Search the words "Lloyd Braun" on Yahoo! and you'll find dozens of references to a character from 'Seinfeld.' In Monday's opening keynote address for the iMedia Brand Summit, "Finding the Voice of the Web," Broadcasting & Cable Editor in Chief J. Max Robins opened his interview with the real Lloyd Braun -- the recently appointed Head of Yahoo! Media Group -- by asking, "Lloyd, how did you become a Seinfeld character?"
The answer was that Braun used to be Larry David's attorney and lost a golf bet with the Seinfeld co-creator. Fans of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' will not be surprised to learn that "One of the real challenges when you take Larry golfing is that… occasionally, if he's not playing well, he wants to quit. So, it became a running joke among my friends and I: 'Are we going to be able to get him through the 18 holes?'" One day, when David was playing badly, Braun kept him in the game by betting on the last two holes. The stakes? If David won, then he could use Braun's name any way he pleased in a 'Seinfeld' episode.
Months later, David called Braun (an hour before taping) to warn him that his name would be mentioned. "How many times," Braun asked. "About 80," David replied. Braun described his alter ego -- George Costanza's nemesis -- as "very handsome. He's also, by the way, insane." The character proved so popular with writers and fans that he subsequently popped up in two more episodes.
Braun's move to Yahoo!
Braun has worked for Brillstein Grey, Touchstone Television and was chairman of ABC Entertainment Television Group before joining Yahoo! Moving from 'Seinfeld' to more internet-marketing relevant topics, Robins observed that ordinarily television executives move from network to network, or from network to production entities. So why did Braun leave television for the internet?
"I'm not sure that two years ago I would have done it," Braun replied, but for a variety of reasons it seemed to be the right opportunity at the right time: "all of this felt to me like it was right about to explode."
Earlier, during the dotcom bubble, there was an immense amount of content, but Braun didn't see the attraction of watching cartoons on his PC rather than sitting on the living room couch. The internet was still "waiting for top notch execution" and wondering "is the promise of this medium ever going to be realized?"
Ultimately, it was his children's media-consumption habits that prompted Braun to start taking the internet seriously. Braun's children are aged 17 to 11, and their media habits are different than his own were when he was their age. As a younger man, Braun was brand loyal to NBC: it was his "channel of choice," and his first move on waking up in the morning was to turn on NBC news. In contrast, his two older children (both girls) are more likely to go to the WB, MTV or VH1. "Cable wasn't the stepsister to them." And Braun's 11 and 13 year olds have still more different media habits, "their first move was to turn on the computer." Given a hypothetical choice between taking their computers away or taking the family television, all of Braun's children voted unanimously to "take the television away." This response helped Braun to conclude that the internet was coming of age.
Then, when Yahoo! head Terry Semel -- another Hollywood veteran -- showed him the length and breadth of Yahoo!'s media strategy, Braun realized that the internet's future is "absolutely limitless."
Creating signature content
Given Braun's successes in television (he green lit both 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives,' ABC's hits this season), Robins was somewhat surprised the Braun did not have "more hope" for television.
Braun replied that his move to Yahoo! was "not a dig against television, but that it's no secret that television faces a lot of challenges ahead… Television to me has always been a medium for this mass audience." Given audience choice in cable, "it's that much harder to find one show that can galvanize everybody's interest," especially when there are so many medical and law shows.
In contrast, the internet represents "a medium that -- rather than one that is fighting the needs and desires of the audience -- totally taps into it" in order to bring the audience what they want, when, where and how they want it.
For Braun, early live broadcast television was defined by Milton Berle. The sitcom was defined by 'I Love Lucy,' and "what cable could be" was defined by 'The Sopranos.' "The internet has not yet had those sorts of defining signature content events. And I believe it will. I believe we will."
Braun's mission at Yahoo! is to find and develop the "unique, signature compelling content for the internet." Listing search, community, personalization and content as the "four pillars" of internet media, Braun's goal is to "take those pillars and… integrate them into a hip product and an event" that will touch the nation's zeitgeist.
Is the internet now where cable was 15 to 20 years ago? Robins asked.
Braun replied that it was a great analogy, but pointed out that the internet has advantages over cable, particularly when it comes to distribution. With 350 million unique visitors per month, half of whom are registered and half of whom are on broadband, Yahoo! has a big advantage over early cable: it is a destination site that can provide everything to the visitor. But Braun dislikes the term website. "These are not sites any more. Not static pictures of linear content." Instead, Yahoo! is composed of "moving, fluid, evolving channels… we cover all of it, not just inside news, sports and health." Cable is a siloed and vertical business. "That's not true of us."
There is a hunger for internet content, both among consumers and the Hollywood talent community. "Looking for content online is the number one activity on the internet," and takes "40 percent of people's time." Yahoo is a leader in online content, but the "truth is, most of this content right now is first generation," Braun said. Applying some of the principals of television in the newer internet channel, "you start to learn what is possible to do. It hasn't been the focus of everybody's efforts until, quite honestly, right now. So, now I think we're going to see a faster evolution of what is possible."
Programming different channels differently
Braun took pains to distinguish the Yahoo! media content that he is developing from what is available in other channels: "I'm not saying that we're going to do television shows on the internet" like 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives.' "I don't believe, ultimately, that the future of internet content is doing on the PC what you can get on your living room television set…. You can't compare that experience." Different platforms require different experiences and executions.
On the talent side, Braun plans a kind of "road show to the agencies… to walk them through how they should look at our business, and how broad the term 'content' really is."
And a mantra for Braun is, "make it simple. Simple simple simple -- because all of this is still way too complicated." Braun is not interested in hearing about "RSS or XTML," and doesn't think that consumers are interested in those channels either. On the content side, he contends that consumers are, generally speaking, not interested in the fine details of how an episode of 'Lost' is made. "I don't want to see how the stuff gets there. I don't want to see how the stuff gets to me. I just want to click."
New to the internet, although a media veteran, Braun shared that, "If I'd only known at ABC what I know now, I would have taken half of my media budget and plunked it here" at Yahoo!
Robins' final question returned to 'Desperate Housewives,' a breakout hit this season, but with numbers that would not have hit the top 20 two decades ago. "Advertisers need a mass audience in a timely fashion. Can the internet do that?" Robins asked.
"Do I believe so? Yes?" Braun replied, but a monster hit "is always a surprise..." At ABC, Braun's philosophy was that "if you did enough things right, you increased your chance to get lucky… I do believe… that we are going to see the equivalent of breakout hits in the future, in this world, but it's going to be different, it's going to be a different kind of hit.
"There will always be a place for television," Braun concluded. "What television does, it does very well" but it will change. On the media landscape, that change will be "a function of education… of evolution. And my hope is that we can play a role in speeding up that evolution."
Jeff Zabin and the power of precision
Monday morning's second keynote address -- The Power of Precision: Capturing and Leveraging Customer Information" -- was presented by Jeff Zabin, director of marketing at Fair Isaac Corporation. Zabin is also the author of Precision Marketing.
Zabin opened his keynote by describing Aesop's fable of the one-eyed doe, in which a doe that was blind in one eye always faces inward toward the island on which she lives in order to avoid poachers. This strategy works, until the poachers hire a boat and shoot her from the sea. Many marketers, Zabin argued, are doe-like in their unwillingness to look at the whole range of information about their customers.
Zabin sited six emerging trends: 1) brand disloyalty, 2) customer scarcity, 3) customer expectations going "through the roof," 4) the proliferation of customer touchpoints, which is "good news, but also bad news" because marketers "need to break down data silos," 5) Media and attention fragmentation and 6) Customer fatigue.
To fight the negative aspects of these emerging trends, Zabin advocates precision marketing, defining precision as "the condition of being accurate and exact." Achieving this condition involves presenting consumers with context-sensitive offers, just-in-time marketing (as opposed to just-in-case marketing), and promoting customer intimacy. Marketers must realize that few customers are equal, must analyze the ROI of marketing in a scientific way, and must pursue a hybrid approach that fuses mass media with precision marketing.
Whereas at the birth of the internet a decade ago marketers could simply try something creative, now these same marketers are saying to themselves, "Oh God, now we have to account for those dollars!"
The scientific method
Mass media marketing goes hand in hand with precision marketing. "Very often, when you have a new technology, the pendulum swings too wide," but then settles, Zabin said. While Hollywood executives were initially nervous about DVDs, they quickly discovered that DVDs were complementary with the theatrical releases of motion pictures. Similarly, microwaves did not displace conventional ovens. When a new technology comes along, that does not mean old technologies go away.
Zabin argued that marketers should practice the scientific method in order to avoid unnecessary anxieties about new technologies and to achieve good marketing results. He then described a "recursive loop" that would function as a scientific diagnostic tool: the "Plan, Do, Act, Check cycle."
Quoting Peter Drucker's famous statement, "if you can't measure it you can't manage it," Zabin then argued that a scientific marketing company must have three related organizational assets: Hardware (a data infrastructure), software (a technology platform) and peopleware (specialized expertise).
With these assets in place, Zabin argued, the company will be able to:
- Collect data profiles for each customer across all touch points
- Segment data profiles and create action plans for each customer segment
- Execute, by delivering targeted messages through outbound campaigns
- Measure effectiveness using an organized framework for testing
One company successfully practicing precision marketing is Kraft, with its Food & Family magazine. Kraft deploys 40 different versions of the magazine within a circulation of 12 million customers. Slicing and dicing the data from these different versions, Kraft can evaluate the impact of the magazine in different markets after just a week.
Predictable imbalance, context and how to make marketing smarter
Zabin described Procter & Gamble's efforts to maximize the value of their brand loyal customers of Tide detergent. "Across all kinds of brands, it's a very small percentage of households that are driving sales." For Tide, "five percent of households drive 60 percent of sales and 70 percent of profit."
P&G's goal, therefore, was to increase its contact with those profitable customers. One strategy for achieving this goal was to "reduce its spend on TV ads for Tide by 16 percent." Sensitivity to context is key to achieving precision marketing, and Zabin argued that marketers should think in terms of "context sensitivity points rather than gross rating points."
To make marketing smarter, Zabin said, marketers must "Capture, integrate and enhance customer data." Then, "analyze the data to derive actionable insights." Finally, the marketers must, "use the insights to drive more efficient and profitable customer interactions."
Blueprinting Customer DNA
Since "people are dynamic," Zabin said that marketers should, "Make sure you capture your customer information from all the different sources. Make sure you capture information consistently across all your merchandising channels" in order to get an enhanced sense of the profile of a company's ideal customer.
"Ultimately what you can do, once you understand the DNA of your best customers" is to "go out into the world and find more customers just like them," Zabin said.
In the next generation of market basket analysis, Zabin said, enhanced customer data will enable marketers to recommend non-obvious product combinations to customers. It would never occur to most marketers to offer a silly flower purse to go with the purchase of a garden hose, but with precision marketing such suggestions can become both routine and welcome to the appropriate customers.
Zabin concluded his presentation by suggesting that precision marketing in circa 2054 will not look like a scene from 'Minority Report.' Instead, it will resemble a high-tech version of his grandmother's corner store in Iowa, circa 1966. Zabin's grandmother kept a "point-of-sale customer identification, data leverage system and high-touch contact center solution" in her head.
With precision marketing practices and the right technology in place, Zabin argued, companies will be able to replicate the high customer loyalty of a corner store on a much larger scale.
Stay tuned for more Summit coverage tomorrow.
