Mike McGuire

Our graphics team collaborated with Laura McLellan to develop a cool new infographic showing top results from our recent CMO survey.  Check it out here.

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“We never got it off on that revolution stuff, and
It was such a drag
Too many snags“

(by David Bowie, made a hit by Mott the Hoople)

My wanderings bring me to Austin, TX, this week where I’m attending the SXSW conference. 

A benefit of being on a panel is you can go to other panels and steal, er, assimilate and contextualize material from other panelists for your own.  One of the panels, “The New Vibrant Ecosystem of Brands and Music,” assembled some folks from agencies Young & Rubicam, brands such as Nike and PepsiCo and Beggars Group, one of the largest independent group of labels in Europe.  The relationship  between brands and music is not particularly new but the evolution of the music industry (or the unwiding of the business of music), depending on your point of view) is making that relationship all the more important — for both sides. 

Brands have long tried to “be cool” by licensing popular music. Sometimes it works (I guess): the Stones licensing “Start Me Up” to Microsoft for the Windows 95.  Sometimes, it’s just weird, like Bob Dylan licensing “Lovesick” to Victoria’s Secret. 

But because of the complete disruption of the music industry, and a recognition by smart agency types of the need to make the linkage between bands and brands authentic, we’re starting to see smart band managers and bands utilizing the power and resources of brands to launch their careers.  The panelists cited some particularly good examples –  National’s work with American Express and Hyundai’s “Re:generation” documentary.

Panelists hastened to point out that there is no one-size-fits-all model for working with bands and artists. It can range from a simple “synch” license (in which a brand simply licenses a song for use in a commercial) — an agreement that’s an increasingly important source of revenue for labels and musicians — to getting directly involved in the launch of a band’s career.   PepsiCo, for example, has invested deeply in creating a set of operational relationships, including an independent label, to support various artists at the beginning of their career

Authenticity  and strategic support from the brands top executives are crucial to brands looking to create effective relationships. 

“It’s always a challenge” to make these arrangements work, said Javier Farfan, of PepsiCo. These n need to be a strategic imperative supported by the brand and its agency.  ”The challenge is keeping everyone aware of what the objective of campaign really is,” said Javier Farfan, of PepsiCo. “It’s about the conversation between the artists, fans and the brand helping to incorporate the brand in unique ways.

“It’s us listening to the band or artist, not telling them what we want,” he said. “ We have idea about what kind of music we wanted, we helped the artist find the right producer . . . and then amplifying a stage for (the artist) so they have a bigger stage.” 

Creating an authentic and beneficial relationship based on music and artists, however, is not for the faint of heart, according to panelists.  First, “synchs” are a good baseline but to move beyond that level means hiring or working with entities that are not only attuned to musical tastes of consumers in multiple markets, but also in the very complex licensing requirements around the use of music in commercials or campaigns. 

You don’t have to look any further than the hub-bub around Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” to see what can go wrong with copyrights. 

Music can certainly be a powerful brand resonator, music, but one that should be treated with care. Otherwise, the lyrics of that old Mott the Hoople song will be what resonates.

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So there I was, at my parents’ house , watching the Super Bowl with a collection of family friends and siblings.  Being the guy who researches mobile marketing and media, I was pulling out my iPhone to check out a few second screen applications. 

And that’s when I was confronted with the reality of “Social” and “social.”  Here I was trying to be “social” by hitting the social graph when more than a couple of people who were part of my “Social” context in meat-space suddenly gave me the dog eye (disapproving look).  They were not happy that the smartphone screen appeared more important to me than their conversation or what was going on on the big screen. 

 What does this little slice of life tell us? 

 While smartphones, tablets and other technologies have linked the offline and online worlds, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done in identifying, building and exploiting the “Social” and “social” elements of today’s consumers.  As I mentioned in a previous post, the social contract between consumers, advertisers and media is still being formed when it comes to mobile.  Mobile technologies have built the bridge that links the two, but there’s still a heck of a lot of work to be done in designing and building the on- and off-ramps from that bridge.  I think one of the key approaches to these on-ramps and off-ramps is considering the notion of “cognitive offloading.” (I’m setting it up, here, people, wait a ‘graph or two.)

 Commerce is already working on its own path to rewriting the social contract implicit in shopping: fighting showrooming at first, but slowly understanding it as a new component of consumer behavior and working to exploit it.  But unlike showrooming behavior which is implicitly a real-time activity (the consumer is in the store now and is checking prices and perhaps entering the “social” world to look for recommendations or product reviews from friends), there are a whole series of consumer inquiries that form engagements points commerce providers can use to help the consumers can leverage to bridge the “social” and “Social” worlds. 

 Think about it. If showrooming is a real-time activity, then merely sending a message to a business to find out if they carry Product X, or calling a restaurant to see if there’s a common table or if customers can order entrees at the bar without reservations, is what kind of transaction? They’re non real-time and they’re reflective of a consumer that is perhaps in the Social context — meaning they don’t need to or want to lean-in to an app or website to fully engage and make the decision right then.  They’re looking for bit of information but want to defer the rest of the decision-making process.  Enabling this sort of “cognitive offloading” (here) is a bridging technique commerce folks should be exploiting.

 So, do you buy that the new social contract is about bridging “social” and “Social” in commerce — with the consumer controlling the interactions but open to offers or interaction points that are timely (occurring at an appropriate time and contextually relevant)? 

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 Besides pondering why the 49ers QB didn’t use the legs that got him the starting job to get himself into end zone last Sunday, I’ve also been pondering how mobile changes the relationship between consumers and brands.  I got started on that after a recent mobile media conference (Mobile Media Summit) I attended in San Francisco. 

The guy making the point was Jeff Bernstein, EVP and global managing partner at the media agency Universal McCann Worldwide, in a presentation about real-time marketing and real-time mobile marketing and its manifold opportunities and complexities. Bernstein cautioned the audience that mobile marketing and advertising practitioners need to take care to avoid being overcome by the technology hype.

Couple of his key points:

• Media has transformed from something people watched (read, listened to, etc.)to something people do (consumers control their media experiences, not programmers)
• The average U.S. consumer is exposed to 1,200 ad messages/impressions per day (marketing budgets go up but its harder and harder to break through)

So what’s a mobile marketer to do? Buy more targeting data? Build an application? More outbound traffic? Turn up the volume?

Maybe, but not until marketers stop to really understand the changing nature of the relationship between their brands and consumers.  Bernstein noted that in a media-saturated world, advertisers have to acknowledge the implied social contract in mobile that’s very different than the implied social contract for established mediums such as TV.  In TV, the consumer knows that for every 30 minutes of TV content, there are guaranteed six minutes of advertisements.  Mobile marketers are failing today because they don’t realize what’s changed.  Today, the implied social contract in mobile is that the consumer will engage if the trigger point is relevant to them and their particular context, it’s compelling and it’s authentic.  (To the point about compelling and authentic content, see my colleague Jake Sorofman’s recent post on brand journalism and content marketing here.)

Knowing at what moment a marketer or advertiser can add value for a consumer is absolutely crucial. This then requires having the right assets in place that can be delivered at the right point in time. 

At one point Bernstein was asked if privacy was going to be a hurdle, given that establishing these kinds of relationships (to deliver such precisely timed relevant content) requires a flow of information from a consumer that is fraught with privacy challenges. 

But Bernstein doesn’t see privacy and technology as the biggest hurdles. I’m paraphrasing here, but he argued that while privacy was definitely going to be a persistent concern, the biggest challenges were going to be found in changing the business processes and datasets and straight-up logistics involved with developing user scenarios and the right content mix to mobile consumers.  Much of the technologies are in place to deliver on the rosy future of mobile marketing and advertising, Bernstein said, but the business processes are not. 

OK, your turn.  So how do y0u think you should meet the consumer halfway with mobile?

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This Friday: links to my colleague’s research!

In addition to Jake Sorofman’s piece on the MobileFirst conference, Adam Sarner delivers a great glimpse of his Social Media research agenda with the key reasons to make the investment straight-away.

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My esteemed colleague Jake Sorofman made the trek to NYC this week to partake of the MobileFirst 2013 conference.  He does a great job (here) of distilling the essentials from the conference.  Check it out!

I’m particularly fond of the Citi’s exec’s pithy maxim.

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As mobile marketers develop and tend to their mobile strategies and day-to-day tactics, the tectonic plates upon which those strategies and tactics ride — mobile OSs and development platforms — will continue to collide, driving shifts in the marketplace which must be monitored.  One important subduction zone (where the plates meet and younger, less-dense rides over the top of  the other) according to some will be maps and mobile search. (FYI — I’m a native Californian, so earthquake-related metaphors come naturally.)

As noted in this WSJ story (subscription required),  Apple’s recent Maps problems have put it in the difficult strategic position of having to play catch-up to Google in the all-important race to monetize locations and location  information.

Having giants battle over a core technology can drive industry standards while providing healthy competitive alternatives for mobile markets.   But Apple’s in a position they haven’t often been in the past few years of having to follow somebody else in the development of what is sure to be a cornerstone of any successful device-software-service ecosystem: location.  With the Maps stumble, and the subsequent decision to allow an updated version of Google Maps into the Apple App Store, Apple might have assuaged its user base but the strategic cost was steep: the company is essentially back to where it was prior to launching their own mapping product — having their biggest ecosystem competitor controlling an all important app that drives significant revenue opportunities.

For Apple, the strategic calculus boils down to two key options.  First, continue to invest in building up Apple’s own Maps product to the point where it is competitive with Google which probably means  signficant financial and headcount investments.  Second, without using the word “cede”, Apple could cede the maps market to Google, and focusing on location-enabled apps and transaction “experiences” that can ride on top of any mapping infrastructure.

For mobile marketers, this particular fight between giants affects your native apps and/or browser-based app strategies  for the individual OSs (Android and iOS) and browsers (Chrome and Safari).  Over the long-term, assuming Apple continues to fight to establish its own location toolkit, it is likely to result in a few opportunities to play the two platforms off of each other in terms of pricing and terms of service for specific location-enabled campaigns or tactics.

To be sure, Apple must come up with an approach to maps and location-aware transactions that tells mobile marketers which of the two approaches ( mentioned in the previous ‘graph) the company is going to take.  I would argue for the latter — build transaction experiences that feed into the Apple ecosystem e.g. iTunes that ride on top of Google’s Map ecosystem.   Right now, mobile marketers need to see something clear, concise and compelling from Apple before they split off any of their location-enabled budgets from Google.

Are we placing too much emphasis on the importance of location? What do you think?

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It’s a new year and for many Gartner analysts, it usually means a flurry of inquiries about the Predicts documents we worked on and published in December.  And sometimes, a news item pops up during the Christmas-to-New-Year’s break that coincides nicely with a recently published prediction.

 This story about Apple’s rumored expansion of Passbook capabilities to include near-field-communications (NFC) including redemption and payment, definitely links to a prediction we published.  In the document, “Predicts 2013:  Marketing Executives Assume a More Strategic Role”  Gene Alvarez and I published the following:  “By 2017, 90% of social selling activities globally will be contextually delivered via mobile devices.”

While the Mashable story notes that Apple’s patent application includes a number of items that may or may not make into future versions of Passbook, the story and the application describe scenarios that are spot-on examples of how context will affect marketing and sales via mobile devices. 

Passbook is currently billed by as Apple as an app that lets a user store and manage mobile coupons, e-tickets etc., but as noted in “Apple’s Passbook Has Subtle but Powerful Influence,” Gartner noted that “Passbook will be among the first real context-aware technology experiences many consumers will have. “ 

If you play out the Apple-Passbook-NFC theory by extrapolating from what’s hinted at in the story about the patent,  and consider how the role the iTunes store and software play in Apple’s overall strategy, it starts to paint a pretty interesting picture.  Content purchases or rentals from the iTunes store, along with purchases made at Apple stores (physical stores or online) can form useful targeting information the company could use to maintain its relationships with customers. 

What do you think? Is this scenario something unique to Apple or do you expect other ecosystem players will deliver similar capabilities? Check out the rest of our predictions in the 2013 document to see how they fit into your views (or plans) for the future.

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Update: Well, at least the folks at Instagram are listening.  The company did a reasonable job of explaining the intent of the change in policies and made clear they aren’t looking to sell users photos.  However, I think the lessons I mentioned are still worth considering.

So many teaching moments wrapped up in the news that Instagram’s terms of service which includes what some view as a bit of a bombshell – that Instagram can license/sell to third parties users photos without the user/photographer having any say in the matter.

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Perhaps some folks might be surprised to see the news that ad inventory for the stream of the upcoming Super Bowl (and I like the 49ers chances of being in that game, by the way) are nearly sold out. 

Why? Advertisers are wising up to the fact that consumers are using those second-screen apps we’ve heard about. Despite the lack of citation to support the claim that second-screen app use by consumers  has jumped ”exponentially” since last year’s Super Bowl (the first to be streamed live), I think we can agree there has been a surge in usage of second-screen or companion apps with a growing number of consumers in the U.S. Actually, some data from comScore’s blog gives us some actual numbers to support the notion that consumers are augmenting their TV consumption with mobile devices. 

What mobile marketers need to look beyond the TV-industry economics angle of this story and focus more on what this kind of shift in consumer behavior means for the future of content consumption on mobile devices.  

In particular, the notion of “ensemble” or multiscreen interactions is gaining traction.  For the mobile marketer, this concept presents some interesting options.  First, would be to look for opportunities to extend the engagement of a broadcast advertisement to a viewer’s mobile device.  Second, would be to acquire audience data from second-screen apps to look for context cues about audience demographics.   Methinks that more than a few of these second-screen app users would find the ability to defer or extend an offer made on the TV or second-screen to their smartphones — when they might be out and about and willing to head to a store or location (for an event) — conveniently compelling.

Anybody seeing any compelling examples second-screen apps that are extending into a truly mobile experience?

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