| Marketing |
| Written by AdMix / Marjorie Teresa R. Perez / joyetteperez@yahoo.com |
| Monday, 19 October 2009 19:25 |
 Paolo Pangan, Serve Digital managing director: “Candidates must believe in new media.” Imagine that you’ve hired one of the most powerful advertising agencies on the planet, and spared no expense for advertising and marketing expenses. Then a student posts a video on YouTube about what a terrible experience she had with your product or service. Or a blogger records a phone call with an indifferent agent in one of your call centers, and his entry gets linked so far and wide throughout the blogosphere. Or someone even devotes a website to how terrible your company is, and it gets ranked right up there with your own website in search engine rankings.
“Obama’s strategy was different. He moved away from traditional advertising but maximized the Internet as a most efficient tool in conveying change that was rooted in innovation itself,” said managing director of Serve Digital Paolo Pangan, who shares with this columnist how marketing to digitally linked communities is fundamentally changing the way we view and practice marketing. Pangan has built and consulted on digital strategy for a gamut of clients, including the Philippine Department of Tourism, P&G, San Miguel Brewery and Mead Johnson. He has created digital campaigns for various political candidates last year and earlier this year. “YouTube was a primary media platform. It has become the destination for online video. Take this: 139,000 different Obama-related video clips were downloaded; 180,000 were officially uploaded by the campaign and more than 14.7 million hours of Obama-related video clips were consumed,” Pangan added. This was a sudden eruption of swarm activity that spreads quickly across social networks. It’s like a virus: You sneeze, two people catch a cold, then they sneeze and infect four people, and so on. Obama’s campaign may have had the lowest ad spend expenditure but got the highest mileage with turnouts pegged at $14,037,426. “He didn’t just campaign online; he communicated, empowered and convinced, taking advantage as the new-generation leader who could change things in America,” Pangan furthered. Obama’s campaign slogan, “I’m asking you to believe,” as we say in marketing, had to do something to the product to get people’s attention. What was called for was a “new and improved” strategy—one that signaled change. In this historic race, Obama dominated the digital elections. There are, at last count, more than 100 million blogs in cyberspace. More than 100,000 new ones are being added as I write this. So at first glance starting a blog might seem like planting a tree in the middle of a very deep forest, where no one will find it. But it isn’t. The difference lies in what we call a “feed,” or a social network that surrounds the person’s blog. While early web pages just sat there waiting for people to visit them, feeds turn blogs into living organisms. Most blogs and social networking sites can be set up so that whenever a blogger adds or changes something, it sends an update to everyone who has signed on to it. What about the Philippines’ political setting? “Our local candidates are starting to learn,” Pangan said. The first thing they want is to not to be “marketed” in the traditional sense. Social networks are looking for things that interest, entertain and engage them, not just self-brand political advertising. This means that the world has moved from a mass market to a collection of micromarkets, which can be scaled up or down to any level. In this columnist’s view, this in turn intensifies the viral potential of specific groups and takes on a new meaning. “Candidates must believe in new media and that it delivers sales,” Pangan said. The metrics for following effective online marketing have evolved considerably these days, growing from measuring clicks to looking at broader measures of [brand] interaction. Far be it from me to bash things like click-through rates, blog hits, or podcast subscribers—they are important measures of one kind of influence. But in my mind there is little difference between, say, what percentage of people click an online banner ad and how many people watch a television ad. You are still measuring what percentage of eyeballs responds to a promotional message. “There are 18.2 potential voters online, 65 percent of 28 million Filipinos are potential voters. Candidates must start thinking about building communities who seek them out. Social networks humanize the candidates. It should be embedded in all their campaign efforts. But they must hire a strong and competent backbone, have a good creative director and great programmer. Another tip is to think young or work with a lot of young people,” Pangan stressed. “Your target audience is online,” Aileen Apolo, Philippine country consultant of Google, pointed out. While search is the statement of consumer intent or interest, it’s the digital equivalent of “hand raising” to show when the consumer is interested in something. Once that intent is known, by virtue of a person’s search, relevant marketing material can be instantly matched to that individual. “According to UK Media Consumption [where users are spending time], 21 percent surf the Internet, 42 percent watch TV, 25 percent listen to radio and 12 percent read newspapers and magazines. There are 192 million online searches in the US. Others e-mail and chat,” Apolo explained. This number is set to grow even further. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Apolo noted, there is simply more and more digital content that people want to search through to find what they want. Second, search is rapidly extending to all types of digital material, including photographs and video. Third, search is moving beyond the desktop to localized search conducted on mobile phones. The in-market use of search will make it even more of a workhorse in everyday life. “Consumers are becoming multitaskers. Researchers estimate that 25 to 30 percent of total media is spent on multitasking: 33 percent read newspapers, 38 percent read magazines while 60 percent have laptops in their living rooms,” she said. People now talk in terms of “friending” your brand in the same way that people “friend” each other on social networking sites. Much of this is coming to pass already; for example, embedded advertising is a key part of the revenue model for sites such as Facebook, and the targeted ads that come when you do a Google search reflects a marketing approach that partners with what people are looking for. “It’s not just about getting consumers to a website, you have to integrate media for a full effect [TV and other media online search],” Apolo added. Today, as consumers turn into communities, they have new sets of needs. The lowest level of these needs is to have a voice, the next level is to co-create with you, and perhaps the highest level is to find each other. Just like [those] presidential wannabes, we cannot fix the image that some people thought of otherwise by just creating a press release or making a media buy. It will take a dialogue and understanding through social networks that will help them accomplish more of their brand images, and connect emotionally with individuals as they work closely with highly engaged, active communities. “I’m asking you to believe,” so goes Obama’s political campaign, go spend an evening on MySpace and Facebook profiles and see how many friends people have—or visit YouTube and see how many people are viewing, commenting on and spreading viral videos. More important, look at how your own relationship to brands has changed over the past decade. We are watching a real revolution in the way people think and socialize. These and many other principles are becoming the new currency of marketing. |
For example, Barack Obama’s online hub “It’s All About You” has 2 million profiles, 200,000 offline events, approximately 400,000 blogposts written, 35,000 volunteer groups created and 70,000 people raised $30 million on their personal fundraising pages. His strategy? Integrate the Internet into the entire political campaign—websites, social networks, blogs/microblogging, online videos, interactive advertising, mobile and search. Obama went into 16 different social networking sites, has 3.3 million friends in Facebook and 5 million contacts in other social sites. More than 1 million people signed up for text alerts. On election day, text messages were used to coordinate with campaign headquarters.