Agencies, publishers at Summit discovering that each new solution serves up a new set of issues.
CAMBRIDGE, MD -- Now that they’ve taken their place at the big table with traditional marketers, interactive agencies and publishers are discovering that the shift from constantly defending to continually improving is like opening one of those Russian nesting dolls. Or peeling an onion. Or playing a video game.
It seems like every time you get past one issue, you find another just as confusing and important that has to be dealt with. And that’s been a recurring theme during day two of the iMedia Summit here on the Chesapeake Bay.
For example, at lunch, we were discussing consumer annoyance with pop-ups. You know how I feel -- users don’t care whether it’s a pop-up, a pop-under or a Pop-Tart. They just don’t want to be interrupted.
Frequency controls have been discussed a lot lately and seem to be the perfect solution, right? Not necessarily. As my lunch companion pointed out, frequency controls only work if a user allows cookies. If they turn off cookies, they’re actually going to get more pop-ups -- not fewer.
New solution presents new problem.
What are you going to do?
Who do you trust?
Just when the Internet is getting noticed for getting messages across to users, David Weinberger -- Internet philosopher and volunteer advisor to the Howard Dean campaign -- said marketers actually shouldn’t control the messaging anymore.
“I can find out more about any product through other customers than I can through the company,” he said.
Weinberger told the Summit about trying to buy a washing machine. He had it narrowed down to two brands, but couldn’t get answers to his questions on the brand sites or retailer sites. So he Googled the brand, plus the words “dryer” and “comments.”
He found message boards -- where a brand can’t control what’s said about it -- and posted a question about the models he was considering. In less than an hour, he had more information than he needed, and answers to questions he hadn’t even thought to ask.
What this particular consumer wanted -- information -- wasn’t available from anyone who built or sold the dryers. Those folks are so used to controlling the message, that they failed him.
“Marketing is so alienating,” said Weinberger. “We [consumers] hate the feeling that it isn’t our system any more. Give us a chance to escape from it and we will. You’re only marketing to us because we won’t do what you want.”
And that was a major lesson marketers should learn from the success of DeanforAmerica.com. The campaign made a conscious decision to give up control of the message to the community that was gathering around the campaign. The ultimate idea was to get people to get active in their local communities on Dean’s behalf.
“The Internet is infinite -- when you put up a new site, you’re not taking away real estate” from finite TV time, or finite pages in a newspaper, Weinberger said. “You can go on and on, so it often tends toward, or at least allows for, nuance. Weblogs value nuance, which is the very thing being driven out of the marketing and political sphere.”
Marketers shouldn’t get caught short trying to apply old thinking to this new medium, which has grown by empowering the people who use it.
“What was the last technology that a billion people adopted in 10 years?” he asked the crowd. There isn’t one, of course.
He said the Internet isn’t really an information space -- it’s a conversation space. As a result, most corporate sites are “completely without value to users. It’s easier to believe someone you’ve never met in a chat, than a marketing message.”
“The hardest thing for companies to acknowledge in public, is that they’re human… thus what we do is not perfect,” Weinberger said. But blogging and other forms of online community are based on that very thing -- stream of consciousness writing, forgiveness for mistakes and being real.”
Subaru is one company that he said gets this idea. The chat area on Subaru’s minisite on Edmunds.com has a frequent poster who apparently is paid by the company. But she’s not a flack.
“She jumps in only when necessary,” he said, without admonishing other users. “That I think is really good. People get to speak their minds, and the company speaks appropriately. It adds value to the conversation instead of creating upset.”
He covered a lot more ground in his conversation with Upstream Group's Doug Weaver. And we’ll bring you that in the next two weeks.
But let me leave you with this quote. Politicians may have discovered that the Internet is a powerful marketing and fund-raising tool, but Weinberger said, “The continued marketing of candidates will continue to drive down democracy.”
New solution yields another new question.
New days at AOL
The final keynoter on Tuesday was Mike Kelly. Kelly is the new president of the new AOL Media Network, which is the long-awaited consolidation of the far-flung and often-uncoordinated sale-related functions at the world’s largest ISP.
If you’ve been in this business more than a week, you know that dealing with AOL as an agency or a client has never been easy. Derek Hewitt, iMediaLearning president, led the conversation with Kelly. Hewitt told Kelly and the audience about a marathon battle with AOL when Hewitt was at Philips Electronics. The two sides literally spent three solid days in a lawyer’s office in Manhattan -- neither side leaving until the terms of their $85 million deal were ironed out.
Those days are over. Growth and specialization as a solution yielded a bunch of hard questions that Kelly’s new group is answering.
Kelly said AOL is shifting “from a deal-oriented culture to more of a transactional business.” Now they’re doing “smaller deals more often, which takes less work, which will move toward standardization,” he said.
That should streamline the process even farther.
Kelly also discussed AOL’s shift from its proprietary Rainman publishing system to HTML. The switch should be completed by the end of the year.
Rainman was not user- or advertiser-friendly, so AOL couldn’t accept many common ad formats. It was a nightmare (I know firsthand). “This gives us a lot more flexibility across the board,” Kelly said.
Going all-HTML will allow AOL to serve any ad format. In addition, it will open up AOL’s content -- and marketer’s ads -- to daytime users who often are blocked by their employers from downloading the AOL client. These users will be able to access all of AOL at AOL.com, using their screen names and passwords.
“We have 20 million people per month who check their email via AOL.com,” Kelly said. “They’ll get the premium content first,” when the HTML conversion is complete.
He also said AOL is building a separate sales organization for its other Web properties, like Netscape and AIM. “We were trying to sell too many things at once,” he said.
Kelly’s comments (which we’ll share in full next week), indicate that there has indeed been a sea change at AOL. And its continued growth is good for the entire Internet business, especially since as much as one-third of traffic to sites like Yahoo! and Google comes from AOL.
“When you’re a company that can do anything, it’s hard to know what to do,” he said. "We’re trying to test the conventional wisdom at all times. I like our chances. We have the No. 1 brand, but we’re not No. 1 in ad revenue. I like being the underdog.”
Other questions, other solutions
There were three other intriguing discussions Tuesday, which I’ll share when I get back. One was a panel discussion on whether media or creative should drive the process and Marc Ryan from Nielsen//NetRatings updated the crowd about the at-work market.
But the big solutions -- and new questions -- will come from the work sellers and buyers have been doing together here this week. They each met separately before the Summit, and identified four key areas that need to be addressed to make their relationships work.
They then merged Tuesday morning, in four breakout sessions and hashed out best practices and common ground. We’ll bring your those in a series, starting next week.
New solutions, new problems. They’re all part of growing the new mass medium.