Stop the Insanity!

I’m given to rail against the state of the world in terms of the overreaction in favor of online marketing methods over print advertising. As with any sea change in the sales end of our industry, there are multiple players (publishers, clients, ad agencies) and plenty of blame to go around. A frequent target for publishers is ad agencies. Part of this is historical, as an agency can stand between the publisher and his/her client. And part of it is structural. Clients squeeze ad agencies, who have to run leaner and often assign inexperienced media buyers to select media.

Today, there are two beefs we have with ad agencies: one is the “RFP due by the end of the day.” The other is “we’re only buying online.” Clearly, there is pressure from clients on both fronts, but the hope is that the ad agencies—who are supposed to be guiding the client’s marketing efforts—would make a greater effort to help stop the insanity.

But I’ve discovered hope recently in the form of two of the most influential high-tech ad agencies, Just Media and Mindshare.

Just Media, in Berkeley, California, has a whole pile of accounts including EMC, the red-hot VMware, Quest, Fujitsu, McAfee, and others. Recently, CEO Dick Reed told me of the battles they are pitching to get these clients to truly embrace integrated marketing—with the print part of the equation being the biggest challenge. It was Dick that told me about ROMO—"Return on Marketing Objective"—and how his agency is using it to convince clients to use print in the mix. Dick also told me about having lunch with Pat McGovern this summer and railing on him about shutting down InfoWorld. A far cry from a 23-year-old media planner plunking numbers into a spreadsheet, this is the kind of involved, opinionated and non-isolationist ad agency we need.

Another agency that gets it is Mindshare, working with IBM. Experienced associate media director Larry Meisel is out on the front lines with publishers, pushing, cajoling and preaching about what IBM needs in print. And he is almost single-handedly keeping the IT newsweeklies alive. (A quick hand-count of 12/17 issues reveals: Computerworld, 21.5 ad pages, 4 from IBM; Network World, 19.5 pages, 6 from IBM; eWeek, 37.5 ad pages, 9 from IBM.)

They are out there. Find those ad agencies that get it. And let’s get them more business.

'ROMO': Better ROI for Marketers

Several days ago I wrote about the desire for marketers to distill their art down to a science in the crucible of online marketing metrics. In it, I suggested publishers ask questions and flesh out whether your client is really doing the work to analyze the effectiveness of their online marketing or whether they were just using online because it could Cover Their Ass ("CTA") if called upon to prove ROI.

So, now what?

Suggest that there are other metrics beyond ROI that they should consider using. The term I heard a few weeks ago was ROMO, or, Return on Marketing Objective. This has broader application than ROI but it both encourages measurement as well as the idea that strict return on investment may not have to be the ONLY thing one should evaluate. So you can begin to discuss what other sort of marketing objectives one might have and how to measure them. For example, brand awareness and buyer preference–those mysterious forces that make someone click on your Adwords ad instead of a lesser-known company’s.

Why not suggest print (oh there I go again) to raise awareness and preference using a pre-campaign and post-campaign study to measure the improvement? And then analyze changes in click-thrus, click-through rates and conversion rates of online efforts during the campaign (across the same audience–it’s called integrated marketing). Who says you cannot measure this?

We had an account that ran regular e-newsletter sponsorships. In the middle of that two-year run of online advertising, they ran some print: full and half pages, 17 times across a 22-issue span (we are 24 a year). The marketing objective was to try and increase awareness five percentage points. While they were running the print ads, they averaged 155 online leads. During the period before and after the print, they averaged 61 leads. The increase lowered the cost per lead even after factoring in the entire cost of the print advertising. That means the nine point increase in awareness they achieved over the period was in effect free. They achieved both a ROMO and ROI.

That is obviously a showcase example and your mileage may vary. But to summarize, don’t get put off by ROI. Suggest ROMO as an equally valuable metric. And then figure out how to measure that ROMO, with awareness and brand preference studies. You’ll like the ROI.

(Note: My source for the term “ROMO” told me he had heard it from Tech Target–kudos are due to TT, or whoever invented it.)

Do Marketers Want ROI or Just CYA?

This entry is for PWLA (people who like acronyms). Many marketers (at least in tech, when I am) chant "R-O-I, R-O-I, R-O-I" whenever a salesperson is present. And woe to the salesperson that wants to talk about PRINT! They claim to need Return On Investment, and of course the only way to provide that is with online marketing (measuring clicks, click-thru percentage and lead generation). Marketers want a Silver Bullet–something that turns their art into a science. They think they’ve found it. Until you start asking questions.

Remember good-ole Bingo cards? Oh, I meant “Reader Service Cards." How did we handle claims that another magazine outpulled ours? You broke them down with questions. What is the quality of the leads? How closely do they track results? If someone calls in six months later, do they link that back to the Bingo lead? In 90 percent of the cases, the marketers did not track leads adequately.

Same is true today with online marketing–at least with smaller or medium-sized companies. They don’t track whether the clicks became leads. Or later, sales. Their salespeople only follow-up on a lead once. The leads don’t get followed up on at all. Nowadays, many marketers simply have a number of leads they must generate per quarter. Period. If those leads don’t turn into sales, well, that’s the sales team’s fault. So, many times, when they tell you they want ROI all they really want you is CYA (Cover Your Ass). You should call them on it. And when you do, you can introduce another acronym to them that will also open the door for you to sell them badly needed print advertising. It’s ROMO, and we’ll talk more about that in the next post.

Magazine Metrics: Make the Punishment Fit the Crime

I just returned from a sales trip on the West Coast. I am always looking for ways to keep fighting the wacky perception that print is dead, as is regularly reported in print media-Doh! One of the problems was typified by a large client who said he wants to measure the success of a marketing effort on the very next day, and since you could not do that with print, he was only using online media.

Now there are many things one can respond to here, but I want to focus on the metrics. It is very difficult to measure the results of a print ad campaign in a trade publication on a daily basis. It's not how they work. You don't measure the speed of a glacier moving in miles per hour. You measure glaciers in inches per year. Similarly, you have to measure print campaign benefits in longer-term metrics like "increase in awareness over six months, change in brand perception or brand preference" over a longer period of time.

If you are not offering the kind of research that measures these kinds of metrics right now, you need to be. Print cannot be measured with clicks but it doesn't produce that type of impulsive result. That doesn't mean that what we do produce-awareness, brand preference and sales-cannot be measured. They can be, quite easily with pre-and post-campaign studies. There are many quick-and-dirty online research sites out there (www.surveymonkey.com is one) where you can do a study for less than $20.

You should also be using Harvey, Readex or Starch to independently measure the perception of an advertiser's creative as well as the creative of every other advertiser in the issue. This sort of research- common in print for years-is very rare in the online world. When I mention the breadth and depth of these studies to the new online buyers they are amazed.

Don't give in to demands for online metrics that don't make sense for print. There are ways to measure print's effectiveness. Educate your customers and use them.

The New York Times’ (and Your) Secret Weapon

I looked at NYTimes.com briefly this morning before leaving for work. Nothing interesting. Some bishops.

Then I got to the Cold Spring Harbor Deli and glanced at the physical print edition of the Times and was surprised to see the headlines on Iran’s nuclear program screaming out at me. READ ME, it said. This is IMPORTANT!

And I did read it. And it was important. If I only read the Times online, it would have just flown right by. Print is really good at providing context. The Internet is not.

If you are selling print, you need to pay attention to these examples as they come up and use them to hammer home the unique benefits of print.

I’m not against online – we sell tons of online products. I just feel the jump to online marketing has gone overboard and there are few voices reminding us why and how print still works.