Everything that should be digital will be
I’ve got some thoughts. But my colleague Shar VanBoskirk is currently fielding a survey of interactive marketers and will write a piece of research in Q4 on this topic.
To contribute your experience and receive a copy of the completed research findings (whether a Forrester client or not), follow this link:
http://www.gmi-mr.com/survey/s.phtml?sn=56456
I began working on the brand monitoring Wave in May and wrapped up the research with publication of the documents today. More on the process and a pretty picture of the results on the Forrester Marketing blog. More on the personal side of the process here.
The Wave is a quite intensive piece of research. It’s very process-driven which is good in some ways, bad in others. The process makes for a very rigorous analysis. It also means that there’s very little time for other activities when you’ve got one in progress. I ran in-person "lab" evaluations with each of the seven vendors. I made 17 client reference calls with existing and former accounts. I also developed the 56 evaluation criteria (with vendor input) and scales, scoring each vendor and backing it up with written analysis. These scorecards turned into longer written documents in addition to the "long doc" that describes the brand monitoring market and process. Moreover, there was discussion at each step of the way with vendors regarding their scores and my analysis, whether fact- or opinion-based. It adds up pretty quickly.
As a result, I’m looking forward to taking a real vacation! Haven’t had a full week off yet this year…
The followup piece to my Reinventing the Marketing Organization piece is going to focus on reinventing the agency relationship. Why is this necessary? Because Forrester researches technology and technology is the primary catalyst driving change in consumer behavior and marketing strategy today.
Case in point: someone at BBDO has just discovered Gillette’s No Scruf microsite. Which has been out for about three months now. The irony is the blogger’s call to action:
"Gillette brand managers… tune in for some girl talk, straight up."
Pretty sure that’s stated without irony, as the agency behind the site is Digitas. You’d think that agencies are at least monitoring each other, let alone social media.
One of the great things about being a Forrester analyst is the opportunity to share thoughts on my coverage area with the media.
Recently, I spoke with CNN about TV advertising for a piece in their "Welcome To The Future" series. You can see the video segment here or on this page (click the Interest Me! link in the "Watch Free Video" section). The piece took practical and realistic view of things, which you don’t see too often in TV advertising coverage. It aired yesterday on CNN and will be on Headline News and Airport Network this week.
Firefox users beware – the video player seems much better suited for IE.
UPDATE: See the video, embedded below.
Tags:
cnn, tv advertising
Late last week, I published my biggest piece of research yet at Forrester, called “Reinventing The Marketing Organization.” Here’s the executive summary:
Today’s marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don’t influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don’t even own the “four Ps” of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires:
1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics;
2) shifting culture away from marketing communications;
3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and
4) rethinking agency relationships.
One of my favorite concepts that ended up on the editing room floor: the marketing mix is fine – tactics may change (e.g. branded entertainment or social computing) but strategic principles remain the same (e.g. relationship building and consumer engagement). However, the traditional model needs to be expanded to incorporate a 5th “P”: Participation.
Unfortunately this isn’t PGM (i.e. Pete Generated Media), so I can’t give it away for free – but if there are particular points you’re interested in discussing from the summary or otherwise, feel free to comment or drop me a line!
Last night during ESPN’s Home Run Derby, I noticed two advertisers. One was hard to miss – Century 21, the sponsor of the event. I guess the word "Home" creates a natural tie-in, if not in meaning then in pronunciation. The other was during a 30-second spot: for Snakes On A Plane.
This was the first time I’d seen the CGM phenomenon mentioned outside of the internet. I was online while watching TV, so I went to the official site and found this fan site: All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us. So much better than the high-production value "official" spot. Another case in point:
The problem is, given that the consumer content is so much broader and deeper than the mainstream, does the film have any chance of living up to its hype? Certainly a very different hype problem than the Star Wars prequels, but definitely of a similar fang vein…
Tags:
snakes on a plane ::
Add to del.icio.us
A great aspect of working at Forrester is the opportunity to share viewpoints from our research with the media. I recently had a conversation with Wendy Kaufman of NPR regarding word-of-mouth marketing and the piece aired last week.
The except from npr.org on the piece:
Day to Day, April 20, 2006 ·
Tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers are circulating in city hot
spots, chatting up friends, family members and strangers in hope of
generating buzz for companies and their new products. Sometimes they
disclose their "buzz agent" identity — other times, they don’t.
Companies are hoping these conversations will boost sales.
Tags:
wom, marketing ::
Add to del.icio.us
Just for the record, I want to close the loop on the topic that shoved me into the blogosphere back in 2003.
One Monday morning, I go into work and there’s a buzz – people are definitely freaking out about something but don’t want to tell anyone. By the end of the day, I hear about this "fake PUMA ad" and the executive board decides that they want to sue anyone who’s got the ad posted on their site. You can read about the full story here; it was picked up by the likes of Gawker, AdLand, AdRants and Salon.
The vitriolic comments were pretty surprising, given how little first-hand information people had. The extent to which my comments to Felix Salmon were twisted and miscontstruedmisconstrued was also impressive. [By the way, it’s interesting to look at those old links and see how many blogs are now defunct.]
What really happened – a small Eastern European agency affiliated with Saatchi & Saatchi created the ads on spec, trying to win business with a PUMA subsidiary. They got nothing and emailed the ads to friends; from that point it snowballed. As you can guess, when the PUMA powers-that-be decided to get all corporate on the blogosphere, the whole thing exploded. Poor Pete M.’s (PUMA GC in the US) email inbox exploded with junk after that, with his name being on the cease and desist. No "Brazilian Maxim", no evil master plan (they’re real but we’ll say they’re fake), but online store sales were up like CRAZY for a couple of weeks. Too bad we didn’t even have the shoes in the ads in stock!
So a lesson for PR/Marketing types that need to deal with this type of issue – the best thing to do is deny and let it die. But the beat goes on. Remember the flap about David Arquette and Courteney Cox Arquette’s baby’s christening pics?
UPDATE: Pretty interesting. Adland, a blog that decided to continue running these PUMA ads despite PUMA’s request to have them removed, has taken a quite different course on some spec ads posted recently. No explanation why, besides that the client asked for them to be removed – same as the PUMA situation. Moreover, they have actually edited the text of comments (!) – thankfully they are located in Denmark, as in the U.S. this action would turn them into owners of all edited comments and the potential trademark infringments therein.
Tags: puma, fake, advertising
Hello and welcome! It’s most likely that you’ve stumbled across this blog by accident and I don’t blame you.
So here’s what’s behind the name. I grew up in Atlanta and back in the day, Koreans in the ATL were few and far between. It was a long time before I ever met another Korean "Peter" let alone another "Peter Kim." However, as Koreans are often Christians as well, combining the Apostle with the Smith of the Land of the Morning Calm was inevitable. Second-generation Korean-Americans have a hard enough time finding their identity and realizing that your name is shared by thousands doesn’t help.
In any case, I’ve worked those adolescent issues out – fast forward to Philadelphia, McNeil Building computer lab on Locust Walk, Fall 1994. After learning to surf the web using lynx, I discovered Mosaic and then Netscape 1.0. I created my home page and it came up as one of six results in Yahoo! ("some crazy catalog out of Stanford – that’ll never make money"). Now when you search on "Peter Kim" in google, 27.8 million results return.
So here’s my return to the web in this era of social computing. If you want to know more, check out my LinkedIn or Facebook profiles or Forrester bio and research, where I’m an analyst focused on Marketing (capital M) (I left Forrester on July 18, 2008). I’ll capture my personal thoughts here, as we intend to launch a work blog soon. If you know me from work, you might find this interesting as another side to me, but I really intend this to be a way to reconnect with friends around the globe rather than an extension of my work as an analyst. Although sometimes those two worlds are just inseparable, right?
I guess sometimes work imitates life and life imitates work.