Jayanto had a marketing budgeting of 10 million UNC (the unified currency for 200 economies of the world). His target was a bottom-line of 20 million UNC with a customer base of 16000 in one year.
Zero wastage, precision guided targeting, zero collateral coverage, and absolute certainty in targeting as opposed to yesteryear's predictive & probabilistic model of reaching the audience was the name of the game.
Will he make the mark? Will he reach his critical mass with a shoe string budget?
Find out for yourself.
The Grand Convergence of Marketing Analytics-Riding the Technology horseJayanto Mukherjee was a brand manager for a leading online bookstore brand. A maverick marketer ; had seen several ups & downs, his career representing the Trigonometric Sine & Cosine Curves , his nerve cells were on eternal electrical impulse churning ideas after ideas sometimes loathed by his marketing fraternity. For long he had the dream to start off on his own. He had painstakingly been saving money for this purpose. He used to spend time on his new venture after office hours.
So When on Feb 17, 2050, he along with group of his friends started their own enterprise. He was as hopeful as a newly wed couple. Theirs was an enterprise in the niche product category- a toy library. Their target audiences were the parents in SEC B and C category who had the desire to make the useful & learning oriented toys although expensive ones available to their kids but somehow could not afford or were concerned about short life in a kid’s mind-space. They thought this was a typical high cost- low life category.
A low margin high volume segment coupled with the fact that they had low capital investment had created the constraints of a low budget and zero wastage marketing.
Thankfully this was an era where behavioral targeting had become a cakewalk. For example; this was a time when a person’s browsing habit whether via mobile or at home was tracked, archived, analyzed by (Marketing AnalyticsAI software ) and tagged to a person’s Social No (SSN) ; the routes a person typically covers was tracked thru Onboard navigation systems; even the places he shops , the retails outlets he visits was tracked , stored, analyzed and tagged to his SSN. And if he paid by a digital medium (mobile/cards/online-where ever there’s digital records), his purchase behavior was also tagged.
For months, Jayanto and his team had developed painstakingly a marketing machinery and model to reach audiences via low cost -high ROI mediums. They were confident that their marketing model will help them garner customers within the set ROI targets. Careful planning, research , media mapping exercises, media planning, and an excellent credible, unexpected & disruptive creative theme made them gung-ho about their success. Step by step, as was planned the campaign was unleashed.
This happens all the timeIn the office building not far from the Bandra flea market in Mumbai, Jayanto was dwelling on the image of their new designed and memory tested brand logo. For him, their marketing campaign had become a problem. The advertising & media campaign they had sweated over, argued, deliberated over, was not working.
They realized even the so-called ‘tried & tested natural market mediums’ were not yielding results as was expected. This was happening clearly because in-spite of customization in marketing analytics environment; there were dime and dozen marketers targeting people with ever increasing messages. Because the idea of an Intelligent marketing/consumer analytics had prompted proliferation of many more companies/products/brand and categories like started by Jayanto.
They had burned their fingers doing targeted small burst messaging [mailers (offline and Online), SMSs, MMSs, tweets etc)] to Parents visiting hospitals for vaccinating kids above 3 years. Not surprisingly they realized that their typical TA was bombarded by 100 messages a day across these platforms only; leave aside the messages bombarded in their 16 hr. mind-space. And they clearly did not have the budget to create a long-term engagement module across these platforms. Neither did they have the luxury to wait for the silent branding horse to work for them-the third party endorsements, PR, guerilla efforts and word-of-moth. They needed the critical mass immediately.
He thought was it his strong belief in Claude Hopkin’s Tenets a wrong approach. Was it the flawed strategy of short-term gains ; a direct marketing approach followed by PR as opposed to the accepted principles of PR brand building first followed by Advertising brand maintenance to be blamed.
Jayanto had sleepless nights worrying about cracking the code. His business had not even crossed the no.s required to start off a user generated push, a word-of-mouth, business via reference so as to reach their targeted revenues committed to their VC.
One day after his daughter came back from her college, she started cursing about the irrelevant interruptions while traveling on MRTS (Mass Rapid Transport System). About how difficult it becomes for her to think about an important topic that she was expected to talk about in the college. To this Jayanto thought about that in-spite of so much sophistication in marketing analytics-Intelligent real time behavioral tracking –why is the consumer still bombarded with messages they don’t want to see.
He thought who is going to bellwether on cause – would it be the government; would it be the consumer forum or would be ultimately be left up to the Marketing /Advertising fraternity that had after a very long haul had started gaining credibility with the public, the CEO, Board of Directors et al. Else it won’t be long when the Trust quotient will fall to the same abysmal levels it had touched in the beginning of the 21st century.
Nevertheless Jayanto thought the conversation gave him an idea. The very next morning Jayanto and his team came up with an idea of serving messages via the small unit outdoor options in the Mass rapid transport system in metro and simultaneously sending messages. The only precondition for serving ads. on the small panels was that at least 10 % of travelers in a coach/ bus had shown online behavior congruent with their TA behavior (this was clearly due to the power of real-time tracking and tagging of a person’s behavior to their SSN).
The first day the campaign was tested in the 20 routes. This gave them a responses of 18 people calling. They were able to close on 5 people@ 500 UNC membership fees. So Jayanto asked himself- Did this breakeven?
With a cost dynamics of 1 dollar for a single ad. serving on the Panel unit and one dollar for SMS serving and only 5 routes live at a time ( out of 20 routes covered) with 7 trips and 100 passengers; the campaign costs went to 3850 $. It wasn’t hard for him to figure out that they had overshot by 1350 $ and reaching barely 65 % ROI. However the team was happy as eventually nourishing the sales funnel and word-of mouth would bear fruit and meet their ‘myopic and stringent marketing metrics’. The team knew that a follow up cycle of 2 weeks would get them an additional 50 % more from existing funnel.
Although the team had decided to nurture further this apparently low hanging fruit in the media ecosystem, Jayanto was foreseeing challenge even in this segment. His concern was ‘Was this ROAI a fluke they had hit?’. He had never been able to prove ROAI in his previous stints. People had always been proponent of PR, Word-of-mouth, ‘Product will speak for itself’ philosophy.
Will Jayanto be able to sustain this strategy ? or will it be just another Flash in the Pan.
Jayanto got up early morning on Sunday and thought he would spend some time with the family and stay away from even thinking about his passion turned into work. He had recently picked up the Learning 24 x 7 package from an online store.
Learning 24 x 7: a projector based full length & breadth screen on the wall integrated to your internet and digital TV. A speech recognition software integrated will make learning an easy and WOW ! experience. An individual speaks aloud a query: 'Q Leonardo DVinci's works' and pops appears the google search based options on the screen.
Suggested Reading: Relevance is everything
(Source: The Social Metropolis -Jimmy Maymann)
A key ingredient in the attention game is relevance - and the biggest problem with advertising today is that, in most cases, it is not relevant. the old joke about the 50/50 rule (50% of our advertising is working and the other 50% isn’t) is more pertinent than ever. Since, with the changing media landscape,things are getting worse.We are seeing increasing media cynicism amongst consumers and the reason for this is that, for the
last 50 years, the old model has worked. Consumers simply didn’t have a lot of choice when it came to media. but, that’s all changing now.
Amazingly,the tv network business model is yet to take heed of this. it is designed to force feed viewers in the hope that a small percentage are actually paying attention.
A lot of media are still traded on a CPM-basis, but the question is: Are people actually paying attention? Wouldn’t it be more relevant to talk about actual contact prices, or the price of engagement with
your content? Online advertising allows for the tracking of everything, for example we know that people are not that interested in banners, given that click-through rates are down to an average of 0.25% and dropping.
but, when we buy traditional media like tv, are we certain that we are actually getting through? Are people watching - or are they making coffee or channel surfing or web surfing during the ads? in the Social Metropolis, more and more people are making purchasing decisions based on something other than advertising, particularly since a lot of it is of the force-feeding variety. instead, consumers seek out, and tune in to, people and places that they believe are credible and have their best interests in
mind - people like family, colleagues, and friends,or places like blogs, podcasts, and newsletters. People are sifting out what they perceive as interruption, and turning their attention to more objective,and relevant, sources of information. in this way, the distribution challenge is actually
two-fold. As a brand, you might never be able to compete with friends or family - at least not directly - but relevance is definitely the way forward. relevance increases user adoption, and the certified quality of the message. Furthermore, to actually be present at the relevant touch points, increases the chances of people connecting with your message
when they are looking for it.
Behavioral Targeting:
The new Way of Segmenting your Audience
While consumers’ attention is still difficult to get on the one hand, on the other it is becoming easier for marketers to learn about consumer habits, and make the message reach the right people. The tool is known as behavioral targeting, and it offers many advantages.For the first time it is possible to move from the traditional idea of segmenting an audience, to targeting their online behavior instead. Even low-involvement products, like fast moving consumer goods (FMcG), become subject to reasonable online advertising because behavioral targeting facilitates the reduction of non-contextual waste. Products and brands that have very few contextual environments on the web can also build engagement by delivering a good experience in the right context.The most important advantage for marketers is that behavioral targeting allows them to bridge campaigns, engage people via multiple gateways,and serve messages to an audience that has already showed interest. that makes marketing potentially far more effective as it can highlight which users feel overloaded with irrelevant information, thus indicating every negative brand impact due to misplaced
advertising. targeting audiences with relevant information and entertaining experiences, on the other hand, makes for a good experience.
The Facts
Behavioral targeting is not a new phenomenon. It first appeared in 2000, but was too expensive and ineffective to apply it to a great extent. however,with generally improved technical possibilities, it made a comeback in the US in the beginning of 2006, and has since grown rapidly in europe.The general idea behind behavioral targeting is pretty simple: Analyse where, and to whom, an online advertisement is served, and improve it based on the feedback and relationship you already have.Cookies are used to track users’ behavior on websites,and identify their unique tastes and interests,like a unique mobile iD. the gathered information
is then used to create audience segments, which enable advertisers to make reasonable choices about where to buy advertising space.
“Context is irrelevant. Remember that behavioral targeting is about reaching groups of people with similar interests, not pages containing specific content“ Paul Goad, Managing Director, Tacoda”
Wait for the Metamediaries: www.toyexchange.com, www.raddiwala.com, www.thiswaytoagreenerplanet.com
