9 New Year's resolutions for digital marketers

Some great resoultions to consider for 2011. Facebook now is valued at 50 Billion$, hope you are spending a larger part of your budget to engage Facebook users!  There's a reason it is worth 50 billion dollars!

http://www.clickz.asia/2282/9-new-years-resolutions-for-digital-marketers

How to get headhunted in Campaign Asia

http://www.campaignasia.com/Article/239754,getting-headhunted-for-top-roles-not-advertised.aspx

Digital Advertising - forget about the Click as a measure.

 

I have been doing a lot of reading on measuring digital advertising recently.  The "Click" measurement has always bothered me as it doesn't reveal much about how the "clicker" feels about the brand or even if they are truly engaging in a brand experience.  Joe Nguyen, Vice President of comScore for Southeat Asia, provided some alternatives to how digital advertising should work and be measured:

Digital Advertising: What to Remember and Forget About the Click

• Clicks on display ads are a misleading metric, and one should only use clicks for direct response ad campaigns (or search).
• Clicks do not reveal information on brand building. Clicks don’t measure all of a campaign’s sales impact nor the cumulative (latent) impact of ads.
• Click-through rates continue to decrease as more content is created and more advertising inventory is available.
• The majority of clicks come from a small percentage of the total population. One of our company studies found that heavy and moderate clickers only represent a combined 8 percent of the U.S. Internet population, yet they account for about 85 percent of all click-throughs.
• Clicks are not the right metric to use for measuring online branding. Better metrics such as ‘reach and frequency’ help establish online media on the same playing field as traditional media to provide continuity in planning.
• Although it might be coined ‘the most measurable medium’, brands need to understand what metrics (and there are many!) are important in measuring their digital success.

Avoid Click Fraud In Mobile Marketing Campaigns

When online advertising first appeared with the advent of  the "banner" ad explosion, click fraud was rampant!  Before working in the industry, consulting with some major agencies and  direct to clients, the stories I heard of campaign results being "helped" with abnormal click rates was quite disturbing!  Now we have a massive mobile advertising market growing across the globe.  Click fraud on mobiles has also seen double digit growth over the last couple of years.  Here is a good piece on how to help avoid click fraud in your mobile marketing campaigns!


http://www.clickz.asia/2010-11-09/how-to-avoid-click-fraud-in-mobile-marketing-campaigns/

AdFest to move location from Pattaya to Phuket - Festival dates set for March 17-19, 2011

It was unfortunate for all concerned that due to the political unrest in Thailand earlier this year they had to cancel the main event, although judging still took place in Tokyo (the one time that month I had to go to Australia!! Typical). 

This seems to have given the committee an opportunity to rethink and refresh their model and plan for AdFest 2011.  The Chairman of the committee has announced Phuket as the next location and said,"...we have plans to broaden this focus and offer more events that will appeal to a young and eager audience, as well as to celebrate and reward all work that betters the professionalism of the industry as a whole and recognizes the talent and effort that people give."

Having been to Phuket, it certainly isn't going to be hard to convince people to head there to celebrate their "professionalism".

Pernod Ricard Japan picks Isobar as digital AOR for Chivas Regal

Isobar Japan has scooped Chivas Regal’s digital agency-of-record contract following a pitch called in August which also involved incumbent Euro RSCG. 

Although the monitored digital spend for Chivas was only about US124,000 July 2009 to June 2010. I really think Isobar has an opportunity to "uplift the luxury, authentic and prestigious brand image of Chivas Regal in Japan."  It's a brand with over 200 years of history, so certainly going back to it's roots and providing some historical perspective in the digital campaign would do well to interest the Japanese consumer - who do love the "history" of a brand.  Tie that up with some good on-and off-trade activity, events and PR; and they can compete with the "whisky high-ball" boom we are now seeing in Japan.

TopJobsInAsia.com & AdvertisingJobsInAsia.com

I've been putting together a team of liked-minded people over the years, to help on projects and execute things that appeal to each other and are mutually beneficial.  A plan for 2011, is to construct a free* portal site for Job posting for both agency side and client side roles throughout Asia.  Considering the size of the market, I am hoping clients and candidates I know, may call on the site as another channel to help them find people and also for people to find their next career move.  I am not writing myself out of a job, but as one extra tool, I think it is something that will benefit all.

I actually own the domains:   TopJobsInAsia.com and AdvertisingJobsInAsia.com

A shamless request: If any of my "creative" friends out there would love to bang together a FUNKY logo for either or both, I would be fully appreciative and it would be the basis of the "look" of the site.  Ideas welcome! The more the merrier...

As always, you can contact me direct at   ty(at mark)asianetjapan.com





*until the traffic picks up and I need to cover higher costs - clients will pay a small fee for posting once i can jutify the cost/value.

It's positive all round!

The details:

• At IPG: Total salary and staff incentive expenses rose 12 percent to $1 billion.
• At WPP: The total number of employees increased 3.5% from December 2009 to 102,759,
• At Omnicom: Salary and service costs as a percentage of revenue increased 1.5% to about $2.2 billion.

It's great to see agencies growing again, after such a "hold and wait".  Let's hope the GFC has taught some valuable lessons, and we move forward, smarter and less complacent!

IPG is looking healthy again! It last saw positive territory in Q1 2009 — eighteen long months ago -congrats!!:

Here is my take on the WPP announcement of its highest growth in a decade!

Sir Martin Sorrell has revealed WPP's best quarterly organic revenue growth for a decade with sales returning to the levels enjoyed in 2008, despite the group having 8% fewer people.

Great news for WPP; possibly confusing news for the hundreds of WPP employees around the world that have been fired to maintain the highest possible profitability of the group.

When agencies all claim their people are their greatest assets, why did we see some of the largest slashing of people at the first sign of trouble during the GFC?  What happened to “We Sell or Die”.

Looking out of the advertising industry for examples of management’s approach to Sell or Die, I want to bring your attention to the approach of Kyocera’s founder Kazuo Inamori: "Maximize sales and minimize expenses". As a founder of two Fortune 500 companies and now volunteering his time to lead Japan Airlines out of a 25 Billion dollar debt at the invite of the Prime Minister of Japan, we could certainly learn a lot from him.

Under his leadership, Kyocera never undertook retrenchment of its people, no matter how bad the economy was.  He “maximized his sales and minimized his expenses” out of it.  The theory is simple but applying it needs some thought.  It’s not simply carving out new territory in an existing field, but to develop a new product and to enter a new field.  Minimizing includes lifting productivity, reducing inefficiency and ensuring you have the skill level needed to implement changes in the organization.  Advertising groups haven’t done well in these areas and as a result, “their people” are the first to be cut as a “expense minimization” effort.  It may also help to explain in Asia why loyalty of staff can be an issue; how can we blame them when they know in the hard times, they are the easiest “cost” to cut.

I was asked to write for Campaign:Five things you need to know about mobile marketing in Japan

Five things you need to know about mobile marketing in Japan - Blogs & Opinions - Five Things - Marketing - Campaign Asia-Pacific


1. The mobile landscape.
There are over 110 million mobile subscribers across three mobile network operators in Japan, and over 80 per cent of subscribers use mobile data services. This translates to a whopping three quarters of the country's population. Even taking out users who only use the data capacity for messaging, it leaves nearly 70 million mobile internet users. With less than three per cent of global mobile subscribers, mobile internet penetration is more than double any European country and that of the US. Estimates of mobile advertising spending in Japan are as high as 38 per cent of the total global figure.

2. User experience.
The Japanese certainly love their mobile technology and embrace it faster than any other country. Over 95 per cent of subscribers are on a 3G handset – the highest penetration in the world. The quality of the network and the coverage is exceptional and this leads to an unparalleled user experience. As 75 per cent of users are on a flat-rate data plan, advertisers are not afraid to utilise data-intensive sites and applications, allowing for highly creative and innovative marketing campaigns all delivered into the hands of their target consumers.

3. Content rich environment.
All mobile network operators in Japan follow an open platform strategy. Staying out of the content business themselves, and offering content providers a pay out of around 90 per cent of the revenue, has resulted in a plethora of easily accessible mobile sites and a consumer that is not suffering from any cost barrier when downloading content rich media.
A downside is that media planners do have a hard time to target across all three carriers and the thousands of sites available. Marketers of large brands in Japan also tend to be of a different generation to the users, and there still is a big gap in knowledge and realisation of the potential of mobile content and marketing for some of the best known brands in Japan.
Educating brand owners by advertising agencies is the key to success – unfortunately while TV media still generates huge profits for the key advertising giants in Japan, a next big wave of content and advertising campaigns is a little ways away.

4. Device fragmentation.
The mobile network operators hold the keys to the kingdom in Japan. They define the device specs they require for their different lines of handsets and the device manufacturers make to order – of course at their own risk. The beauty for the consumer is that with three mobile phone operators with very similar functionality, developers and marketers rarely have to worry about device fragmentation and usability across the networks. This has significantly contributed to high consumer adoption of mobile data services.

5. Just plain 'funky'.
Japanese love convenience and have a lot of idle time (thanks to long train commutes). The more ways they can utilise their pocket-size, personal device, the more they love using them. We see mobile handsets used for everything from SNS to electronic payments, from navigation to video-on-demand, and of course calling.
The average 16 to 24 year-old is spending at least one hour a day on web usage on their phones, and this is still early days in Japan!

*Statistics and insights credited to research done by Christopher Billich, one of the most knowledgeable experts on mobile marketing in the world