The Future Place Blog

Some people have a strange idea of client confidentiality!

The news is at last confirmed that Omnicom have purchased Communispace, another sign that MROCs are becoming mainstream. However, that is not the focus of this post, this post looks at some of the frankly bizarre comments in the media before Christmas about client confidentiality in market research, in the context of the, then rumoured, Communispace deal.

Good examples of bizarre views came from Marketing Week’s Stuart Smith , Kunar Patel at Ad Age, and especially the asinine headline from Jim Edwards “Omnicom’s $100M Focus-Group Deal: How to Overpay to Spy on Your Rivals”.

Perhaps in their version of the advertising industry it is ethical and legal to conduct industrial espionage on behalf of a parent company, but that has not been my experience in the market research industry. Companies in MR do not pass confidential information about clients to other companies in the same group nor to parent or holding companies, this is specified by our codes of conduct (for example the ESOMAR code) and in many countries it is a legal requirement. Indeed, inside most market research companies the team working for client A do not share information with the team working for client B. 

For example, when (some years ago) I worked for Millward Brown, there was never any suggestion that we would supply confidential information about our client to say RI or to one of the WPP advertising agencies, even when the client was an advertising agency.

So was the suggestion, that many of Communispace’s clients would be forced to leave if Omnicom bought them, mischief making, ill-informed comment, or an attempt to create news rather than report it?

 

The 50 strongest branded Facebook Pages

Ignite has a great blog post by Jim Tobin which lists the Top 50 branded Facebook Pages. What Tobin’s post reveals is that there are clear winners and losers. Some brands get Facebook and some do not. 

One of the best examples is Skittles, which has the fifth largest number of people following it, with almost 6 million followers. This provides an enormous asset for marketing, for research, for word or mouth, and most importantly for listening to customers. For several years Skittles has been very innovative in the way it has used it Facebook presence.

Once scary observation by Tobin is that the for the top five to keep their top position they grew by an average of 65% over the last six months. Brands which fell out of the top ten, compared to six months ago included Disney and Pringles, with Red Bull and Victoria's Secrets both joining the top ten.

I recommend that anybody who is interested social media reads Tobin’s post and starts to follow the score card provided by InsideFacebook’s PageData site.

Be careful what emails you opt into!

Slashdot has a post about how Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi appear to feel that signing up to receive emails and campaigns makes you fair game for cyber-stalking and terrorising!

In Los Angeles a women is suing Toyata for damages incurred through being on the receiving end of a series of emails from a fictitious character made up by a division of Toyota's agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Evidently the campaign consisted of people nominating their friends to be 'punked' which means to be on the receiving end of a prank.

The campaign against the complainant consisted of a series of email and links to a MySpace account making her think that she was going to be attacked. When challenged over the claim for damages, Toyota's lawyer said the women had signed up to receive emails, so it was OK?

Evidently a friend of the complainant emailed her a link to a personality test, the test contained an agree to the terms and conditions (with a link to terms and conditions), Toyota's lawyer has argued that this means she gave informed consent to receive an pseudo stalking campaign (which she did not know was pseudo).

Even ignoring the damage done to the public image of Toyota, Saatchi & Saatchi, and emailers in general, I wonder how they thought this was likely to make the complainant buy a Toyota? Perhaps the grim truth is that they thought it would make the 'friend' who had nominated her to receive the cyber-stalking more likely to by a Toyota?

All that glisters is not gold, and online advertising is not the same as tv advertising

Over the last couple of days the news has been full of stories recounting how online advertising spend, in the UK, has surpassed spending on TV advertising, for the first time. The lazy assumption, and one that has been made repeatedly over the last two days, is that means online advertising is replacing TV advertising.

A much more considered view is shown by Nigel Hollis in his blog. Nigel patiently points out that large parts of online advertising are not comparable to TV advertising, for example a large part of it relates to search engines. In many ways the story is not about online vs TV, but the way that online is replacing print, outdoor etc.

Unilever tries outsourcing for Peperami

WARC has a story about Unilevers plan to move away from ad agency Lowe London and try Ideabounty. The site is offering a £10,000 'bounty' for the best ideas.

WARC's description of what Unilver is aiming for shows how highly they are aiming "Rather than loosely-formed plans, Unilever wants this approach to yield creative work with the same production values as its existing ads, while offering a greater number of ideas for it to choose from.".

Great analysis of Skoda's cake ad

Nigel Hollis has a great piece of analysis on his blog about the Skoda cake ad. Not everybody buys into the Milward Brown model of ad testing, but this article gives insight in the MB approach, and is an interesting perspective on the Skoda ad.

Updated list of events

Here is an updated list of what I will be doing in 2008, I hope to meet as many of you as possible at one or more of these events.

AMSRS Summer School, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 17 & 18 February 2008, Ray is running a two day workshop on Research in a Web 2.0 World, Theory and Practice.

SMRD, Stockholm, Sweden, 6 March 2008, Ray is addressing the Swedish Societies annual conference.

ESOMAR Asia Pacific Conference - Workshop, Singapore,  7 April 2008, Ray and Jon Pinnell are running an advanced quantitative techniques workshop.

ESOMAR Asia Pacific Conference,  7-9 April 2008, Ray, John Shanahan, and Jason Ho are presenting a paper on the impact of Social Networks on research in Asia Pacific.

MRS Workshop - Advanced Thinking In Quant, London, UK, 29 April 2008, Ray is giving a presentation on integrating advanced quant and online.

BIG Conference, Chepstow, UK, 21-23 May 2008, Ray is showing how tools like RSS readers can massively increase a researcher's productivity.

MRS Workshop - Social Networking, Web 2.0, and Research, London, UK, 18 June 2008, Ray is helping run a workshop on using Web 2.0 approaches in research.

ESOMAR Congress - Workshop, Montreal, Canada,  22 September 2008, Ray and Jon Pinnell are running an advanced qantitative techniques workshop.

P&G top ad spending league, again

WARC report that P&G were the world's biggest spender on advertising in 2006. P&G spent US$8.5billion, almost double the second place spender, Unilever, who spent US$4.5billion. This means P&G has topped the spending league for six years in a row.

However, things may be changing. P&G's spend  increased by 4% compared with Unilever who grew by 8% and fourth largest spender L'Oreal who grew by 13%. If the recent decline of the US dollar continues P&G will either have to spend more dollars, or lose ground to companies based in areas with stronger currencies. Indeed, if the current currency movements persist we will see some major changes in advertising and market research conducted by US comapnies.

The full story can be found at AdAge.

Jakob Nielsen suppresses information about 'evil' banners

O'Reilly has an interesting post about how website usability guru Jakob Nielsen suppressed a finding on banner effectiveness 10 years ago, and how Nielsen has now changed his mind about the best way of handling the information.

Nielsen's data shows that banners which look as though they are system dialogues, with messages like "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized" are effective at driving traffic. Nielsen's main reason for changing his mind is that anybody who repeats his study will get the same findings. He might also have mentioned that advertisers and the vendors of advertising space also have the click-thru data to show that these wretched ads work, at least in the context of driving traffic, I really hope they don't work in driving conversions.

Telling the truth can make a great campaign

Dan Heath has posted a great story from the history of Claude Hopkins, one of the all time greats in copywriting. He describes how Hopkins visited Schlitz Beer in 1919. After visiting the brewery he recommended a campaign including: “crystal clear water from a special artesian well”, the result of over “1,500 experiments and produced a very distinct fresh, crisp taste”, and how the bottles were “sterilized 12 times to ensure purity, so that nothing would interfere with the clean taste of the beer”.

Schlitz initially dismissed the campaign, because the same facts were essentially try of all beer. However, when they ran the campaign their market share rocketed from 15th to 1st in just six months.

Schlitz had done two things. Firstly, he recognized that although the brewing process was well known to experts, it would be impressive to the man in the street. Secondly, he described the features in terms of benefits to the consumer – for example, the 12 repetitions of sterilization were there to improve the taste for the drinker.

As an indication of how sucessful and influential Hopkins was, consider the fact that he was hired in 1907 by Lord & Thomas for a salary of US$185,000 (comparable to about US$1.6million).