HHblog: Rethinking Marketing

Hill Holliday had an extraordinary night at The Ad Club’s 49th Annual Hatch Awards, collecting “Marketer of the Year” Honors for client John Hancock.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Bacharach said, “We are extremely proud of this recognition for our marketing efforts. The John Hancock brand strives to understand our customers and provide solutions for any of their real life needs. Our marketing efforts speak to the needs of consumers, making it easier for them to find good answers to their financial questions, and helping them to build and reinforce confidence about their financial futures.”

The agency received honors for work created for a variety of clients, including Liberty Mutual, Dunkin’ Donuts, the City of Boston, the Graduate Counseling Center, and even the agency itself.

The first Hatch bowl is always the best, the one you never forget, so special congratulations to Hill Holliday’s first-time winners Dan Jordan, Karen Hite, Steven Grskovic, Carissa DiCenzo, Jackie Markarian, Lisa Adajian, Wesley Dorsainvil, Nicole Ricciardi, Dannie Miller, and Julie Natola. If you know any of these first time winners, please go out of your way to congratulate them.

Liberty Mutual’s policy was to ask for great work, then produce lots of it. Under the leadership of Kevin Moehlenkamp, Ernie Schenck, and Rob Rich, the following received accolades: Megan O’Connell, Dan Jordan, Scott Noble (whose father is in the advertising Hall of Fame), Nicole Ricciardi, Scott Hainline, second-generation producer Carissa Marlowe, Eric Chao, Eric Shi, Jason Shipp, Carissa Dicenzo, Kathy McManus, Ashley Engel, Jad Mintum, Dmitry Orlov, Chris Roby, Dan Pearce, Brian Yoder, Kerry Bodine, and Bryan Sweeney.

The judges deemed the creative for Dunkin’ Donuts to be just as fresh as the coffee. Kevin Moehlenkamp, Tim Cawley and Kevin Daley lead a small army to creative victory: Dan Jordan, Megan O’Connell, Rick McHugh, Bob Gates, Jeff Baxter, Lisa Belden, Brad Powell, Darren Bult, Jim Buckley, Marion Didio, Mike Shaughnessy, Mark Nardi, Karen Hite, Dannie Miller, and Colette Walkinshaw. Chief Media Officer Baba Shetty was especially pleased to see perseverance pay off when the Dunkin’ Run concept received a silver bowl, as was Alyssa Merritt, Paul Lenzi, Ilya Vedrashko, Kerry Bodine, and Brian Yoder.

Scott Hainline, who has won a shelf full of bowls as a producer collected his first as a writer for his epic restaurant review, “53 lunches.” He shares the credit with Kevin Moehlenkamp, Lisa Adajiian, Lee Phenner, Jean Blundon, Jacquelyn Markarian, Wesley Dorsainvill, and Michael Shaughnessy.

The duo that brought you award-winning work for the Duxbury Dollhouse back in the day thought big for the City of Boston. Rick McHugh and Kevin Daley worked with Kevin Moehlenkamp, Scott Woolwine, and David Majeau. The effort dominated numerous categories, including out-of-home, unconventional format, and integrated campaign.

The Graduate Counseling Center took the advice of Kevin Daley and Tim Cawley. The campaign put another silver bowl on the shelf. Admiring the tower of silver bowls, Kevin Mohlenkamp was thrilled with the results. He said, “Lots of agencies can do great work for one client. The thing I love about Hill Holliday is I believe we can figure out how to do great work for all of our clients.”

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We are back from the IIT Design Research Conference, which this year was held in Chicago and attracted lots of people from all kinds of disciplines: interaction designers, ethnographers, info architects, design students, but also teachers and nurses.

Thursday opened with Robert Fabricant from Frog Design, who talked about his concept of “Designing with Intent” and how it should incorporate more user research into the design process. Doing the research is not enough, though; the secret is in translating the results into meaningful data. There is a social nature to research – you have to communicate and talk with the people. People love giving opinions – we need to take advantage of that in order to make better and more sustainable products.

Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio’s founder, gave his “Tap Is The New Click” talk about how we have evolved from the world of robotic mouse clicks and keyboards to the wide world of touch screens and gestural interfaces. In order to design for these types of new systems, we need to understand the limitations of the human body. These new systems call for us to get in touch with our human factors and ergonomic roots as designers; our bodies are not meant to do repetitive motions over and over, which increases the possibility of “gorilla arm” (try holding your arm out straight ahead of you and move it back and forth over and over, and over). In order to make effective designs, we need to design it for the way we as humans are hardwired to behave. “The best design should dissolve into behavior”. Saffer’s book on the subject: Designing Gestural Interfaces.

The use of stories helps to evoke a more compelling sense of empathy for the user — that’s from Kim Goodwin’s presentation on incorporating storytelling into research. (Goodwin is GM at Cooper and the author of Designing for the Digital Age.) “What is more impactful? If I tell you ‘The customer support really sucked!’ or if I say ‘So, the waitress let me wait 20 minutes before she came to my table. When she did, she frowned, twirled her pony tail on her pointer finger, and told me they were out of most of the items on the menu.’” Which will you remember? Does one story cause you to be more sympathetic to me and the situation over another?

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 If you don’t see the Flash screenshot gallery here, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/hillholliday

(…and a flotsam of bad puns, but that’s another story.)

We have spent the last few nights poking around Google Wave, and after the initial confusion our mind is officially blown.

The new communication tool was announced in May and just went into limited public preview. It is so different from anything else out there that it’s hard to describe in a sentence. Think of it as an email application with elements of an instant messenger, online bulletin board, wiki, and blog all in one package.

At first we felt like owners of the first telephones — proud but sort of lonely since there are few people to “wave” with. We found our cure for loneliness in the “with:public” search that brings up all waves made public by their authors.

What really sets Google Wave apart from other communication platforms out there is not its collaboration features (several participants can work on the message together), the step-by-step playback of changes made to the document (nifty!), dragging and dropping files from your desktop directly into the message (very nifty!) or seeing your friends type their replies in real time, word by word.

The true power of Wave lies in its many extensions, robots, and gadgets — mini-applications created by Google and others that turn a humble email message into a web page that can sport anything you want from a mortgage calculator to a multiplayer game. Only with the regular email, you click on a link and you go to a webpage; with Wave, the webpage comes to you.

So, what exactly can you do?

- Embed a Hulu player with this gadget, tune it into a new episode of The Office and engage in a discussion with other participants.

- Have an automatically updated RSS feed from your favorite blog.

- Make money advertising Amazon books with an affiliate widget…

- … or from a block of AdSense ads (at least while it’s not against the TOS).

- Add new functionality by adding a “Wave bot” — an automated participant in a conversation who, much like chatbots in instant messengers, perform certain functions when triggered by the content in the wave. To activate, simply add bot’s email address in the To: field. Here, BotURL automatically expands all links shortened with bit.ly and tinyURL.

- Since you can add just about anything into a wave with this handy HTML Gadget, there is no reason why you can’t install a piece of analytics code. I quickly grabbed one from StatCounter and dropped it in. (Copy the gadget’s XML link, then click on the jigsaw icon in your Wave, and drop the link into the box that pops up.) The counter works just as it does with any other page; you too can view live stats of this wave.

Remember the mid-90’s switch from text-based email clients (Pmail for DOS, for example) to Outlook and Lotus where you suddenly were able to spice up your messages with embedded pictures and nice-looking templates, and send calendar appointments and business cards? If Wave takes off, replaces Gmail and eventually becomes a new email standard, it will be the biggest thing to happen to email — and email marketing — in more than a decade.

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Photo Credit: iStockphoto

The next time you’re watching live TV, pay attention to the ending of commercials. What you’ll find are an increasing number of them tagged with a URL, or even better, a URL with voice-over to go online. This is certainly not new news as it was estimated that during the 2008 Super Bowl, 64% of commercials included a website address.

But why not 100%? One of the most common reasons I’ve heard is:

[”We want to drive people in-store. We don’t want to confuse the message by driving them to the web.”] 

Yet, consider the fact that:

• - You can only do so much within a 30-second TV spot
• - Neilsen recently reported that 28% of the time people are online at home they’re also watching TV
• - According to Forrester, initiating an online search is the most common response to an offline ad
• - 95% of the 2009 Super Bowl ads had some kind of online presence
• - Hundreds of thousands of TV commercials are watched and shared on YouTube

Since it is unlikely that, upon seeing a TV spot, a viewer will immediately get up off their couch and head into the respective store/restaurant/business to make a purchase, why not harness the momentum of their piqued interest and reinforce their consideration?

Television and the web will only continue to converge:

• - TiVo now enables you to order pizza from live Dominos Pizza TV spots
• - Verizon Fios is integrating Facebook and Twitter updates into their program interface
• - Cablevison is piloting a series of interactive TV display ads to order samples
• - IBM is developing a TV remote control that integrates with Twitter

Driving to the web from TV can only amplify your message and, if done well, marry TV and web in a way that’s greater than the sum of their individual parts. It’s the 1+1=3 media effect in action.

As for the future? If the Vitamin Water TV spot featuring Kobe Bryant vs. Lebron James is any indication, brands will start to favor directing TV viewers to their social media properties over their corporate websites.

Mike edited and adapted this post from his original blog post on Harmonic Aftershock.

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For those of us who think that ad exchanges represent an exciting, fundamental shift in the way much of online advertising is bought and sold, today was the day we’d been waiting for: Google announced the launch of the re-vamped of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

At the moment ad exchanges (auction-based marketplaces that match sellers and buyers of display inventory) represent only about 10 to 15% of the display market, according to the NY Times. But expect that percentage to spike as a result of the new DoubleClick platform, for two reasons:

1. An influx of new inventory.
Many of the top websites already use DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers product to serve their ads, and the new exchange makes it possible for them to easily put unsold inventory up for auction in the exchange. The new exchange will also include Google’s AdSense publisher sites, which reach 76% of the internet audience. The combination of the two means the exchange now provides access to the full spectrum of display inventory, from premium to long-tail.

2. A familiar and easy to use interface.
One of the factors that’s limited the growth of exchanges is that they just have not been easy enough for buyers to access and manage. As part of the re-launch, DoubleClick Ad Exchange inventory will now be available through Google’s AdWords product, which is familiar to anyone who’s ever bid on a search keyword. In other words, Google just removed all barriers to entry to buying display ads on the exchange.

So, a very important for exchanges: the market just got bigger, and more accessible.

Note: For those who have been closely monitoring the exchange space, it’s worth pointing out that two of the most interesting features of the DoubleClick exchange - real-time, impression-level bidding, and the ability to append data - can’t be enabled through the AdWords interface. For those features you need direct access into the exchange, which for most agencies will come through a partnership with one of the “demand-side optimizers” like DataXu, MediaMath, or Invite Media.

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Among the recent finds we’ve shared with each other on Hill Holliday’s Yammer network are:

- A giant 18′ x 4′ multi-user, multi-touch wall at the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas.

- Aerial Earth maps augmented with dynamic information (for example, a stadium map with added animation of an ongoing game; YouTube video).

- Interesting numbers on the rapid growth of social media shared in a popular Socialnomics video on YouTube — and a critical deconstruction of some of the cited stats.:

- NYTimes.com: iPhone-like apps might soon come to your TV screen.

- eConsultancy: “The Roger Smith Hotel may be the most social media savvy hotel in New York — if not the world.”

- A big list of infographic art and related resources on the Smashing Magazine site.

If you work at the agency and would like to join our Yammer network, sign up here with your @hhcc address.

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– The news of the Eve Asbury’s appointment as the Director of Integrated Production and Technology was picked up by Adweek, The Boston Globe, and Boston Business Journal, among others.   Eve said in a statement, “Hill Holliday is a place where breakthrough creative is produced for broadcast, print and digital. Bringing these robust capabilities together under one unit will amplify the power of our work for clients. I was drawn to Hill Holliday because it’s a unique agency with some of the smartest people in the business who have a commitment to drive innovation in marketing. I want to be a part of that.”

– New York Times: “According to the Twitter account for Hill Holliday, a communications and marketing agency, a single video of Mr. West’s outburst registered 500,000 viewers and “got pulled by Viacom within 20 minutes.” Hill Holliday credited Twitter for spreading word of the incident so swiftly.”  Follow @HillHolliday on Twitter.

– Boston Business Journal in a “Mob Rules” piece about companies turning to their customers for ideas:   “Dunkin’ Donuts recently crowdsourced its “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” contest with the help of Boston-based ad agency Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos.  Jeff Hager of Hoover, Ala., won $12,000 for creating the “Toffee for your coffee” doughnut, which is now available in stores.”

– Boston Business Journal, earlier: “Advertising agency Hill Holliday has introduced a new television spot for Chili’s highlighting the restaurant chain’s annual drive to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals, which provide care for children with cancer.”

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Broadcast

Radio Advertising Eliminator, 1934: “The device will operate the radio only when musical programs are coming over the air. Just as soon as any voice announcement is made from the station, the radio receiver is turned off and is not turned on again until the musical program resumes. It is believed that the new device uses a vibrating reed tuned to a predominant voice frequency to operate a relay which turns the set on and off.”

The first wireless TV remote control, 1955 Zenith Flash-Matic Tuning, had a mute button that was advertised as a commercial killer.

When avoiding ads, men use more mechanical methods: change the channel, for example. Women use more behavioral methods, such as talking to someone. (Journal of Business Research, 2008)

“Physical avoidance (leaving the room) reduces ad exposure by more than 20% and mechanical avoidance (switching channels) reduces it by 10%.” (Journal of Advertising, 1997)

People either plan to watch a television program or watch it on impulse. Impulse TV viewers (70.4%) were more likely to change the channel during commercial breaks as opposed to planned TV viewers (48.5%). (ANZMAC Conference Proceedings, 2003)

In December 2008, DVRs were in 27% of all TV households (30.1 million homes). In 2014, DVRs are expected to be in 44% of all TV households (52.3 million). But only 12% of DVR users say skipping ads is the most important feature. (Media Life, 2009)

Similarly, only “10% of viewers said the ability to zip through commercials was the reason they have a TiVo.” On the other hand, “9 of 10 viewers say they always or almost always fast-forward commercials”. (TV Week, 2008)

In 1994, Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury produced a TV spot for Mazda designed to counter ad avoidance. The ad encouraged viewers to “video” the ad with the VCR and then pause it several times to read a sequence of written split-second messages.

Online

2007: Spam was 83% of all email traffic, or 60-150 billion messages per day. (USAToday, 2007)

2009: “According to Microsoft, 97 percent of all e-mail sent on the Internet is spam.” (ArsTechnica) Microsoft founder Bill Gates used to receive four million e-mails per year, most of them spam. (BBC, 2004)

“120 billion spam messages [are sent] daily worldwide. That’s about 20 spam messages per day for every man, woman and child on the planet.” (IronPort Trends, 2008, pdf)

At the same time, spam filters are becoming better at recognizing and blocking unwanted messages. (Wired, 2007)

Response rate for spam: 1 in 12,500,000 emails sent. (Berkeley+UCSD study, 2008, pdf)

The average click-through rate for a banner ad:
2004 - 0.33%
2006 - 0.22%.
2008 - 0.19%

Then: During the first seven months of 2002, there were more than 11.3 billion pop-up ad impressions. 80% of pop-ups were from 63 companies. (Nielsen Online, 2002, pdf)

Now: “Some 79 percent of survey respondents said they already had a pop-up blocker of some sort, and 43 percent said they already had ad-blocking software.” (AdWeek, 2008)

As of September 30, 2008, there were 172,523,062 registrations for the “Do Not Call” list (FTC pdf). The US population at the time was about 305 million people.

Compiled by Juan Alvarado (emerging media intern; on LinkedIn, Twitter).

Related posts: The Elusive Advertising Clutter and Why Adblock Plus May Be A Good Thing

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While attending today’s Gravity Summit at Harvard University, I was thoroughly impressed with the lineup of speakers that organizers Beverly Macy and Rodney Rumford managed to assemble. It was a phenomenal cross-section of disciplines that demonstrated how social media has fundamentally affected advertising, PR, B2B corporations, media conglomerates, small business, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and yes…celebrities (That’s MC Hammer below).

Broadcast live through a partnership with CNN.com, the packed room and online viewership managed to make the #gravsum hashtag the 7th trending topic on Twitter at one point with in excess of 4000 tweets over the course of 8 hours.

While the attendance of keynote speakers MC Hammer and Gary Vaynerchuk drew a lot of pre and post-event media buzz (and for good reason as both were outstanding), every presenter brought valuable content to the table.

And when mixed together and boiled down, there appeared some very clear and simple business themes:

• - Social Media isn’t a fad and isn’t going away
• - For social media to work, employees must be empowered and trusted
• - There are no shortcuts with social media – you must roll up your sleeves
• - At the end of the day social media enables customer service
• - Those who have the passion for it are the ones to succeed with it

I was particularly touched by Ramon De Leon (above) who is a franchisee operating partner for a set of Domino’s Pizza stores in Chicago. This is a passionate guy who has whole heartedly embraced his customers using social media in every way possible to connect and communicate with them. “If you can’t be a part of the conversation, you know what? You start one.”

And of course, Hill Holliday was very proud of Dunkin’ Dave Puner (above) who shared his insights and lessons learned in starting up Dunkin’ Donut’s very successful Twitter Channel:  “We knew there are a lot of conversations happening about Dunkin’ Donuts out there and we simply wanted to be a part of the conversation.”

Check out all of my notes and sound bites from many of the speakers, a video of MC Hammer’s intro and a slideshow of the pics I snapped.

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Pssst, word on the street is that the Snoop Group of Hill Holliday is looking for people to take part in exciting and thought provoking surveys.

We are excited to release our seventh Word on the Street survey: We KNOW you’re on FACEBOOK right now!. Completing the survey automatically enters you into our sweepstakes with the opportunity to win 1 of 5 $50 American Express Gift Cards.

Please feel free to forward along this survey link to anyone you know who may be interested in participating. Also, if you’re not already a panelist member of Word on the Street, you can sign up at the end of this survey.

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