Marketing Governance

ADAM Software to extend its leadership in Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) for data-driven marketing by delivering sophisticated rich-media management capabilities for the extended enterprise to benefit marketers and their customers throughout the world.

With the recent proliferation of digital touch points, a key challenge for today’s marketers is to strategically use engaging rich-media content like video, audio, augmented reality and dynamic web content in their brand and product campaigns. Creating meaningful and relevant customer experiences and preserving brand consistency through multiple channels is increasingly the key differentiating factor for leading companies; but operationally speaking, doing this exceptionally well is very complex. Helping today’s enterprises improve in marketing process efficiency, make it easier to manage rich media across today’s distributed, multi-lingual ecosystems, and to optimize the brand experience all along the customer journey (marketing, sales and services), is precisely what this partnership between Teradata and ADAM is all about.

The exponential growth of marketing activity and screen-driven experiences means consumers now expect to find every product aspect they are interested in immediately presented to them. Marketers need solutions that enable them to respond quickly; and to ensure and maintain brand integrity they must work from a single, centralized master of approved content. CMOs must realize that customers, campaigns and content systems are no longer separate entities; these aspects of the marketing environment need to be tied together with enterprise data and synchronized through workflows and process management systems with reliable analytics providing intelligence on customers and the market. These integrated elements – data warehousing, analytics and applications – are what define data-driven marketing. And with the Teradata-ADAM Software partnership, even more of a company’s data-driven marketing needs can now be met, say the companies.

Read the full pressrelease here

The US-based Siteworx, LLC and the Belgium-based ADAM Software have announced a partnership. The two companies partnered up to help enterprise clients implement and improve their digital asset management (DAM) solutions.

How do today’s marketers truly view their ability to harness and leverage big data to produce measurable results?

That’s the question posed by the team at Teradata. And the answer may be found by diving into the extensive new Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013.

The global results offer an in-depth look at some key issues, including marketers’ perceptions of how their companies use data to guide marketing decisions, perceived barriers to using data to drive marketing, and where marketers’ expect their organizations to place data-driven priorities over the next couple of years.

In times of big data, predictive analytics and marketing automation it looks like we forgot marketing is about connecting with people. But as data and analytics provide more and increasingly accurate insights into target audiences and customer behavior who your clients are, what they do, why they do it, what they need, what they like and how they feel it enables companies to continually improve products, services, campaign messages and brand experience.

This is a highly relevant topic for companies working towards an integrated marketing management approach and now companies get more experienced in translating data into action, we expect more publications and case studies to become available over the next months. In her article on forbes.com, Sandra Zoratti explains how to link marketing IQ to marketing EQ using a pet food case study. Click here to read the article on forbes.com.

All marketing practitioners are seeking ways to save money and get a bigger bang for their budget buck. How to do that isnt at all obvious. But, sometimes, the answer can be staring you in the face!

No. 1: Seek opportunity in adversity

Inertia, complacency, and overconfidence are your inner demons. Get rid of them. Theyll cost you money. Reading the writing on the wall, on the other hand, is a great place to start to save money.

Too many marketers pay insufficient attention to the early warning signs of big shifts in demographics, technology, and regulation. As a result, they miss out on a great opportunity to proactively innovate to take advantage of those shifts.

Turn adversity on its head and get it to work in your favor. The key is to translate challenges into opportunities (glass half full) and use constraints to spur innovation (necessity as mother of invention).

No. 2: Do more with less

Being resourceful in a resource-scare world should be second nature. But it isnt.

You dont necessarily need a multimillion-dollar budget. In fact, some of the most successful in our industry are those able to get more from less by applying frugality to every activity they perform. They tend to work for organizations that are efficient, and by that I mean they are frugal in how they design products, how they produce them, how they deliver them, and how they perform after-sales or after-care.

Their frugality shows up not only in their parsimonious use of capital and natural resources but also in how they maximize their limited time and energy. Rather than driving everything themselves, which can be very costly, they rely extensively on partners and collaborators to perform various operations, saving resources, time ,and money.

Try to reuse and combine rather than create something new from scratch.

No. 3: Think and act flexibly

Try walking across a road in Mumbai, India. Youll make it to the other side only if youre prepared to think and act flexibly! And theres no point thinking the Highway Code (Rules of the Road) is going to be your savior when youre behind the wheel. It wont. Linear thinking wont always help. The same is true in our industry.

Western brand owners and their leaders often operate in a black-and-white world that confers a sense of predictability to the order of things. For example, competitors are bad and partners are good; regulations are typically bad for business whereas protectionist policies are good; and although some brand owners may like doing good as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives, they worry primarily about doing well financially.

Yet such binary thinking thats anchored in deep-seated assumptions prevents brand owners from reconciling priorities, a process that could yield creative, innovative, and highly cost-effective marketing solutions. The sheer diversity, volatility, and unpredictability of global markets demand that we be flexible. Inflexibility will result in failure and a waste of resources.

We must think laterally, out of the box. We must experiment and improvise.

No. 4: Keep it simple

In the developing world, consumers are put off by complexity. Complicated and elaborate communication is costly and can be a distraction. In the Western hemisphere, we seem obsessed with everything being bigger and brighter. We often get seduced by the power of technology. The world beyond 2013 wont be like that.

Consumers are down-shifting and opting for simpler, more meaningful lives. Brand owners that respond to these attitudes, values, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors will benefit in the long run.

No. 5: Use the Web

Being part of the community, being yourself, being transparent, being a great listener and a genuine problem solver build trust, and the fastest way to do so with the biggest community of like-minded people is via the Web.

No. 6: Avoid dependency relationships with external agencies

The only practical way to do this is to be focused on outcomes, not just outputs. Share the learning of triumphs and mistakes. By making a commitment to triple-loop learning, youll save a fortune in the long run as the agencies wont suggest strategies that dont work and you wont blow a big fat hole in your budget finding out. Learn as you go.

No. 7: Spend less than others say you should

Anyone whos ever been into a car showroom to buy a new or used car will know that having an idea of what you want to spend can evaporate in the presence of a convincing salesperson who knows how to pull emotional levers and customize the product just for you.

Its not just alloy wheels or a nicer in-car entertainment system, but its the extended warranty, freedom of not worrying about the gap in resale value when you go to sell the car at the end of the payments period, and other extras that all come at a price. You invariably end up with a figure thats more than the one you started with.

The same is true in our industry, particularly when designing and building a website. Beware of buying extra bells and whistles. Chances are, you dont need them.

No. 8: Dont just spend time with people you know; network instead

In our industry, many of us prefer to keep the company of those whom we know. But growth of a commercial enterprise demands networking. For one thing, building a new relationship with a customer or client could unlock marketing and sales opportunities well beyond the spending constraints of those you already know.

Effective communication increasingly depends on word-of-mouth. And the best way to stimulate effective word-of-mouth is to network. And the best bit is that it doesnt have to cost you anything if you join a relevant social networking group where you are free to exchange thoughts and ideas.

No. 9: Collaborate with your customers and clients for profit

Why use expensive market research to come up with insights and answers to some of the most challenging sales and marketing issues when you can collaborate with your customers and clients and get them to help you design your products and services in the first place? After all, if they like them, theyll want to buy them.

No. 10: Know your ends from your means

Winston Churchill, one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived, once said: However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

The best communication plans and investment in a range of activities will all turn to dust if they dont deliver the outcomes youre looking for. Being outcome-focused rather than output-driven means that you know your ends from your means.

And thats by far the most profitable place to be.

This article is written by marketingprofs.com

Forrester recently published the results of their 11th annual Marketing Performance Management survey. We published earlier on this subject in March of this year

More than 400 business and marketing professionals from over 200 companies completed the survey, which was designed to assess Marketings performance: specifically, how marketers use data, metrics, and analytics.

All the results are now presented in this infographic.

What do you see when someone asks you how marketingcampaigns are created. Creative people doing all kinds of stuff to get inspiration. Locking themselves up in an office, taking a walk or just going to a bar for a drink and look around? That is a common image. An image that can change quickly in the near future. We all can think about campaigns, crowd-sourcing is the new game.

Unilever plans to expand its use of crowd-sourcing to create more relevant marketing campaigns for all its brands. A partnership with eYeka will see the co-creation platform based in France use its online community to develop new campaigns for the FMCG giant across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Russia and South Africa.

Rahul Welde, Unilevers vice-president (media) for Asia, Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Russia told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the company intends to engage more fully with its most creative consumers. The objective is to build a great creative product working very closely with Unilevers agencies, and create a stronger ecosystem and platform, he said.  Ultimately, this agreement will accelerate the development of a culture of co-creation and collaboration that drives innovation and creativity, he added. For eYeka, crowd-sourcing can give major brands a considerable competitive advantage by turning to consumers for ideas. Francois Petavy, CEO of eYeka, said: Brands and their agencies are opening up to creative ideas from more diversified sources such as communities of consumers. We believe in a new open model where brands and their agencies collaborate with consumers and other non-traditional players on a sustainable basis, he added.

Petavy argued in a recent blogpost that crowd-sourcing was an idea whose time had come and it was set to take off in 2013. He said it was capable of solving real business problems and that ROI could be demonstrated.

And the Innovation Excellence website listed six partnerships, including the Unilever-eYeka agreement, that it said proved that crowdsourcing was going mainstream.

The others included Deloitte and Kaggle, Sony CEA and Mofilm, Edelman and Poptent, Booz Allen Hamilton and Innocentive, ADK and eYeka.

William Arruda. “Finding nine minutes and spending them building your brand doesnt seem like a hard task, but in this world of email overload, Twitter attention spans, and instant messaging interruptions, even a nine-minute habit can be hard to create.”

He’s got a few tips and tricks he shares here:

study by the MediaSchool Group.

A survey amongst 2000 students in the age of 20 to 25 years by the MediaSchool Group revealed that 70 percent of the students think that marketing will be a whole different kind of job than today. They think that marketing will be “dominated” by content marketing and “PR thinking.” An advertisers job will be mostly to “entertain” rather than “sell,” according to 7 in 10. Recent survey results indicate that American consumers already believe that should be the case.

The European students almost universally see the importance of social media as an integrated marketing channel: 90 percent feel that it’s a channel that should be used by all practitioners, rather than a stand-alone discipline. As a result, 85 percent believe that in the next 10 years, social media and digital agencies will be integrated with other marketing communications agencies or be full-service agencies themselves.

In an industry where entertaining is more important than selling, 81 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that content marketing – where brands become publishers and creators of their own content – would be an essential part of their job 10 years from now. Meanwhile, “PR Thinking,” where word-of-mouth creation and trust in brands are paramount, will be similarly important, according to the students, with 70 percent believing that will be the primary way in which agencies respond to briefs.

And in a nod to TV, an excellent medium for story-telling, 70 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that TV advertising would be irrelevant in 10 years.

VisionEdge Marketing (VEM), ITSMA, and Forrester, organizations committed to helping marketers improve their effectiveness, released the findings from their 2013 Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Survey. We made a call for that in of our previous blogs.

The 2013 MPM Survey captured input from more than 400 respondents, enabling ITSMA, Forrester, and VEM to expose valuable insights on the performance measurement and management challenges marketers face. The study, began by VEM initially, is now in its 12^th year.

Marketing Activity, Not Business Outcomes

The study reveals that few members of the C-Suite rely on marketing data to make decisions. Results show that only nine percent of CEOs and six percent of CFOs rely on marketing data to make decisions. The reason? Marketing dashboards report marketing activity rather than business outcomes. Marketers cling to metrics that measure and report marketing’s performance, continuously justifying marketing budgets and resource allocations when they should be showing how marketing moves the needle on topline growth or profitability.

“The data demonstrates how marketers rely too much on their CRM and marketing automation systems to produce dashboards or report on marketing results. These systems are fine for providing a view into marketing program activity and pipeline, but the research shows that most fail to produce the level of information and metrics that business executives want to see,” said Laura Ramos, Vice President, Principal Analyst serving CMOs at Forrester. Read More