The desire to seek something better is a natural human desire.  After all, who doesn’t want something better?  But humans are also naturally reluctant to change.  It’s the constant alure of something better pulling against the security of something we know that creates tension in the workplace (and, often in our personal lives as well).

Nowhere is that tension felt more than in the sometimes tempermental relationship between client and agency.

The way things used to be, it cost a lot to find an Agency of Record (AOR), especially if you measured cost in time, frustration and lost opportunities in addition to money.  Clients were historically reluctant to make a change, finding it easier to stick with “the devil they knew” rather than the one they didn’t.

But with the advent of agency directories like the Ad Agency Red Book and then agency search consultants, clients found a much deeper pool of potential candidates and a willing group of hired guns to vet them.

To be sure there were (and still are) problems with this system.  The cost of hiring a search consultant was prohibitively expensive meaning only clients with larger budgets could rationalize the expense.  Directories were good at providing basic contact information but not particularly reliable in allowing clients to do an objective “apples-to-apples” comparison of one agency against another.

Then along comes the internet and the ability to process significant data points almost instantly.  In the ad agency search and selection game, this technology manifested itself in the form of www.agencyfinder.com.

Now, just one disclaimer, I’ve worked with AgencyFinder before.  My agency has received work from AgencyFinder and I’ve run agency reviews through AgencyFinder as a consultant.  But Chuck Meyst and his crew have developed a fair and objective methodology and a rich database on agencies based in North America (and now the UK, too).  And the price is right for clients who decide to search (or the search consultants they hire to do the search).

It’s free.

Yep.  Clients search the database for free because the agencies who are listed there pay a fee every year to maintain a listing and participate in the searches conducted by the service.  Every agency pays the same fee no matter how big or small it is, so there are no “favorites” in the system.  Every agency also has to complete a long and detailed agency survey that helps clients pinpoint exactly the right service or experience they need.

And because the service is free, clients of all shapes and sizes use it. This past year, that was nearly 800 searches for agencies. Not every account went to a big agency – because not every account is a big account.

But enough about AgencyFinder.  Whether you use that service or another, as a client there are five things you need to do in order to make sure your search for a new marketing agency is efficient, fair and productive:

1. Make sure you have taken the time, up front, to clearly identify what your agency will need to accomplish in order to be successful.  Any agency worth their salt will want to know what they’re up against.  As you’ve seen in our piece on client briefs falling more than a little short, many clients don’t do this kind of thing very well.  If this happens with an existing agency, it may slow down a project or create redundant expenses.  If a client is unprepared going into an agency review (or selection process) the results could be disasterous.  Imagine NEVER being on the same page with your agency … yikes.
2. Identify the best agencies that do what you need to have done in the industry sectors in which you operate.  Starting there, broaden your candidate list out to agencies with similar experiences and/or capabilities.  Certainly, this is where a service like AgencyFinder has a tremendous advantage over something like an agency directory.  Just remember, developing your candidate list of potential agencies is significantly more involved than just typing a search term into Google and seeing what comes up.
3. Have some idea of what you’re willing to invest into your marketing program once the agency is hired.  It doesn’t have to be a firm number, but trust me – you’ll lose the good agencies if you can’t tell them what you’re prepared to spend if they come up with the great ideas and show an ability to work effeciently.  Telling an agency you don’t have a budget or you don’t know what your budget is; is the same as telling the agency you’re not serious about finding a new agency.
4. Have a schedule for your review in place, publish it and then stick with it.  Today, a full-on agency review shouldn’t take more than 8 weeks; 12 at the outside.  And at the pace of today’s economy, losing a quarter because you’re reviewing agencies can spell disaster.  Be prepared to move quickly, make decisions and get the job done.  As critical as the time is to you, it’s doubly critical to the agencies who will be participating in the review.
5. Finally, make sure you spend time with agency you DON’T select to thank them and tell them why you picked the agency you did.  As a search consultant, I can tell you this is the hardest part of the job – but it’s the part that has yielded the biggest dividends for me.  The agency’s appreciate the show of respect and, more importantly, they try to improve.  It raises everyone’s game and the profession, as a whole, is better off for it.

Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, I suppose a well-run review greens all the pastures in the future.

Thinking about switching agencies and want to learn more about how to conduct a review, feel free to email me and we can arrange an obligation-free phone consultation.

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“It can be a very daunting task for companies to hone in on the specific needs of their Hispanic customers,” says Leylha Ahuile, senior multicultural analyst at Mintel. “Latinas come in a variety of shades, so a wide range of products must be developed to cater to every pigment and hair type.”

Hispanic women are especially concerned with the box or bottle their favorite products come in. Eighty-one percent of Latinas surveyed report that they would like to see more personal care products with bilingual packaging. Younger Hispanic women are more inclined to express a desire for bilingual packaging than their older counterparts.

“Hispanic consumers often look at bilingual packaging as a way of being acknowledged and respected by a brand, not because they are unable to read English,” notes Leylha Ahuile. “The lack of Spanish-language packaging has the potential to make these women feel ignored by manufacturers.”

Latina women are younger than the average US female population, and 62% of the Hispanic female population has yet to enter their peak earning years (35+). As a result, Mintel believes Latina purchasing power is definitely on the rise.

Please join Leylha Ahuile for a FREE webinar on June 16 at 2 pm CDT as she presents, “Marketing to Today’s Latina.”

Register here: http://tinyurl.com/26ood6p

About Mintel
Mintel is a leading global supplier of consumer, product and media intelligence. For more than 38 years, Mintel has provided insight into key worldwide trends, offering exclusive data and analysis that directly impacts client success. With offices in Chicago, New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai and Tokyo, Mintel has forged a unique reputation as a world-renowned business brand. For more information on Mintel, please visit www.mintel.com. Follow Mintel on Twitter:http://twitter.com/mintelnews

I suppose it was just a matter of time before the Mancrunch stunt finally raised enough hackles in the gay community to motivate a few curious bloggers to do the legwork necessary to find out what was really going on.  Kudo’s to Lyndon Evans for writing a blog post that provides a fairly concise summary of the whole affair.  A second post debunking the Mancrunch controversy, written by Alex Blaze, provides even more sordid details on the site, its ownership and makes a direct connection between the site and other online dating sites of questionable moral values (i.e. these other sites promote affairs and secret/discreet relationships focusing primarily on sex).

(NOTE: Both links go to sites with gay content and may be considered NSFW in some situations.)

And here’s one other thing of note – it looks like this stunt (and the ensuing controversy) isn’t a first-time experience for Mancrunch’s ownership (represented by Bridge & Tunnel PR’s Dominic Friesen and Elissa Buchter).  As pointed out in a piece appearing in Tuesday’s LA Times (by Dan Neil), another site represented by Friesen and Buchter – AshleyMadison.com – ran the same gauntlet last year, generating tons of press and web links in the process.

The tv guys have caught on, as Mr. Neil reports in his column:

Martin Franks, executive vice president of planning, policy and government affairs at CBS, told Reuters: “A whole cottage industry has grown up out of trying to make use of network turndowns. . . . They’ve found a loophole in an otherwise well-intentioned process.”

So what’s the point of this whole exercise?

It’s all about search engine placement and creating as many in-bound links as possible for the lowest possible cost.  Because search engine placement means traffic and for web sites that charge desperate people a monthly membership fee – traffic means big bucks.  If you were searching the Internet for this kind of site, you would find over 2,000 stories about Mancrunch listed before the first link to a competing site.

Mission accomplished.

It’s too bad they had to hijack the Super Bowl to do it.  But for those of us not in the targeted demographic, we’ll hardly notice.  None of these marketing shenanigans are going to impact the telecast of the game – unless the Mancrunch people have a “Heidi moment” planned for the fourth quarter.

UPDATE: 02/03 @ 10:00 pm – Popped back into the office this evening and found a link to an article covering this issue that included an interview with me.  Big thanks to Michael Tripplet at Mediaite.com for taking the time out of his day to call me and talk about this entire situation in more detail.

And when I received a news release yesterday about the brewing “controversy” over the Super Bowl spot submitted to CBS by Mancrunch, I had my doubts.

As I’ve noted in my other post on this subject, I tried to confirm a few facts in the previous story and wound up leaving messages or missing late-night call backs.  Today, however, after being approached by Mancrunch’s PR guys for a second time, I submitted some questions (in bold) that were quickly answered by Mancrunch’s spokesman, Dominic Friesen.  What follows is the entire exchange, verbatim – and after that, my thoughts on this entire thing:

1.) Prior to the decision from CBS there were already reports that the spot had been rejected – primarily from bloggers covering gay issues. Was this outcome expected?

Not at all.  Especially given the fact that they accepted the Focus on the Family spot we thought CBS would eventually accept ours given the public attention.

2.) What do you think you could have done from a creative standpoint that would have forced CBS’s hand into accepting your commercial?

Based on their response to this, we don’t think they would take any commercial we created that promoted gay dating.

3.) Do you think a similar spot for a hetero equivelent (i.e. Fling.com, AshleyMadison.com or something like that) would have been accepted by CBS? After all, Mancrunch doesn’t look to be like Match.com or eHarmony - it’s about hooking up, right?

You’re comparing a dating site for single men to a cheating site like AshleyMadison.com?  Nowhere on our commercial do we mention sex or on our web site, for that matter.  We definitely think that if the spot contained a man and a woman kissing on the couch, there wouldn’t be an issue.

4.) What agency produced the ad? The concept and production values of the spot, quite frankly, don’t seem to be all that “out of the box” or expensive – why did it take the agency so long to produce your commercial for the largest advertising stage on the planet (the Super Bowl)?

We produced the spot in-house.  You’re right the spot didn’t take that long to produce.  The reason we only submitted the spot on January 18th was that was only when the web site was ready.  We literally just launched the web site last week.

5.) Why isn’t the URL for your web site included in the ad?

To be honest, we posted an earlier version of the ad. Here is the actual version.

6.) You now have over 5,000 inbound links to Mancrunch as a result of the publicity surrounding this situation with CBS. While it would have been nice to spend the $2 million (or more) to run an ad in the Super Bowl, do you still consider this effort a successful launch?

The effort is not even close to over.  If we can’t advertise in the same places that Match and eHarmony can, this is just the beginning.

7.) Do you intend on running any other television spots on network television this year? In your opinion, do you think the programming would influence the likelihood of a network to accept your creative (for example, would an ad produced for the Academy Awards be more likely to be accepted to run versus an ad produced for the Winter Olympics)?

Absolutely.  We plan on running on network television this year and we’re confident that any program that allows alcohol, erectile dysfunction and other online dating ads will allow ours … which we thought included the NFL.

Now, I’ve done a little more checking and have found some things that, I think, point out that this brouhaha is really just a big stunt – playing on the fears and deadline pressures of both the mainstream and gay media. In fact, in my view, this is a great example of “wag the dog” and shows why, as a society, we still have a long way to go to accept the differences between people and form a more civil society.

Let’s go through the questions I asked and the answers I received and I’ll attempt to point out why I’ve reached my conclusion …

Mancrunch was surprised by the rejection.  Really?
Bloggers covering gay issues were reporting that CBS had rejected Mancrunch’s advertising overtures yesterday.  I’m sure some of the editorializing on their part was based on an assumption of  pre-determined bias against an advertiser reaching out directly – and obviously – to the gay community.  I can understand that.  After viewing the spot, it seemed to me the commercial was made to be rejected – and, for a stunt like this, the spot HAS to be rejected to resonate in sympathetic communities – so I wasn’t surprised by CBS’s rejection.

But according to Mr. Friesen, they didn’t see it coming.  Really?  He claims that since the right-wing Focus on the Family spot with Tim Tebow was accepted, the Mancrunch team thought their spot would eventually be accepted given the public pressure (brought about in an afternoon).  Really?

Whether you agree with Focus on the Family’s anti-abortion/anti-choice/pro-life (you pick) spot or not, it’s clearly a spot advocating a public policy/political stance – not selling a dating service.  Mancrunch is clearly presented as a commercial venture.  They’re not advocating public policy related to mashing with your football buddy over a bowl of chips.

In addition to all that, if you read the rejection notice from CBS, you’ll see that there were also questions about Mancrunch’s credit that needed to be worked out.  This is a multi-million dollar buy we’re talking about.  In typical advertising situations, advocacy/political ads are “cash-up-front” buys which means the station or network know they’re going to get their money after the spot runs.  I’ll bet CBS would have been less inclined to reject Mancrunch’s spot had it been seriously produced and paid for in advance.

Creative changes – would they have made a difference?
Mr. Friesen says “no” – and I’m inclined to agree.  To a point.  Unless Mancrunch had produced this ad with the serious intent of airing it, there isn’t much you could do with it to make it worthy of the biggest stage of the year for advertising creative.  Really.  This is a crappy spot.  Having one character tell the other he “sucks” wouldn’t have made it out of any legit creative department in any agency I’ve ever worked in.

The spot doesn’t really do anything to sell the site, just stir up controversy.  But then, I suspect that’s the point all along.

Would a spot for a hetero equivalent site been accepted?
Here again, Mr. Friesen makes the point that if the spot had contained a man and woman kissing on a couch, there wouldn’t be an issue.  That’s true.  We’ve seen that issue time and again in television ads.  But these two characters aren’t just kissing – they’re mugging each other.  And they’re promoting a site that doesn’t say a thing about “finding a soulmate” or any of the other sappy slogans thrown around by Match.com or eHarmony.

No, Mancrunch is  - as the site claims – where many, many, many men come to play.  Doesn’t sound monogamous to me.  So, while Mr. Friesen is right when he says they don’t mention sex on their commercial or on their web site.  The music on the site talks about wanting to kiss a guy and the site promotes promiscuity by innuendo at the very least.

In addition to all that, I thought it was interesting that Mr. Friesen would single out my reference to AshleyMadison.com and show some offense at my comparison.  He claims the Mancrunch site is “a dating site for single men” (which is not stated or obvious on the site) compared to the other site which promotes affairs between married people (and was featured on CNN a while back, by the way).  His reaction is interesting to me not just because I still think it’s a fair question (as is the comparison to Fling.com) but because the PR firm Mr. Friesen is a principal in, Bridge & Tunnel Communications, represents AshleyMadison.com.  In fact, the Mancrunch spokesperson who left a message for me on my phone, Elissa Buchter, also works for Bridge & Tunnel Communications and as of January 11th was still serving as a media contact person for AshleyMadison.com.

What’s up with the spot?
As I mentioned earlier: in order for the stunt to work, people have to be outraged.  In order for people to be outraged, the spot has to be rejected.

And it’s much easier to reject a crappy spot than it is a good one.

But what ad agency, in their right mind, would take on a creative assignment to produce an ad with the expressed intent of having it rejected from appearing in the Super Bowl (besides GoDaddy’s agency, of course).  The answer – none.  More to the point, what client would say “Hey, I’ll fork over 2-3 million clams to make sure our first-ever, ground-breaking ad gets seen by one-third of all the people in America – but I won’t pay more than $500 to produce the spot.”

I don’t buy Mr. Friesen’s excuse here.  This is the best he could do because, I suspect he suspected that I’d call the agency if he gave me a name of an agency responsible for producing the spot.

The ad for a web site without a URL.  What?
Yeah, the first version of the ad I saw didn’t have a URL in it … I swear it didn’t.  The Mancrunch team sent me a new YouTube link, this time with an ad that included a tiny little “.com” after the Mancrunch name in the spot.  Not much better, but better.

So, which version did they send to CBS for evaluation?  How could they expect their spot to be taken seriously if they didn’t even get their own web site into their ad?

Was the stunt a success?  Mancrunch says “no” so loudly it has to mean “yes.”
The team at Mancrunch has to be eating up this publicity like crazy.  The FOX News hit was critical to the campaign’s success.  It legitimized the story even though it wasn’t a real story – even I could see that – but FOX News didn’t care.  Next to abortion, gay rights is pure gold to FOX.  It winds the stems on their faithful and drives tons of web hits and viewers.  The guys at Mancrunch know this and played FOX News like a fiddle.

And, I’m guessing, the guys at FOX News didn’t mind a bit.  They just laid back and took it like … well, like that baldish guy with the green jersey in the spot.

Once the fire was lit, other sites started jumping in.  My guess is this thing will continue to burn for a few more days and when it’s all said and done, Mancrunch will have tens of thousands of inbound links and an established place atop the gay-dating world.  Whatever that is.

Are we through, yet?  Unfortunately, Mancrunch has pledged to “fight on.”
I’m not so sure this is a good thing, but Mr. Friesen has pledged to “absolutely” plan on running on network television.  That means, I suppose, we’ll see this play staged again around some other event.  And why not.  For Mancrunch, it’s a no-lose scenario.  As long as their ad gets rejected, they’ve created a viral hit and generated tons of publicity and – more importantly – inbound links to their web site that will raise its profile among search engines and the like.  If their ad gets accepted, it runs and creates even more controversy (in all likelihood).

So, what’s the wind-up on all this?

This is, I believe, another manifestation of manufactured controversy like the fake US Chamber of Commerce Announcement or Balloon Boy controversy of last year and any number of other fradulent PR events and fake news that – over the long run – diminish what little confidence the general public still has in the news media.  It’s a shame to see that none of the major news outlets covering this story are doing anything more than dancing to the same tune implanted into FOX News’ brain by a savvy PR flack.

But it’s not really a surprise.

Where’s Howard Kurz when you need him?

UPDATE, 01/30/2010 @ 1:25pm (CST) – I’ve been receiving a few comments on these posts that have been, shall we say, off-topic.  I’m not endorsing or condoning a lifestyle.  This is a blog about media and marketing, not about politics.  And certainly not about people feeling their First Amendment Right to free speech gives them the license to use hateful words on my blog.

I follow the “dinner party” rules of blog monitoring … I allow and encourage spirited conversations about the things people expect to talk about when they come here.  And that’s advertising, marketing, public relations, publicity, journalism and the media.  Anyone who comes in here and tries to be a boor by wading into off-topic, red meat political issues will be shown the door.  Sorry.  But it’s my party and I make the rules.

After all, the outrage we should feel here isn’t about gay dating it’s about the manipulation of an all-to-willing media and people who would rather believe in grand conspiracies and imagined enemies than take the time to think about the messages they’re being fed and how realistic or reasonable they are.  This is just one of many examples as to why we all need to become better (and more critical) media consumers.

Echoing around the media blogosphere today (at over 1,700 5,000 18,000 posts and counting) has been the news that CBS Television is “considering” a television spot from a reputed dating site for homosexuals called Mancrunch.  And when we say “considering” we take that to mean they’ve received the commercial and, presumably, an order to air it in the Super Bowl for a couple million bucks – but the spot is going through a review by someone in the the Broadcast Standards & Approvals department of the network.

In the meantime, Mancrunch has turned on the publicity machine – generating maximum buzz by getting the red meat journalists at FOX News to bite on the story and proclaim that CBS is considering airing the gay dating site ad during the Super Bowl.   That, in turn, has lead to posts on the Huffington Post, LA Times and several other news sites to continue giving the story gravitas.

This is all great for Mancrunch and, I suspect, of very little consequence to CBS.  And why is that, you might ask …

… because as of this point in time, none of this “news” is confirmed.

This may, in fact, be much ado about nothing.  And that’s just what Mancrunch and other marketers who trade in controversy (like GoDaddy.com, for example) want.  You see, the controversy is much more affordable than the actual television time.  And thanks to the Internet, the residual effects of all the bloviating by pundits, bloggers and the rest will create thousands of links to Mancruch, lifting it above competing sites going for the same audience.

It’s brilliant, really.  And the PR firm involved in the kerfuffle, PR Media Now, should be congratulated.

So, why am I not biting on the story?  Why am I not outraged one way or another?  Why am I such a freakin’ cynic and suspicious of this entire thing?

For starters, I don’t have a political axe to grind or ox to gore.  I’m not in the target market.  But I am interested in advertising and marketing.  And there are plenty of things about this effort that don’t sit right with me and make me think that this whole controversy is manufactured.

First off, take a look at the spot.  It’s on YouTube and has less than 1,000 views which tells me that for all the web traffic the story is getting (there are over 70 comments on the FOX News story alone), no one is taking time to actually watch the television spot.  If you do, you’ll see some things that don’t make sense.  For example, the production values of the spot are really low.  Not “Calvin-Klein-porn-shoot-in-the-basement” low (on purpose), I mean this looks like it was produced by Wayne Campbell and Garth to run on Aurora Cable Public Access.

Further to that, is the language in the spot.  One character tells the other one he “sucks.”  What copywriter would write that and think that would pass by anyone?  Really?

The obligatory make-out scene which, undoubtedly raises the hackles of conservative viewers is, at best, staged.  It looks like two straight guys acting like they’re making out but not letting anyone actually see them make contact with one another.  It’s arbitrary and poorly acted … at best.

And finally, this is an ad for a web site – a web-based dating service – and the URL of the site isn’t shown in the ad.  Huh?

If this ad isn’t fake (as, I assume the controversy is), Mancrunch would be fortunate to have CBS reject the spot so they could hire a real ad agency to produce something that works for them and gives interested consumers the information they need to sign-up and use their service.

UPDATE 01/28/2010 @5:50pm (CST) – It’s now been four hours since I was first contacted by Mancrunch’s PR firm.  I expressed my skepticism the first time but the PR folks were responsive and reassuring that this whole thing was legit.  They offered to put me in touch with a spokesperson from Mancrunch, but I still haven’t received a call.  I understand that.  I would assume that they are busy dealing with bloggers who are convinced this controversy is legit and covering it thusly.  Mancrunch’s PR firm did give me the name of someone they said worked in CBS’s Broadcast Standards & Approvals Department and I’ve left a message on her voicemail as well.

I’ll make this promise: I’ll update this post as I speak with people and as I learn more.  If it turns out the story is legit, I’ll be sure to say so.  If I get a call back from the network contact provided by Mancrunch, I’ll make note of that here as well.  I will continue to make a few calls and see what else I can confirm on my own.

But know this – if this all turns out to be a stunt, you saw it here first!  (Well, actually you saw it on the LA Times blog, AdRants and the Brand Central Station Facebook page first.)

UPDATE 01/29/2010 @ 2:28pm (CST) – Just received word from Mancrunch’s PR firm that CBS has rejected the spot (here’s a link to a .pdf of the rejection notice).  I wasn’t able to get a hold of anyone at CBS for comment yesterday and, quite frankly, have been too busy to try and reach someone today.  I did get a returned call from Mancrunch last night but was out of the office and unable to take the call.

Looking into it in more detail, it appears this news broke a couple hours earlier and is now starting to climb up the media status ladder with stories on USA Today’s site among others.  Most are citing this news breaking on CNBC – which, interestingly enough isn’t actually referencing a story but rather a tweet on Darren Rovell’s Twitter account.  It was enough, though, to legitimize this entire controversy as far as USA Today is concerned.

I’m still trying to figure out what Mancrunch is trying to do with all this “free” lift via controversy.  As a result, I’ve asked the Mancrunch folks to answer a few questions.  Those questions are:

1.) Prior to the decision from CBS there were already reports that the spot had been rejected – primarily from bloggers covering gay issues. Was this outcome expected?

2.) What do you think you could have done from a creative standpoint that would have forced CBS’s hand into accepting your commercial?

3.) Do you think a similar spot for a hetero equivelent (i.e. Fling.com, AshleyMadison.com or something like that) would have been accepted by CBS? After all, Mancrunch doesn’t look to be like Match.com or eHarmony – it’s about hooking up, right?

4.) What agency produced the ad? The concept and production values of the spot, quite frankly, don’t seem to be all that “out of the box” or expensive – why did it take the agency so long to produce your commercial for the largest advertising stage on the planet (the Super Bowl)?

5.) Why isn’t the URL for your web site included in the ad?

6.) You now have over 5,000 inbound links to Mancrunch as a result of the publicity surrounding this situation with CBS. While it would have been nice to spend the $2 million (or more) to run an ad in the Super Bowl, do you still consider this effort a successful launch?

7.) Do you intend on running any other television spots on network television this year? In your opinion, do you think the programming would influence the likelihood of a network to accept your creative (for example, would an ad produced for the Academy Awards be more likely to be accepted to run versus an ad produced for the Winter Olympics)?

We’ll see what they have to say.

Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post by a contributing writer to the Brand Central Station Blog.  Mary Ann Johnson is a member of Team Position2, experts in search and social media marketing and sent us this post on behalf of the team.  You can learn more about Position2 by visiting their web site.

by Team Position2

Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

Listen: It is very important to “listen” to what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry as a whole. People and their opinions influence your customers. Watch out for any complaints against you or your competitors, as it is the best opportunity to showcase your customer service to them and show that you care and value customers.
Potential customers also look for others opinions before they make the purchase decision.

Participate: It not about just listening, you need to get engaged and converse with people. If you respond timely to any of the questions it reassures the faith in your brand among the people. Even if your brand is not talked about its essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Make a plan and start conversation at relevant places and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Respond: When you are monitoring the conversations you know the happenings and can implement relevant responses. A proper response goes a long way in spreading the good about your brand in these times of the ripple effect like Twitter.

Tools: There are many paid and free tools to keep a tab on the conversations. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Backtype.

There are paid tools, which help in monitoring and analyzing the brand such as radian6, Collective intellect, TechrigySM2 to name a few.

About Position2
Position2 is a leading Search & Social Media Marketing firm that delivers continuous growth for its customers through its proprietary “Surround & Intent Marketing” methodology. The company’s adaptive technology solutions are customizable to customers’ evolving marketing needs. It delivers integrated Search & Social Media Marketing solutions that engages prospects at multiple touch-points in the online environment. For more details, Please visit http://www.position2.com

Besides when you’re at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, of course.

The answer is when you’re trying to drag your business (or your client) into the realm of social media and/or online marketing (no, they’re not exactly the same thing – but that’s a topic for another post at another time). 

Specifically, we’re talking about companies contemplating – or trying to cope with – the following:

• Blogs
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Private social networks (i.e. Ning or Webs.com)
• eNewsletters
• Social Bookmarking Tools
• Virtual Couponing
• RSS-driven Content
• Webinars
• Social Media Monitoring
• Blogger Relations
• Discussion Boards
• Social Media Releases

… and the list goes on (and on).

If you’ve been there before, you know exactly what I mean.  The game-changing nature of these tools opens up a range of possibilities (and potential) for your business.  And because it’s so easy (and usually so cheap) to get into it, enthusiastic marketing people tend to fall all over themelves on their way in only to find themselves neck deep in a morasse of tweets, posts, updates and more that consumes a lot of time and doesn’t produce much in the way of results.

So, what’s my point? 

It’s this:

You have to take time out to figure out a mission for each message and each tool in your social marketing toolbox before you get to work.  Go in with a purpose and some idea of how you’re going to use each of these snazzy new applications to help you get there.

And most of all, don’t be afraid to leave something on the table for later.

I’ve been in a lot of meetings with clients and agencies where there’s interest in a new online service or application but noone has a clue as to where it fits in the mix.  The intentions may be right and honorable, but the execution is doomed to failure unless someone learns how, when, where and why that tool is the riht tool for the job.

If you don’t know what to do with a new technology or a new social media opportunity, you have to either be ready to fail the first few times out of the gate with it or to put it aside to see (and learn from) the mistakes others make.  There’s no lack of “early adopters” in this line of work, so all you have to do is wait and watch and then jump in after the smoke clears.

Making the mission fit the tool …
Key to making social media work for your business (or your client) is making sure you have a good, working understanding of what each piece in your social marketing toolbox can do and how that capability can help tell your brand’s story in a compelling and relevant way. 

It should seem obvious, but make sure you’ve spent time figuring out the best way to use Facebook, Twitter and the rest before you test things out on your brand or your client’s business.  Less obvious is the need to narrow the focus for each tool from what it can do to what it should do with respect to your brand’s story.

Just because you can get thousands of followers on Twitter doesn’t make it a good fit for your brand.  If, on the other hand, you’re able to identify key bloggers, writers and industry thought leaders’ Twitter ID’s you may want to consider using Tweets as an easy and convenient way to keep them in the loop and to alert them of new developments.

Taking that line of thinking to the next level, if your team decides you want to maintain several Twitter feeds as a core element of your social marketing program, you need to have some idea of which application will give you the control you need to manage and monitor activity on each feed.  And for heaven’s sake, don’t just go out there and recommend a social media strategy to a client (or your boss) without having tested it out on your own first!

Knowing the practical application of each social media tool is just as important as clearly defining the story you want to tell with it.  Just as I encourage clients to develop a message matrix – I insist we do the same thing when it comes to developing their social media marketing program.

If I don’t, I run the risk of being the “social media tool” at our next meeting.

For decades, advertising agencies and the media have operated under a shared myth about what they do. The canard runs something like this: “Create brilliant advertising that gets people’s attention, run it in enough places the consumers can’t get away from it and eventually you’ll see your share of market increase as a result.”

When it came to generating measurable performance, agencies and the media gave lip-service to “Return on Marketing Investment” and other things that sounded very measurable and analytical; but the hard truth of the matter was that advertising has always been a fairly imprecise endeavor – and everybody was fine with the smoke and mirrors of it all.

That was until the Internet and attendant technologies made measurement of every customer interaction with a commercial message a measurable event. Clients, sitting along side their agencies and the media reps who sold them the space, could see exactly what was working and what wasn’t.

And not much was.

Not all of the conventional marketing and advertising wisdom had to be thrown out the window – but a lot of things had to change in order to make sense of the new realities of an interactive and completely measurable medium. The marketing profession – both on the client side and on the agency/media side – has been scrambling to find ways to produce results from online campaigns that meet reasonable expectations of management.

Traditional display advertising, like print ads in newspapers and magazines, seem to take up plenty of real estate on the web page, but no matter how many impressions the web site is able to guarantee, there has not been a reliable methodology in place for associating the media inventory purchased with the customer transactions that result.

PR efforts – attempts to tell the client’s story in the form of editorial content – are helpful in forming opinion but usually lack a significant or engaging call to action. Consumers may be educated, but the ability to act on that education is an issue.

There are a lot of possible solutions out there. And one of them debuted this last Spring (on April 20th) at ad:Tech in San Francisco. Hydra, one of the largest CPA ad services in the country announced its partnership with OnDialog, Inc. Leveraging the combined resources of OnDialog (and its partnership with landing page optimization company, Site Tuners), Hydra now claims an ability to increase conversion rates of online ad campaigns by as much as 80%.

But first, a little background on Hydra. Hydra is the largest and fastest-growing, pure performance-based, CPA affiliate network. For those of you not familiar with Internet ad-speak, that means that Hydra produces and manages online ad campaigns for clients and gets paid only when a customer is captured by the campaign. This is the same premise as the old “per inquiry” television ads that allowed television stations running the ads (usually late at night) to receive a fee for each sale made as a result of the broadcast of the ad.  Similar campaigns in magazines required the advertiser paid the magazine a percentage of the orders received using the order form from the magazine.

As a performance-based, CPA network, it’s in Hydra’s best interest to make sure the landing pages customers click-through to are effective and hard-working.

Enter OnDialog/Site Tuners.

The Site Tuners engine allows OnDialog to create customized landing pages from a set of variable elements. As customers click and interact with the landing pages, OnDialog learns what elements perform the best and serve the most effective content accordingly. At any given point in a campaign, the OnDialog/Site Tuners system can test up to 10,000 different combinations of elements sewn together in various combinations to create a myriad of landing pages.

As time goes on, the effectiveness of the landing pages continues to improve and additional customer data is fed back to the creative team for the on-going development of more and more effective page elements. For a company like Hydra, shortening the “learning curve” of what makes a landing page effective is paramount. The partnership with OnDialog/Site Tuners does that in a big way.

In my conversation with Mason Wiley, SVP of Marketing at Hydra, he explained why the OnDialog/Site Tuners relationship is so important to Hydra:

“We have a lot of entrepreneurial clients who need to make sure every dollar they spend online is working as hard as possible for them. Our model offers clients an opportunity to run a high-impact, online campaign with no upfront expense because clients pay on the back-end.”

“Only the biggest companies could run campaigns like this before – now anybody can. Our CPA model helps make things accessible.”

The technology can also be used in the creation of display ads to be placed in web sites as part of a larger campaign. Those ads, like the landing pages, can be built on the fly from a database of elements hosted by OnDialog/Site Tuners and placed via Hydra. The more successful ads (and elements) are then used and enhanced for future placements over the duration of the campaign.

Hydra’s partnership with OnDialog positions the ad network as one of the first adopters of this kind of technology. “We’re thrilled to be working with OnDialog as this partnership further builds on Hydra’s suite of services for maximizing campaign performance,” said Zac Brandenberg, CEO of Hydra.

So, what does all this mean for marketers? Well, it looks like it could be a significant breakthrough in the world of online advertising. The ability to test literally thousands of variations of your landing pages and ads and then review the data and make creative decisions as a result is significant. The thought that this kind of service would be offered on a “use it first, pay us when we perform” basis is outstanding.

One word of caution, though. Companies that provide marketing services on a “per inquiry” basis don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re experts at what it takes to make things work and they expect to be compensated appropriately for it. This caveat is issued in two, primary areas:

• Creative ownership of campaigns and landing pages is too often given to people who don’t understand how or why things work in the world of advertising or web development. Hydra, for example, has their own creative team who understand how to get customers to engage, where links and buttons should go, etc. Let them do their job!
• From a cost standpoint, remember that nothing is ever, really free. The back-end fees for a CPA campaign like this may appear large when compared to other ad options – but remember, you’re paying for results here. Be prepared to provide some money into an escrow account (in some cases) to reassure the service provider (no matter who it is) that you have the funds to make payment in the event of success.
• Also, I’ve run “per inquiry” campaigns where a “minimum fee” was expected in the event the campaign under-performed. Realize that there are fixed costs to any campaign and some providers may require it.As a special note – I did not discuss either of these financial points with the folks from Hydra, so please don’t misconstrue my observations as a reflection of their policies or practices.
   
• And finally, if you’re considering using a service like Hydra or any other kind of “per inquiry” marketing program, it’s vitally important you understand what the “lifetime value” is of a customer relationship.

Do you know what a customer is really worth to you?

If you don’t know how to figure that out then it looks like I’ve got more blogging to do, doesn’t it. We’ll cover that later on next week.

There’s probably no consumer product that has done more to ruin the moral credibility of the advertising profession more than cigarettes.  After all, there aren’t any more credible arguments that can be made against the dire health warnings issued by doctors, governments and just about everyone else who DOESN’T SMOKE.  But people still do it.

There’s no denying that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs out there – but it’s the advertising and the image created around the act of smoking that has drawn people in for generations.

Just to be clear – I don’t smoke.  I have never smoked (other than an occassional, celebratory cigar) and have instilled the fear only a father can in my kids about the dangers of smoking.  But as an advertising professional who is absolutely fascintated with pop culture, history and the art of marketing – I’m not sure there is anyone who enjoys vintage cigarette ads as much as I do.

That’s where Andrew Lindstrom, writing his wellmedicated blog, comes into this post.  Back in February of this year, he put together a classic blend of 40, vintage tobacco ads.  Some are humorous, most are an accurate representation of the state of American culture at the time of their creation and some are … well, they’re beautiful.

Here’s a gallery of some of my favorites and here’s a link to Andrew’s blog and to his entire photostream of vintage tobacco ads.

Enjoy, just don’t breathe too deeply.