Does Marketing Have a Heart of Darkness?

　


The orthodox advertising model takes no account of reality, hopefully the Financial Crisis should bring back some sanity One of the few benign consequences of last years financial crisis was the exposure of modern marketing as an emperor with no clothes. Now it is a fact that modern marketing/advertising has to be urgently reinvented.

This could lead to a flowering of original thinking in a profession whose creativity has been stifled by the intellectual monopoly of orthodox advertising and marketing bodies. The dirty little secret of modern advertising is that the models created by media and advertising agencies said almost nothing about accountability.

The defunct advertising and marketing bodies today are the people who took control of the subject in the 1960s, with theories about the effectiveness of advertising.

These theories, never really tested with reality, had a major flaw, if reality contradicts these theories it was reality that marketing & advertising professionals wanted to change. It is not surprising that the whole marketing edifice has come crashing down. To-days approach prevented marketing professionals from thinking about a world that is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inconsistent.

Why did Marketing fail to predict the crisis. It is said they failed because they all had a flawed view about markets! To gain some genuine understanding of unpredictable communications marketing and advertising people will, first of all, have to understand the real meaning of the word "communications." Perhaps they don't really want to!

The formula of reach and frequency is a thoroughly dishonest formula, based upon the need to rip as much money off Clients with complete disregard to accountability. There have been far more effective methods of marketing, however because these achieved startling results with a substantial reduction in advertising budgets they were dammed by faint praise and shuffled off out of sight before Clients could be woken up to the fact that they were being, simply put, ripped off!

Advertising has encouraged the growth of the sick & degrading culture of celebrity in the quite erroneous understanding that circulation is one of the key elements within the charade called advertising. In an article "Admen to tackle mistrust" the Advertising Association is to urge members to fight back against waning consumer trust in advertising, which is another example of the complete lack of understanding on the part of the Advertising Industry of the communications process and individuals complete lack of interest in advertising.

In a survey it was established that only 15% of adults "generally trust advertising" Frankly I am surprised that it is so high.

Consider this, the strength of newspapers to markedly affect the outcome of elections is severely doubted, if editorial strength support cannot markedly affect political outcome just how can we expect advertising to have any effect! Especially if adults "don't trust advertising", add to that fact that right now they also don't trust politicians and surely we could find a better way to spent the vast sums invested in political advertising!The fact is that in all walks of life the "system", despite the original intention and rules, always becomes corrupted by its users and lazy administrators, advertising has become so corrupted and is in the process of corrupting the New Media as they have corrupted the Old Media!

Of course there is a tacit agreement to keep the current inefficient system going for as long as possible. The vast sums of money spent on advertising go towards making a few people very rich indeed, in the past, Media Barons created media to gain power, nowadays the reason for creating new media, in whatever form, is no longer a route to power, it has become a route to vast riches and never mind the quality of media hence the "dumbing down of all media" in recent years.

Don't agree with what I'm saying? Well then consider this little shard of information. As much as 60% of all tracked advertising expenditure world-wide during 2008 failed to deliver results expected by marketers and can be considered wasted. $70bn alone is spent in the USA on advertising extrapolate that out to world-wide and that becomes a hell of a huge waste of money.

More accountability: Being the results of one exposure to an interactive programme vs traditional (frequency and reach) advertising.

Client: Chesebrough-Pond’s.


Brand: Intensive Care Hand & Nail Lotion.

Research: Burke Market Research.

"Readers of the Event were significantly more likely than non-readers to recall all four copy points, additionally readers were significantly more likely than non-readers to have tried the lotion, to have repeated buying it and to have purchased the brand recently.

　

Client: Rexona (Unilever).


Brand: Vaseline Intensive Care.

Research: AGB.

"Prompted-Brand-Product-Awareness increased at the rate of 31.5% among people seeing the Event, similarly and increase in Past-Four-Week-Purchase +90% and in increase of 81.8% Definitely-Will-Buy was recorded."

　

Client: Carter Wallace.


Brand: Dencorub & Dencorub Ice (Muscle Pain Relief).

Research: AGB.

"Quite dramatic increases in Prompted-Brand-Awareness and in the Past-Four-Week-Purchase and Next-Four-Week-Purchase-Intention (DWB) occurred amongst main grocery buyers. These range from 55.6% to 120%."

　

Client: Carter Wallace.


Brand: Nair Hair Remover.

Research: AGB.

　

"Research again indicates that those who saw the Event had greater levels of Brand-Advertising-Awareness +161.1%; Past-Purchase-Behaviour +100% and also Future-Purchase-Behaviour +60% over people not exposed."

　

Client: Carter Wallace.


Brand: Arrid Deodorant.

Research: AGB.

"Arrid’s participation within this Interactive Event again demonstrates the effectiveness of the Technique. All key measurements show positive improvements for those exposed versus people not exposed. Brand-Advertising-Awareness +200%; Past-Four-Week-Purchase +100% and Future-Purchase-Intent +66.6%.

　

Client: Carter Wallace.


Brand: Sun-In Hair Colour.

Research: AGB.

"Sun-In Hair Color benefits from exposure within the Interactive Event. Brand-Advertising-Awareness was increased by 366.6%; Purchase-in-Past-Four-Weeks +100%; and Future-Purchase-Intent +100%."

　

Client: Pork Promotion Council.


Brand: New Fashioned Pork.

Research: AGB.

"Grocery Buyers exposed to the Interactive Event showed higher Awareness +12.3%; higher Advertising Awareness +45.16%. They also had higher Past-Purchase patterns, 80% and higher figures for Purchase-Intent +36.3%.



Client: Sara Lee.


Brand: Hearty Fruit Muffins. (Frozen Bakery Goods).

Research: AGB.

"Grocery buyers who remembered seeing the Interactive Event showed a higher than average awareness of the product +30.9%, a high awareness of advertising at +83.3% and 100% increase in Future-Purchase-Intent.

　

Client: Unilever.


Brand: Streets Log Ice Cream Deserts.

Research: Martyn Research.

"Unprompted Brand-Awareness increased +8% amongst main grocery buyers who saw the Interactive Event and Purchase increased +80%; Advertising-Awareness increased 100% over people who had not see the Event."

　


　

　

Better Marketing Without Reform? - Forget it

The current state of Marketing is such that the need for change and "New Models" are desperately needed.

The trouble is the "New Models" will not prove to be financially sustainable without substantially changing the way advertising and media services are organised. The first thing we must do to start to tackle the problem is to embrace our lack of knowledge about the process of communication. We must allow outside organisations to question the fundamental ideas that shape current advertising. We must allow them to innovate and keep the money saved through innovation. That way there is a chance that advertising and marketing will keep improving without costing more. One thing is for sure. We can't carry on as we are.

Pretending that without reform our money will go further. This is definitely the time for creative innovation in Marketing, not the ridgid belief that Marketing and Advertising can still show us all the answers to our problems – it never has and it never will.

Our only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the Marketing values we have lived by in the past 30 years. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

So just when are we going to prick our bubble of denial?

Because the Advertising and Marketing world is living in a world of denial. They use rhetoric that blurs their perceptions and have become addicted to the world view it represents
At the same time reinforcing themselves by a stream of cheery models engaged in consumption and leisure, they shuttle from workstation to mall, increasingly insulated by a media consensus that leaves out the rest of the world. We have had a band of denial built around ourselves, thus this belief cost us the capacity to self-correct.

Thus this delusional self-image is finally catching up with us. And make no mistake marketing will benefit hugely when reality breaks through.

　

　

It is refreshing to hear more discussion around the shortcomings...

of social media rather than the constant proselytizing of a still baby-fresh and

misunderstood communication channel. However, possibly a more constructive way

of thinking about those shortcomings is to consider the growing gap in

expectations of what social media can and should achieve for a brand.

The IBM Institute of Business Value just published a study

comparing the differing perceptions of business leaders and consumers regarding

social sites. The most interesting find from the study was the ironic business

misperception that consumer's would rank discounts and purchase opportunities at

the bottom of their list of reasons to engage with a company's social site. It

actually ranks at the top of their list.

Companies need to design experiences that deliver tangible value in return

for customers' time, attention, endorsement and data. -IBM Institute of

Business Value.

Time and attention really are the currencies of our customers. Those expenses

are precious for them and they want something in return for it. Simply providing

conversation's will never be enough. No brand is interesting enough to entice

just by being available. Although the social space is cheaper, quicker, and

ever-present, a brand still needs to provide those nuggets of material value to

drive significant engagement.

And Interactive Communication does all that...and more! To discover more contact:

Paul Ashby on (UK) 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com. Cell 'phone 07586259605.

Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme.



Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess

of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield

record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due

The problem?....tomorrow never comes!! Our legacy to our successors should

not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and

Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the

scale of the challange.

If ad agencies want to regain their position as valued contributors to a company's success,

then they must also help their clients focus on promise

delivery. If agencies only care about making the promise and not about helping

ensure that the promise will be kept, then they are shirking their

brand-building job. It is, after all, the synergy between promise and

performance that represents ultimate success and that's true for the agency

and the client.

So is advertising dead/dying, or merely having temporary breathing problems?

I'm very Interested in learning what readers think.

The role of advertising has been diverted by new experts

to media buying, sales promotion, computer speak, direct marketing but in essence they are mere

variations of the same basic three-card trick! With the advent of the PC all

sorts of marketing emerges, again devised by those same experts who did not

know what they were doing from the beginning. Moreover, the illusion becomes

self-reinforcing. Those involved in the process sitting behind their computer

screens, no longer control the beast they have created.

Advertising breeds more advertising and the only people who win, in fact the

only people who have ever won, are the media owners which is precisely why the

media owners desperately do not want the system to change! But the system

relies entirely, as do all Ponzi schemes, on two assumptions, 1) That

advertising works, and 2) the assumption of continued growth, hence its inherent

instability. Once that growth is threatened the whole edifice collapses.

Marketing...a very simple and devastatingly effective swindle, but largely

invisible because it has become so deeply embedded in our culture. The

consequences of that swindle, the desperate need for economic growth together

with the environmental and cultural despoliation it engenders require some

radical thinking that one encounters nowhere in any of our Business Schools...or

elsewhere for that matter!

OK, so some people have question my assumption (?) that advertising doesn't

work, fortunately there is enough evidence supporting my claims and I will

commence to detail that evidence in future articles.For example:June 2005

issue of Harvard Business Review reporting on the effectiveness of 500 various

consumer and B2B marketing programs: 84% resulted in less market share, not

more Most customer acquisition efforts did not break even Fewer than 10% of

new products succeeded Most sales promotions were unprofitable Advertising

ROI was below 4% Doubling advertising expenditures for established products

increased sales just 1% - 2%

Showing the results of just one exposure to an interactive "Event" against the reach and frequency model of traditional advertiing.



Client: Reckitt & Colman.

Brand: Setamol 500

Category: Analgesic.

Research: AGB

"Findings from this Post Event Survey shows impressive increases in scores for those who saw the Event in comparison for those who did not. Results are consistently superior in all three key market measures: Prompted-Brand-Awareness +92.6%, Past-Four-Week-Purchase +47% and Definitely-Will-Buy +47%.

　

　

Client: Warner Lambert.

Brand: Listerine.

Product Category: Mouthwash

Research: Market Intelligence Corporation.

　

"Gains in all key measurements were recorded among consumers exposed to the newspaper interactive event, versus those not exposed. These gains were: Unaided Awareness 39%, Aided 11%, Past-Four-Week-Purchase 55% and Next-Purchase 97%. This translates in total market gain of 8% for Unaided-Awareness; 2% gain in Aided-Awareness; 11% increase in Past-Four-Weeks-Purchase and 19% in Brand-Next-Purchase."

　

　

Client: Warner Lambert.

Brand: Listerine.

In-Store Sampling Programme.

Research: Market Intelligence Corporation.

Research Protocol: Interactive Sampling was conducted in 6 stores with other 6 matched stores used as a control group where sampling was conducted without the interactive elements. Additionally, other stores that had no sampling programme at all were monitored. Purchase behaviour was monitored for three months. Actual inventory and cases sold were monitored.

"For the month of November (time of sampling and commencement of survey) an increase of 129% in actual purchase was obtained in those stores where the interactive sampling programme took place versus those (control) stores where the interactive sampling did not take place.

The average for the three month programme, November, December, January was a gain of 36% in purchase, versus those stores where the interactive programme was not held."

　

Client: Nestle.

Brand: Nescafe Excella Coffee.

Product: Instant Coffee.

Research: Market Intelligence Corporation.

"Substantial gains in all key measurements were recorded among those readers who were exposed to the interactive event versus those who were not. Unaided Awareness of the brand increased 19%; Aided-Awareness increased 10%; Past-Four-Week-Purchase increased 33% and Brand-Next-Likely increased 31%. In the total market these increases translated to a 4% increase in Unaided-Awareness; 2% increase in Aided-Awareness; 8% increase in Past-Four-Week Purchase and 8% increase in Future Purchase-Intent.

Follow-up programme in same publications seven months after above programme.

As a result of the feedback from the above programme, the creative was strengthened to focus on a secondary feature of the above. OpinionGram responses from this programme event suggested this repositioning.

"Increases in all key measurements were recorded: Unaided-Awareness + 60%; Aided-Awareness +8%; Past-Four-Week-Purchase +70% and Next-Brand-Purchase +54%.

The effect on the total market among those exposed versus not exposed was in the magnitude of: Unaided-Awareness +12%; Aided-Awareness +2%; Past-Four-Week-Purchase +15% and Brand-Will-Buy-Next =11%."

　

Free... As In Doughnuts



I know a guy who spends hours looking for illegal MP3s to avoid paying $.99

on iTunes. Some people are likely to prefer watching ads to paying for content

despite all the drawbacks. The point is not that advertising is

bad for everyone in every situation. But it is unfortunate that advertising is

so often seen as the best or only way to make money from digital wares.

It's worth remembering that ad-financed television came to the fore at a time

when no alternative would have been feasible. The technical challenges of the

day involved getting a decent picture on a 17" CRT without standing next to the set holding the

antenna all evening. Subscription or pay-per-view models were not in the cards. Now we have the

technology to meter and charge for content in many new ways, but we've gotten into the habit of

expecting TV shows to be free.

One of the quirks of human psychology is that, once we get used to free doughnuts, we are enraged

by the idea that we might have to pay for them.

If we succumb willingly to disfigured television shows, psychological

manipulation and higher prices on SUVs and shampoo so that we can avoid paying a

few dollars for entertainment and internet services, we have no one to blame but

ourselves. When the most frightening hoax imaginable is that Facebook

will start charging users, we can hardly blame them for slathering more and

more lucrative ads onto their website. It would be fantastic if creative types

were to look for less intrusive ways of financing their work. But that is

unlikely to happen until consumers start to realize that free is sometimes the

most expensive price of all. And best told by interactive communication!

More from the "Marketers rate below politicians..." research study.

The study's findings suggest that the ads that are more traditional -- and less able to track for

engagement using digital tools -- are actually the ones consumers say they prefer. The study found

that people prefer to view advertising in their favorite print magazine (45%) or while

watching their favorite TV show (23%). Only 2% stated that they prefer to view

ads via social media and 0% said they like ads in an app.

Companies investing in branded social-media sites should also pay attention

to this finding: Just 2% of respondents believe information about a brand from a

company's social-media site is credible
.

"Make no mistake, creativity will always be our calling card," Ms. Lewnes

said. "But digital has given marketers an opportunity to rewrite their roles.

Marketers today have access to technology that gives them critical data and

insights about their customers ... insights we can turn into more relevant,

high-impact marketing. People want messages and marketing that's more customized

to their needs. And businesses want to be able to measure the impact of their

marketing dollars. Digital gives you both. As an industry, we need to accelerate

the move to digital. Only then will we be able to get the respect and

credibility we deserve."

Considering the participants of this study aren't merely a cross-section of

average consumers but also include 250 top marketing professionals, it seems

imperative that the industry needs to start from within. How can you expect

folks to respect you if you don't respect yourself?

According to the study, the majority of consumers --53%-- stated that most

marketing is "a bunch of B.S." That's compelling evidence of a big reputational

challenge the industry must tackle, and fast.

The web has turned us all into liars

We pretend the web has opened up huge new advertising opportunities when we secretly know

that it has mostly been a dismal failure as an advertising medium. We cling to the few big successes

and argue from the extreme. We pretend we know how to "do it all", but we don't. We

pretend to be "media neutral" but secretly are either broadcast-centric, print-centric or web-centric.

When will we discover the real meaning of the word "communication" and start practicing real

interactive communication? Because that's what it's all about!

Consumers attitudes to digital advertising - a decline in response rates!

A new YouGov survey into the attitudes of consumers to digital advertising

has revealed some alarming trends around how the explosion of digital marketing

has jaded many consumers, and hinted that a shift in approach may be required by

digital marketers.

Marketing Tech contributor Marco Veremis is president at

UpStream, the digital response specialist that commissioned

the research, and a front runner in mobile and digital advertising for over a

decade. Speaking to him at the Mobile World Congress recently, we questioned him about the

interesting and alarming shift that's taken place over the last five years as

the numbers of digital ads being served every year rocketed from 150bn in 1996,

to a staggering five trillion today.

The effect, as one might expect, has been general desensitisation and a

decline in response rates. This is the worrying part,says Veremis.

Response used to be a healthy 7%, but today it's below 0.1%. And the

reaction of advertisers over the last five years has been, "well, my response

rates are declining, let's do more, more, more"

But more, more, more can be a risky strategy; not just because of the general

apathy and ad-blindness it lays on the average consumer. As fast as response

rates are declining, the number of consumers staying with a brand and not

actively opting out of communications is on the decline also.

Perhaps more worryingly, disgruntled consumers have the power to wreak havoc

and brand damage like never before. "If you asked asked people 40 years ago whether

they were getting too much advertising, the answer may well have been the same

as today, says Veremis. ,But today they have the ability to go online and be

vocally negative about that brand. So the negative impact is there, there is

such a thing as negative brand awareness.

On the face of it, running less advertising in a more targeted way would seem

the logical solution. A lot of companies have caught wind of this, but many

have fallen into another pitfall, personal data, says Veremis. How are you

targeting?

It's a pitfall elegantly demonstrated by the oft-cited case of the US teenage

girl, secretly searching Google for abortion information, whose family then

learns of her pregnancy through targeted pregnancy ads.

On the one hand you've got invasion of privacy, trying to be more targeted

and advertising less, says Veremis. On the other hand you've got massive

volume. Whereas the middle ground?

The interesting thing here is that none of these are traditional marketing

segmentation metrics that companies use.

Privacy has become more of an issue as people become more protective and

more vocal when it is violated, concludes Veremis. Targeting criteria should

change; one should look for the types of data that are perceived to be

non-intrusive.

However when you use interactive communication, properly executed, all your marketing becomes

totally unobtrusive and, at the same time, totally effective and accountable.

Social Media's Massive Failure

For several years there has been consensus among a very vocal and highly placed group of marketing executives and commentators that fundamental changes have taken place in our culture and in technology which render traditional modes of marketing communication no longer relevant or effective.

The thinking behind the hypothesis goes like this:
Marketing is a "conversation."
People are no longer willing to accept the "interruption" model of advertising.
The objective of marketing communication is for a brand to create "engagement" with consumers.
Traditional forms of advertising do not create engagement and have substantially outlived their usefulness.
The Internet has created an environment in which consumer control of his/her purchasing behavior is unprecedented.
Consumers are quickly moving away from brands that are obviously out to sell them something in favor of brands that seek to engage with them and have conversations.
Social media represents the most effective medium for engaging with consumers and having these conversations.
Among mainstream brands that have adopted this new marketing paradigm, none has been more zealous than Pepsi-Cola.

Last year, Pepsi substantially abandoned its long-standing commitment to traditional advertising in favor of social media. It canceled its annual Super Bowl advertising. It diverted tens of millions of dollars from traditional advertising to create the "Pepsi Refresh Project." Pepsi Refresh was an online social media initiative in which Pepsi gave out 20 million dollars. They also spent many millions more in support of this initiative.

I am pretty certain Refresh is the largest social media initiative ever undertaken. Never before, to my knowledge, has a brand taken so much of its traditional advertising money and energy and re-directed it into social media.

Most major brands have some kind of social media program. But never before, to my knowledge, has a major consumer brand made a social media program the centerpiece of its advertising and marketing.
"We took the divergent path," explained Frank Cooper, chief consumer engagement officer for Pepsi. "We wanted to explore how a brand could be integrated into the digital space."
The idea behind the program was that you, the consumer, got to engage with Pepsi by voting for the "Refresh" projects you deemed most worthy. There were also other opportunities to engage through an enormous online effort -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, website, blogs. Millions of dollars were also spent in what might be called "traditional advertising in support of social media."

Skeptics (such as yours truly) have been eagerly awaiting a report card on this initiative as it is the first real test case for a major brand implementing a massive transfer of marketing resources from traditional advertising to social media.

The results are now in. It has been a disaster.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Pepsi-Cola and Diet Pepsi had each lost about 5% of their market share in the past year.
If my calculations are correct, for the Pepsi-Cola brand alone this represents a loss of over $350 million. For both brands, the loss is probably something in the neighborhood of 400 million to half-a-billion dollars.
For the first time ever Pepsi-Cola has dropped from its traditional position as the number two soft drink in America to number three (behind Diet Coke.)
In 2010, Pepsi's market share erosion accelerated by 8 times compared to the previous year.
The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media program is expected to: Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million "likes" on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi.

It achieved all the false goals and failed to achieve the only legitimate one.

In reaction to this disaster, Massimo d'Amore, chief executive of PepsiCo Beverages Americas had this to say...
"When my ancestors went from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, they blew up the place, so that's what we are doing."
He also said...
"We need television to make the big, bold statement...
Social media has taken a huge hit. Only zealots and fools will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.

˜Advertising is failure,"

˜Advertising is failure," says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks' media only get in

the way of customer relationships. And indeed, how will you make more friends

at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says "I am a

great friend" or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers,

listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense

of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that's what we

should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity creating

publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.

William McEwen, authour of "Married to the Brand" and "Inside the Mind of the

Chinese Consumer", writes: "Agencies must recognize that advertising is neither

the outcome nor the objective. Advertising's job is to set the stage for an

actual customer experience. Then, the company's performance, the quality and

consistency of its products, and its human brand ambassadors will determine the

company's sustainable growth and enduring success. There is absolutely no value

in making a brand promise, however memorable it might be, if a company cannot or

will not keep it.

If ad agencies want to regain their position as valued contributors to a

company's success, then they must also help their clients focus on promise

delivery. If agencies only care about making the promise and not about helping

ensure that the promise will be kept, then they are shirking their

brand-building job. It is, after all, the synergy between promise and

performance that represents ultimate success and that's true for the agency

and the client.

So is advertising dead/dying, or merely having temporary breathing problems?

Interested to hear what readers think.

Paul Ashby @ paulashby40@yahoo.com

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world...

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world...

and, at the same time, discredited many of the ideas regarding advertising, marketing, consumers and society, that were taken for granted in the pre-crisis decades. Here nobody appears to see the crisis as an opportunity to build a new form of capitalism. Nobody seems to see that the future can be – and most certainly should be – better than the past.

Without a doubt the institutions discredited by the crisis can be replaced with something better, not merely patched up and restored. Corporations see the crisis entirely as a threat to established ways of life and modes of thinking. Nobody is presenting a vision, or even a credible thought, about how the crisis could produce a better tomorrow. The best that has been offered is a promise to clear up the mess created by previous corporations

. Without a doubt the new forms of advertising and marketing that must emerge from the crisis must be very different from the systems that were so badly damaged in the early 1980. The transformation will not just be a matter of rewriting some rules or replacing some incompetent people. It will mean changing the relationship between markets and consumers that has defined each successive version of marketing.

It is time to engage with citizens' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing and advertising suddenly revealed in 2008, the creation of an over informed society, clutter, lack of accountability, the Internet, Social Media and so on. Like all those packaged-up bundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising has no fundamental value. It was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30-second TV commercials!

The Clients spent so much money on advertising because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it was all just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true. In the years to come this advertising will be seen as the ultimate symbol of the economic fairyland we have been living through in the past fifteen years or so, an era in which the world lost touch with its sense of value. These were not masterpieces of advertising, they were the icons of idiocy.

By thinking seriously about such fundamental reforms, business leaders can engage with their customers' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing. The crisis has blown away the simplistic belief that the markets automatically produces the best possible outcomes and that we must always accept whatever social consequences market forces dictate.

Having invested over $10 million in independent research, Paul Ashby is ideally suited to present the case for the widespread use of interactive marketing communication. The research investment has proved conclusively that one exposure to an interactive "event" is far more effective in all key measurements, than traditional advertising. Paul made this investment because his company, Effective . Accountable . Communication is predicated on being totally accountable to its Clients. Discover more on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com You can contact Paul on: paulashby40@yahoo.com

Our form of interactive communication...

... dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive your commercials, instead of being seen as an interruption the commercials now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be known as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow InteractiveTV to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.Contact Paul Ashby on Tel: 01934 620047 or paulasyby40@yahoo.com

ACCOUNTABILITY AND INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION!

With corporations under increased pressure to show that every dollar they spend delivers results, marketing expenditures are now being held to the same level of accountability as other investments.

Clients expect to see detailed, quantifiable results for their marketing and advertising efforts that demonstrate a positive return on their investments.They want to know which elements of their marketing plan helped achieve their goals in the most efficient manner—and which did not—and be able to allocate their budgets on an ongoing basis accordingly.

This corporate attitude change comes just at a moment in time when advertisers face major challenges because:

Consumers are more difficult to reach than ever.

Reasons include:

Media options available to consumers have increased. Technologies that have been designed to suit consumers’ growing desire to be in control of what they see and hear have given consumers

the option to reject advertising messages.To determine what will yield the best results in planning their advertising efforts, advertisers and their agencies turn to research and analytic tools more and more to guide them in making decisions. However, the multitude of analytic options has led to confusion about what constitutes accountability and how to measure it.

With Interactive Communication, properly executed, this confusion ends and proper accountably exists. One exposure to an Interactive Programme is far more effective than "frequency" and allows Clients to cut, substantially, their heavy marketing expediture (s).

Click Fraud

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising.

He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers

rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid

Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur

believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when

prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he

has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as

Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers

customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S

Fleischmann is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and

deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all

sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's

advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and

Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.

The growing ranks of businesspeople worried about click fraud typically

have no complaint about versions of their ads that appear on actual Google or

Yahoo Web pages, often next to search results. The trouble arises when the

Internet giants boost their profits by recycling ads to millions of other sites,

ranging from the familiar, such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like

insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When

somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers such as MostChoice get billed,

sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from Mongolia. Google or Yahoo then

share the revenue with a daisy chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or

so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at

times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to

tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly

recycle ads.

SLIPPING CONFIDENCE

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either

don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed.

That confidence may be slipping. A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a

thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players,

making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of

members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and

dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits

automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of

making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't

receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they

claim. "It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out

of your wallet," says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they

dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months.

Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites

filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid

others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would

click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was "way too easy," he adds.

Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating

unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. "Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to

stop fraud], it's not having much of an effect," he says.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the

advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to

$29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc.

About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by

the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to "impressions," or how

many people view them.

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by

traditional print and broadcast outlets, based partly on the assumption that

clicks are a reliable, quantifiable measure of consumer interest that the older

media simply can't match. But the huge influx of cash for online ads has

attracted armies of con artists whose activities are eroding that crucial

assumption and could eat into the optimistic expectations for online

advertising. (Advertisers generally don't grumble about fraudulent clicks coming

from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. But there are growing concerns

about these media sites exaggerating how many visitors they have -- the online

version of inflating circulation.)

Most academics and consultants who study online advertising estimate that

10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual

billings. Usually the search engines divide these proceeds with several players:

First, there are intermediaries known as "domain parking" companies, to which

the search engines redistribute their ads. Domain parkers host "parked" Web

sites, many of which are those dummy sites containing only ads. Cheats who own

parked sites obtain search-engine ads from the domain parkers and arrange for

the ads to be clicked on, triggering bills to advertisers. In all, $300 million

to $500 million a year could be flowing to the click-fraud

　

Negative consumer attitudes toward advertising...

 ... "remain the single biggest barrier to improving return on investment for marketing spending. Until we get better at engaging consumers, they're going to continue to push back and resist what advertisers are trying to deliver to them.

Several common barriers prevent companies

 keeping open channels of communication and using them to good effect. The most frequently cited are inefficient systems and processes, named by 47% of companies, workload pressure (38%) and budget (35%).

Last year, 60% of businesses cited budget as a reason for lacking an engagement strategy. Only 11% of companies now name it as the main barrier, putting it fourth in this year’s study.
Email is the second most commonly used communication channel for the purpose of customer engagement, with two-thirds of companies citing it. From some of the research we have seen in the past, people do not see that as a good way for a brand to engage them.”
Communication channels
Top of the list of commonly used communication channels for the purpose of customer engagement are websites, used by 75% of brands, while PR and advertising are joint third, with 57% of respondents claiming that they use these methods.
The high placing of these last two channels might suggest that marketers are failing to link their engagement strategies with the key elements of listening to and acting on customer comments since PR and advertising are more likely to be methods which push out messages to people rather than ones that encourage feedback.
Many companies perhaps still take this one-way ’broadcast’ approach to their customer communications. Brands often find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of comments and find it difficult to respond to each directly. In many cases, there is almost too much information, and brands and companies find it difficult to react to it.”
It is unsurprising, therefore, that companies that use social media to engage with customers prioritise monitoring comments and making company announcements ahead of creating a dialogue.
Using Shopper's Voice allows you to keep open channels of communication and using them to good effect. Thus ensuring that there is regular and constant involvement with your on-line and off-line marketing programmes.
Contact paulashby40@yahoo.com or call (0044) 01934 620047 or visit interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com