Huxley Quayle von Blog

Twitter is for old farts.

Twitter Traffic Explodes...And Not Being Driven by the Usual Suspects!

By Sarah Radwanick
Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon - from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

Keep an eye out for the March U.S. Twitter data, which should be available later this week. An early peek at the data suggests it’s going to be another HUGE month for the increasingly popular site. Follow comScore on Twitter and be the first to find out how the site did! You can also follow comScore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni on Twitter to hear his thoughts and insights on the digital media industry at large.

Emotion as a marketing advantage.

Why Emotional Messages Beat Rational Ones
Settling the Debate: 'Soft Sell' Can Reduce Price Sensitivity, Create an Enduring Sense of Brand Differentiation

by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field

Published: March 02, 2009

Hamish Pringle
Peter Field

Ever since the DDB creative revolution in the 1960s, debate has raged about the best kind of messaging for building profitable brands. On the one hand, devotees of the "hard sell," or persuasion-based communications, argue that facts and rational arguments sell products and services best. On the other hand, devotees of the "soft sell" contend that brands that can inspire strong emotional responses in consumers and create true engagement can transform businesses, turning the tables even on bigger competitors. In recent times the tide has begun to turn in favor of emotional engagement, with some high-profile converts at Procter & Gamble, but the argument is far from over.

So when we sat down to write our book, "Brand Immortality" -- a manual on how to keep brands healthy in the long term -- we knew this would be one of the key issues to address. Our primary data source is the U.K.'s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising Effectiveness Awards, which were founded in 1980. The book's analyses are based upon the accumulated learning from 880 case studies from the U.K. national and international competition.

The cases cover two recessions and the occasional market wobble, so we can distinguish between strategies for the good times and the bad. By comparing the case studies that generated the largest business effects with those that generated less impressive effects, we have been able to explore which marketing inputs tend to promote success and which do not. We can also see how this varies during the life cycle of market categories, from birth and growth to maturity and decline.

What the data show us is that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure fall somewhere between the two.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Anheuser-Busch cuts agency fees. It's about time.

Anheuser-Busch Whacks Retainers for Its Agencies
New Compensation Model Could Cost DDB Dearly

Posted by Jeremy Mullman on 02.16.09

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Agency fees are the latest casualty in Anheuser-Busch InBev's quest to trim $1.5 billion in costs out of the world's largest brewer.

A-B has swapped its long-held retainer-based model of compensating its busiest agencies for a new approach based on an agreed-upon scope of work at the shops. That shift, which has become an increasingly common one for marketers looking to cut agency outlays, puts the agencies on the hook if projects require more hours or greater cost than expected. Other changes include stingier reimbursement rates for production costs and smaller, flat per-concept fees.

Read the rest of the article here.

Ad Age reports 77% of marketers are looking to reduce their advertising costs. It's about time, we say.

Today on Ad Age Online I read an article about marketers in the US cutting budgets and challenging agencies to find cost savings. Specifically, here's the numbers from their latest survey:

• 72% of marketers plan to reduce advertising-campaign production budgets
• 68% plan to "challenge" agencies to reduce internal expenses and/or identify cost reductions
• 48% are looking at reducing agency compensation today.

Funny how it takes a recession to force people to look at being more efficient and finding more creative ways of doing more with less. Here at HQvB that's just plain-old-everyday-how-we-work.

Anyway, click here to read the whole article.

Five things that probably won’t happen in social media in 2009

From Matt Rhodes at Future Lab. It shows there's a ways to go before social media is the commercial killer.

Five things that probably won’t happen in social media in 2009
21st December 2008, 11:57 am

For the second in our Five Things to Do in 2009 series, I wanted to turn on it’s head the usual round of predictions that we usually see at this time of year. Rather than make predictions about things that will happen in 2009, I’m going to do the opposite, so find below our Five things that probably won’t happen in social media in 2009.

1. We probably won’t see the rise of mobile social media

For many years, people have been predicting the rise of the mobile web, and this year is no different. Evidence from the UK suggests that growth in Internet penetration is indeed being driven, in part, by an increase in mobile internet access. But this increase is being driven only by those who are already online and by a very small proportion of these. For social media to truly go mobile we need widespread acceptance of mobile internet. And this has not yet happened. Perhaps a rise in fully internet-enabled mobile devices in 2009 (such as the iPhone and BlackBerry) will set the scene for truly mobile social media in 2010 or beyond. But until then it will continue to just be a relatively small trend for a relatively small proportion of users.

To read the rest, click here.

CMOs Annoyed by Agencies, Ad Networks. From Ad Age

HP, Charles Schwab Mull Going Direct to Media Companies; Verizon Takes Online Partners to Task

By Jack Neff

Published: October 20, 2008
ORLANDO, Fla. (AdAge.com) -- Agencies and ad networks came in for some rough treatment at a CMO roundtable during the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference on Saturday as executives vented their dissatisfaction with agency models and ad-network performance.

Becky Saeger, John Harrobin and Gary Elliott
Photo Credit: Art Beaulieu

The chief marketing officers of Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab openly mulled the attractiveness of bypassing agencies to work directly with media companies and other experiments as they look to fix an agency model they see as broken.

"The overall message, I would have to say, with HP, is that I don't think any of these [agency] relationships are satisfactory enough that we would continue them without having some degree of experimentation," said Gary Elliott, VP-corporate marketing at Hewlett-Packard. "We've been experimenting with different agency relationships where we're looking at agency partners and vendors in ways that connect them loosely with each other. We're looking at models where we have everything with one of our key partners."

Speed to market
What's lacking in agency relationships now is speed to market, Mr. Elliott said. "I don't think with our current system we're achieving that. ... We're going to pilot a number of different relationships where we go direct with media companies."

He pointed to publisher Meredith Corp. -- noted in remarks earlier by Booz & Co. consultant Chris Vollmer as Kraft Foods' agency of record for customer relationship marketing -- and Time Warner as candidates for such relationships.

John Harrobin, senior VP-marketing and digital media for Verizon Communications, echoed Mr. Elliott's thoughts on going direct to media companies.

"I don't think you can be a top-20 or -30 advertiser and not have that relationship with media companies," he said.

"If I were an agency, I would be really worried about being disintermediated," said Becky Saeger, CMO of Charles Schwab. "More and more the agencies are almost in the way sometimes. So there are people in this room who were at a talk this week where we had started to do strategic briefings for media companies so we know that they understand what we're trying to do with our brand so we get higher quality input and not have to rely on our media agency to be in the middle all the time."

Erratic performance
Not that media companies got unconditional love. Verizon's Mr. Harrobin pointed to the erratic performance of online advertising networks as one of the biggest hurdles to more media dollars going online and recounted some tough love Verizon recently visited upon the networks.

"We in late July saw three of our banner ads on sites that we absolutely would not want to associate with," Mr. Harrobin said. Verizon asked for a full report and assurance it wouldn't happen again, but in August it happened again, and Verizon pulled all of its online advertising except ads placed through AOL's Platform-A, where Mr. Harrobin said a process was already in place for preventing such problems.

Then Verizon called in representatives from 20 ad networks and laid down the law, which included no reselling, serving ads only on sites that have a direct relationship with the publisher and full transparency, and the ability to audit every site where its banner ads appear.

After Verizon gave the networks 30 days to comply, 18 of 20 did, Mr. Harrobin said, and Verizon resumed its online advertising Oct. 1.

Impeding growth
"Managing context of where your ad appears online with these networks is really vital," he said. He added that online video sites' refusal to allow pre-roll advertising is another major impediment to growth of online media.

"There are still doubts that [online is] as effective at telling a story as TV or has the reach," Mr. Harrobin said. "Thankfully, Hulu and MTV and others have proven that you can do this effectively without disrupting the customer experience. So I think that's going to help the market."

53% of Marketers Reduce Ad Budgets.

Bravo! It's about time.

We at HQvB believe that most advertisers spend too much money having their agencies design "integrated" campaigns designed for another time. A time when you blasted your audience over and over again with the same TV spot, backed up by the traditional out of home and radio "support", with a big dollop of newspaper or magazine thrown in for good measure.

And then if the agency wants to get creative, they throw in a small non-traditional, ambient or online stunt. It rarely has any effect, but it makes people feel like they're thinking out of the box.

In the process, the same agency that sold the client on "out thinking the competition instead of outspending them" blasts through the client's ad budget like a drunken wall sailor on 24 hour shore leave.

The problem is it's very addictive. After all, if you spend enough money everybody will get your message. In fact, like the new Bell campaign here in Canada, they won't be able to escape it even if they try. And believe me, we all try.

This current round of spending cuts may have been spurred on by the economy, but we think it's a good thing, as it forces people to rethink how they communicate with their audiences. It forces them to make hard decisions that they didn't have to make before. It forces them to get more creative.

Maybe it will finally force agencies to deal with the reality of the new 2.0 world and see that big media spends are not the be-all in advertising. The smarter, more nimble shops will see this round of cuts as an opportunity. Maybe smaller, more entrepreneurial shops look better in a climate where new thinking isn't just a "nice to have" but a necessity.

So hooray for the budget cuts! Bring on the cost consultants! And let's raise a glass to faltering stock markets.

They will force us all to be better, more cost-efficient, faster, leaner and more forward thinking. Just like every other industry in the world has had to do to survive.

How advertising can get you through the recession.

I read this in Ad Age this morning. Well worth a read for any clients that may be a little nervous about the economy. Interesting enough, what the pundits are saying agencies should do, is what we at HQvB are already doing.

So ha!

How Creativity Can Carry Your Business Through a Recession
Here's What a Some Who've Been Around the Block a Few Times Have to Say

By Teressa Iezzi

Published: September 22, 2008
So, a giant dragon of economic doom has rained fire upon the world. And the overall economic picture (and this is especially true if a certain uninformed product of the patriarchy being cynically sold as a beacon for women has any role to play) is not going to be fixed overnight.

In these pages, we've read about the ways in which this sort of environment affects ad spending. But what happens to creativity in times like these? Dark days have a way of producing creative breakthroughs. So I asked some creatives who have weathered a few economic "cycles" what really happens when Wall Street stumbles (or dives face first into an empty pool).

What will be the impact of this climate on the kind of work you'll be doing?

"It already has (had an impact). Clients have been in a slow trend to do more conservative work. The words 'guaranteed to work' get thrown around nowadays. The dependence on testing not as insight but as the decision maker is on the rise. Testing has become the client's defacto creative director nowadays. The messaging in the work has also become less singular and packed with as many messages as possible. It's the strategy of, 'everything but the kitchen sink. No, wait. Put that in there, too.' And tonality has become more subdued and quiet, less entertaining." -- Peter Nicholson, chief creative officer, Deutsch, New York

"It'll be more pragmatic. More measurable. More digital." -- Nick Law, exec VP-chief creative officer North America, R/GA What are the opportunities here?

"The opportunities in this type of market are abundant, but they're big 'if' statements. If a company takes a slight risk and takes a bolder approach that allows its message to have a strong point of view, it will be heard. It will stand out." -- Nicholson

"Hopefully our industry will finally start delivering on the hollow promises of a thousand "brave new world" PowerPoint decks. Agencies will stop talking and start doing. At last, the triumph of practice over theory." -- Law

"When fear is in the air, I always have the same response when it comes to our creative work: Be brave, be bold. Like steering into a skid, it's counter-intuitive. But bold works. It stands out from all the timid, fear-inspired work." -- Marty Cooke, chief creative officer, SS&K

"I've always thought optimism in the face of pessimism was a great response. As long as an advertiser has something to be optimistic about, of course. You don't want to appear clueless and out of step. But there's a way to be optimistic in a credible way. People are hearing from enough places that times are tough. For advertisers, it's a chance to be a positive antidote." -- Jamie Barrett, creative director and partner, Goodby Silverstein & Partners

What's creativity's role, if any, in shaping the next economic era?

"Our industry's creative minds will not just be concentrating on messaging. They'll spend more time on product enhancements and digital services that transform businesses." -- Law

So, in conclusion, bad times have the potential to make for bad advertising but, as always, there are huge benefits to zagging.

And before you get too excited, remember:

"Ninety-eight percent of advertising is awful. During difficult economic times, when companies can't afford to waste a single dollar on mediocre creative, and when outsmarting and creatively outgunning your competitors can lead to concrete market-share gains, that number plummets to 97.8%. That's the sad truth of our business." -- Paul Venables, founder and creative director, Venables Bell & Partners

~ ~ ~
Teressa Iezzi is the editor of Creativity magazine and Creativity-Online.com.

Business lessons from miraculous survivors.

I read this article on CNN.com. It tells of a study of people who have survived disasters. As I was reading, it came to me that many of the traits these survivors have in common are also useful in business.

The short version is that survivors of disasters tend to:

1. Not be arrogant. Apparently the Rambo types tend to die off first.
2. They're independent thinkers. They take the info they have in front of them and make their own decisions.
3. They have strong family ties. One could liken this to having a strong corporate culture.
4. They create a vision for the future and they hold on tight to that.

Sage advice for anyone who wants to succeed in business.

Here's the article.

Miraculous survivors: Why they live while others die

(CNN) -- Deborah Scaling Kiley still can't break free from that night.

Deborah Kiley can smile now, but she says she still has nightmares from her ordeal at sea.
2 of 2

She can't shake the screams, the image of the frothing water turning red, and the sounds of sharks attacking the man who had just been sitting next to her.

She still can't forget blurting out the Lord's Prayer to block out the cries of the man dying in front of her.

"As long as I kept saying those words, I knew I was all right," she says today. "It was my only proof that I had not gone mad."

Kiley would survive that night, clinging to a dingy in the Atlantic Ocean for five days without food and water. But so have others in circumstances that seemed as hopeless. They are the amazing characters who seem to surface during every manmade or natural disaster -- those who survive against all odds.

What do these survivors share in common? That's the question that the author Laurence Gonzales has long tried to answer. Whenever a disaster hits -- a cyclone in Myanmar; an earthquake in China; a climbing accident in Alaska -- Gonzales scans the headlines for the stories of those survivors who made it out alive when all others perished.

"I know when something big happens, I know the kind of stories that are playing out and the people who emerge from them with similar stories," he says.

Gonzales looks for people like Ma Yuanjiang, a 31-year-old power plant executive who survived seven days buried under rubble by drinking his urine and eating paper after a massive earthquake struck China in May. He studies survivors like Ari Afrizal, a construction worker who survived the 2005 Tsunami by clinging to a raft for two weeks in the Indian Ocean.

Don't Miss
Father, son rescued after more than 12 hours in Atlantic
"I Shouldn't Be Alive"
China quake: Another against-odds rescue
Maritime disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries
Gonzales explains what makes these survivors special in "Deep Survival," a book that dissects the psychological and spiritual transformation that takes place within people who survive against all odds.

Most of these survivors share the same traits, Gonzales says.

"These are people who tend to have a view of the world that does not paint them as a victim," he says. "They're not whiners who are always complaining about the bad things that are happening to them and expecting to get rescued."

Gonzales says at least 75 percent of people caught in a catastrophe either freeze or simply wander in a daze.

"The first thing people do when something bad happens is to be in denial," Gonzales says. "People who make good survivors tend to get through that phase quickly. They accept the evidence of their senses."

'The Rambo types are the first to go'

Gonzales says many of the disaster survivors he studied weren't the most skilled, the strongest or the most experienced in their group.

Read the rest here

It's official. Green is now mainstream.

The environmental movement even has it's own tv network, Planet Green. I don't know if it's going to last. After all, even though people are concerned about the environment, as I am, do they really want to sit at home and watch shows about to green your toilet? 

Still, as new network, it'll get some novelty ratings as everyone like to be in on something new. If I was an advertiser in the US, I'd jump on board for the first couple/few months for the positive brand association. But I wouldn't commit to more. Here's their launch ad. Kinda' funny.