There was clearly some kind of counsel strike going on….Each day a fresh layer of black and blue bags piled up; resembling some kind of gruesome flower display. As it went on, I started to feel a bit offended by the sight and smell, and a bit sorry for the visiting tourists confronted by the mounds of ugly rubbish. Not what you really want to see on your holiday.

…you can call me stupid, but after a week and a half it suddenly dawned one me that the bin men weren’t the problem, we were. We’re the ones who produce all this rubbish, they just take it away and put it somewhere we can’t see it. The problem is society is obsessed with buying and consuming, but very little thought goes to where it all goes when we’re done. We make ourselves feel better with token gestures, putting our used papers in the recycling bin, our green bottles in the green bottles bin, using recycled paper… you get the idea.

So I woke up one morning with the thought in my head that maybe the rubbish strike was a great opportunity to make a point and get people thinking about what happens to our rubbish, so that they might spend a bit less time producing it.

I jumped out of bed (not a usual occurrence) and ran to the window hoping that the bin men hadn’t decided to “unstrike themselves” and went and did a little scouting to make sure the rest of the city was still covered in rubbish. It was.

Headed to work and had myself a 8:30 brainstorm with the team. Then a couple of hours later, props and camera in hand we found ourselves wandering through the red light district of the city looking for the most photogenic rubbish piles.

View the video here (YouTube Video)
Even being caught red handed in the middle of the red-light district stuffing a pair of purple tights with bubble wrap by the police didn’t stop us. Uttering the stock phrase, “student project” which sent them happily on their way, smiling and waving at us to carry on.

We set up our little stunt and stood back to see what happened. We got a lot of attention, with people stopping and asking questions and taking photos. We even got onto the Amsterdam news site. Did it make people think any more about the rubbish they produce, I’d like to hope so.

http://www.at5.nl/gespot/41051/it-s-big-and-it-stinks

By
Michelle Henley
Creative Director
GyroHSR Amsterdam

Contrary to popular belief, digital is central to b2b marketing. So much so that in GyroHSR’s B2B Marketing Insight Report, 44% of respondents felt that digital communications were the most effective method in B2B marketing, eclipsing that of more traditional tools, such as direct marketing.

It isn’t hard to see why digital is favoured over other channels. Direct response direct mail has produced a 0% response rate for almost half of the respondents in the research, compared with 27% for email marketing campaigns. Furthermore, the best response rates achieved were higher for email than any other communication channel.

But while the technologies being used in digital are at a similar level of development across business and consumer marketing, it is why they are used and what is deemed as sufficient return on investment which differs massively.  For B2B marketers, digital is treated as a tactical tool to help build a brand rather than a strategic platform for brand engagement and lead generation which consumer marketers have embraced.

So why does this disconnect between the application of digital exist? It can be because different digital tools available to marketers behave in different ways for the two disciplines.  Take Twitter, for example, which has a very different application in the B2B world than it does for consumer marketing. In B2B circles it is a highly targeted communication channel which allows individuals to network and share knowledge directly with each other. For consumer brands, Twitter is a broadcast medium which is effective in communicating to a mass market.

However, the main reason for the disparity between B2B and B2C is because B2B marketers are only measuring a fraction of what digital offers. Too many B2B marketers are still trying to convince themselves that digital works and as a result are failing to see the full potential of digital, which consumer marketers wised up to five years ago. This preoccupation with measurement of activity in place of measurement of return has led them to focus on short-term results, looking at the open and click through rates of email marketing as a barometer for brand engagement, rather than a consideration of the influence exerted after opening.

We know that B2B marketers are using digital channels to help with brand building, and that they are aware of the latest technologies available, with 78% stating in the report that they feel fairly or very well informed on digital developments.  But, crucially, they are failing to measure the impact of these efforts, with only 13% of respondents actively seeking to measure brand building as part of their overall marketing review, but instead focussing on website visits (82%) and e-mail open rates (66%) as benchmarks for success.

To combat this, marketers operating in the digital sphere need to adopt more sophisticated digital metrics for success and evolve from proving how it works to actually using it for lead and income generation.  B2C marketers have already shown this can work and B2B counterparts need to recognise this or risk falling behind the curve by not fully embracing the potential of digital.

By
Danny Turnbull
General Manager
GyroHSR in Manchester

Ferruccio’s secret? Realising that a simple element he was selling as functional, effective and reliable, could expand outwards into something that was beautiful, awe-inspiring and world-famous. Now, of course, Feruccio could have stuck to turning out his tractor clutch for tractors. But he didn’t. He realised he was only selling a percentage of what his product was actually worth, and went after the remaining potential.

It’s a lesson direct marketers would do well to learn. No, it’s a lesson direct marketers must learn, or risk finding themselves staring into the abyss. For too long, we have marched into pitches talking about data, targeting, response, measurement – all that solid, commercial stuff that we know budget-conscious clients want to hear. “Don’t spend your cash on those beautiful, but intangible brand awareness ads”, we urged. “Go for DM. It works, and here are some cold, hard (if boring) stats to prove it.”

And, for the most part, that approach has worked. Who wouldn’t want to engage with consumers in an intimate way and be able to track where every penny is spent? But the landscape has changed. The consumer has changed. And if direct marketers don’t learn to sell everything else they can deliver, then they can kiss a share of tomorrow’s marketing spend, goodbye.

So why now? What’s changed?

Well, the direct marketing industry has been focusing on the clutch – the fundamental cornerstone of its heritage. We’ve been selling our targeting and measurement. Which is great. Only now, everyone else is starting to walk the walk – or they are at least talking the talk. We all know that with a long history of understanding customer data, direct marketers are those best placed to navigate the new digital landscape for clients, but it’s unquestionable that other disciplines are staking a claim on cross-channel targeting and measurement.

Add to that the lightning speed at which consumer channels have fragmented and multiplied and the ensuing land-grab this has created. Where direct was once a one-to-one channel, it has fast become a one-to-many channel, and this has fundamentally changed the way we must operate.  We predict that we won’t see disciplines drop off, but we will see them continue to multiply.

Taking this new landscape into account forces us to reassess the way we view disciplines and channels within it. Contrary to what some may think, direct marketing is not just a tactical tool, it is a strategic approach. It can build brands and it can create an intimacy that no other approach can. Believe it, because if you don’t, you can’t sell it. And if you can’t sell it, you might be left to turn the lights out as everyone else embraces a new era somewhere in the future. This is an approach we had to adopt when launching a US campaign for agricultural and construction equipment giants John Deere. (If only these essays were themed ‘DM…and tractors’…).The challenge was clear: John Deere wanted to enter a new digger category. The audience was contractors, landscapers, farmers and dealers. So a simple offline DM piece, targeted and tracked, might have done the job.

It might have done. But then, it might have gone down as another classic example of the real potential of direct marketing going well and truly unexploited. Instead, we created a campaign that incorporated the stalwarts of direct marketing and used them to create something much, much bigger.

“Smackdown” involved staging a series of head-to-head battles featuring the top machines in a ‘robot wars’- style duel. The events—the hill climb, visibility test, power lift and serviceability—were based on real-world situations that drivers experience and were staged in front of a live audience.

Initially, the audience was engaged via offline mailers, but that was only the beginning. At the heart of the programme was the ‘SkidSteerSmackdown.com’ microsite, featuring videos of digger battles. The site was fully interactive, enabling visitors to engage in a number of ways. For example, fans could create e-postcards which could be customized and distributed to friends and co-workers. This simple tool converted dealers and operators into the campaign’s strongest advocates. A series of eDMs were distributed to alert both dealer and prospects when new content was available on the site, and finally – traditional elements such as print ads were also incorporated.

And through this activity, John Deere gained a cult following. Since the site launch in April 2008, the microsite has had more than 150,000 visitors with 125,000 unique views and more than 350,000 page views.  Smackdown videos have garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube. Offline, the Smackdown-themed lead generators yielded a 4 percent response rate, outpacing many other similar mailers during the year. Drive-to-site banner advertising had click-through-rates of approximately 3 percent, and eBlasts promoting the site had response rates of more than 7 percent.

This was a campaign that had direct marketing at the heart – there was an identifiable audience, a clear proposition and a measurable response. But to encapsulate it in this way does no justice to the true reach of the activity. We could have sent out the mailers and waited to track the sales. But we didn’t. We took the brand to a new marketplace and created a following populated by genuine advocates. We drove awareness, created buzz and instigated WOM. And if I’m starting to sound like a traditional adman, then I make no apologies.

And neither should DM as a discipline. It is perfectly poised to tell complete brand stories through this brave new media landscape. But if DM professionals hide behind data and measurement without talking about the inspiring creative, groundbreaking online innovation and power to build genuine brand experiences, then they will be selling themselves short. They will be moaning about their Ferrari clutch, whilst never looking beyond to the potential of their own product. Go forth and sell it all, sell it now. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about

By Christoph Becker
Chief Creative Officer
GyroHSR

Links: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/944635/PROMOTIONAL-FEATURE—Direct-marketing-round-table/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH/