The Marketing Consigliere™ Blog

This week’s Adweek cover story is about alleged ageism in the advertising industry.  “War of the Ages” tries to present a picture of aging baby boomers getting tossed from high-six figure jobs and being replaced by less expensive, “hipper” younger professionals.  These hipper and younger professionals also happen to know a lot about network-centric marketing than the axed veterans.

While that last statement may be a generalization, here is the bottom line:  Just as I briefly blogged a year ago in “Digitally Deficient CMOs Need Not Apply,” a day of reckoning for Marketers is nigh - and they need to get on the net-centric (or as I say C4ISR) bandwagon.

George Hayes, an axed executive from Universal McCann who is featured in the article and is suing the agency and its parent company, is mentioned as being 53 years old.  I’m about to hit the 48 year milestone - not too far behing Mr. Hayes - and have some advice for him and other peers who have been enjoying significant six-figure incomes for a while - Pay heed to the careers of square-rigger captains at the dawn of the age of steam, or cavalry officers at the dawn of the tank.

The Marketing Consigliere knows that it is a lot of work to get out of your comfort zone to learn about “new media,” but it has to be done if you want to be perceived as relevant and billable.  Don’t let Alvin Toffler’s visionary Future Shock be about you…

About a year and a half ago, Mini Cooper instituted an interesting promotional campaign using RFID technology.  Cooper owners were given RFID-enabled key fobs which interacted with special billboards in EZPass regions.   When the driver approached the billboard in his or her Mini, a talking car would appear, along with the person’s name who registered the key fob.

So now the question must be asked, why isn’t there more marketing like this?  Did Mini Cooper not extract any value from this - did customers complain, did the car company not see any ROI besides publicity, was no other data gathered that could enhance demographic or behavioral targeting of messages?

Where is the promise of location based advertising - How far a leap is it from here?  Would Mini Cooper do this again?  It has to have more value than merely as a public relations stunt… Is there anyone else that is engaged in promotions utilizing RFID technology?

Uomo avvisato, mezzo salvato.

Forewarned is forearmed.

I heard some colleagues talking enthusiastically about EDS. I was puzzled why a small startup like OnDialog, which has created a SaaS tool for creating landing pages, microsites, and personalized URLs (PURLs) would be abuzz over the company that Ross Perot put on the map.

Well, I was misinformed. Email Data Source, Inc., is a company with the same investor (TWJ Capital) as my company. They have a great story that needs to be told. According to their website, they “collect, analyze, organize, and archive thousands of daily email marketing messages, providing our clients a never-before-seen view into the form and function of email messages sent and received worldwide.”

Totally cool. They “get” net-centric marketing, and they link email delivery with business intelligence. EDS’ Email Analyst product allows Marketers to monitor their competition’s push offers, see which offers were the most effective in conversions, and uncover relevant and potentially valuable third party email lists. Additionally, Marketers may be able to accurately monitor their affiliate’s campaigns for branding policy violations or better yet, CAN-SPAM compliance issues.

This tool is part of the C4ISR Marketing world and should be looked at by every Marketer who wants to know why their competition seems to be succeeding. Since email is still considered the business “killer app” of the Internet, it makes sense to see what your competition is doing with email, and Email Analyst can hopefully give you some insight.

My, my… A year ago I had no idea what work and fun blogging would be. I’ve slowed down lately due to my exciting new job at OnDialog, but I’ll try to pick up the pace to bring you another year’s worth of the latest in net-centric marketing.

A lot has happened in the past year in what I call the C4ISR Marketing arena, and it’s clear that it’s an exciting place to be.

Thanks to the people who have commented, cheered me on, argued with me, bookmarked me, linked me, blogrolled me, smiled at the title of the blog, given me scoops, and inspired me. This is a great time to be a marketer and I plan on bringing you more of my humble opinion on what’s going on in a wired marketing world.

I cursed Bill Gates before I ever knew he existed. My first job out of college was with Mayflower Moving. (How I got from working in trucking industry to working in the Internet industry is simple - they’re both transportation related. One is with packages while one is with packets - you must deliver them both on time without dropping them.)

In the warehouse we stored computer parts for IBM - this was 1984, the dawn of the PC age. And I remember having to fulfill parts orders to deliver to the nearby IBM facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for assembly. Part of the parts order included the shrink-wrapped DOS boxes, with their funny miniature 3-ring binder and five-inch floppies.

It always seemed like they would call an order in at the end of the day, just when I was about to wind down and go home. So I didn’t know what DOS was an acronym for but I knew it meant it was a pain in the you-know-what.

Fast forward almost 25 years later… Bill gates, the mastermind behind DOS and the rise of Microsoft, is stepping down from his daily responsibilities at the software giant. Actually, I harbor no resentment to him at all but do chuckle at the umbrage many techies take to Bill’s mere existence and the success of his leadership.

His departure really does signify the end of an era. Bill and Microsoft have dominated the computer, but even with Internet Explorer, the man and company have not dominated the Internet. There is a new era with new players and will prove to be even more amazing than the era closing with Bill’s new direction.

This is the true beginning of a net-centric world, with marketers discovering more and more the power that data brings to the enterprise. While other disciplines such as finance, operations, manufacturing and even sales have been automated and networked, marketing is finally getting its day in the sun.

What I call C4ISR Marketing is the ability to leverage the complete power of data and internetworking to deliver what the customer needs; although it has taken a long time to reach this ability, the marketing world sometimes doesn’t seem quite ready for it. Well, Bill is out of the limelight and now the real show begins…

This year’s Business Marketing Association (BMA) Conference was very enjoyable. This was my second time, so I was able to reconnect with people I had met with the previous year. While The Venetian was a great place to visit in 2007, I thought that Loews Lake Las Vegas Resort was an amazing venue and made it a much more relaxing atmosphere in which to network with other B2B marketers. I met a lot of great folks from agencies and leadership in the B2B marketing world, including Ellis Booker from BtoB Magazine, Jeff Hayzlett, BMA Vice Chairman and Chief Business Development Officer for Eastman Kodak Company, and Alan Scott, the SVP & CMO of Dow Jones.

There was a particular breakout session that I found very useful entitled “Optimizing Marketing Spend Through Influence Networks.” On the panel were Myra Norton of Community Analytics, Matt Goddard of R2Integrated, Tom Michael of Jack Morton Worldwide, and Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn, (It was really cool to meet someone from LinkedIn, which finally really took off last year although I had been a member 3 years prior to that.) The basic walkaway I got from the session was that networks and communities are complex and don’t have to be online to be useful, and it takes a disciplined methodology to determine who the true influencers in a community are. Likewise, it takes a great deal of thought on how to reach out to those influencers in a way that will encourage them to engage in a dialogue with your community.

The keynote speakers were absolutely stellar. On Wednesday, Eduardo Conrado, the Corporate Vice President of Global Business & Technology Marketing and Communications for Motorola, described how his company is bringing public sector customers into an “immersive digital experience” which facilitates good lead generation.

On Thursday, Judith Sim, the Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer of Oracle, gave the audience a talk entitled “From Marketing Communications to Participation Marketing – Data is the Driver.” First of all, Judith, THANK YOU. Data is the driver. It always has been ; only now it’s finally in digital format in a way that helps marketers. Your presentation was one of the most amazing I have ever seen and underscores why Oracle is a top notch marketing organization. Your tenure there of 20 years is equally impressive and clearly you deserve a lot of credit for such a compreshensive, well executed plan. Print publishers, however, were probably not happy to see that you dropped all print advertisements except for the Wall Street Journal. Just another bad day for those who don’t get Oracle’s embrace of network centric marketing

The best perk for attending the BMA Annual Conference wasn’t’ the beautiful venue and world class speakers from Fortune 500 companies. It was from Aaron Kahlow’s consultancy, Business OnLine. BMA Conference attendees received a complimentary website SEO assessment or usability audit. By signing up for a half-hour session, you could get a clear, understandable and constructive critique of your site.

Now I’ve been involved with sales and marketing over the Internet since before most people knew how to spell “www,” and I’ve met a lot of people who claim to be SEO mavens. Most of them are just snake oil salesmen. Not Ray “Catfish” Comstock - he is awesome. He can quickly guide you through the pitfalls of SEO like no other. If your company needs the real SEO deal, call the pros at Business Online. /p>

See you guys next year. Sooner, I hope.

The past few weeks have been so hectic I’ve let my blogging slip but I am still able to keep my personal goal of blogging about marketing and technology every month for an entire year .

My latest excuse for my absence from the blogosphere is this: I have started joined a turnaround management team at a VC-backed startup in the space that I have been blogging about, so I am extremely happy but busy.

OnDialog is in the SaaS space and offers Marketers the ability to create custom landing pages, microsites, and personalized URLs (PURLs) that increase probability of conversion and customer loyalty.

Integrated with Salesforce and SugarCRM,the OnDialog “LP” product is a tool for Net-Centric Marketing that should be in every Marketer’s toolkit, but perhaps I’m a bit biased.

I had the pleasure to travel to the west coast to go on sales calls.  Since our company is a member of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, I was totally psyched when I visited their Bay Area incubator. Being the Friday afternoon of the Memorial Day weekend, it was quite empty, but one stalwart soul was still working and all I can say is that the app is so cool I can see why.

Greg Goldfarb of Ribbit demonstrated his baby – an AppExchange tool that takes phone call voice messages and routes them into Salesforce. These audio and voice-to-text files can then be assigned to contacts in the application

It is an extremely helpful tool that takes “offline” data and includes in a network centric marketing world. Greg, keep on building this great C4ISR Marketing app for Sales pros!

In iMedia Connection’s leading e-newsletter story today, “5 New Ways Brands Can Go Beyond the Browser,” Max Zabramny of Organic writes about the new applications on the near horizon which will allow for work to be conducted offline after the a connection is terminated or is that is automatically executed once an online connection is re-established. We are familiar with this, but the twist is that now marketers are taking this and running with it, allowing their brand to interact with users to either recreate the online experience or something different in an offline environment.

Look out for Adobe Air, Google Gears, and Mozilla Firefox 3 to facilitate these tools with a branding spin on them, which may allow marketers to gather data in an offline fashion that is seamlessly transferred to them once the user is back online. But net-centric marketers beware; there may be a slippery slope with regards to spyware and adware. Back in the late 1990s, a company called Conducent flopped in a major way - they had agreements with desktop software developers that allowed the running of ads on the software while a user was offline. Additionally, their software was difficult to uninstall. The backlash from the online community was small, but intense. Conducent, trying to leverage the “irrational exuberance” of the time, and run by energetic but inept management, failed to understand a fundamental need of the end user - privacy and no distractions.

So almost ten years later, while I agree that the Marketing professional should gather as much rich data as possible, they should be careful and know just where the end users “draws the offline.” So make sure you’re intelligent before you try to mine business intelligence.

This Week’s ADWEEK article, “Addressable Ads Get Closer to Reality,” Betsy Cummings reports about “Project Canoe,” a joint venture of some of the largest cable companies, is creating a platform that can target TV ads by household. Tests of “addressable ads” have been conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, and are planned for Baltimore, Maryland.

What made me chuckle was her first line of the article: “Marketers, media buyers and network executives have all been looking at new technology that could revolutionize the industry.”

Revolutionize?

How about “allow an ‘old media’ (push) format to feebly catch up to Internet based advertising?”

I must admit that Cable has actually stepped up to the plate in several ways - namely in terms of convergence and offering more secure Internet access than they had in the past, but revolutionize?

When you can deliver ads based on behavioral or contextual criteria, opt-in, make them truly interactive, and optimize them, call the agencies and then call me.

Nyet- the revolution has already started, cable comrades, and it’s led by others. Network centric ma4rketing is leading the way and you cable guys better hurry up - keep converging with the data-heads.