Digital Strategy - Servant of Chaos

Astronomer and Brand Bravery: From Brand Crisis to Conversion

Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Loving the Hypertext, Pop Culture

One of things about marketing that you don’t realise until you do it – is that you are working out loud. Many of your actions, decisions and choices are played out in front of an audience. That means that the people who count – your customers, partners and collaborators – and your bosses – all see your work. And they are all ready to judge you.

And while this is run-of-the-mill for most marketers, it’s when crisis hits that it becomes acute. A business or brand crisis sees most marketing and communications teams kick into gear. Agencies leap into action and marketing steps up to be one of the most important strategic arms of an organisation. Those making decisions on marketing and crisis responses have no choice but to step into highly visible leadership – and this takes a certain amount of not only brand bravery, but personal courage.

And so it was with Astronomer when senior execs from the company were caught on a “Kiss Cam” at a Coldplay concert. Take a look at the Google Trends view for the term Astronomer.

Google search trends for the term Astronomer (30 days)

As the footage when viral, I was just imagining what was happening behind the scenes:

Social media mentions start building
Google organic peaks and the paid search budget is exhausted
Traffic to the brand’s About and Team pages start spiking
Web services come under strain
Cyber attacks ramp up as brand visibility grows
Marketing, social and PR teams gather to
Viral contagion spreads across geographies and it all happens again.

Now, whenever your brand comes under fire, the crisis comms playbook kicks in:

Respond quickly to control the narrative
Reach a broad audience
Engage directly with your stakeholders
Provide updates and monitor the situation.

But these are generally reactive approaches.

Before this event took place, I had no clue about Astronomer and its DataOps platform. However, thanks to this creative, disruptive and self-deprecating response starring “Temporary Spokesperson”, Gwyneth Paltrow – I not only have heard of the brand, I also know of its products and its upcoming conference.

What’s great about this is that the crisis comms playbook has been turned upside down. What we see is a “culture-first” response:

Paltrow has a global profile as an actor and CEO of her own company. She is also Coldplay lead singer, Chris Martin’s ex – which carries a healthy dose of ironic baggage
The script leans into the humour while keeping core brand and product message at the centre of the communication
While most brand step back from emotion through formal messaging and delivery during crisis comms, Paltrow’s wry smile and delivery reframe the narrative away from the very human crisis that started all this, and refocus on the 300-plus employees of Astronomer.

It will be interesting to see how or even whether Astronomer is able to continue to capitalise on this momentum. No doubt CMO, Leo Zheng, will be high on the list for speakers at upcoming marketing conferences (quick Comms Connect!) – and this will make for a fascinating case study.

As I reflect on this situation and the vastly un-human AI-driven comms world we find ourselves in, I wonder how much artificial intelligence played a role in this effort from Astronomer. I have a feeling this is a culture and creative-led response – but I could be wrong. And maybe we will never know.

Tracking Brand Visibility in AI Search

Digital Strategy, Marketing, Search

You know that when super-optimised brands/websites like Hubspot see an 80% drop in traffic, you know that the foundations of your strategy are shifting under your feet. Little surprise, then, that brands, agencies and consultants are all asking questions about “what is next” when it comes to traffic, demand and lead generation and all things digital.

No matter whether you are client or agency side, for those of us working in strategy, marketing or the black arts of revops, we need answers and we need them now. Unfortunately, the state of play is actually a state of flux. And I expect this will be the case for some time.

For now, the best we can do is maintain a watching brief, and run a rigorous program of testing and learning. Yes – it’s a time to double down on continuous learning. To get you started, here’s a nice infographic explainer by Jake Ward on the various SEO tools designed to track your brand’s visibility across the various large language models (LLMs).

As you can see, we are far from a consolidated or consistent view or or approach – but it will help you get started in this new wild west of the web.

Strategy Then and Now – Lessons for strategists in an AI-activated world

Digital Strategy, Strategy

When we are constantly working, grinding, learning and delivering our work, it’s easy to forget to stop, reflect and share our thinking. So it was great this week to take a moment to pause and reflect on some of my strategy work, sharing with the team over at Sling & Stone.

Brian Giesen had asked that we think about how we used to develop strategy, and then share some more recent insights into how we develop strategy now, in light of prolific data and artificial intelligence. Without naming names, I thought I’d share the key points of how I have found the practise of strategy has changed over the last couple of years.

Customer foundations are essential: I always say, that everything starts with the customer. And this won’t change. After all, it is pretty rare that a bot will identify and conduct a trade/purchase (unless, of course, you are offering shares on the share market). And this means that you have to find a way to capture the attention of an audience and trigger their engagement and action. So when it comes to developing strategy, it’s your job to ensure that your understanding of your client’s customer is the same customer that your client is seeking. Keep asking and drilling your clients on their understanding of their customers.

Then vs now: Not a lot has changed here except that we now have better data at our fingertips. Use data to validate your position and play this back to your clients. Ask them to explain any gaps or suprises.

Prototype your client’s customers: If your clients can’t robustly describe their ideal customer profiles, you’ll need to invest in doing so. Sometimes clients do understand their customers through the experience of working with them. But they may not have documented the nuances. Use expert interviews to ask questions, identify triggers and validate your assumptions. Create personas that you can use as models and then conduct interviews with your clients and their sales teams to validate the motivations, triggers and profiles.

Then vs now: There are plenty of frameworks for customer profiling. Choose one that suits your needs and dive deeply. Use AI to accelerate your profiling based on known archetypes and refine through several iterations. Then step away and let your creative mind chew over the nuances. Remember, you are envisioning future use cases and AI is based on what we already know – not what we have yet to experience.

Map the competitive landscape: Who are the competitors in the industry? And how do you describe them? I like to spend some time thinking through the commonalities of competitors and plot them on a quadrant chart. As a strategist, try to identify both commonalities and areas of differentiation and use these to analyse each of the competitors and plot them on the chart. Deep dive into each competitor to understand their:

Underlying narrative
Visual storytelling
Palette and persuasive intent
Over-arching message
Super powers.

Then vs now: You’ll need a real-time AI to assist, but generate an analysis of the competitors and the industry trends. Brainstorm (with your team) the different lenses you are considering for the axes and iteratively plot out the competitors and see what emerges. Use your judgement (and the insights from the previous steps) to select the plotting and seek out the clear space available to your client.

Artificial intelligence is yet another technology that has emerged from the digital and social media world. But it’s not a solution or a replacement for solid strategic thinking. It’s a tool to aid and guide your efforts. Have AI do your grunt work, and then spend your time (and budget), developing deep, motivating and lasting insights to deliver the outcomes your clients expect – and need.

Account based marketing overtakes leadgen as a marketing challenge

Branding, Digital Strategy, Strategy

From Green Hat’s 2022 B2B Outlook Report

Green Hat’s annual B2B marketing outlook report has seen account based marketing displace lead generation as a top marketing challenge. But measuring brand awareness and health resolutely remains #1.

Given that the last 18-24 months has been driven by Pandemic thinking, it’s no surprise to see this shift in focus in the lower rankings – brand requires strategy as does ABM. And successful lead generation occurs when strategy, segmentation, targeting and journey mapping all work hand-in-hand. So in many ways, these top 3 challenges speak to the need for strategy.

Interestingly, the research indicates that 64% of marketers have no personas or journey maps, or have only developed one of these.

As we emerge from our own Pandemic inspired marketing fog, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that the world has changed. There are new conditions, expectations and challenges. There are also opportunities that we are yet to fully grasp.

With this in mind, perhaps it is time go back to basics:

Work from core strategy out – assess, measure and re-validate your brand, brand health and levels of awareness
Define and validate audiences – develop and test personas, document your segmentation
Develop and match customer journeys – map journeys by audience / persona
Map your messaging to key points on your buyer’s journey.

And with Q4 just around the corner – you’d best get started now.

Netflix disrupts the Australian ad market

Advertising, Big Data, Digital Disruption, Digital Strategy

It has been quite some time since there has been a tantalising new advertising offering in the Australian marketplace. But recent announcements indicate that digital streaming goliath, Netflix, is briefing media buyers ahead of an Australian launch.

Launching before the end of 2022, Netflix aims to sell audiences to advertisers via Microsoft’s ad team and newly acquired Xandr digital marketplace. Strict limits are being planned, with a focus on brand storytelling (not tactical advertising), including:

Four minutes of ads per hour
No repeat ads
Mid rolls on series only, 15 and 30 second pre- and post rolls on everything else
Opens to advertisers and subscribers simultaneously.

With inventory restrictions and a limit of three ads per brand to a user each day, Netflix will create an interesting new category. Especially when we consider the power that content-related targeting may offer.

And who knows – we may see this new offering launch just in time for some special Christmas brand storytelling.

Marketing Dividends – Is it Time to Re-evaluate Digital?

Digital Strategy, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Strategy

The promise of digital targeting has had marketers salivating for years. We would be able to identify, reach, engage and convert consumers one-to-one at scale thanks to technology. Better yet, with mobile devices, we could bring an offer to a consumer who was physically close to our retail outlet thanks to big data, mapping and location services.

Accordingly, substantial investments have been made in a wide variety of technologies from CRM and data mining, to automation, analysis and beyond. In fact, Scott Brinker’s infographic on the landscape of marketing technology (2016) suggests that there were almost 4000 marketing technology solutions vying for your attention and purchase. With so many choices, it’s hardly surprising that marketers wonder where to start with the MarTech stack.

But Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia says that the promise of digital marketing is unfulfilled. Or perhaps, we have over stated the role of digital at the expense of brand. This video segment by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) touches on these topics, raising interesting challenges for us all.

Now, there is plenty that I could argue with. There is a huge assumption that analogue marketing metrics are/were valid, and also that marketers are not following through on data, analytics and measurement of business value. But these are quibbles – because the most interesting aspect of this interview is the refocusing of marketing towards strategy.

In many ways, the pursuit of digital marketing and technology has seen us become reliant on tactics masquerading as strategy. We put some technology in place and think that the strategy will magically be enabled.

But this is never the case. As Byron reminds us, “We are in a battle for attention – for physical and mental availability … people [consumers] just don’t think of you enough”. Segmentation, data and technology alone won’t solve that problem – only a tightly threaded strategy and approach to execution will. And that means doubling down on your marketing skills. So don’t just re-evaluate digital – re-evaluate your team and yourself.

Digital rule #1: Don’t host where you register

Digital 101, Digital Strategy

One of the challenges of digital strategy is that you are – in most instances – wedded to a history of previous technology decisions. So while you may come in to an organisation to overhaul the strategy, you might find yourself constrained by some bad search engine optimisation, platform and publishing choices or hosting restrictions.

Generally these kind of problems can be undone with time. With money. With resources.

But there is one particular challenge that can be terribly difficult to unlock. And it happens at the very beginning of your digital journey – with your domain name registration.

Domain names are like your business name on the internet. They tell everyone where to find us. We all know that to order a book online, we visit Amazon.com. To search, we visit Google.com or Bing.com. These are domain names.

To get one of these domain names, we need to register that name with a Domain Name Registrar. These are companies that are authorised to sell and manage domain names. Popular registrars include GoDaddy.com, NetRegistry.com.au in Australia – and many others.

But registering your domain name is like registering your business name. You may register with the relevant authorities, but you don’t setup your business in the same office. You do so elsewhere.

And you should do the same with your domain name and your online business.

When you register your domain name, you will usually be offered hosting. That means that you will be provided space online to upload your website. While this may be convenient – and perhaps even cheap (or free) – I tend to avoid this situation.

Like any business, domain name registrars go through ups and downs. And should the registrar’s business fail, it can take your registration details with it.

If you have your website hosted with the registrar, you can lose both the website and the domain name.

I had a client recently who purchased a small business package with one of the country’s largest and most reputable brands. This included domain name AND hosting AND email and more. It sounded like a no-brainer and the package was purchased.

A couple of years down the track this package was discontinued. As it turned out, the domain names were registered through a European registrar (not locally as we expected), and the email, domain name registration and hosting were all outsourced and rebranded locally.

My client had expected that the emails that were being sent were just marketing spam, so ignored them until the website was offline. What followed was literally months of follow-up, documentation and phone calls until the domain name could be transferred.

Even the largest and most powerful brands can change their strategy mid-stream. So even if you are registering your domain name with a brand you know and trust, my advice is to host your website elsewhere. At least if something changes you won’t lose both the name and the business/technology.

Interaction: GroupM’s Take on Digital

Digital Disruption, Digital Strategy, Media, Social Media

I am always interested to see how different lenses on the same subject reveal insights. For example, B2B marketers have a particular skew when it comes to digital and social media – it is hard edged, data driven and technology enabled. This is particularly true for large scale tech companies – but is an approach that has been resonating across industries for some time. B2C marketing, on the other hand, operates in a high velocity world that can turn on a tweet – responsiveness is no longer just a customer service issue but one that impacts the entire value chain.

We are, after all, ever closer to our customers than ever before.

Social and digital media, however, often feels like it operates in a bubble. An ever-increasing bubble it seems, but a bubble nonetheless. When I watch Gruen, for example, I struggle to recall even the most popular or widely discussed TV commercials shown – my habits have now been so deeply skewed by on-demand viewing and timeshifting that TV by timetable seems so last century.

But this is merely the bubble that we choose. The lens that we select.

And there are movements and trends that continue in their own parallel universe that operate at different speeds.

The GroupM Interaction 2017 report is interesting particularly because it applies a media lens across everything from ecommerce to fake news, television to bandwidth. I particularly like the section on privacy and the impacts that widespread security breaches are having on consumers’ sense of trust.

The report identifies four creative challenges facing both brands and agencies:

Getting the attention of the consumer in a low attention world. As the buyer pushes the seller towards viewability, the consumer is pushing the brand to greater ‘watchability.’
Meeting the costs and measurement implications of the constant iterations of formats and functionality.
Finding the balance of enough variation to meet the needs of ever finer segments without undermining the overall brand proposition. (The Marriott Hotel Bogota has 57 images on Expedia.com. Marriott / Starwood operates over 7000 properties. That’s a lot of images.)
The creation of new classes of content for e commerce environments.

While I can agree on the surface with these challenges, I wonder really whether our attention spans truly are shrinking – do we really have the attention span of a goldfish? And if this is not true, what does this mean for the remaining three challenges?

I have a sense that we are consuming ever-larger volumes of media each and every day – but it’s not necessarily in the format and channel that lends itself to the kind of tracking and measurement that business clients have come to expect.

A recent article from BBC Health questions the notion of the shrinking attention span by unearthing the starting point for this theory – a Microsoft report referencing the Statistic Brain website. Apparently there is no evidence pointing towards a shrinking attention span, nor support for the widely held view that goldfish have attention spans. In fact, Dr Gemma Briggs from Open University suggests that attention is entirely contextual – ”How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation”.

And that brings us back to the question of lenses and touches on the topic of Fake News – a subject also covered in the GroupM report. One of the suggestions in the report points towards the emergence of a “purpose driven media” and an incentive structure created to drive this:

The most shared and most monetized stories come from authentic news sources. A way of decreasing the incentives to the bad guys is to increase the incentives to the good guys. A simple adjustment in the revenue sharing model would go a long way.

And that’s where the future of media becomes extremely interesting. Given the emergence of organisations like Sleeping Giants, a purpose driven media may be a necessary development to help restore trust, authenticity and – dare I say it – respect in the media and advertising industry.

Download the Interaction 2017 report here.

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Sleeping Giants Take on Fake News and Brands – Is Your Brand Ready?

Age of Conversation, Digital Disruption, Digital Strategy, earned media, Marketing Skills, Social Judgement, Social Media

We have all heard about the vast network of fake news sites that spread disinformation during the recent US Presidential Campaign. These sites use the same clickbait strategies that propelled sites like Upworthy to the top of the digital media scrapheap – inflammatory headlines, sensationalist stories and catchy hooks that tempt you to click just once more.
What Upworthy’s content strategy revealed was a unique combination of skilled teams, data and insights would help the organisation create content that was “viral ready”. As Joseph Lichterman explained in this Nieman Lab article:

Using the user data it’s collected, Upworthy found that elements like humor and a story structure that built in suspense would draw in readers and keep them on the page and better engaged.

This meant that even to tell a story with real information and verifiable facts, the goal for Upworthy was to grab and own the attention of readers as a priority, delivering news and information as a lower priority. As Amy O’Leary, Upworthy’s Editorial Director explained, “If I were to tell you, ‘Hey, I’ve got a 5,000-word piece on fast-food workers’ wages,’ very few people would be excited about that”. Instead the story would focus on building rapport with the audience, engaging through an imaginative framework of shared experience and emotionally engaging writing and opening up into the ethical challenges that come with enjoying something you eat while knowing the background and facts of its production. As O’Leary suggests, “I think we’re reaching deeper into people, because the approach is one of openness and not judgment”.

It’s worth reading more of the article to learn how Upworthy used data to drive its curation process – but what is fascinating (and concerning) is the way that this model has been co-opted by the fake news movement. By ignoring facts as the basis of news, these fake news sites have effectively defined a whole new genre of content catering to our own sense of digital isolation and disconnectedness. If we have learned anything from the last decade in this Age of Conversation, it is that when we (as consumers) come face-to-face with the vast anonymity of the internet, we rapidly seek our tribe – and we do so through the media at our fingertips – visuals, text, keywords. We seek the connection via keyword and conversation – and naturally enough find ourselves in an echo chamber.

Those of us who work with digital technology and audience strategy have – to be honest – been taking advantage of this approach for years. I often say that both love and hate Facebook and its targeting for I know how useful and powerful it is as a marketer, but equally how invasive and manipulative it is as a consumer. So much so that I consciously manage my engagement and sharing on Facebook and limit what I click on etc. But I also know that even my limited engagement there – and on every other digital channel – leaves enough breadcrumbs to be valuable to the brands and businesses seeking my attention. These days my choice to click comes down to context and location.

Because I know that every click rewards not only the brand but the advertiser too.

With the massive rise in programmatic advertising over the last two or three years, most advertisers and planners are unlikely to even know where their branded advertising will appear. It could appear on alt-right websites (the term used to mask white supremicist oriented websites), pornographic websites or even across the dark web. The powerful retargeting tools now in the hands of marketers and their trained algorithms means that ads that you first see on a mainstream website will follow you wherever you may go online. And while the web has some amazing resources, it also has some deep and nasty crevices.

So what do you do when your brand starts advertising in this murky digital world?
Imagine, for example, that you visited a fake news site with outrageous headlines and you did so out of curiosity. What kind of advertiser, you wonder, would support a platform that knowingly creates fake news and information that demonises your own audiences (the people who are your customers and supporters). This NY Times article explains such a situation:

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Rather than to let this slide, the professor sent a tweet to his Duke questioning its affiliation with a “sexist and racist” site. Eventually this was sorted, as the NY Times revealed.
But in the background, a movement known as “Sleeping Giants” was arising to combat this kind of fake news. This shared Twitter account and network of followers are using a similar approach – naming and shaming the brands that support these fake news networks. The Sleeping Giants publish a list of brands who have discontinued their support for fake news sites – starting with the Breitbart network. But we can expect more of this kind of activity in the coming months and years. The question for brands in all this – do you know where and who your ad dollars go to? And how will you respond when you find your brand in places you don’t expect or want?