Social media is going out of fashion. Not really because there’s anything wrong with many-to-many media platforms. Quite the contrary in fact. These platforms represent enormous potential. No, instead it’s because of the misunderstanding of what this type of platform can be used for in our jobs as business consultants (Yes, that’s what we are. Not clowns).
Why Millions of Views are Worhless By Themselves
Let’s face it – racking up bought YouTube views, spam-clicked (or “seeded” in agency lingo) by child laborers in sweat shops doesn’t sell any product. Period. Putting up cheeky case film-friendly Facebook-ideas doesn’t either. If you had seen the result graphs I’ve been shown on iPhone 4s in dark pub corners by deep throats in black hats (I somehow seem to be the favorite point of contact for these people) you’d be amazed. If you’ve ever wondered why the standard answer on questions involving the word “ROI” often float out into pink clouds like the “let’s not underestimate the power of fun” or “your brand needs to join the conversation”, the answer lies in this simple fact: Agencies don’t yet understand how to turn people lol-ing to their fun little films into paying customers.
Jesper Åström on Billing Relationships
Yesterday my colleague and business partner Jesper Åström was the keynote speaker at The Bring Dialogue Conference 2010 in Strömstad. The title of his provocative talk was Social Media Money, but the topic was really about how to create billing relationships – the exact topic that keeps account managers awake at night trying to figure out how to persuade their client that their next “fun viral” is a great idea. I say provocative because if you think about this for a bit you realize that there’s quite a bit of discrepancy between what you see in advertising awards shows at the moment and the topic of billing relationships. I wonder if this term has ever been uttered in Cannes (except when talking about the agency-client relationship).
Jesper went into topics like how social persuasion mechanisms are enabled through platforms like Facebook and how to use metrics and open source data mining to drive buying behavior. He also went into more tactical stuff like his 5 C’s of viral marketing that are part of the everyday vocabulary at Honesty by now, and also the topic of his upcoming book.
A Performance Agency Relationship
My vision for Honesty is that we should be the most expensive agency around, but that we should be worth every penny. That means we nee to provide the highest ROI for each Dollar paid to us. Since clients are not idiots, there is really only one way to achieve this in the long term, and that is by showing REAL results. Not YouTube views, not Gold Lions, but sales and hard cash. To demonstrate results like that we measure everything and always strive to have performance based sections built into our business relationship.
If you’re a client of some agency reading this I strongly encourage you to have this built into your agency relationship as well, but don’t fall for the trap of using metrics like “views” or other fluff that doesn’t directly and visibly correlate to your earnings. There is a lot of cheating going around (look for hidden development graphs as a clue for example). Look for metrics like engagement and conversion rates instead, because at the end of the day, you will get what you measure.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Walter,
I appreciate your blog, and your provoking, and interesting thoughts. I’m sure that you only have the best for your clients as an intention. But, this latest post I have to comment upon. I try to hack it in english, since it is the main language of the blog.
I’m not sure if you ever been on the client side in a big corporation (at least I haven’t seen you mention it), but from that perspective it is actually things talking against what you stress here. If I understand you right, you think it is too much focus on “fun” creativity, for the sake of the agencies own joy, rather than focus on the business.
I have earlier been working with marketing at Tele2 both on a global scale as well as marketing director in Croatia, I understand your point but think you make it a little bit too easy for you.
I have three things to stress.
First, in my experience the thing big corporations needs the most from the agencies, is a contionous pushing of creative borders, simplification, customer experience and not being so dry product focused (product should play a part, but not being there just for the sake of it, it has to have a mening connected to the brand; tone of voice, character, and objective).
This push is also needed for the reason that you get “blind” internally, but also because you need someone to inspire your thinking. As De Bono use to say “you can analyse the past, but you need to design the future”, and design new really takes time, effort, and pain.
I think different clients has different needs. The clients more in need of total focus on analyzing of the past, maybe has more than 50% of their business revenue online (web shop, etc), but then you have another part that still has a big chunk of business offline, and needs to build up an advertising awareness, plus a spontaneous as well as T-o-m brand awareness, connected to specific brand attributes. Here can a viral hit play a great role (even if some traffic has been hijacked, which in every case is a shame whatsoever) in terms of getting a “buzz-vehicle”, that creates a modern folklore, that friends tell their friends about, not only online, but also offline.
Then, when a brand campaign comes up 6 months later, the psychological reminder kicks in and again the the subject is being picked up, in focus, and transferred to more than one product. My point is that “the talk of the traffic” & a good storytelling should not be underestimated, as a PR-tool that takes the story further without having people actually watching it.
Second, maybe your post is right for the developed Swedish market, but in market where online marketing haven’t kicked in for real yet (like eastern Europe) knockout-creative-solutions is more than ever needed as inspiration. It is needed to show that strong ideas really breaks the clutter online, to give the client proof of something things that users want to spend time with, and people talk about is closer than for example a branded print-ad.
If it not happens no client is willing to put a dime more than necessary on digital marketing. Which, leads to very uncreative marketing, since no creative people wants to take the step into the area, which lead to no further investments in online, because of it has not given any really results. Without results the web-shops do not pop-up, because why do it when it does not seem to be worth it. Once again creativity designs the future! Creativity breaks border.
Third, creative “hits” builds a strong positive mentality in the marketing departments. When people get a response of that things is appreciated and creative, a higher ambition is being set. Of course, views, especially not bought views, is not the right tools for only measure success. But, neither is pure sales figues or for that case, clicks. The closest you can come is quantitative and qualitative monthly trackings with the right advertising KPI’s, connected to your various KPI’s, and for the emotional kpi’s for online marketing I can say by heart that it is very few persons that answers that they felt that a nice funnel-back after clicking on a SEM-ad was a thrilling experience, and something that made them become a brand endorser. It is a lot more people that tells about great viral movies, campaign sites that were engaging and facebook applications as something innovative made of the company. These answers put new energy into the marketing department. because as much you focus on sales, you also know that only bringing in sales is short-term thinking. if you loose your different rational & emotional kpi’s you are long-term in risk of disappearing.
So, energy used to be in front of marketing, and trends is needed because for being a change pilot you need a lot energy. This energy I think is a mistake to underestimate. One result of it is a client with energy gives the agency a lot of energy.
Finally, what I think is a bigger problem from the agency side is the agencies who knows that the product they are trying to sell is not strong enough, or even worse, do not understand the product at all, and don’t have any intention to learn. For no matter what kind of marketing it is; display, social media, viral or something else, the agencies has a responsibility to know the brand, and the products, but also a mission to every day try to think how they can communicate them even better, and how they could be even more customer focused, and integrate online with offline. that is a pure sales understanding.
/john
Hi John, and thanks for a great comment. It would be more fair to call it a post in it’s own right actually.
And yes, I do agree with pretty much everything you are saying in your comment. I am intentionally making it a bit easy for myself by simplifying this message to get a point across.
I am a very firm believer in strong creative and storytelling. In fact, two of the partners in my agency are some of the most creative storytellers we have in the Swedish advertising industry. The main idea of Honesty is to rig a cultural clash between top shelf storytellers and online behavioral engineers and have them work together from start to finish. This is a very potent mix.
What I am trying to say here though is that there is no lack of creative in Sweden. Relevance sometimes, but not creative. What IS lacking is the last bit of the funnel online. We do have examples of things like high view counts (even if most likely spammed in many instances). We even have quite famous examples. But we have yet to see accompanying smart conversion strategies and billing relationships created with intent. I am stressing this point since this is what we are not seeing. Setting up the right KPI-matrix is actually part of the creative process in my opinion. A great KPI-matrix used in real time tracking situations can improve efficiency many times over in a very cool and under-used way.
This is not to be confused with thinking that I do not believe in kick ass playful creative. I do. We will hopefully show some examples of that this fall. Stay tuned for that.
Thanks again for taking your time to write a very well put and thought through comment.
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