WPN forges new partnerships to deliver response in a digital world

Our business is all about getting results. But as the world gets ever more digital, WPN needs to make sure it helps its clients get those results in digital media with the same success we achieve in off-line media as well. We have of course produced a lot of digital work over the past 12 months, but we would like to build on our current offering and take it to the next level.

And while we could have hired in a specialist or two, we didn’t think that really represented the best possible solution going forward.  To be honest, most of our clients want joined-up communication strategies but they also want the specialist expertise. So it seemed to us that the best way would be to create partnerships with some of the ‘best in breed’ in the digital world, rather than a ‘jack of all trades’, and for that reason I’m delighted to be able to announce that WPN has now agreed a strategic alliance with three of the leading businesses in their respective fields: partnerships have now been established with mobile marketing specialist, Sponge Group, social media specialist, Tamar, and Harvest Digital, who offer a wide range of digital services but who have a particular expertise in eCRM.

In each case, we’ve been impressed  by the experience and enthusiasm of the business and its people. In mobile marketing, Sponge have a enviable record in developing hard-hitting solutions for clients such as Coca-Cola, Audi and Unilever. Tamar is an award-winning specialist in social media and natural search, working with clients such as Peugeot, Miss Selfridge and Age UK. And Harvest have a particular strength in eCRM work with clients such as NatWest, RBS, Auto Trader and Brooke Animal Hospital.

And although they remain separate businesses from WPN, the arrangements we have in place mean that any digital work will be managed through the existing WPN client management structure so the process remains joined up at all times: although you will have direct access to the specialists, the project will be fully managed by WPN who will take overall responsibility.

These partnerships mean that WPN’s passion for getting results can now be applied across a wide range of digital media in addition to the more conventional press, insert, TV, direct mail and other off line media. But rest assured, ‘results’ remains as ever the lifeblood of our business.

If you’d like to know any more about these new partnerships and how they could make a contribution to your marketing programme, then I or one of the team would be delighted to talk to you in more detail.

How does the weather affect response?

When it rains, businesses offering goods and services for sale online should be rubbing their hands in glee because what do we all do?  We stay inside out of the rain and spend more time and money online. And what happens when the sun comes out?  We go out to make the most of the sunny high street before it starts raining again.  Also, apparently when the sun is shining it puts us in a good mood and we spend more on in-store purchases.

So don’t knock the changeable British weather because depending who you are, it can be used to your advantage to increase your responses.

Sainsbury’s lead the way here by appointing their own ‘Weather Manager’.  They are very aware of how weather can affect response and by monitoring the weather across the UK they can ensure that in regions where people are enjoying long hot sunny days, there is a plentiful supply of lettuce, ice creams and barbecue foods in-store.  And where it is cloudy and cold, warming soups and hot meals are prominently on display.

Last winter really demonstrated the power of the weather for us at WPN. Our 2010 Christmas mailing for The Salvation Army was delivered when the weather was notoriously bad, with heavy snowfalls and temperatures outside reaching as low as -20 degrees.  Through experience we know that direct mail always works better when the weather is bad, but there may have been an added factor here in that the cold weather may have increased the donor’s empathy with the homeless people sheltering in doorways or lonely older people worried about the cost of heating. It resulted in a record response to the appeal, raising over £10 million for the charity.
We can all speculate as much as we like about how the weather either boosted or ruined the response to our advertising, but is there any way we can prove that it really was the weather that affected response?  Yes. It’s called Macroeconomic modelling and is a service offered by our data department.

As well as seasonality and weather, they can take into account a number of economic factors which may affect your results including The Stock Market, Bank Holidays, Pay Days and Sporting Events. By monitoring all these factors over a year, they can help you build up a picture of the effects of external events on response to your advertising message.

Has Olympic fever gone too far already?

It’s now just a year until the UK host the Olympic games for the first time in 64 years. A lot of people are excited about this (even those people who felt robbed by the ticket ‘raffle’ system). And no doubt there were some crafty marketeers who thought that there would be a prime opportunity to piggy back Olympic fever in the coming months to garner interest in thier own products.

Not surprisingly, the Olympic Games has pre-empted this and defended themselves with some robust copywrite laws. And fair enough. But I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking they have gone too far.

The ruling works like this:

There are two categories of words.

Category 1 – ‘Games’, ‘2012’, ‘Twenty twelve’, ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’

Category 2 – ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, ‘London’, ‘Medals’, ‘Sponsor’, ‘Summer’

And if anyone unauthorized

(a) uses two words from category 1 (e.g. ‘Games 2012’)

or

(b) uses one word from category 1 and one from category 2 (e.g. ‘Gold Twenty Twelve’)

then they could be found to be breaking the law. And these rules aren’t even exhaustive! The legislation makes room for plenty of other grey areas.

We are all currently acutely aware of the dangers of monopolies in communications industry. And this one worries me because common sense tells me that in many cases  it’s ridiculous. We don’t want companies ‘ripping off’ each other’s intellectual property but it seems a misguided and disproportionate allocation of power to allow ANY organisation veto phrases such as – ‘Summer 2012’ or ‘2012 Sponsor’.

In our work with charities I can think of a number of times when we might want to use these phrases like these over the coming months – in ways that would make absolutely no threat to the sanctity of the Olympic Games brand. It seems at best churlish to restrict fundraisers in this way – especially as money gets tighter and times harder.

To be honest, I doubt that the Games would want the bad press of holding a fundraising organisation to task over such a misdourmeaner. Given the heavy-handedness of the legislation we’ll be steering well clear of any obvious transgressions. But we’d suggest that there are other ways of riding on the coat tails of Olympic joy – we just need to be careful and a little clever with our words. Copy that acknowledges ‘a summer of sport’, ‘a special sporting year for Britain’ can help us make the most of the auspicious year without treading on anyones toes .

Move over QR codes

My colleague, Lucinda recently wrote a very insightful piece on the merits and pitfalls of QR codes. But I must admit I’ve never quite seen the appeal of them. For me, they just represent a bit of a hassle with little reward.

I believe their adoption is more a result of advertisers’ paranoia about driving online response from an offline medium, rather than a genuine customer desire for a short-cut means of typing a URL. There are obviously truly inspired applications of QR codes like this, but more often than not, they just feel like an afterthought – ‘why don’t we shove a QR code on the poster, that will make us look progressive’!.

This is all pretty redundant – I believe that QR codes will soon be cast off to the marketers’ scrapheap. No, the real opportunity is in Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is short-range wireless frequency that allows transactions and data exchanges with a simple touch.

In London we’ve all been using the technology for years. The NWC chip in Oyster Cards has allowed Londoners to buy tickets and travel on public transport, while completely avoiding the typical rudeness of TfL staff – brilliant!

Google accelerated their inexorable takeover of the digital world last month with the launch of Google Wallet – an NFC application that will allow mobile payments. With this they join the global arms race to own, what will be, the next form of commerce.

However, the potential of mobile payment and social applications (imagine a group huddle on FourSquare) masks some of the more fundamental applications of NFC. You’ll be able to do anything you could do with QR codes quicker and easier!

The real experience of brands

Do some brands have a particular time rather than a position? I believe that many brands will take a large degree of equity from the time and place in which they were experienced, rather than how and why they were experienced. Therefore the way you usually feel at the time you consume a product or service will act as a ‘frame of reference’ and have a disproportionate effect on how you feel about the brand.

For example, my associations of Greenpeace are with the Glastonbury Festival, and therefore share the stage with lukewarm festival-strength cider, hallucinative experiences and Radiohead.

In a similar vein, the only time I ever buy the Economist – and I’m sure I’m not alone in this –is when I go on holiday. Therefore the frames of reference are of the excitement of new experiences, lounging on a sun bed or snuggling by a warm firm in a ski chalet. (N.B. the time between my holidays is usually enough to forget what a grossly-opinionated and bias publication it is).

Both of these examples bring back positive memories and in turn reflect positively on the brand with which I associate them.

Now I’m suggesting that brands have the power to create these frames, but it’s an area that we should consider when trying to find new insights and recognise in our communications. In direct response communication, the way consumer feels when they view brand messages is exceptionally important and at WPN we will always take this into consideration when developing campaign strategy.

Waking up the words

We’ve got lazy with words and it’s costing response. There was an otherwise good banner for a life insurance company that ended with ‘Get a Quote’. Consider the man or the woman on the famous Clapham omnibus. Quote? Someone saying something? What can it possibly mean? What they meant to say was ‘find out how little it costs’. Would have worked better, I strongly suspect.

‘Click here’ is as bad. Why? What happens? Why should I bother? Where’s the benefit?

And I’d be rich if I got a fiver every time I wrote ‘without obligation’. But I’d be richer still if I did a lot better. What can it mean? It won’t cost you anything? Send it back if you hate it? You won’t get pestered? Any one of these would be better, I suspect, than the dead words so familiar to our dear readers.

It’s too easy to lapse into copywriter’s jargon.  A recent charity mailing had the immortal ‘I’d like to give…’ at the top of the donation form. ‘Like’? I doubt it. What they meant was something like ‘The plight of this person has moved me so much that I’m compelled (think about it – like?) to do something about it. Here’s my £10 and I hope you’ll get it there quickly.’

Come on writers. Wakey wakey.  Act now.

The role of role models

I noticed that a new series of Undercover Boss starts this week. It’s a great concept for a programme. A boss whose charisma, vision and passion helped to forge the company, stepping back to the shop floor to see whether those values still reign true. In doing so a human face is put to the brand and, much like celebrity endorsement, all the characteristics of the boss are overtly associated with the brand.

Look at some of the UK’s top brands whose business model relies on what we at WPN call business critical response (by that we mean a company that cannot exist without a steady stream of marketing response), and you will often see a larger-than-life leader that exemplifies their brand. For example, the no-nonsense, unapologetic approach of Michael O’Leary, the soft, customer-focused attitude of Johnny Boden or the pure, environmental image of Liz Earl.

Having a likable spokesman is especially valuable for direct response brands for the simple reason that any piece of direct mail requires a sign-off. Consumers aren’t naive enough to assume that a company CEO personally wrote to them, but on some level, receiving marketing associated with them will have greater impact.

Adapting a brand image will often take years and millions of pounds worth of investment. However, in adopting a spokesperson who represents the business, you instantly inherit all the charm and charisma of that person. Rather than developing a brand position, a leader can have an opinion and stand for something, which I believe is far more powerful than any brand manifesto.

There is an obvious risk, however. If a true business icon puts his/her foot in it and acts out of turn, the whole business will suffer (taxi for Gerald Ratner!)

A company’s staff is its lifeblood, and its CEO is the living embodiment of everything that the brand represents. I think more companies should recognise this and be brave in pushing a spokesman into the limelight.

Facebook pitches social TV to the world.

Facebook has to move with the times to survive, it must grow just like any other up and coming web based service, and it looks like they are going to give their best shot, by taking over our TV’s.

Andy Mitchel, the SVP of Strategic Partner Development at Facebook, has said very recently…

“If you look at the program guide [as it stands now], you’re trying to figure out what to watch among five hundred channels. It’s really hard. But think about a program guide where you see what your friends are watching, that changes the experience. ”

With the likes of Samsung already leading the way with TV applications, and TV internet crossovers, its only a matter of time before we get to see what our friends are watching on TV. Whether it be live as its happening, with live forum style commentary chat or just as a like button on peoples favorite shows.

But does it end there, what about the world of advertising… How long will it be before you like a brand on your laptop or smartphone and then see your own or your friends face endorsing the very same brand live on TV.

Twitter analytics

Everyone seems to be getting their knickers in a twist about Twitter analytics at the moment. Both Wired and The Economist have run hefty articles on its potential power recently. It’s easy to see why; a company in the States has just patented an algorism that assesses all tweets about new box office films. They claim that they are able to predict with 98% accuracy the takings for every one of the 24 films tested.

We all know that people now display their thoughts, hopes, fears and aspirations online. As such, many companies, organisation and governments are now turning to blogs and social networks for answers to many of the questions usually assigned to analysts, economists and indeed, planners (the most intelligent of all!).

Real world events such as consumer confidence, product demand and political voting can apparently now be accurately predicted. So powerful are thoughts and sentiments expressed in the online world that a new discipline – gracelessly named “infodemiology” – has sprung-up.

The potential for direct marketers is huge. I believe the rise of mobile monetisation and the ability to buy where you want, when you want will simply add another layer of behavioural analytics, making the insight provided by Tesco Clubcard feel as relevant as basic socio-demographic segmentation does now.

The trouble is such analysis requires a great many people with Oxbridge mathematics degrees (and the hedge funds are hoovering all these boffins up in their forecasting departments) and sadly, it would seem we are still a long way off decent sentiment analysis software.

Creative Responsibility

There are obviously many ways you can generate response creatively – there is a plethora of different consumers insights and emotions you can tap into. In direct marketing it’s often easiest to appeal to consumers’ fear, naivety or confusion. And as such, there are unfortunately far too many unscrupulous businesses and advertisers willing to do so in order to entice consumers to spend money on a product or service they don’t need. We’ve all seen them; they are those lowest common denominator, no win-no-fee-style ads that plague daytime TV. They simply act to exacerbate the negative reputation that direct response TV often has.

I saw a perfect example of this last week when I was off work for a day with a dreadful bout of man flu; day time commercial breaks now seem to be full of ads offering to claim a four figure refund from mis-sold payment protection insurance. However, the FSA (unusually for them) have gone out of their way to act in the consumers’ best interest and ensure that claiming back PPI insurance is as straightforward as possible. Yet, companies will still typically charge more than 30% commission on refunds that could have been claimed with the minimum of fuss.

We recently worked with our client, Which? and Barclays Bank to dispel any confusion in the market place about the rights of consumers to claim PPI compensation. It would have been very easy to bamboozle our audience with financial jargon in an attempt to gain attention. However, the brand image of both organisations would have suffered enormously and we therefore, took a no-nonsense, simple approach.

Financial aggregators and comparison sites have provided a new creative benchmark, which proves that financial services ads do not need to stick to the traditional DRTV conventions to be highly effective. There is now no excuse or justification for ads such as this.