Showing posts with label Marketing-IT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing-IT. Show all posts

6.7.20

Tough Enough| Dell

This particularly audience-focused campaign from 2014 led by Mediacom, born out of the need for Dell to build brand trust in Germany, led to the realization that the tech giant had been making false assumptions about its target market.
Dedicating a significant amount of their time to audience research, the creative Medicom team discovered that most IT decision-makers actually relied on an informal network of IT Administrator colleagues to make a purchasing decision.
Using this insight to refocus their marketing, they uncovered a clear frustration among their target market with computer illiterates.
The message was simple: “Life is tough enough, take IT easy”.
Launching a powerful, content-driven campaign, it consisted of a 16-webisode sitcom honouring the heroes of the IT department and recounting tales of day-to-day struggles that only their target audience would understand, resulting in an abundance of targeted leads.
“The Dell ‘Tough Enough’ campaign was so successful because, rather than talking to the target audience about servers or back-end infrastructure, we created branded content that entertained them while still enabling them to relate to the brand”.
“We made them laugh and, most importantly, we also made it easy for them to share their own stories.”

8.10.16

Customer Experience, listen, indulge and embrace

Or as we call it in branding “ Brand offering “ … the unique selling proposition 

Brand Promise

Because we know how important it is to get your food on time…
If we are more than 30 minutes late on your confirmed order  time , your order is FREE….
"we delay, we pay”. 

Why:

It's the tangible benefit that makes a product or service desirable. And assures  brand stand out position in online food delivery spectrum in KSA

Who:

A practice embedded in each policy and procedure of brand daily operations.

Where

Manifested in operations , monitored and controlled by customer service  after the set procedure is confident in its abilities and has developed a controllable and consistent customer experience

When

  • First 30 days,  internal and external communications + penalties funded by marketing budget
  • Next 30 days customer care will fund
  • Final 30 days and forward each team member fail the promises will pay for the order value.

Worldwide practice

  • FedEx —when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.
  • Careem — if we are late on your airport trip, its free
  • Apple — Own the coolest, easiest-to-use cutting-edge phones, computers and other consumer electronics
  • McKinsey & Company — Hire the best minds in management consulting
  • Lynda.com — High-quality training that’s affordable and convenient
  • IDEO — Industrial design for companies that want to innovate

Industry: Food & Beverage, QSR, Online food order application
Brand: Local, 9 months since launch.
County: Saudi Arabia
Date: September 2016 

30.8.14

Intel | Your World

Insight

For Intel, its 18 to 34-year old target audience comprises of major technology consumers. However Intel is an enabling ingredient - it’s the unseen bit inside - and so doesn’t significantly influence their purchase decisions. OMD needed to show the potential Intel had to enrich their lifestyle and passions.
The agency knew that Intel’s audience (like most consumers) love sport and music. Not hugely ground-breaking insights, true, but what it also discovered through further digging was the audiences’ passion for testing the limits and exploring what is possible with their technical devices. 
This empowering consumer insight  gave OMD permission, in tandem with its new communication strategy of “Look Inside” to shift the focus from “showing what Intel make” to “showing what Intel makes possible” – bringing a new richness around the activities the audiences love – music, sport, fashion and the outdoors.
The second media insight was that The Feed is dying a slow death. With Facebook and Twitter at an average engagement rate of 1%, down from 16% last year, anyone who publishes or reads content on Facebook and Twitter has a cluttered and less engaging experience. What does this mean for brands like Intel who have invested heavily, for many years, in this form of publishing and in content creation yet feels let down by The Feed?

Strategy

Working in collaboration with OMD’s sport and entertainment marketing division and partner creative agencies, social analysis identified pioneering influential individuals within the music, sport, fashion and outdoor areas, and negotiated ground-breaking collaborations. The agency invited these Influencers to explore exciting collaborations with Intel’s engineers, providing them with the support and technology to create products that push the creative boundaries.
The first collaboration launched in early 2013 with fashion designer Christian Joy who created her ‘super guitar-licks rock star jacket’ – a wearable tech light-show that responds to the guitarist’s pedal. The programme has since developed to include influencers such as singer-songwriter Imogen Heap who worked with Intel to invent a running app in which the music keeps pace with the runner’s speed, drawing in ambient sound from the runner’s environment; and Olympic & World triathlon champions, the Brownlee brothers who with the help of Ultrabook and Intel engineers, ‘gamified’ their repetitive training routine, enabling them to race against a virtual, hybrid Super Brownlee.
Each influencer has added something unique making the programme bigger and better, culminating with our biggest influencer to date – Ben Saunders who attempted to cover the longest unsupported polar expedition in history – which launched in October 2013 across 13 EMEA markets. Ben worked with Intel engineers to ensure his Ultrabook functioned at minus 50 degrees centigrade to help him communicate with the outside world from the middle of nowhere.
The campaign was extended to Intel.com, with a dedicated hub documenting the progress of each Influencer through video, images and other content. For the media insight, OMD recognised the gap in engagement and sought to find better content partners that could distribute this extraordinary content via a new network of native content partners to reach, engage, and drive consumers to sale.

Execution

The paid media strategy was simple but dogged: The right content. The right place. The right audience. If it could do this with low levels of paid media, earned media would grow exponentially, so OMD focused on three objectives  – engaging advocates; converting interest and creating buzz.
As a result, the planning execution was bespoke to each collaboration – each plan tailored to build on the passion points and the existing equity each Influencer already had, carefully crafting media to allow the paid media to drive further organic growth by embedding it within the social environments both they and the target audience inhabit.
For all campaigns Intel used Facebook, but targeted the passion verticals as well as existing fans. For Christian Joy it targeted Fashion and Technology verticals; for Imogen Heap it targeted Music and Technology verticals; for Brownlee Brothers it targeted Sports and Technology and for Ben Saunders targeted Outdoor activities and Technology.
Intel also used additional channels and media owners specific to their vertical. For Christian Joy it worked with eBuzzing to excite and engage fashion bloggers; for Imogen Heap it worked with Spotify to target listeners through banner advertising; for Brownlee Brothers it used Promoted Tweets and utilised OMD’s RTB tool, targeting sports fans to build a cost efficient long tail hosting content; and for Ben Saunders it partnered with Discovery Channel to share campaign content to an engaged tech influencer audience. Finally the agency worked with Buzzfeed to create bespoke posts and editorial series “#Mindblowing facts” – a media first.

Results

The success in using low levels of paid media to catalyse earned media has seen strong results across the 13 markets, delivering a truly geo-wide campaign delivering against all campaign objectives.
• In one month Buzzfeed delivered 87k engagements (page views), 18k social engagements achieving a 1.3X Social Lift – for every 10 people who saw the content from paid media, an additional three people saw the content as a result of sharing. That's equivalent to 30% earned media
• Facebook delivered over 400m impressions - 21% of which were earned impressions
• 55% of the 1m YouTube videos were earned views
• The Intel.com Shop page, where laptops are bought from, recorded an increase in purchase engagement rate from 25% to 40% and 74,000 visits were driven to Intel.com from Facebook
• Over 1.7M actions have been generated (shares,likes, retweets and comments)
• Over 120,000 new Facebook fans and Twitter followers were acquired organically, creating a 1:3 ratio of earned media to paid media overall.
The past year has been a chance for Intel’s social fans to inspire and be inspired by what is ‘inside’ Intel’s products, and to add to Intel’s ever-growing image as a company that innovates and makes new things possible.
BRAND:
Intel
CATEGORY:
Computer/Software
REGION:
Czech Republic[
France
Germany
Hungary
Italy
The Netherlands
Poland
Romania
Russia
Spain
Sweden
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
DATE:
June 2013 - March 2014
AGENCY:
OMD
MEDIA CHANNEL:
Digital,Integrated,Online

Cxense | Cxense boosts hyperlocal targeting capabilities

Insight

Widespread use of centralised web traffic hubs in the Nordic region has traditionally limited the value of advertising geotargeting technologies in the area. Leading ad serving technology provider, Cxense, is now breaking the mould, using an IP geotargeting solution from Digital Element to improve granularity by over 110% and eliminate holes in coverage – resulting in significantly higher revenues for its customers’ ad campaigns.
Online geotargeting in the Nordic region is notoriously difficult due to the common practice of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) routing large numbers of IP addresses through centralised hubs, a practice known as ‘backhauling’. Unsophisticated geolocation methodologies can be misled by this practice, resulting in a disproportionate number of IP address locations being incorrectly geolocated to a centralised hub, rather than the location where the device actually connects to the publicly-routable internet.
For Cxense, ad serving technology provider, the issue of tracing an IP address back from the centralised hub to the ISP end-point was not completely resolved with their previous IP geolocation provider. Cxense, which handles more than 45 billion ad impressions per month, recognised that, with improved data granularity and city-level accuracy, it could serve more relevant ads and generate higher Click-Through Rates (CTRs) and revenue for its advertising clients.

Strategy

After an extensive evaluation process of several IP geolocation solutions, Cxense chose Digital Element’s NetAcuity Edge technology for its hyperlocal targeting capabilities.

Execution

By integrating the NetAcuity Edge technology into its ad serving platform, Cxense is able to address the challenges associated with online ad geotargeting in the Nordics. While less sophisticated IP targeting techniques rely on routing infrastructure analysis and are degraded by backhauled traffic, NetAcuity Edge combines traditional infrastructure analysis with anonymous insight gleaned from a network of global commercial partners to provide a more granular and accurate response at a hyperlocal level (city and postcode), while still maintaining user anonymity and complying with the highest standards of end-user privacy. Now publishers, using EmediateAd from the Cxense Advertising suite, can assure its advertisers that it is utilising the most accurate and granular hyperlocal dataset available and that their ads are reaching users in the right geographic locations throughout the entire Nordic region and beyond.

Results

By deploying Digital Element’s IP geolocation technology, Cxense’s local advertising capabilities have become significantly more precise, and the company now delivers the Nordic region’s most granular and accurate geotargeted ads. With a rate of 100% country-level accuracy, 98% region-level accuracy and 97% city-level accuracy, Cxense’s geotargeting solution delivers fewer blank spots, more impressions, higher CTRs and, ultimately, increased revenues for its customers’ ad campaigns.
To measure the success of the deployment, Cxense compared before and after geotargeting data* across four different countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland – with staggering results: 
Denmark:
- Average increase in cities identified: 114%
- Average decrease in ad impressions served to visitors in unknown locations: 99.6%
- Average decrease in inventory delivered to unknown locations: 99.3%
Sweden:
- Average increase in cities identified: 146%
- Average decrease in ad impressions served to visitors in unknown locations: 99.1%
- Average decrease in inventory delivered to unknown locations: 99.9%
Norway:
- Average increase in cities identified: 131%
- Average decrease in ad impressions served to visitors in unknown locations: 98.1%
- Average decrease in inventory delivered to unknown locations: 97%
Finland:
- Average increase in cities identified: 157%
- Average decrease in ad impressions served to visitors in unknown locations: 97.8%
- Average decrease in inventory delivered to unknown locations: 97.6%
Percentage change in geotargeting data accuracy by country

By deploying Digital Element’s NetAcuity Edge geotargeting technology within its leading-edge advertising platform, Cxense is charting new ground for the future of successful advertising campaigns across the Nordics.   
BRAND:
Cxense
CATEGORY:
Internet
REGION:
Norway
DATE:
1
MEDIA CHANNEL:
Online

13.5.10

Steve Jobs.. dont speak your mind OFF!










Two weeks ago, Steve Jobs published his now infamous “Thoughts on Flash” memo on Apple.com. Adobe has now responded with its own message, a message of “love,” “choice” and “open markets.”
In addition to the post on its own website, Adobe has also placed display ads (created in Flash, naturally) on Engadget and The New York Times, and taken out a full-page ad in The Washington Post outlining its position and what it thinks consumers should know.

 “Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”





While Apple simply posted a link to its “Thoughts on Flash” memo on the front page of its website, Adobe is going to much greater lengths to get its side of the story out.






Our thoughts on open markets

Screenshots of the ad banners that are appearing on sites across the web:
























Adobe’s Founders Speak




Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, Adobe’s founders, also penned their own letter, “Our thoughts on open markets”:
“The genius of the Internet is its almost infinite openness to innovation. New hardware. New software. New applications. New ideas. They all get their chance.
As the founders of Adobe, we believe open markets are in the best interest of developers, content owners, and consumers. Freedom of choice on the web has unleashed an explosion of content and transformed how we work, learn, communicate, and, ultimately, express ourselves.
If the web fragments into closed systems, if companies put content and applications behind walls, some indeed may thrive — but their success will come at the expense of the very creativity and innovation that has made the Internet a revolutionary force.
We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.
When markets are open, anyone with a great idea has a chance to drive innovation and find new customers. Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.
That, certainly, was what we learned as we launched PostScript® and PDF, two early and powerful software solutions that work across platforms. We openly published the specifications for both, thus inviting both use and competition. In the early days, PostScript attracted 72 clone makers, but we held onto our market leadership by out-innovating the pack. More recently, we’ve done the same thing with Adobe® Flash® technology. We publish the specifications for Flash — meaning anyone can make their own Flash player. Yet, Adobe Flash technology remains the market leader because of the constant creativity and technical innovation of our employees.
We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.
In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.
Chuck Geschke, John Warnock
Cofounders
Chairmen, Adobe Board of Directors.”

The “Truth” About Flash

Adobe has also created a site (oddly not in Flash) that aims to set the record straight about Flash. The first thing you’ll notice is a big graphic that shows off Flash’s impressive reach across the web.










I don’t think that anyone would argue with the figures that Adobe has put out — the current dominance, or ubiquity, of Flash has never been the issue. Instead, the discussion has centered around which technologies will lead in the future, especially on mobile and CULV devices.
Most of Adobe’s responses to other areas of concern — including video, performance, touch and security — are more about what is being promised with Flash Player 10.1 and less about the issue at hand.
Flash Player 10.1 is arguably the most anticipated Flash release in Adobe’s history. It promises to bring Flash support to ARM devices — meaning that some Android phones like the Nexus One will be able to get what Adobe calls the “full Flash experience” — and hardware acceleration for video playback for more devices, which should improve overall performance and battery life.
We know Adobe is really excited about Flash 10.1, as it should be, because it’s shaping up to be a great release. However, we can’t help but be bothered by a rebuttal that essentially says, “all of this will be fixed with the next release,” especially when we’ve been waiting for this release for a really long time — a time during which content publishers have started to embrace alternative technologies.


Note:::   Adobe Responds to Apple... With A Banner Campaign ,banners are in Flash, so they can't be viewed on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.


Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Client:Adobe




Date: May 13, 2010

27.7.09

Why You Need Marketing More Than Ever


by Alyssa Dver

A good marketer is hard to find - and worth paying for

"I consume; therefore I can market." Many people underestimate what marketing is and can do for a business. It would seem strange for someone to say, "I use a computer; therefore I can program." Nevertheless, many technology experts seem to regard marketing with apathy, if not out-and-out suspicion.

Techies often identify marketers as accomplices to the function that shall not be named: sales. Both sales and marketing are often viewed by engineering types as unnecessary, intellectually restricted, and just plain evil. Maybe that is because marketing is seemingly void of scientific explanation and often unclear in its cause and effect. However, consider that without sales and marketing, software is quite literally invisible bits.

So, let's briefly discuss what marketing really is and why it is important to software businesses.

First, here's a practical definition of marketing:

Marketing identifies, attracts, fosters, and retains qualified sales leads.

The continuity implied here is that marketing is responsible for finding precisely who will buy the software, enticing them to consider buying it, and then helping them consummate the purchase. As such, the objective of marketing is:

To profitably find prospects and then help them make efficient buying decisions.

The words "profitable" and "efficient" are key, because they imply that marketing doesn't count if it uses too much time or too many resources. So how does marketing avoid wasting time and resources?

To begin with, it must obtain a body of knowledge that will help to make defensible marketing plans. More specifically, that body of knowledge starts with marketers understanding the demographics and psychographics of buyers, users, and influencers. This helps narrow down the target segment and make it easier to position the product to reach the target audience with relevancy.

Next, marketers must thoroughly understand the buying process: who is involved, what steps occur, and how long the process takes. Marketers use this knowledge to effectively support the prospects' buying cycle and, ideally, shorten and optimize it.

Third, it is imperative that marketers know where prospects feed - that is, where they get information. This means they must know the media, events, and other places in which information about your type of product might be shared (formally or informally). Examples might be associations, conferences, meet-up groups, blogs, and LinkedIn groups, as well as which thought leaders influence target buyers. This information obviously affects the places and methods used to educate and market to the target audience to let them know about your software and its applicability to their lives.

Clearly it's important for marketers to be knowledgeable about competing vendors, but many of them don't make the most of that intelligence. Marketers should know not just the obvious offerings, the ones that are similar to yours, but also the products that yours might replace in function and/or budget.

And certainly, in terms of competition, pricing is not just a tool for profit management; it also works for positioning a product and sometimes even to help qualify appropriate buyers. (Sure, we all want to drive a Mercedes, but we aren't all qualified.)

The most amorphous area of expertise is predicting market trends and future marketing opportunities. Marketers should be able to assess major technological, social, and economic trends in their target markets and consider how much these may affect the business, whether positively or negatively.

One of the more challenging aspects of marketing is figuring out the balance between push marketing - generating awareness of the company and product with the target market - and pull marketing - retaining qualified leads and bringing them closer to the buying decision. Sorting and assessing which programs will generate desired results is not an easy task for any marketer, especially when budgets are limited and time is of the essence.

Why Do They Call It a Campaign?

Once all of these areas are known (which may be easier said than done), marketing's strategic plan and the tactical execution of that plan become based less on guesswork and more on math. For example, knowing what the close rate is per number of generated, qualified leads will allow marketers to better plan programs with which they can fulfill the needs of the sales pipeline and then measure the effectiveness of the programs as they are in process. Depending on the campaign (and the marketer), measurement may not be all that easy (or even possible).

To help manage the innate invisibility of marketing, lead tracking systems can help. Even simplistic ones done with Excel or ACT! can be better than using nothing. Knowing what leads are coming from where, and what happens to them when they go off to sales or a partner, can make or break a marketer's career. He or she may be generating terrific buzz and activity, but that may be moot if there is no way to demonstrate it in terms of marketing's cost-effectiveness, let alone its ability to deliver enough qualified leads.

Perhaps the toughest aspect of marketing today is filtering out the noise and figuring out what works for a specific business. Twitter is great, but not in all cases. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might not even apply to a business, and if it does, what's the right amount of sizzling Flash and boring old (but searchable) HTML on your website?

And speaking of websites, I contend that writing something pithy and captivating is much harder than writing something that is lengthy and educational. Whitepaper or brochure? Demo or narrated PowerPoint? You get the picture. Making defensible, measurable, and yet creative decisions is what makes marketing something not everyone can do - or at least do well.

Marketing is a professional discipline, and, like any other, it requires schooling, degrees, professional training, and ongoing personal education as new technologies and techniques emerge. Moreover, marketing isn't about any one tactic, such as social media, SEO, or direct mail. This is why experience helps, and makes all the difference when resources are scant and the marketing department may be, at best, one full-time person.

Knowing how to write a well-crafted press release for SEO, as well as attracting target readers, is no small thing. Writing the proper survey questions so that the answers are clean and not accidentally skewed is not an intuitive talent. Just try pitching media or crafting a positioning message if you have never done it - it's kind of like writing unintentional, self-referencing code.

So before we throw marketing under the SaaS, Agile, or Web2.0 buses, let's just keep in mind that marketing never was, isn't, and never will be easy& even for really smart marketers. Given the challenges of doing more with less, the answer isn't to cut marketing or use an inexperienced intern. You always get what you pay for, and if you cut corners on marketing, your customers probably won't pay at all. Marketing isn't a necessary evil; it's a scientific art form that can help make scary code attractive to the right buyers.

Formerly a CMO for a public company, Alyssa Dver is chief executive of Mint Green Marketing, which consults for companies ranging from large multinationals to small startups. She is the author of No Time Marketing and Software Product Management Essentials.

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