Customer Listening Blog

P&G and Coca-Cola Keep spending up despite recession

The clear way to go as all academic research available shows that big brands should continue to spend and innovate to win consumer confidence specifically in down times.

Below an article sourced from WARC that provides some empirical evidence of this.

VALENCIA: Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods company, and Coca-Cola, the soft drinks giant, will continue to spend on advertising in the downturn, but both firms are also placing a greater emphasis on innovation and efficiency.

Bernhard Glock, P&G's vice president of global media and communications, argued the world's biggest advertiser is "committed to continue spending behind its branding efforts."

Among other initiatives, it will also aim to double its outlay on innovative and sustainable products to $50 billion (€39bn; £35bn) by 2012 according to Glock, who was speaking at the Festival of Media in Valencia.

He added that in the current, rapidly-changing environment, advertisers and agencies must adapt, and also seek to drive the overall transformation rather than "be changed" by external events.

P&G wants to work "hand-in-hand with our agencies," combining increased collaboration with a greater simplicity in decision-making in order to "develop and free up capacity for innovation."

Maarten L. Albarda, Coca-Cola's director of media and communication innovation, said the Atlanta-based beverage-maker was similarly attempting to "nurture" and "protect" its marketing budget, but would also be "keeping investments relatively flat."

As such, he argued that agencies should not to "look at budgets to determine position or relative strength," and also be honest enough to admit when they "can't handle something."

Coca-Cola's marketing strategy for the recession revolves around "connection planning," which Albarda defined as a "360 degree" approach that is "consumer-centric," "media neutral" and "goes across all touchpoints.”

Babs Rangaiah, director of global communications planning at Unilever, also said at the event that the Anglo-Dutch food-to-homecare company was "scanning the globe for ideas and content."

In this vein, she argued that the modern agency – "Agency 2.0" – needs to bring "everything together in the way it comes to the clients with the solutions."

Data sourced from AdAge/Rightbrainleftbrainblog; additional content by WARC staff, 23 April 2009

Google CEO to the Press Industry: Consumers Won't Pay for Most Online News

This interesting article on Adage last week caught my attention and I wonder who really thought that Eric Schimdt, Google CEO, would have said the opposite ?  

Since its early days, Google built its business and content on others' content, offering the mass, consumers, you and me, useful information through a "universal platform". This is not going to change any time soon as Google has taught consumers for "Free Stuff". Google is not to blame, the free content model is in Google "genes", the ones that did not really get the Internet early on, and to some extent still now, is the press and media industry, looking at portecting their content, thinking of people as "their audiences" rather than thinking about themseles as ubiqutious branded content and ways to make this content unique enough for consumers to care enough to stick to it and eventually value it to pay for either directly or indirectly. The issue is that the battle is probably over, Google drives massive audience, media websites struggle to make people loyal and make them pay using their traditional advertising and media models. It is even worse now in a troubled economy, at the end you need to follow your consumers, if they are on Google, accept it, this won't change any time soon, only try to master what you have under your reach: Your Brand!

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Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads

Intuit Is First Marketer to Have Its Tweets Streamed Across AdSense Network

Read this interestintg article about what the future of "conversational advertising" may be...if markets are converstions...make ads converstional.

Thank you to Abbey Klaassen and AdAge for the feed! (published April 2nd 09) 

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter may still be tweaking its own business model, but Google has found a way to use the popular microblogging service to sell ads.

 

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop. When a user clicks on an ad from Google, it takes them to TurboTax's Twitter page.

"It's syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts," said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.

'Conversational vehicle'
The deal with Google also expands the audience for TurboTax's Twitter presence as the ads are syndicated it across the web. After all, while Twitter is growing and had about 7 million unique visitors in February, Nielsen NetView pegs the active digital media universe as 167 million people.

"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource? We're not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions."

The ability to put real-time feeds and data into ad units has existed for years, but one of the technological limitations of this particular execution was that users can't actually click on links that are included in the "tweets," or posts by users. Right now, the feed only pulls from TurboTax's Twitter account, rather than pulling a stream of tweets that mention the brand or tax-related issues. A Google spokesman said it is doing "limited" tests with a "small number of advertisers and publishers."

Not exactly a new concept
The concept of aggregating tweets and syndicating them on web pages isn't new, either, although it's more commonly seen on an individual's blog or other content-based websites than it is within paid-media placements. There are several widgets, blogging tools and independent third-party apps that can be placed on a website or blog to stream tweets organized by user, hashtag or keyword. Earlier this week, Glam Media launched an offering called Tinker.com, which lets advertisers buy ads around events or conversations. For examples, a retailer could buy all Twitter conversations around the Oscars, and those Twitter conversations -- along with the ad -- would show up on sites Glam Publisher Network.

The TurboTax ads are running during the last two weeks of tax season -- crunch time for tax-prep marketers. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Intuit's tax brand spends more than $100 million in 10 weeks. Intuit did not disclose how much it spent on this particular buy or whether the unit was sold at a premium ad rate.

TurboTax spokeswoman Colleen Gatlin mans the Twitter account, along with her public-relations team and Christine Morrison, social-marketing manager at the company. She considers them "enablers" -- they get people's questions to the folks who can provide answers. There are many reasons why the company is on Twitter, she said, but one big reason is that the microblogging site humanizes the brand.

Network effect
"We're raising awareness in the social community that we're here helping consumers," she said. "We make changes based on customer feedback, we're learning about the process."

Mr. Greenberg said he's still trying to work out exactly what a Twitter follower is worth from a marketing point of view, such as whether people have a greater propensity to become a customer when they're following a brand on Twitter or how valuable those customers are. But he's sure one of the advantages to the tool is its network effect.

"We're doing research about people who engage with us but also more interesting are their friends and followers," he said. "People can influence others in their own networks."