Salesforce buys DimDim and immediately upsets me

Sometimes it's not what you say but how you say it. This morning I got an e-mail telling me that Dimdim.com (a web conferencing system that we use a lot) was being taken over by Salesforce.com. Here's the e-mail:

Dear Customer:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!


The Dimdim Team
________________________________________
Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.

Hmm - not an especially great piece of communication which makes me think that they are closing down the whole show. They had a great opportunity to (re)introduce me to the Salesforce.com world - tell me what was better etc...

Even better is the legal stuff hidden at the bottom of the e-mail. All quite off putting.

Oh well - time to find another provider for these services - Dimdim was fantastic and I do hope that I will be able to use their services again. Maybe it's time to go back to Zoho meeting.

IPA Databank - what does it tell us?

The IPA have just added a (for now) free tool to their website to help marketers review the various case studies they have pulled together throughout the era of their IPA awards (see http://idol.ipa.co.uk/). Whilst the usefulness of the tool is limited, it does provide us with some insight into the nature of the various campaigns evaluated and entered for awards.

For example, there are 921 case studies available. By looking at the meta data (the data that describes these cases), we can see what's going on. For example, I did a visualisation of primary business objectives for campaigns vs the number of campaigns reporting "very large" effects:

Powered by Tableau

So overall I think this is a useful source of data although in truth, it's also a great way for the IPA to see you more case study downloads. A valuable resource no doubt.

UK MOT failure rate visualisation

Here's a quick visualisation I did on UK MOT failure rates for 2007 across various makes. It shows the power of Tableau - a solution that I'm a big fan of.

Powered by Tableau

Pop-up Genius

I'm still here (just). The blog will re materialise in the new year but for now, let me just highlight one piece of marketing that I'm sure will work wonders in the new world - the pop-up shop. A great example of this can be seen here with the new Marmite shop on London's regent street.

With this concept, brands can quickly get out and about - it feels partially like test marketing but really it's a reasonably opportunistic way to get attention on a budget.

The reality of the economic climate is that even the Unilevers of this world are watching the pennies. This is a trend that will either fizzle out as rental rates climb or may come into it's own. Either way, interesting times...

Recession - marketing still works doesn't it?

Long time since last post which shows that either I’ve:

1. Given up
   
2. Been very busy
   

The answer is (fortunately for me) 1 – been busy – in fact I still am. I’m one of the lucky ones. Given the current economic climate, being busy and gainfully employed is starting to feel almost like a luxury.

Assuming that we all now agree that there is a recession on, one question was put to me over the weekend – does marketing in a recession still work in the same way?

I have to admit that I’ve only seen a mild adjustment rather than a full recession in my working life but to be honest, I think we can all see from the high street that the rules are shifting a little bit. In the last week, lots of retailers have been having “extravaganza” events or similar – 20% off everything, Buy One Get One Free etc….

I think a quote from Time magazine best summed up the feeling of many consumers towards these offers – “Is that the best you’ve got to offer”. That’s a dangerous message but it’s what many people seem to be saying. The danger is that we all wait until tomorrow then the next day to spend. Here in the UK, we’re about to get a sales tax reduction (if you believe the papers) but retailers are warning that it’s going to cost them to pass on this reduction.

What then are the tactics that will work in the current climate? If conspicuous consumption is out of fashion, what’s the solution for marketers? Maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem here in the UK or maybe they are worse than many realise.

In terms of making sure that marketing is effective, many advertisers and retailers are turning to “tried and tested” direct tactics – Direct Mail, Vouchers, Online etc to try and buy short term sales. This undoubtedly makes sense for most and must be a real worry for the big media companies. Whether this type of activity damages brands in the long term doesn’t really matter right now when everyone is just trying to improve cash flow. The price of traditional brand building activities will certainly be reducing as competition for spots or sponsorship opportunities dries up. At some point the pendulum will swing back as brands stop fighting fires and look to rebuild. Those that are nimble will undoubtedly do well – others will fail.

What is clear is that unaccountable marketing is going to be one casualty of this whole economic event. If you’re marketing budget is delivering only unquantified benefits then you’re about to lose it. The good news for some is that there is no marketing activity out there that needs to be unaccountable.

25 Pieces of Data for You to Review

John Billett is writing a fantastic series of articles currently called “25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness”. This is one of the most concise series of its type that I’ve had the pleasure to read. I suggest you take a look at this since John has essentially covered all the great myths about effectiveness in one simple to digest framework. He’s now up to number 18 so let’s see what the next 7 installments bring.

See http://blog.johnbillett.com/

It may not be the catchiest title but it’s certainly worth reading.

New Media driving out Old?

The common perception is that new media is driving out old. Given the current recession, many DM and digital agencies are hoping this is going to be the case. However market forces are at work....

Traditional media is going cheap or at least cheaper. It's also getting it's act together re accountability.

An interesting battle awaits...

Way Off Topic - don't sync your RSS feeds with Microsoft Outlook

Just a quick FYI – unless you have a great reason to do so, don’t sync your RSS feeds between Outlook 2007 and Explorer. Outlook maintains all your RSS history which can stack up over time – at least Explorer doesn’t do this.

Great Ad but Did it Sell?

I always thought this was a very underrated advert. However given that it's never won any awards that I'm aware of nor is it well known, I can only presume I'm missing something.

Did it sell any product? No idea. What I do know is that Alan Sugar hasn't got a clue either. On room 101 this week, he suggested that both the Honda Cog and launch adverts for Orange were both worthless since they can't have sold any product. I can't comment about the Honda ad (although I have a stong belief that it did very well) but I can be certain that the launch ads for Orange were vastly more successful that the traditional positioning employed by One2One (now T-mobile in the UK). For more on this, check out Simply Better by Patrick Barwise.

I think Alan Sugar may have misunderstood the nature of building a brand or he's being deliberately obtuse about the whole thing. More on this another time...

Some Thoughts on Software Brands

Just an observation that occurred to me earlier

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Software brands (and I know that Apple isn't really the software brand) are rarely loved. However why do creatives all love their Apple systems. They still crash sometimes and there's only one mouse button....

Irrespective, I would love one.

Dashboard Competition Notice

Two nods to XLCubed.

1) They just published an excellent article on their blog about using different data sources for an Excel dashboard - see http://blog.xlcubed.com/data-sources-for-excel-dashboards-avoid-spreadsheet-hell/

2) XLCubed is also running an Excel dashboard design contest - see http://www.bonavistasystems.com/NewsMicroChartsCompetition.html if interested in entering. Looks like it could be interesting and offer learnings to all interested in the subject.

Can we forecast marketing performance?

One issue which I've been looking at recently is that of forecast accuracy in marketing. The question I've been asking myself is this - how accurate can a forecast be and if we're not sure of the forecasts accuracy, what should we do - ignore it?

Tim Harford (the Undercover Economist) recently wrote an interesting piece on Economic Forecasting and the long running debate about why economists bother when their forecasting is so often inaccurate (see http://timharford.com/2008/05/why-economic-forecasts-are-so-hard-to-get-right/). The conclusion which is reached by Prof David Hendry is that we fail to forecast accurately because in part we fail to quickly realise when a "structural break" has taken place in the environment being investigated.

This issue is one that applies tenfold in the field of marketing because there are so many potential things which can lead to a structural change in the market. For example, a competitor launches a revolutionary new product; your advertising is run in a recently vandalised environment; a factory burns down. None of these things in inherently predictable but as a brand manager each can be catastrophic to the performance of your portfolio. Does this mean that it's not worth forecasting because the likelihood that the forecast will be "accurate" is low?

Predictably I'm going to say "no". There are many reasons that forecasting is a useful discipline in itself. In the marketing area, these would be something like:

1. It forces you to consider a wide range of outcomes from each strategy
2. It's a discipline which helps ensure consistency across the business and gives credibility to your operations
3. Getting all your forecasting ideas and assumptions down on paper will help you evaluate and learn from past mistakes. Finding out that an idea was a success is great - being able to repeat the logical process that led to the idea is fantastic and will take your marketing to a new level

Will the forecasts be accurate? In the marketing world, the answer is they might be in the short term but in the long terms, it's anybodies guess. Will advanced analytics solve this? Again better analytics may give a small improvement in accuracy over the long term but it has yet to be proved. In the short term, practical quick analysis is more powerful than advanced time consuming analysis.

Forecasting is necessary in all businesses (although many still fail to add any discipline to this process). How accurate these forecasts are does indeed depend on the effort put into them and the predictability of the market in question. Whether the incremental effort that goes into advanced analytics is worth it depends on whether you can find the correct balance between speed of analysis and the degree of "forecastability" in the market.

Econ 101 reading

Again I've been slow to blog so in place of a real post (interesting news coming soon), I'll give a couple of tips on reading for anyone off to study Economics or Management in the coming years:

1) The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan
This is a fascinating book which is surprisingly well written considering an economist had a big part in the creation of it! If you want an overview of how the modern world economy works at a high level and the implications on the major economies of various govermental polices, this would be a great place to start.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
2) Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt - only just picked this up but it seems a great read from page one and comes with a strong recommendation from someone I respect a great deal.
Economics in One Lesson: 50th Anniversary Edition

Publicis wonder if we're all idiots

Apparently we don't know if TV advertising works. That is apparently the "hold grail" (see http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=126611). Hmm for me, this one is in the bag. TV advertising does work - or at least some times. Maybe someone at Adage isn't so sure.

Do we manage brands on past performance?

People often question using techniques such as marketing mix analysis to help manage brands. They accuse it of being a blunt backward looking tool which fails to take into account the changing dynamics in a market. This is the "driving using the rear view mirror" critique.

My response is always the same - you need a three point plan in order to mitigate against this potential issue:

1. Acknowledge that analysis is indeed backward looking but it's only one piece of the insight jigsaw and nobody has an Oracle with which to look into the future
2. Ask yourself some tough structured questions about how and why the future might be different from the past. Construct some kind of process around this questioning (Delphi workshops work well here)
3. Invest some effort in activities designed to answer new questions - if you haven't got a clue whether sponsorship and events are a great way to communicate with your core customers, try it on a small scale

Not doing the above and relying blindly on historical analysis will leave you looking a bit like this guy when things to shift.

Information Visualisation Workshops in London this September

Just a quick post to let you know that we (marketingQED) are hosting three workshops on Information Visualisation this September.

Very briefly, the workshops are as follows:

1. Table and Graph Design for Effective Communication - Sep 17thThis full-day course will teach you how to effectively communicate quantitative business data using tables and graphs. You will learn how to select the appropriate medium of communication (table vs. graph, and which type) and how to visually design each component to express your message clearly and compellingly.


2. Dashboard Design for at-a-Glance Monitoring - Sep 18thDashboards offer an exciting new way to provide people at a glance with the critical information they must monitor to do their jobs. This full-day course reaches past the hype to give you the unique design skills required to build dashboards that really work.


3. Visual Data Analysis for Discovery and Understanding - Sep 19thMost business data analysis requires skills and practices involving the use of graphs that can be easily learned, but resources that teach them are almost impossible to find. Almost all books and courses on data analysis teach sophisticated statistical and financial analysis techniques, but only about 10% of business data analysis requires them. This full-day course is for those responsible for the remaining 90%.

More details here -> http://www.marketingqed.com/Services.html

All workshops will be run by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge.

Highlight of the morning from the BBC

Director: Rilap Loof according to Scamp....

Viewing the previous post - YouTube clip now removed

FYI - The youtube link I posted yesterday for the "do the test" campaign has been pulled because for copyright reasons - click on the vid.

Much to my joy, this commercial is also getting a lot of comment on Scamp so I must be onto something - see http://scampblog.blogspot.com/

You can still find the video here: http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Update - new YouTube clip now added - It would appear that you can't keep a good thing down.

Great new commercial focusing on Awareness

I often find myself telling people that running a commercial JUST to generate awareness is a waste of time - the commercial needs to alter behaviour as well. I'll make an exception for the great new commercial from Transport for London. This is the first commercial I remember seeing which was designed for the time-shifting generation. Viewing it on a broadcast system without the ability to rewind the broadcast just wouldn't have been the same.

Enjoy

Going through the bins

I'm currently reading a brilliant book called "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb where he exposes just how poor humans can be at forecasting. Taleb was a quant on Wall Street so he should be well aware of the power or otherwise of forecasting.

One interesting observation I took from the book was just how poorly we forecast because we limit the set of information we consider before drawing conclusions. So how do the guys in the city make their money?

One explanation came my way the other day. The "top" guys look for the big unexpected (by others) events. How do they do this? Well according to my source, one method is to hire private detectives to go through the rubbish of directors from the firms and industries that they track. Why bother trying to forecast share prices with dubious assumptions on productivity gains etc when you can just go through the rubbish and find out whether the company has a massive law suit creeping up on them. Genius forecasting if you ask me!