ChasNote

Rohit Bhargava at Influential Marketing points out that brands aren’t just shaped by the experience a customer has with the product itself, they are formed (for better or worse) at every stage of the product’s journey from the manufacturing plant to the recycling heap.

“while a GM exec . . . may drive the same car as his or her customer, they have had a far different experience in getting it. They didn’t research the car online. They didn’t shop around and talk to several dealers about it. They didn’t have to trade off something else in their budget to afford the car and figure out how to finance it. And now that they have it, they don’t have to worry about things like maintenance or even filling gas into the car. All of that was taken care of.

“Eating your own dog food (ie — experiencing your own product) isn’t enough. You need to experience the entire process around buying it to really understand your customers.”

Makes me think that obnoxious (but effective) DR campaigns and offensive (but highly viewed) viral video campaigns are counter productive in the long run.

• Honeydripper movies

I agree with Godin that traditional advertising doesn’t and won’t work in Facebook or Twitter. Operative word: traditional. But I don’t agree that Twitter and Facebook — just because they’re designed for connecting communities rather than distributing traditional media content — won’t devise native experiences that will work well for their communities and for brand marketers at the same time.

Brand marketing doesn’t need to operate like “traditional advertising.” For example, with its OPEN Forum blog, American Express is using marketing dollars to create a credible small business publication, replete with editorial contributions from the leading names in business advice. Based on repeat visitor rates and links from other sites that recommend it to their readers, the SMB community is finding value in the OPEN Forum blog even though its content is funded by ad dollars. And because the contributors to the site, such as Guy Kawasaki and Anita Campbell, are given license to create real, editorial content (they wouldn’t participate otherwise), they’re alerting their Twitter followers each time they post something new. They are not paid to post these stories to Twitter; they’re doing it because they always Twitter new stuff they publish, whether the content appears on their own sites or at someone else’s publication.

I’d argue that American Express is using Twitter for brand marketing right now, and it’s working as well for Guy’s and Anita’s followers as it is for American Express.

Certain applications within Facebook, like Graffiti, have done the same: Developing ad-supported experiences that allow brands to enter the conversation without spoiling the conversation. Here are some exmples.

(Disclosure of sorts: Seth Godin is not officially affiliated with FM, unless you count our informal Seth Godin Fan Club. He is, however, a sometime contributor to the OPEN Forum site, the content of which FM manages.)

From Joe’s column in MediaPost:

“If I click on a paid link or banner for Nike shoes and make a purchase profiting Nike by $10, to say that the click on that link is worth up to $10 is stupid. Before I ever clicked on that link I have had so many brand interactions and product perceptions, from peer suggestions to celebrity endorsements, I couldn’t count them all even if I wanted to. It could even have been those interactions that caused the click.

“….it’s the product of a broken system and an addiction to Google’s amazingly efficient direct response model. But too many dollars fighting for clicks at the bottom of the funnel is causing artificially inflated pricing for those clicks. Thus, there is a real opportunity to move up the funnel online and achieve spectacular results for marketers (especially in social media).”

Right on, Joe.

Great article about the evolution of digital brand marketing at Ad Age:

“The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is ‘old’ media — a commercial message to be placed next to editorial or entertainment content. And we know by now that measured-media growth has pretty much ground to a halt as marketers continue to increase their dollars in unmeasured disciplines such as web development, public relations and database marketing at the expense of paid advertising. Ad spending among the top 100 U.S. advertisers last year grew a paltry 1.7%, with measured media only up 0.3%. Measured-media spending is in decline in Japan, and it’s not much better in the U.K.”

No news here for folks who have participated in the television or print publishing businesses anytime in the past 50 years, but it may be revolutionary news in certain online marketing circles, especially circles in, say, Mountain View. From Ad Age:

“Now, new findings from the Online Publishers Association suggest that content is king: Ads on branded-content websites are more effective than non-branded sites and outpace industry norms in nearly every category.

“[The study] determined that ads on content sites have greater impact on the overall purchase process, including customer awareness, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference and purchase intent, especially among the consumer package goods, financial services, technology, telecommunications and travel sectors, giving credence to the idea that audiences are attracted to websites.”

From Ad Age.

“Hollywood’s oldest talent shop, the 110-year-old William Morris Agency, is partnering with a triumvirate of digital media, wireless and advertising executives to create a joint venture called Agency 3.0, a digital-marketing-services company seeking to marry digital technology to strategically developed content….

“In an interview with Ad Age, Mr. Johnson said TV advertising ‘is becoming less effective,’ in part because ‘it’s highly disconnected from the creative process.

“His partners’ new venture aims to ‘bring the ad dollars that much closer to the creative process,’ Mr. Johnson said.

Smart idea and an impressive team. I bet, though, they will come to regret that name.

In a piece for Business Week Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine (among other things), profiles Starbucks’s MyStarbucksIdea.com concept — an initiative Jeff calls a foray into corporate democracy. The site allows Starbucks customers to offer advice on improving its customer service, products or business practices. Starbucks (the retail chain) benefits from good ideas it may soon implement, and Starbucks (the brand) benefits by connecting with customers at higher, more emotional level — through a conversation in which customers have a voice, and Starbucks listens and responds.

“‘If [an idea] fails,” says [Starbucks CTO] Bruzzo, “our customers who are on MyStarbucksIdea ought to participate in being accountable for it.’ Whether an idea is accepted or not, customers get only the satisfaction of participating; there are no payments or other tangible rewards.”

What an excellent example of a brand-as-conversation, or what we at FM call (and Jeff often criticizes!) conversational marketing.

That’s the prediction at PaidContent, anyway.

“The self-serve ads option has been all the rage for search ads the last few years. Increasingly, now, do-it-yourself is becoming similarly popular for the display ad space.”

I don’t think ad-sales extinction is quite as imminent as reported. “Display ads” in print magazines refer to the glossy ads purchased by brand advertisers to accomplish brand-building goals. When pundits use the term online, they mean graphical banner ads, as opposed to paid-search text ads. Most advertisers, however, are using graphical banners and text ads for the same purpose — direct-response marketing with the singular goal of driving clicks at the lowest CPC. Only a very small percentage of online ad dollars today are designed to build awareness and affinity for brands. I’m a big believer in the promise of DIY ad-buying platforms, but it’s a mistake to assume these services — just because their customers can upload animated banners — are changing the rules, the expectations or the metrics for brand marketing.