PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

My most recent inquiry shows that 30-second spots at the 2008 Super Bowl will run you about $2.7 million, up 4 percent from $2.6 million last year.

Coincidentally, $2.7 million represents the entire marketing budget for some of our B2B clients. Granted, if you don’t sell cars, beer, automobiles, movies, lingerie or mixed nuts, it’s probably not the best place to blow that budget.

Of course, the possibility of doing a Super Bowl ad is invariably tossed around in B2B marketing meetings as the ultimate dream: nearly 100,000,000 sets of eyeballs on your ad, especially if it airs in the first half, and all that follow-on Web activity as people make a mental note to / actually visit your site.

But let’s say that price tag is a bit steep. What can all we non-participants learn from the best features of the best Super Bowl ads, versus blowing off a lot of steam the morning after on which ones were the most effective? Here are a few ideas:

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I like two things I’ve seen over the past week about the experience you ought to build and generate on your Web site (or is it next-generation Web presence?).

One is Brand Action, from Ron Rogowski at Forrester. Your site needs to both communicate Brand Image and encourage Brand Action by delivering value. I think that’s a handy little heuristic to use when looking at sites. Not so surprisingly, Rogowski looked at some luxury brand sites and found they were all image and no action. I’d have to say that many BtoB sites are in the same boat: us, us, us. Just compare the chest-thumping of Oracle with the helpful and lower-key approach of SAP. Who cares if you’re #1 in embedded databases, especially in 28 point type?

The other term is customer carewords. Okay, carewords does call up an image of a new section of the Hallmark store, but in the way Gerry McGovern defines them – the words that bring your customer through your site versus to your site – they make a lot of sense. He points up a good example in a recent MarketingProfs article: the term ‘executive MBA’ might get someone to your school’s site, but a term like ‘advance your career’ qualifies as a careword because it’s going to motivate them to go on.

He offers some good steps to arrive at the carewords that should drive your site: look at Level 1 and 2 of your site classification, look at competitive sites, look at most popular search words to your site and your industry, see which pages are the most popular pages on your Web site, and dig into the most common help desk call topics your help desk gets. In addition, talk to customers through usability tests.

The better cared-for the visitor feels, obviously, the higher the conversion rate and the more actions they take.

We’ve been talking these days about mobile marketing and mobile search. We’ve all got a mobile device (okay, my younger sister is holding out, but that’s mostly an Emersonian thing she has about simplicity and hidden fees), and we all know that someday we’ll be getting real-time cardiovascular advice based on feedback sensors built into our PDAs and mobiles, but what happens in between?

The results thus far seem to be: no one’s sure because the ecosystem isn’t there yet. eMarketer reported earlier this week that meaningful mobile brand marketing is still on the horizon, the same extremely promising horizon it was on a few months ago. Two-thirds of agency execs won’t be moving a dime of their online marketing budgets to mobile during 2008. The other third say it depends on the client, and the final 1% are already heavily invested in mobile. And much of that already-moving segment is serving youth-centric BtoC, Sprite being a good example of a company that’s pushing into mobile.

And what is going on there? In The Yard on the Sprite site, you can register to get the Yard applet on your phone (standard fees apply; maybe my sister is on to something), then enter a code under found under each cap of each bottle of the nutritious carbonated health drink and be eligible to win…content. Unspecified content, but purported to be quite cool. Perhaps a Sprite ringtone.

Somehow this model seems a bit nascent for BtoB markets, though it’s mildly amusing to consider a CIO looking under his new blade server for a special code he can text in to get a free white paper.

At the moment, PJA comes down squarely in the ‘it depends on the client’ category. We’re thinking about applications and mobile search, but in many cases the technology just hasn’t caught up to the complexity of material needed to support the decision process. That’s not to say that a certain colleague who slipped off to Vegas this week won’t come back with an idea that will perfectly align with a security or open source company on our roster.

As Kuhn said 40 years ago in debunking the myth of linear progression in scientific advancements, a breakthrough or two ought to erase all the gradualism and sideline chatter we’re hearing now.

No, I don’t mean telling fewer jokes to colleagues or really organizing your desktop, but communicating and working a little bit more efficiently.

The backdrop: several years ago, PJA hosted a marketing manager from one of our global clients. The manager, based in Germany, spent a few months at local HQ and during her stay came to PJA for a look inside an American agency.

While we were waiting for some of her colleagues to arrive for a meeting (you’ll never guess; they were late), I talked to this marketing manager about the different cultural approaches to doing business in American and German corporations. Coming out of this baptism in the American way, she had some strong opinions. In essence, here’s what she said:

“I’m amazed at how much time Americans waste on meetings! And how much we bother each other all day long. In Germany you would never get up and lurk around people’s desks to exchange news. We go into work, we work all morning, and then we have lunch together and talk. That’s when we really exchange information, over lunch. Then in the afternoon we go back to our desks and work again, so we can leave at a reasonable hour.”

If you’ve already noticed meeting and email creep in your world, here’s a resolution we can all benefit from in 2008: when you’re at work, focus on getting your work done. That leaves a lot more time for life. Just be a bit more German about it.