Jan 5, 2009
Within the technology marketing sector, I predict budget cuts of 15% or so for the first half of 2009. And within the typical marketing mix, the events budget and traditional-media advertising will bear a dis-proportionate share of those cuts. Given the trend of accelerating spending on digital advertising, it is more likely then ever before that traditional media spend lost in the downturn of 2008-2009 will not - ever - be replaced.
In the tech industry we are now, over the past couple of months, just acknowledging the impact of the recessionary cycle; even while the macroeconomists are now saying we have been in an overall recession for a year. My sense of the marketing budget cuts in tech is that at the beginning of an acknowledged recessionary cycle (i.e. now), there is an over-reaction that brings budget cuts that go too deep on the first pass. It’s the nature of management which is so often short-sighted. I have believed that good marketing investment policy has elements of a large inertial flywheel: let it stop spinning and the fuel to get it going again costs a lot more than if steady increments had been consistently applied. Vendors should have the wherewithal and courage to keep their investments basically steady.
Other guidance for senior marketers:
- Use the downturn to permanently eliminate or re-shape entrenched silos of program costs: 1) Example: Isolated events not part of a broader campaign or important new launch; 2) Let the downturn play the role of “bad cop”; 3) Be most rigorous/suspicious of heavily guarded budgets
- Given the forecasted short duration of the downturn: 1) limit staff reductions . . . Marketing headcount turnover has already exceeded 9% annually for the past two years; 2) Use the downturn to mandate/effect more aggressive Content Audits
- Identify and create shared services: 1) Target is duplicate discretionary costs (e.g. across your 3 product lines, PM’s have purchased 3 separate on-line community platforms); 2) Target is duplicate activities executed within fixed costs (e.g. you oversee 3 product lines and each group spends 4 days per month on separate dashboard performance reporting compliance, which you are unable to normalize)By Rich Vancil, VP, IDC’s Executive Advisory Group (rvancil@idc.com)
Dec 3, 2008
Over at Writer’s Digest there is an interesting debate on the future of magazines between Bob Sacks, better known as “BoSacks,” a 38-year veteran of the publishing industry whose e-newsletter, “Heard on the Web: Media Intelligence,” 
reaches nearly 12,000 readers daily and is essential reading for anyone in the magazine and media industry. BoSacks is a proponent of the digital world and is a strong believer in the developments that are happening around e-paper and the growth of various e-readers and netbooks. In the opposing corner is Samir Husni, nicknamed “Mr. Magazine,” who holds a doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and is the author of Launch Your Own Magazine: A Guide for Succeeding in Today’s Marketplace who has an amazingly optimistic view on the future of print. The two columns, It’s a Digital World Now and The Death of Print Magazine and other Fairy Tales are fascinating reading and represent extreme viewpoints from the publishing industry.
Personally, I’m in BoSack’s camp. While I appreciate the tactile experience of magazines and all the reading and visual advantages they bring - print magazines are just less relevant today given the developments in the digital world. There will be niches where print magazines survive for many more years but these will look like hobbies rather big business. And that’s OK. For those interested in vertical segments and enjoy the print experience there will be publishers willing to serve them. The mass-market consumer glossies will also have their place for as it will be many years before technology replaces the print experience of Vanity Fair for the general consumer. However, to ignore the long-term digital trends, the advantages of the digital format plus the current actions being taken by consumers, is to live in a fantasy world.
It’s still some time off before mass adoption but eventually we’ll see cost effective e-paper work in various mobile formats. In digital form, e-paper readers will go much further than static text - there will be search, interactivity, social communications, real-time updating via WiFi with audio, video and other multimedia complementing the text format.
As a parent who watches his son hunch over as he carries a huge weight of textbooks to school every day - I cannot wait for the textbook industry to be reformed. It’s a total disgrace - over priced, out of date text books are being forced on our kids by an industry trying to protect a legacy business model. An excellent recent article in The Washington Post discusses the jolt that’s needed. I truly hope that a company such as Apple or Amazon combines a hardware and distribution strategy to revolutionize the way our children access and interact with information.
Sorry Mr. Magazine, now we live in a dynamic not static world. Print is a vestige of the past - it has many admirable attributes and will be around for quite a while - but today we don’t just want prepackaged text pushed at us - we want to be involved in the content and the discussion around it. Digital and mobility are the way forward - clinging to icons of the past is a disservice to the readers of the future. I know whose class I would recommend my kids to enroll in.
Nov 24, 2008
I recently attended MIT Sloan’s annual CFO Summit in Newton, Massachusetts; not just to earn the CPE credits needed to maintain my CPA certification, but more importantly, I wanted to gain an understanding of CFOs’ perspectives in this difficult economic environment. This is something that every CMO should understand to help optimize their management strategy as well as their tenure.
It was no surprise that the theme of the conference was “Relentless Volatility”. Jack McCullough, one of the two co-chairs of the event, put it well in his opening remarks: “My investment banker friend in London described this environment as being similar to a divorce but worse. . . ‘I’ve lost half of my net worth, but I’m still stuck with my husband.’” I’d like to summarize several key comments from the event that may offer you some ideas for how best to not only ride out the storm in the upcoming year, but even perhaps to leverage the situation to improve your position and take share in this tough market:
- As part of your annual and intra-year planning process, ensure that you leverage scenario planning to best identify what challenges you may encounter in the next quarter or year, as well as what steps you need to take to minimize the potential damage from these risks;
- Communication in this volatile environment increases in importance. . . not just with your functional team, but also with senior management; (i.e., don’t be intimidated to better engage your CEO and CFO, especially when you need help or need their advice)
- Ensure that your executive team knows that you not only understand the current challenges you face, but that you also have a plan to address them; (and meeting with the CFO offers a great chance to ensure that your plans are grounded in reality, as well as a chance to share your vision and increase their comfort level with your management framework and strategy)
- “We’ve spent a significant amount of time reallocating our budgets to ensure that we’re focusing on investment in the high growth, high profitability areas vs. in the “harvest” areas that may not need as much investment”, Norman Robertson, CFO Progress Software; (e.g., IDC CMO Advisory Practice research indicates that the average technology vendor allocates 38% of their marketing budget to newer, higher growth business areas or product lines vs. existing, more mature business areas or product lines)
- The large companies will no doubt be reducing their on-campus recruiting efforts this year. Therefore, now is a great opportunity to hire the best and brightest individuals from the top schools.
- And finally, continue to drive innovation within your team, motivating individuals to take chances in an effort to change how they do business today. We need to give our staff the opportunity to be leaders, stepping into the light that no one else may see.
Nov 15, 2008
Despite the doom and gloom of falling circulation and advertising that’s besetting traditional media - the worst of times will eventually lead to the best of times. This economic crisis will force major changes in the thinking of traditional media companies. Of course, it’s probably more likely that key executives will have to be retired before we see real long-term strategic shifts.
The current climate is creating an amazing entrepreneurial opportunity to build “new media companies” - organizations that are unburdened by the vestiges of traditional media thinking - ones that ditch the command and control mentality and open up to their audiences.
Excessive control of content and messaging has already shifted. For the last several years we’ve been moving to a world of disintermediation. The openness of the web has taken away a significant amount of power from traditional media houses and placed it in the hands of their audiences. Now, content is widely distributed and syndicated – often in an uncontrollable manner.
We’re now in a world of audience participation or “social media” - a world where it’s all about engaging distributed audiences with contextually relevant content. No longer limited to traditional brands, news and information topics can be created by virtually anyone by the intelligent re-aggregating of fragmented content.
It’s world where publishers and marketers collaborate with audiences rather than broadcasting irrelevant stuff at them. The old adage of the general being pushed out by the specific is particularly relevant today. Users expect information and marketing that’s relevant to their interests and needs - they will turn out the rest. It’s all about the user experience http://www.nngroup.com/
Unfortunately, it’s painfully evident that many traditional publishers just still don’t get it - as demonstrated by some recent high profile lay-offs - much digital talent has been let go with the old guard regaining power - this short term thinking underscores a total lack of understanding of what is happening on today’s web and tomorrow on the mobile internet. Medium to long-term strategy is being sacrificed for immediate returns. While some of the decisions are understandable from a short-term financial perspective, in a few years time these media organizations are going to severely regret such brand asset stripping moves.
It seems that in this period of economic uncertainty too many traditional publishers and marketers are rapidly surrendering and retreating to the medium they understand from their past - print, rather than being prepared to go on the offensive and embrace the fundamental secular shifts in the media industry being embrace by the new generations of users.
The web has evolved over two decades from the original HTML document centric approach of Web 1.0 to Web 1.5, which was about interactivity, and search to one of relationships around content - the social Web 2.0. Now it is moving to one of interlinking applications with the dynamic and intelligent linking of content around semantic connections. Content is being automatically connected with people, place and location - the so-called semantic Web 3.0. On top of all that, mobile Internet usage will soon dwarf laptop and desktop Internet usage. It already has in certain regions of the world.
Traditional roles have changed. The role of editors has evolved from one of being focused primarily on original content creation to one of content curation - linking to content from all over the web plus involving audiences in discussion while actively encouraging them to virally distribute content to their own networks.
To quote Jeff Jarvis – cover what you do best - link the rest. Media sales teams now have to look beyond the limited scale of a brand site approach to delivering audience reach across the web. Audience development and the needs of the user absolutely must be at the heart of any digital strategy.
Media companies should appoint audience development, community strategists and community managers to senior management positions to help drive the new focus. Technology needs to be in place to allow publishers to understand the behavioral of their audiences so marketing can be appropriately targeted to users’ interests. The world of online CPM advertising will be under tremendous economic pressure - however publishers that can prove engaged, participatory audiences will command premium rates. Engaged, loyal audiences are the key defensive barriers to competition. Engagement Intensity is today’s key KPI.
It’s a dififcult cultural transition for many but relatively inexpensive technology is available to build these new media companies - so new competitors will appear rapidly, putting even more pressure on the current strategies of existing brand publishers.
Publishers and brand marketers that don’t evolve to connect and engage with their communities are quickly heading to the bankruptcy court. Debt-burdened companies will be foreced to restructure to survive and it will be painful for many. Over the next year, smart fire-sale buyers will swoop in and buy brands and audiences on the cheap and rebuild these brands in a way that incumbent management has failed so to do.
Media companies should look to companies such as Apple for inspiration - Steve Job’s leadership aided by a highly competent supporting cast took a failing company and beleaguered brand and re-polished it by focusing on the total user experience coupled with a unrelenting focus on the quality of their products, resulting in a incredible passion and loyalty for the Apple’s brands - Mac, iPod and iPhone.
While the economic challenges are significant - a massive opportunity exists to build a new media businesses in this new digital age of audience interaction. Bloated, inefficient and slow moving companies will rightly die but we’ll see the emergence of exciting new media companies unburdened by the cultural inflexibility of many existing media companies.
The industry will be re-energized as a result. The new media companies will be largely driven by a new generation of “Young Turks” often who will be mentored and hired by seasoned media executives who actually welcome the inevitable changes. This new generation of digital natives, who live on their laptop and mobile phones, will shape the media content and distributions companies of the future.
The long-term future of publishing is very bright. Embrace it.
Highly recommended reading Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber and associated website
The Forrester Series “Reinventing Media eBusiness” series by Sarah Rotman Epps (payment required)
Nov 5, 2008
As your marketing organization approaches the end of its annual planning cycle, remember that it shouldn’t end on January 1, 2009. As marketers we must get better at managing our annual and intra-year process as a part of our regular business processes vs. a once per year disruptive event. Doing so could be a helpful step forward in improving our ability to manage investment, shift resources in response to market conditions, and improve alignment within marketing and with the rest of the organization. Based upon interviews with marketing leaders in the technology industry and findings from IDC’s recent Marketing Operations Board meeting, I’d like to offer the following “food for thought”:
1. Staffing: Do you have an individual or team who’s accountable for developing, executing and governing your planning process? The marketing operations function can provide the foundation and discipline for a well-orchestrated and managed planning process. Although this role has been effective in planning and orchestrating marketing’s annual and intra-year planning process, marketers’ view of planning as a separate activity from their daily job coupled with their lack of financial acumen continues to hinder the success of planning. (email me to receive a copy of our recent mktg. ops. study. . mgerard@idc.com)
2. Process: Marketers have made significant progress in establishing planning processes, such as global marketing leadership boards, a consistent taxonomy, financial tracking and other performance measurement processes; however, the lack of consistent adoption of these processes across the organization including a lack of alignment with finance, sales and regional marketing must be overcome to advance marketing to a higher level of operation and performance.
3. Technology: It is only in the past 3-4 years that most marketing organizations have actually achieved an understanding of how much they spend on marketing across the organization, mostly leveraging highly manual processes and Microsoft Excel. A recent IDC study revealed that 40% of IT marketers in companies >$3B in revenue continue to use Excel and other manual processes vs. a more automated MRM(marketing resource management)-type solution. It is time for us to advance to the next level of marketing, including tracking of investment at a more detailed level. (e.g., by objective, campaign, activity, brand, product, country, or segment) MRM applications offer the opportunity to do this in a more systematized and efficient manner. But remember, process first.
Oct 30, 2008
author: Todd Defren
source: PR Squared
One of the benefits of living in a Boston suburb is that you meet smart people wherever you go. Even on the neighborhood soccer field – where I share cheering duties with Frank Cutitta, the General Manager of IDG Connect. Our talented daughters are on the same team.
IDG Connect is an “information technology resource for the latest research and product information in the IT Industry. The library includes technical white papers, webcasts, podcasts, case studies and product information.” And more to the point, Frank is always smiling. Yes, even nowadays, through the gyrations of the stock market and all that.
According to Frank, what IDG figured out is how to help marketers meet the expectations of prospects who are seeking various levels and types of information, about industries and products.
“You need to understand the buyer’s precise knowledge needs. What does your buyer expect at each stage of the purchase process?” Frank explains. “Once you know that, you can optimize content in the best format to match the buyer’s learning style.”
In other words, you may need to create a white paper and/or a podcast and/or a videoblog and/or a webcast of the same content because different types of prospects will have different engagement preferences.
It all starts with a “content asset audit.” With an average tenure of just under two years, most corporate marketing executives can’t even find most of the content on file at the corporation, much less map it to a strategy. Think, “random acts of content.”
“Once content assets are cataloged, marketers need to map assets into a sequential lead nurturing ‘curriculum,’ i.e., moving prospects through a series of content-focused engagements - each of which signify a higher degree of complexity/value and a closer proximity to sale,” Frank notes.
Here’s an example of that “sequential lead nurturing” … Rather than create a 45-minute webcast (zzzz), why not create smaller content bundles delivered in “chapters?” A 2-minute introductory webcast can lead to the prospect to “graduate” to a more in-depth 10-minute video demo or a slideshow, and so on… Each request for the “next in the series” signals additional movement through the sales funnel, and can be tracked accordingly (which videos work best? which are responsible for the most drop-offs?).
Let’s get tactical.
Say you head up marketing for a CAD/CAM software maker. Various types of buyer types (and purchase influencers) come to mind: design engineers, CTOs, CEOs, pencil-pushers from purchasing, etc.
What content marketing strategy can you employ to meet the highly variable information needs of these audiences, across different stages of the purchase process?
Well, design engineers and CTOs are a technical audience, right? They are likely going to want to see white papers and demo-style webcasts. But, these folks are also on-the-go and of many different industries, so you might also want to develop a podcast series that literally talks them through your product demo, in chapters that synch-up to the prospects’ needs. You can also “verticalize” the content, by making tweaks that speak to specific industries. Spice it all up by asking a couple of customers to submit to interviews that you can splice into the dry stuff.
Now, you’ve got those customer interviews on-hand, and you realize that CEOs and Purchasing execs who don’t understand what your product does will still appreciate assurances of your product quality, viability and customer support! If you’ve got those customer interviews on video, these snippets can become part of a vlog; they can be 
emailed by salespeople during the courtship; etc.
And if part of your strategy does include white papers and other text-based content, be sure to offer both prettified PDFs as well as “atomized” HTML versions. The former can be printed or forwarded to old-school executives, whereas the “atomized” version ensures that bloggers and/or prospects can point their readers and colleagues to specific datapoints that help them make the case for your CAD/CAM solution.
The right content delivered to the right people, at the right spot in the sales cycle. Sounds so simple, right?
Oct 10, 2008
You’ll have noticed a small in text blue icon next to companies mentioned in the posts. Rolling over the icon opens up a “panel” that displays additional information about the organization.
“Panels” is a new consumer information network that instantly gives users the most sought after information about any organization, brand, or advertisement – in a standardized, consistent, and predictable format called a “Panel.” Panels can appear on any internet ad, blog, social profile page, email signature, URL, brand name, and more. These “Panels” automatically deliver contextually relevant and in‐depth information to users about any entity, at any time, from numerous data sources.
Users get this information for free without diverting them from their web location and without requiring any effort on their part. Panels’ categories are organized as tabs across the top of the panel and so far the following are available;
“About” - Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary
“Site” - A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
“Map” - Beginning with Google Maps 
, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
“News” - Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
“Jobs” - Employment listings across numerous providers such as Monster and SimplyHired
“Financial” - If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories
Coming Soon over the next few weeks are “Reviews” and “Shop”
Site Search - Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of the panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab.
Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple , Ford , AT&T , or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at Demo Fall 08 ) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50)
Panels make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because;
Users will stay on the page because they can get deep information via panels and,
Clicks on links - including ads - will dramatically increase
More information on panels is available here. If you’d like to test out panels on you blog - send an email to me at colincrawford@gmail.com - implementation is simple.
Oct 1, 2008
When budgets are on the cutting board, the marketing function often has to shoulder more than its fair share of the pain. The cuts of 2008 and 2009 will be no exception. In IDC’s most recent budget survey, closed in September 2008, actual 2008 spend increase will be just 3.5%, a reduction from the 4% predicted earlier this year. In addition to the short term budget cuts, the pressures of the current downturn will usher in a period of more sweeping marketing organization change. In my five years as a CMO Advisory analyst at IDC, I have never observed so much management analysis regarding potential marketing-organization change. Here are some things to think about to help you to survive and thrive in 2009:
- Transformation Starts at the Top. Many tech marketing organizations have far too many silos and lack alignment. For these companies, there is too much independent resource and spending at corporate and, in some cases, in the business units; and not enough spending in the field, closer to the prospects and customers. This also contributes to the dis-connects between the sales and marketing functions – as the sales department often perceives that marketing’s actions are far removed from their efforts. IDC suggests further examination of the marketing organization’s structure to improve alignment between corporate marketing, business unit marketing and field marketing.
- Seek to Decentralize. Continuously question yourself during the budget planning process: where is the money owned; and where is it spent? IDC guidance is for the typical large tech vendor of greater than $1b in revenue to have at least 45-50% of its total marketing execution “spent” in the geographical regions. Currently, about 36% of the total marketing budget is directly owned and spent by the regions. Add to this the 6% of the typical corporate marketing budget that is “spent” by the field. The total is about 42% of spend in the regions, and so is short of the 50% benchmark goal.
- Improve Relevancy. Two areas of essential guidance to help with the relevancy effort including campaign management and sales enablement. The first is an improved Campaign Management function. This role should seek to knit together disparate product-line marketing efforts into broader and larger themes. I have observed several top CMO’s making these moves in 2008. The second area is Sales Enablement. Marketing needs to improve its ability to get the right marketing assets to the right sales-people, at the right time and in the right format. This is hard to do: its needs go above and beyond product marketing’s attempts to do this.
Sep 21, 2008
Excellent and informative two-part interview with Marc Mielau, Innovation Manager for Mobile Marketing at BMW. Part 1 , Part 2
Taking mobile marketing opportunities very seriously, BMW has established a cross-divisional group, the mobile marketing circle that meets every third week with the goal of building synergies across the full range of mobile activities.
Marc attitude - “I believe that it’s a short step from “mobile advertising” to “mobile everything”, which includes mobile advertising, mobile communications, mobile entertainment, and even mobile commerce”. “A multi-channel approach to marketing will be necessary in the future, and mobile will play an important role. We think mobile marketing is about trying to reach customers with added value offers. This is the focus of the Innovation group.”
BMW has been testing 2D bar-codes, the use of SMS to provide customers with additional information additional and also informational MMS to enable customers to get advice and recommendations from their friends
In the second part of the interview, Marc discusses some of the highly successful mobile marketing campaigns that BMW has run recently, in partucular the use of MMS in conjunction with their customer database to render for each customer, an individualized picture of their specific kind of car, it’s specific color, and a specific recommended winter snow tire is applicable for their car together with a detailed price.
Marc’s key take-away - for brands such as BMW If you’re not mobile - you are not in touch with a whole generation.
Well worth a read by all those interested in seen how a major brand is successfully using mobile marketing campaigns.
Sep 8, 2008
Google announced yesterday their newspaper archive program
As noted by The New York Times Google is working with more than 100 newspapers including partners such as Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. Google has already scanned millions of articles.
IDG’s flagship title, Computerworld is part of the program and all issues, stretching back over 40 years are available. Check out the first issue that was published on 21st June 1967.
Google willingness to bear the digitalization cost and to share revenues made it an easy decision to allow Google to archive the content. Now, Computerworld in partnership with Google has been able to provide a great resource for those interested in researching the computer industry.
