The Impact of Mobile on Marketing and Branding. Insights From the Impact Conference.

The second annual Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Impact conference, held this past week in New York, offered marketers new perspectives on how to leverage mobile in their branding and campaigns. New technological advances such as VR, AR and AI can be creatively used to help consumers better engage and interact with products and services.

The Power of the Consumer

Mobile in particular is a very powerful tool for the consumer since they have all of the control. Kristi Argyilan, Senior Vice President Marketing, Target, stated that, “We can no longer simply buy their attention. We have to earn it every day.” To that end, she explained that, “We engineer relevance for true one-to-one.” Relevance is pivotal in a time of fragmented attention and a flood of messaging. Add to this the fear of brand safety and fraud means that ads and campaigns are under more scrutiny than ever before.

Overcoming Brand Damage

What do you do when a brand is damaged? Jonathan Beamer, CMO, Monster, admitted that his company, “Hasn't rocked it for a decade.” Monster was founded 25 years ago and offers a cautionary tale to others. “We were disruptors and then we were disrupted.” Today, there is a shorter life span for Fortune 500 companies with fewer and fewer maintaining their size and power over a decade. Beamer blamed bad management for losing sight of the original purpose and squeezing profits when they should have been re-invested in the business. “We missed how mobile and other technology could also be used to serve our mission.” Data and insights gleaned from research have helped Monster re-establish itself with a firm mobile presence that speaks to an invigorated target consumer – the job seeker rather than the recruiter. “We dig deep into consumer research’” and found that, “consumers want a champion. They want a company that will do right by society,” he concluded.

Enhancing Brand Position

Ophelia Ceradini, Vice President Digital Innovation and Technology, Estee Lauder, is charged with the task of enhancing an already strong brand through the use of new mobile technology to better match products to consumers. She focuses on, “The power of the human touch and emotions underpins the high touch approach.” Estee Lauder has advanced a myriad of AR elements to their site including ways that women and men can personalize their experiences online using facial recognition on skincare needs. The site then recommends which products each individual should use. Voice assistants are now enabled to recommend store locations as well as offer meditation so the application of products is hands free.

The Next Steps for Mobile

In this fast paced competitive environment, how can mobile continue to grow its marketing prowess? Dr Neil Morgan of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University is spearheading the MARS (Mobile Analytics Realtime Social) project that asks what marketing capabilities do we need to be good at to survive today? His project interviewed over one hundred executives at over 80 companies over a range of performance metrics and levels of digital adaptation.

He found there are four areas of concentration that impact a consumer’s expectations across categories: Individuality, Immediacy, Integration and Information. “We should be in the golden era of marketing with accuracy, accountability and agility,” he stated. “But instead we find entropy, barely concealed chaos, like a roller coaster creeping up before they drop you down.”

There is a lot of data available out there but what is the next step? Marketing is divided, tech is eating strategy, which bell and whistle should I choose, adding but not changing and the potential errors that can occur when we mix third party data into our first party data.

He advises that companies need to first choose a strategy and decide how they will compete. Develop growth stacks based on exchange, experience (eliminating pain points) and engagement (to drive enhanced functionality) and then join, build and manage communities. Finally, marketers need to integrate all learnings into the fabric of the organization, creating an environment of trust where people are willing to share.

Next Steps

As we all grapple with the continuing refraction of industry, a greater understanding of the potential of mobile will enable marketers to successfully leverage their consumer outreach. From damaged brands that can come back from the dead to successful brands who strive to maintain their brand position, the promise and perils of mobile need to be understood and fully integrated into a company’s mission. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

NPR One Personalized Radio. Interview with Thomas Hjelm of NPR

Thomas Hjelm is a digital media veteran with 21 years of experience spanning such corporations as NBCU (both in their Entertainment group, where he was a founding members of the first interactive media team, and the Local News division), AOL, LivePlanet and New York Public Radio. 

He joined NPR in April as the organization’s Chief Digital Officer –a role which draws on his background in digital strategy and operations, audience development and marketing, business and content development, writing and producing, product and technology.

I spoke with Hjelm about his new role at NPR, what he calls the ‘genius' of the public media system, innovation within the NPR network and NPR One, the personalized listening app which has seen +124% year on year growth in app users and is providing important insights into listener behavior.

Charlene Weisler: What is your current role at NPR?

Thomas Hjelm: I’m responsible for defining and executing NPR’s strategies for innovation and growth across current and emerging digital platforms. I also work with our many partners across public radio to develop collective, system wide strategies for building platforms, audiences and value. I manage a few different divisions at NPR that work toward these goals. In Washington, we have a large team of digital strategists, product managers, developers and technologists, producers, program managers and analysts who build and support the core platforms of NPR.org, NPR One and other properties, as well as cultivate partnerships with third-party platforms and distribution channels. In Boston, we have another unit supporting a suite of products and services that are made available to more than 200 NPR member stations. And then across NPR we have a number of other digital specialists in a variety of functions, starting with news, but also including social media, audience development, and revenue. Digital is a department, in other words, but more importantly it’s an organizational concern, one that’s central to every part of NPR and the public radio system as a whole.

Charlene Weisler: Public Radio is a collection of fairly independent stations. How do you help maximize collective efforts?

Thomas Hjelm: That’s true. As a system, public radio is quite decentralized, even diffuse. There are 264 NPR member stations out there, all of them under their own management and marching to their own strategic drum. And that is part of the genius of public radio. Stations in huge markets and small markets and in-between markets have their own voices and identities. As local institutions, they have a direct and intimate connection with their listeners, and they reflect those communities back to themselves in ways no other media organizations can.

Being a distributed network can also bring advantages in digital terms: when I visit stations (I’m talking to you from Madison, where I just spent a day meeting the team at Wisconsin Public Radio), I’m so impressed by the innovation and creativity of these shops, and the great work they do in digital journalism, audience engagement, even product design, and almost always on very lean budgets. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a collective network strategy. If everyone is doing their own digital thing, inevitably there’s redundancy, inefficiency and lost value, to say nothing of a fragmentation of the audience. So how do I handle that? Well, I’m still just a few months into the job, but in an effort to find common ground my first task has been to define and socialize a common value chain that links all of us across the system. It’s simple: we’re all in the business of growing the audience, knowing and understanding the audience, engaging the audience and ultimately monetizing the audience through membership and sponsorship. This narrative applies to NPR, it applies to New York Public Radio, to Vermont and Abilene, but above all it applies to the network as a whole. So if we can all get behind that, it begins to clarify our respective links in the big value chain, the roles we play in relation to  each other, the investments we make and the priorities we set. It’s a first step, and obviously those are very broad terms, but it’s critical if we’re going to, as you say, maximize our collective efforts. 

Charlene Weisler: How has digital evolved since you first started 21 years ago?

Thomas Hjelm: My career has been spent working for so-called legacy media companies that have decided, in one way or another, to transform themselves. When I started, no one knew just what digital media was or would become, but people who took a long view of things saw that it was worth experimenting with. I was at NBC at the time, and we were given permission to create an “online network” of original content. It was a lot of fun, though it certainly didn’t produce much money or many viewers. Today, it is a real business, with a real audience, and the technology has caught up with our creative ambitions. And digital departments are no longer just the guys in shorts sitting in the corner. Digital is woven through every modern media company. I often say my job is to make my job obsolete. We don’t have a Chief Radio Officer here, why a Chief Digital Officer? I’m still fighting that fight, but I’m getting there.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me about NPR One.

Tom Hjelm: NPR One is a smart phone app that delivers audio content from NPR and most member stations and public radio producers in a form that’s personalized, based on the user’s listening tastes, interests and location. It’s an experiment in making our content available in ways that map to the changing behaviors of listeners – especially younger listeners. Yet in other ways it builds on the standing model, format, even business model of public radio. It’s geo-targeted, so when you download the app, it will call up an instance of the local member station. So in New York, you get a WNYC-branded version of NPR One. You get content produced by WNYC alongside NPR content, and you can pledge your membership support to WNYC there, too. There’s also a mix of sponsorship inventory – some sold by NPR and some available to the member station’s local sales team. It’s like radio then – only using algorithms (plus some editorial controls) to tailor the audio experience to the individual. If you tend to skip certain content, over time it will deliver less of that; and if you like certain types of content, you’ll gradually get more of it. And the more successful we are in engaging the listener through this “personalized radio,” the more we learn about them so it becomes a powerful data and engagement tool.

Charlene Weisler: What have the results been so far for NPR One?

Thomas Hjelm: The retention, satisfaction and demographic numbers are all very encouraging. Thirty percent of users come back to use it within a week. That rate is far greater than is typical for an app. The satisfaction score is 4 out of 5 based on our surveys. Best of all, the basic demographic skews younger than traditional radio, with18- to 34-year-olds making up a third of the audience -- and they’re as affluent and educated as our current NPR audience. It’s a big step toward taking the enduring value proposition of public radio and making it available in new ways for new listeners.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

Q&A with Stacey Lynn Schulman - TVB

Stacey Lynn Schulman discovered research through college internships. In fact, she is a great proponent of internships as a way for students to explore different career opportunities and to make important contacts for employment after graduation. She launched her career at the rep firm Katz Television, followed by stints at CBS, ad agencies, Turner and ultimately at the TVB where she is CRO. Her responsibilities include supporting the marketing and sales efforts of member television stations across all of their platforms.

In this informative interview Schulman talks about her career, digital mobile, social media, national and local efforts, research trends, big data and what the future might look like for television stations and their multi-platform efforts. And she offers a way to view CBS (and other broadcast networks) that is not impacted by any MVPD contract negotiation.

The six videos of the interview are as follows:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background                                                        (7:03)

TVB                                                                   (10:07)

Digital Mobile                                                    (4:05)

Local Digital Efforts                                          (7:50)

Predictions                                                         (5:17)

Good Data vs More Data                                 (6:16)

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about her background in this 7:03 minute video:

 

Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about the TVB, its mission and projects in this 10:07 minute video:

 

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Digital Mobile and its ability to get over the air television anywhere in this 4:05 minute video:

 

CW: It sounds like Digital Mobile gives all Time Warner cable customers access to CBS whether or not it is available on our channel line-up.

SLS: Yes. The important piece about Digital Mobile TV is that consumers do not need to feel victimized by television delivery mechanisms like cable or satellite choices.  They can still receive over-the-air TV stations -- and all of their digital subchannels (some of which aren't being carried currently by cable or satellite providers) -- by purchasing a regular antenna at their local electronics store or by purchasing what we call a "dongle" (a mobile antenna) from Amazon.com.  The dongle connects easily to a cell phone or tablet computer and allows the consumer to view over-the-air television signals, for free, anywhere.  No WIFI required.

 
 

In this 7:50 minute video, Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about local digital efforts by the TVB:

 

Looking ahead in the media landscape, Stacey Lynn Schulman descibes possible new innovations and opportunities for stations. This interview video by Charlene Weisler is 5:15 minutes:

 

In this final video, Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Big Data and the conundrum of good data compared to more data in this 6:16 minute video: