Lights On : Lights Off


Erik Hauser 2.10.13

Understanding The Consumers' Daily Journeys To Seemingly Optimize Opportunity

Demographics, Psychographics, Impressions (Burning Eyeballs) - these tried and true measuring sticks along with several others have served as the timeless units of measurements to satisfy clients' seemingly, unquenchable thirst for quantifiable analytics, and all other known positives that their advertising efforts yield. At first, these were enough. Since the onset of these, now mostly antiquated, tracking processes and protocols seemed to once add a reasonable expectation of accuracy. Thus, enabling agencies and advertisers alike to track the overall effectiveness of their ad dollars in the analog age as we all began to slowly make our way towards all things digital.

Boy, have times changed!

As the clients' thirst for analytics became seemingly unquenchable - it also became obvious that this once niche field (analytics), inside the world of marketing, had to vastly expand its capabilities and continually innovate to keep the faucet of advertising dollars flowing in an economy that had not until recently become somewhat buoyant.

This matter required agencies to conduct an entire re-think on this ever growing important subject. Moreover, it required a complete acculturation of all thought pertaining to how and what marketers were doing and not doing. Enabling agencies the ability to formulate a 100% defensible position in the world of analytics when it came to the holy grail of track-ability as pertaining to ROI,ROE and every other kitchy name that's been bought forth.. We've seen the (E) take on the meaning of everything from - Return On Experience, Return On Everything, Return On Enticements - you get the picture.

The client sides' unending need for granularity opened up new realms of understanding and yielded undeniably better techniques and metrics for tracking their measurement needs. Ever since the notion of ROI and onset of measuring ROI came into existence - there's been a myriad of formulations . These formulas are what ultimately comprised what is now deemed the holistically unsatisfactory, deficient and inadequate traditional metrics dashboard. Although the dashboard provided a foundation for standardization - it’s as moot today as anyone that's pontificating about the world being flat.

No longer do the concepts of things like burning eyeballs, impressions, demographics, psychographics etc. even come close to the level of sophistication necessary to meet today's clients' expectations.

Today, in order to exceed clients' expectations, as a marketer, one needs to understand their intended audiences behavior from the moment they open their eyes until the minute that they turn off the lights to go to bed.

How does one meet this extremely raised bar of expectations? Well, originally, agencies went so far as to make arrangements with consumers to have "social anthropologists" live alongside them in their daily lives and have the consumers try to act as if they weren't there. This, in hindsight, was the beginning of building the foundational layer for a vast methodology and way of thinking that would ultimately open the door to begin to give us the greatest understanding of all re: consumers' behaviors from lights on until lights off.

The greatest knowledge that we can use to insure that we are optimizing our external marketing initiatives and every other touchpoint is to fully believe and practice in the art of the "consumer journey". This allows us to utilize our deep understandings and up-close perspective to the consumer. Their individual decision making behaviors as well as the key drivers for their behaviors. These, of course, are all dependent on each consumers' individual situation.

For example, if a consumer has a certain HH income of X, the consumer has Y # of kids and they are most heavily influenced by their significant other. We, as marketers, can turn to our vast databases and new methodologies as well as our innate understanding of consumer behavior. This allows us the ability to construct a nana-focused campaign that insures we deliver the correct message via the the correct medium at the correct time. Thereby, greatly increasing our clients' chances of keeping them as a consumer or , even better, converting them into one and grabbing additional marketshare in their particular vertical.

It's a long way from saying X percentage of people saw your ad on TV. The before mentioned practical application of deploying consumer journey work allows marketers to do things that they could have never even imagined before.

And as we continue to evolve. On the rise now, is the re-focusing (commonly called re-targeting) but i HATE the word target as it makes me cringe. But, by extremely deep understanding of the consumers' behaviors and journeys doesn't fully complete the task - this new field is popping up to insure that there is zero margin for not being able to help our clients systematically attain their goals.

When all is said and done. We create positive brand experiences where and when our clients' audiences will be most receptive to wanting to receive and participate in any modality by delivering the highest perceived value proposition. Leaving everyone happy and our GDP on the rise.

And we can all agree that the GDP needs to start heading North!

It's a Digital World - Oxygen Optional

Erik Hauser

Jay-Z, the lyrical genius - among other things, famously uttered one of his trademarked coined phrases that re-contextualized an every day saying. A saying that we’re very used to hearing in today’s pop culture. The awe-inspiring, soul awakening Jay-Z phrase that I’m referencing is, “ I’m not a business man - I’m A BUSINESS man - let me handle my business damn.” Jay-Z showed that a simple turning of a phrase can change the entire meaning if it’s existence. Likewise, the intent of this article is to have the same dramatic effect - it’s certainly not intended to reinforce the subtle nuances of our current, perceived, “digital world”. It’s to serve as a wake up call that, collectively, we’re absolutely no longer simplistically, incrementally trolling along at a normal pace into the vast, digital frontier. We’ve reached the speed of light screaming into a world where we don’t simply perform digital marketing. The new reality, “ The entire world is a “digital world” deeply embedded inside of an oxygenated world. A world, for the most part, where the myriad of non-digital communications and delivery mechanisms have become the exception to the rule.”

“We’ve, as a society, journeyed prodigious distances from performing the tasks involved in digital marketing to marketing fully immersed in a “digital world.”

” I’m talking about the uber-violent, cataclysmic, earth shaking, tectonic plate crushing transmogrification of our new digital existence - we’ve left the “snails’s pace” of the analog world somewhere beyond in the distances of our rearview mirrors. We’ve literally shifted from the dawn of digital to being fully engulfed in a world in which digital is a foregone conclusion.

So, let’s somehow find a way to draw this back to be relatable to the agency world. It’s not a question of if a successful agency has a digital presence, but just how large the agency’s presence is outside of it’s digital core. Furthermore, it begs the question, does the agency’s entire staff have a deep understanding of just how radically the ground has shifted underneath their feet? To be safe, for those that aren’t keeping up with the pace - please hold on to the grass so that you don’t drift off the earth.

The recent proliferation of technology has been at a rate that’s never been seen before in human history. The rate of adoption for these technological advances has grown exponentially by a factor of more than 40x.

Let me rewind this and slow it down a bit.........

With the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s we had a brilliant time in human discovery as technological advances were being made on an hourly basis. However, these discoveries were quietly being discovered and further cultivated in the back rooms in the silicon valleys that reside across the world. Through the lens of the consumer - it was almost as if all of the manufacturers were partaking in some sort of collusion and systemically and simultaneously releasing the same technology at a digestible pace. Thereby allowing the consumption rate of technology to be deemed healthy. But, if one looked closely they could have forecasted what was to come. In a world where everyone has, basically, the same devices - eventually speed to market is going to become one of the ultimate, salient differentiators. This was, for the most part, foreseeable except for the revolutionary ideas that were hidden in genius of geniuses Steve Job’s mind.

I vaguely recall the days of the 8-track. I recall the frustration of my John Travolta and Olivia Newton John Grease 8-track continuously getting stolen from my mom’s 79’ Toyota Corolla. Then, I distinctively recall when I decided to reluctantly move by transitioning my enormous tape collection over to the new format that was based on the actual the digitizing of the music and putting it onto cylindrical discs. The process of digitizing music actually entails breaking up the individual song into thousands of digital pieces that when put back together- make the one individual song. This, of course, outraged music’s purists like Neil Young while enticing the musical layman to reach deeper into their wallets to upgrade to the “latest and the greatest”

I won’t jump too deep into the Beta vs. VHS discussion. I’ll only say that throughout history whichever medium porn has chosen - wins the race - regardless if it’s the better technology or not. Take a second to really think about that. It’s sad but true.

 Eventually, a small company named AOL single handily began to fill our mailboxes with an entrance to something known as the world wide web. For a brief moment in time the entire country thought that the internet was AOL, and then because the emergence of Netscape confusion set in between what was a browser and what was a service provider. In any case, a bunch of super smart coders figured out how to take a bunch of code and turn it into a somewhat easy to interact with UI. And, for the record, what dramatically increased the usage of the WWW?

And the story goes on and on and on - I’m trying to stay limited to about 1,000 words.

Every company and everyone held on while the pace of technology being brought to us began to increase dramatically. Everyone was still holding on to the same system until a group of radical, rule breakers came along and began to bring technological advances to the thirsty consuming public as we, in hindsight, technologically progressed more in ten years then in the last one hundred. The emergence of digital music came front and center and then quickly behind that came a peer to peer file service known as Napster that blurred the lines of what was borrowing and what was stealing. It was at this very point where the recording industry got caught with their pants down in the rain. They would spend the next ten years agonizingly watching their business model crumble before their very eyes.

It wasn’t long before Steve Jobs was on the scene creating radical inventions like the Ipod that completely changed the consumers’ behaviors of how we consumed music. And where was the technological adoption rate at this point? There were 10 million VCR’s sold in 20 years - there was 20 million Ipods sold in 5 years. At this point in time we began to move so quickly that a strong breeze began to blow through our hair. Of course, the Ipod was just the first radical innovation as Steve Jobs decided to drop the word computer from the company’s name as they began to transcend any one market and simply became a lifestyle company meeting the needs of a public so thirsty that they were waiting for days outside of the Apple retail stores for the next device.

While Steve Jobs was busy building his own proprietary ecosystem, along emerged companies that began to change the denotation of the word community by building on-line platforms that allowed to take the experience taking place in the physical space and bring it on-line. These new technologies began to test long standing theories like Dunbar’s number which states that a human being can mange 140 relationships at one time. As the average Facebook user has 400 friends - the denotation and connotation of what it meant to be a friend.

And as all of these magical things are happening - the delivery mechanisms for which we receive and interpret all this data like PCs, smart phones and tablets are coming to market so quickly that by the tie that you buy the latest and the greatest - the news hits the wire that the next generation of the device will be out in a few months.

So - here we are. Buying technology that’s nearly obsolete by the time that we take it out of the box - is that fast enough for you? But is that what it’s all about? Sort of. I say sort of because the shear amount of technology and technological devices that exist in the physical space have taken the majority of our mind share.

How many people are actually fully present where they’re physically standing? And, how many people are looking across the restaurant and noticing that nobody is looking directly at each other, but noticing their all enthralled with their piece of technology firmly planted in their hands.

We’ve reached the point where the vast majority of people are mentally engaged in the digital world while their body is existing in the physical world.

Bringing me to my point. While we’re all still breathing oxygen and falling to sleep and waking on planet earth. The minute that our day gets started - we get transported into the digital world that we spend the majority of our hours engaged in.

Once again bringing back to the agency world. Hopefully there is a broad based understanding that in order to reach someone one must reach them where they are. And, while they used to be holistically located in the physical space.

Today they reside, mostly, in a world that’s digital. Soon, on the horizon, is technology like SPIME - which will completely blur the lines of the digital and physical spaces much like, in the days of old, we allowed things like music and movies to temporarily allow us to suspend belief to take us to another world. Now, that other world is first, and you’re going against the grain if you mentally spend your days in the world with oxygen.

The ramifications of all this for agencies is endless. I’d go on, but I want to keep some of my understanding of consumer behaviors secrets close to my chest so that my agency wins the foot race and grabs the market share. Because much like the technology race itself - agency’s speed of understanding this new technological norm is what serves as a strong, salient differentiator between ad shops. And if I haven’t welcomed you. Welcome to the brand new, digital world. How you get here is irrelevant as it will change as quickly as the seasons. As corporations keep refining the experience of separating us from our money.

Codification & Finality Of The Journey Through The Liminal Period Into Another Golden Age

Erik Hauser 1.29.13 

In the 1980‘s, if you decided that you wanted to blink then you may have missed a mere mili-second of the reality that existed outside the darkness of your closed eyelids.  In 2013, blinking can cause you to miss beautiful, cataclysmic or space/time continuum defying acts.  The world is moving much faster than we even thought.  

It’s not just me saying that - if you listen and/or talk to any talented cosmologist or quantum physicist - they’ll tell you that many of the unknowns in the world of science are dropping like flies and that the emergence of dark matter explains the radical acceleration of the universe. Much like physics explains that if you work on the tenth story of a building that your clocks move slower than the clocks on the first floor of the same building - I don’t want to get lost in physics - it would be too easy! But, until recently, It has been thought that the world and universe were actually slowing down - it couldn’t be farther from the truth - introducing once again dark matter as the culprit! Don’t even get me started about the hex particle!

Fantastic discoveries aren’t simply relegated to the scientific realm - thankfully, the world of marketing has been experiencing equally mind bending strides and accomplishments.

What’s happening in the wonderful world of marketing?  I think the more appropriate question is to ask what’s not happening in the world of marketing. 

There’s been all kinds of things that are are happening - things so great that it will be looked back on fondly as the exiting stage from the liminal period that redefined our then existence and completely reengineered our thinking. Simply put - YES ! WIth the world picking up so much speed and capitalism reigning supreme.  We found ourselves in a brilliant time of technological discoveries.  And, brilliance in any modality always brings enormous influxes of cash which in turn brings more brilliance.  It’s a spiral that spirals upward until for a brief moment - a scintilla of a second - someone eventually looks down.  And, upon looking down, realizes that while building these technological marvels was certainly a golden age in technology - looking from the lens of harnessing their power for advertising - nobody was able to keep up.  Nobody was truly  being able to quantify the successes that these technological advances could have been bringing across a wider body of verticals and not just the technology itself.

We, as marketers, found ourselves in a liminal period in which we could vocalize to the client that the old metrics were a distant memory, but our current assortment of metrics fell well short.  That didn’t keep the industry from pushing forward and widening the vast divide between what is, and what could be proven to drive purchase with complete certainty. This caused some animosity between clients and agencies as many accounts went up for review - the advertising world was in chaos.  But chaos is really what liminal periods are all about.  It’s the ones that keep their head down and endure the pain, push harder, work longer that emerge from liminal periods ahead of the pack.

There is always a tremendous amount of fear locked inside radically changing entities.  So, it’s only natural for us to try to assert some order to keep everything moving along.  However, the reality was clear, and those in the advertising industry that didn’t acknowledge it lost to those that operated with a greater level of transparency.  There was so much going on at the macro level that people just got fed up with hearing things that they knew were finally crafted speaking points by the PR agency - enough was enough!

Direct Marketing -- Avoid It At Your Own Peril

You Don’t Have to Touch It To Feel It

Erik Hauser

As a global advocate, crusader and practitioner of media-agnostic, experiential marketing methodology - I’ve always taught that you don’t have to actually touch the product or service to “feel it.” For years, starting in 2007, The Experiential Marketing Forum teamed up with other industry leading voices such as Adweek, Brandweek and other leading trade publishers such as Penton publications.  These industry heavyweights provided myself and others a platform to properly disarm the misperception in the marketplace that experiential marketing was only confined to the live brand experiences. When in actuality, a well-crafted coupon can be the quintessential opportunity to serve as a perfect platform to deploy experiential marketing methodology. This was especially true when the world melted in 2007, and people just needed large corporations to understand - making the coupon the perfect experiential media - whether that coupon had a digital or a physical delivery mechanism.

The truth is that experiential marketing methodology is a methodology that is predicated on the notion of being media-agnostic.  It’s all about reaching the clients’ intended audiences at the right time with the right message, but the most important element is that an agency uses the correct modality of brand experiences where and when the audience will be most receptive to receiving and participating in it.  The better the “high perceived value proposition” the greater opportunity that an agency will be able to modify a consumer’s behavior and shift the pendulum in their clients’ direction.

Having said all of this, as we all fully acknowledge that we’re living in a world which digital marketing has convincingly taken control of the driver’s seat.  And by the way, this just didn’t happen because it seemed like a good idea - This has happened because smart agencies spend their clients’ money where their intended audiences spend their time. So, vast percentages of the total IMC spend is absolutely dedicated to digital. Whether it be 100% digital or simply using digital as a form of a delivery mechanism.

The smarter agencies understand that they need to sometimes swim against the trend to lead the next trend - because not everyone is an early adopter. Thus, it would be absolutely irresponsible of intelligent agencies to discard the most tried, true and tested medias that have bankable returns.  And while most agencies have moved away from direct marketing - leaving the USPS in extremely bad shape - smart agencies are grabbing back that marketshare as it’s always the smart move to engage consumers in the least cluttered space.  It’s a beautiful thing.  Everything old is new again, and everything that’s called one thing on Monday will often be called something else on Tuesday because the buzz word seemed like it would improve margins for the agencies - clients be damned. Clients lease heed my warning - you want an agency that is comprised of “real people” because that “reality” permeates the internal culture of the agency that you’re doing business with.  And, trust me -  I’ve seen ti happen too many times - margins come before thinking things all the way through and understanding the notion of a client as always being a possible high CLV client.  Smart agencies mange the long term extremely well by managing the short term, or increments, properly.  You’d think it would be obvious, but publicly traded companies think in quarters instead of independent agencies managing YOY.

And, as we all know.  The agency that excels at transparency, that truly acts as a business partner and not just an ad agency will create lifelong clients and quietly grab marketshare while the other agencies are busy gratifying themselves by submitting to every awards program.  I can say that, being in the know, as I’ve served on the Effie’s grand Jury and as a Final Round judge for the last 7 years.

When all is said and done.  Make sure that you’re not overlooking any touchpoint, and are perfecting your clients’ brand experiences at every opportunity to engage them. Truly delivering on the IMC promise - making clients successful one at a time.

McDonald’s Gets 100% Consumer-Centric Down Under In OZ

Erik Hauser 01.08.13

Just when one thought it was safe to come out of the water - McDonald’s takes consumer-centricity to a new, all-time high.  While they’ve been known for doing some crazy things over in Japan - they’ve never sent out the utility crews to do any heavy lifting.  That’s right - we’re talking about changing the signs to turn a local catch phrase, albeit briefly, into the actual name of the restaurant.  This particular move from the world’s largest burger flipper gives me eternal hope that the rest of the world will understand that playing locally to your intended audiences will greatly increase the size of the lane of the pathway to purchase, and vastly grow their average CLV consumer.  

While this principle has been proven time after time after time after time - corporations seem wholesale reluctant to partaking in these extremely monetarily beneficial moves.  Before we unveil the current McDonald’s business move - let’s take a look at some other moves that have been done throughout the globe that have had absolutely radical effects on the demand curve for the product and/or service.  Coke, In Malaysia and in Singapore, back on the early 2000’s created a small contraption affectionately referred to as the shrink tank.  What was the shrink tank? And what did it teach us?

The shrink tank was way ahead of it’s time in allowing people - intended audience of people ages 8 to 16 years of age - to co-create their product.  The tank allowed the consumers to select one of 14 shrink wraps that could be applied to the bottles on the spot - instant gratification!  Did it work? OMG - yes it worked as it increases same store sales by 900% in Malaysia and 300% in Singapore.  I think that everyone from the boardroom to the procurement office was happy with that effort.  

In hindsight, this did start to give birth to an outbreak of big corporations allowing consumers to create their own products on-line.  To see a great example of this, one needs to look no further than my closet when people found out that you could design your own Pumas.  Those that knew me immediately knew what I wanted as gifts from here to eternity - customized shoes, watches, cars, cars, cars, cars - sorry i digress:). 

So let’s jump on the kangaroo and take a leap back to the current day in the land of OZ. What systemic move did McDonald’s make to show their appreciation to their consumer base during, you won’t believe it, consumer appreciation month. 

McDonald’s has temporarily changed their name to MACCA’s ! Why you ask?  Because that’s the affectionate nickname that the population has given McDonald’s.  So, they make a BRILLIANT choice to get the sign crews together to go out and change all the signs, all the materials - EVERYTHING - soup to nuts.  SIMPLY GENIUS !!!!!

It warms the cockles of my heart to see a massive corporation go to such lengths to actually appreciate the consumers during consumer appreciation month.  Call me crazy, but I think that this bandwagon will get extremely large very quickly because it will cement the love of current consumers, open the door to new consumers while cultivating all kinds of consumers across the board.

If you’re looking for ways to transform the way that people experience your brand then simply give me a buzz, and we’ll make your brand really relevant - really quickly!