• by March 7, 2007

Hypothetical situation: You're a CMO charged with marketing a dog food brand. Challenge: How do you reach your core audience of passionate pet owners, build loyalty, and maximize your return on investment?

Those were the questions put to marketing and media executives at a digital marketing conference on Tuesday for the purpose of sparking a Socratic debate. Most marketers know they should be deploying digital media programs-search (keyword, organic, contextual), behavioral marketing, online video, and a raft of other elements -- but many are stumped about how to maximize the opportunities and get a decent bang for their bucks. How do you manage and navigate this new landscape?

"You can't just dabble in digital," said Matt Freeman, CEO, Omnicom's Tribal DDB. He, like other panelists, maintained that eventually there won't be digital agencies -- it will become more a matter of who the best advisers are. Still it's rather hard to imagine since most agencies continue to have silos -- silos of media, digital expertise, and creative.

Conceding the point, Penry Price, director-North American Sales, Google, said silos persist, but now, "it's almost a wild west where everyone is working on digital ideas." By "everyone," Price was referring to creatives, media folks, account teams, online publishers, and digital shops, of course.

"We think search should be part of every ad campaign at every company," he said.

Jeffrey Glueck, CMO of Travelocity, noted that marketers must have an idea that can be pulled through all media channels and that they need to realize that a channel like direct response TV drives search marketing: "It all has to work together," Glueck noted, adding that search and online media teams should work together. Where ROI is concerned, Glueck deploys sophisticated multichannel regression techniques, segmentation analysis, awareness tracking data, and marketing mix modeling to account for every dollar spent in his marketing.

Known for his clever upstaging of industry panels, David Verklin, CEO, Carat Americas and Chairman, Carat Asia Pacific, challenged the panelists by pushing the hypothetical scenario further: "How do we advertise to the interested? How do we reach the 40% of the population that owns a dog? We have to find a way to eliminate waste." It's worth noting that Carat counts IAMs as a client.

Laura Lang, president, Digitas, concurred: "It's about finding a way to engage with people who want to buy your product or service. It's the idea that drives engagement. I need people to opt in to my brand. How do I tap into peoples' affinities?"

DDB's Freeman asserted that waging a war based on price and features is useless, "it's about figuring out the inherent value of the product or service ... You have to have a higher purpose and be part of the consumer's emotional bond" with their dog.

Nick Law, North American chief creative officer at R/GA, went so far as to imagine a social networking technology that pet owners could embed in dog collars to facilitate doggie pals, and pals for their owners as well.

"You have to think about how to do something useful for people consuming your brand," Law asserted at the New York event hosted by AdAge Digital.

Travelocity's Glueck compared the value argument with his company's guarantee to consumers: "The big idea isn't necessarily an advertising idea. In our case, it's about what we stand for as a service. Our travel guarantee is about accountability and a great travel experience," it goes beyond the gnome, the advergaming, and blogs the brand mounted.

At Digitas, all work emanates from a so-called "active branding platform," whereby the agency thinks about how to personalize messages and then how to promote them.

Speaking to that point, Steve Rubel, SVP, Edelman me2revolution, said marketers need to think about how to create "small content," off the Long Tail. "It's a two-way relationship," he said, adding, "it's not about a [media] buy."

"We'll be seeing more and more all media drive people online to the Web," Verklin asserted, in what he termed a "Web-first" strategy. Increasingly, marketers and media are using offline media -- all kinds -- to drive people to a digital location. "Creative is just content," Verklin said.

As he's wont to do, Verklin made a radical prediction in stating that within the next 36 months all the big media shops -- Starcom, OMD, MindShare, Carat, etc. -- will be full-service agencies, incorporating all offline and online functions, and yes, offering creative services.

"Carat Fusion and Carat will be combined."