Old Spice is ramping up their advertising of late, I have noticed a lot of their work getting props on creativity.com. I have been amazed at the number of agency’s, both local and national, that feel that a good creative shop and analytics are mutually exclusive.

With companies talking about real-time ad insertion on cable boxes and minute by minute tracking by DVR companies. Companies and Agencies have the power to know exactly which half of the marketing is working. The real opportunity becomes the ability to shave the media buy costs and demonstrate a true ROI for traditional media.

Shaving the costs  on the buy process allow the creative to create truly great cross platform advertising that is targeted to a specific customer. Those ads can be placed in extremely relevant spots where the user will enjoy creative. It all sounds rather idealistic but, it is here – the capability is real.

We just finished watching CSI New York. Here are some of the details that when you stop and think about our viewing that are absolutely amazing.

• The show originally aired last week.
• We recorded the show in HD format.
• We watched some of the episodes on a laptop.
• We were able to pause the show, so that I could replenish my milk and cookies.
• We watched only one of the commercial breaks .
• Finally, we burned it to a disk to share with a friend.

Our DVR is also our home media server which is connected to our home entertainment center. We use it to watch movies in our TV Room, stream internet radio throughout the house, or watch TV or movies anywhere we get a WiFi connection. The technology is allowing us to begin to help adapt media, content that we may have forgone in the past, into our daily lives. The trick is how do media providers monetize their product given that consumers are able to ‘bend’ media to adapt to their lives. I believe their needs to be a new form of measurement for media…We’ll see if I bet right.

RawData is out to make the world a better place! It all started as a discussion about how horribly produced commercials actually hurt Listener or Viewer-ship (the volume of which should effect station rankings) and has evolved to become a complete solution to provide analytics at a price point, frequency, and granularity that the media industry has never seen. Having built our software from the ground-up for the cost of a laptop and a lot of vacation time from our day jobs, we are about to complete alpha tests with our first customer and are just entering alpha development for a second customer.

The lack of sleep from constantly thinking about and working on RawData is pushing us to an entrepreneurial inflection point – and we are excited to jump off the edge with friends.

Ad Age is reporting that the average lifespan of a CMO is 26 months, reading on, Ad Age attributes the shortening lifespan to reporting metrics. They begin to insinnuate that the art of advertising is being replaced by the numbers hungry capitalists.

Just take a minute and think about this…I hire an ad agency to be creative and get my message to my most profitable customers and prospects. Ad Age is claiming that Advertisements should be held to any level of accountability and that great art will find its way automatically to your customers.

“High CMO turnover may be due, in part, to the fact that over the past few years, the balance between the art and science of marketing has tilted much too heavily toward quantitative metrics and away from its historical position as a qualitative, creative practice. “

By Lloyd Trufelman

The point that I am belaboring Great creative could have even greater effect if it lands in front of the target audience a higher percentage of the time.

More information about marketing success is readily available than ever has been and Executive Teams are holding Agencies feet to the fire. Agencies like Crispin Porter + Bogusky are excelling (they hedge their income by taking equity positions in some companies) just read a case study on some of the tactics they have taken with Volkswagen or Burger King.

Advertising Age is reporting that ad spend on traditional media is down, while ad spend on media that can track and demonstrate results is up. What a a good sign, here is the link.

Today I read an article about CPM on the mobile phone industry at Ad Age. If you don’t know what CPM (Cost Per Thousand) is you get more information at Wikipedia. That I found very interesting.

The short and simple of the report is that online advertising turned the ad world on it’s head because Clients could track actual results of online ad campaigns. Whereas traditional media is much more difficult to even get a vague idea of how many eyes see media content. This is our goal we want CMO’s to be able to take accurate reports to the executive staff. Reports that create a more accountability by creating a more accurate measuring stick that won’t be filled with the loopholes and low confidence ratings of A/C Nielsen’s. Oh yeah, and these reports will be easier to interpret as well as digital (no more paper).Traditional media should be held to the same level of accountability as online, mobile, and the rest of the digital marketing realm, we’ll see to it that it is!

If you are really interested in mobile marketing you should click on the video link at Ad Age.

On another note, Beanstalk Talk reported on an article that commented on online marketing of ‘junk food’ to younger demographics. First, I think marketers should give themselves a great big pat on the back that they have become so proficient at hocking their clients wares that advertising now faces government regulation because the advertising removes all inhibitions and self-control that the general public should have. That takes me to my second point, what the hell is going on when people don’t know that McDonald’s is not healthy and are unable to instill/control their children to the point that we (a nation) require government intervention to help curb the media that our children are exposed to (because parents will cave to a child’s every demand).

Disclaimer: I am a sucker for the McD’s breakfast menu, I don’t have a disease I just enjoy some deep fried eggs and potatoes every now and then.

Wow, what a week! All sorts of news:

Claire Atkinson of AdvertisingAge reports that AC Nielsen is entering the set top box market:

The big question facing Mr. Meyer is whether Nielsen can deliver on the promise quickly. “Talk to anyone and they get my sense of urgency. We know we need to move fast, and [Nielsen Media Research President-CEO] Susan Whiting gets it. Her directive is to make this happen quickly. It is critical to our future,” he said.

With so many competitors entering the set-top box market (Google even has a set-top box now and should already be generating numbers) Nielsen had better figure out how to get to market otherwise they may begin to lose their stranglehold on the media metrics market.

“Nielsen’s advantage is having a finger in other parts of the pie,” said Ira Sussman, Cable Advertising Bureau’s senior VP-research. “People want to know what’s happening in the household from every single source. That’s a tough nut to crack. TNS also has a great product and competition is what’s going to help things move faster.”

I submit that Nielsen has a whole lot more than a finger in the pie, they are practically sitting in the pie. They are now incetivized and empowered by current backing from private equity firms that own a majority stake in Nielsen. With all of the information and tactics that Nielsen has learned in their lawsuit of ErinMedia one would think they might have an idea  of how to get to market.

That said some are already holding memorial services for ErinMedia, check out this awesome article by Joe Mandese at MediaPost. I think this article is important enough that I am going to copy the text and place a second link at the bottom of this post, it is well worth your time to take a second and look it over.

Other articles of interest:

Bill Gates on local advertising: Yellow Pages gone in 5 years

TV most effective for marketing new products: study

Movie Studios, Retailers Balk at ‘Live Plus Three’ - More news about UpFront

Full Copy of MediaPost article by Joe Mandese:

We are in the final weeks of what could be called the 9th Upfront Season. How broken is this system,? Let’s Review:

For the newbies out there Upfront is not held to one specific conference or power meeting of all media brokers. Rather, it is a time of year that has evolved with and coincides with AC Nielsen’s Sweeps Month (this is the same reason that we all have season finales and sensational local news twice a year – to help inflate numbers and viewers temporarily so Networks can sell ad space for top dollar). The numbers that AC Nielsen generates and reports will largely determine how advertising dollars get spent, currently $9 billion in just prime time tv. Some organized events that try to take advantage of the time of year where so many dollars are being exchanged are becoming more and more evident (Television Week).

Networks take advantage of the season and some of the events to show off stars and woo buyers (a bit of gossip – The cast of the The Office was being trumpeted around to touting their success when one of the stars fell down a set of marble stairs and broke some of the vertebrae in her back – we get the feeling that NBC was trying to hard to show off it’s couple of hits).

Other big talk this year is time-shifting, a fancy way of referring to DVR’s and recording shows to watch later. We have touched on the flaws of current time shifted viewer rating in one of our past postings, more to come so not to worry. Networks are saying we can guarantee fresh content to viewers in at least 3 days. Never mind the the fact that ABC has their show “Lost” online so viewers can watch past episodes, or the fact that somebody besides TiVO might make a DVR. We don’t have nay number just yet to refute the 3 day claim but, RawData just had a big break on some of our software development and we are much closer to providing accurate data.

At RawData we are hyper consumers of media and are excited to see where media buyers spend their dollars because those dollars dictate what will be broadcast in the coming season. Our vote, buy “Lost” and “The Office” – Don’t buy into “Dancing with the Stars” (contrary to what AC Nielsen is reporting nobody is watching).

Here is a link to a preliminary forecast of what is being canceled, what is going another season, and what is new for the individual networks.

The CMO Council just released a new report which is making waves in the ad world.

“When you talk about business acumen, people in marketing today absolutely have to have their eye on proving that their investments are working and having an effect,” said Tim Ellis, global advertising and media director for Volvo cars, who was not party to the survey. “There’s a difference between business acumen as it applies to sales. It’s not so easy to just compare the marketing to the number of sales.”
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch

The gyst of the article is that CMO’s with agency experience are being replaced for CMO’s with a broader list of corporate experience. Simply put the era of tagline’s is over. In order for a CMO to win over the rest of the executive committee he/she must be able to justify and demonstrate success on a spreadsheet (just like everybody else).

Blogger Jim Novo brought the report to our attention, and we wanted to give him due thanks.

As peoples means of consuming media changes our methods of tracking successes and failures has to adapt as well. We get excited as we read about marketers struggling to demonstrate success and actual interest to conversion. In my opinion that means that the old Guard of Media Inteligence is not fulfilling market demand. Mike Small of ‘Comment is Free‘ gives us our latest example of a changing in the guard:

Herald editor Charles McGhee dumped its traditional pollster, TNS System 3, on cost grounds, and hired a largely unknown and inexperienced market research company, MRUK.

The following excerpt from the adweek article (CMO’s Left in Lurch) strengthens our position that a new means of collecting and demonstrating media consumption is in order.

The study’s authors write that the credibility of CMOs has been further eroded by “self-described ’superstar marketers’ who leverage personal style to elevate and inflate their titles”—and salaries, which average between $300,000-500,000 in Fortune 500 companies, according to the study. But their perception within corporations is less flattering. According to board members surveyed, CMO failure was seen as resulting from their having “no real authority or clout in the organization” (59 percent) and “a lack of credibility and respect among key stakeholders” (54 percent).

So how do CMOs gain cred? Not by touting taglines but by crunching numbers, becoming “quant jocks” in the model established by CMOs at CapitalOne and Dell, then proving to their boards that their marketing is working, said Tim Furey, CEO of MarketBridge, Bethesda, Md.

On that point, the survey found CMOs have work to do: 62 percent of board members disagreed that their marketing leaders were providing adequate ROI data. Yet the study confirmed that CMOs with greater quantitative focus and measurement emphasis have a significantly longer expected tenure, “greater than 20 percent longer,” said Furey.
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch

We are sure that Julie Roehm would like to weigh in on the issue; we would love to hear your feedback Julie.

Here is the news – Landmines and a Land-Office Business

It appears to be final that ErinMedia’s financing has fallen through. We have mixed emotions on this, we get excited to see interest in the space. However, It is daunting to watch from the near sidelines as the Google Juggernaut has laid waste to an inferior product, I have hammered on why this technology is inferior and destined to fail.

I wanted to point out a couple of faults with the set-top box model.

Joost – btw…We would love an invite to Joost if you can spare one let us know. We will try to find a way to make it worth your while.

NextNewNetwork

YouTube

MP3 Players

I could keep going but I think you get the point. Time is short and sleep is necessary (at least in small amounts).