In this interview, this Media Director shares the secrets to “Mr. Green’s” success.
Christi Reynolds has worked with the Dallas office of Tribal DDB for the past three and a half years. She serves as Media Director in addition to heading up strategic planning. Some of the current clients for the Dallas office are Pepsi, Exxon Mobil, American Airlines, and U.S. Air Force. We talked with Reynolds recently to get her views on the industry.
iMedia Connection: What’s one of the most successful “DR” campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?
Reynolds: The direct campaigns that have been the most successful have been the ones that developed from CRM efforts. A good example would be the e-mail marketing that we do for Hampton Inn. We’ve decided in the last few months to change the format of the communication from being a newsletter to single minded offers. This aligns better with the client’s overall business objectives and we were able to track significant increases in click through as well as revenue generated as a result of this strategy shift.
Another example was a campaign for Sabre’s Virtually There. This was a business-to-business play because it’s a Web publisher that sells advertising to media buyers. We bought targeted direct-mail and e-mail lists to send out testable offers. The most successful approach used mailers that were more than mailers. They were actually coffee cups that came with Starbucks gift cards with a numbered code. By going to a Website and registering, people were able to activate and learn the value of their gift cards. Then based off of that, the sales force was able to follow up and provide more information about Virtually There. As a buyer I know how many media kits I get, but this one was really able to stand out because of the format. It was interesting to get a cup in the mail. And, it was invaluable being able to collect all the data. We received around a 40% response rate on a rented list, which is phenomenal.
iMedia Connection: What’s one of the most successful “branding” campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?
Reynolds: We’ve run several successful campaigns for Pepsi over the last few months. One good example was the launch campaign for “Mr. Green,” a soda under the SoBe brand. The launch was supported from the company’s perspective only with grass roots and online marketing. We developed a series of rich-media units that switched out every week as the teaser campaign rolled out to unveil the new brand. We used Eyeblaster for the teaser ads and Unicast for the payoff.
The goal of the campaign was to build awareness in an exciting way that would inspire consumers to try the product. Even though there wasn’t a study in place to directly measure awareness from the online advertising alone, we believe the success of the product launch was in part due to awareness built in this campaign. The click-through rates were phenomenal – averaging over 3% across all units and as high as 30% for some placements. And even though click through really isn’t an awareness metric, it does show us that people were noticing the advertising and were choosing to spend more time with something they connected with through advertising.
Another thing that made this campaign significant was its overall approach. The ad units linked to a micro site with sweepstakes opportunities that had a staged rollout in the same phases as the advertising. The campaign also fully integrated into the client’s CRM program so we were able to send out e-mail launch announcements and even select targeted recipients from the database to ship product samples or offer digital coupons to those customers we felt were most likely to be interested in “Mr. Green”. All of this was on a really modest budget but we were able to take a lot of different pieces and put them together in a way that gave us awareness so that was a good example for us.
iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics?
Reynolds: We do that in a couple of different ways. There has been a lot of talk about the brand-impact studies and we definitely encourage our clients to use this type of measurement when appropriate. The other way we do it is through measuring interaction and involvement. It’s such a great indicator if someone spends the time to actually interact with your advertising or spend time on your Website. We’ve used interactive rich media like the Point.Roll ads or Unicast to be able to measure that interaction time. We’ve had some good experience with a Diet Sierra Mist campaign where we were able to measure that people not only rolled over to engage the banner ad but they also spent an average of 18 seconds interacting with it. That’s at least as powerful as a television ad where you’re passively viewing – these people are very active in the way they’re engaging. In that case, you could actually participate and register for a sweepstakes right within the ad.
The other way we’ve been able to prove it is with campaigns like Mobil 1 motor oil where we will measure event conversion rates once people click through the ad to actually spend time on the Mobil 1 site. When advertising gets users interested enough to spend time on the Website and enter the sweepstakes or register for the database or do engage in other flagged events within the Website, they’re obviously experiencing the brand.
Other indicators are repeat visits when people come back to the Website a second or a third time because they’ve had some experience with the brand that is powerful enough for them to want to come back and engage again. And, forward it to a friend. We feel like that measures a positive impact on the brand because you want to expose your friends to that positive experience. We’ve done promotions where as high as 10-15% of the people who participate will forward that on and for the people who do forward it, we look at the average number of people that they will forward to. They don’t just tend to forward it to just one person but two or three people so we measure those kinds of things.
iMedia Connection: Are third-party Internet traffic-measuring services useful beyond being something to which you have to subscribe to get R/F data?
Reynolds: Yes and no. I don’t believe every campaign should have a third-party ad server. I don’t feel the cost is always justified especially as CPMs are falling so much. They just add on a greater rate, and you question whether it’s truly worth the investment. If there’s no sales transaction to be measuring revenue against or those events aren’t significant enough to really obtain that data then a lot of times we’d rather put that money into a brand study or back into more media. So we don’t always use third-party ad servers.
On the other hand, they can be really helpful for a company like Hampton Inn that does use third-party ad serving. We’re able to look at the creative and figure out which creative units are driving more revenue than others. In that case, we feel that it’s really valuable. So I think it depends on the campaign.
iMedia Connection: Have you piloted any early Reach & Frequency planning on behalf of your clients? What did the results reveal? Have they panned out as planned?
Reynolds: We do use the principles of reach & frequency planning and have piloted the Atlas tool. We want to understand to what extent we’re reaching new users and what the frequency implications are, etc. I think there’s definite value to it, but I also have some real concerns with us relying too heavily on this. Not all online impressions are equal. We could buy some small ad unit at a cheap CPM that consumers aren’t even likely to see and make our reach & frequency numbers look really impressive or we could take that same budget and buy fewer, richer units that actually have a chance to make an impact.
Plus, there’s a real challenge to do reach & frequency analysis with particular targeted demos. And even when we get past those challenges, reach & frequency planning dismisses value to users who have the same mindset and behavior as the target but who fall outside the constraints of straight demographic parameters. If you’re trying to sell soda to a video gamer on a gaming site it probably doesn’t matter whether he’s 24 or 25 years old. I do think the principles of reach & frequency are important to the planning process; we just have to keep it in perspective and not do everything based off of these decisions.
iMedia Connection: Is one source better than another in achieving predictability in planning tools vs. post?
Reynolds: No, as far as I know, there is the Atlas tool and the Web R/F tool both of which have really different methodology. The tools are different in their approaches so you don’t come out with the same results necessarily. I think they both have their strengths and weaknesses.
iMedia Connection: Are most of your clients taking advantage of day-parting or is this perhaps more hype, than hope?
Reynolds: We have not done a lot of day-part targeting although I’ve seen some really great applications for some clients. As to whether or not it makes sense depends on what you’re trying to sell. But it’s great to have the capability for campaigns that need it.
iMedia Connection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?
Reynolds: I think the industry’s complexity is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There’s a lot to online marketing and it can be a very effective and efficient marketing tool. There’re a whole host of tools in the set – online advertising, online promotions, e-mail campaigns, relationship marketing, search engine optimization, etc. – and within each there’s complexity. The industry can meet a lot of challenges, but the industry needs to be more diligent in matching the objective of what we’re trying to do with the particular strategy or campaign. Just because a program worked in one situation doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for a different situation. The industry seems to be always in pitch mode and we want to have a solution for everything, but we need to make sure the solutions we are pitching are the right ones and that they’re ready for prime time.
iMedia Connection: What knowledge can you share to bridge the gap on how to better serve marketers’ needs in the online world?
Reynolds: I think education is really important and it needs to be done respectfully and in the right spirit. We’re all marketers talking to other marketers with different specialties. Sometimes people will come in to pitch us on an idea and if we don’t like that idea, they’ll assume that it’s because we don’t understand it. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think that rather than complaining that others ‘don’t get it,’ we should focus more on listening to those objections and learning from that so that we can get a better understanding of how to better suit the program.
iMedia Connection: Have any of your clients successfully utilized any emerging technologies, such as IM, wireless, iTV, etc.?
Reynolds: Several of our clients have used wireless as a data acquisition strategy at event marketing venues with a degree of success. In any process you have learning as you go and there’s the comparison between the old way and the new way and determining strengths of both methods. We’re continuing to learn and grow these programs at different levels and in different ways.