What are the three scariest words to a marketeer? Well, according to David Pogue, Tech Critic at Yahoo Finance, at the OMD Oasis at CES last week they are “skip this ad”. The four members of the panel delved deeper into why consumers want to skip ads and their conclusion? It’s all down to relevance (or lack of it).
Bastien Schupp, Vice President Global Marketing Communications at Groupe Renault, explored the notion of relevance further by equating it to the car industry. He explained that, at any one time, 96% of people are not in the market for a vehicle and yet around 90% of communication is attributed to them. He talked about how we need more balance in focusing on the 4% who are actually ‘in the market’ to buy a car by marketing to individuals rather than marketing to the masses. His stark warning?
“More efficient targeting is about relevance. And if we don’t become more relevant we are doomed.”
Bastien also added that it goes far beyond targeting, it’s also about relevant content too. Simply put? “You can’t just put your TV commercial on digital platforms”. He pointed out that achieving this shift was “a long process” and to ensure this happens “agencies need to transform rapidly”.
Paul Kelly, Chief Partnerships Officer at Awesomeness TV, elaborated further on the topic of relevance. He made a clear distinction between ‘individual relevance’ (something that satisfies the need state at that particular moment in time) and also ‘cultural relevance’ which he said was “an inconvenient truth… purchase decisions are often made on emotion rather than fact”. Kelly insisted that by continuing to chase increasing accountability through all forms of addressable media “we are possibly missing out on cultural relevance”. He cited an example from Honda who had decided to target younger age groups even though they are obviously not in the market for a Honda. The reasoning behind that move? Because if Honda don’t speak to those younger consumers then by the time they get into the market Honda won’t be in their consideration set. He added, “a lot of big brands are missing out on that right now”.
Nikki Mendonça, President at OMD EMEA, interjected and stated that brands need to become more disruptive. She believes that since the economic crisis many clients had become “risk averse” but she had detected more recently that some clients were becoming “more willing to take risks”. In terms of addressable media, she added that “we are only at the beginning” and the main challenges to adoption would be the acceleration of technology, how we use the data and data protection laws. But she made it clear that both advertisers and agencies need to get on board because “no-one is going to stop the addressability train”.
What followed was a lively debate on the future of live content via the likes of Periscope, Meerkat or Facebook Live. Bastien Schupp believes it’s potential is “hugely overrated”. He conceded that it may offer an interesting opportunity at live sporting events (such as unique viewing at half time during a football match) but for the automotive industry he was much more sceptical: “we could broadcast from a Motor Show but frankly unless we had a flying car then no-one would watch”.
David Pogue disagreed. His assertion was that the power of live video was its authenticity. He offered a personal perspective of taking the unboxing of technology (something we have all witnessed on YouTube) and taking it to a live platform. For example, he had reviewed the Apple Airpots in a 15-minute unveiling last month. Despite the fact that he didn’t think anyone would watch he was astonished that “58,000 people watched me open a box!”. In the following days, the views jumped up into the hundreds of thousands. He went on to say that although it wasn’t necessarily the best quality broadcast the fact that “you can’t edit it and you can’t script it” is one of the main reasons why consumers love it so much.
Paul Kelly had a foot in each camp. He acknowledged that there were limited applications for ‘live’ right now but still felt that we would pivot towards it when we had figured out how best to use it. And that is a challenge for clients, agencies and vendors alike to determine how best to use the platform. What is also true is that the technology will continue to evolve and as such previously undreamed-of applications will inevitably surface. But the key driver of the platform will, as ever, be the consumer themselves. As Kelly put it so succinctly “it depends solely on what the audience wants to see”.
Cisco were receiving poor quality sales leads from their lead generation campaigns, which were failing to convert. Although we were targeting the right people with the right products and solutions, and receiving high volumes of data at a low cost per lead from a number of publishers, the campaigns weren’t delivering actual sales results.
The problem was that the prospects themselves weren’t engaged or informed, and consequently weren’t ready to be turned into customers when Cisco came around to contacting them. Quite simply, despite being identified as viable leads, these prospects were unaware of what specific solutions Cisco could offer them, or the potential benefits. As a result, conversion rates (and sales) were very low.
So when Cisco’s new mobility offering was ready to launch, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to supercharge the approach through a new strategic partnership, generating high quality, sales qualified leads from our prospect data.
The strategy
Rather than working with multiple publishers to generate volume, we decided to focus our efforts on developing a single strategic partnership where we could work together to increase the quality of the leads, both by better targeting and better engaging our prospects.
IDG’s market reach, audience profile and potential to deliver made them the ideal partner for Cisco. We approached them and proposed a fully transparent collaborative partnership that would see the two organisations completely sharing and aligning resources in a way rarely seen in this industry. We started by discarding the traditional divisions of ‘client’ and ‘publisher’, and set up a special cross-discipline task force, with a set of high KPIs to meet. This partnership would offer a unique opportunity to break down the usual constraints and barriers, and come together as a fully integrated team, focused on delivering great results.
The idea behind this bespoke solution was to make sure we were driving engagement, as well as qualifying leads. To do this we needed full transparency across the team, enabling seamless sharing of our collective knowledge and expertise. Our new collaborative approach enabled us to invent and implement innovative ways to deliver quality leads, by fully engaging and informing our target audience.
Making it a reality
Sharing regular insights, conversion data, feedback on quality and internal process concerns were essential to the partnership and allowed us to identify areas where each party could improve processes and methodology.
Previously we focussed on delivering BANT leads via telemarketing which qualified the user with the below criteria:
Budget available
Purchase authority
Relevant projects
Project timescale
We needed to find a solution which delivered qualified leads whilst increasing content to maximise engagement with the target audience. Tying in with the mobility theme, we created a new interactive layer to IDG’s existing ‘i-zone’ mobile app, to host relevant mobility content within a Cisco-branded online zone, while collecting prospect data. Once a user had engaged with this content they were then contacted by IDG’s call centre for further qualification. Only those which met the BANT qualification were classified as accepted and payable, and prioritised for follow-up by Cisco.
After this initial stage of qualification, IDG continued their engagement with more Cisco-related content. A second asset, relevant to their buying stage, was delivered to keep the user engaged while Cisco followed up the lead. This dual approach not only increased the volume of prospect data, but also helped to support the brand KPIs of consideration, by engaging and informing the prospects whilst preparing them for sale.
Throughout the campaign, we continued to collaborate with input from all parties. We regularly shared internal sales information, empowering IDG to fine tune their market focus, and prioritise the targeting, keeping our approach fluid and agile throughout the campaign period.
Results
The campaign achieved impressive results and significant return on investment. Our new partnership and content rich approach delivered, via the branded i-zone, a 133% increase in market-qualified leads (MQLs) delivered to Cisco for follow up.
We saw the biggest increase in the conversion of these leads to the pipeline revenue, with a 3800% increase in sales-qualified lead (SQL) revenue in comparison to standard and TM BANT qualified campaigns.
This approach was such a success that it has now been adopted globally and being rolled out across regions as Cisco’s best practise approach to an “always present” campaign.
By Richard McNeill, Director of Resolution OMD Ireland
OMD Ireland created a marketing campaign that saved lives. Now that’s a purpose.
The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) requires a steady supply of blood donations to help save lives. Historically, major sporting events cause a massive drop in blood donation levels, as the key donor demographic become distracted by their passion for sport.
During the Euro Cup, the IBTS saw a dramatic decrease in donations of 20%, or 600 units, which lead to dangerous shortages. TV was the obvious answer but with a budget of €4000, this was not an option. However, the Euro Cup was also predicted to be the largest dual screen event ever – so TV could still be leveraged.
Real-time targeting
For the first time ever in the Irish market, innovative TV-syncing technology was used to uniquely target the station stings at the start of each ad break during the World Cup programme. This triggered activity on mobile and tablet devices at precise moments in the match when dual-screening was at a peak. Creative was tailored to each team, and updated for every game and stage of the tournament, linking the events on the pitch directly to blood donation themes, and serving as a perfect real-time reminder to “Give Blood Now”.
Making time to donate
Using bespoke TVadSync technology OMD Ireland synchronised online messaging on mobile devices with the live TV broadcast. By live-syncing ads to purely the breaks in the football coverage OMD could take advantage of the benefits of multi-screening. Pushing the blood donation messages, with match specific creative, at the moments during ad breaks when users were likely to be online on their smart devices, and weren’t going to be pulled back to the TV for a few minutes, allowed time for people to book a donation appointment.
The real winners
As the World Cup broadcasts started, donations dropped by a frightening 34%. However within days of the campaign launch, the drop reversed and donations returned to normal levels. Amazingly, two of the highest donation days over the last three years occurred during World Cup 2014.
The real impact was that 2,000 units of blood flowed through the Irish health services that would otherwise have been lost, meaning that the real winners were those who found themselves in need of a blood transfusion.
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