The Storytellers

Imagine 300 people donned in their finest gala attire gathered at the most celebrated awards ceremony in their professional field. The big night starts with a bit of a hiccup. Several ticket holders are left holding the bag and out in the cold as their prepaid $125 tickets go missing at the admission office. Inside, things are a bit stranger. The program begins hours behind schedule because the emcee is also missing in action. Adding to the weirdness of the situation, the caterer steps on the stage and attempts to assuage an increasingly hostile crowd by commencing with the evening's ceremony. But, there's no script. Winners are forced to identify their prized work—projected in an out-of-focus slide show—to claim their coveted statuette as an everlasting symbol of a momentous and proud occasion. Just when things can't get any worse, they do. There is no winners' list for a key category, provoking the most exasperated in the audience to bum-rush the stage and claim any idle trophy as their own. The night ends in a cacophony of boos, hisses, and slurs as the curtain falls on the most prestigious event of the year.²

This incredible circus actually happened. But, because the statuettes in such high demand were not Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, or Grammys, many never heard about it. However, the spectacularly disastrous occasion is well known among those in the advertising community. Indeed, the 1991 Clio Awards have been appropriately labeled the “most bizarre event in advertising history.”³

The Clio is the advertising world's prestigious nod to creative excellence in the field. Although it is deeply coveted among advertisers as validation of their work, it seems that there is more to the Clio than just pomp and circumstance. In a world once dominated by physical media, the advertising game was twofold: (1) Expose one's message as often as possible to capture attention, generate preference, and stimulate action among one's target prospects before diminishing returns set in; and (2) create a compelling advertisement that has the potential to “break through” the clutter generated by advertisers. Referring to the latter, in 2007, Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimated that a person living 30 years earlier saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 in 2007.⁴ And this was before the tsunami of new digital media options ushered in by online and mobile technologies had yet fully developed. Advertisers are the victims of a cluttered marketplace that they helped spawn—one in which creativity and ubiquity hold sway—explaining, in part, why an esteemed crowd would devolve into an angry mob for a trophy. Indeed, evidence suggests that creative ads are more successful in capturing the elusive attention of consumers in an increasingly cluttered market.⁵

Marketers are the consummate storytellers. They must create a more compelling narrative than their competition does and deliver it to their intended audience in a more effective way—helping to explain the tremendous importance placed on well-executed advertising. Today's technologies serve new opportunities to accomplish these goals. They also result in a catch-22 for marketers, who often find themselves breathless in keeping lockstep with, if not slightly ahead of, an increasingly savvy marketplace that changes its behavior as quickly as it adopts the latest technology. As consumers embrace new technologies, they fragment their time and attention across an increasing spectrum of options, and marketers must follow suit or risk being abandoned by those they intend to woo. The CMO of today must be more than just fluent in the stories that will resonate with her target customer. She must understand how to apply her message across a wide variety of new platforms, how to share ownership of her brand with the community she serves, how to apply rich data analytics that expose offers to prospects at precisely the right time without exploiting them in the process, and how to navigate a sea of evolving regulations surrounding consumer privacy. The result is a fundamental shift in the skills and metrics that define success for the enterprise's modern storytellers.

To understand the challenges facing marketers, one must first understand the nature of the field and how it has changed over time, particularly in the discipline of advertising. Advertising is as dated an art form as selling itself, but the industry came into its own with the advent of print in the early eighteenth century. Some 200 years later, radio entered the scene, leaving doomsayers to question the value of print against the new broadcast kid on the block. But it was the television boom of the 1950s that lifted the advertising industry to new heights with its compelling visual medium. Between 1949 and 1953, the number of households owning a television soared from just under 1 million to 20 million.⁶ Advertisers enthusiastically followed. In 1948, the number of sponsors of television programs increased to 993, an exponential increase of 515 percent over the previous year.⁷ In the early years, television had no playbook or official means of measurement, leaving many critics to scoff at an unproven medium some saw as merely a passing fad among simpletons. As radio began losing followers and advertisers, its long-standing institutions saw their demise. Among the most legendary programs to fall victim to the television trend was The Fred Allen Show, which had been a radio fixture in most American homes since 1931. Allen reacted bitterly to the downfall, mocking television as “a device that permits people who haven't anything better to do to watch people who can't do anything.” Taking a jab at Ed Sullivan, one of television's early talking heads who would dominate the medium for an impressive 23 years, Allen remarked, “Sullivan will stay on television as long as other people have talent.”⁸ Despite the naysayers, it was hard to ignore the television juggernaut. Whereas it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, television was able to accomplish the same in roughly one-third the time.⁹ Early shows dominated and set records for ratings. At one point, Milton Berle had an unprecedented 86.7 percent share of the available audience—a feat never to be matched.¹⁰

Fast forward to the present day, and things seem strangely familiar. Online and social media are now the darlings on the block, leaving some critics to prophesy the death of traditional alternatives, including print, radio, and television. Although there is some validity to the claims (consider that print advertising, once a $60 billion market at the turn of the millennium, eroded in value to $20 billion by 2011—a precipitous drop attributed to online advertising alternatives¹¹), there is also a fair degree of hyperbole in the mix. A marketer's success now requires the ability to distinguish such hype from reality. Take the demise of television as one such example. Although the death of the television spot has been predicted for years at the hand of competing online alternatives if not the ad-skipping threat fueled by DVR households, the reality paints a very different picture. It turns out that the traditional television advertising market is still alive, well, and booming, reaching a record-setting $72 billion market in 2011.¹²

Despite the sustainability of television as a media powerhouse, significant challenges for marketers linger. It is true that television measurement has come a long way since its inception, yet there remains a void in understanding exactly how attention—not just time—is spent in a household with proliferating distractions. Unlike online, there are no ubiquitous click-through capabilities on television to measure attention and behavior, at least not yet. And, in a space cluttered with hundreds of channels, the television advertising market has become congested and fragmented, making it all the more difficult for a marketer to determine where to invest precious dollars in the medium itself, not to mention how to spread those dollars across multiple platforms. Although some may view the fragmentation paradigm opportunistically by accessing a very targeted demographic on a specific channel or show, gone also are the days of ubiquitous reach and frequency on the medium itself. Milton Berle once commanded nearly 90 percent of the viewing eyeballs, but today's top show attracts just over 10 percent of the viewing population.¹³

Competing for the consumer's attention is a plethora of new options, and, whereas marketers once eagerly followed consumers down the uncharted television path, there appears to be some reluctance or inability to give new media its due. Despite the strange reality that more people worldwide have a mobile phone than a toothbrush and 91 percent have said mobile device within arm's reach 24x7,¹⁴ the mobile advertising market has only recently eclipsed $1 billion.¹⁵ Compare that with the $70 billion television advertising market. In fact, although the media time consumers spend with mobile devices is now at 10 percent, the advertising industry's investment in the platform has yet to reach 1 percent.¹⁶

So, why is the same industry that once demonstrated such unbridled enthusiasm for a yet-unproven medium in television not following as whole-heartedly down the paths of mobile and online alternatives? Some may argue that it is the lack of measurement provided across these new media. Social media, in particular, have suffered a black eye by not sufficiently proving its ROI to companies fixated on profitability. However, compared with the early days of television when measurement was nonexistent, online, social media, and mobile options provide a wealth of information that can be used to measure and, in some cases, predict consumer behavior. One cannot also make the argument that television was more popular in its formative years in drawing an audience than either online or mobile, hence explaining the reason that advertisers eagerly followed their consumers by blindly investing in the new platform. The Internet had a much more aggressive adoption curve—reaching the 50 million user mark at roughly one-third the time of television.¹⁷ In comparing the adoption rate of television to mobility, one has to change the axis of the latter to even be relevant in measuring its exponential growth—the iPhone marketplace hit 1 billion applications in less than a year.

If not lack of measurement or slower adoption rates, what else can explain the tempered enthusiasm for new media platforms? It seems that the more tepid response among advertisers has more to do with the sheer volume of platforms available than a lack of interest in any one media alternative itself. At MediaPost's recent Mobile Summit, media guru Patrick Quinn reflected on how the number of media alternatives available to an advertising agency has grown over the years: “In the 1970s, there were eight choices. Today, there are more than 100, and 17 from mobile alone.”¹⁸ Adding to the complexity of the equation is the dependency of platforms on one another. Consumers rarely invest undivided attention into one medium at a time. Multitasking is commonplace, with youth spreading their coveted attention even more thinly than older generations. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8- to 18-year-olds manage to pack an astounding 10 hours and 45 minutes of media into just over 7.5 hours of entertainment time by consuming more than one medium simultaneously.¹⁹ Marketers must not only determine how and where to invest dollars across more than 100 platforms, they must also construct a plan of attack to use media synergistically across platforms—all the while devising creative concepts and executions that work across multiple device and experience environments.

It seems that just as marketers gain traction in balancing multiple platforms, a new media alternative enters the ring vying for their scarce resources. In an ironic twist of events, online video is now emulating traditional television in more ways than one. YouTube has announced its intention of offering more than 100 channels of original programming, sponsored by the likes of significant brands, and has backed this commitment with a $100 million investment.²⁰ It and fellow online cohorts AOL, Hulu, and Yahoo are looking for a piece of the advertising spend still dominated by traditional television and have devised a new commercial industry—the NewFront—to sell their wares. For those familiar with advertising, the “upfront” market has been the mainstay of traditional television advertising sales for some time. This is the time when television executives shop around their upcoming programming lineup in hopes of selling advertising inventory for the forthcoming season. Before the upfront market had an opportunity to open for business in the spring of 2012, online media companies promoted their programming options in the NewFronts, making a case that their content is complementary, if not cannibalistic, to the television time invested by today's multitasking consumer.

If that weren't enough to make marketers' heads spin, perhaps the new family of augmented reality possibilities will do the trick. Just as QR Codes, those funny-looking schematic designs that are increasingly found on print advertisements and publications and can be read by a smartphone to push content (such as a web page or video) to the consumer, become more mainstream, they are being displaced by newer forms of augmented reality in which conspicuous codes are no longer necessary. With the latest technologies, the “code” still exists, although it is invisible to the user. Whether using an audio fingerprint that identifies a particular sound (such as shazaming a commercial) or an image recognition software that can automatically identify an object (such as the object-driven capabilities of HP's Aurasma), the user need not scan a “code” to get more information or content. Of course, the challenges for advertisers remain because they must extol the virtues of this new media technology to their consumers while also designating the capabilities existing in a particular advertising format, at least until augmented reality becomes the expected reality on the part of mainstream consumers. Of course, when this day comes, advertisers who have not embedded the latest visual and audio cues may find themselves at a disadvantage as opposed to those that do, in much the same way that companies were forced to hop aboard the Internet bullet train with a website and e-commerce platform to remain competitive a few years back.

With so many choices present, and more entering the market each day, marketers are confounded with how to keep up. A 2010 survey from the staffing firm The Creative Group found 65 percent of marketing executives considering it at least somewhat challenging to stay current on social media trends.²¹ The problem reaches across enterprises of all sizes. A Forrester study concluded that less than a quarter of Fortune 500 companies had effectively integrated interactive marketing teams.²² The vast majority had maintained artificial silos between traditional and interactive marketing efforts, despite the fact that the majority of their consumers no longer partitioned their time and attention as such. Because more and more of a consumer's time is spent through these interactive media, they also represent a breeding ground for rich consumer feedback and insights. But, like the challenges in using such media for promoting a company's message, marketers encounter similar difficulties when mining the treasure trove of consumer data available through online options. A 2011 study by IBM found that, although marketers believe such data is important, they find themselves ill equipped to harness it, with more than 80 percent of CMOs still relying on traditional marketing research to build market strategies.²³

New alternatives are not only changing the way marketers promote their brand, they are also changing the discourse of the brand itself. In the good old days of one-way broadcast media, marketers owned their brand. The most brand-conscious of them took painstaking caution to ensure that the integrity of their image remained true to the personality and promise of the identity they attempted to create and solidify in their consumer's mind. Feedback was controlled, often through channels as dated as toll-free numbers or snail mail correspondence. Word of mouth was limited to those individuals within a consumer's close circle over whom he had direct influence—a positive outcome for brand missteps but one that also limited the positive referrals coveted as the crown jewel of “advertising.” The two-way world in which consumers now dwell significantly alters the paradigm for marketers. In a 2010 study by KRC Research among company owners, executives, brand managers, and marketers, 40 percent of respondents agreed that social media created new challenges for protecting a brand's integrity.²⁴ With a few keystrokes, consumers can opine about their personal experience with the brand and share those thoughts with millions of strangers around the virtual world. But marketers attempting to put a lid on such feedback may find themselves the scorn of the population they attempt to influence.

And, in a media category in which instantaneous action goes both ways, marketers are prone to mistakes not common in other media in which checking and rechecking are the norm. Those who do not fess up to such errors find themselves ridiculed by a savvy consumer market unforgiving of attempted cover-ups, as Chrysler learned the hard way. In 2011, the author of the ChryslerAutos Twitter account inadvertently tweeted, “I find it ironic that Detroit is know [sic] as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f***ing drive.” The company deleted the tweet and claimed it was the product of a hacker, only to admit later that the tweet was the opinion of an employee at the company's social media agency, “who had since been terminated.” But the damage was done for Chrysler, who suffered a black eye in the court of social opinion for attempting to bury the offense.²⁵

If the changing landscape in how one creates, maintains, and promotes a brand is insufficient in throwing marketers off balance, there's always the altered selling process itself to keep them unsteady. In 2011, the average U.S. shopper consulted 10.4 sources before making a purchase, twice as many as the year before.²⁶ The fact-checking is no longer relegated to research done at home through a stationary broadband connection. More consumers are using the ubiquitous computers attached to their hips—smartphones—to do comparison shopping while in the field. Seventy percent of these smartphone consumers use their device while shopping in-store.²⁷ For retailers, that behavior presents an interesting set of unique challenges. Showrooming—the use of a mobile device to comparison shop for cheaper or better alternatives for a product while in a store—is entering the consumer mainstream. The problem is particularly daunting for big-box retailers, who increasingly find themselves the victims of merchandising the physical product for curious consumers to investigate, only to have said consumers increasingly opt to purchase the product from an online retailer capable of offering cheaper prices. In response, these retailers are turning to sophisticated data collection mechanisms, using technology often embedded in the store, such as Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras, to serve up special targeted offers to consumers about to vacate the premises and likely to purchase the merchandise from another retailer based on showrooming behavior. For companies vying for limited space within major retailers, they may find themselves coerced into offering exclusive promotional pricing or products to earn their slot on the shelf. Advanced negotiation tactics are yet one more way retailers are addressing the showrooming trend, attempting to secure some measure of exclusivity to counter competitive offers, and challenging the traditional rules of channel marketing in the process.

Of course, building a brand, promoting a message, and selling a product presume some understanding of a target market in the first place, bringing the discussion to how a marketer now finds his ideal consumer or prospect. It is perhaps the best of times and the worst of times for marketers in this regard. No longer are they relegated entirely to buying expensive media time through broadcast channels based on broad demographic cohorts. On the contrary, the hundreds of mouse clicks, IPTV channel changes, and location-based updates that consumers make each day reflect a dazzling constellation of preferences, patterns, and intentions. However, effectively mining this data without crossing a fine line into “creepy” territory becomes the new battlefield for marketers. The public narrative had been fairly clear on this debate. Marketers were given considerable free reign in mining their own company's data in an attempt to offer more targeted or discounted products to their consumers (think of the targeting schemes popularized by grocery stores and large e-commerce retailers as examples).

Marketers had to proceed cautiously when attempting to sell or use their consumer data with third parties. These unwritten, although well understood, rules of the road existed before Target making national headlines. The retailer used its own shopping data and a complex statistical algorithm to serve up targeted offers to consumers based on transaction history and patterns. In 2012, the retailer sent a direct mailer with specific offers for expecting mothers to a household where the matriarch was not pregnant. Outraged, the patriarch called the retailer, excoriating the company for a clear miscalculation in their targeting attempts. That was, until a few weeks later, when the same father made another call to the retailer sheepishly admitting that his teenage daughter was pregnant, unbeknownst to him at the time of his initial complaint. The creep factor of a retailer using advanced statistical data-mining capabilities on its own shopping transactions to target an expecting teenage mother before her parents were even aware heightened the sensitivity of using such big data for a marketer's efforts—whether the data was in the clear perimeter of said marketer's consumer database or not.

Those supposedly well-understood guidelines were upended overnight, leaving marketers questioning, if not gun-shy about, the implications of using their own data for sophisticated targeting efforts. Any lack of clarity on the topic is rich fodder for regulators or journalists seeking their next poster child of a company crossing the line. Despite the trouble spots awaiting pioneers, innovative marketers continue to test the limits of this largely uncharted terrain. Perhaps it's because the payoff is big for those who succeed. Among the more than 1,200 U.S. advertisers in a 2010 Alcatel-Lucent study in which various potential media options were tested, the most universally popular among company marketers and advertising agencies alike was one that generated targeted lists based on rich profile data of consumer activities across multiple digital platforms (including online, mobile, and IP television)—the likely outcome among a base of respondents in which more than one in three strongly agree that digital media offer a high ROI.

Although challenges abound for professionals in this field who find themselves at the cross roads where marketing and technology intersect, there is hope, and some prescriptive guidelines, that can help when navigating the goldmines from the landmines. Among them are:

• Earn trust—Marketers have long been accused of being tone-deaf to the needs of their company by focusing on “squishy” metrics (things like share of voice, qualified leads, brand preference, social buzz, etc.) that are often difficult to correlate to the most important metric favored by CFOs and CEOs—profitability. However, a 2011 Alcatel-Lucent study covering more than 5,000 consumers (from teens to empty nesters) challenged the conventional wisdom of money as the most valued currency exchanged in a market where consumer data is up for grabs. In the study, Alcatel-Lucent tested 10 brands from across the service, web, and consumer equipment provider industries. Respondents were asked to measure each brand on a variety of scales, including things like how much the consumer loved or hated the brand or how much he trusted the brand to keep his information safe and secure. Those attributes were then correlated with how much money consumers were willing to pay for a service offered by each brand. The results showed a more than 60 percent correlation between trust and willingness to pay; that is, the more respondents trusted a brand, the more likely they were to pay for a service offered by the company. Although that may seem intuitive, consider that other metrics, such as how much a respondent loved or hated a brand, had virtually no impact on the same. As it turns out, trust can be converted into dollars. In addition, when consumers willingly trade information about themselves in exchange for free, better, or discounted goods and services (the fuel driving the big data phenomenon), there is an implicit understanding that they themselves are the product for sale, making trust an all the more coveted currency for brands attempting to cash in.
• Build clarity—Contrary to legal counsel that marketers may receive from within their companies, privacy policies do not engender trust. They mitigate lawsuits, admittedly an important objective in a highly litigious society; but, to build trust, marketers must go the extra mile in ensuring that the only privacy policy that exists in their company to sufficiently inform consumers about how and when their personal data may be used is not one written in convoluted legalese unintelligible to the average person. According to the same 2011 Alcatel-Lucent study, attributes associated with low trust are (not surprisingly) those concerned with how a company goes about informing consumers of its data-collection procedures. Companies that are perceived as not respecting their customers' privacy, not being upfront or honest in how they use customer information or collecting “too much” information about their customers, suffer a lower trust score and consequently a lower willingness for customers to pay. In an era of big data, privacy policies are simply too important to be left exclusively to a company's legal department or outside counsel. Marketing must take an active role in ensuring that said policy is clearly written (such that one with a junior high school education can easily understand it), conspicuously available (such that one without a detective's license can easily find it), and readily controllable (such that one may opt in and opt out of sharing data in a temporal manner based on contextual or preferential changes).
• Lose control—Perhaps the most difficult aspect for any professional is in letting go of some of the controls once afforded him or her. This couldn't be truer than for marketers zealous to create and maintain an appropriate image of their company in the marketplace. However, the rules have changed in a two-way market in which conversations, not monologues, are expected. This new environment requires marketers to cede some control of their brand to the consumers who helped create it. Although this may be a scary proposition, new evidence suggests that letting go may yield significant dividends in shaping consumer perception—a key objective of a successful branding strategy. This includes allowing vocal consumers to opine about a brand's attributes—both positive and negative. According to Reevoo.com, 68 percent of consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores. Furthermore, shoppers who actively look for bad reviews convert 67 percent more than the average consumer.²⁸
• Retain purpose—Losing control is not to be conflated with abandoning strategy outright. Marketers have a responsibility to put forth a strategy that equips their company for success. But, with new media alternatives beckoning the attention of company executives, marketers have fallen victim to losing purpose in favor of trying a new medium just because they can. The social media highway is littered with the carnage of companies who dabbled in the medium with no sense of purpose or objective, only to be left deflated and bewildered by the consequential lackluster success. This is, in part, due to the cost-effectiveness of this medium against more traditional alternatives—like television, print, and radio—where production costs can run high. As such, social media tend to favor the pointless, and marketers have proven susceptible to the hype of their market and/or executives with blind experimentation in this space. Any media tactic, including the latest varieties, must be used in concert with others to execute a purposeful strategy within a market. Anything less will result in a disjointed set of activities seeking a mission and leaving marketers and company executives alike confused and underwhelmed.
• Fail fast—Although appearing contradictory to the earlier point, failing fast is not the same as lacking purpose. Marketers are entering the age of experimentation, in which empirical testing can be executed fairly quickly and cost-effectively, yielding the most reliable and affordable market research that money can buy. Google runs hundreds of experiments per day to optimize clickthrough rates and results. Amazon is able to test the impact of relocating its shopping cart upon the user experience—and can improve conversion rates within hours, not months or years. Marketers have a bevy of new media alternatives that come with sophisticated measurement capabilities. By having a purposeful testing strategy, they can determine the impacts of precise variables on the consumer's shopping experience and convert more sales as a result. Although these leading indicators can predict and influence purchase intent, marketers must resist the temptation to be seduced by their allure at the CEO's table. For the CEO and key executive stakeholders (including the CFO), it comes down to ROI. Experimenting quickly, failing fast, and course-correcting are important marketing activities, but only to the extent that their effects can be translated to ROI.
• Recruit reinforcements—Traditional marketing has seen its facelift, and it's time the complexion of the marketing department reflects the change. Although it is beneficial to recruit tried-and-true marketing talent, CMOs must now augment their organizations with additional skills to address the changing needs of their consumer base. Statisticians will command a premium in an environment in which big data must be translated into propensity models that yield actionable insights. Engineers and other technologists will earn their respect among marketers by demystifying the dizzying array of innovative media platforms entering the scene. Last, but certainly not least, marketers will find themselves increasingly reliant on an IT organization to support a single customer view across multiple inputs and data-mining capabilities. Fences surrounding these previously distinct organizations will be replaced by bridges among the more innovative firms that embrace the synergies imposed by a hyperconnected market.

There's no doubt that the landscape for marketers has changed dramatically. But not all the changes have been negative, nor should they be met with trepidation. Consider how different the world is for marketers since 2007. Aside from the vast technology changes that have occurred since then, 2007 was also the year when Businessweek penned an article that called the CMO position “radioactive.” At the time, CMOs had the shortest tenure (just 26 months, on average) among any of their executive counterparts (including CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs). Among the reasons hypothesized by a Businessweek source at the time was the fact that 70 percent of companies did not know what to look for in recruiting a CMO.²⁹ The startling statistic left AdvertisingAge—one of the more influential voices in the marketing community—to editorialize why CMOs existed in the first place: “Perhaps we should just call for the end of the CMO position. Put the job out of its misery. It's not really working anyway, is it?” Since then, the “radioactivity” of the CMO position appears to have been contained, with CMO average tenure hitting 42 months in 2010 (still below the average tenure of CEOs, but a marked improvement since executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart began measuring the statistic in 2004).³⁰ Although less radioactive, the job has never been more mercurial. Those who adapt to their new surroundings will find new relevance for their hard-earned stories—both in the boardroom and the market they serve.