Social media, a level play field for small businesses

2009 Advertising Financial Management Conference

300+ attendees expand their networks and their notebooksBy Bob Barrett, Editor, ANA Advertiser
The ANA gathered 325 members of the extended marketing community at its 2009 Advertising Financial Management Conference. The 3-day event, held April 19-22 in Phoenix, attracted attendees from a range of disciplines — marketing, procurement, finance, sourcing, and accounting, among others — to discuss and debate the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing programs they either lead or support.
Beginning Sunday afternoon and ending midday on Wednesday, the conference featured experts and thought leaders who shared their ideas, insights, and opinions on how to conduct business better. "The focus of our member companies is on business growth — that is how we will drive the economy," ANA President and CEO Bob Liodice said in his opening address to kick off the conference. He cited Wal-Mart Stores, Microsoft, and McDonald's as "shining examples" of success.
Insights, Trends, and Best PracticesPresenters and panelists addressed a range of thought-provoking topics that included brand building, agency-marketer relationships, strategic sourcing, procurement, compensation, and, of course, the economy. The agenda also included a speed networking luncheon and plenty of opportunity for attendees to chat with representatives of sponsoring companies and consultants to learn more about the products and services they offer to help marketers improve the programs they lead.
Monday's keynote was delivered by Reid Hoffman, chairman and CEO of LinkedIn, who reviewed the current landscape for social media — including Twitter, Facebook, and the site he co-founded — and explained what it means for marketers and advertisers. The president and CEO of The Dial Corporation, Brad Casper, was Tuesday's keynote speaker, offering 3 case studies to demonstrate how the company is keeping up with competitors that are much larger and spend much more on marketing. "You can make $1 look like $10 if you are creative and think about your target audience and how you want to meet them," said Casper, who spoke about the success of the company's Dial for Men, Purex, and Soft Scrub brands.
"This conference helps us understand how we are benchmarked against what other organizations are doing," said Diane Gibbons, team leader, agency management, at Pfizer. "For me personally, it's been a great learning experience and opportunity to meet other people and understand what they are doing, which helps us improve and become a best-in-class organization." On Tuesday, Gibbons was part of a panel that discussed how Pfizer's scope-of-work (SOW) program is helping to keep the pharmaceutical giant and its agency partners focused on the most important priorities.
Agency Relations Takes Center StageThe Pfizer session, which included consultant Joanne Davis and representatives of two of Pfizer's agencies (McCann Erickson and The Kaplan Thaler Group), was one of several that examined the relationship between marketers and their agency partners. Steven Goldbach, global account manager at Monitor Group, made a strong case for fixing an agency-marketer system that he believes is fundamentally flawed and outdated. The ideal model, he said, is one that facilitates the development of marketers and agency personnel who are "communication integrators" — flexible, adaptable, and comfortable with different communication vehicles. His presentation preceded a panel discussion about Procter & Gamble's new agency-compensation model, led by Richard DelCore, finance director, global marketing, at P&G.
Sarah Armstrong shared her efforts to develop and implement a value-based compensation (VBC) program at The Coca-Cola Company. Acknowledging that it's rare for Coca-Cola to speak publicly about its policies and strategies, Armstrong explained that the company made a conscious decision to participate in the hopes that the VBC model, in general, could advance from a widely discussed philosophy to the industry standard. "The amount of labor or time provided by an agency should not define value," explained Armstrong, who is director of worldwide media & communication operations for the Atlanta-based company. "The focus should be on the value of the work versus the hours, the production, or the time."
A lively Q&A session followed the presentation, with attendees asking for Armstrong's guidance on how to overcome the challenges they are facing as they reconsider their own models for agency management and compensation. "It was interesting to hear about Coke's model for value-based compensation, and to understand that there's a lot of similarities to our model," said Gibbons of Pfizer. "We really want to be a best-in-class, top client that agencies want to engage with."
Recession-Busting TakeawaysEarlier on Monday, the economic context had been set in an update from Alexia Quadrani, a managing director at JPMorgan, who predicted that the current recession will "likely prove more dire than anything we have seen since the Great Depression." Jim Zambito, chair of the ANA Advertising Financial Management Committee, drove home the point in his welcome remarks. "I guarantee that everyone of you in this room will do things this year that you have never done before," said Zambito, executive director of agency relations and controller at Johnson & Johnson, before promising that the conference had been carefully planned to provide "the tools and confidence you need to succeed."
Indeed, anyone who took the stage was not allowed to leave before answering questions from the audience and sharing actionable tips and suggestions that could be acted upon as soon as the conference ended. Many of these "pearls of wisdom" were relevant to attendees who work in any of the various marketing-related disciplines represented. Throughout the conference, sessions delivered information on topics such as purchasing, procurement, managing risk and liability, auditing, compensation, and financial management. Doug Wood, senior partner at Reed Smith, provided an update on the industry's new collective bargaining agreement with SAG and AFTRA, highlighting money-saving provisions and encouraging attendees to carefully review the final memorandum of agreement.
The recession-busting insight was not limited to the presentations. Attendees also engaged with a variety of conference sponsors on hand to network and share how they can help marketers and others address the challenges they face. "The topics being discussed in the sessions directly related to what we do, so it really made the connecting much easier and much more meaningful," said Doug O'Brien, client services director at ISD, which helps marketers make better media buying decisions and improve ROI. "We hit the target we really like to work with to help them better themselves." Doug's ISD colleague Heather Dudley, marketing and sales director, added that the conference format, agenda, and venue (The Arizona Biltmore) offered "an ideal set up to have really good dialogue with the right people."
By the end of the conference, attendees had expanded both their networks and their notebooks. "I've taken about 30 pages of notes and I'm going to go back and sort of reflect on those to better understand how we can continue to improve our business," said Keith Levy, vice president of marketing at Anheuser-Busch, who presented on "The Intersection of Creativity and Accountability." In June, Levy will join the ANA Board of Directors. "This ANA event has been a new experience for me, so I wanted to come and spend a little extra time and see what it was all about, hear from some of the other speakers, have some offline conversations with people in the procurement, finance, and agency areas. I've been pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the richness and the content."

Markwting in financial crisis

Hey guys, I stumbled upon this video. The guys are talking about what google is doing to improve personalised marketing, through facebook, twitter and many other social media.

Also the guy mentioned that the best way to get a large following in your blogs entails frequent posting of interesting stories/content.
http://odeo.com/episodes/23694382-HubSpot-TV-Marketing-in-a-Financial-Crisis

Anti-marketing

Could the enormous prevalence of marketing in our society be self-destructive? It seems that you can't go to an informative website without being funneled into a targeted eBay affiliate link or Google Adsense paid link (giving the site owner a few pennies), do a Google search without seeing dozens of catchy site taglines, or walk down Cottage street - let alone a major road in a city - without being bombarded by brand names of restaurants, hardware stores, gas stations, and clothing lines. The theory of "anti-marketing" (think of that super-hip club with just a logo for it's name) suggests that simplicity and exclusivity may be the answer.

Perhaps people aren't all looking for the site that is the first in Google or has the best landing page, or the store with the biggest sign, but for a more personal and exclusive touch. I know that I (and I assume many other people) prefer real-world communication to rather impersonal online "chatting" - why should this be any different with marketing? (on the other hand, it can be pretty annoying to be approached by Greenpeace or LaRouche PAC street-marketers in cities one after another on the same block) If people are made to feel as they have found something special, they will probably want to stick to it. They may also be most proud of things they discover themselves.

So what is the way to tap this market? Clearly it isn't the "EXCLUSIVE DEAL FOR OUR 10,000TH VISITOR" banners all over the web. Anti-marketing, really, seems to be a groundswell-based approach. By not advertising a quality product, people may be more inclined to spread the word themselves by bringing friends to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant or playing an obscure band's music at a party. However, I doubt that this method could create a Facebook or The Beatles or McDonald's. But perhaps this is irrelevant - there are many more small communities with a few loyal members, bands with a few loyal fans, and restaurants with one or two must-go locations in the world. And so long as the business models are sustainable long-term, these communities/bands/businesses (I'm sure you can all think of one) may not even need to be marketed outside the most basic groundswell methods at all in order to be highly successful.


Inspired by this article.

Online marketing blog

Hey guys, I was reading on online PR and marketing and I stumbled upon this. It has many interesting stuff about marketing and PR. Please take your time to see what works best. I think it can be useful for our projects and long term use.

http://www.toprankblog.com/

Wolfram Alpha

I was reading some news on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and came across Stephen Wolfram's "Computational Knowledge engine". The title of the news reads as "Web tool 'as important as Google'" and I kept reading to see what is it all about. The free engine - Wolfram Alpha aims to answer question from a natural language directly rather than provide web pages like Google.com. His plan is to launch this knowledge engine by May (2009(?)). Wolfram states "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.


Stephen Wolfram is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman famed for his work in complexity theory, and com. View and Read his Blog Here

Is Wolfram Alpha groundbreaking? Well, there is another guy called Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He created a question answering system called Start - I went to the website and typed "What is your name" Start answered " My name is START; it stands for SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations. Source: START KB" Did you know about this question answering engine? if not - same with me. Anyways, Wolfram "disappointed" Dr. Katz on dismissing of English syntax as "fluff". Dr. Katz then states

"...suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?" Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,"
"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."

Finally, I would say that the media is comparing Wolfram Alpha with Google ... I ask what the media is trying to convey about this web tool? And What do you think about this engine? Keep in mind that Wolfram Alpha aims to answer natural language questions rather than provide a lot of web pages --- :-)

So what do you think?

"YouTube helps man deliver baby"

This is the power of social technology! The groundswell.

A man watched a YouTube video to help deliver the baby as the midwives and the ambulance took too long.

Watch the Video on the BBC News Here

PR--an intrinsic part of marketing

Method Man

Eric Ryan, Co-Creator and Chief Brand Architect, MethodEric Ryan of Method on building a belief brand, fusing fashion and design, and going after 8 CPG GoliathsEric Ryan, who co-founded cleaning products company Method in 2001, has a simple strategy for competing with the likes of Unilever, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and Clorox. "Everything we do has to be different," says Ryan, 36, chief brand architect of the San Francisco company, which is among the fastest-growing private companies in America. "Method is a belief brand being built on what money can't buy. We're a challenger brand, taking on 8 Goliaths."
With sales "just north of $100 million" and 106 employees, the company has a long way to go before it can slay even one of the Goliaths in its space, as Ryan readily admits. Meanwhile, he's betting that "our scrappiness can match competitors' scale." And, perhaps more crucial to the company's continued success, he's betting that consumers will embrace the company's environmentally friendly philosophy of producing cleaning products that are effective, safe, and without toxic ingredients. "Historically, consumers were focused on the best products," he told the crowd during his session to kick off Tuesday. "Now, consumers are equally focused on how things are made." Ryan was joined on stage by Scott Potter, founding managing partner of San Francisco Private Equity Partners, a key investor in the company.
Ryan's presentation created quite a buzz among the 300+ attendees, who were fascinated by his entrepreneurial spirit and optimistic outlook. "The difference between successful and unsuccessful companies is that the unsuccessful ones gave up too early," Ryan said as he described the launch of the company in 2001, during an economic downturn. "We constantly push ourselves and remind ourselves that standing still is not an option."
Ryan had much more to say, on a range of topics, when ANA Magazine Editor Bob Barrett sat down with him under the 100-degree Phoenix sun. Here's a transcript of the interview.
Bob Barrett, ANA Advertiser: You've created an instant buzz here and I've seen you shaking a lot of hands since coming off stage. What kind of response have you had to your presentation?
Eric Ryan: Usually, the word I hear most often, which is really cool, is inspiring. That's what I try to do, as far as a lot of people working for really big companies and legacy brands. I feel like the one thing I can do is just help try to inspire them to think a little differently and give them the confidence to do that. So I try to design my talk, as much as possible, to be uplifting, anything's possible, and then here's some real simple ways of how to think about it to try to create change. People want something they can use, versus just talking about it. So I don't want to just talk about what we do. If I talk about something we do, I want to make it easy for someone to take that and run with it.
BB: What role has traditional marketing played in the growth and success of Method, to the extent that anything Method does is traditional? And how close are you to the marketing function?
ER: I'm really close to marketing because I come from a marketing background, and the only asset we own is the brand. So, creating and building the brand is my number one priority. Now, with that, we've got a big team and we've got a head of marketing, a creative director, and other people who that's their daily responsibility. But it's something that I still get my hands quite messy on, so it's still very focused.
BB: As you look forward and you think about the next level of growth for the company, what role will marketing play in allowing you to achieve the success you're targeting?
ER: Well, we're in a great spot, depending on how you look at it — glass half full, glass half empty. Our awareness is high for how new we are as a brand and how little we spend. But, compared to our competitors, our awareness is very, very low. So, the role of marketing, more than anything else, is going to be trying to get our story out there in a broader way and bring more people into the brand. If you look at our growth drivers, our number one growth driver is getting more people into the brand. We have a lot of distribution opportunity, a lot of products opportunity, but what's really going to be our number one focus is just creating more advocates, as we call them.
BB: Today you talked about differentiation and how you really work hard to differentiate Method from the mega-competitors you face. But what have you learned from them? What are some things that maybe you're doing similarly to them, even though they have much bigger scale?
ER: The big thing we're trying to do is use their strengths against them, right. We can't outspend them. We can't outmarket them on claims. So we've got to try to use their legacy against them. So, that's anything from the way we try to reframe products. It's all about shifting the conversation, right. These are brands that have been around for decades and decades, so they own the conversation. If you're Windex, you own the conversation on streak clean. We can't come in and join that conversation and do a better job, so we've got to shift the conversation to a different topic. So, in that case, we shift the conversation to non-toxic and the fragrance and the beauty of it and the overall experience. So, that's the biggest thing we've got to do, is keep trying to figure out what is the conversation that our competitors are talking about and then how do we shift it to something different.
BB: You are ever-mindful of your competition, including the fact that many of them were listening to you today. Given that, how do you approach a presentation like this? Are you cautious about giving away secrets and strategy?
ER: We're cautious about what we share. But, also, anybody can look at what we do and dissect it. It's not rocket science, it's soap. And the things we're sharing we know are difficult for them to do in some cases. In other cases, they're really, really great at it. And I don't think we're giving anything away. But, also, if we really are a challenger brand, we've got to keep innovating and keep challenging. So, our story shouldn't be static. It should be dynamic. And what I shared here this year, by next year, this story should've evolved. So, if they're following what were doing today, that's fine, as long as we're evolving.
BB: How are your competitors reacting to Method's early success and your presence in the market?
ER: Quite aggressively. We're seeing it come from all spaces, but it's coming in a very different way. So, I think CPG really struggles to build tensions into a brand. So, what makes Method unique is the tension of style and the tension of substance. Bringing those together is really challenging because there's constant trade-offs that you've got to work through. Typically within the world of consumer products, brands are built around a single attribute, so there is no tension within it. It's a single plot. The way you're seeing competitors come after us, the way it's manifesting, is they're focusing on green or they're focusing on design. Nobody's focusing on bringing them together. Design's not something you talk about; it's just something you do. It's your tone. It's who you are. It's your personality. And the ones who are focusing on what we call substance, which is the green, they're also doing it in a very single-dimensional way, which is selling green as a product feature. Whereas, to us, it is a product feature, but it's bigger than that. It's the entire philosophy behind the brand.
BB: Has Method reached a point where you need to formalize and scale functions like finance, procurement, and accounting?
ER: Yeah, absolutely. We're north of $100 million, so we're a real business. And with that comes real challenges and you need to have real process. So, for us, it's great because we started the company with a clean sheet of paper, so we're very sensitive to what needs to continue to be protected and nurtured as far as what makes us different in terms of our competitive advantages. But, at the same time, we have to add on more professional management so the company can scale and get to the next level.
BB: Method has private investors, including the venture capital firm of your co-presenter today. How does this keep you on your toes and has it ever led you to compromise any of your ideals?
ER: No. Our investors are our business partners, so we've brought on partners who share our values and our vision for the company. Therefore, in the board room there's no tension about what we are tying to achieve for ultimately who we work for, which is our advocates. And that's also good, because having professional money in a company does challenge you and does push you harder to be a greater organization, and it brings in expertise as partners that you might not otherwise have if you were just growing the business slowly and organically.
BB: What kind of impact has the current economic downturn had on the company? Has it stalled some of your plans in terms of growth and do you see that it will hinder you at all going forward?
ER: Well, we started the business in 2001, which was a recessionary year, so we were kind of borne out of a recession, which is great because it just forces you to kind of sharpen what you're doing a little harder and it makes you have to really prove whether you have a good idea or not. So, now we're back in our second recession in the history of the company, and it's the same thing. I'm a big believer that you don't want to ever waste a good crisis for opportunity. It's made us more focused this year, so it forces you to trim the fat to really rethink some of the things you're doing and tighten and focus your company even more, which is very, very healthy. But, what it hasn't done is slowed down our investment for the future. So, we've made sure that, while we're not launching a lot of products this year and we're a little tighter in the way that we're running the organization, we made sure it hasn't sacrificed the future. So, our expectation is we'll see a recovery next year, and we're putting ourselves in a position with pretty big investments and R&D and innovation that will hit the market next year. So, as things pick up, we're running.
BB: What is the longer-term plan for the company? Have you planned for moving beyond private investors and perhaps taking the company public?
ER: Well, when you take professional money, they want it back at some point. The company ultimately will reach a point where it's going to need even more resources to get to that next level. What that is, we don't spend a lot of time speculating on it. Certainly, an IPO could be an option. There's a lot of different ways you could go. But we think we've got a long ways to go and huge growth potential in front of us, so there's absolutely no rush. The great thing about our investors, too, is they're very patient and they don't have any short-term demands. Therefore, we've got a long runway.