Sales Tip: The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness)

These six factors can erode the grandest of plans and the noblest of intentions. They can turn visionaries into paper-pushers and wide-eyed dreamers into shivering, weeping balls of regret. Beware!

1) Availability

We often settle for what's available, and what's available isn't always great. "Because it was there," is an okay reason to climb a mountain, but not a very good reason to take a job or a free sample at the supermarket.

2) Ignorance

If we don't know how to make something great, we simply won't. If we don't know that greatness is possible, we won't bother attempting it. All too often, we literally do not know any better than good enough.

3) Committees

Nothing destroys a good idea faster than a mandatory consensus. The lowest common denominator is never a high standard.

4) Comfort

Why pursue greatness when you've already got 324 channels and a recliner? Pass the dip and forget about your grand designs.

5) Momentum

If you've been doing what you're doing for years and it's not-so-great, you are in a rut. Many people refer to these ruts as careers.

6) Passivity

There's a difference between being agreeable and agreeing to everything. Trust the little internal voice that tells you, "this is a bad idea."

Top 100 Advertisers Boost Ad Spending, But Not In Traditional Media

The nation's 100 biggest advertisers boosted 2011 total U.S. ad spending by 4.8%. But you wouldn't know spending was on the rise if you looked only at last year's measured media. 

Measured spending for the top 100 actually slipped 0.2%. A double-digit measured-media gain for Internet display spending and a small increase in TV did not make up for losses in newspapers, magazines and radio. 

So where's the money going? Into unmeasured disciplines -- a vast pool that includes various digital plays (search marketing, online video and some forms of social media), promotion and direct marketing. The appeal is clear: Marketers are putting money into disciplines that directly connect them with targeted consumers. 

Advertisers are reshaping the media pie. Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia expects the Internet to surpass newspapers this year as the nation's second-largest advertising medium, behind TV. By ZenithOptimedia's tally, the Internet was the fifth-largest ad medium until 2009, when it powered past magazines and radio into the No. 3 spot. 

Nearly three-fourths of ZenithOptimedia's Internet breakout comes from what Ad Agecurrently counts as unmeasured spending (including paid search, online video and mobile ads); the rest comes from measured disciplines (display advertising, including display ads on social-media sites). 

Fortunes of unmeasured and measured disciplines have diverged since the Great Recession ended and not-so-great recovery began in June 2009. 

The top 100 U.S. advertisers in 2010 increased unmeasured spending by 12.6% and measured spending by 6.3%, resulting in an 8.8% rebound in total ad spending. 

The 100 Leading National Advertisers' unmeasured spending jumped 11.8% in 2011 while measured media eased 0.2%, resulting in an overall increase of 4.8%. That slower growth shows how major marketers have kept a check on ad spending in this plodding economic recovery. 

Measured media's share of LNA spending dropped to 55.8% in 2011 from 58.6% in 2010. 

The tug of war between measured and unmeasured disciplines is hardly new. Since launching the 100 LNA report in 1956, Ad Age has used the term "unmeasured" to quantify ad and promotion spending distinct from media types -- such as TV, print and (in recent decades) Internet display -- that are measured by tracking services. 

The shift in 2011 was widespread: 100 Leading National Advertisers in all but two major industry categories reduced the portion of 2011 spending that went to measured media, according to Ad Age DataCenter's analysis. (The two exceptions were financial services and restaurants, where measured media scored a bigger slice of the pie.) 

Case in point: Kohl's Corp., the department-store retailer, disclosed gross advertising costs rose 10.4% to $1.123 billion in 2011. Kohl's 2011 measured-media ad spending declined 2.5% to $331.3 million, according to WPP's Kantar Media. Ad Age defines the difference as unmeasured spending: $791.7 million, up 16.9%. 

To be sure, marketers still rely on measured media to build brands and promote products. Apple's U.S. measured spending surged 82%. 

The 100 LNA accounted for 44% of Kantar Media's 2011 U.S. measured-media spending. 

Among the 100 largest advertisers, total 2011 U.S. spending (measured media plus unmeasured spending) increased in all but three major industries, according to Ad AgeDataCenter's spending analysis. 

Telecom had the sharpest spending drop, falling 7.9%. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel Corp.and Verizon Communications all cut measured-media spending. 

Marketers of cleaning products reduced total ad spending by 3.3%. The LNA's 10 food companies trimmed spending by 1.5%. 

Two major industries saw double-digit increases in total U.S. ad spending: automotive, up 16.1%, and financial services, up 11.2%. 

During the 2007-2009 recession, automotive and financial-services imploded as industries and ad categories. But the two industries have rebounded sharply, scoring double-digit ad spending increases in both 2010 and 2011. 

Fiat's Chrysler Group boosted U.S. measured-media spending by 48%; Chrysler's stated worldwide ad spending jumped 49%. 

Estimated total U.S. ad spending for JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest financial advertiser, rose 22%. JPMorgan Chase's stated worldwide marketing costs in 2011 were 77% above the company's recession-period low (2009). 

Among the 100 LNA, about two-thirds of marketers increased U.S. spending in 2011, with 32 cutting spending, according to Ad Age DataCenter's analysis. 

What about 2012? Kantar Media last week reported some sign of a modest rebound in measured-media spending. Overall U.S. measured spending increased 2.6% in the first quarter, the best quarterly growth since second-quarter 2011. 

Kantar Media's top 100 marketers increased first-quarter 2012 spending by 3.4%, vs. a 0.2% spending decline in full-year 2011. 

ZenithOptimedia forecasts total U.S. spending for major media and marketing services will grow 3.2% in 2012 and another 3.2% in 2013, up from 2011's tepid 1.8% growth. That hardly signals a boom. But it's better than a bust.

(Source: Advertising Age, 06/25/12) 

How to Succeed with Digital: 5 Strategies

Chaos. If there's a single word to encapsulate today's digital environment, that one clinches it. The dizzying pace of change has been hard to keep up with (never mind get ahead of) from every perspective: Channels and platforms. Devices and tools. Customer behaviors...and expectations. 

For marketers, the challenge is to understand how to best manage the chaos, and that is a do-able proposition. It takes a strategic orientation that is grounded in five key tenets. Making these the basis of your approach will result in a powerful pathway to better customer engagement and better harness both the chaos and the power that digital represents. 

1. Your customers, engaged -- your story, amplified

The digital environment is a milieu characterized by shared ownership in your brand by you and your consumers. You can't control what's being said about your brand here, so focus on what you can control: what it stands for. The better its promise and positioning are focused, defined, and communicated internally and externally, the better you will be able to encourage consistent storytelling about it by your customers. 

2. Know the customer "fragments" 

Digital tends to create a marketplace of people with multiple personalities, which makes the challenge of targeting much more complex. An individual may have multiple identities on Twitter, share their professional persona on LinkedIn, and on Facebook, reveal another persona. 

Telling the right brand story requires an understanding of the multiple dimensions of the individual, and figuring out which one you want to connect with. 

Just remember. Your audiences are allowed to have multifaceted online personalities. Your brand, however, can't afford a fragmented identity. 

3. Don't rush to follow

Digital is a relentless and omnipresent environment that has dramatically altered how we consume and share information. It can be overwhelming. If you respond well, you can capitalize on the opportunity to make your brand a bigger part of customers' lives -- but you must be very clear on your digital strategy. There's a risk of getting caught up in (and overextending your resources on) the hot new channel or capability of the moment. 

Understand which insights matter by truly listening to and assessing the data to design a strategic approach that is aligned to your brand and your target customer. Remember: Missteps are less tolerated in this realm, as there is a permanent digital footprint. 

4. Integrate the CMO and CIO roles

Digital intensifies the need to break down organizational silos. It takes both marketing and technology know-how and capabilities -- bound by respect for the medium -- to envision and activate the most effective digital strategies. 

Marketing and technology capabilities must work together to create the best possible outcomes. This means that marketers and their IT counterparts must increase their understanding of the interplay between technologies, how they work, and how they are best utilized to create customer experiences that drive the brand and business forward.

5. Measure not for Klout, but business impact

The impact of digital strategy is measured in ways that traditional media is not -- via a stream of data that can be analyzed to continuously fine-tune and refine approaches for maximum impact. Ultimately, however, metrics must connect back to business impact. But the reality is that nothing in digital exists on its own. 

Mobile links to social media, which in turn may link back to a company Web site. The trick is to ensure that linkage models are being used to measure the effectiveness of the digital strategies -- especially considering the fuzziness of some digital measurements (like Klout and "liking"). It's better to link those digital measures to traditional ones like awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

The explosion in digital has created an exciting and challenging environment for society and culture. The marketer's imperative is to learn how to manage the chaos to grow deeper customer connections and successful businesses.

(Source: Chiaki Nishino, Marketing Daily, 06/27/12) 

Obamacare Just Created a Huge Ad Category

Health insurance companies already moving toward consumer advertising 

It's official: the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare, depending where you sit on the political spectrum) has been upheld by the Supreme Court as of this morning. While the announcement certainly wasn't the proudest moment for cable news networks (easy on the trigger there, fellas!), it's likely to be very good indeed for television as a whole.

Pivotal Research senior researcher Brian Wieser (formerly the top forecaster at Interpublic) has a solid predictive track record, and he's extremely bullish on the possibility of a rapidly expanding healthcare category on television and in other consumer media as the hotly contested individual mandate becomes a reality in 2014. Individual healthcare policies are the exception, rather than the norm, but if everyone in the country is required to have some kind of coverage, the number of those policies sold is going to skyrocket. That, said Wieser, means new business models.

What will probably happen at first, according to the analyst, is that a single company will grab a lot of attention when it rolls out an effective campaign. "A reference point could be the auto insurance market until the last decade," said Wieser. "It was a lot of smaller companies, and then Geico catalyzed the entire sector. It will make a huge difference in market share."

Since health insurers market mostly (sometimes exclusively) to businesses, there's a steep learning curve ahead for big insurance companies that don't yet have a consumer-friendly infrastructure. "These marketers are going to have to reorient themselves from being B2B brands to being consumer brands," said Wieser.

And it's worth noting that some of them have already started to do just that. Last April, Cigna bgan its pivot toward consumer-focused advertising by hiring Hill Holiday to handle its needs in that department; the company also rolled out its "Go You" campaign a few months later (see link above). Meanwhile, WellPoint has hired Interpublic agency Deutsch, also with a conumser focus in mind, and even earlier—in May 2010—Humana retained Omnicom.

"I'd be surprised if you see them in next year's upfront, but I think you'll see a little in the fall of 2013, more in 2014, and a lot more in 2015," said Wieser. Still, health insurance advertising increases may be a safe bet, but there's no guarantee that it will be a net gain of the $1 billion-plus that Wieser predicts the market will eventually reach. "Health insurance goes up and maybe it makes it more difficult for soft drink manufacturers who were, uh, on the other side of the health proposition," said Wieser with a laugh.

It's also probably safe to expect the larger insurers to start retaining the larger advertising agencies; consumer ad spending hasn't yet been a priority, but the Kaiser Family Foundation (a nonpartisan nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of the health insurance industry and is formerly affiliated with Kaiser Permanente) predicts that the number of individual policy holders in the U.S. will at least double from 14 million to 28 million by 2016.

Sam Thielman - Adweek, 6/28/12

Newspapers lose auto ad dollars

Dealers have turned the page on newspapers, at least when it comes to buying advertising in them.

The annual National Automobile Dealers Association's state-of-the-industry report released last week highlights just how much their choice of advertising media has changed in the past decade.

At the typical store, NADA says, newspapers accounted for more than half of total ad spending in 2001. Last year it was just 20 percent. The Internet, in contrast, accounted for 5 percent a decade ago and 25 percent in 2011.

But all that lost newspaper advertising didn't go to the Web. TV and radio spots, as well as direct mail, are up as a percentage of the total compared with 2001.