Download Traditional and digital marketing thrive in tandem

www.dmnews.com | April 2011 | 37
ROUNDTABLE
Jim Kabakow
President
and CEO,
Media Horizons
Brian Bolton
VP of marketing,
Bridgeline Digital
Carol Krol
Editor-in-Chief,
Direct Marketing
News
Tom Fenske
Owner,
Fenske Media
Corp.
Stacy Braun
SVP of marketing
and advertising,
AXA Equitable
Darrin Wilen
President,
Wilen Media
Peter Westerman
SVP of audience
marketing,
Ziff Davis
Enterprise
Larry Kimmel
CEO,
Direct Marketing
Association
Photos by Larry Ford
Bryan Trainor
VP of marketing,
Bulbs.com
Scott Drayer
Director of
marketing,
Paul Fredrick
Debbie Roth
VP of sales and
marketing,
Japs-Olson Co.
Ginny Musante
Director of
channel marketing,
Interactive
Entertainment
Business at
Microsoft Corp.
Traditional and
digital marketing
thrive in tandem
Direct and digital marketers today are tasked with defining and
refining the optimal marketing communications strategy based
on audience and objectives. That often includes marrying both
traditional direct marketing and digital media channels, whether
the marketer’s goal is customer retention or new customer
acquisition. Direct Marketing News convened a diverse group
of marketing executives in March for a roundtable, sponsored
by Kodak, to discuss this topic, including marketing integration
challenges and opportunities; the role of print and direct mail in
the overall marketing mix; how best to deploy behavioral targeting that is both meaningful and relevant; and the importance of
content in engaging customers. Participants also discussed the
role and merits of social media in the marketing toolkit.
Direct Marketing News: What role does print
and the traditional direct mail channel play in
your larger multichannel marketing strategy?
Jim Kabakow (Media Horizons): I don’t think
the effectiveness of the offline channels like print,
direct mail and inserts have changed. What’s really
happened is digital has become another effective
marketing channel. If you look at the overall spend,
digital, on a push media basis is still relatively small
compared to the other channels. Digital has given a
place for consumers to interact and transact, even if
they’re driven to a website by an offline channel.
Tom Fenske (Fenske Media Corp.): Mail is the
closer. The other media work hand-in-hand, opening the door: radio, billboards, newspapers and the
Internet. As we track every mailing, we see direct mail
bringing high response rates. The other channels are
valuable to the mix, but mail pays the bills.
Peter Westerman (Ziff Davis Enterprise):
Most of the revenue that we drive in our business
comes from digital media. Probably 85% of the company’s revenue at this point is from digital, but 90% of
the names that we acquire come in through our print
38 | April 2011 | www.dmnews.com
ROUNDTABLE
Left to right: Stacy
Braun, AXA; Peter
Westerman, Ziff Davis;
and Larry Kimmel, DMA
publications. We’ve started thinking about print vehicles almost like traditional, postal direct mail. That’s
the way we’re creating our relationships with our customers. We monetize through our digital events and
through lead generation activities. But all the research
that we’ve done internally and that our clients have
shared with us specific to print as a medium show that
it’s still very strong [as an information vehicle].
Some of the products that we sell, we sell them once.
It’s something that they buy for the future. We really
need to use direct mail as a way to retain [them].
Retention is a very big part of our business.
Bryan Trainor (Bulbs.com): We don’t use any
print. We don’t use any traditional channels. We are
growing right now and testing a lot of different online
programs. We’re doing a lot with paid search, as well
as free targeting and behavioral targeting. We’re
significantly growing within e-mail.
A lot of our marketing focus right now is organically
trying to build our marketing e-mail database. We’re
not in the position to buy a lot of lists, but we have a
16-person internal sales staff that is constantly working leads. I’m putting all my money towards online
because it’s getting me the best possible ROI.
Debbie Roth (Japs-Olson Co.): The integration really ties into what is your core. The core for so
many marketers continues to be direct mail. Your arm
cannot work without its connection to your body. The
nice thing about the core is that it is one of the easiest
ways to get measurable results. You can measure it a
lot easier than so many of the other channels.
Larry Kimmel (Direct Marketing Association): It’s very different by category. We just ran an
event for the nonprofit community. In the fundraising world for nonprofits, it’s about 95% mail. You’ve
heard about some success in mobile, but that’s not
scalable. In other categories, like online commerce, it’s
the converse. We see significant lifts when direct mail
is combined with other channels.
Stacy Braun (AXA Equitable): We’re marketing to the financial adviser or to the broker, as well
as marketing directly to the consumer to help create
brand awareness. That way, when they have that interaction with the intermediary, they’re familiar with
our product line.
With our captive agents, we’ve created a program
where they can select the direct marketing piece that
they want to use with their clients and customize it.
Direct Marketing News: One of the biggest
challenges for marketers is marketing integration. How are you solving that?
Westerman: We would never lead with something
like postal direct mail as the first element of the campaign. It’s expensive, and the cycle time from production to testing to feedback is much longer than our
business can tolerate. We’re going to always use digital first. We’re always going to use channels that are
“free” to us before we spend a considerable amount of
money on something like direct mail.
When we look at product launches now internally,
the first things that we do are all digital because
they’re relatively cost-free. When we send e-mail or
telerecruiting for something, or somebody’s tweeting
about something that we’re doing, we get pretty instantaneous feedback. It takes too long to gather that
through traditional direct mail.
Darrin Wilen (Wilen Media): The proper
integration really involves a strategy and the proper
synchronicity. We have a website called Where’s my
Mail, which allows us to track every piece of mail that
goes out. What we’re able to do is determine exactly
when our direct mail for clients will hit the home.
Then you can determine [when to] send an e-mail.
I’m putting
all my
money
towards
online
because
it’s getting
me the best
possible
ROI.”
Bryan Trainor
VP of marketing,
Bulbs.com
40 | April 2011 | www.dmnews.com
ROUNDTABLE
the Web because I want a ring, right? Later, when
he came home, we were doing something completely
different on the Web. Up pops a banner ad for a ring.
It led to a pretty awkward conversation. If I privately
was looking at my computer on a wedding site and
got that ad, I would have been clicking on it. Instead,
I had the opposite reaction. You really have to think
about the environment in which you are marketing.
Braun: We’re doing a lot of experimentation this year
with social media. What we’re finding in doing focus
groups on all of the exciting technologies and integrated ideas that are out there, is that you can’t rely
on consumers to integrate them. They really have to
stand on their own.
Direct Marketing News: There has been much
discussion and hand-wringing around behavioral
targeting. What is your approach?
Braun: We started with segmentation and really
understanding who are the customers that we want
to target. We’re a 150-year-old company, and we have
some contracts on the books that are 40 years old. We
have customers who don’t even know they own a contract from us. Trying to understand what products and
services we want to offer to these different segments of
the market was our first goal.
Now that we’ve identified our segments, it is understanding how these people think and how they
behave. We’re doing a lot of testing, working with our
counterparts at our group level, and doing overlays
with our existing customer base onto prospects.
Ginny Musante (Microsoft Corp.): We have
some behavioral targeting pilots right now that we’re
working on. One thing we’re thinking about very
seriously [regarding behavioral targeting] has to do
with contextual relevance. It gets back to right message, right person, right time. If you give someone a
message but it’s completely out of context, it can have a
negative effect.
Direct Marketing News: Can you give an ex-
Above: Ginny Musante,
Microsoft; Darrin Wilen,
Wilen Media
Kimmel: Can I make a point about behavioral targeting? I hate the term. It’s the wrong characterization of
what we’re doing. I don’t think we should ever use it.
What we’re doing is personalized messaging. If you
change the dialogue and the thought process of what
this is about, we’re trying to be helpful and supportive
of individual consumers. It’s not just semantics. It’s an
understanding of the service model that’s part of the
heart and soul of the direct marketer’s DNA.
Westerman: I think there are a couple of different
actors that we’re talking about regarding behavioral
targeting. I think people are appreciative if you’re
using data to give them things that are more relevant
to [them]. I think where that kind of targeting has
gotten a bad name is you have a lot of data brokers
and you have these aggregators who are aggregating
behavioral data and turning around and selling it to
people who don’t understand the context in which the
information was gathered and they’re using it for inappropriate things.
Scott Drayer (Paul Fredrick): We take advantage
of remarketing opportunities and personalize interactions with the customer based on our own internal
data. If we’re using information that the customer has
readily provided us or modeling behaviors so that we
can present them with a more relevant message, I don’t
think as many people are having problems with that.
Kabakow: When you’re doing behavioral targeting
or retargeting, you’re not getting the information on
where those people actually searched or looked. You
just know that they’ve been to one of those pages or
they’ve been to your site, so you’re able to serve them
a relevant banner or message when they’re surfing
the Web.
On the direct mail side, when you talk about behavioral targeting, you’re talking about building predictive models to target best prospects. It would be very
difficult, with the cost structure of direct mail today,
to make direct mail work well without those types of
predictive models.
ample of your behavior targeting?
Musante: This is very personal. Friday morning
my boyfriend said he wanted to marry me. I was so
excited, but he didn’t give me a ring. I started to search
Fenske: We’ve been talking about acquisition of new
customers and house file mailings. The house file is
a goldmine. It tells you what they bought, when they
bought it and how much it cost.
www.dmnews.com | April 2011 | 41
ROUNDTABLE
Ginny Musante: It’s not so much about behavioral
targeting as it is about personalization. What we
know is that with our customers, it will be personal,
it will be connected, and it will be social. When you
launch your Xbox and you sign into Xbox Live,
you’ve signed in with an ID. They know who you are.
Then, if you have that same ID on your mobile phone
and you bring it to the Web, then it’s personal.
From an entertainment perspective, we can make
recommendations about what you would want to
watch. It’s connected to Facebook and Twitter and
you can invite your friends to have the same experience with you. The same technology that allows us to
do that from an entertainment perspective will ultimately allow us to do it from a marketing perspective.
Braun: I think it depends on the industry in terms
of how close a customer will let you get to them. Entertainment is one thing. But when you start talking
about your financial situation and the investments
that you’ve made over time, customers don’t want that
information shared.
Direct Marketing News: What are the major
e-commerce trends you’re seeing?
Drayer: We very much have a heritage as a cataloger. The multichannel component came later. Print
is still a viable channel for us. We’re using the catalog,
we’re using print as an acquisition tool to bring in new
customers. That’s been very effective.
With e-commerce, there are a couple of the things
that we’re thinking about right now. Among our current initiatives is optimizing our e-commerce site from
a personalization or behavioral targeting standpoint.
As a multichannel retailer, the heart of our business
is our customer database. We want to make sure that
we’re making the right decisions on attribution and
monitoring behaviors that are important so that we
can run CRM and figure out “is it better for me to
send this person a catalog next or an e-mail next?”
Trainor: We’ve been testing content. LED is a new
and up-and-coming technology, so in the last few
months we’ve been testing content around LED [in
our e-mail]. We’ve seen triple response rates any time
we include content regarding LED.
Musante: Content is huge for us. The most scarce
thing in this fragmented media world is the consumer’s attention. In order for a marketer to get a
consumer’s attention, they have to offer value.
Brian Bolton (Bridgeline Digital): We work
with a lot of customers that are grappling with content
management. They say, “My content’s not on my
website anymore. My content’s on Facebook. My content’s on Twitter. My content’s in an e-mail campaign
that’s all over the place.” We’ve actually revamped our
products to give marketers more ability to manage
that concept of content. That applies not only to what
Above: Peter Westerman,
Ziff Davis; and Larry
Kimmel, DMA; Below:
Jim Kabakow, Media
Horizons; Debbie Roth,
Japs-Olson; and Tom
Fenske, Fenske Media
42 | April 2011 | www.dmnews.com
ROUNDTABLE
Left to right: Jim Kabakow, Media Horizons;
Darrin Wilen, Wilen
Media; Scott Drayer,
Paul Fredrick; and Bryan
Trainor, Bulbs.com
you’re doing on your website and how that content is
performing there, but hooks into what you’re doing
anywhere your content can be found.
Direct Marketing News: How is social media
playing a role in your marketing strategy?
The biggest
question
now is who
owns social
media...
a lot of
companies
are deciding
it’s not an
e-commerce
play.”
Larry Kimmel
CEO,
Direct Marketing
Association
Braun: We’ve done a lot of work over the last six to
nine months on social media and trying to understand
buying habits of consumers around financial products. We’re selling the relationship that you have with
your adviser. Those individuals are our brand ambassadors. We just launched a pilot a week ago with 50 of
our AXA advisers. [We’re] training them on how to
use social media and providing preapproved content
that we developed.
Kimmel: Many companies are still figuring it out. I
think the biggest question now is who owns social media? What is it, and what is the best way for marketers
to use it? A lot of companies are deciding it’s not an
e-commerce play.
Direct Marketing News: Ginny, is it about cus-
hasn’t been about place. But suddenly, with consumer
empowerment, consumers are deciding what they
want and what to recommend to others. Social media
is forcing marketers to think about holistic marketing.
I think it’s very exciting if you’re a marketer, because
most marketers today don’t have influence on the
totality of marketing.
Direct Marketing News: Is it a marketing function or a PR function or both?
Bolton: It can be both. We’re executing a nine-city
seminar tour around content marketing. We made
a conscious decision to do a lot with Twitter around
this event. We’ve been promoting the hashtag. Every
confirmation e-mail, it’s in there with links to automatically post on Twitter. The amount of traffic that we’re
starting to generate around our hashtag on Twitter has
generated registrations from people that we’re not even
marketing to. A lot of the other stuff that everyone
talks about is hard to measure.
Direct Marketing News: Is anyone else able to
measure social media yet?
tomer service or e-commerce for Microsoft?
Musante: No, it is about engagement. For example,
on Halloween, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups did a
campaign with Xbox where they invited you to enter
your avatar in a Halloween costume. A total of 1.6
million people dressed up and entered the contest, and
something like 125,000 people clicked on and played
the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup TV ad. People talked
about it on Facebook and Twitter. The challenge
becomes how to track that.
Kimmel: Social media is forcing marketers to be
marketers. Marketing for the last 30 years has been
about advertising communication. It hasn’t been
about product. It really hasn’t been about price and it
Westerman: We look at social media really as an
evangelism function. We did a lot of work with Microsoft about 15 years ago when the developer relations
group still existed. It reminds me a lot of the activities
that they used to do, where you have evangelists who
work for your company who then empower third parties to talk on your behalf.
Bolton: The speaker on our content marketing tour
tells a story in her presentation about taking a trip
to Armenia and looking for a camera. She throws a
question out on Twitter asking for a recommendation
for a camera. Then, the VP of marketing from Kodak
responded to her directly and made a suggestion. Now
she’s telling everybody. n