Category Archives: Marketing

Carol Bartz Talks Leadership at UW

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Marketing

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone with a tougher executive position than Carol Bartz.  As the CEO of Yahoo, she had to step into the shoes of the Founder, fix the mess he caused with the board, figure out what her company actually “does” these days, and then decide how to compete in ecosystems dominated by Google, Microsoft and the sports and entertainment giants.  So when I heard the UW Foster School of Business was bringing her into town for their “Redefining Leadership” series, it was a can’t miss opportunity.

First impression – I was shocked and pleased by how personable and affable she is.  It was a fairly conservative environment – a large auditorium and a moderator doing Q+A – but she was candid and downright funny.  The moderator did not take us through much of a story arc in his line of questions, so rather than recap the event in paragraph form, here are a few bullets that stood out.

On teamwork:

(paraphrase) Business schools put too much emphasis on “teamwork.”  Individuals have different goals, even within a team.  It’s unnatural to think that in a team setting, you can all be motivated by the same thing.  Learn teamwork on a sports field instead.

On Corporate Strategy vs Executing on Tactics:

It’s tempting to go into a firestorm and put your head down, and ignore what the road looks like outside the fire.  3,4, or 5 year plans never work.  In fact, any plan that you had in December is now wrong.  But there are always people in a company who love thinking long term about what the company should be doing down the road.

You need to build your business so that 70-80% is stable and going to be consistent, but that 20-30% can change and be changed to adapt quickly to what is happening around you.

Thinking is a skill.  Understand when you have someone who is good at it.

On Joining Yahoo:

Yahoo had been working with tons of data, but hadn’t actually made any real decisions for a while.  She needed to make a couple of decisions quickly to shake people up.  She also found that people were hungry for interaction, or even communication, from the executive level.

In her first 5 weeks, Bartz held 45 minute conversations with staff members, and always ended the conversation with, “Who else should I be talking to?”  From this, a clear pattern of thought leaders and key influencers developed, which didn’t necessarily map to an org chart.  The standout members at Yahoo were recognized by multiple people she talked to.

The Yahoo Ad campaign was meant as much for the staff as more the consumers.  She needed to show the staff that Yahoo was relevant, and being on national TV helped that.

On Change:

Fail. Fast. Forward.  You have to try new things.  If you aren’t ever failing, you aren’t innovating.  But make sure you can fail quickly, so you can change course and try the next thing.  Always be looking forward.  Don’t dwell on the failures, and don’t penalize people.  Take the learnings to the next test.  

If you look at life, the biggest mistakes are always the things you didn’t do.

Change is a muscle.  If you don’t exercise it, you lose the ability to do it, or do it well.

You need to have a good understanding about what in your business needs to stay stable, and what parts can change.  Know that your people need to be able to handle that.  

You need people who can be interrupted without negative effects.

On Culture:

You have to pick your battles and understand what is really important.  Your culture is secondary to having a company that a) Makes Decisions, b) Moves Forward and c) Gets Things Done. You can’t sacrifice any of these things for “company culture.” 

On Identying Strong Performers, and Career Development:

Think of a bell curve.  It’s really easy to spot the folks on either extreme.  Your top performers easily stand out.  They volunteer for projects, they are the ones you think of first to solve a problem for you, and they tend to self-select and join in a pack together.  So, they are pretty recognizable.  

But the harder thing is to find the people with that same potential, and stretch them to turn them into top performers.  They may be quieter, or not on the projects that get as much recognition.  So it’s important to find these folks and put them in positions where they can become stars.  They aren’t the average employees making the most noise – so you need to look hard for the hidden talents and figure out ways to cultivate these quiet ones with potential.

On the other end, you need to be direct and clear with the ones who slow you down.  They’ll perform well somewhere, it’s just not necessarily in your company.  The worst thing is that the rest of the team knows when an employee is a bad fit.  and it makes management look bad when they don’t help them move on to a place where they can be more successful.  You do everyone a favor when you cut them loose and help them find a better fit.

Every employee should be involved with sales.  Sales is not a dirty world.  You simply can never really understand what your company does until you actually try to sell it to someone.  Understanding why someone says “no” to you will help you figure out what your company can do better.

On Personal Life vs A Business Life

Yahoo delivers 100 Billion emails a day, and filters out another 600 Billion spam messages.  When their servers go down, it’s a big deal.  But, Yahoo doesn’t cure cancer.  It’s a web site.  Your job is probably not curing cancer either.  Enjoy yourself, experiment, laugh – don’t pretend you are more important than you are just because you have a boss or client who wants something.  Chances are pretty good the world will go on without you completing that one task you are stressing out about.  

Don’t add pressure to yourself by thinking about the “would haves, should have or could haves.”

On Developing Employees:

Annual reviews are a waste of time.  Yahoo quit doing them.  Instead employees and managers are tasked with making sure they have a substantive conversation at least once a quarter.

An annual review is useless because you have an opportunity for feedback, and have to sit on it for 6 months.  You wouldn’t wait 6 months to reprimand your puppy for going to the bathroom in the house, why treat a human that way?

Difference Between Succeeding in Technology vs Other Industries:

At the end of the day, business fundamentals are the same no matter what.  a) Understand what your customer wants, and deliver it.  b) Measure your success and failures.  c) Recruit and cultivate talented employees. 

New Ad Report – TV $ Down, Social Media $ Up

Posted by Andy Boyer in Advertising, Big Businesses, Marketing, Media, Social Media

You always have to take these kind of reports with a grain of salt, but Mediapost reports on a new Forrester Research/Association of National Advertisers survey, based on responses from 104 U.S. advertisers in 21 industries, including Cisco Systems, GlaxoSmithKline, ING, Kraft, Marriott, State Farm and Clorox.  All told, they represent nearly $14 billion in media budgets.

Here are some highlights from the report, which kind of illustrates how many irrational people there are making marketing decisions: 

  • TV marketers plan to spend 41% of their media budgets on television in 2010 — the same level as a year ago.  (However, this is down from the 58% level of two years ago.)
  • BUT…62% percent of companies say TV ads have become less effective in the past two years due to increased advertising clutter. 

So, even though 62% of the marketers admit TV ads are less effective than before, they are going to spend the same amount as last year.  Read: “Buying TV is easy, and I like hanging out with ad agency folks on sound stages.”

More insight:

  • Virtually all advertisers believe the TV industry needs new audience metrics beyond reach and frequency; 82% of respondents would be interested in ratings for individual commercials.
  • BUT…While 78% are interested in targeting consumers more precisely, only 59% would be willing to pay a premium for it.

So, advertisers admit the TV spot is hard to measure.  But no one wants to give up any of their media buy to improve targeting capabilities.  Read: “Buying TV is easy, and I can blame the product guys if the ads aren’t working.”

More:
  • 80% of advertisers say future branded entertainment deals will grow. And in 2010, 38% say they will spend more on branded entertainment as an alternative to the 30-second commercial.
  • 19% say the 30-second spot will be dead in 10 years, down from 28% a year ago.

So, advertisers want to move away from 30 second spots and into branded entertainment.  But these same people think the 30 second spot will live forever. 

Now the good stuff:

  • Social media, Web advertising and search are stealing budgets from TV and other media. Of those surveyed, 77% said they would be moving TV dollars to social media this year; 73% plan to shift money to online advertising, and 59% will be spending more on search-engine marketing and 46% on e-mail marketing. Other non-TV traditional media doesn’t seem to be part of this trend. Only 15% said they plan to increase spending in traditional media such as radio, outdoor, magazines or newspapers.

Advertisers want targeting (online advertising, email and SEM).  They want stronger engagement (Social). And they don’t see much future potential in radio, outdoor, etc… The question is, do they expect lower CPM’s in these channels in comparison to TV?  If they want to shift budgets to mediums where they can get a direct measurement of success, why don’t they want to force TV to do a better job of measuring?

There’s an obvious part of this survey that is missing, which illustrates how there’s still a knowledge chasm.  No one asked how many of these companies are going to integrate their social and online campaigns with a TV buy.  It’s obvious TV is still needed – at least for the largest 104 advertisers – to drive awareness and brand.  But it’s not an either/or.  These guys have the chance to use the 30 second spot to drive branded entertainment deals online, and capitalize on an engaged social audience.  For me, how these 104 companies are going to integrate those campaigns is the really interesting question.

A Few Notes About the Tiger Woods Debacle

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Marketing, Media, Sports

Yes, I’ve succumbed to the Tiger Woods scandal.  I think there are a few items of this story that make it different than the ordinary tabloid affair.

1) The effect this will have on golf:  Golfers didn’t become multi-millionaires for consistently finishing 13th until Tiger got to town.  A huge percentage of golf fans are simply Tiger fans.  Phil vs Tiger is completely different than Phil vs “That other guy.” Sponsors were paying big money for Tiger, which meant TV networks could charge more money to Golf advertisers, which more money was going into the Prize Pool of each tournament.  Companies are already having to trim marketing costs.  This is a great excuse for companies to pull money out of Golf.  If you were the 45th ranked player in the world, you may have found this funny when the story broke, but your check for finishing 13th just got smaller.

2) Why the Tabloid Web sites are crushing the Sports sites: I can’t think of a better example of the power of search driving news consumption.  For the reasons listed in Section 1, the sports sites like ESPN.com have been loathe to dig too deeply into the story.  There’s a lot of hand waving and things like, “Yeah, Tiger’s in some controversy over there, but let us tell you all about the upcoming Alabama vs Texas game.”  ESPN needs this to go away, so they can get back to the business of reporting on Golf and Tiger’s domination in the sport.  To the sports sites, Tiger taking time out of competing in Golf is comparable to the New York Yankees deciding to sit out one season.  Or having the the entire rosters of both 2009 NBA All-Star teams take a year off to travel the globe.   But, ESPN’s decision to pretend it’s not a “big deal” is not fooling anyone.  People are just going to their favorite search engine, typing in “Tiger Woods,” and getting the juicy stories from other sources, like TMZ.  It’s another example of why in the news aggregation business, we really need to ensure all web sites get a level playing field to broadcast across.  You can’t trust news sources if they are in the pockets of the people paying the bills. 

3) Seeing the Inside Mechanics of Tiger’s Spin Machine: I don’t know about you, but I’ve been shocked at what seems to be near PR incompetence from Team Tiger.  Now, it’s possible that his transgressions are so monumental that cutting them down to 2 porn stars, a pseudo-madame, a reality show wanna-be and a few other random floozies, is actually a big win because they’ve managed to keep the other 90 quiet.  If that’s the case, then all of Team Tiger should be ashamed for not reigning him in earlier.  It’s also possible that their whole strategy of keeping him away from cameras for the last 10 years was specifically designed because they knew he’s been an eventual PR nightmare ready to explode.  But it does seem like all of the companies with money invested in Tiger should have been able to assemble a PR “Dream Team” to handle this better.

4) The Unfortunate Duck and Cover Strategy:  With some regard to number 3 above, I think it’s incredibly sad that Team Tiger’s best exit plan is to throw Elin under the bus.   According to some web sites, there’s a claim that Elin is demanding, “Your family or your golf.”  This would be a convenient excuse for Tiger to disappear to Dubai for 12 months and avoid having to discuss this issue with anyone.  The public perception would be that he “loves his family so much,” that he’s giving up golf to make it right by them.  The reality would be that the wife would be placed in the position of “Bad Guy” to anyone who watches golf.  Plus, sponsors, other golfers, advertisers and golf fans would all be cheated by having a year without the best player in the world.  The great thing about team sports, is that no matter what mess you find yourself in, you have an obligation to the rest of your team.  Alex Rodriguez couldn’t take a year off.  He had to go out every day and get heckled by fans, because he was ONE of 25 New York Yankees.  Kobe Bryant was ONE of 12 LA Lakers.  Those guys had to stick their pride in their back pockets and still compete against the best athletes in the world.  It would be sad if Tiger used the excuse of “My wife doesn’t want me to play” as a way to duck the criticism he deserves. 

Those are the thoughts of the top of my head.

A Few Thoughts From Ad Week

Posted by Andy Boyer in Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

To the faithful 49 of you, my apologies for my week away.  I headed out to New York for “Ad Week” and a bunch of interesting meetings and assorted merriment.  Anyway, I read an article a few weeks or months ago about some poor guy who told everyone on his blog that he was leaving town for a 2 week vacation, only to to return to a house devoid of all his valuables.  So until I get a Doberman, I think talking about leaving town, or alerting people to when I’m out fo town, is a bad idea.

Now, I’m no prolific blogger who is going to give you a play by play from all the evnts at Ad Week in New York.  Clay and I hung near the more social media related events and seminars, and here are a couple of things I took from the week.

1) I’m not sure where all the unemployed people are in New York, because every good restaurant in that town is still hard to get seated in, even at 10:00pm on a Monday night.

2) At the risk of annoying all my friends and partners in the Ad World, I posit this theory.  It’s possible that the explosion of Social Media is a direct result of consumer backlash against advertising.  People (aka Consumers) got tired of a one way communication channel.  Then things like blogs, facebook and Twitter appeared, and suddenly everyone had a way to talk to each other and ignore the advertising.  Only after the social media attack on advertising did the agencies decide to embrace Social Media.  In fact, the agencies did everything they could to dismiss it as a passing fad.  And so now, to hear all the agencies on stage talking about the power of Social Media and how they are integrating it into client strategy, is kind of funny to me.  It’s kind of like a coal or oil company suddenly recommending what solar panels you should buy.  It’s just my theory.

3) A quick note to all panelists and keynoters: Please dial down the hyperbole about “Social Media Revolutions” or “The Incredible Power of Social Media.”  The reality is that consumers have always wanted to tell companies what they think of them.  They’ve always wanted to tell the Slurpee Product Manager that Banana sucks and to quick wasting a spigot on such a dumb flavor.  Or that the battery life of their laptop needs to be as long as a movie, otherwise it’s worthless.  People have had these opinions forever.  And now they have a megaphone, and their friends have megaphones.  It shouldn’t be a gigantic revelation to think that people who spend money on a product they like would want to have interaction with that product and provide ways the company could make the consuming experience more enjoyable and effective.  I’m not saying your keynotes are wrong, you can just dial down the rhetoric a little.

4) Before I get accused of being negative, I want to add that I think it’s great that the agencies are now going full steam into figuring out how to build creative campaigns for customer engagement.  I’ve always believed the creative teams at the big agencies are more representative of Joe Consumer than Malcolm Corporation III.  And now instead of using their creative powers of good in a way that cost them part of their soul, they’ll be able to unleash themselves in ways that develop connection and goodness.  So I think we’re going to see some really cool experiments in the next 12 months.  

5) I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Ad week was going on the same day of the UN sessions where Khadaffi (sp?) and the Iranian President (whose name I won’t even attempt Spellcheck to fight with) went off on crazy soliloquies.

Overall, we had a great time chatting with partners, clients, friends and colleagues.  Lots of neat announcements and fun times.  Thanks to everyone who made it a good, fun and productive week.

Did FC Barcelona Force Sounders FC Into Their First Marketing Non-Win?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Seattle, Sports

If you’ve read this blog a few times, you know that I have unabashedly praised the management of Sounders FC since Day 1.  I admit I’m a little biased due to my previous professional relationship with a person in a high level of management there, plus my overall interest in soccer.  But I have objective arguments for how much I admire their work.

That being said, I’m not going to shy away from saying that tonight’s match with FC Barcelona left me underwhelmed for the first time out of the 11 or 12 games I’ve attended so far.  On one hand, maybe my expectations were too high.  The best team in the world comes to town, I want to see magic.  And in the first half, I saw some really cool things from Messi, Xavi, Henry, etc..

Then a funny thing happenned at halftime.  The Sounders decided that this was indeed a friendly, and they didn’t need to play any regulars for the second 45 minutes.  After all, the team is 2/3 of the way through their season, in a playoff hunt and coming off their worst loss of the year.  It made tactical sense to rest the starters.

And so for the first time all year, they forgot who they were.  They confused themselves with the Seahawks and 1996-2003 Mariners.  They forgot that out of the 65,000+ who came to the game tonight, 25-30,000 of them had never been to a Sounders game before.  They forgot that the MLS is the MLS.  And for the first time all year, they forgot to put on a show.

The result was 45 minutes of second half football that resembled 2 people kicking a ball of yarn away from a cat.  The Barcelona second team seemed to be under strict orders not to attack the goal until at least 10 passes had been completed.  (And yes, we were counting as they passed the ball easily from one side of the field to another.)  The Sounders first team is a very competitive MLS team.. With all due respect, the Sounders second team is made up of guys who can’t play on a first team in Norway or Sweden.  I don’t say this with contempt.  I’m just saying when I fire up my Xbox 360 and play Fifa 09, a game with about 1.2 gajillion players in its database, the guys on the Sounders reserve squad are not in that database.

So, imagine you are the Sounders management.  Your immediate response is, “Andy, what do you want?  I brought you Chelsea and Barcelona.  Oh, and we’re in 2nd place.  Oh, and we made it to the US Open Cup Final. So take your blog and smoke it.”

And that is an argument I can totally agree with.  So maybe next year, bring me one of Chelsea and Barcelona.  And maybe bring me someone else not so good that we can actually compete with.  Maybe AC Milan and Watford.  Or Tottenham and PSV.   Or maybe the MLS needs to give the teams a week off o they can book friendlies and not get screwed by the schedule.

My rambling point, is that the MLS lost out tonight when Barcelona’s subs playes Seattle’s subs for 45 minutes on front of 65,000 people that paid full price to see at least one of the teams play starters all night long.  Or if you were going to sub everyone out, at least do it at the 50 minute mark and pull them off the field to a standing ovation.  Instead, we got one half of fun soccer, then the teams sneaking the players off the field at halftime, with a level of play in the second half that simply confirmed for soccer haters why they dislike the sport.   Blame it on the MLS, blame it on Barcelona, or blame it on the Sounders.  But I think for the first time, they allowed a crowd to leave the stadium saying, “I don’t get what the excitement is all about.”

Girls in Lingerie = Education?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Media

Ok, this is whay I deserve for watching Fox Soccer Channel on a Saturday evening.

Channel 401 is awesome if you want to see some of the most random commercials from companies who can’t afford stations that receive am actual rating point. But this one takes the cake.

Imagine a young 19 year old girl standing in her lingerie. Starting with some line like, “Guys, don;t you wish you were out of your pajamas right now?” And then she goes on to tell us how important it is to get an education, and since watching soccer on a Saturday night obviously makes us uneducated, we should get an online degree.

You might think they’d spend the 60 seconds talking about a brand we could Google or Bing (heretofore to be simply called “Bingle”) later.  But instead they have bought a bunch of urls to test their ad effectiveness, and thus drive the unique url the whole time.  So they own http://10connect.com, http://20connect.com, http://30connect.com etc all the way up to 100.  (Trust me if you don’t believe me.)

Anyway, I’d love to understand more about this campaign.  Do lingerie-clad teenagers really drive signups for online education?  Weird. 

A Good Article on Community Stadiums

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Seattle, Sports

With the Sounders selling out their entire season, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the MLS is not sharing the same attendance success.

BigSoccer.com has a good article about how Frisco, TX (suburn of Dallas), used their MLS squad as a way to get an entire community complex developed, and how everything works together in a nice synergy.  Perhaps there’s a way to do something similar with a basketball/hockey/concert arena type complex in Seattle?