REPOST: Challenge for digital marketers to keep up with innovation

In this article for The Belfast Telegraph, Norbert Sagnard shares the lessons he learned about digital marketing from the Mobile World Congress, one of the world's biggest events in the mobile industry.

 

At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I was reminded how digital innovation is impacting the practice of mobile marketing. What to do with 'cameras without lenses', or with 'proximity sensing' that allows you to move content on a smartphone screen without actually touching the screen, or with paying your retail purchases from a nod of your head?

Such new techniques always seem outlandish at first, yet they become the new normal for billions of smartphone users around the world rapidly.

Image Source: limexdesign.co.za

Technology breakthroughs are coming thick and fast, thanks to crowd-funding and angel investment, and accelerators like Wayra, where founders set up and grow their tech business and launch new products within a few months. The challenge for marketers is to stay up-to-date on new digital technologies, to engage and communicate with the billions of smartphone users – the general population in developed economies – who watch more video every day and adopt new ways of communicating through apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Telegram, ever faster.

The complexity and plethora of mobile technologies like augmented reality, frictionless payments, wearables, NFC, smartX – watches, fitness trackers, houses, cars – forces creative professionals to adapt brand stories leveraging the technical capabilities of the moment. This begs the question, can marketing innovation only be subordinate to digital innovation?

Image Source: theguardian.com

Over the past decade, marketing has evolved into digital due to web innovation and is now exploding into a myriad of combinations in the mobile space, where both real and virtual worlds blend. Sci-fi movies seem to precede our reality with ever less delays, tricks from Star Trek and Minority Report are here today, but the fundamental question for marketers is which communication tools and style to use, in order to address the fickle mood of their audience, or to devise mobile commerce journeys that make shopping effortless and enjoyable from a mobile device.

The quickening pace of technology innovation sets us all, marketers, the challenge of dedicating ourselves to continuous learning, trialling, refining, adopting or discarding in weeks rather than months, new mobile technologies. We must make decisions fast, yet achieve the objective of raising brand differentiation, brand value and customer satisfaction, those timeless marketing values.

Follow this Mitch Berman Twitter account for more on the latest trends in digital marketing.

REPOST: Casting Jesus is a key marketing decision

Casting Jesus for the big screen has always been a challenging feat. Fox News reveals what goes on in casting Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado as Jesus for the new film “Son of God.” 

Image Source: foxnews.com

They say you can never be too rich or too thin. Surely it goes without saying that you can't be too good-looking, either, right? Especially in Hollywood.

But in the popular new film "Son of God," Jesus is so, well, easy on the eyes that some are revisiting an age-old question that has vexed scholars for centuries:

Did Jesus really look like Brad Pitt, only slightly better?

OK, that exact question hasn't vexed scholars for centuries. But those who study religion as portrayed in popular culture do note that depicting Jesus on the screen has always been a tricky business, one that balances weighty theological concerns — how divine to make the son of God, and how human? — with more earthly ones, like how best to sell movie tickets?

"Listen, films are big business," says Steven Kraftchick, professor at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. "They're probably not going to cast Jonah Hill as Jesus."

Not that Hill wouldn't provide an interesting spin. But the producers of "Son of God," Roma Downey (who also plays Jesus' mother Mary) and her husband Mark Burnett, were clearly going for something different when they chose the strapping, 6-foot 3-inch Diogo Morgado, a Portuguese actor who's dabbled in modeling, for "The Bible," their History channel miniseries. ("Son of God" is culled from footage shot for the series).

Downey won't deny her Jesus is good-looking — not that she'd get very far with that — but explains she was seeking a subtle mix of qualities. "Someone with strength, presence, charisma, tenderness, kindness, compassion and natural humility," she says. "Someone who could be both a lion AND a lamb."

Casting came down to the wire. A few weeks before shooting was to begin in Morocco, there was still no Jesus. Downey fired off an email to church and business contacts with the urgent header: "Looking for Jesus."

Salvation came from an unexpected place. In Ouarzazate, Morocco, a member of an advance team remembered an actor who'd been there more than a year earlier on a different project. He searched through hotel registries and found the name.

Not surprisingly, Morgado's looks have been a big part of the conversation ever since. "We not only found Jesus, we found 'Hot Jesus,'" Oprah Winfrey told him in a TV interview, referring to a Twitter hashtag about the actor. "

A hunkier Jesus than necessary," Variety noted in its review of the movie. The Hollywood Reporter called it "Jesus as pretty boy," and noted a resemblance between Morgado and the young Marlon Brando.

But box office is booming. "Son of God" came in a close second last weekend to Liam Neeson's "Non-Stop," beating out the blockbuster "Lego" movie.

To Morgado, it's all good. "Long after I'm gone, this is going to be my legacy," he said in a telephone interview. "So why should I worry about people calling me 'Hot Jesus'? I'm really proud of this movie."

His key acting challenge, Morgado notes, was getting that balance between divine and human: "It's a really tricky thing."

That's always been a problem, says Jeffrey Mahan, professor at the Iliff school of theology in Denver. "Jesus films go back to the very beginning of cinema, and there's always that tension between human and divine."

Mahan notes that "this isn't the first sexy Jesus on film." When Jeffrey Hunter played the role in the 1961 "King of Kings," he says, people dismissively dubbed it "I Was a Teenage Jesus," a reference to Hunter's youthful good looks (though he was in his 30s).

Some films, like the 1959 "Ben-Hur," avoided problems by not showing Jesus' face. Others, says Adele Reinhartz, author of "Jesus in Hollywood" and professor at the University of Ottawa, show a sanitized figure "that could have walked right out of a Renaissance painting." But they were always fairly good-looking: "These are marketing decisions."

The deeper problem with portraying Jesus, Reinhartz says, is that "to make a compelling movie character, you need flaws. And that doesn't fit into most conceptions of Jesus."

One exception was Martin Scorsese's 1988 "The Last Temptation of Christ," starring Willem Dafoe as a Jesus conflicted about his identity and experiencing earthly temptations, like lust. That didn't please everyone — a Christian fundamentalist group hurled Molotov cocktails at a Paris theater where it played.

Then there was Mel Gibson's 2004 "The Passion of the Christ," starring Jim Caviezel, an enormous hit which is deemed one of the most controversial films of all time, both because of its bloody depiction of the Crucifixion — Roger Ebert called it the most violent film he'd ever seen — and allegations of anti-Semitism.

Caviezel, Dafoe, Morgado — all give different interpretations, but they all look a certain way. None, for example, are dark-skinned, as some have speculated Jesus was. Others have noted that men of the time were significantly smaller than they are today.

"The fact is we just don't know how Jesus looked," says Kraftchick, at Emory. "How big was he? Did he have a speech defect?"

Downey, asked about the issue, points out that her Jesus is a Latino, and that in itself is groundbreaking. (The film is also being released in Spanish.)

What troubles Mahan is that heartthrob Jesus portrayals ignore that "Jesus was an outsider. And this 'pretty Jesus' is an attempt to make him sort of a celebrity. That isn't accurate according to the tone of the Gospels. "

Morgado says he's taking the long view.

"When I was in Jerusalem, I saw a man and a 10-year-old kid praying," he says. "And I looked at the kid and thought, 'Wow, I will be his visual and spiritual reference."

That's what producers are hoping.

"I think people who don't know Jesus will fall in love," Downey says. "And those who do know him will fall in love all over again."

Zen Digital Fund CEO Mitch Berman aims to harness creative talents and innovative digital entrepreneurs to help forge a new era in digital marketing. Follow this Twitter page for more news on marketing, media, and technology.

REPOST: Enterprise software marketing: Sell the value, not the box

If you’re planning to put your software in the market, focusing on customer needs instead of your product features will give you a better boost in sales. Learn more about this technique in this article from ZDNet.com.

Many enterprise software startups view success as a simple equation: build a great product and the world will line up to buy. There are two problems with this logic. First, it assumes that great product always drives great success; and second, this thinking leads to feature-oriented, rather than customer-centric, decisions.

The tendency to focus on features rather than customer needs is understandable. After all, the team pours its life into refining the idea, building features, designing the UX, testing, and all the other incredibly demanding tasks associated with launching a product.

The drive to perfect features before achieving a profound understanding of customer needs, pains, and business context comes from the mistaken assumption that technology, like idealized love, can overcome any obstacle. This mindset pushes many startups to believe their core mission is creating a great product.

In a blog post and video, entrepreneur and Stanford professor, Steve Blank, challenges startups to rethink the fundamental nature of their challenge and goal. Instead of pushing for better product and technology alone, Blank defines a startup as:




Blank's perspective has three important implications for enterprise marketing and sales. Although tailored to startups, these points are equally valid for people in large or established software companies, who may forget their real job is satisfying customer needs and creating delightful outcomes for buyers:

1. Customers are king. There is no substitute for spending time with real customers in your target market. Although the old adage, "the customer is always right" is often wrong, never forget that your company has little value outside the benefit it provides to customers. When it comes to selling, theories about the world are meaningless unless real customers actually buy.
2. Markets don't buy, people do. The term "market" is an abstraction designed to generalize about groups of prospects or customers. In the zeal to identify target markets we may forget that individuals, not markets, issue purchase orders. Strategize for the market but sell to the person. 
3. Sell value, not features. In enterprise software sales, feature wars push combatants toward commoditization — as software vendors leapfrog each other's feature lists, buyers learn to pay lowest dollar using missing features as the lever. Instead, build value by selling the meaning, not the box.

The best enterprise startups internalize the customer's mind so thoroughly that the resulting product actually anticipates customer needs. Products that meet this high standard are virtually always grounded in a deep and profound understanding of the customer; it rarely happens by chance.
In my experience, startups who don't get this message drift from one solution to another, never getting the traction they need. And large companies who focus on features, rather than real value, end up looking like their competitors in an endless cycle of non-innovation.

Mitch Berman, the founder of ZillionTV Corporation, has over 30 years of experience in domestic and international consumer and enterprise marketing, operations, and sales. Visit this Facebook page for more information about his career.

REPOST: Tradigital Marketing: How to integrate traditional and digital marketing for maximum results

In this article from The Business Journals, John Garcia discusses tradigital marketing--the integration of traditional and digital marketing strategies--as the most effective way to reach target audience, score high conversion rates, and make the most sales.

Image provided by ThinkStock (Oleksiy Mark) Image Source: bizjournals.com

There is a paradigm shift regarding the way people consume media.

Media that includes newspapers, television, magazines, radio, direct mail and the Internet are now the conversation starters, and digital is the new destination. People want to know where to go online to either get the rest of the information, sign-up for, or download the offer.

In other words, it is not "traditional" vs. "digital," its "tra-digital" that will garner the best results.

For starters, there are far too many "digital" ad agencies that want to tell you that traditional media is dead — that no one reads the paper or listens to radio anymore. They want to take your ad dollars and put all of them in search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and a brand new website.

While it may seem like good advice, this is not a good strategy. The truth is traditional media is not dead, but its role has changed dramatically.

For one thing, a digital agency only knows digital and therefore only recommends digital solutions. Even so-called “full-service agencies” are often guilty of separating traditional and digital marketing strategies, doing a disservice to their clients.

A quick case in point is Ironhorse Country Club. The club came to our agency after years of advertising a discounted-fees ad in the local newspaper (“bring in the coupon or call to schedule a round”). The club’s goal was to add a minimum of 25 new members in Q4 2012. We reallocated its budget, and for the same amount of money that they were spending in print, we created two 15-second commercials and ran them locally during two televised golf tournaments, The Fed-Ex Cup and The Ryder Cup.

The results were 92 new memberships — A 300 percent increase. All we did was use a media vehicle that best reached the club’s target audience with a simple call to action: “Visit Ironhorse Membership dot com to schedule a free membership preview round."

This TV campaign generated more traffic to the landing page than any SEO, SEM or other digital campaign could ever have in such a short period of time. The landing page made it easy for the prospect to continue down the sales funnel, and the excellent service by the advertiser closed the deal.

The takeaway: A tradigital strategy that is highly targeted, using a well-crafted ad, and directing its audience online will deliver the highest conversion rate because it mirrors the mindset of the advertiser’s audience.

Next month we’ll discuss the five basic steps to a successful tradigital marketing campaign.


Mitch Berman is a pioneer in the creation of innovative digital consumer and business-to-business products and services based on the principles of influence, sharing, and reward.  Follow this Twitter page to keep abreast of the latest marketing updates.

REPOST: On Cyber Monday, Pinterest More Than Tripled The Revenue Sent To Online Retailers

TechCrunch reports that Pinterest, despite just recently opening up to advertisers, proved its capability to drive web sales by more than tripling the revenue of online retailers on Cyber Monday.

Image source: TechCrunch.com

As Pinterest opens its doors to advertisers, retailers have been carefully monitoring the service’s ability to drive traffic to their sites, and more importantly, increase conversions that impact their bottom lines.

Over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping holidays, Pinterest delivered on this promise – or so claims a new report from marketing and analytics provider firm Piqora. The company found that Pinterest doubled the revenue sent to retailers on Black Friday, and more than tripled the revenue (up by 3.6x) on Cyber Monday, when compared with the 30-day average preceding the Thanksgiving holiday.

And since the after-Thanksgiving sales began a little early this year, it’s also worth noting that Pinterest drove two times the revenue on turkey day as well.

According to Piqora CEO Sharad Verma, whose company helps retailers and other brands market themselves across the “visual web” on sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, what the Black Friday/Cyber Monday figures show is that Pinterest users aren’t just “pinning for the sake of pinning.”

That discounts a widely held assumption that users on the site have been saving items they found there in a more “aspirational” manner, rather than a practical one. Or to put it more simply, there was concern that a Pinterest save didn’t indicate buying intent.

Says Verma, that’s not so. “[Pinterest users] are pinning to buy and they are going to Pinterest to look for products to buy. They thought of Pinterest as a destination for their holiday shopping circuit,” he explains. “That never happened with F-commerce or Twitter, else we would have known it by now.”

However, though revenue sent to retailers via Pinterest increased over these recent, lucrative shopping days, traffic across the site remained flat. This is because users on Cyber Monday and the like are more in “buying” mode, and less in “collecting or discovery” mode, so the overall clicks on pins and outbound traffic didn’t see any meaningful jump.

But though there were not more clicks, the clicks Pinterest delivered those days were more profitable. “We know that Pinners pin before they buy, and they click on their past pins when they are ready to buy them,” Verma says. “A bulk of those purchases (from self pins) happen between the second day of pinning and four weeks,” he notes.

For retailers, that means those who had optimized their websites for pinning ahead of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday benefitted the most. The higher the share of pins they offered, the larger their Pinterest catalogs, the more the clicks. And, apparently, the more revenue as a result.

For this latest report, Piqora also took the time to study the top tags and images across the site during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping days to determine what exactly people were pinning and buying. Not too surprisingly, given the season, the answer was simply “boots and coats.”

Though the findings are a bit self-serving given Piqora’s interest in helping companies market themselves on Pinterest and elsewhere, its data holds up against reports from others which also previously found Pinterest capable of driving more social media traffic and revenue than Facebook or Twitter. Large retailers are abundant on the site, and though they may not discuss their exact numbers, many have been shown to be very bullish on the benefits of being on Pinterest.

For instance, Nordstrom embraced Pinterest so fully that it’s testing popular Pinterest items on floor displays, and armed sales staff with iPads which contain an internal app showing the most pinned merchandise. Meanwhile, Lowe’s director of social media, Brad Walters, said in an interview earlier this year that the company would consider Pinterest’s advertising platform.

Though Pinterest is a young site, has raised a massive amount of funding which values the business at $3.8 billion, and is only now launching its own advertising platform, the company has momentum among online retailers. According to Internet Retailers’ October study, 59.5% of respondents said they would increase use of Pinterest this holiday season compared with last year. For comparison’s sake, 54.8% said the same about Facebook, and 32.6% said so for Twitter. In addition, 78% of the retailers in the site’s 2013 Top 500 Guide are active on Pinterest.

Mitch Berman is the brains behind Zen Digital Fund, a technology and digital marketing company. Visit this Facebook page for more discussion on the future of digital marketing.

REPOST: Patent wars: Tech giants sue Samsung and Google

The mobile phone patent war thickens as Rockstar Consortium, an alliance of Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson, and Sony, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, Samsung, and other smartphones that run the Google Android operating system. BBC News has the full report. 

Image Source: bbc.co.uk

 

A group of tech giants known as the Rockstar Consortium is suing Google, Samsung, HTC and others over alleged mobile phone patent infringements.

Rockstar, jointly owned by Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson and Sony, is targeting manufacturers of phones that run the rival Google Android operating system.

Rockstar spent $4.5bn (£2.8bn) buying thousands of Nortel patents after the telecoms giant went bankrupt in 2009.

Google lost out in the bidding war.

The Rockstar lawsuit claims Google has infringed seven patents relating to the way internet search terms match up with relevant advertising.

Dominance

The move is just the latest in a number of mobile device patent cases being fought across the world, as technology behemoths fight for dominance of the lucrative smartphone, tablet and games console markets.

Google's Android has been doing particularly well, largely thanks to the success of Samsung's Galaxy range of smartphones.

Android devices accounted for 81.3% of smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013, according to research firm Strategy Analytics, compared with 13.4% for Apple iOS and 4.1% for Windows Phone.

This week, Nokia, whose mobile devices division is being bought by Microsoft, won a patent victory over HTC that could see the Taiwanese company's HTC One smartphone being banned from import into the UK.

And earlier in October, Samsung offered to stop taking rivals to court over alleged patent infringements for a period of five years, after European Union authorities said the South Korean company's litigious actions were stifling competition.

Samsung faced a potential £11.3bn ($18.3bn) fine if found guilty of breaching European anti-trust laws.

Google's Motorola Mobility, which the search giant bought for $12.5bn, has also been accused of similar anti-competitive behaviour.

Samsung and Apple are currently slugging it out in the courts of more than 10 countries across Europe.

Cross-licensing

But some senior technology experts believes the legal conflict is bad for consumers.

In an interview with the BBC's Click programme to be broadcast on Saturday, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says: "There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone; I wish Apple would use them, and could use them, and I don't know if Samsung would stop us.

"I wish everybody just did a lot of cross-licensing and sharing the good technology; all our products would be better, we'd go further.

"I do kind of wish they were more compatible."

But the Rockstar Consortium's legal action suggests such a rapprochement in the global patent wars is still a long way off.

Mitch Berman is a digital evangelist who runs Zen Digital Fund, a dynamic organization focusing on the creation of the innovative "digital" consumer. Read this blog to learn more about his work in the digital media.

REPOST: How to build an effective social marketing strategy

Businesses act according to a strategy they believe would get them a better position in the market.  Forbes contributor Greg Satell provides tips in building an effective social marketing strategy for the digital age:

In the 20th century, nearly every marketing problem had one solution—the 30 second TV ad.  If you had a product to sell, you could reach everybody you needed to with a powerful, highly polished message in a very short period of time.

Yet marketing in the digital age is different.  Building awareness is no longer sufficient.  In fact, it may even benefit your competitors more than it does your brand because once consumers react to your message, they will be retargeted using digital methods.

So the basic function of marketing promotion has changed.  It is no longer enough to simply grab attention, you need to be able to hold attention and that’s where social strategy comes in.  The age of catchy slogans and massive ad campaigns is over.  Brands in the 20th century need to become more like publishers and strategy needs to follow from that.

Brands like Harley Davidson built strong communities long before social media even existed. Image Source: www.forbes.com

Clarifying The Mission

Content strategy has become a popular specialty in marketing lately.  The problem is that very few content strategists actually know what they’re talking about.  They tend to approach content as if it was just a longer version of an ad and therefore double the usual amount of psychobabble about the “consumer mindset.”

In truth, a publisher’s first loyalty is not to the consumer, but to the editorial mission.  That doesn’t mean you should ignore consumers, trends or anything else that’s going on.  What it does mean is that great publications stand for something.

Apple stands for design.  Harley Davidson stands for friendship and camaraderie.  Red Bull stands for an extreme lifestyle.  These brands successfully engage consumers because the brand’s mission supersedes whatever they happen to be selling at any given time.

So the first thing you need to do to create a successful social strategy is figure out what you stand for.

Identifying Analogues

There is probably no greater peril in marketing than the misplaced compulsion to be original. Originality, after all, is not a virtue in and of itself, but only has value if it’s meaningful.  Try to be different for difference’s sake and you’ll accomplish nothing more than being weird.  That might thrill the guys in the office, but it will fail in the marketplace.

So the best way to start formulating a social strategy is to identify others who share your mission.  What are they doing?  What succeeds and what doesn’t?  What can we add?  What can we subtract?  There’s no reason to try to reinvent the wheel.

When I was a professional publisher, we would insist on 3-5 analogues for any development or editorial brief and we found that practice absolutely essential.  It not only helped us adopt best practices and avoid poor ones, it also helped everyone visualize exactly what we were trying to accomplish.

Focusing on Structure

Law and Order was one of the most successful TV shows in history.  Running for 20 seasons, it not only ruled the ratings, but was a critical success as well.

Regular viewers of the show became familiar with its strict structure.  First, a crime, then an investigation leading to an arrest and prosecution.  Somewhere along the way a snag would be hit, creating tension that would drive the story. You could almost set your watch by it.

Every successful content product has a clearly defined structure.  TV shows have plot formulas, radio stations have clocks, magazines have brand bibles and web sites have usability rules.  These are strictly followed.

While this may seem boring in concept, creating a clear structure is absolutely crucial in practice.  Any cognitive energy your audience uses up trying to navigate your content lessens the amount of energy they can spend on what you’re trying to tell them.  A standard format is also helpful in setting the constraints under which creativity thrives.

A legendary editor once told me that a great content product delivers two things: consistency and surprise.  I think the same is true with social marketing.  You should set expectations, but also feel free to break the rules now an then.  However, without consistency, there can be no surprise, you just make a mess.

Create A Community (Not An Audience)

Up till now, I’ve focused mainly on content.  That’s deliberate, because without compelling content that informs, excites and inspires, social marketing doesn’t have a chance.  It simply will not be effective.  However, the mark of a great social marketing program is that it builds more than an audience—it builds a community.

This is where things often go wildly, wildly wrong because social marketersmistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following.  They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as a key performance indicator and then blast them with brand messages.

The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to you than how they are connected to each other. That’s how great social brands, like Apple, Harley and eBay built devoted followings long before anyone even heard of social media.

The bottom line is that we are now in a post-promotional age where brand messages are only half the battle.  To build a great brand today you need to build great brand experiences and the best way to do that is to build a community around shared values with content that holds attention.

Mitch Berman, founder of ZillionTV Corporation, currently works as a principal at Blend Digital, where he provides marketing strategies for privately-held and public companies that include IP-based digital entertainment, consumer marketing and branding, 2nd screen social TV, content licensing, connected devices, digital media business development and distribution, social and mobile media marketing.  Check this Facebook for more information on Mitch Berman.