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RSSI'm writing this article on the heels of the OMMA Global Conference in Hollywood, where I spent the past few days immersed in the belly of "the machine" with hundreds of marketers, industry pundits, media buyers and vendors discussing the current state and projected future of all things media and marketing-related. My major takeaways from the event are:
- We are in the midst of great uncertainty and change across all media channels. Marketers and agencies are trying to figure out how to leverage emerging forms of media: social networking, online video, viral marketing, blogging, and mobile.
- Spending on various forms of new media advertising is continuing to grow while traditional media advertising spend is diminishing; however, very little of that spending is going to email.
- Consumers want to interact with media when they want, where they want, and how they want. We will never be able to go back to the days of traditional media, where pushing messages to the consumer was the only game in town.
- People don't come to OMMA to discuss or learn about email. I attended two breakout sessions focused on email, and the turnout and audience participation in both was less than I would have hoped for at an event with over 500 attendees. To add insult to injury, in most of the keynote presentations, when the requisite holistic multi-channel marketing campaign slide was shown -- you know the one, where the presenter shows how television, search, viral, online video, social networking, ad infinitum all combine to create a beautiful and successful marketing program -- email was conspicuously absent from the mix.
Does this mean marketers are no longer thinking about email, or that OMMA is not a good conference to attend if you want to learn more about email marketing? I think the answer lies somewhere in between.
Email has been around for a while now, and for many, it works well. The ROI is great and that's that. Marketers in new media are like kids in a candy store. Once they've sampled malt balls, they move on to taffy pulls. Email is like grandma's oatmeal cookies: reliably tasty, but easy to forget when you're sucking on a gobstopper.
So what do we do to generate interest in our sector?
For the past few years, it seems the buzzword for the email industry on a whole has been "relevance." Well, I believe we all need to heed that advice on a more personal level and work to make email more relevant to the people that matter most: executives, marketers, media buyers and planners, and email recipients.
What are some of the things we can do to step up our game, to move email marketing forward, and to stay relevant to these core constituents?
1. Executives: During a breakout session, panelist and Insider columnist David Baker said executives neither care nor want to know about procedural-based metrics such as opens, click-throughs, and conversions. They are concerned with more fundamental numbers: how much are we spending, and how much revenue are we generating in return?
If you are running an email program, it's your job to morph your metrics into information that's meaningful to the people that fund the program. To get a bigger portion of the increasing dollars spent on new media advertising, you have to make the case that the money spent will be worth the investment.
2. Marketers, Media Buyers & Planners: We as an industry need to work on making it easier for media buyers and planners to understand email and plug email into multi-channel campaigns. In a breakout session, one media planner voiced her frustration at the lack of high-level information and understanding of email within the marketing industry as a whole. We need to help marketers see email as an integrated component of large-scale marketing campaigns and not just a standalone direct-marketing channel.
3. Recipients: Here's where I think we have the greatest opportunity to improve. Most B2C email programs are still following the same direct-marketing script as catalog mailings: send out a generic message or promotion highlighting an offer or product that appeals to the widest base of recipients. By sending more relevant messages to fewer people, we may be inspiring a little more interest in the recipients, but this type of segmentation is basically the same thing as sending a targeted catalog in the mail; we are still following the traditional media approach of pushing messages to the consumer.
It's easy to get stuck in the rut of thinking email is a one-way street from the marketer to the recipient, but that doesn't have to be the case. There are so many ways we can open up the dialogue with our recipients to create a true two-way street, driving real engagement, interest, loyalty -- and results.
We've all been talking about strategies like activity-based messaging and personalization for quite some time now, but most programs are still following the batch and blast script. Let's take some action this year and supercharge our email programs. Please, share your ideas. How can we make 2008 the year we blow the lid off email marketing and give them something to talk about at the next OMMA Expo?!
RSS FEEDS
You are on target. Email is a great channel for communication and should be included in any multi-channel program. Getting Senior Execs to understand this message is our challenge.
Dave Dorsey iContact
Here is what I took away from the conference: BUZZWORDS! Scalable viewing, evergreen content, wrappers, behavioral targeting, dynamic assemblage… In sessions we are still talking about “the long tail�, and “permission marketing�, but both of these topics have been covered heavily in the past years with books of information on the subjects. Standardization and analytics were the heated subject of all the jam packed Widget sessions. Yes I agree that these things are important, but really did I need to go to a seminar to find this out? The best was this AB TESTING and MULTI-VARIANT TESTING? Wow! Now that sounds really cool, but what it turned out to be was quite literally AB comparison shopping and multi comparison shopping. Pricegrabber and a zillion other website have been doing this for years, but it was brought up as if it was INNOVATIVE.
Yes the true buzzword of the show INNOVATION.
There was some good stuff I got from the conference. I did learn more about the business end of the agencies and how difficult it is to get and keep talented people. This is a fascinating industry and they certainly do want to push the envelope in far reaching directions, but a lot of the people involved seem to just be riding a wave and trying to stay on. With the exception of a few key speakers not many were doing much to push the creative aspect within their respective agencies.
Years ago I worked at a post production company that dealt with many high end clients and had vicious deadlines on a regular basis. This would be the norm for many of you. My boss at the time seemed always to be nearing a heart attack as disasters and problems would arise almost hourly. The truth of the matter was that he would take any simple to normal task and turn it into a mountain of grief, run around like a chicken with his head cut off telling everyone in the building how hard his job is. Later after the supposed fiasco had cleared he would brag about what a hero he is for getting the job done. Here’s the catch, I knew upon taking the job that the deadlines were tough, and the jobs were studio driven (as a rule studios change their minds a lot, and often at the last minute.) So when a fiasco occurred, it was really just part of the job, you deal with it and move on. I find NO value in people who live and work like this. Everyday brings new challenges and we all deal with them, tonight my fiasco would be doing the dishes. Oh my god the world will end! But I am happy to report, that after much writing about the dishes and analyzing the stack I was able to overcome and take the 5 minutes and put them in the washer. Fiasco averted! Phew that was tough! The point of this story is that it felt to me that many of the people that attended the OMMA show were doing just that, making mountains out of molehills and bragging about the tough clients and super creative work they were doing.
I call bullshit on this! If you are meant to be in a creative position then do something creative, don’t follow trends, and don’t copy and piggyback onto another’s idea. Look hard and come up with a solution. Yes follow the necessary steps to monetize your work and be smart, but creating a widget that counts down to the release of a film is not really forward thinking. My 9 year old nephew can make a widget that counts down to his birthday! Yet tonight I read online the big news that Indiana Jones people have created a WIDGET that does just this. How about a widget that takes Indy’s trademark whip and smacks the executive of this innovative idea across the face until he comes up with something useful!
I will end on this, there were some speakers who really stood out and seemed to really know their shit. There were some that saw the potential of the web universe and had cool ideas and just didn’t know how to rope them in to be user friendly. I do give credit to each and every person who had the courage to go to the front of the room and talk about themselves and their companies. When the focus of a conference is so scattered its not surprising that their would be some wishy-washy speakers. At the next one maybe OMMA can really get use the analylitics to see that the behavioral target of the attendees was not to hear what they can read about on the web, or to be pitched to, but to learn techniques in innovation and monetization. Two buzz words that were thrown about, but never elaborated on.
SpookyDan