IMV11 : Integrating Online into Traditional Advertising

The following is a transcript for IMV11 : Integrating Online into Traditional Advertising. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 11. I’m your host Ted Murphy and with me today is Andy Fletcher, President and CEO of the Fletcher Martin advertising agency. Welcome to the show today Andy.

Andy Fletcher:

Thanks very much.

Ted Murphy:

Andy if you could tell everybody a little bit about Fletcher Martin so that they understand what it is you do.

Andy Fletcher:

We’re a full-service agency located in Atlanta. And we’re part of the MDC Group of Agencies which is a group headquartered out of Toronto and includes other agencies such as Crispin Porter and Kirshenbaum Bond and folks like that.

Ted Murphy:

And how long have you guys been around?

Andy Fletcher:

Our agency has been around since longer than I’ve been here. Approaching 30 years --

Ted Murphy:

Wow.

Andy Fletcher:

I’ve been here about ten years and matter of fact exactly ten years.

Ted Murphy:

Well, Andy, I thought a great topic to talk about today would be integrating online marketing in traditional marketing campaigns. Obviously you guys have been around since long before the explosion of interactive technologies and I wanted to see what your agency’s take was on integrating these two mediums.

Andy Fletcher:

It’s really interesting for our group because you’re right we have been around a long time and in fact we’ve been pretty heavily steeped in the traditional retail worlds, sort of the brick and mortar retail world. And we are really getting far more active and far more successful in getting our clients to understand the role of the online world even when they in fact may not actually be vending or selling online, but the role that the online activity has and in fact enhancing their brand at a more traditional retail level.

Ted Murphy:

And are many of your clients dividing their efforts into different silos like television, radio and direct mail or are you keeping the branding consistent through the channels? How are you typically working with your clients?

Andy Fletcher:

I would say that with the amount of traditional retail business that we do that online is sort of a weird stepchild for many marketers, not specifically pointing at our clients. But it has normally been a rather sort of segregated approach to business as far as activity at the retail level, in-store signage, things like that. And the more traditional use of electronic media, TV, radio seems to have their own way of doing things. And then traditional direct selling with all the insert business and print business and newspaper mailbox delivered types of promotions it has been sort of segregated into silos. However no one seemed to really want to grab this part of the business until I’d say the last couple of years. It seemed to be something that "Hey I’m not selling on line, so I don’t need to market online."

Ted Murphy:

And how are you seeing, within your own organization, how people are adjusting to making online part of that marketing mix. Because obviously you have people that have been doing television for years or radio for years or direct mail for years and it’s something new for them and they may feel uncomfortable with that. How are you changing the culture at your own organization to say hey guys this is part of our future whether we like it or not? And how do you get them to accept that?

Andy Fletcher:

Well it really gets down to the more traditional things that an agency like ours would have normally done and we’ll call those things, you know TV, radio, outdoor print type activities as well as you know in-store design. Those types of disciplines have become harder to differentiate you know for each of the agencies out there doing it. As a matter of fact many of the clients may in fact have as much skill strategically, maybe not executionally, but strategically in those areas as their agencies do.

One of the things that we tell our people here is the way that you maintain the level of trust and respect with your client is to always know things that they may not know. Not just to know the things that they also know. And this whole online world has given all of our people an opportunity to bring new thinking, new knowledge, those types of information proposals that our clients don’t, they’re not currently looking at. They don’t have that level of awareness and it’s given us a reason to learn more very, very fast and to bring it to bear because it gives us a chance to have sort of an expertise again.

Ted Murphy:

How have you encouraged your people to do that inside your organization? What gets them excited about this?

Andy Fletcher:

Honestly, it’s basically saying you’re now being judged on it. If I’m not seeing for instance recommendations going from the account people to our clients that include online every time we make a new sort of campaign proposal, it’s required that there be an online component of it. It has to be part of the central idea. We actually like our creators now to think in non-traditional media and I know that’s sort of an over, over-used word and frankly not even true anymore because the online media is becoming as traditional as everything else. But we don’t want people to start with, well how about a new TV campaign or how about a new radio campaign or new print campaign. We really want them to think of the idea first and really move to the online application of an idea before we look at the more traditional application of an idea. And it’s really changing the way people think.

The other thing we try and do is expose them to companies like yours and make sure that they have good relationships and that we understand the type of support we can get from the more specialized firms. And then frankly there is you know tremendous opportunity for education and knowledge through seminars and things like that. And we literally have provided enormous opportunity for our people to go get smart.

Ted Murphy:

Are you seeing a lot of this change through the industry in other traditional ad agencies that are starting to say, "Hey, maybe we need to look at some other options here." You know obviously everybody’s kind of competing for the same dollars in the end. People with the best ideas win. So are you seeing some of that happen in other agencies?

Andy Fletcher:

Agencies across America, we just came and really across the world, we are a member of an organization called Magnet, not to be confused with the MDC ownership group. And it’s a group of about 45 independent agencies, primarily in the United States, but also in Europe and South America. And literally two weeks ago we just had a complete seminar on everything that’s going on, not that you can do it in two days, but the newest things that are going on in the online world and we’re really seeing the more traditional agencies understanding that if they describe themselves as a traditional agency today they’re really saying "I’m behind the times." They simply must think in this world. We believe that the consumer has taken control of the message and the marketer really doesn’t have control of the message anymore. And it’s because of the Internet. The consumer, particularly younger consumers are saying, "You know what I’ll determine when, where and how I’m willing to receive information from you." And normally the way they are willing to receive it is online.

They’re not watching television, television ratings are dropping. Your ability to reach the size audience that you need to give a demo is not happening with broadcast right now even including cable. So I would say our entire industry has had to wake up to say you know what, if you’re not just as good at this as you are at TV, radio, outdoor and some of these other things, you’re probably not headed to a very bright future.

Ted Murphy:

Yep. And how are you competing against things like TiVo and satellite radio and iPods? How is that affecting your television and your radio business?

Andy Fletcher:

Well, it’s having a tremendous effect. I mean so far, you know we look at satellite radio and it certainly has had an effect, but as a percentage of the total population it has not gotten a huge market share, yet, you know it’s still under 10 percent penetration. TiVo on the other hand is well over 20 percent market penetration level and with the fact that Direct and Dish, as well as you know all the major cable providers, you know Warner and Comcast and everybody else, they’re making that technology available to their subscribers. And it’s going to start escalating. Now what kind of affect it has? Well currently the biggest effect it has is time-shifting. You know people are not watching, they’re not seeing your message when you think they’re seeing it. Let’s say you’re a retailer and you want to run some advertising on Wednesday or Thursday and Friday for a sale you’re running this weekend. You can’t really assure that they’re gonna watch it before Monday because they time-shift when they watch programs. That’s assuming that they don’t fast forward through those, through the commercials.

Fortunately, so far TiVo’s been pretty good at not making it you know where you can actually program it, legally, to do that. But you know you get pretty good with that handheld device and you can start flipping pretty quickly if you want to. So it is having an effect. But it’s not just TiVo. It’s the fact that people are just not spending as much time watching television. It is fragmented to the point that you know right now, you know there was a point in time, say 20 years ago I bought three or four television networks and I could achieve about an 80% reach. Today I can buy six television networks and a dozen cable networks and still not reach 50% of the market.

Ted Murphy:

Yep. And then you also have things to contend with out there, the other technology that’s blocking advertising whether it be online or not so even if you look at emails, there’s technology that says okay just don’t load the images.

Andy Fletcher:

Right.

Ted Murphy:

So at least email you do see that or pop-up blockers and things like that so it seems for advertisers out there, no matter what we’re trying to do there’s somebody out there inventing a technology to circumvent what we’re trying to do.

Andy Fletcher:

There’s no question and that’s why we all just have to get better at how do we communicate without being intrusive? How do we communicate without interrupting? How can we communicate in a way that is acceptable and preferable to the user and I do believe that most of those opportunities are shifting more to an online environment.

Ted Murphy:

Let me play a call that we got here on our “800” number. And that’s actually, that’s actually “866” number, toll free number 1-866-206-4461 if you have any questions for us at Internet Marketing Voodoo and I’ll let you answer this question here.

Brent, CA:

Good afternoon Ted. I’ve been having a difficult time convincing my boss we should expand upon our online branding effort by possibly integrating podcast, online games or even doing an online promotion. He feels this would be too costly and ineffective and would rather spend the money only running television spots. Do you have any advice to offer and how you can show the value of an integrated approach to advertising?

Andy Fletcher:

Everything is about the consumer today. So not knowing who the consumer is for that product I can’t tell you if it’s more efficient. Whether he’s right or his boss is right. I can tell you if the audience skew is younger his efficiency is going away with television and his efficiency is increasing with online. And if it’s really young the whole gaming world is just mind-boggling right now. The Europeans have been sort of way out ahead of that from a more marketing oriented basis. I mean it seems like almost every marketer in Europe has some sort of game opportunity running over there. So if it’s young, man it’s a pretty easy sell. There’s plenty of statistics online that’ll tell you how many of these folks you’re reaching. If it’s an older audience then yeah, the boss might be right, you know he might want to stick with TV.

Ted Murphy:

When marketers are doing online initiatives, how do they need to adjust their expectations in terms of what they’re gonna get as opposed to television, radio and what, the types of numbers they’ve seen in the past?

Andy Fletcher:

I think the biggest, really the biggest issue is in both online and in traditional media is how accurate the tracking actually is in either case. I mean Nielsen is having significant problems supporting the numbers that they put out for television and radio audiences. Is it gonna be a smaller audience? It can be. Its certainly gonna be a smaller audience to track. But if in fact you’ve offered the consumer who views the message the opportunity to make the decision when and how to view it, then I think you probably have a more engaged viewer. A more engaged customer in the online environment.

Ted Murphy:

And speaking of tracking, how do you measure the success of an integrated campaign? Let’s say we’ve taken the time to make sure that our television pushes to the Web site and our radio pushes to the Web site and all these things are talking to each other and we’ve got a really integrated campaign. How do we measure that we’ve been successful?

Andy Fletcher:

Well at the end of the day every layer you add should add a layer of sales. So that should be the fundamental way you’re looking at what’s working and what’s not, is through sales. The other thing I think we all have to do is begin to realize that we don’t want to do everything. We don’t want to drive everything to the same web address, right? I mean we use techniques in direct response TV and direct response vehicles to track which medium is delivering, which vehicle within a medium is delivering. And I think that you have to apply the same principles too when you’re adding a layer of online or you’re adding traditional to your online activity. You know make sure that you can track it and you can with very simple, you know technologies that people can use.

Ted Murphy:

Yes in the same way you’d have different phone numbers on a --

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, you have different landing pages. You know whatever it might be. You can track. What a lot of folks in my really limited view do wrong is they send everybody to the home page regardless of what the message was to get them interested in learning more about your product, company or service. And frequently what you, what intrigued them in the communication doesn’t even exist on the home page.

Ted Murphy:

Yep, we see a lot of that with online ad-word buys where people are buying key words and all the key words go to the same place. So (a) there’s no tracking and (b) the message is all the same no matter what the hell the key word was.

Andy Fletcher:

And it’s confusing to the consumer because they have no idea which of the words got them there. That it may not be what they thought they were going to.

Ted Murphy:

Absolutely. Well Andy it’s been a great time with you. I hope you can come back on the show one day in the future. Everybody please check out Andy’s web site at, is it fletchermartin.com?

Andy Fletcher:

Yes.

Ted Murphy:

Absolutely. Great, thank you and have a great day.

Andy Fletcher:

Thanks a lot.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Download Top Ten Things to Know About Integrating Online into a Traditional Mix (PDF - 682.6KB)

Listen to the Integrating Online into Traditional Advertising podcast.

Contact MindComet about integrating online strategies into your traditional mix.

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