1. "The Obama campaign’s “experiment-informed programs”—known as EIP in the lefty tactical circles where they’ve become the vogue in recent years—are designed to track the impact of campaign messages as voters process them in the real world, instead of relying solely on artificial environments like focus groups and surveys. The method combines the two most exciting developments in electioneering practice over the last decade: the use of randomized, controlled experiments able to isolate cause and effect in political activity and the microtargeting statistical models that can calculate the probability a voter will hold a particular view based on hundreds of variables."
    The Death of the Hunch

  2. "To a large degree, corporate America is very siloed with departmental analytics. The consumer doesn’t see departmental boundaries. We brought the analytics out of the specific departments into one central analytical group. We didn’t have operations problems or marketing problems—we had consumer problems."
    David Henry, from CP+B

  3. Brand and Perception

    Most of my life has been spent in the performance marketing field. Tracking conversions and cost-per’s to the percent and penny. I never really thought brand mattered. I got irritated with big brand marketers and their massive budgets spent on building brand and getting more eyeballs on their logos and ads. I didn’t get it.

    Now that I spend my days at an ad agency, I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for how all of the parts come together, and why brand matters.

    Brand is the atmosphere around product. Brand trains the consumer and gives them value contexts.

    Brand is why the $6.79 Advil can sit right next to the $4.29 CVS brand Ibuprofen on the shelf, and still sell out each week. Same ingredients, same pill count. Same everything, save for the branding.

    I’ve always loved this story of Joshua Bell, playing as a busker in the DC Metro.

    On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

    The passersby here had been trained over time, to view a subway musician much differently than one playing in a concert hall. Same product, just a different context and perception.


  4. Newsweek Mad Men Edition

    The new issue of Newsweek magazine, ads and all, brought to you in part by Hill Holliday.

    Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, an agency in Boston that is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, worked with the Newsweek Daily Beast executives to bring the project to fruition.

    “We positioned the sales pitch, the idea of creating custom ads, and we even sold a few to our clients,” said Karen Kaplan, president at Hill, Holliday, referring to Dunkin’ Donuts, whose ad carries the headline “Say ‘Yup!’ to America’s favorite cup,” and John Hancock, whose ad, in black and white, carries the headline “Pessimism is a darn lousy investment strategy.”


  5. Nobody Cares About Your Brand’s History

    It’s been a little more than a week now since Facebook released Timeline for brands at their FMC event. This new brand page format was a terribly kept secret leading up to the event, and was more or less a quick gloss-over on the way to a multi-hour romancing of what can be most neatly summed up as “MOAR ADS” once the event itself finally arrived.

    Nevertheless, social media strategists and marketers went (and continue to go) berserk over this page restyling. Even saying things like this:

    It’s as if dozens of little corporate museums just launched on Facebook. (from AdAge)

    Now while that may technically be true, the problem is that these “little corporate museums” are likely to be about as popular as actual corporate museums. Which is to say, not very popular at all.

    As a creative type at heart, I am not immune to being in love with the possibilities of what Timeline presents, and I have no doubt that some brands will find really neat ways to leverage this format. However, as the cynical and jaded northeast pragmatist that I am, I can’t help but feel like…well, like the general public just won’t care about this in the long run.

    The two main issues that I immediately see here are:

    • Social media creation and consumption is still firmly entrenched in the present. Twitter feeds whiz by, Facebook newsfeeds update at a dizzying speed, and while every app on my phone may be recording what I’ve done (past tense), I only care about pushing the buttons and telling the world while I’m doing it (present tense). Rarely do I go back in digital time to re-live my OWN past, let alone the past of a corporation. Certainly Timeline aims to change this (as do apps like Timehop, which I admittedly love), but as shared experiences in the present tense continue to proliferate at a breakneck pace, one has to doubt if users will also have the desire to dig into corporate histories with any regularity.

    • The newsfeed still rules. When users consume content on Facebook, they are overwhelmingly doing so through their newsfeeds. And this is especially true when consuming content from “Liked” brands. Facebook Brand pages are rarely visited by fans more than once or twice on average, and being a user myself (and having watched/studied lots of other user behavior), I question whether or not those couple of visits will be spent scrolling through a deep timeline of corporate past and/or giving a shit about what that past contains.

      “Coke sponsored the 1928 Olympic Games? That’s great and all…but are there any coupons here?”.

    Coca-Cola is actually a nice proxy for the “who cares?” theory. They are the most popular brand page on Facebook with over 40mm fans, and a brand with a storied corporate past. Also one of the launch brands for Timeline, so they’ve got the benefit of a first-mover’s advantage here as well. Scroll down to their two oldest Timeline posts, and there is a sum total of 384 actions on them (comments + likes). That’s a 0.00096% “engagement rate” if you’re scoring at home. And again, this from the biggest brand, with one of the most famous histories of all.


  6. The Influencer Model Doesn’t Work

    I’ve been thinking about this a ton over the past couple of months, and have three half-written blog posts on the topic (so I suppose I have 1.5 blog posts then?).

    The generally accepted marketing approach of leveraging “influencers” to promote a product in the social media space, is shit.

    Finding people with huge followings, giving those people some special treatment in hopes that their chatter will incite the masses into action, is a fool’s errand. It’s blind yelling. It ignores so much of what makes influence…influence. It’s social spam.

    AdAge has a nice breakdown. Better than any of my blog posts could have been, so I’ll just hand it over to them.

    There is little data to support so-called influencer behavior in social marketing; rather the data suggests that content and ideas online spread through large numbers of people sharing with small groups.

    The full article is here.


  7. Nike Digital Sport

    Traditional ad spend down, in favor of more digital innovation and tracking/use of consumer data. Love everything about this.

    But Digital Sport is not just about creating must-have sports gadgets. Getting so close to its consumers’ data holds exceptional promise for one of the world’s greatest marketers: It means it can follow them, build an online community for them, and forge a tighter relationship with them than ever before. It’s part of a bigger, broader effort to shift the bulk of Nike’s marketing efforts into the digital realm — and it marks the biggest change in Beaverton since the creation of just do it, or even since a graphic design student at Portland State University put pen to paper and created the Swoosh.

    Nike’s new marketing mojo.


  8. Awesome Wheat Thins ad using Family Guy.


  9. Google Plus….Plus Google

    I was initially bearish on Google Plus. But I’ve spent some time with folks over there recently, and it’s now becoming more clear to me how this will come together for Google in the long-term, and it’s awesome.

    I still maintain that for the time being, Google Plus pages will not likely replace Facebook pages for brands or users. But that’s not the point. Google Plus (meaning those profile pages) are merely a node (and not a hugely important one right now) in a larger system. One that could become even more efficient than it already is.

    It has grown from a free utility, the thing that makes the web useful, into a digital ecosystem of Gmail, Docs, YouTube, Google+ and software that powers smartphones. Now it intends to bring order to this vast and sometimes chaotic network. And though Google argues that the move benefits consumers, it’s clear that it’s also a positive for advertisers.

    More from AdAge here.


  10. "Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate. There can’t be articles that make the reader question why a brand is sharing it. Also, brands need to make sure they’re not just regurgitating content, but instead offering readers/followers valuable information, as readers will quickly determine the curated content — and thus the brand — is not worth their time"
    Brands Want To Be Content Creators

About me

Boston guy, creative thinker, digital doer. I'm an advisor at Custom Made and Vice President, Digital/Social Strategy at Hill Holliday. Thoughts are my own. More on me here.