THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Projects.

We made our company on projects.

As in, “Why pay an ad agency a big retainer, then wonder what you’re getting. Use Centric, and get everything you need on a fixed budget.”

Or, “Time and materials? You gotta be kiddin. There’s no reason for anyone to ever finish a project on T&M. Here, let us give you a nice fixed-price quote for this scope of work.”

Get in, get out. Clean, simple.

But, in a time of change, models change, too. We’re now at a point where ongoing relationships are the only thing that makes sense. Sure, we can quote and deliver a website, but what happens after it’s delivered? Do you maintain it yourself? Who does the marketing? What happens when you have to add another product line, or need to do a promotion? How does it tie into offline programs? Who’s doing the metrics and analysis? What are customers saying, and how does it reflect on what you should be doing?

It’s a new world. Your website never goes dark, and it’s intimately wrapped up in a lot of things that don’t ever end, either. You need an ongoing relationship.

So, let’s dust off the hour-tracking tools, because things change.

How does it feel to be joined at the hip? We’re thinking, pretty darn good.

Later,

Jason Stoddard
www.centric.com

WOM. Word of mouth. Next to the death of “traditional” branding, it’s one of the things you’ll heard the most about in 2006.

But let’s take a few steps back. I’ll assume you don’t have infinite time to peruse all the latest research by Jupiter, Neilsen, Emarketer, Marketing Sherpa, ClickZ, and everyone else who makes it their job to report on the latest happenings in the interactive space. (Though you really should subscribe to Emarketer’s daily blasts. They’re a great way to keep ahead of the steamroller.) So, given that, here’s an important statistic you may or may not have heard:

Over 50% of online content is now generated by users.

This means that for every NBC, ABC, CNN, MSN, Yahoo, magazine site, corporate site—all the media that the press and the marketers generate—there’s at least one corresponding piece on the blogs, forums, newsgroups, SIGs, MySpaces, ad infinitum.

And what they’re saying can drown your marketing message.

How? Well, let’s say we decide to buy keywords on Google. And we decide to broadcast these keywords out on a wide range of sites—which, today, includes many, many forums and blogs. And we polish our creative to let your audience know that you can get your latest Widget X2000 for less at your Widgetstore, and it features wonderful reliability and industry-leading features they can’t do without.

One problem: you’re now advertising next to blog posts. And forum threads. And they’re saying, well, yeah, that’s great, but maybe you should consider the Thingamigiggy Y3000 instead. And all those features, well, maybe that’s true, but some of them don’t really do much for them as an end-user. About this time, the one person who had a bad experience with your customer service chimes in to say, well, I would never buy from them anyways.

The result? They listen to each other, rather than to you. This is word of mouth. And it can negate any outreach program you have in place.

How do you combat this? Three ways:

(1) Generate ad messages that resonate with your audience, and are believable.
(2) Monitor activity on the blogs and forums, using tools such as a Technorati search, or Blogpulse.
(3) Consider sending an identified customer representative to defuse any hot issues found.

Note the importance of #3. Your liason is identified as an employee of the company. You don’t try to hide. Because the penalties for trying to “tweak” the forums are severe. People don’t like to be “handled” or steered. But a company rep, sincerely trying to help, can win them over.

Think of it as a new kind of customer service—pro-active customer service.

This is the same reason you read about the death of “traditional” branding, and why branding companies focus more and more on credibility than on raw position and personality. We’re being drowned out, and our share of voice will only decrease in the future.

Welcome to the new world of change.

Until next time,

Jason Stoddard
www.centric.com

Can you imagine how simple advertising was at the turn of the last century? Let’s see, you have newspapers, magazines, billboards, and that stunning technological innovation of catalog mail-order.

Even the 20th century was pretty managable. Until those last few crazy years, our big new media experiences were in radio and television.

But, with every new medium comes new opportunities for communication. Did you know the first spam message was sent in 1978, by DEC? Or that the first banner ad ran in 1994? Or that blog networks are now accepting streaming video ads?

And, no matter if you look online or off, you’re seeing media opportunities like you’ve never seen before. Consider:

• Painting the top of your building to advertise on Google maps
• A company in Japan just launched point-of-purchase displays using electronic paper for animated display–available now, starting at $30
• Advertising via graffiti, stickering and hand stamps, like Sony’s PSP campaign
• Google is planning a vast, trackable advertising network that includes all kinds of media, online and off
• Printable barcodes can now be made dense enough to store video—that’s right, pass a piece of paper through a reader, and watch a short commercial
• They’ve even developed interactive, heat-activated urinal advertising (you can’t make this stuff up)

The upshot? Every conversation about “advertising” becomes exponentially more complex. Today, when a client comes to us to talk about “online advertising–you know, just ads, not keywords or any of that other stuff,” we have to talk about:

• First tier sites
• Second tier networks
• Blog networks
• Audience-specific single sites
• Rich media
• In-stream video
• Contextually-matched text ads
• Analysis of site traffic re keywords

And half a dozen I don’t remember off the top of my head.

The media steamroller is here. Staying ahead of it requires that you know where your audience is, what they’re likely to respond to, and how they’re already acting on your site. Metrics drive strategy, and strategy drives results. And that’s what keeps you ahead of the steamroller.

Until next time,

Jason Stoddard
www.centric.com

It’s sometimes funny the depth of misunderstanding we have on the most basic, well . . . basics. Like, um, even websites. We’ve been doing these for over a decade now, and we still get questions like:

“That word wrap is ragged. Can you fix it?”

Um. No. We don’t have the fine control of type that we have in printed media. Blocks of text wrap differently on different browsers and different platforms. Add in the fact that people can actually adjust the size of the text on their screen and believe me, you don’t want us putting any hard breaks in there. And no, you don’t want graphic text either, or the whole thing in Flash.

“Why does our site look small on Henry (in IT’s) monitor?”

Um. Well. Considering that Henry is running 2048 x 1536 resolution, that’s not real surprising. Yes, we can set the site so it will expand to the browser window size, but I doubt if even Henry wants to read lines of copy that are 16″ wide on his 24″ monitor.

“Will that PMS match on everyone’s screen?”

Um. I don’t know. We have no control over the type, size, or settings of their monitor. Believe me, I wish we could send a magic little monitor adjustment fairy out with every website packet. But we can’t. Somehow, people still manage to order clothes and furniture online.

Until next time.

Jason Stoddard
www.centric.com

Imagine 10 years from now when you’re pitching a client, telling them how wonderful you think their products are, how you’ll do such a wonderful job for them.

Of course, like everyone else, they’re wearing a little earbud that links them to their iThink, a semi-artificially-intelligent algorithm that scans, oh, say, all internet content from 1995 to the present, and whispers in their ear:

“On December 28, 1998, this person said your company’s products were terrible, and he couldn’t believe you were allowed to come in the country” and “On January 1, 2002, they referenced your ascendancy to the chairmanship as a low point in corporate culture in the United States,” and “On numerous occasions between 2005 and 2012, they campaigned for a congressman who actively blocked your business expansion in California.”

Of course, you probably wouldn’t pitch this client. But who knows what they’ll be able to pull out of the mediascape?