The Quisenblog

“I may not be able to to accurately describe it. But I’ll know it when I see it.” This was the famous phrase used by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in the famous case Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964).

He may as well been referring to measuring the results of a typical marketer’s online spending.

While marketers are quick to acknowledge the impact and potential of digital and social media, a large majority are not so sure about the effectiveness of their own efforts. For example, in a new survey of 3,000 marketers conducted by Social Media Examiner, only 22% said they think their Facebook advertising is“effective.” Similar numbers have been reported regarding online display advertising.

Yet, the marketing dollars keep flowing.

Why are marketers continuing to up their online budgets at a time when they’re unsure about how that spending affects the bottom line? It could be that on some level, they “sense” it’s working, even though (as in the obscenity case above), they can’t tell you how.

The main problem to measuring results of online media is that many of us tend to view each element of online spending (social media, paid search, SEO, display, mobile, email) as a separate silo. We’d like to see accountability for every dollar we spend.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. The customer’s “path to purchase” has changed from a predictable funnel to an “Influence Loop” with many new possible touch points and opportunities for information and influence, from social conversations, authority and customer review sites and long-tail search terms to the “old school” media of TV, print, outdoor and radio.

So is there any way to measure your program’s effectiveness? A popular approach some progressive marketers are taking is a metric called Effective Cost Per Action (eCPA). Rather than focus on outmoded measurements such as clicks or “likes,” eCPA is built around a “multi-attribution model.” In short, it doesn’t give “credit” for a sale or conversion to any individual click or action, but acknowledges that the overall “mix” of elements may have contributed along the sales path.

Under an eCPA model, you first need to define what counts as an “action” (examples: a sale, an inquiry, a download, a video view, a completed survey, an opt-in, a review, or any combination). Then you would divide your advertising-plus-online spend by the number of defined “actions,” regardless of where your analytics say they came from (yes, even those actions from repeat customers, who at some point are “influenced” to purchase again). This will give you a “cost per action” figure that can be used as a benchmark, either by looking back at past years or quarters, or for reference in coming years.

But how do you know if your Facebook ads, for example, are pulling their weight? You can always take a look at the traditional engagement statistics, but with an understanding that such actions do not necessarily indicate a desire to buy. Trying to attribute incremental sales to a single touchpoint (“Last Click Attribution” for example) totally ignores how today’s mix of mass, social, digital and mobile “mesh together” to create a much fuller experience for the consumer.

Perhaps eCPA is not as comforting as a spreadsheet populated with “click-throughs” but it certainly addresses the reality of the New Customer Path.

If you’d like to learn more about eCPA or are interesting in trying it out, feel free to drop me a line. Either leave a comment or email me at mickey @quisenberry.net

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admin Mobile Marketing, New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media, customer experience analytics, attribution, eCPA, Effective Cost Per Action, path to pruchase, SEO, social media measurement

This week, two big cases were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, both having to do with gay rights: California’s Proposition 8, and the Federal Defense Of Marriage Act.

In anticipation of these cases going before the highest court, an LGBT lobbying group called Human Rights Campaign (HRC) turned to the Internet to drum up support in favor of overturning of both cases. They asked well known celebrities (such as Ellen DeGeneres, Lance Bass and George Takei) to change their social media “avatars” to the group’s pink-and-red-equal-sign logo for the two days of arguments. Almost immediately many other sympathetic people did likewise, and Facebook and Twitter were awash in HRC’s logo. This was a simple way ordinary people could show their support to the causes.

Then something interesting happened. Versions of the HRC logo started turning up on brand pages and in brand tweets. Major ad players like Bud Light, HBO and others adopted the HRC logo, if only for a day or so.

A few years ago, a major brand going out on a political limb like this would have been unthinkable. Communications were in a “corporate voice” and left little room for supporting anything other than “politically safe” causes, if any. Seemingly overnight, brands have started letting their “human side” show through. Brands have discovered that people crave authenticity, and seek out stories from organizations and companies that “sound” like they do. Brands are ditching the management-approved “corporate speak” of not so long ago, and are now talking to customers as if they were people (because, well, they are).

Customers and fans have embraced this switch. One need look no farther than the Facebook timelines of some amazingly large companies (Starbucks as an example) to see how this plays out. And brands? They’ve seen how “brand stories” go a long way towards stimulating new purchases and building customer loyalty.

Looked at in this light, it’s a no-brainer to see how brands could glom on to a real-time meme like this. Brands know a lot more about their customers now than they used to. Not just in regard to their products, but in regard to life. They’re getting in tune with their fans’ likes, dislikes, what’s important to them, what gets them excited, what turns them off, and yes, even their political preferences.

So when you see Bud Light or HBO’s “True Blood” “coming out”, so to speak, it’s not so much about taking a political stand as it is marching with their customers.

If you’d feel a little queasy about having your brand step out on this ledge, just know this is a trend that’s going to gain momentum. People like to do business with “people who are like them.” And sometimes your brand can demonstraate that it is that person.

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Mickey New Media, On Clients, On Customers, customer experience authenticity, DOMA, equal rights, politics, Prop *, storytelling

This week, Coca Cola released results of a study that concluded that online “buzz” has no measurable impact on sales.

That’s right. The company that’s arguably the most “social” organization in the world (with a record 61.5 million Facebook Fans) says there’s no relationship between online generated buzz and sales. (Well, almost. The study did give buzz credit for 0.01% of increased sales.)

So what exactly does this mean? That social media, while entertaining, does not contribute to sales?

Not quite.

For starters, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between social media “participation” and social media “buzz.” Buzz is primarily generated by a single piece of content or single event (think Red Bull’s space jump, written about here). These things are created solely to get eyeballs, and rarely have anything to contribute on behalf of the sponsoring product or organization. Another example would be this Long-Distance Slip-and-Slide video produced by Microsoft:

No doubt about it, this is amazing content. People may like it.. They may even share it. But would you seriously believe a slip-and-slide video would persuade people to buy a Windows computer? Or that a stunt like the space jump, no matter how spectacular, would have people lining up outside convenience stores for a Red Bull?

Social media participation, on the other hand, is not nearly as sexy. It’s not the atomic bomb, it’s winning the battle hill-by-hill. It’s never going to be a trending topic on Twitter. It’s never going to generate 20 million views. Instead, it’s an ongoing effort to engage fans and customers on a deeper level, where they hang out. It’s a way to listen to customers, try out ideas, provide “insider” content and provide one-to-one customer service. Basically a way to help your organization become more “human” for your customers.

What I hate about studies like this one from Coke (and the accompanying news coverage) is that things tend to get painted with a broad brush. Nuance is nowhere to be found. It’s either “this” or it’s “that.”

Successful marketing today requires a complete toolbox of owned, earned, shared and paid media. Attempting to break one of these out to determine its ROI is a fool’s errand.

It helps to think of social as a “trailing” tactic (nearly all people who become ‘Fans’ are already customers, and prefer you already). As such, social’s true value in the marketing funnel is to engage with converted customers on a deeper level, to give them more opportunities to interface with the brand, to shorten the buying cycle, to stem churn and learn more about your audience.

If you still question the value of social media to the marketing process, consider this: the more time your customers spend interfacing with your brand, the less opportunity (and inclination) they have to interface with your competitors.

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Mickey New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media buzz vs participation, Coca Cola, Microsoft, Red Bull, social media buzz

Way back in 2009 (ancient history in the digital world), Daily Deals providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial sprouted up on the digital landscape like weeds on an untended lawn. In the beginning, they were all the rage. Consumers welcomed them. Social pundits loved them. And local restaurants and retailers saw them as a great way to affordably bring in new customers. Some pundits even proclaimed Groupon to be “the next eBay.”

Here some three-plus years later, things aren’t looking so sanguine for them. So much so, that Groupon sacked its Founder and CEO due to its listless financials. (His legendary farewell letter to staff is worth reading, and can be found here.) And another pioneer of the Daily Deal, LivingSocial (the #2 player in the industry), is rumored to soon be sucked up by a larger company or get the plug pulled on it altogether as early as next year.

So how did the major Daily Dealers go from being the fair-haired child to the ugly stepsister in just a few years? A few factors conspired to hamper these firms:

1. The market became highly fragmented. Every locality in the country seemed to have sprouted its own Daily Deal services, and a lot of these focused on narrow niches. Plus a lot of offline providers jumped in as well (television stations and newspapers, as an example). The national players haven’t done enough to differentiate themselves from the local competition.
2. A lot of meat-and-potatoes businesses became disenchanted with participating. Groupon, et al, took a massive cut of the Daily Deals purchases. So often participants had to settle for a few crumbs from the paid voucher amount, sometimes not even covering their costs. While some participants had fantastic experiences with Daily Deals, many others didn’t. After a while, you could see which businesses would benefit, and which wouldn’t. But sadly, Groupon, LivingSocial and company treated business owners like pigeons, and took all takers instead of focusing on businesses their services could really help.
3. The Daily Deal offerings are all over the map. Here’s an example: my kids are teenagers. So why did I received offerings more applicable to young families (such as a diaper service)? A few of those, and you can’t blame consumers for questioning the services’ relevance.
4. The market turned out to not be as large as was originally projected. Annual growth has been around 3%, which in the digital realm is beyond stagnant.

So is there any saving the major Daily Deals players? Heck yeah. But there are a few adjustments they’ll need to make:

• Provide more relevant offers, and get involved in after-the-sale follow-up. Get to know customers’ interests better. Look at purchase patterns. Look at price points. If need be, send out surveys and questionnaires in return for “Groupon Bucks.” Learn from every purchase, and follow up with purchasers to have them evaluate their purchases.
• Focus especially on the highest value users. Twenty percent of the Daily Deal audience accounts for 80% of the sales. So do whatever it takes to cater to this group and build loyalty and evangelism among them. Create a rewards program that provides points for every purchase that can be redeemed for vouchers. Provide amazing exclusive deals that can only be “unlocked” by users once they reach a certain level. Create events specifically for this group of buyers.
• Mend fences with the local business communities. The feedback from the original model is pretty clear. Do more to partner with local businesses to make sure they succeed, give them tools to get the most out of their offerings, and don’t take a powder on them once their check are cashed.

Simply stated, the main problem with Groupon and LivingSocial is that they are more focused on being profitable than being relevant. For them to survive, that has to change.

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Mickey New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media, customer experience Andrew Mason, Daily Deals, Groupon, LivingSocial, mismarketing

As you may have heard, this past Monday morning, a group of hackers “hijacked” Burger King’s official Twitter account (@BurgerKing) and replaced all the BK branding elements with the golden arches of McDonald’s. The hackers then sent out posts on the hijacked account claiming that BK had been sold to McDonald’s, then posted some raunchy posts about customer and employee “reactions” to the fictitious sale. You can get the whole chapter-and-verse on the hack at Mashable.

It didn’t take long to figure this was a hoax, and within a few hours, Twitter suspended the account. And within a day or so, @BurgerKing was once again tweeting out content about Whoppers and Chicken Fries.

An interesting side note: blogger Travis Wright followed the hack in real time, and discovered that the number of Twitter users “following” @BurgerKing went from 77,000 at the start of the day to more than 111,000 within just 90 minutes. Suddenly, getting a Twitter account hijacked proved to be a great way to increase followers by almost 50%.

As you’d expect, over the next few days Twitter got a pretty good spanking from social media heavyweights. The micro-blogging service was berated for offering insufficient security to commercial and branded accounts. But to me, there’s a bigger story at play.

The fact that the hacked account drew more than 37,000 new followers in less than two hours reveals how most Twitterites use the service, and how brands just don’t understand it. People were way more interested in the real-time entertainment value of the hacked account than they ever would be about anything Burger King was tweeting out on behalf of themselves.

In other words, the big “fail” for the Burger King social media team wasn’t that their Twitter account got hacked. It’s that they came up way short in delivering engaging content their customers and fans really care about.

I did a double take when I read that BK started the week with 77,000 followers. That’s a pitifully small number for a visible national brand such as BK (Starbuck’s, by comparison, has around 3.5 million followers). The fact that BK been unsuccessful at getting even their most loyal customers to follow them is an indication of how lame their content has been.

In fairness to Burger King (and Twitter, for that matter), they’re not in this boat alone. The unfortunate truth is that many marketers, who are used to “controlling” their messages via mass media advertising, still see social as a way of pushing branding messages. They are unwilling (or unable) to give up control to an audience that might say…anything. They fail to grasp that social is an opportunity for deeper engagement with people who already ‘like’ them in real life. They neglect their responsibility to provide content that’s relevant, useful and yes, entertaining. Instead, boilerplate management-approved messages get sent out and are for the most part ignored by customers. And brands wonder why their engagement rate on Facebook is less than 0.5%.

I hope the Burger King hack teaches a lesson to brands’ social media teams, but not necessarily the lesson everyone’s talking about. It’s my hope that this serves as a wake-up call to create more compelling content, whatever the platform.

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admin New Media, On Clients, Social Media burger king, compelling content, McDonald's, social media fail, Travis Wright, twitter hack

This past Tuesday, Facebook unveiled its revamped internal search system that makes it easier for users to get answers drawn from the social network’s vast array of status updates, pictures, “Likes” and other content posted by the social network’s billion+ users, its 240 billion indexed photos and its one trillion connections.

What the 'Results Page' of Facebook's Graph Search looks like.

The new service called Graph Search was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an alternative to Google-type Web searches tied to keywords.

Instead, of providing the searcher with a page of links where the user “might” find her answer (as Google and other search engines do), Graph Search is geared to provide specific answers to specific questions and phrases by presenting searchers with a list of user pages that answer the specific query.

Facebook’s self-stated goal with its search system was to make search more “personal” and “social.” The company envisions it as a way to find word-of-mouth recommendations (“Mexican restaurants in San Francisco’s Mission District that my friends like” or “Movies that are liked by film directors”) and connect with people with similar interests (“People who live in my hometown who like hiking” or “People who graduated from my high school the same year I did”). The list of profile pages you’re presented with is based on profile information (which every Facebook user has already filled out), plus key words used in status updates, uploaded photos and videos, plus pages that are “liked.”

Depending on your point of view, this new development could either be extremely helpful or uncomfortably creepy (funny how that word pops up more and more in regard to Facebook).

While Facebook says it has no plans for monetizing Graph Search, you gotta believe that’s not too far off. The company’s most valuable assets are its users, and more specifically, the profile information shared by its users. Facebook has dabbled in profiting from profile data by allowing advertisers to target according to profile, and by selling “sponsored stories” based on user behavior. But from the sound of things, Graph Search has the potential to make this seem like small potatoes.

As a marketer, you can potentially find some amazing uses for Graph Search.

It could give you a leg up in areas such as employee and executive recruitment. Graph Search will allow businesses to create hyper-specific queries within their existing Facebook networks, such as “employees of my company who are friends with employees of (Company X)” or “people who have five or more years of experience in software project management.” Yes, there are other social networks that are more focused on recruiting (LinkedIn, for one), none of them can boast the user base or profile data Facebook has.

Undoubtedly, marketers will also benefit from even finer-grained ad targeting that’s sure to come. Facebook’s future revenues will be deeply tied to providing access to its users’ profile data. By sharing information about who their friends are, what music they listen to, where they vacation, and what brands they “like,” each Facebook user creates a rich vault of profile data that is of great value to companies and advertisers.

Ah, but there’s a big “if” here. All this could work out to help Facebook revolutionize search if…its users willingly cooperate by keeping profiles accurate and up to date, and more importantly, if.. they stay active on the network. To my mind, it would be a mistake to take this for granted, especially given the pushback Facebook has received regarding its many “privacy policies” and the potential for stalker-like searches (“single women in Seattle who live on Capitol Hill, are friends with my friends and like Gold’s Gym”).

So what do you think: will Graph Search reinvigorate Facebook and make it more useful for users? Or will it creep users out to the point where they step away from the social network? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For more information on Graph Search, check out this story first published on MediaPost.

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Mickey New Media, On Customers, Ramblings, Social Media facebook profile data, Facebook search, Graph search, social search

Rather than cook up yet another “year-end list” of one sort or another, we at The Quisenblog thought we’d curate for you the most interesting marketing/advertising lists we’ve come across over the last few weeks. Our hope is there’s something here you’ll enjoy.

The best digital campaigns of 2012 (Slideshow with video).

From Gangnum Style to Red Bull’s “Stratos” space jump to the “Invisible Mercedes” get a peek inside the top-performing digital campaigns of the year.

Five Social Media Marketing Campaigns of 2012 to inspire your 2013 strategy. (From Content Lead)

Case study examples: The Obama Presidential Campaign (segmentation), The Dollar Shave Club (web video), Totino’s Pizza Bites (Twitter hashtags), Nike’s Olympic Run (promoted Tweets), Sephora Beauty Products (Pinterest). Ideas for how you can use these platforms in 2013.

From Tampons to Tablets: Best/Worst names of 2012. (From Marketing Profs)

Microsoft Surface. Chase Liquid card. Doritos Jacked. (The good) Pepperidge Farms Jingos! Parrot Zik. Qsymia. (The bad) These names and others are dissected in this post.

5 Smart marketing habits for 2013 (from OPENForum)

OPENForum is one of my go-to sources for timely management intelligence. This article is a classic.

25 Experts Predict the Future of Marketing. (from Exact Target)

Industry heavyweights like jay Baer, Geoff Livingston, Joe Pulizzi and Mark Schaefer share their insights in bite-sized forms, on topics from Cross Chanel Marketing to Email to Mobile and Social.

10 biggest ad stories from 2012 (podcast, from The Bean Cast)

The best/worst of 2012 advertising and marketing stories in one portable podcast. Stream or download.

That pretty much does it for 2012. If the world manages to make it to the New Year, we do hope you’ll check back.

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Mickey Friday LinkFest, New Media, On Clients, Social Media, strategy 2012 case studies, Best of 2012, Worst of 2012

One of the most under appreciated aspects of social media and how it can affect your marketing is how they give you the ability to ‘listen in’ on consumers.

By setting up listening posts online, whether through conversation monitors like Social Mention, keyword tools like Google Alerts or trending topic tools like Twitter hashtags, you can not only get a sense of what the public is saying about you, your products and competitors online. In many cases it can even give you inspiration.

One recent example of this is the case with Samsung and its Galaxy III smart phone.

Samsung’s latest television ads, which mock Apple’s recent release of its new iPhone 5, seem to be striking a chord with consumers, at least judging by its popularity on YouTube (32 million+ views as of this writing). The South Korean electronics maker credits part of its success to the fact that the insight behind its advertising came straight from the consumer’s mouth (or in this case, the consumers keyboard).

According to Samsung, the ads’ scripts were based on “hundreds of thousands” of Tweets the company monitored that complained or poked fun at specific features of the iPhone 5. Here’s on example of the TV campaign.

One of the customers says: “I heard that you have to have an adapter to use the dock on the new one.” Another young man chimes in: “Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters.” Reportedly, those lines and other parts of the ad’s script came straight from Twitter conversations.

This is just one example of how social media are helping marketers shape their ad campaigns, or even their products themselves. Procter & Gamble’s Duracell Battery division used data from social media to help it develop the Duracell Powermat, a portable device that allows smart phone charging on the go. Duracell’s decision to use iconic red and green battery signals came about after social media analytics found that people often referred to the color of their battery signal when they were expressing frustration about losing power.

It’s rare that social media monitoring alone will provide all the marketing answers for you. But it’s one more tool to use to get a “voice of the customer” that just might lead to some inspired executions, whether through ad messaging or product refinement.

Just listen.

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Mickey Creative, New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media, strategy analytics, hashtag marketing, hashtags, listening posts, social media analytics, social mention

Last week I wrote about why it’s never a good idea to cheap out on guerilla tactics. This past weekend gave us an example of one marketer who not only didn’t cheap out, but may have set a record for spending on a one-time sponsorship event.

The example I’m referencing is this past Sunday’s “free-fall skydive” of Austrian Felix Baumgartner. “Fearless Felix” jumped out of a capsule suspended by a balloon 128,000 feet (24 miles) above the earth. He not only smashed the record for the highest ever free-fall, he also became the first skydiver to go faster than the speed of sound, reaching a maximum velocity of 833.9 mph before touching down safely just outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

From a social media standpoint, the numbers are pretty incredible. A reported 7.3 million people watched the event live. Soon after, a Facebook photo generated nearly 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments and more than 29,000 shares in less than 40 minutes. And on Twitter, it occupied half the worldwide trending topics, pushing past seven NFL football games. The blogosphere continues to buzz about it. And the major news networks, newspapers and magazines have run stories on the stunt.

Mr. Baumgartner’s feat was not your ordinary extreme stunt or quest for a world’s record. Rather, it was a promotion bought and paid for (and managed) by Red Bull.

The question that begs asking here is a simple one: despite all the attention the event received, did Red Bull get a good value for its participation? Did it get an ample bang for its buck?

This is where the spin meisters come in. Barely 12 hours after the stunt, Huffington Post’s Janean Chun calls Red Bull’s sponsorship of Baumgartner’s jump “the most successful marketing campaign of all time,” noting that the brand “broke the traditional barriers of marketing, sponsorship and social media.” And a CEO of a digital agency opines that Red Bull stands to rack up “tens of millions of dollars” in sales because the stunt, although in typical social media style, he fails to quantify where those sales will come from.

But let’s back off the social media hyperbole for a moment. There’s no arguing the event generated a ton of social media eyeballs for the brand. But these are “social media” eyeballs. Eight million live views is big news in social media, but in the world of marketing it’s nothing special. By way of comparison, Sunday’s season opener of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” attracted over 11 million viewers–and this is basic cable.

And while the promotion is consistent with the “extreme stunts” Red Bull has become known for (at least within a select vertical market) and with its “Red Bull gives you wings” tagline, we need to remember Red Bull isn’t the lead in this story, Felix is. And while the stunt generated a ton of “free media” (specifically TV and newspaper stories), how much of it haloed onto Red Bull? I saw a one-minute story on NBC news that never bothered to mention Red Bull. I got a quick glimpse of the Red Bull logo on the parachute, much like you’d see a sponsor’s logo on a NASCAR driver’s suit.

While Red Bull has yet to release any spending figures on the sponsorship, one could easily envision an investment of $20 million or more on the stunt, plus all the advance promotion (check out this slick CG “movie trailer” that teases the event) with no guarantee of a happy outcome.

I’m not arguing that Red Bull shouldn’t pony up for events such as this. They’ve sort of primed their audience to expect such things. But the real measure of whether or not it was successful can’t be ciphered by social media buzz alone, no matter how much it gets. At some point, it has to be about sales. Good old fashioned ROI (remember that?). “Soft metrics” like mentions, hashtags, likes, shares, sentiment, etc. might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. But did the $20 million+ spent on the event generate incremental sales? Did it help drive distribution? Did it increase market share? Did it allow Red Bull to charge a premium for its product?

To be clear, I’m not saying we needed to see 40 million cans of Red Bull fly off the shelves in the hours after the stunt. Give it time. But for the cost of running a spot in each of the next SEVEN Super Bowls, it’d be a shame if all Red Bull got in return was a few million YouTube hits and some news photos with an incidental logo splashed across a parachute.

Success in the world of social media isn’t about dreaming up outrageous ideas that’ll get attention. That’s the easy part. The currency of a social media program is how well it marries to an organization’s business objectives. And in this case, we’re yet to see how that works out.

A side note to this campaign: a marketer that seems to have successfully “coat-tailed” on this sponsorship was Mars, who sent a Kit Kat bar into outer space to give Felix a “break” during his jump. You can view that one-and-a-half minute video here.

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Mickey New Media, On Customers, Ramblings, Social Media, Uncategorized, strategy branded event, felix baumgartner, free-fall, promotion case study, Red Bull

If you are interested in exploring guerilla marketing (or, if you prefer, non-traditional marketing) because you’re committed to creating something outrageous, standing out from the crowd, hitting people with an unexpected message when their guards are down and perhaps inciting a viral campaign, then it might just be for you. If you’re interested in guerilla because you want to save money or don’t have the budget for a mass media campaign, prepare to be disappointed.

“Guerilla marketing” is often defined as hitting consumers (prospects) with marketing messages either in places they don’t expect them, or in ways they don’t expect. While guerilla campaigns are rarely scalable, they can break through the mind-numbing clutter we each have to deal with each day, and can help consumers think about you and your offerings in a new, fresh way.

That is, if you do it right. And let me just say it here: guerilla marketing is not a cheaper way to do marketing. While it is true you won’t have the media expenses of a more traditional mass media campaign, you will have a lot of expenses mass media campaigns don’t incur. A lot of what we in the business refer to as “man hours”–fabrication costs, research and preparation, event planning and hosting, content creation, fulfillment and follow-up. All things you don’t have to worry about in the “set-and-forget” world of paid media advertising.

So how do you know if the non-traditional approach you’re considering will be a hit or an exercise in futility? As it turns out, many of the most successful guerilla marketing efforts have a lot in common. More specifically, they’re able to unequivocally answer “yes” to each of these questions:

• Is it surprising/quirky/unexpected? Unlike with mass media marketing, where you can buy attention, with non-traditional marketing, you have to earn it. Your content has to be disarming, and catch people with their guards down. These beer stein decals installed on glass doors are but one example.



• Does it amplify the brand’s story outside the traditional media space? Getting attention is great. But if it doesn’t play back to your core brand story (and what you want people to say about you), you’re likely wasting your time. This urinal poster for the Arizona Science Center is an example of linking non-traditional creative and media to boost the brand.



• Is it sustainable? Coming up with a “blockbuster” event might sound like a good idea, but too often these are little more than closed-ended tactics. This video for Coca Cola showcases one event (in this case, rewarding good samaritans who turned in an unattended wallet with tickets to a soccer match), but it leads to a bigger pay off for the brand–“Buy That Person A Coke.” Works for honest folks who turn in wallets. Works in hundreds of other situations too.
• Is it supported? Is it a stand-alone execution, or is it tied to other things the brand is doing, both on- and off-line? Social media provides your brand many possible ways to reach people. Plan ahead to determine how to amplify your guerilla tactics through social. Check out this video to see how The Opticians Council Of Canada amplified their guerilla tactics.
• Can it do things in a way that can’t be done in a traditional media space? Getting out of the two-dimensional world gives you lots of possibilities to explore. Check out this guerilla tactic for a gym.



• Is it disruptive, without being inconveniencing or annoying? People are used to advertising messages being restricted to specific times and spaces (magazine pages, TV programming breaks, etc.). Once you venture outside the expected ad media, you run the risk of irritating your audience and building resentment against you. If you’re going to intrude into their lives, you better make it worthwhile for them.

With the rise of social media, and your audience’s ability to share and spread things that interest them, guerilla marketing can serve to garner tons of attention to the brand, ignite word of mouth and generate ample free media, and get people talking about the brand. (Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice“ are two of the most famous examples).

In the not-so-best cases, brands have wasted a ton of money, resources and good will developing stuff that their audiences, to put it bluntly, could care less about (Cisco’s “Ted From Accounting” web series comes to mind).

For 50 great examples of guerilla tactics that worked, click here.

The net of it then, is that in regard to guerilla tactics, while spending money is not a sure-fire recipe for success, not spending it is a sure-fire way to fail.

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