Category: Vietnam Advertising

The Evolution of Agencies (Part 2)

Posted by Chris Tran 15 Oct 2011 1 Comment »

CRM to the forefront

Traditional marketing activities are very front-loaded. Advertisers and agencies spend the majority of their time trying to get sales, and to convince customers to try (trial) or convert to their brand. There has not been a lot of attention until late in creating real relationships with customers. The only industry segments that have paid much attention to fostering long term connections with consumers include:

Airlines/Travel
Finance
Ecommerce

For everything else, it just did not make fiscal sense for brands to put their customers into CRM programs. It simply was too expensive to manage as Cost per User, or even Cost per Customer. This has changed as two shifts have taken place:

Technology has made CRM programs much cheaper and scalable (i.e. lower Cost per Customer)
Social media gives each customer the chance to become a brand advocate/champion.

Or as Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen writes:

Customer service is the new media department.

When you look at the most successful brands on Twitter or Facebook (Zappos, Southwest), the story is very much centered around great customer service. A focused social media strategy is the easiest way to build Word of Mouth, and a cornerstone of that strategy needs to be a CRM program.

The CRM program identifies :

Customers with influence
What their problems are
How to deliver great customer service

Advertising agencies will start working in hand with customer service programs. Imagine websites, full of testimonials to be spread out via social media. And operations departments structured to deliver fantastic service, to give people real, credible reasons to believe in a service.

Online buzz will become a barometer of a brand’s health. And this buzz will be driven increasingly by great customer service.

Utility not Persuasion

The rise of branded mobile applications has shown that consumers are willing to interact with brands as long as they have something to gain. ”What’s in it for me” will continue to drive the conversation, as despite their best delusions, people will not become fans of Pantene or Head and Shoulders without either showing tangibly, how the brands make consumers’ lives better.

After all, isn’t the foundation of any advertising is the promise, “use our product, and your life will improve?”

Huggies had a great application for tourists in New York City, which showed on a map (and GPS) where the closest public bathrooms are. Mini Cooper has MiniMiles, which is a live loyalty system for their car owners. It also updates them with their maintenance schedules.

Nike Plus is a fantastic example, where a simple USB device tracks how much I run, and how often. Using that, I can track my progress (distance, speed, frequency and calories burned) and challenge friends. Running is a very solitary activity, and Nike has turned it around, and made it into a social one. Nike had been losing traction to other brands in its positioning, and Nike Plus has helped it regain its market leader position.

Digital Departments will disappear

I wrote about Digital Manifest Destiny, a concept liberally borrowed from people smarter than me. Essentially, it states:

All content will eventually be digital.

And as a result, all advertising will be digital also. Right now, there is an artificial divide between digital and traditional agencies, when really, ideas should be platform agnostic (and scalable!). And in so doing, every creative and account person should understand digital and how it operates in today’s world.

This is what we have done at Edge, where our combined Creative and Account management departments can handle both online and offline media. No campaign will ever be only digital, and similarly, the number of campaigns that are totally offline will decline to zero.

Agencies will start having creative technologists, essentially people who understand how technology can be used to deliver advertising ideas.

Big agencies will acquire digital agencies, and those digital agencies that survive will either die or become internet startups.

Game Mechanics – Not for everything

Posted by Chris Tran 20 Oct 2010 No Comments »

I wrote a couple months ago I wrote a post on how advertising is not game design. Because of that, I was quite happy to see Dan Hon’s rail against the inclusion of game mechanics into advertising at the PSFK advertising conference in London.

http://www.psfk.com/2010/10/video-dan-hon-psfk-conference-london-2010.html

Similar to what I wrote, Dan argues that the inclusion of game mechanics do not make things fun. You can force people to play a game, and acquire points. When you do so, the focus is quickly moved from marketing to instead create a myriad of processes for point accumulation.

In fact, new up and coming location based startup Scvngr actually has a set of playing cards they use to develop their “games.”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/

The power and the challenge of internet advertising is the search for joy in messaging, and creating what JWT Creative Chairman Fernando Olmos calls “ideas that people want to spend time with.” Television , radio and print are largely interruptive mediums; you are forced to see this advertising. However, with Internet and mobile, you are always asked/invited to participate.

The audience is well empowered to ignore internet advertising. For that reason, quality of creative and depth of understanding of the target audience are the most important factors for campaign success.

You cannot just bolt on prizes and point gathering mechanics onto a campaign and call it advertising.

Vietnam Telcos Aim to Slash Prices

Posted by Chris Tran 05 Aug 2010 No Comments »

I read this article this afternoon on the mobile telcos, and thought to myself this is a bad idea for everyone involved.

For some background, the telcos here are dominated by three companies, Viettel, Mobifone and Vinaphone. The funny thing is that all three are affiliates of VNPT, so the competition between the three is sort of half-hearted from the outside. They all have similar tariffs and offer the same quality of connectivity (since they use the same network effectively). Their VAS offerings differ, but not largely.

But to me, most importantly, they have not done a good job of creating separate brands for themselves. You have three companies selling the same thing and offering the same services at the same price. And they wonder why they do not have loyal customers.

SIM card churn is a big problem for telcos here. SIM card churn is the condition where consumers buy multiple SIM cards to take advantage of the bonus minutes you receive when you first activate a SIM card. Consumers literally jump from telco to telco with the span of weeks, if not sometimes days.

I am sure that the advertising agencies for these telcos have shared these thoughts with them. Yet instead of spending the time to develop and promote products to segment and claim a niche, all three are going after the mass market with the same strategy.

One might wonder if it is VNPT that stands behind this. If they are, they are the ones that are hurting the most.

Without clear brand separation and no brand loyalty, the big three can only compete on price. The three of them are cannibalizing each other, so much so that the only way they can ever gain new users (and its questionable how they count new users) is buy lowering prices. The only people who win are consumers, and seriously, not by much.

God help the other smaller telcos like S-fone, Vietnamobile and Beeline. At least Beeline has a catchy name and is trying to focus hard on a target segment with advertising and heavy media weight.

Clicks may be hurting your brand

Posted by Chris Tran 23 Jun 2010 No Comments »

Not a lot of time to post today, but I saw this article this morning, and it is exactly what I am saying about Clicks and Online Advertising in Vietnam. From AdAge:

In particular, we noted negative correlations with a consumer’s intent to view (for TV shows or movie campaigns), ad exposure time, ad recall and awareness. Put another way, we were able to conclude that online consumers given to clicking on ads are actually less likely to either spend significant time viewing advertisements or to recall them later. And, perhaps more importantly, that optimizing an online campaign to solely focus on CTR is quite likely to have a negative impact on other valuable brand measures.

As it’s been said before, the point of any advertising is not to drive clicks — it’s to build a brand, boost sales or add revenue streams.

My crusade to save Vietnam Online Advertising

Posted by Chris Tran 08 Jun 2010 1 Comment »

Destroy the Clicks!

As I get used to writing a blog again, it is almost a given that I will talk about how I ended up in Vietnam, my past and my daily life here. But at the beginning of the day, short declarative statements will help me focus on what I’m trying to do with this blog, and what has become my purpose in Vietnam.

I see day-in-day-out online advertising done poorly. People (and I mean advertisers, agencies and publishers) take a very high level, superficial and ‘detail-free’ view on campaigns, how to structure them and the metrics behind it.

Especially on KPI and campaign result measurements, everything that can be measured HAS to be measured, and not only that, every campaign needs to be provide stellar metrics including but not limited to:

Bounce Rate
Pages per Visit
Time on Site
Game plays

And the truly egregious problem is that clicks remain the sole, greatest, most important measure. That any campaign that has a lot of clicks is automatically better than any campaign with less clicks, irrespective of target audience, or what the pre-click or post-click story is.

My mission in Vietnam is to destroy the Click as the standard measure of campaign effectiveness.

My name is Chris Tran, and I want to destroy the click as a campaign KPI.