Listen to the Voice of the Brand—
By Calling its Call Center

By: Jessica L'Esperance
01Dec10

UX designers probably already know how important it is to evaluate a brand’s call center at the start of every engagement. For direct response and e-commerce companies, it’s often the only brand touch point where consumers can talk to a live human being. As designers, we listen to the questions customers ask, identify their pain points and look for ways to prevent them. We also learn the top 10 customer questions and the order that the agents drive the conversations—all in an effort to identify opportunities for simpler, more intuitive transactions.

But what most people don’t know is, you can also listen for the voice of the company. Think about that for a second. You can literally hear the brand through the phone. It’s so obvious, and yet so incredible.

Try it. Call a couple call centers. I did. I called Time Warner, and Zappos and got a real vivid understanding of their brands.

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Filed Under: Design, Development, E-commerce, Strategy

This Holiday’s (Required) Reading UPDATE

By: NoD Editors
29Nov10

Another must-read “response” to Fast Company’s The Future of Advertising is Bloomberg Businessweek’s feature Don Draper’s Revenge. Like The Future of Advertising, it’s a state of the union for Madison Avenue—although it comes to a distinctively different conclusion. Bloomberg Businessweek’s article argues for the success of Madison Avenue goliath agencies; the Fast Company feature reasons that there’s potential for a new world order.

Here’s the short story:

  • Fast Company says Madison Avenue executives are struggling to stay up-to-date and there’s room for a new model to grab market share. “The holding companies will still exist, but around them could emerge a chaotic pattern of startups, independent talent, and connectors who thrive with minimum overhead,” author Danielle Sacks concluded.
  • While Bloomberg Businessweek says Madison Avenue goliaths have successfully adapted to the prominence of digital media. “After a couple of years of slumping fortunes, the Big Four advertising agency holding companies—Omnicom, the WPP Group, Interpublic, and Publicis—are bouncing back…as the global ad market continues to thaw, the descendants of Madison Avenue not only are alive but are looking as well positioned as anybody to capitalize on the digital market moving forward.”

The debate is live and you can contribute with #adfuture.

Filed Under: Management, Start-Up, Strategy

This Holiday’s (Required) Reading

By: NoD Editors
24Nov10

Six-thousand word articles are hard to fit into the everyday grind. So thank goodness it’s Thanksgiving weekend. Because Fast Company‘s Danielle Sacks has written a must-read with her epic The Future of Advertising. You won’t want to be caught at an industry holiday party without having read it.

Why? First, it’s likely she interviewed someone you know. Second, her panoramic portrait of the industry at a time when tectonic change isn’t just being talked about, it’s actively happening is stunning. No matter what part of the industry you’re in, her story is about you. This is why so many people are talking about it.

A snapshot of some notable reactions:

Make the Logo Bigger‘s Bill Green explored the advertiser side of the agency story. He wrote, “You can’t ask what’s changed without also looking at the role of brands here.”

Ad Age’s Small Agency Diary contributor Derek Walker argued in his post entitled “The future of advertising…is still advertising,” “Advertising by its definition cannot be revolutionized, redefined or reinvented. It will always be advertising. Now, how we do advertising is a different matter.”

Agency Spy talked with Sacks. The most “fascinating realization” from her reporting: “Advertising is a business that hasn’t changed in virtually 50 years. Whether you were a copywriter in 1962 or 2002, your job was virtually the same–and your goal was to perfect that one craft. Moving forward, the only constant in advertising will be change. Therefore the most coveted talent in the future (and present) needs to be able to continuously evolve, learn and adapt.”

David Jones, global CEO of agency holding company Havas, curiously tweeted, “The future of advertising is about purpose beyond profit #adfuture #eurolondon #eurorscg #social.”

Add your own opinion in the conversation with #adfuture.

Filed Under: Content, Management, Start-Up, Strategy, Talent

Notes on Digital’s
Recently Closed Tabs

By: NoD Editors
19Nov10

Here are a few of the notable articles Notes On Digital and @Hugeinc has in its browser’s history.

Can I Have Your Attention Please? Facebook and Apple square off for the informal yet valuable title of The Week’s Biggest Announcement. Apple had compelling pre-announcement hype. But Facebook trumped it with its evolved messaging product and its late-in-the week announcement of its victory over MySpace.

They’re Watching You. Google knows more about you than you might realize, but so might this guy if you cross his path.

Deals to Die For. Crazy promotions can do more harm than good for advertisers’ bottom lines. High CPCs and sharply cut profits are a real threat. But not-so-good deals are not so good for business either.

Filed Under: E-commerce, Search, Social Media

Jimmy Fallon & Ashton Kutcher Are Leading the Online TV Revolution

By: Erin Scime
18Nov10

(With a little Justin thrown in for good measure.) Photo by Lloyd Bishop/NBC.

In this post:
Lessons from NBC’s Late Night (featuring Fallon’s and Timberlake’s History of Rap), Ashton Kutcher’s Contribution, How to Start Acting on the Big Picture

TV is on the iPad, it’s on YouTube, it’s on Hulu, it’s on Fancast, it’s in podcast form, it’s saved on DVRs, it’s aggregated (or would be aggregated) through Google TV, Roku and Boxee—it’s on-demand from myriad sources. TV is simply one more kind of digital content that needs a strategy.

In this nebulous, fledgling relationship between TV and the Internet, Jimmy Fallon and Ashton Kutcher are standing out as leaders.

Lessons from NBC’s Late Night:

  • Timeslot doesn’t matter anymore. “Times don’t matter much in my generation…I Tivo everything. I DVR everything. I don’t know what time Jersey Shore is on, but I know Snooki,” he told the ladies of The View. Would his ratings have suffered if his show were on even later? No, he said. His audience knows where to find him.
  • Programming must truly be cross-platform. “Last night before the show, I went on Twitter and started a hashtag called #awwhellno…Thousands and thousands of tweets came in. In fact within an hour, it was the number one trending topic in the United States and worldwide. This is serious. It was crazy,” Fallon said in a video on the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon blog. Most all broadcast shows and networks utilize social networks to push out their messages. But Fallon has lifted it up from a promotional tool to content creation tool, thereby expanding the ecosystem of his show brand across multiple platforms.

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Filed Under: Analytics, Content, Social Media, Strategy

Awareness Shmareness

By: Nicole Victor
16Nov10

In this post:
“Bury the Marketing Funnel”, Go For Brand Engagement

Brand awareness, the key performance indicator, is a relic of the old, my-bologna-has-a-first-name days when advertisers could only talk at consumers and hope their messages would get drilled into viewers’ and listeners’ memories.

It stems from the one-way-street purchase funnel, a concept first defined in 1898, that goes something like this:

Awareness (Aware) → Engagement (Interested) → Activation (Decided) → Conversion (Customer) → Loyalty (Loyal Customer) → Advocacy (Ambassador)

But for any campaign that extends into digital media, goals based on brand awareness are just not robust enough. A campaign can no longer be considered successful because a high portion of viewers recall seeing it—that bar is way too low.

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Filed Under: Analytics, Display Ads, Social Media, Strategy

Notes On Digital’s
Recently Closed Tabs

By: NoD Editors
12Nov10

Here are a few of the notable articles Notes On Digital and @Hugeinc has in its browser’s history.

Too Much of a Good Thing Is a Really Bad Thing. Facebook struggles with an oversupply of ad space, and Google makes a move that could preempt their own version of this problem with ad-blocking instant previews.

Generational Email Divide Starts Monday when Facebook present its Gmail killer.

Thinking globally not locally. Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela and Pakistan have the slowest internet connection speeds—all less than 1 Mbit/s. South Korea has the fastest at 16.61 Mbit/s. See the whole list at Pingdom.

Abandonment Issues. Google offered an engineer $3.5 million not to go to Facebook.  That’s $3.5 million good reasons for every Google employee to send an email to Facebook’s HR department, right now.

Filed Under: Display Ads, E-mail, Search, Social Media, Talent

Billions of Dollars Built on…Message Boards?

By: Josh Payton
10Nov10

In this post:
Message Boards 101, The Underappreciated Underpinning of the Social Web, Message Boards Behind Facebook, @SoAndSo, Viral Memes & Monetization

If you were to write an anthropological history of the Internet, the term “social media” probably wouldn’t make an appearance until you got to the years between 2000 and 2003, when MakeoutClub basically defined what a social network is and Friendster and MySpace began to capture mainstream attention. That’s when the web hit a tipping point. “Web 2.0” picked up, everything became social and we moved on to new billion-dollar businesses like Facebook, Twitter and sites like Digg.

The systems that support these powerhouses, however, have been with us since the beginning.

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Filed Under: Content, Design, Social Media

User Research Shows iPad Is Mobile,
But Only Inside The Home

By: Dan Hou
09Nov10

At Facebook’s recent mobile event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “The iPad’s not mobile…it’s a computer.”

This statement aroused a series of conflicting opinions about the device. Many readers of Engadget felt this observation was obvious. “The sky is blue,” the most popular comment read. Yet AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher tried to refute Zuckerberg in her article, Dear Zuck: The Apple iPad Is Mobile (So Sorry!). And then succeeded to a degree with a poll showing that 85.1 percent of 1,671 respondents think the device is in fact mobile.

Neither Zuckerberg nor Swisher and her readers got it quite right.  The iPad is mobile, just not as mobile as you might assume.

Results from a recently completed user research study by HUGE shows:

The iPad isn’t often carried around outside of the home, but it is very mobile within the home. Users bring it with them from the kitchen table to the bedroom and even the bathroom. It’s the at-home device of convenience and leisure, just like the iPhone is for people on-the-go. This behavior has had the side effect of putting a cap on at-home laptop use. For those with an iPad, the laptop has become a work-only machine.

The primary scenario where we saw consistent mobile usage was during vacations. People opt to take the iPad in lieu of a laptop when leisure is all that matters.

This was one of many insights that we uncovered in our research. If you want to know more, let the NoD editors know with a comment or email, and we’ll follow up when the full study is released.

Filed Under: iPhone/iPad Tagged |

Notes On Digital’s
Recently Closed Tabs

By: NoD Editors
05Nov10

Here are a few of the notable articles Notes On Digital and @Hugeinc has in its browser’s history.

Setting the Standard Mashable lays a foundation for standard social media measurement and campaign components. While a valuable service to the community, some numbers speak for themselves—like the article’s 2,219 tweets and 444 Facebook shares in 6 hours.

FourSquared: The new verb meaning: “Do something innovative, get co-opted by a giants, and have your lack of success broadcasted on CNN.”

What Would Bloomberg Say? The respected incubator Y Combinator combs New York City for promising start-ups—with the intention of taking the most promising to Mountainview (albeit just temporarily).

Filed Under: Mobile, Social Media, Start-Up, Talent