One of the things that frequently gets lost when you talk to marketers looking to do work online is the fact that traffic doesn’t just appear. If you launch something new, you have to find a way to let people know about it. Big companies that I’ve worked with learned that lesson fairly early by launching microsites that no one visited. Very quickly, new campaigns started including budget for attracting visitors.
At Fight we’ve been growing our following organically through Twitter and our blog, but we have also been keeping an eye out for opportunities to get in front of new people who haven’t yet ran into our online presence and might be interested in what we do.
So it was with no small amount of interest that I discovered that my copy of the June, 2010 Wired magazine arrived with a coupon for $75 worth of Google AdWords credit. Probably coincidentally, LinkedIn sent out a coupon on May 12th for $250 worth of advertising credit using their DirectAds product (LinkedIn’s Andrew Chang said that these offers have been going out since April to a subset of LinkedIn subscribers, so you may or may not have one sitting in your own inbox).
We love a good challenge, and this matched up well with an existing need, so we gave ourselves the task of putting these offers to good use in our favor. This is the first entry in a series of articles that we’ll do as we explore how to best take advantage of this very limited, but free, advertising opportunity.
There are some exciting new changes happening here at Fight. This past week we saw at 25% growth in the company with the addition of Mickey Slater. We can’t wait for you to meet him.
Mickey joins us in an essential business development capacity, but is also a strategist in his own right having worked at Razorfish on clients like Microsoft (Kin, Surface, and Office, among others), Coors, and Sony. Through his previous client work, he has been committed to helping clients make meaningful connections with the people who use their products or services. A tradition that he will continue at Fight.
You can find Mickey in a variety of places across the social landscape and we encourage you to reach out to him and introduce yourself. He will be an active contributor on the @madebyfight Twitter account, or if you want a more casual Mickey experience you can follow him on his personal Twitter account at @verymickey. If Twitter is not your thing, you can always email, call, facebook, or stop by the office.
It’s anotherexample of a major brand looking to crowdsource ways of making themselves better
In this case it’s focused on marketing (even though it says advertising, their definition of advertising is over-broad)
We like to use opportunities like this to flex our brains with, poke at our process, and generally have a good time
We had not heard of this program from anywhere other than TechCrunch (see The Target Audience, below)
There’s actually precious little information to go on for GE Ads. In the best scenario, this is because GE is treating this not as a one-off contest, but as a long-range funnel for innovative work from unexpected places. In a less-good scenario this is because someone at GE thought that the idea was fun and went ahead with it with little thought (which is not a bad idea in itself).
In any case, we felt we were game, so we spent 120 minutes on it. Here’s how it played out.
Who’s Your Client?
GE has a HUGE breadth of products. We considered focusing on specific products, or even just specific major product categories, but, since we didn’t have any collective expertise in any one area, digging in to any one of them and trying to really understand what GE was doing and where the opportunities were, was beyond the scope of the time limit that we had set for ourselves. Besides, the scope of the request, while open-ended, seemed to be about GE as a brand overall, and not particularly about a product category.
The Target Audience
Again, not having done any sort of discovery (beyond what 30 minutes of web searching will get you), we decided to focus on the average consumer as the target. Business-to-business relationships are tricky to quickly understand if you don’t have some experience with what the target audience wants. On the other hand, we all have experience being a consumer, so it seemed like an easy headspace to get into. Ultimately we narrowed the audience down to Advanced Digital Literates because:
We are them, so we have some idea of what’s going on there
This project so barely made our radar (only due to Ned’s keen attention to things like this), but was so squarely targeted at people like us that it seemed to point to an opportunity that we could take advantage of
It turns out that, not having any information to the contrary, we thought that the broad consumers were probably being served quite well, actually, with the campaigns that GE is currently running (see below for more on this). We’re sure that someone in GE could give us evidence that there is a serious failing somewhere – in which case we’d tackle that more head on – but, barring that, we had to go with what we knew
The Goal
Again, given that there is not much to go on in terms of this project, we took a fairly generic goal:
Increase brand affinity volume with broad reach
What We Know
At first we didn’t think we knew much about the umbrella brand that is GE with respect to marketing. But it didn’t take us long to realize that GE’s advertising had actually reached us (which was especially surprising to me, as I’m nearly unreachable with advertising – a fact that I’ve decided to take as amusingly ironic). The ad campaigns are broadly inspirational, speak to the positive idea of “imagination” and talk about how GE improves the world. We’d seen ads on TV, and their digital ads were pretty solid. In fact, a campaign that they ran a few years ago, where you could create new ideas on a shared whiteboard, seemed downright inspired (though, of course, we can’t speak to its success).
Insomuch as umbrella advertising doesn’t seek to sell anything directly, these all seemed to be on the right track. And reflecting on our own feelings we came away on the positive side of neutral on GE, which is pretty good for a brand that we don’t knowingly consume on a regular basis (unlike, say, Coke).
Our Key Insight
GE has the opportunity to own a real concept of “imagination” in the marketplace, beyond what they currently do.
Our Strategy
GE creates the groundwork for inspired ideas. GE should provide the digital infrastructure for digital natives to bring new wonderful things into the world. Inspiring innovation and providing the framework in which it can grow.
By doing this, GE reinforces, in a very concrete way, its ownership of “imagination”. It creates affinity for GE in the people who are actually using their imagination to make the world a more interesting place. It also provides an interesting opportunity for GE to expand its business into a new space that is consistent with the image it projects (see the tactics section, below).
Tactical Approach
Specifically, we would like to see GE collect, build, foster, and own tools to help people spark new ideas, nurture those ideas into deeper concepts, and bring those concepts into reality. GE should be the company you think of when you want to figure out something new to bring into the world.
We envision a web site called imagine.ge.com which would provide a range of tools that GE has actively helped develop. Most tools would be free. This would include tools such as:
Community Ideation Platforms (e.g. Salesforce’s Community offering, which powers Dell’s Ideastorm, or, ironically, Google’s Moderator, which is what GE is using for this project)
Community Idea Acceleration Platforms (I don’t know of any in the wild, but have built a couple: systems that allow people to see other people’s ideas and get involved to the degree that interests them)
Basically an entire ecosystem devoted to the imagination/innovation process from creating the initial spark to making the idea a reality. We see this infrastructure as the “ideas” equivalent to Amazon’s Web Services, which provide essential services for new web applications without the need for a company to build the infrastructure themselves.
We imagine GE expanding upon these layers and integrating them into a more complete workflow.
The kicker would be for GE to make this infrastructure the foundation of how ideas grow within GE. This provides added incentive to improve the tools and added credibility to both the tools and to GE as a company that practices what it preaches.
In our biggest version of this concept, GE creates a new business unit around creating “imagination” infrastructure of all kinds (potentially capturing the brand space that Disney evacuated after Walt died), they create a global incubation program, get involved in 3D printing (maybe through the RepRap or MakerBot projects), and buy Adobe both for its creative and technology development tools.
All of this provides additional emphasis on GE’s classic jingle “We bring good things to life”.
Last week we posted the first edition of “Get in the Ring” featuring Rob talking about why social media was actually a 301 course for marketers. This week it’s my turn to step into the ring. The topic I drew was “What’s the difference between traditional and digital marketing?” This turned out to be a lucky draw as it’s something I’ve been talking a lot about recently, but getting it into three minutes wasn’t easy. Neither apparently would be writing on the board in a legible way. But GITR is all about just going for it, so that’s what I did.
If you want to know more about GITR is all about and why we’re doing it, or even how you can get in on it, check out Rob’s original post. But enough stalling – here’s me, talking about things off the cuff.
To help us stay on our toes, we’re doing something that we call Get in the Ring.
It’s a kind of game to help us hone our skills at talking about different topics relevant to Fight.
The rules of the game are simple:
Everybody in Fight plays (this helps us all understand every part of what we do)
Each person takes a turn, and we rotate through everyone as many times as time allows
When it’s your turn, you get randomly assigned (using Random.org) a topic from our collection of topics (there are currently about 40 topics)
You have 5 minutes total to prepare and present
You have no more than 3 minutes to present
We record the whole thing
The topics range from broad subjects relating to the overall field of marketing, to very niche subjects that maybe only one of us has any expertise in.
As you can imagine, some videos are spot on quick hits on a topic, and others are wandering ramblings that try to find some way to relate to the topic even remotely (I’m guessing that there may be an outtake reel in our future). That’s the fun.
We thought we’d take the best ones and toss them out for people to take a look at. We’re hoping that you might find something quick and valuable in one of the videos, or at least be entertained.
The video production is low quality, and none of us are professional speakers (though Justin DID speak at the last Webtrends Engage conference), so be prepared to cut us a little slack. If you can’t cut us some slack, or you think the concept is too fun not to participate in, then we encourage you to join us (drop us an email, or leave a comment below) and try it for yourself. You don’t get to choose the topic, though. That’s part of the fun
Why Social Media is Marketing 301
The first video is of me; probably the least telegenic one of the bunch (but SOMEONE has to go first). The topic is on something that we talk about internally a fair amount: That despite all of the “Social Media 101″ posts, videos, conferences, and classes out there, social media is really a 300-level marketing course.
Enjoy!
If you have topic (that’s relevant to Fight) that you’d like to see us tackle, please email us and we’ll add it to our list.
Last week I had a chance to sit down with Bret Bernhoft from Face of Media to talk about brands on the web, what competition means now, and a little about what Fight is up to these days.
You can listen to part one here. And Part two here.
While you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews Bret has done. He is a great interviewer and has talked to some really interesting people.
