IMV50: Interactive Promotions

The following is a transcript for IMV50: Interactive Promotions. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. Now here’s your host Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host Paul Lewis and today’s topic is interactive promotions. Our guest today is Josh Linkner. He’s the CEO of E-Prize. Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Linkner:

Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Paul Lewis:

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what E-Prize does?

Josh Linkner:

Sure. We’re the largest interactive promotion company in the world. So we build, design, manage and run online programs across the world. We run programs such as sweepstakes, games, contests and loyalty programs for 73 of the top 100 brands. So we’re doing work with folks like Coca-Cola, Proctor and Gamble, Citibank and Disney all the way down the long tail of small and medium sized advertisers.

Paul Lewis:

Great. So obviously interactive promotion is an area that’s seen a lot of growth. I know that your company has seen a good deal of growth as well. Tell us a little bit about the benefits that brands see from interactive promotion. Why are so many brands turning to this type of method to promote and build awareness about their products and services?

Josh Linkner:

There’s a couple of key areas of results that interactive promotions are just terrific at driving. The first one is that it helps introduce advertisers to their previously anonymous customers. Think about buying key word ads and you get a bunch of people to your website and they come and go and you paid for them and they leave and they’re anonymous that doesn’t do you a lot of good as an advertiser. Where marketing is really headed is data driven relationships. So it could be the chance to win or a coupon or loyalty program point but some incentive that sits up in front is the most powerful mechanism to convert an anonymous browser to a registered data driven one to one relationship.

The other key thing that we really do is interactive promotions help motivate specific human behavior. So all marketers want their audience to do something. It might be visit a website or take a test drive or tell a friend or buy product A instead of product B. What we tend to do with interactive promotions is wrap the right incentives around a desired action in order to move the needle in favor of the advertiser. We live in a what’s-in-it-for-me society so we have to take advantage of that fact on behalf of our clients.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah. I think that when we talk to clients and other people in this space one of the things that strikes me is it’s important to distinguish a different value in the response that advertising has. So before it was very much just a, “Was it seen, was my television advertisement seen? Is there a brand awareness?” Now what we’re seeing is that across the funnel of responses. There is, “Are they aware of my brand? But then through a prize or promotion did they come to my website? Did they learn more about my product or service? Did they go through specific actions that showed they interacted with my product or service or understood a differentiating point about my service offering and then hopefully continued to incentivize them to download a white paper, a case study or more information, a 3-D fly through of my product?” So it’s very important to actually differentiate those stratas. I think that’s a great analogy.

Josh Linkner:

You couldn’t be more dead on. You know, the marketing world of the past which was lowest common denominator, shoot your message out there and hope for the best when there was three network TV stations - that’s really gone. You used the word action a lot just now and I think action is what it’s all about. It’s getting consumers to take a specific action. Furthermore, being able to deliver immediate and measurable results. It’s not okay to just have a cool TV ad that makes people laugh on the Super Bowl and you can measure brand impact eight years later. Right now in the marketing world it’s all about driving immediate and specific measurable results. Interactive promotions are a fantastic way to do it.

Paul Lewis:

What are some of the things - you mentioned about a Super Bowl commercial and things like that - how are people using interactive promotions to make sure the target really identifies and understands the brand as opposed to just pure brand awareness?

Josh Linkner:

Well a lot of times inside interactive promotions we create these really rich brand emmersive experiences where you’re really getting a consumer engaged deeply in the brand. We’re what they call lean-forward advertising. You think about old advertising, king of leaning back in your chair or maybe paying attention, maybe not. Who knows about relevancy? In this case you have an active consumer leaning forward, really getting engaged with the brand.

An example I could give you would be a program we did recently for Westin Hotels in which consumers were able to go online, register to win a prize and the way that they did so was designing a Westin suite. So there was like a blank suite on their screen and they could drag and drop furniture and wall coverings and electronic and colors and scenery. So they could create their own beautiful Westin suite and then people would vote on which was the best design. So here you’ve got people actively engaged thinking about what it’s going to feel like and look like to be inside a Westin hotel. Again, I can’t imagine a more brand emmersive experience.

Paul Lewis:

Right. When you look at the cost per time engaged as a potential metric the fact that they are probably as they’re custom designing it they’re spending several minutes or more as opposed to a 30 second spot. And I liked the whole idea of lean forward as opposed to sit back. They’re actively engaged, consciously thinking about the brand. It’s not a subconscious thing which is a much higher attention rate and a bigger impact and judge hopefully of future behavior.

Josh Linkner:

That’s exactly right. Just to give you a quick sense - so obviously a 30 second TV spot it 30 seconds. It’s there and gone. We’re seeing when running a typical promotion average time spent on that promotion is about three minutes and we’re seeing average frequency. In other words people coming back day after day to play, getting more chances to win, be more engaged with the brand is about six times. So you think about a 30 second spot now is a three minute engagement times six. So you were taking 30 seconds and turning it into 18 minutes of lean forward brand engagement.

Paul Lewis:

Wow. That’s a big impact. For someone who hasn’t used interactive promotions as part of their branding and promotion strategy so far, what are some key factors that lead to an interactive promotion being successful and could you also tell us some of the metrics that you use to define whether something’s successful or not?

Josh Linkner:

Success is really determined based on objectives. We tend to work in about eight different primary categories or marketing objectives such as driving more sales or creating awareness of a new product or product launch. So depending on which objective they’re going after you’re going to measure it differently. Some of them include number of registrations, amount of time spent, clearly impact on sales or decrease on cost per unit to drive a sales environment. So again, the nice thing about all digital marketing but specifically interactive promotion is that it’s a very tangible and measurable type impact.

Paul Lewis:

When a brand is starting out with this do you sit down with them and help them to figure out which of those metrics are most relevant to them and how to measure it and how to make sure that the promotion that they have is really going to drive all of their key business objectives? Is that like a consultative phase in the engagement?

Josh Linkner:

You know that’s exactly right. Certainly our technology company but our strategists and account executives sit down with each client and really map out what are we trying to accomplish here. Our tag line is, “Interactive promotion results.” So we say, “We mean that. What are the results that we’re trying to accomplish?” We work on a very specific way to measure those key objectives. So you never want to get to the end of a program and say, “Hey, did it work,” and you client says, “Gee, I don’t know.” It’s really got to be much more of a situation where you can see a legitimate score card if you will and say, “Okay, we can track and measure the results of this campaign.” That’s something that most clients don’t come in knowing and something that we advise and coach them on along the way.

Paul Lewis:

Do you find that there are certain types of interactive promotions that are more effective for a certain type of product or a consumer market that if you’ve seen that before you can already recommend to a client, “Well you may want to consider this because we found this very effective with this branch of consumers”?

Josh Linkner:

For sure. There are certain programs that work specifically with different types of demographics as well as certain type of product. Again, also back to our different key objectives so for example if you’re trying to drive a customer from an offline environment to an online environment, offline could be an event, it could be a print ad, it could be a retail visit we often use a technique called an e-decoder which is a physical game piece with a colorful window on it. So the customer goes online, registers for the promotion - again, so we’re capturing data on that consumer - holds the game piece up to the screen and there’s a scrambled image that appears on the screen. By looking through the game piece, what it reveals is that consumer is an instant winner. So it’s a very powerful tactic, again, to drive offline to online behavior. Again, depending on the industry there’s certain things that are going to work really well with teen girls and certain things that will work very well with 50+ year old men. A lot of it also ties really into the demographic makeup.

Paul Lewis:

Sure. Do you have guidelines that you recommend to clients as to how much they should invest in the promotion itself and how much they should invest in the promotion of the promotion and how much they’ll spend in offline and online media to drive their target consumers to see the promotion?

Josh Linkner:

That’s a great question. Interactive promotions are really a magnifier of direct response rates. So if an advertiser is already spending X dollars in marketing and they’re getting Y results they’re just going to amp up the results even with the same media spent by attaching an interactive promotion to it. For example if you spend $10 million in advertising you put in E-Prize promotion or really any interactive promotion on top of it all of a sudden you get $15 million of response. The advertising that you spent obviously increased in value. That being said as a benchmark we like to see at least a three to one ratio but a lot of times it’s many, many, many times higher than that. So an example I just gave, $10 million of advertising someone might only spend $100,000.00 or $50,000.00 on a promotion but be able to see a huge improvement in the results of their previous advertising spent.

Paul Lewis:

So really the way to look at it is it’s maximizing the value of your current advertising spend for in some cases pennies on the dollar?

Josh Linkner:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. More importantly most marketers don’t sit around thinking about bizarre metrics. They might say, “Gee, I’m watching a new product,” or, “I’ve got back to school coming up. How am I going to deal with these current marketing challenges?” So experts like us are the ones that can help map in marketing language what an advertiser might be thinking to something that will drive specific results.

Paul Lewis:

Well as we’re wrapping up here what predictions do you have for the future of online promotions? What do you see coming down the pipe? Obviously you’ve got a little bit of a bird’s eye view compared to the rest of us. What do you see happening? How’s the landscape changing?

Josh Linkner:

One of the biggest things that we’re seeing is really data driven marketing taking a bigger foothold. We run programs all the time, we call them intelligent promotions. So in the past everybody saw the same marketing messages, old, young, rich, poor, whatever. Everyone saw the same message. Now what happens is when someone registers for a promotion the minute they hit submit the entire experience thereafter is dynamically generated based on consumer information.

So in other words a single female in Miami might see a very different creative design than a married guy with two kids from L.A. or a heavy user might be prompted to a larger purchase where a competitive user of a product might be offered a switching type coupon. So the idea, again, is that once we capture consumer data rather than just saying, “Oh hey, it’s nice that we have consumer data,” using the data to provide much more relevancy. Everything that you read in marketing and tons and tons of studies say that relevancy is what really drives results. So again, using data to drive relevancy.

The other one clearly is mobile marketing. When we use the word interactive and online maybe five years ago that meant the same thing. Today we’re doing “interactive” campaigns on mobile devices and kiosks. So interactive doesn’t have to mean sitting in front of the computer with a web browser. We think that trend is something that will certainly continue.

Paul Lewis:

I agree. I think data driven relevancy and mobile marketing are going to be huge components of any advertiser or marketer’s future. So it’s great for them to begin to think about those elements today if they haven’t already. Well we’re at the portion of the show where we move onto Truth of Marketing. Are you ready to play?

Josh Linkner:

Let’s rock and roll.

Paul Lewis:

All right. Here’s your first question. Windows Vista will prove to be Microsoft’s turning point where they will own a diminishing share of the operating system market for home computing in the future?

Josh Linkner:

I think it’s marketing. I think Microsoft’s going to come roaring back. I think you’d really be making a mistake to bet against Microsoft. They are vicious competitors and they always have a way of bouncing back with vigor.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, I would say the folk at Redmond are the best in the world at moving from 2nd place or 3rd place to being No. 1. So it’s hard to ever count them out in any race.

Josh Linkner:

Exactly.

Paul Lewis:

All right. What about AOL? Will they find their niche and start growing revenues again or are they on a downward trend?

Josh Linkner:

I haven’t seen as much innovation as I would like to see. I know they are doing some things but unlike Microsoft who when they find themselves down come back ‘a swinging. I haven’t seen a whole lot of innovation. I’ve seen a lot of reorgs and changes but I haven’t seen anything that’s ground breaking, that’s really positioning them in the forefront. They certainly have been historically a great force in the Internet space and I’m not saying they’re going to go away but I really need to see something more bright and brilliant coming out of our friends at AOL to give them the thumbs up.

Paul Lewis:

All right, so last prediction. Are you a Sox fan or are you thinking Colorado Rockies?

Josh Linkner:

You know, I’m an Internet guy that’s staring at a screen all day long. So I really couldn’t comment on it so much. Although I’m a jazz fan so I’d be happy to tell you anything about jazz music. But I don’t know that I’m the right guy to make that call.

Paul Lewis:

All right. Well fair enough. I think you’re allowed one pass because you definitely stuck your foot in the pool on the other two. So Josh, we really enjoyed having you on the show. I think it’s given a lot of our audience some great ideas about what is interactive promotions and why it’s so important for them to consider adding that to their marketing plans. Again, for the audience if you have other questions, you’d like to learn more about this type of interactive promotion you can definitely check out Internet Marketing Voodoo or you can go to EPrize.com. Again, Josh, thanks for being on the show.

Josh Linkner:

Thank you. Take care.

Announcer:

For more information on this week’s topic visit InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, The Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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