2015 Predictions for CMOs and Digital Marketing

Gil Press Contributor

In 2015, digital marketing budgets will increase by 8%, according to a recent Gartner’s CMO Spend Report, a survey of 315 marketing decision makers representing organizations with more than $500 million in annual revenue.

Customer experience is the top innovation project for 2015, continuing its role as the top priority for marketing investment in 2014. The survey also found that

• In 79% of companies, marketing has a budget for capital expenditures — primarily, for infrastructure and software
• Marketers are managing a P&L and generating revenue from digital advertising, digital commerce and sale of data
• 68% of organizations have a separate digital marketing budget — it averages a quarter of the total marketing budget
• Two-thirds of companies are funding digital marketing via reinvestment of existing marketing budgets

Earlier this year, IBM found in its worldwide survey of CMOs that CEOs increasingly call on them for strategic input. Furthermore, the CMO now comes second only to the CFO in terms of the influence he or she exerts on the CEO. The survey also found, however, that very few CMOs have made much progress in building a robust digital marketing capability: Only 20%, for example, have set up social networks for the purpose of engaging with customers, and the percentage of CMOs who have integrated their company’s interactions with customers across different channels, installed analytical programs to mine customer data and created digitally enabled supply chains to respond rapidly to changes in customer demand is even smaller. Almost all CMOs, 82% of survey respondents, felt underprepared to deal with the explosion of data.

With this as a background, here’s a summary of what digital marketing and the CMO will look like in 2015, based on observations by Scott Brinker, a leading commentator on marketing technology, Forrester, TopRank online marketing blog, Wheelhouse Advisors, and Brian Solis.

CMOs will take charge of focusing their companies on the customer

CMOs and their marketing teams will become the primary driver behind customer-centric company growth. Leveraging their knowledge of the customer and the competitive landscape, CMOs will advise and council CEOs on how to win, serve, and retain customers to grow the business. They will also lead organizational changes and new collaboration initiatives aimed at unifying all customer engagement activities across the enterprise.

CMOs will poach IT staff to help them manage a rapidly expanding digital marketing landscape

The number of digital marketing tools will grow in 2015 with new startups and large, established tech companies confusing even more that CMO with their numerous offerings. To help manage this embarrassment of riches and move their companies further on their digital marketing journey, CMOs will be poaching IT staff looking for new challenges and better salaries.

CMOs should expect heavy rains from proliferating digital marketing clouds

Digital marketing tools will be increasingly offered as a cloud-based solution (“marketing-as-a-service”) rather than licensed software. Cloud-based solutions will continue to expand their ecosystems, with many small software developers adding apps to existing cloud-based digital marketing platforms.

CMOs will invest in new digital marketing hot areas

Content marketing and predictive analytics will continue to be hot areas of interest and investment for CMOs, but they will be joined in 2015 by sales enablement, post-sale customer marketing, marketing finance, marketing talent management, and new tools based on the Internet of Things, allowing for the integration of offline and online experiences.

CMOs will become brand publishers

CMOs in 2015 will act as heads of a publishing house, overseeing the entire spectrum of brand engagement, increasing the quality of their output, and improving the perceived value of digital interactions with customers and prospects.

Read The Complete Article & Related News on Forbes.com

Toms Founder: 3 Killer Advantages of Social Impact Businesses BY JILL KRASNY @JILLKRASNY

Blake Mycoskie explains why giving back doesn’t just feel good–it’s really good for business.

If you told Blake Mycoskie 10 years ago he would become a world-famous entrepreneur known for selling and giving away shoes, he probably would have laughed in your face. But after a life-changing trip to Argentina, the Texan realized the value of helping others. When he went on to launch Toms Shoes out of his Venice, California, apartment, he knew he was doing it for the right reasons and not just for money. “Giving doesn’t just feel good,” Mycoskie told an audience of entrepreneurs at the World Business Forum on Wednesday, “it’s actually really good for business, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Here are three reasons why.

Customers Become Marketers

“I recognized very early on that when you incorporate a purpose beyond profit in your business, your customers will become your biggest marketers,” said Mycoskie. Take the time he was in JFK airport and spotted a woman in Tabasco red Toms. He decided to perform a little experiment and asked what she was wearing. “Toms Shoes!” she exclaimed. This response was enough on its own, but what she said next was astounding. “No, I don’t think you understand,” she went on. “This is the most amazing company in the world. When I bought a pair, they gave a pair to a child. “Turns out, the woman had watched every video of Mycoskie giving away pairs of shoes on YouTube. “She wasn’t a customer,” he said, “she was an evangelist for what we were doing.”

You Attract–and Retain–Amazing Talent

“When you create a purpose that is something more than just profit, you will attract and retain amazing talent,” he added. “Plus, it is an incredible way to diffuse all the petty office politics that happen.” The reason? “People bring their gratitude into the office.” If there’s an argument, they’ll quickly realize both sides are working toward the same goal and drop it.

Others Want to Help

When you run a socially-minded business, others will want to help you out, McCoskie continued. “We had so many partners” over the years. When Toms was less than a year old, American fashion mogul Andrew Rosen allowed them to use his Theory store windows to tell the Toms story. And Ralph Lauren offered to design some pairs for his Rugby stores, which helped them break into fashion. “These people partner with us not because they love our business,” McCoskie said. “They see they can connect to their customers in a new way. More people want to help you out and be part of it.”

View Full Article

IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

LAST UPDATED: OCT 8, 2014

JILL KRASNY | Staff Writer

Jill Krasny is a staff writer for Inc. magazine, where she covers the intersection of entertainment and startups. Prior to Inc., she was a writer for MTV and Esquire and an editor at TheStreet. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a degree in communication. She lives in New York City.

B2B Approach To Social Media

B2B Approach To Social Media (click here)

 

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Forget the Selfie: Samsung Is Out-Innovating Apple in Marketing Samsung’s Agency May Be Exaggerating, But It Has Something To Brag About

What was the brand and advertising value for Samsung of the infamous “selfie” taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars? Do we really know?

It was the tweet heard around the world, but was it worth $1 billion?

That was the value Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy put on the star-studded Oscar smartphone “selfie” during an interview in Cannes earlier this week. He also immodestly took credit for it, which is a stretch because while Publicisbuying arm Starcom Mediavest did broker Samsung‘s sponsorship of the Oscars, the tweet itself was spontaneous, according to two sources with knowledge of Samsung’s marketing.

Now, without that $20 million Oscars sponsorship, Ellen DeGeneres would likely have taken the shot with her preferred iPhone, so Mr. Levy can indeed take some credit for setting the stage (the Wall Street Journal reported the agency negotiated with ABC to integrate Galaxy phones into the show).

More…

 

A Recipe for Building and Implementing a Social Media Plan

So, you work in the corporate marketing department and your boss wants to know what “your” plan is for social media in 2011 and beyond. After clearing your throat and fumbling with a few papers on your desk, you tell him or her that you have been working on it and should have the plan ready to present in the next week or two.

So you’ve bought yourself some time but what next? Well you do a web search for how to build and implement a social media plan and come across some articles like this one which provide you with enough of a framework to put together a sound plan. What would we do without the internet?

There are a number of variations to this approach but the fundamentals remain about the same. This particular process is intended for a large company but can just as easily be followed by smaller organizations.

Step 1 – Define your Objective(s). Objectives can be things like building brand recognition or loyalty or providing customer service or indirect sales (direct sales via social media is best left to those who have already followed and implemented a plan like this). Be careful not to make your objectives so broad that they cannot be measured. It’s also worth stating the obvious – one person or one group for that matter should not be defining the social media objective(s) for the entire company without input from other key internal stakeholders and ideally one or more subject matter experts.

Step 2 – Understand Your Audience. Will you be interacting with happy or unhappy customers, former customers or prospects, or all of the above? Also don’t forget that whoever your intended audience is, there will be others watching and listening. This includes shareholders, the competition, legislators, regulators, current, former and prospective employees, your business partners, vendors and more.

In order to fully understand your audience you also need to know where they are. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, industry or competitor blogs, Digg, Delicious, etc.? Are they passive, meaning they are mostly in read-only mode, or are they active in generating messages and commenting on others’ messages? To fully understand this you will need to learn about social media monitoring tools. These tools help track sentiment towards your company or brand as well as the volume of mentions and how influential the person or people talking about your company or product are. Influence is usually gauged by the number of followers someone has, but that is not the only factor. You may be familiar with TweetDeck or Seesmic which are among many basic and free social media interface and monitoring tools. More sophisticated and expensive tools include Radian6, Sysomos, Lithium and others.

You can also do some basic look-alike modeling where you input the demographics of the audience you will be engaging (for example your customer demographics) and find out where others who share the same demographic profile are and understand what their social tendencies are as well. Forrester offers a free Social Technographics profile tool on their web site.

Understanding your audience, where and how they engage is an important step in the process, especially as it relates to staffing and operations which is discussed later on.

Step 3 – Assemble a Cross-functional Team. This is a step which arguably can be skipped if you work in a small company, but beware of the dangers of leaving out key internal stakeholders if you do. Generally speaking, a cross-functional team should include members from marketing, sales, public relations, internal communications, human resources, legal and customer service. Obviously this list of departments should be adjusted to suit each organizations unique structure. Also, the level of the participants should be such that they are close to the day-to-day operations and therefore aware of potential challenges, yet empowered to make day-to-day decisions on behalf of that department.

All teams need leaders and it is customary though not mandatory that someone from the marketing department lead a team such as this. Having a strong project manager on the team is a tremendous asset as well as there is no substitute for excellent process and project management.

Once the team is assembled, make sure that they understand their objectives and what is in and out of scope. Ideally there will be an executive-level sponsor of this initiative who has or will take on some of the tougher decision-making assignments with his or her peers.

The cross-functional team (team) should understand and agree with the social media strategy and objective(s) and understand the make-up of the primary and any secondary audiences. If this is not the case, then this is a good way to build some team dynamics and synergy.

Step 4 – Study Best Practices & Lessons Learned. Once you begin searching the internet, you will find that there is no lack of free information or best practices and lessons learned as it relates to social media. What’s more, the information is in a constant state of change and evolution and requires regular monitoring and engagement. Join online discussion groups and forums like those on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Read AdAge DIGITAL and other online publications and blogs and subscribe to Twitter accounts that blog about social media. Also pay close attention to your competition so that you know where the bar is set in your industry. You may see things that you want to emulate and other things that you want to avoid.

Step 5 – Set Goals. Again, depending on how your company operates, goals may have been set at the beginning of the process. Regardless, take the time to socialize the goals with the team and to ensure they pass the test of being measurable and attainable. Start with simple goals like getting a certain number of people to “Like” your company’s Facebook page or a certain number of followers on Twitter within a defined period of time. If your goals include customer service, you may include resolving a certain number of issues per month via social media. You can also set goals for positive versus negative mentions of your company or brand but beware that sentiment is an inexact science. Even the best monitoring tools can only approximate sentiment because they cannot account for human sarcasm or cynicism in text comments. Goals can also include clicks from Facebook, Twitter, etc. to a specific offer landing page but remember that wherever possible you do not want to disrupt the user’s social networking experience. Generally speaking, people are not engaging in social media to click on a bunch of links to corporate pages. You can however set up separate Twitter accounts and Facebook tabs just for offers and promotions or provide people with an opportunity to opt-in to receive emails or text messages for special offers.

Step 6 – Operationalize. Now comes the fun part – figuring out how to support your social media efforts on an ongoing basis. I underscored the last two words to emphasize the point that social media efforts do not have a hard start and stop date like a direct mail campaign or a print ad campaign. Once a comment or promotion begins, it takes on a life of its own and you need to be prepared to support the conversation until your audience tires of engaging on the subject. This is where most companies fail. They don’t understand that in the digital age, companies don’t really own their brand or the conversation with the consumer. The consumer owns them. As marketers, we now guide, nudge, polish and influence our brand and the conversation, but we no longer own it. This is what marketing 2.0 is all about – giving up control in return for an honest and open dialogue and partnership with your external customers, prospects and other important constituents. It’s no longer “push” marketing, it’s a partnership with your customers for the good of everyone involved. If you try to “control” your social media efforts as opposed to managing them, you will fail. It is important to manage the expectations of senior management on the topic or control versus transparency and partnership.

Back to the operations decisions that need to be addressed. The team must make decisions about when and where to begin. It is often best to start small, like starting a Twitter dialogue. This will help limit mistakes and also help with resourcing the effort. By the way, if you work for one of those companies that need to see a business case with a documented positive ROI on social media before investing in it, you have a huge uphill battle on your hands. That doesn’t mean that social media cant or doesn’t contribute to the bottom line, because it does. My point is you do not begin engaging in social media purely for the ROI. It’s an indirect outcome but not the initial objective of social media efforts.

Different departments will have different objectives. For example, customer service may be focused on servicing customers while marketing may be interested in raising brand awareness or raising positive sentiment. Public affairs may simply be interested in more positive mentions. Additionally, Twitter may be the best venue for customer service while marketing may prefer Facebook or YouTube. This doesn’t mean that departments or objectives should be limited to only one social media channel. I am simply suggesting that the team establish a preferred channel for each main objective.

The team will also need to address monitoring, establishing a policy or as I like to call it, “rules of engagement” which is about who in the company is allowed to engage in social media in an official capacity. Staffing and training will need to be discussed as will in-sourcing versus outsourcing, internal communications to employees and more.

Step 7 – Pilot. Once the team has made all key decisions and senior management has signed off with a full understanding of what to expect, it’s time to cross your fingers and soft-launch your social media efforts. Soft-launching means no major announcements in the media. This will give you a better chance of becoming confortable with whatever you are doing, before you announce it to the world and get more volume than you can handle. Also keep in mind that whatever you are doing, social media should provide at least the same if not a better experience than conventional channels. What I mean is that if your call centers for customer service are 24×7, then your social care efforts should be 24×7.

Of course there are many more details and considerations behind each step, but these 7 steps should serve as a good road map to plan your efforts.

Here are some additional tips.

–          Be honest, don’t “spin” the truth or you will lose credibility and your audience will discount your point-of-view in the conversation that is taking place. It really does not matter that you represent the company or brand, if you are not credible, you will be discounted.

–          Know when to just be quiet and listen

–          Identify key influencers and get to know them and understand their social media habits and behavior

I hope you found this article helpful. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments and stay tuned for a follow-up article about Social Media Communities.

Author:  Steven Copertino

Copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved.

How You Name Your Web Sites, Microsites and Blogs Can Impact Your Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very complex, with proprietary algorithms used by each of the major search engines to determine rankings and I am only scratching the surface in this article, but here are some important tips and guidelines.

Background
Many people and companies often talk about web site content and content structure when discussing search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is about making your web site content efficient and effective so your web site ranks as high as possible in organic listings (not sponsored or non-paid advertising, also known as search engine marketing) but did you know that the web site URL you select is also very important?

Many companies like to use vanity URLs instead of a real company name in their URLs. A vanity URL is like a vanity phone number or a vanity license plate. A vanity URL for a fictitious company such as Acme Precision Widgets, whose real web site is www.acmeprecisionwidgets.com could be www.acmespecials.com or www.apw.com.  Typically, the vanity URL would then redirect to the real URL and if you paid close attention you would see this happen in your browser http address listing. For permanent vanity URLs, coders typically use what is called a “301 redirect” to the real page URL shown above, but the user would only need to see (click on) or type the vanity URL. A 301 redirect is a redirect that does not have a time expiration as opposed to a 501 redirect, which does expire at a predefined time interval.

 Vanity URLs Can Suppress Search Engine Rankings
Search engine relevancy scores (the scores that determine which pages will make it to the top of a search engine’s organic search results) take into account page load times. Therefore, making pages too “heavy” with rich media content or having too many URL redirects (hops due to vanity URLs or other hidden structures) will slow page load times and consequently lower your page rankings with the search engines. This means that your web site moves down the list of organic search results, leading to potentially lower organic traffic and a need to rely more heavily on paid search. 

What Is Your Goal?
If your goal is to drive as much online volume as possible through organic search results, versus paid online media, then vanity URLs are not necessarily the best way to go. Instead, use your company’s real URL wherever possible and add a forward slash to drive to a specific landing page which contains content relevant to what you are promoting. Alternatively, you can drive users to your home page and feature whatever you are promoting there in what is called a “hero space”. Many companies use hero spaces that allow you to feature multiple products, services or offers, by rotating them at pre-set short time intervals.

 When Vanity URLs Are a Must
Sometimes there is a justified need for a vanity URL due to the nature of the product or service or promotion, or because your company URL is simply too long and is not easily shortened. When those exceptions are made, here are some helpful tips to follow.

Track Whatever Vanity URLs You Already Have or Create
When creating a vanity URL, keep a central repository of those links because they need to be maintained over time. A simple example is if you choose to move the location of the real page on your web site, then the reference point for the vanity URL needs to be updated or the user will have a broken link that goes nowhere.

Vanity URLs Should Also Have Strong Brand and Key Word Relevancy
Vanity URLs should also have strong brand and key word relevancy as opposed to making up or using words infrequently used by consumers simply because they sound “cool”. Strong brand and key word relevancy will further increase your relevancy scores with search engines. If the intended audience is not familiar with the term, then even if it’s catchy, it will hurt your organic results because you will achieve fewer exact matches. The only exception is if you are going to literally spend millions and millions of dollars advertising offline and online in order to create brand recognition for something like a new term or a new product, service or company name.

 For those who want to delve further into the technical side of how vanity URLs/redirects erode search engine relevancy, please see this article which discusses 301 redirects and confirmation from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) that some link equity is lost when a 301 is used within a website – but not as much as when the true URL is completely removed from the vanity name.
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/301-redirect-test-how-much-link-juice-are-you-losing/2010/04/09/

Written by: Steven Copertino, Digital Marketer
http://www.linkedin.com/in/copertino

 

Six Lessons in App Marketing

Good overview of what needs to be done by marketers “beyond creating an app” in order to drive awareness, usage and ROI!

By: Andrew Pavia    Advertising Age     Published: June 09, 2011

So you’ve made an iPhone app, now what? Lisa Bettany, creator of Camera+, an app for the iPhone which has sold 2.6 million copies and has achieved the top spot in the App Store in the first release, gave CaT attendees tips on how to sell a product through the app store.

1. Create a Twitter contest. The contest that Camera+ ran had two simple steps: follow one designated account and post as many pictures as you want. “Twitter contests generate buzz,” she said referring to them later as “Tweet blasts.”

2. Sell strategically. Releasing an app on the weekends or a holiday, such as Christmas, has proven to be beneficial to sales numbers. Also, targeting the U.S. might be a good idea, since 58% of total iApp revenue was generated from the U.S. store.

3. Create a loyal following through engagement. Camera+ app users were sharing photos daily for a year. “If they’re loving it, they’re sharing it,” she said.

4. Wow your users. Research the features people actually want. Ms. Bettany advised to take app store reviews into consideration (while taking “You Suck” with a grain of salt, she said).

5. Fix bugs and boost performance. While this may be fairly obvious, she said Camera+ problems resulted in the app dropping from the top ten to roughly the No. 180 spot.

6. Don’t get kicked out of the App Store. Jokingly, Ms. Bettany referred to the time in which Apple took its app out of the digital store for creating the ability to take a picture using the volume button. Apple did not want that feature included in this app. Spoiler alert: It is going to be a feature on the iPhone 5 camera.

With the tremendous success of her Camera+ app, Mr. Bettany said, proudly, that “zero dollars was spent on traditional advertising.”

New Tool Promises to Put Social-Media ROI on Same Footing as Traditional Media

Interesting article in Ad Age about a new tool to measure Social
Media ROI. I think some marketers and finance people are too obsessed with measuring the ROI of Social Media, unless you are talking about a true ecommerce component like some retailers such as Express, JC Penney and others are integrating into their Facebook presence.

Most social media is considered upper funnel activity that drives awareness and consideration. This does ultimately lead to increased purchase activity by makigng your SEM more effective or increasing organic site traffic, but it’s very difficult to tie back to your SM activities due to all the other variables at play.

– Steve Copertino

Marketing Evolution, Telmar Believe Effects Can Be Predicted, Accountable Like Other Media

By: Jack NeffBio               Advertising Age              Published: June 03, 2011

Social media has struggled for years to demonstrate return on investment on the same analytical playing field as more established media. Now, Marketing Evolution, which has been working on cross-media analytics for more than a decade, is joining with media planning software provider Telmar to release an ROI tool they say will do just that.

The companies will unveil the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool, which became available earlier this week for early clients including Interpublic’s Universal McCann, during a presentation at Federated Media Publishing’s Conversational Marketing Summit June 6, the start of Internet Week in New York. That’s fitting, said Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs, because a statement by Federated’s executive chairman, John Battelle, at a conference last year prompted development of the new tool.

“He lamented the fact that there was no way you could put the investment you were making in social media side by side with your TV investments or even digital display to figure out where you should be investing more or how much,” Mr. Briggs said. At that point, Mr. Briggs said he turned to Rick Brunner, a Doubleclick and Google veteran and longtime internet marketing analyst who has headed Marketing Evolution’s work on the project, and said, “We’ve got the data to do that. Why don’t we solve that?”

Mr. Briggs has been conducting cross-media effectiveness analysis with a wide variety of marketers for more than 10 years, adding new media in along the way as they emerge. The Telmar Matterhorn service will be based on data collected in working with clients such as as Unilever, Coca-Cola Co., Nestle, MTV, Time Warner and EA, among others. Inner workings of how the TMR tool evaluates media will be open for inspection, Mr. Briggs said, and open to addition of new media as they emerge.

“A lot of social media, search and digital advertising models just don’t follow the traditional reach and frequency and cost-per-thousand framework that media-planning tools have been using for decades,” he said.

In fairness, marketing-mix modeling now used by many big advertisers already can analyze sales impact from just about any marketing input, given sufficient levels of spending and a sufficiently well-defined time horizon. The problem, however, is that lower levels of spending for digital and social media often get swamped by the impact of higher-reach media, and earned media such as social and PR don’t always work on the same predictable schedule as paid media.

Also, not every campaign has as its objective an immediate sale, often focusing further toward the fat end of the so-called purchase funnel. Mr. Briggs points, for example, to automotive marketing that may aim to get a brand into consideration for a purchase that may not take place for years.

To address this problem, Marketing Evolution years ago began analyzing campaigns based on objectives often besides sales — such as changes in survey responses regarding what brands consumers are considering.

The TMR tool will look at “basically for every dollar you spend, how many people do you influence on whatever that business objective is — building awareness, changing a brand position, generating purchase intent or generating sales,” Mr. Briggs said.

Analyzing much of digital advertising isn’t so different than traditional, given that it operates on similar reach and frequency data and often similar pricing schemes, he said. But social media and other earned media, that is, public relations, depart from those norms in two key ways.

The costs are often structured very differently, with much of it coming in the form of relatively fixed salary or fee costs for internal or agency staff to, say, run a social media monitoring command center, Mr. Briggs said. Traditional analysis tools also often fail to count all or some of the pass-along effect of social media.

Lack of any ROI norms may have been OK when social-media marketing was still in its infancy and considered experimental, he said. But now the discipline has been around a few years — at least in its toddlerhood — and increasingly expected to stand on its own two feet.

“Earned media and the people curating it probably need to be held a bit more accountable today,” Mr. Briggs said.

Seemingly, such programs would have such a short history and wide range of reach, pass along and impact that it would be difficult to predict outcomes based on past experience, which is how the Telmar Matterhorn ROI tool works for other media. But that hasn’t been the case, Mr. Briggs said.

“What we began to see pretty quickly is that there is a range of results just like with any advertising,” he said. “Some TV ads are better than others. Some programs are more conducive to social sharing than others. But there are absolutely common patterns and averages. One thing we can do is say if you spend $100,000 or $1 million, what should you be expecting to get back as results? If you’re not getting these levels, the budget should really trade over to be invested somewhere else.”

At the same time, other ads in traditional media also generate social-media pass along that needs to be calculated, and draw on some of that investment in things like social-media monitoring, Mr. Briggs said. TMR can account for that, but, he said, more important, it aims to calculate the combined impact of media elements, including their synergy, rather than viewing them entirely in isolation.

 

Procter & Gamble Names Ilonka Laviz New Top Digital Marketer

For the second time in a row, P&G selects an executive who has not held a digital marketing role to be its top digital marketer. What are your thoughts on this?

Always Marketer Assumes Role Held by Lucas Watson

By: Jack Neff – Ad Age Digital                                                  Published: May 02, 2011

Procter & Gamble Co. is getting a new top digital executive as Lucas Watson, who has served in that role since 2008, moves to an overseas assignment with the company. He’ll be replaced by Ilonka Laviz, associate marketing director on the Always feminine-care brand.

Mr. Watson referred calls to P&G spokeswoman Tonia Elrod, who confirmed the move and said Mr. Watson would be shifting to a role in P&G’s personal health-care business in Latin America. Ms. Laviz will transition this quarter into the role of marketing director-digital brand-building strategy and global e-commerce in the global brand-building organization. Mr. Watson, based in Panama, will be marketing director in P&G’s personal health-care global business unit.

P&G has substantially stepped up its digital and social-media marketing efforts under Mr. Watson, who reported jointly to Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard and Alex Tosolini, VP-global e-business. P&G earlier this year consolidated its digital marketing and e-commerce efforts into a single “e-business” unit.

Since Mr. Watson took the job in 2008, P&G has more than tripled measured internet ad spending to $169 million last year, according to Kantar Media. P&G also had one of the most widely watched social-media and viral-video campaigns ever with the “Responses” effort for Old Spice last year. It also had several other videos, particularly for Old Spice and Gillette, notch top spots in the viral-video viewership charts in the past year, launched its own e-store and added click-to-buy options or Facebook commerce for several brands.

Mr. Watson was associate marketing director on Pampers when P&G Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard selected him for the digital position. He didn’t have direct experience in digital media or marketing prior to that, but had worked with a Pampers brand that had one of the company’s biggest websites and online relationship-marketing programs.

Mr. Pritchard appears to be taking a similar tack with Ms. Laviz. She, too, hasn’t been a digital marketing specialist at any point in her career, but has been a strong supporter of one of P&G’s longest-running online relationship-marketing and community programs, BeingGirl.com, which primarily serves the Always and Tampax feminine-care brands, according to people familiar with the matter.

Always, the brand Ms. Laviz has worked on since 2005, most recently as associate marketing director, has relied far less on TV than other P&G brands in recent years. But measured spending for the brand has been mostly on print, which got 78% of P&G’s $78 million outlay on the brand last year, according to Kantar. TV got 21% and internet received 1%. Kantar data cover online display but don’t pick up spending on search, mobile, or website development and don’t cover the full cost of behaviorally targeted advertising.

Ms. Laviz joined P&G’s finance department 16 years ago in her native Colombia before moving into marketing on the fabric-care business there two years later. She worked out of P&G’s Latin America headquarters in Venezuela starting in 1999, and in 2004 joined the global feminine-care organization, where she helped lead expansion of the Naturella feminine-care brand from Latin America to Russia and Poland.

During her watch on Always in the U.S., the brand launched the unusual and sometimes controversial “Have a Happy Period” campaign from Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, Chicago. That campaign is criticized in an “open letter” to a fictitious P&G brand manager, James Thatcher, that appeared in 2007 and has been making the rounds virally on the internet ever since.

Despite the criticism, P&G’s share in sanitary pads rose from 44.7% in 2006, before the campaign began, to 51.4% in 2009, according to SymphonyIRI data from Deutsche Bank. But Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s U by Kotex launch helped carve 0.5 points off Always’ share last year.

In a 2007 interview with Advertising Age, Ms. Laviz said, “Yes, we understand periods definitely are not the best part of the month. … But it doesn’t have to be that bad.”

The campaign, she said, “started behind the understanding that unlike tampon consumers, the pad user doesn’t want to get rid of her period. Her period is a natural part of being a woman.”

Most women who criticized the campaign, she said, are tampon users, who aren’t the target for the ads.

Strategies for Brands in the Digital Age

I attended a terrific meeting and presentation this morning, hosted by the NY American Marketing Association. The breakfast session was entitled Strategies for Brands in the Digital Age.

The presenter was David Rogers who is the Executive Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia University. Mr. Rogers is also the author of a new book entitled The Network is Your Customer – 5 Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age.

One of the main points in the book is that there is a new paradigm called the customer network and it needs to be understood, respected and leveraged by companies, but they must never try to control it and there is no need to fear it.

In the old days, there were very few places for consumers to get information about a company and its products and services. Companies were usually the only sources of “reliable” information around. It was an era of mass production and mass communication and the company was clearly in control of the product/service, the message and the brand.

Today, in the digital age and with the explosion of social networking, companies no longer “control” the message or their brands. They influence, guide and nurture the message and brand but they can no longer make misleading claims or define their brand, products and services in a vacuüm like the executive boardroom or at the advertising agency holiday party.

Mr. Rogers goes on to point out that consumers place a higher value on the opinions of friends, colleagues, family and now also those in their social networks, than on corporate ads or paid spokespeople – when it comes to evaluating a product or service.

The book goes on to identify and detail five steps to help companies develop a Customer Network Strategic Plan.
1. Setting Objectives
2. Segmentation & Positioning
3. Strategy Selection & Ideation
4. Execution
5. Measurement

Mr. Rogers also goes on to redefine the infamous purchase funnel, adding a level for loyalty and customer advocacy.

I have only read the first 40 pages but I can’t wait to read the rest. David Rogers’ insights and views and the many case studies he uses to illustrate his points make this book an easy read and a very valuable tool for today’s marketers.

Many thanks to the NY AMA for hosting this session.