sell, sell, sell and this mentality was actually hurting the firm with their most valuable customers. 

Yahoo! announced at Ad Week in NYC this week that it will spend $100M on a global brand campaign to connect with you (I mean, Y!ou).

At the conclusion of Ad Week, Shelby Bonnie, former CEO of CNET and Chairman of the IAB, makes a bold statement. The CPM model is flawed. Now that Shelby is no longer beholden to his stockholders it's time to kill the CPM...before of course, it was almost time but not really because CNET was already in trouble and struggling to sell a whole bunch of new brand format ads to make the internet seem more like television and keep the CPM alive. While I actually don't disagree with his logic...especially the part about there being no natural constraint online as there is with tv, print, and radio causing impressions to be essentially meaningless these days...he offers no real solutions in his scathing assessment of this enormous industry crutch. 

In my first post on the subject, I talked about how challenging it is for companies to link marketing activity to financial impact and identified the need for a customer-centric measurement system.  Now, let's see it in action.

We work with a financial services client that has three different lines of business-organized around product and channel-all talking to the same valuable customer with no knowledge of the other's activity. The result is more than 50 contacts to any one customer in a given year. That's close to one contact a week. But it isn't just the sheer volume of contacts creating saturation and decreased performance; it is also the lack of a coordinated effort to understand who the customers are and where they are in the buy cycle for a given product, relative to their lifetime value.

When sales are down, people ask questions. The answers are generally a litany of conjecture about what's behind the fatigue in the list, leads, close rates or market conditions. Despite the flying conspiracy theories, no one in the organization knows exactly what's causing the decline, and fingers are pointing.

Dell announced this week that they've made $3M on Twitter. They were smart enough to harness this one-to-many communication network at virtually no cost to deliver significant revenue to their outlet stores.  They're capitalizing on a surprising statabout tweeters - the top 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% account for about 30% of all production. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.  Advertisers get that.  Anderson Cooper gets it.  Does Twitter?

Customer Data Management. Customer Intelligence Management.  Data Intelligence Management.  The notion of using customer data to drive investment decisions has propagated many organizational names and acronyms over the last few years.  Customer Intelligence Officers were crowned, integrated task forces were formed, and dedicated publications multiplied.  Why?  Because data = $.

Online marketing trends come and go, but none take permanent root without a supporting data strategy.  That's right, a data strategy.  It really is that simple.  No behavioral targeting tool, ad serving platform, or marketing automation solution is worth much without it.  They are blunt instruments without an underlying analytics engine to chart the course.  And I don't mean the 12TB of data streaming directly out of your web analytics tool into some poor analyst's lap, but a true understanding of how to distill and parse that data into something meaningful and, wait for it ... actionable.

In this economic environment, we're all struggling to get more out of our current investments. My husband and I live in Marin County, CA where double-digit real estate value growth is the norm. While the rest of the country is staring down drastically declining home values and possible foreclosures, our community has dropped from an average single-family home price of $1.3M to a meager $1.1M in the last year and is facing mere single-digit growth projections in the next fiscal. Let's just say that Marin County is as good as any place to live out the uncertain times that lie ahead. So while a few short-sighted neighbors post "for sale" signs, we are investing in finishing out our attic and laundry room to get the most out of our existing space, knowing this will pay immediate and future dividends.