eROI Days Email Agency

Here at the OMMA show in Hollywood, a gorgeous sunny break from Portland rain, it’s been great to connect with the Email Insiders crew, the EEC, KickApps, and others in the social networking / online video world here.

From a presentation standpoint, I was most impressed with Patrick Keane, CMO of CBS Interactive. He talked about trends in online media and marketing:
1. Engagement - advertisers don’t want vanilla users, they want engaged users who spend a lot of time on a media site like CBS or social platforms like Facebook, MySpace.
2. Cross-platform - advertisers want to buy across ALL mediums and channels.
3. Flexibility and Customization
4. Branding + Video - moving faster, demand video
5. Data - need better Audience Analytics

Most interesting, however, was Keane’s central theme of how the online medium is an incremental effect, not cannibalizing in any way. He used the show “Jericho” as an example - on TV, it had a 4.2 Nielsen rating, but online video views added another 0.9 points to it - 1.4 million video views of the current and past shows in the few days following each show.

TV, web, and mobile all work TOGETHER to have an incremental engagement effect. No cannibalization.

Another key takeaway: media sites like CBSSports.com appears like its all original content, but there are actually a significant portion of community features and user-generated content (e.g. Fantasy Leagues, etc.).

BTW - CBS is streaming all March Madness games this Thursday - I hope no one at eROI finds out about this.

Dylan Boyd, our VP of Sales & Strategy, Maureen Pimley, our VP of Client Services & Operations, Sam White, our Creative Director, Chris Masagatani, our AE and soon to be eROI New York office Director, and I just returned back to P’town from an amazing 4 day trip to New York City. It solidified our decision to open an office there after meeting with strategic partners like KickApps, HBO, Ogilvy, Return Path, MediaPost, RidgewoodTV, and the Mixx Agency. We checked out several shared office places and are most likely going to settle into an office in Union Square in Manhattan.

We also attended and spoke at the MediaPost OMMA East show which had an unbelievable number of online marketing stars from Google, NBC, and others in the social networking space where the highlighted hot topics revolved around “widgets” and professionally-produced video content mashup up with user-generated video content to form very real and believable, engaging content driving media sites.

As an entrepreneur, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to grow our relationships and connections in NYC, but I also have to admit that it’s a little nerve-wracking with how expensive it will likely be. It’s clearly a risk worth taking and I have the utmost confidence in my team (and especially Chris who is going to be starting up the office there) making this a huge success. Our partners and clients in New York have already extended unbelievable generosity and hospitality. Thank you to all of you who have opened your doors to us (literally and figuratively). Thx!

Our very own Dylan Boyd with eROI spoke on this panel where the goal was to engage audience participation and guess who the Liar was among the 5 panelists.

First potential liar: Al Gadbut, CEO, Acquire Web
Acquisition Email - is your response true? Al showed examples of acquisition email for an auto-insurance client, non-profit event, financial services client, and telecom client. Was he lying that email recipients actually sent long, valuable responses to acquisition email that so many people perceive as spam? (Not a liar)

Second potential liar: Scott Mencken, Director, Relationship Marketing, eBay
With hundreds of different lists and email creatives for transactional and marketing emails, Personalization is Key! Lots of ways to personalize email:
1) Audience composition
2) Degree/Mix of personalization
3) Email design + production
4) Frequency of delivery

Results: 113% lift in open rates; 285% lift in response rates, and 160% increase in sales.
(Not a liar)

Third potential liar: Dylan Boyd, Vice President, Sales and Strategy, eROI
Offline to Online Lead Capture Case Study for Jewelry company:
PIN-coded direct mail postcards sent to 100k customers/prospects (their in-house list). That postcard sent people to a website where they were asked to do only 1 thing - enter a unique PIN code and click “submit”. The following page pre-populated all of their info and asked a few other questions like email address and 2 lead qualification questions, then gave the customer a coupon for limited sale in their physical stores.

Results: 1920 coupons redeemed ($312.50/sale) = $600k in sales
Learnings in this case: use branded URL to instill trust: rogersandhollands.com/vip
Next phase: convert to more email as postal rates are set to increase 7% or more.
(Not a liar)

(more…)

OMMA West ‘07 - Day 1 Re-cap

Overall theme of the event: “High Anxiety”

Topics covered were:
1) Top 10 Online Marketing Buzzwords you need to eliminate
2) Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, talks about the power of the Blogosphere as well as consumers need + longing for authenticity, transparency, and like-minded values to the media and brands they consume.
3) Shelly Palmer, Media 3.0 host, coins the next big realization - Context (not Content) is King
4) The new new thing in Social Networks
5) Case studies of HOT trend: User-Generated Video integration into websites - for Media, Big Consumer Brands, and smaller brands
6) Email Liars Club - featuring AcquireWeb, Ogilvy, AvenueA / Razorfish, and eROI

Details to follow in upcoming blog posts…

Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in ‘06, impressed the hell out of me with her bold statements and charisma. She talked about consumers longing for authenticity, transparency, and values. “If you can hit upon this, that’s when the magic happens,” she continued.

Huffington strongly declared, “Don’t be stopped by the naysayers. We have to deal with the naysayers - including the inner-critic in our heads. We must break through our own self doubt.”

Mainstream Media has Attention Deficit Disorder! Examples:
1) Anna Nicole Smith is everywhere in U.S. media for an entire month, then it doesn’t exist ever again. (Drop it like it’s hot).
2) Kosovo - does anyone know what’s going on in Kosovo today? No, and we should because lots of bad stuff is happening.
3) Elian Gonzalez - how is he doing in Cuba? Does anyone know?

Key insight on the Blogosphere - bloggers like to take little nuggets, investigate, and make them into stories that get AMPLIFIED in the mainstream media. Many times, blogs are the source of the bigger stories. The Huffington Post is a news aggregator for progressive, political news. 800 bloggers write for free because they want their views out there real-time.

There will always be Print and New Media. Huffington used the analogy of Gilligan’s Island - “it’s not just Ginger OR Mary Ann - let’s have a three-way.” Meaning: there is a need for magazines, newspapers, blogs, and other forms of online media.

Fearlessness is key. You need to experiment (what works today will not work in a few years). Your organization must carry the torch like Google, where they accept an 80%-90% failure rate as a great thing. 10% success on big ideas is HUGE. Don’t be easily discouraged - most people give up way too early.

3000 attendees at this Online Marketing Media and Advertising show in Hollywood, CA today. Wow!

Apparently, a survey went out with lots of buzzwords that people voted on and should be avoided at all costs - there were 10 of them, but I could only remember the top 7:
7. Viral
6. ROI (sorry, but that will NEVER go away)
5. Buzz
4. Out of the Box
3. Synergy
2. Engagement
1. Web 2.0

Nick Nyhan, founder of Dynamic Logic, is the show’s Master of Ceremonies. He leads the discussion with some dazzling facts about the online marketing industry and trends. Online marketing spend is up to $18 Billion; hard to hire again; and VC money is back in a big way.

We’re living in an Era of “Control Shift + Options.” Digital is about Control.

Advertisers thinking about:
1. Engagement
2. Advertising Opps
3. Accountability

Consumers think:
1. I’m in control
2. Free Content
3. Scary Data

Advertisers / Brands must give up a lot of control to survive in this new world. Consumers are at the center with brands all around them trying to make a connection of the 7,000 marketing messages bombarding the consumer each day.

Chuck Porter, Chairman of Crispin, Porter, & Bogusky - arguably the hottest agency in the world right now, spoke at OMMA East today about the success of his agency and the secret of viral marketing.

In his presentation, Porter brought up examples of how the world is moving so fast that a big news story hits for a few hours and then that person / story is forgotten about. This is often true of ”memorable” ad campaigns. The lifespan of great ad campaigns has gotten shorter and shorter with so much noise out there, especially with user-generated content. In fact, one panelist on ”The Creative Panel” pointed out that 90% of big box-office Hollywood films fail, so why expect all TV advertising to succeed? Coming up with and executing upon a big idea is exceedingly difficult and there needs to be a tolerance around how to define success.

The Secret of Viral Marketing

Case Study: Burger King’s Subservient Chicken
www.subservientchicken.com
This site launched 3 years ago and within 12 days, there were 100 million hits to the site and the average amount of time spent on the site per user was 7 minutes. 3 years later, there have been a total of 460 million hits and it completely resonates with the 16-25 year old male demographic who are powereaters at Burger King.

More Chuck Porter advice:

To see the video clips of Chuck Porter’s presentation AND to see his entire presentation via video, go to OMMA’s specific webpage here to check it out>>