PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

No getting around the fact that the Chief Marketing Officer has been on the endangered species list almost since its creation. Recent data from Spencer Stuart points out that the average CMO now lasts only 26 months in their position before deciding to spend more time with family. That’s compared to 44 months for the average CEO and 39 months for the average CFO.

A recent piece from BusinessWeek captures the new challenges any CMO faces. In fact, the best part of the article lays out what one CMO, from Geico, faced in just 72 hours: (more…)

Like a lot of bloggers, I’m a polygamist. I write for one at PJA, and one for The Life Science Executive Exchange, about marketing to life scientists. I’ll confess that I used to worry that our estimates to set up a soup-to-nuts blog for a corporate client, complete with concept, design, editorial plan and upkeep, might seem a bit steep. That was before I realized how much you have to work at a blog to keep it not only relevant and populated, but connected to the rest of the world.

Visibility means ensuring that your blog is clearly linked to any other blogs you write for, as well as other blogs and sites that you feel complement it. Transparency is, after all, at the core of social media. Until all relationships are clearly demarcated, your blog doesn’t look legit, or as legit as it could. Content is one thing you can control on your blog. Look and feel is another. But links are a third thing, and they’re every bit as important as the other two.

Reciprocity is another important component of the social media world. If you link to another site, they should know about it. If they like what you produce, they should link back to you. When we asked the president of BioInformatics if we could link his site to our blog, he not only agreed, he gave us two free banners to promote it, one on his Executive Exchange home page and one on his HTML newsletter. Content is king in social media, or to quote one of my favorite clients, “You’ve got to feed the beast.” Anyway, you’ll never know how much you’ll get unless you ask.

Tony Hung has more some tips on blog promotion at his ProBlogger site. Okay, he has 41 tips, which is 39 more than I do. In fact, I think it’s time for me to print out his list and hunt down my interactive department colleagues. They’ve been positively ignoring me, and my blogs. I just hope I can afford them.

All kinds of articles this year have stood up to be counted on the topic of measurement. Executives, especially CFOs, want marketing to be more and more accountable. A good recent piece on CMOs in strategy + business ranks accountability second only to putting the consumer at the heart of marketing.

At PJA, our clients are following and (we hope) driving this trend toward measuring campaign effectiveness. At the end of this week I had a conversation with a client for a campaign that is not even approved yet, and we discussed the following metrics for the first six months of the program: (more…)

Over the past month, we’ve helped a client to find their best fit in a social media tracking and analysis vendor. Top contenders included Biz360, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony, and Factiva. With this group, we felt pretty comfortable we’d covered all the bases.

As an agency employee, it’s always interesting to play client once in a while and see how vendors look from the other side of the table. Who looks hungry and who comes across as surprisingly sleepy? Who attempts to dazzle with capabilities? Who really does their homework on the brand? Who pauses the longest on the well-designed slide that shows their huge global network, while the clients politely glance down and check their PDAs? Nothing leaves you feeling more exposed about your last pitch than seeing how others do it. On the other hand, talking to so many speciality vendors in a row is always instructive, and I’ve pulled out a few of the more interesting tidbits from all the presentations. (more…)

Behavioral banner advertising is all the rage. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and bloggers everywhere have cottoned on to it, and clearly the US Federal Trade Commission is interested. If the federal government takes notice, you know we’ve crossed the chasm.

I can’t help thinking, though, about a piece I ghost-wrote two years ago for a pharmaceutical chemist, who decried the trend toward putting all scientific exploration into a niche and discouraging forays into fields outside one’s specific therapeutic area. The memory of writing that article makes me wonder: Whatever happened to Renaissance Men and Women who branched out and weren’t defined purely on the basis of their clickpaths? Several years down the road, Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” function continues to elicit a shrug from me. Once in perhaps 1,000 times I see something of interest. Everything else is based on a generic picture of who I am. If you looked at my book or music collection you’d wonder whether I was hopelessly schizophrenic instead of interested in everything. Except NASCAR.

In the end, I suppose the net is that behavioral ads will win the day, thousands of coders in China will design hundreds of versions of the same message for 50 cents an hour, online vendors will sell more long-tail page placements (the equivalent of 4:15 AM Sunday air time), and companies will profit from the fragmentation. To look at what else in the world might inspire us beyond our click paths, we’ll just have to take it offline.