von Roland Hachmann | Juni 13, 2009 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
14:00 audience session: context by Stefan Erschwendner
Some interesting questions arise after the kick off presentation:
- Should agencies rather focus on context of the target audience? Will context drive marketing (communicationss) in the future?
- Which type of agency will be best suited for this in the future? PR or ad agencies?
- What happens when companies piggyback contexts without honestly solving the problems relevant to these contexts – when the branding effect is purely placebo.
- How can you focus on certain contexts, for chocolate bars, for example? You can’t with the current system of target audience definition.
- If the goal is managing relationships with consumers in different contexts, who will do that in the future? The brand, the agency? Probably the brand in the long term, agencies will turn in to coaches.
- Will the time frame for communications programms change? The model of having „quarterly“ campaigns can probably not be sustained in the future.
von Roland Hachmann | Juni 13, 2009 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
11:05 second day just started, with some delay, as Roland points out explicitly 😉
First panel:
Trend Cocooning
Wie verändert die Krise das Verbraucherverhalten?
With Prof. Peter Wippermann and Roland Kühl v. Puttkammer (Organisator der remix09)
- First, Roland explains the trend cocooning. Prof. Wippermann expands on it. The trend was orifinally coined by Faith Popcorn, before the internet existed in it’s current version.
- Quote Wippermann: Freedom is being defined by technology…
- Prof. Wippermann about scouting the web via software for identifying trends and topics. Sounds reasonable.
- The below 20 year olds search for social connections preferrably online, instead of online. (?)
- Now the panel is extended by two people from the audience: a young guy living in London, and John Groves, one of the sponsors of the conference. They are now discussing their personal media usage.
- Especially younger people don’t have an internet presence such as a „homepage“, but rather facebook profiles, etc. Homepages are oldschool?
- Wippermann: „Die Mitte ist die neue Minderheit“ (not sure how to translate that: the average German is a minority)
- People in gerneral are very slow in adopting new things. 34% still calculate prices in Deutsche Mark.
- Who has more knowledge about the consumer: the ad agency or the companies? Wippermann: the companies. Agencies are still busy being „creative“.
- it is an idea of the industrial age to separate everything: ad agencies from the companies. Originally, advertising was part of the companies. In the network age, everything will be connected (again).
- The middlemen (media companies, agencies) will have to proof their added value. Companies can directly connect with their target audience and gain knowledge.
- Three Trends by Wipperman: freedom defined by technology, success defined by sharing, family as a „negative“ trend, because people are afraid/don’t want it…
12:00 – next session is about Hinz&Kunzt, a street magazine sold by homeless people here in Hamburg.
Hinz & Kunzt
Ein gemeinnütziger Verlag im Überblick
- A monthly magazine, founded: 1993 by Dr. Reimers. A brand awareness of 94% The idea: helping people to help themselves. Financially and politically independent.
- Each homeless person is a single entrepreneur. They purchase the magazine in advance for 0,80€ and then sell it for 1,70€ When starting, each reseller gets 10 magazines for free. There are about 400 resellers in Hamburg.
- There also is a website, wich some of the magazine articles as a teaser. They even have a blog (because: you have to have one today…?)
von Roland Hachmann | Juni 12, 2009 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
17:33h – Ok, I skipped a session: quantitative vs qualitative viral marketing by viral seeding company elbkind. Very interesting session with a goood discussion about reach of campaigns in generell (i.e. millions of views) vs reach within a certain target group (wich might result in viewer, but qualitatively lesser views).
Now I am sitting in this (last) session:
Agenturgezwitscher: Twittern zwischen Tratsch 2.0 und echtem Mehrwert
Bastian Scherbeck and Nicole Simon about twitter for agencies.
- One opportunity: internal communication instead of mail and IMs: it can reduce mail but doesn’t offer all functionalities needed.
- External Communications for clients: it’s all about transparency and trust. The agency needs empowerment when doing this, clients need „courage“.
- (missed the third scenario, as I had to answer an email for work)
- Interesting question from the audience: why should companies twitter? Answer: It depends. And: you can, you don’t have to.
- A further discussion with lots of questions from the audience arose about why should you twitter, personal accounts vs corporate accounts, etc. Temporarily it was stated that you can do customer service well (not cheaper) – in the future I believe that. Currently twitter has around 60-80.000 users in Germany. That’s a bit small to be a relevant channel for customer service…
von Roland Hachmann | Juni 12, 2009 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
14:00h – the first afternoon session started with:
XING und die Klassiker
wahlfreie Informationen und Networking statt einfach nur Werbung
Oliver Nickels of IBM starts the session explaining how IBM uses WoM and direct networking to sell their solutions to the German Mittelstand, because it works better than pure advertising.
- Networking is extremely important in German Mittelstand – when it is based on trust. Advertising is too expensive because it’s too broad for this B2B segment.
- IBM created and advertised a „mittelstands“-group in Xing. IBM employees actively posts articles and comments, even distributes flyers during events, etc.
- Speaker changed: now it’s Dirk Reimers of FAT IT Solutions, speaking about benefits of the IBM Xing group.
In total, it appears to be completely logical to build awareness and consideration via networking – isn’t that how B2B usually works best? Only difference: with Xing these networks expand over time and space…
14:45h Next up is Wolfgang Hünnekens talking about crowdsourcing:
Crowdsourcing
Funktioniert die Kreativität der Massen für das Agenturgeschäft?
The session runs with Markus Roder and Oliver Nickels, but first Wolfgang Hünnekens speaks about crowdsourcing.
- Hünnekens starts way at the beginning and tells the old tale of how crowdsourcing was first noticed and researched…
- The cases mentioned are the usual suspects: Tchibo, Dell, Fiat500… And now that he wants to show a clip, there are technical difficulties.
- The discussion starts with the question: what is creativity? That was a discussion during the last ADC awards.
- Markus Roder doesn’t believe in crowdsourcing, because even if a single person gets to estimate things several times in a row, his aggregated estimates are more on target than each individual estimate. Also: people quite often don’t know what they want from a brand. Cites Henry Ford: if he had asked people what they want, they would have said: faster horses.
- Oliver Nickels: the examples for advertising crowdsourcing were all „risk-free“. Crowdsourcing in product development is always possible. A brand should not be handed over to the „crowd“.
- Interesting question being debated: for which brands could crowdsourcing be relevant? Some brands need to uphold an illusion, a placebo effect to keep up their brand values (Markus Roder).
- Next question is: how do you manage consumer perception of a brand – how does crowdsourcing contribute, if a brand needs to be lived?
- Another fact: brands have to face an increasing lack of control.
von Roland Hachmann | Juni 12, 2009 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising
10:55 at the Museum for Hamburgische Geschichte, and the show will start any minute.
The speakers of the first panel are already sitting on stage. First topic:
Share Economy, Collaborative Marketing, Radical Individualism
Markenführung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Klassik und Online, Stabilität und Individualisierung, Kontrolle und Partizipation
The first panel is with Bernd M. Michael, Gregor Stemmle and Dr. Stefan Tweraser, moderated by Mark Pohlmann.
- Adwords makes up 95% of Google’s revenue… after a small calculation Mark deducts that Google in Germany makes about 2 billion Euros.
- Question posted to the audience sparks the first discussion: can you separate between off- and online.
- Bernd Michael states: there are many experts in this room, but not much knowledge about the effectiveness of what we’re doing in terms of revenue. We are not able to give a 100% media recommendation for ROI.
- Dr. Tweraser: The seach box mediates between attention and brand promise.
- Michael: The average German knows 3.000 words – how should they memorize 50k+ brands?
- Stemmle: there are examples of successful brands in this digital world – but not built on traditional principles.
- Zara was mentioned as an example for brands that are successful without any advertising whatsoever. Instead it gew by WoM because of the subjective brand qualty. (Triggered a discussion about subjective vs objective benefits of brands)
- Good advice by Michael: collect casestudies of companies that were successful during the last crisis (2000-2003 or thereabouts). Show these to your clients when talking about facts.
- Stemmle: Use free content online to build your brand – then use the brand power to sell paid content offline.
- Michael: does not agree… calls it a huge strategic blunder, what happened a couple of years ago. Traditional media was to fat, to saturated, they didn’t take the internet serious enough.
- Stemmle: the business of the future for media: prioritization and weighting of content. Defining what’s „talk of the town“…
- Discussion is going back to the original topic: branding today. Tweraser: brand marketing is already a dialogue, some brands already admit that the brand has partially been taken out of their hands.
- Michael: the apple store in NY has a simple way of adding value for R&D: every question that the staff gets and has never heard before, they write down and send it to Cupertino… (Great, that’s what every company with direct customer interaction should do!)
- Markus Roder (in the audience): Viral Marketing can work, when brands give promises and then overdeliver: that triggers excitement and hence word of mouth.
- Last question by Pohlmann: what’s in it for the future. Stemmle: network, interact. Tweraser: use the information available on the web (Google was able to predict the winner of the eurovision song contest, for esample). advertising is no longer art, it’s a science. Michael: We need experts. It’s still difficult to get experts. Offer more opportunities for knowledge gaining.
This marks the end of the first session.
Wo ich sonst so bin...