Do we still need brand websites?

A few years back everyone seemed to be preaching that “Google is your new homepage” and that investment in search as part of the consumer decision journey might be more important then the site itself. A few years later we are witnessing a similar discussion regarding Facebook. 2010 was the year of Facebook for advertisers. It was finally clear that Facebook is here to stay, that it’s the global standard, that everybody is there, and that advertisers must be there as well. It was the year even the laggers started joining Facebook. This turn of events led to a new question – Is Facebook replacing the brand website?

Looking at Fortune 100 companies we can see that 68% experienced a decrease in website traffic in 2010, while  time spent online is obviously growing rapidly. Moreover, as we can see in the graph a number of companies experienced a decrease of over 70%, and the average decrease is 24%.

Why is the traffic going down?

• Consumers today have many more sources to gather information before purchase. While a few years back retailer sites were the main source for product information we now have an abundance of objective sources such as review sites, social media, etc., decreasing the necessity of the brand website for product information
• Search engines promote social media results, harming the potential traffic of brand websites
• Facebook represents such a large portion of total time spent online (something like 7 of 35 monthly hours, much more then the next sites on the list), that traffic to other websites has gone down across the board – people just don’t have time for other websites
• Brands’ online presence is distributed today between multiple channels other then the brand website – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon and more, leading to a distribution of the potential brand traffic over multiple channels. For example, a consumer might prefer to receive customer service through the brand Twitter account rather then the brand website. Often we see brands directing in their marketing communications to the Facebook page in addition to the website, and sometimes even instead of it.

Meanwhile, the number of Facebook users is increasing rapidly and with it the fancount of brands. Here are the leading brands -

In many cases the the Facebook page traffic exceeds the brand website traffic. For example, Coca Cola gathers 96,000 new fans every day, but its website gets less then 10,000 daily visitors. Hence, Coke’s Facebook traffic is at least 10 times greater then it’s website traffic.

But is Coke the exception? It’s noticeable that the graph above mainly features CPG and retail brands. Will this trend be any different for brands from other categories? Will their website traffic be more significant in comparison to their Facebook traffic?

I distinguish between three kinds of companies when it comes to the role of the brand website:

• Low involvement brands (e.g. CPG) – Most of us wouldn’t conduct  market research before buying a snack or a shampoo, and usually we have no reason to visit the brand website unless there’s an incentive in the form of a campaign. The folks at Skittles have understood years ago when they turned their website into a reflection of the Skittles conversation across social media channels (a manifestation of the common saying – “the brand is not what you say about yourself but what consumers say about you”). CPG brands are leading the innovation on Facebook because it has become their main digital engagement platform and because consumers tend to be more open to engage with CPG brands
• Medium involvement brands (e.g. retail) – Buying a pair of jeans is not a big expense and not a life changing decision, but for many consumers the research and online window shopping is part of the fun. The brand website needs to enable consumers to learn about products and shop online, even if the Facebook functionality is very high, like JCPenny’s impressive Facebook store.
• High involvement brands (e.g. automotive, finance, pharma)- Consumers seeking information about expensive or critical products will spend a significant amount of time doing research. Brand websites are critical and should be much more then a marketing platform. For example, traffic to consumer electronics websites has been growing steadily the past few years as consumers seek more and more information to understand the rapidly changing consumer electronics market

At the end of the day, we still haven’t gotten to a stage where brand websites are obsolete, whether we’re talking about low involvement, medium involvement, or high involvement brands, for the following reasons:

• The brand website is in complete control of the brand – interface, design, content, campaigns, cross-channel collaboration, SEO, SEM, etc. The Facebook page is basically owned by Facebook, and if you’ve built brand pages before you’re familiar with the fire drills every time Facebook changes it’s policies or design
• Facebook pages are still limited and often don’t enable us to create compete brand experiences which fully conveys the brand, its values, and its marketing communications activities
• In a reality in which mobile will soon be the leading online access method, the fact that Facebook pages don’t provide a similar experience on mobile is a real issue for brands
• Facebook is a gigantic 700 million citizens strong country, and yet many potential consumers are not on Facebook and we wouldn’t want to lose them
• Google still has its difficulties in featuring social content in its search results

So what should brands do?
We’ve all already figured that brands need to take an active part in the conversation. Yet, most brands don’t integrate the brand conversation on their websites, which usually stay pretty static.  Brands need to think how to integrate their website and their social media assets in a synergistic manner which generates by-directional traffic and value. A good example of doing it right is Samsung.  Samsung.com features a social media dashboard which curates the brand conversation from multiple platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, forums, review sites, etc. – and promotes participation and traffic. This is the near future of brand websites.

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Why Windows Phone wouldn’t be the next iPhone Killer

You’ve all seen it. It’s everywhere. It might be in a business meeting, while having a beer with a friend or just walking down the street. Everywhere you look people are constantly preoccupied with their smartphones. It always reminded me of the future humans from WALL-E.

Another guy who’s not a big fan of this trend is Jerry Seinfeld who ranted about it on Conan.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these inspired Crispin-Porter (and Bogusky who sits at home) to create their great new campaign for Windows Phone. In a similar fashion to Droid, this campaign also goes head to head with the iPhone. Yet, while Droid talks about the iPhone’s (lacking) features (”Droid Does“), Windows Phone talks about the iPhone’s strategy.  Windows Phone’s great campaign strategy is that it enables us to do our tasks easily and quickly in contrast with  iPhone that can do anything and anytime (”There’s an app for that“) but causes us to actually avoid human contact. The solution, according to the campaign, is “a phone to save us from our phones” and enables us to “Less stop and stare, more glance and go”  and basically ”I’m in, I’m out and back to my life“.

Yet, I don’t see Windows Phone becoming the next iPhone killer.
Why? Mainly because there is no such phone!
Windows Phone is merely an operating system that runs a variety of Dell, Samsung, HTC and LG devices. The average consumer doesn’t really comprehend what is an operating system and is not familiar with codenames such as Android, iOS, Symbian or Linux. Instead of choosing one flagship device and branding it as “Windows Phone”, Microsoft doesn’t learn from the success of the big smartphone brands – iPhone, Blackberry and Droid – and invests in a wide variety of sub-brands, none of which is likely to become an iPhone killer. The company that failed in almost any consumer product it ever launched does it again and let me speculate that Windows Phone will not be the next Droid.

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Soccerness Factory

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CokeCopyCat

I’m usually not surprised to see Israeli ads getting “inspiration” from ads abroad.
I am very surprised to see the biggest brand in the world bluntly copying a 2005 Y&R Tel Aviv ad for a dairy brand.

Coke’s Sleepwalker ad from yesterday’s Super Bowl:

and the Israeli original:

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Butthead is back

I was recently introduced to the latest Altoids digital campaign - Brainstorm – which comprises of webisodes (internet episodes) that take place in a crazy ad agency. The campaign well written and well executed but unfortunately didn’t create a lot of buzz and has less then 10k views overall.

I believe it’s a lot due lack of media support and search optimization.
- The campaign’s micro site does not play the episodes from YouTube but from the less Popular Dailymotion, preventing it to be a part of mass social media. The episodes are also on YouTube but are practically unfindable and have very few views. In the case of webisodes the approach should always be as social as possible including promotion agreement with social video sites (”features content”).
- The only way I could get to the campaign is through the Altoids homepage. In todays world your campaign homepage is Google and when searching “brainstorm altoids” only news items about the campaign come up. Together with the problematic YouTube search optimization for the clips, it is almost impossible for this campaign to go viral even though it has the potential.

It’s a shame that they obvisouly put a lot on money in the production but eventully the campaign fails because of the faulty social media strategy. Another example of Altoids’ faulty social media strategy is when a “Click to Watch the new commercial” button on the Altoids homepage leads to a nonexistent clip on YouTube.

On a funnier note, in one of the webisodes a copywriter comes up with a silly idea for a campaign in which the Altoid helps a person with a butt face get back to normal.

Shortly after Y&R Milan launched the following just as silly campaign for Glassing sunglasses:

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Social Influence Marketing Trends by Razorfish

The most compelling notion for me is the “Social Influence Marketing Score”, a brand health metric comprised of the share of online conversation & the online brand sentiment.

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Branding of the Decade

There are many many blogs I like.
There are very few blogs I adore.

Brand New belongs to the latter. It’s an utterly professional blog written by different branding specialists and covering company branding/rebranding from the visual aspect.

Last week it published an eminent post summarizing the most significant branding initiatives of the 2000s. The list includes at&t, Walmart, Pepsi, Obama, Cisco, Unilever, UPS and many more. Fascinating!

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What works in social media?

Well the answer to this question is pretty vague.
Social media as a marketing tool has only been around for a few years now and it’s hard to see a consistent pattern for what works and what doesn’t.

So eMarketer surveyed marketing managers in both B2C and B2B companies asking what works for them on Facebook and Twitter. The results are quite interesting.

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25 best digital campaigns of 2009

I know you’re probably tired of 2009 roundups but this time it’s a roundup of the most fascinating and dynamic field. Enjoy the 25 best digital campaigns of the year arranged by 5 categories:

Social Media

It was the year Facebook tripled its user base, won over MySpace and became the largest social network in the world and the second most popular site. It was the year Google finally capitalized on YouTube and integrated ads. It was the year Twitter went from gickstream to mainstream and grew 80-fold. It was a year with numerous social media activities. Here are a few of the best.

1. Whopper Sacrifice, the glorious Facebook campaign by Crispin Porter Bogusky for Burger King challenged users to delete friends and get free Whoppers and raised the interesting question:  What do Americans love more – their friends or their Whopper?
2. IKEA Showroom lets Swedish Facebook users tag themselves in pictures of IKEA showrooms and win the products they tagged
3. A Woman’s World by Frito Lay is a great case study how to communicate to digital moms. Through witty and entertaining clips which became very popular the brand managed to create a a conversation within a demographic which perceived it as quite irrelevant.
4. In a classic win win scenario Ashton Kutcher upgraded himself as a celebrity while making Twitter the hottest conversation topic around the world. Everything started of course from Kutcher’s challange to reach 1 million followers before CNN. The rest is history. Or in other words – my auntie in Israel knows what Twitter is.
5. Insurance comparison site CompareTheMarket.com created a great buzz with CompareTheMeerkat, a cult campaign featuring a hilarious “Meerkat” by the name of Alexander Orlov (TV ad, funny Twitter account, active Facebook fan page and a lot of blogs and forums activity)

Banners

So is the banner dead like everyone is saying for the past few years? Well if we’re talking about the creative punch the answer is quite positive. The past few years digital campaigns are becoming so complicated that the real creative is behind the micro-site or the cross media campaign, so the banner is nothing more that a traffic generating tool. I believe that Cannes 2011 will not feature any banners. In this kind of reality the interesting banners are the more inclusive ones which contain a whole activity and communicate the entire campaign message on the banner itself. Here are several examples of great “standalone” banners.

1. Volkswagen with a personalized banner which analyzed the user’s charachter by his Tweets and matches him or her with a car.
2. New Zealand DMV with an anti text-messaging-during-driving campaign featuring a smart banner sends an SMS to the watcher
3. Pringles with a banner that shows that you don’t always have to make a big fuss. Sometimes an almost print-like simplicity is enough to create an experience
4. IBM creates the first  collaborative banner in order to promote Lotus’s collaborative abilities
5. Playground, a Swedish outdoor store, with a banner that matches an outfit according to the weather

Viral Videos

Ranking virals is always tricky. What matters more? How creative do you find a viral or what is its view count? The next virals are a combination of both.

1. Samsung, which had a very creative 2009, used sheep with LED lights to create unusual art
2. Samsung are creative again presenting a challenge to YouTubers with an invisible camera. A week later the solution is revealed.
3.  T-Mobile was the first to take advantage of the Flashmob trend with The T-Mobile dance. Later Flashmob take-offs did not do too well.
4.  Evian realized that Etrade’s babies are doing a good job so it used babies on roller skates to communicate its rejuvenation message
5. Boone Oakley, an tiny unknown North Carolina ad agency, became the hottest topic in the advertising industry for a day thanks to its breakthrough new web site which is essentially a YouTube video. It’s the best use of the YouTube Annotations technology I’ve ever seen.

Augmented Reality

In 2009 it was hard to escape the Augmented Reality trend, the technology in which the user sees on screen the picture taken by his webcam with certain alterations. What started as a nice gimmick soon found valuable and useful usages. In 2010 I believe the majority of the use of AR will be in cellular by adding info layers to outdoor views. Here are the best examples of this year.

1. USPS lets users check which package size do they need
2. Ray Ban lets users try on its collection without leaving home
3. Spanish fashion brand Springfield also allows users to try on its collection
4. Mini Cooper in a breakthrough campaign combining AR with print and making the technology more accessible to non-geeks
5. Pepsi and CBS in a campaign that doesn’t really goes here but had to go somewhere make first use of Video-in-Print technology. The insert attached to People magazine had a small video screen which plays with a touch of a button. Not very cost effective yet but truly extraordinary.

Branded Utilities

Branded utilities are an established trend but as smartphones become more common branded utilities only becomes more relevant and widespread. Here are a few of this year’s best.

1. Nike continues the Nike+ innovation with Nike SPARQ, a professional personal workout platform
2. Fiat also takes after Nike+ with Fiat eco:Drive, a smart app which assists environmentally friendly driving
3. Kraft presents iFood Assistant, the most popular recipe iPhone app and even manages to charge 99 cents on it
4. Absolut Vodka launches Absolut Drinkspiration, an iPhone app which matches one of 4000 drinks according to the user’s mood
5.Charmin launches Sit or Squirt, an iPhone app which finds the nearest public toilet

Have an amazingly creative year!

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SocialMediaSourcing

For the last decade numerous campaigns implemented “crowdsourcing”, running competitions asking web users to create various content such as ads, slogans, movies or packages.

Another, less talked about, trend is Social Media Sourcing – taking advantage of social media originated creative concepts and using them in ad campaigns.

An example is the recent ad for Amazon Kindle:

And this is the original – the ultra-popular clip “Her Morning Elegance“:

Some would consider social media sourcing as copycatting. In the Kindle ad it’s probably true. The fact that these contents are mostly not copyrighted helps the decision to just copy the whole thing.
Yet, usually social media just supplies creative teams with inspiration to create more original and interesting campaigns.

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