• Established his own (very successful) ad agency
• Launched the Dodge and Chrysler brands
• Hired and mentored Leo Burnett, creator of the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Pillsbury Doughboy, and many other advertising icons that made his clients rich
• Turned positioning into a fine art form half a century before Ries and Trout even coined the term.
• Helped establish Cadillac’s pre-eminence among early automotive marks
• Wrote “The greatest ad of all time,” as voted in 1949 – an ad still listed in the top 50 of Ad Ages Top 100 Advertising Campaigns.

Interesting, but why should you care?  Because MacManus’s – and by extension Burnett’s – approach was the yin to Hopkins’ yang, and because MacManus’s approach still works today.

And what was that approach?

In a word, it was to position the client while dethroning competitors in the minds’ of the audience. He wanted to create, in the mind of the public, a deep-seated prejudice towards his client’s brand.

If, in the words of the legendary Gary Halbert, the biggest key to success is to sell to a starving crowd, then MacManus aimed to persuade the consumer that only his client’s product would fully cure their hunger, and then wait for the more-cheaply-persuaded and much larger mass audience to get hungry as their individual circumstances dictated.  This would be in contrast to targeting only hungry people and then selling to them via direct mail.

And so the two poles of advertising continue on to this day, as is clearly seen in the following comments by an extraordinarily successful brand builder, Chris Maddock.  Chris was responding to my request for his opinion on Google’s recent attempt to track the effect of offline advertising upon online sales/conversions.   Here’s what he had to say:

Jeff,

I think Google’s traditional ad analytics are interesting, sexy, and certainly useful on some level.  But I think the program could also be dangerous, in that it could give some folks faulty impressions of what is actually happening – or what is right – because it assumes advertisers know things they probably don’t.

Let’s say a local hardware store runs some print ads, and compares the online response to another time they’ve run radio ads.  If the print ads were for a short term offer, and the radio ad of a more institutional bent, the print ad could drive more traffic to the website and have the hardware store owner thinking that print’s the ticket.  The reality in such a situation is that the print advertising is impressing and motivating a tiny, albeit palpable, percentage of the market to respond and go the the website, while the time-sensitive nature of the offer makes the advertising all but invisible to the bulk of the market.  On the other hand the radio advertising is likely creating greater long-term top of mind awareness, yet probably not motivating as many to go the website.  Mr. Hardware likely thinks that the radio campaign was less effective, when in fact most category dominant businesses are those that eschew short-term sales, offers, promotions and the advertising tools that make them work, while leaning on intrusive media such as radio and television to push long-term awareness.  Over time, radio could likely drive many more visitors to the website – visitors who will likely buy.

So my worry is admittedly Hamiltonian.  Years of interaction with average business owners and traditional ad people has revealed a startling blindness to things like buying cycles, differences in long and short-term strategy, and proper media selection.

So these new Google analytics are cool.  I just hope the good people using them understand what they’re trying to make happen, and what the numbers returned really mean.

-    Chris

Do you see how Chris picks up the standard of Theodore McManus, Leo Burnett, and Roy Williams?  Although I think it is possible to intelligently and rigorously compare media, I can’t help but agree with Chris’s larger point.  Creating a prejudice in the mind of the customer before they’re hungry is often a more effective strategy than trying to only target hungry customers.*   But it requires a longer time horizon.  So if you are only measuring on the short term, you’ll likely come to the opposite conclusion and then deem your position to be “scientific.”  It’s a perfect example of one of the deadly sins of Web Analytics.

So what’s your time horizon?  And have you implemented a measuring/analytics system that will enable you to measure accordingly?

* To be fair, there are certainly also times when it pays to directly target hungry customers, rather than engage in a lengthier branding campaign.  I’m not necessarily advocating one over the other; I’m arguing that you shouldn’t base your decision on skewed metrics.

With that level of “targeting,” it’s anyone’s guess. There just isn’t enough information available.

But if George Costanza, the white middle-income male New Yorker between age 30 and 44 from “Seinfeld” picks up the wallet, everyone knows exactly what he’ll do.

He’ll keep the money.

By allowing you to imagine their concerns, reactions, and questions, personas allow you to better plan marketing interactions and messaging. Personas are critical to lead generation Web sites, specifically those that want to engage their suspects and prospects in a sales dialogue online and offline.

Personas vs. Segmentation/Demographics

When building personas for your lead gen or demand generation Web site, psychographics are typically more profitable than demographics.

Psychographics give insight into how an individual perceives the world, their belief structures, and some of their core personality traits. Psychographics, in the form of personality theory and motivational research, have a long documented effectiveness at predicting decision-making styles and behaviors — including buying behaviors.

Demographics, on the other hand, are only loosely correlated to behavior and often horrible in predicting marketing response.

Personas tell us how to plan and have a conversation. Demographics mostly tell us where to have that conversation. Both are important.

Using Personas to Take Action and Build Persuasion Scenarios

Web sites and online interactions especially benefit from this by allowing copywriters to plan the interactivity of click paths, the link structure for embedded hyperlinks, and the messaging required for increased persuasive momentum and conversions.

“Actionable personas” have easily predictable and imaginable conversations and reactions, like good fictional characters. They have to generate empathy and engage the imagination.

Meet Melissa Putnam, 23, Sales Assistant, $32,000 Annual Income

Melissa, a newbie at her job, was just asked by the sales manager to research and suggest some potential sales training vendors. Melissa is a people person; she likes to build strong relationships and relies on good first impressions to get relationships off to a strong start. She wants to make a splash and impress the boss.

The Brooks Group, a sales training company, offers all sorts of customized training, many of which would be a perfect match for Melissa’s needs.

Let’s peek at how we planned the interaction on the site for Melissa’s style and needs.

Melissa is a “humanistic,” meaning she’s interested most in relationships. So as she arrives at the Brooks Group Web site, she’s immediately presented with two links to the About Us page, both at the top and left-hand navigation.

When she clicks through, she’s presented with a page that addresses her motivations about midway through, and notices the header “Meet the team.” You also see a picture of the founder, and a link in the active window that reads ‘real coaches.’ This is all Melissa speak.

After she clicks that link, she arrives at the “Working with Brooks Group” page. There’s a lot of content here that is virtual red meat for her. Here she reads a little about coaching and clicks the link near the bottom of the page that reads, “Contact one of our sales coaches, and they’ll talk you through a typical training deployment.”

Melissa is on her way to becoming a lead.

If you click around the site acting as Melissa, you’ll find other paths for her to follow, all leading toward a conversion event, giving her several opportunities to call or fill out the lead form. You’ll find links and elements designed and planned exclusively for her humanistic style persona.

If you’re astute, you’ll notice that Melissa isn’t the only persona accounted for on the site.

Meet Charlie “Nubs” Harrison, 45, Sales Manager, $90,000 Annual Income

Charlie, a former top salesperson, was just promoted to sales manager. He’s starting to doubt he made the right decision. His quote: “Managing these people is like herding cats.”

Charlie is a take-action, spontaneous type. He doesn’t like to waste time and he’s in pain. His sales people are driving him crazy.

Since Charlie has little patience, the first and most visible link in the active window was planned for him. He might also be interested in first learning about the company, Unlike Melissa, he’s looking more for credibility and experience than a relationship.

On the “about us” page, a link is planted just for him that reads, “the ability to manage sales rather than micromanage sales people.” Score for a Charlie type visitor!

As he follows that link, he arrives at the “Herd Your Sales Cats” page that is rich with Charlie language and content intended to speak to his pain. Near the bottom is a link that reads, “Getting started with the Brooks Group is easy.”

Here are things you can do for your personas to better plan your online lead gen interactions.

• Speak to temperaments such as humanistic. When you have content for several on the same page, put elements links and copy for the impatient competitive and spontaneous types higher up on the page, humanistics in the middle, and provide all the deeper details last for your methodical personas. Methodical types are not afraid of reading, so let them at it.
• Account for buying cycles. Ask what your personas need at each stage of the buying process. If they’re early in the buying cycle, they don’t know what they need or how to buy your product. If in the middle, they know approximately what they need. And finally, those in the late stage know exactly what they want. Provide copy, links, and elements for all three stages. In a recent column, I showed how Marketo was trying to convert outside the context of an early stage buyer.
• Understand sales complexity. You need to know how your personas relate to four measurements of complexity and provide content that addresses the questions and issues they face. One persona may have a greater felt need (Charlie), while another needs consensus (Melissa).

You might be thinking, wow, this is a lot of work.

Yup. But we can help you get these great results.

Being purposeful and prepared to deal with your prospects is always sweat-inducing work. But with a good plan, the sweat breeds greater conversion.

Bottom line for the Brooks Group: it doubled its leads by planning using persuasion scenarios, components that lead a visitor segment to participate in a conversion action.

* Cross posted from ClickZ.

In “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” — which, as one might expect, is available for free at Wired.com* — Anderson argues that, across industries, businesses are baiting new customers with free stuff.

Of course, that’s nothing revolutionary. But it is evolutionary in the sense that we’ve come to expect some level of “free” something. In fact, we’re willing to pay top dollar for “free”! (Here’s how Ryanair does it.)

Back in 2002, Bryan evangelized “The ROI of Free“…

“An innocuous question can hit you where you live. I should have expected one day someone would ask me, “How do you measure your ROI for that?”

How does someone who writes “ROI Marketing” justify publishing so much content for free? Do we charge for advertising, rent our list, or bombard those names with commercial offers? No. In fact, Jeffrey, my brother and partner who handles such things, estimates we’ve invested about $100,000 developing free content for our newsletter, free whitepapers and other publications. How do we measure its ROI?

As our CFO will tell you, that $100k figure is nothing compared to what we’ve spent since “The ROI of Free” was published. Still, our dedication to free content remains — and for good reason.

Much like he did with The Long Tail (which also began as an article), this latest piece is Anderson’s way of cleverly cross-promoting-in-advance his upcoming book, FREE, which won’t be available in 2009. Looks like Anderson’s on his way to generating some positive word-of-mouth for the magazine and the book.

Has your business discovered the ROI of Free?

*Putting their money where your mouth is, WIRED will send you the print edition of its March 2008 issue for free — so long as you’ll offer a name and mailing address in exchange.

While the move is win-win for its creators, Trey Parker & Matt Stone (also the writers), their lawyers, Viacom (MTV’s parent company), the advertisers and the fans, what’s striking, so to say, is that South Park is the only show on MTV’s roster sitting on a contract for a 50/50 digital ad revenue share.

Although it was smart of Viacom to ink an online revenue share with the people behind South Park, it seems odd that such offers aren’t available for writers of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, both of which are huge ad-money makers and award winners for the company. Here’s what Viacom told The New York Times back in August when South Park’s $75 million deal was penned:

“Doug Herzog, president of MTV Networks Entertainment, acknowledged that the 50-50 digital deal, which was approved by Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief, would set a precedent. If this is seen as a bold stroke, all the better, because it’s going to take bold thinking to move ahead,” he said. But he said it was justified by the “South Park” team’s stellar track record and by the changing balance of power between the buyers and creators of entertainment.

[...] Adding to the likely interest in the revenue-sharing pact is that digital income is one of the key issues confronting negotiators for the Hollywood studios and the guilds representing writers, directors and actors, who want to ensure they are compensated fairly for their work for the Web, mobile devices and other technologies still in their infancy.

“Talent will look at this and say, ‘Why not us?’ ” said Warren Littlefield, a television producer and former president of NBC Entertainment. “Unfortunately, what you’ll probably find is the response is, ‘We’ll tell you why not you: because you haven’t achieved what they’ve achieved.’ This is based upon a decade of proven success; it’s not a deal that’s made on the come, it’s not a deal made with an established creator who’s about to create something new. It’s 10 years in.”

While it’s nice that Viacom has finally discovered how to leverage “the ROI of free,” many fans — and certainly the writers — have a hard time viewing the media giant’s selective awareness of online marketing as anything but greedy. So, what do writers for The Daily Show, now in its 11th year, really have to say to the execs?

John Oliver: “…all our Daily Show clips were pulled off YouTube by Viacom, who is suing them for a billion dollars. That was not at our instigation – we were happy for people to watch the clips. But instead they wanted to set up a website where they can sell advertising while the clip is buffering, although I thought we were at the point where clips don’t need to buffer anymore. So you have to watch a commercial for thirty seconds or whatever. So they’re clearly making money on that; they’re also clearly making money because they’re suing YouTube for a billion. So that seems quite strange when they’re saying, ‘Well, there’s no money to be made off the internet but we’re suing YouTube for a billion dollars.’ That takes spectacular ba…”

…what I think John’s trying to say is that, well, this YouTube video sums it up.

Even The Daily Show’s friends (colleagues?) in the “real” news media are hearing the echoes from this void. NBC News anchor Brian Williams writes…

Jon Stewart and his colleagues in comedy — along with the writers who support them — serve an invaluable purpose by skewering the pompous and deflating the egos of the high and mighty. They function almost as a separate branch of government. We need them, and we miss them.

But Slate.com’s Dana Stevens said it best:

…The Daily Show is the ultimate Web-ready television show. It’s divisible into discrete chunks (the headlines at the top of the show, followed by reported segments and interviews) that tie in to the political and cultural conversations of the day, and those chunks can easily be collected, shuffled, and exchanged among friends like trading cards.

It’s unfortunate that it’s come to this. In a strike, everyone loses. Had Viacom invested in online channels years ago, they wouldn’t be awkwardly wading through bad word-of-mouth as they sue YouTube and play favorites with their writers.

This is a branding problem, wrapped in a PR problem, spawned by a marketing problem. But the good news for Viacom is that it could all end tomorrow with an online revenue share agreement.

[Picture taken from myyearofnewthings on Flickr. Originally seen at TechCrunch.]

The New York Times has some bubble-bursting hindsight on the broader effect of eBay’s soured Skype acquisition.

Skype earned $90 million during the second quarter of 2007, far below eBay’s projections. EBay said in a regulatory filing that the charge was “the result of the updated long-term financial outlook for Skype.”

The Skype deal helped to initiate a renewed acquisition frenzy in the online world, and a return to what some call a bubble mentality. After the spectacular dot-com flameout seven years ago, Internet executives pledged to begin judging technology companies by revenue rather than by something as ephemeral as “eyeballs,” or traffic on a Web site.

But somewhere along the line, the high-tech industry reverted to its old form.

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, a senior Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability. That’s what eBay did for Skype. They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.”

How bad’s the bleeding? Ebay says it’s $1 billion-bad. Silicon Ally Insider’s Henry Blodget says it’s probably $1.4 billion-bad. And, on The Next Big Thing blog, Don Dodge even adds Skype to his list of “Worst Billion Dollar Acquisitions of All Time”. Says Dodge:

I wrote a post “The 10 Worst Billion Dollar Internet Acquisitions of All Time” Skype didn’t make the list at the time because it was too early to tell. Not anymore. It takes a spot very high up on the list. AOL, Lycos, and Excite are still the clear leaders in this dubious category.

If you’re reading this, eBay, we may not be able to provide much comfort — but here are some tips for selling “it” on eBay.*

[*Please Note: The term "it" may not apply to "IT".]

OK, I made up that last one, but it really was that bad. The even scarier thing is, I’ve seen hundreds of forms like it.

When someone does a search and lands on your website, they might have some familiarity with you if you’re a well-known brand. Or, more likely, they have little-to-no awareness as to who you are and what you do. Basically, you’ve just met. So, why ask for so much personal, sensitive information on this first meeting? Are you proposing marriage when you should be asking him/her out for coffee?

Part of the problem is, the only way many B2B or lead generation sites measure success is by the number of people who fill in a lead form. That’s a pretty big step. Many visitors to your site won’t be ready to make that kind of a commitment to you yet. So, do you just write them off? Do you consider that a failed conversion?

Don’t forget, there are other micro-conversions to consider. Your visitors might agree to a cup of coffee, or a short “date” to find out more about you. Examples of these types of conversions could be as simple as someone taking the time to read your ‘About Us’ page, or watching a short product video, or signing up for your newsletter. These are conversions. You should be planning and measuring them.

When trying to measure the ROI of your website, you need to take into account the ways you engage prospective customers when they’re earlier in the buying process. Yes, some people are ready to start some sort of relationship with you; meaning, of course, that they fill out the lead form. (You’re only asking for the least amount of information, right?).That’s a measurable success. But don’t forget those who were engaged enough to spend some time on your site, gather information, watch a video, download a whitepaper, sign-up for a newsletter, and so on.

All these micro-conversions indicate your visitors are at least engaging with your brand. They may only be willing to commit to a cup of coffee right now, but that’s an encouraging first step!

Several of the B2B panelists recommended this report by Enquiro. (Notice the wonderfully short registration form ) I haven’t read it yet, but it got high marks from the panel. Let me know what you think!

Despite continued growth in search spending, ROI on search campaigns in Q1 was down 43 percent since last year, according to the latest search trend report from DoubleClick’s Performics unit. That makes sense when you think about it, since more and more advertisers are competing for the same limited pool of clicks, bidding up prices and squeezing their margins in the process. The winner in this bidding war is Google. The losers: everyone else.

. . . average cost per click and cost per keyword both spiked. Campaigns included six times as many keywords with a cost per click above $1 and used 54 percent more keywords than they did a year ago.

Isn’t it time marketers finally looked beyond paid search, and focused on organic? As overall traffic costs rise, businesses should take conversion more seriously; not just as a metric, but as an integral part of their strategy. What makes people convert? Well, relevant content that answers the visitor’s questions–and in her own language–is a start. As it happens, that’s also what boosts organic rankings.

Building a site that gets organic results and converts takes dedication–and may not come cheap–but it’s the surest path to ROI.

Has traffic cost inflation been a wake-up call for your business?

Business Week

For instance…

Perhaps it is time for companies to adjust the paradigm of management responsibility:

“You are investors and speculators, not shareholders, and you temporarily find yourselves holding the securities of our company. You are responsible for maximizing the returns on your investments. Our responsibility is to maximize the long-term value of this company. We will therefore act in the interest of those whose interests coincide with our long-term prospects, namely employees, customers, the communities in which our employees live, and the minority of investors who plan to hold our securities for several years.”

They continue to argue for restructuring public companies. Whether or not you agree, it’s worth a read.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that management has to act in the long-term interests of not only of shareholders, but of the company’s greater constituency. It’s a higher standard than mere shareholder ROI, and more difficult to manage, but it reduces volatility and forces management to focus on what matters.

Wouldn’t it be nice if companies could focus on what matters, and not simply on this quarter’s results?

Instead of acting like John Wayne, management should be more like Einstein at the OK Corral.