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Below is the link to the slide share of the latest  research from EIAA on how people are multi-tasking across media and influencing their purchase decisions

http://www.slideshare.net/robertmattar/eiaa-media-multitasking-report  

The Media Multi-tasking Report reveals a marked increase in the number of people choosing to consume different media simultaneously, heralding the emergence of the engaged ‘Media Multi-Tasker’ and highlighting how consumers are entering a new phase of communications and commerce online. Advertisers can benefit from a better understanding of this user behaviour, feeding insight into media strategies particularly when planning multi-media campaigns.

Key findings are:

•  TV and internet media multi-tasking is growing rapidly, +38% since 2006, with almost a quarter of all Europeans now using TV and internet simultaneously. For brands, this highlights a growing audience of active and engaged consumers that can be targeted more effectively online

•  ‘Word of mouth’ is fast developing into ‘word of web’ with more than half of all European media multi-taskers using Instant Messenger and communicating via social networks to share updates and opinions with friends and family. This demonstrates how consumers are becoming more empowered online to formulate and communicate thoughts and opinions of brands

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Profero’s co-Founder and CEO North America, Wayne Arnold, this week had a thought-provoking article published in Ad Age. He writes on the declining relevance of Q Scores and generic awareness in the modern communications environment and the real value of being the Most Linked brand.

Here is the full version. Leave a comment if you agree or disagree:

Move Over, Q Scores
What Matters Today Is Whether Yours Is a Most-Linked Brand

by Wayne Arnold
Published: June 01, 2009

 As Simon Clift of Unilever made clear at the Ad Age Digital Conference recently, brands no longer have total control of the communications surrounding their products or even the positioning of them. That power is now in the hands of the digital consumer. Ford agrees. It’s just asked 100 bloggers to launch the Fiesta in the U.S.

Every week I read about a campaign headed in that direction. Skittles and Land Rover had their respective Twitter experiments, and while we are yet to find out if candy flew off the shelves and more 4×4s hit the road, I applaud their willingness and bravery in stress testing what I, too, think are the new rules.

And yet I regularly talk to marketers and agency folks who still think they can rely on the brute force of traditional mass media, humorous creative or cute animals to promote awareness and favorability and consider their job done. Yes, awareness still offers recall, recognition and familiarity. But now more than ever, it does not automatically mean increased brand value, purchase intent or loyalty.

I’m a believer that broad-scale awareness and favorability in the old sense — represented in marketing short-hand by Q Scores — really don’t matter anymore. An evolution in thinking is required. What is important now is the concept of being the most-linked brand — building brands through multiple, relevant, consumer engagements — often on a smaller scale. The brands that make themselves the most connected today will build more solid foundations and stand taller tomorrow.

Q Scores (the Q stands for quotient) were developed in the early 1960s to calculate awareness of and favorability toward TV anchors such as Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. Don Draper and his “Mad Men” colleagues would have bought TV spots against the highest-rated shows. Over time, the panel survey was extended to include sports personalities, products and brands. Many similar measures were devised, and for a long time that’s largely how big ad campaigns have been measured for “success.”

But when thousands of daily media messages have a 99.9% attrition rate, and “we the media” means Twitter revolts lead to immediate changes in marketing strategies, brands must embrace the new realities and truer indicators of consumer engagement. As Ford recognizes, the power has shifted to thousands of small conversations that can to grow to influence millions. Buying the biggest megaphone and shouting in the hope your messages will ring in consumers’ ears is nowhere near as effective as it used to be. Shouting rarely creates conversations.

What can create them is a greater focus on brilliant brand storytelling and content that gives rise to as many relevant and deep conversations as possible, both on and offline — although these happen increasingly in digital media. This mind-set has planning at its core. (Doesn’t everything, you ask? Well, in the digital space, at least, I’m afraid to say unfortunately, it does not.) It involves interrogating product truths and brand values (thankfully, some old concepts don’t change) and data mining and buzz aggregation across the realm of social media to unearth the consumer insights and cultural connections that will inform your strategies.

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Brand Bubble – John Gerzema and Ed Lebar (by Patrick Collister)

Gerzema and Lebar both work for Y&R and the book is a plug for Y&R’s BrandAsset Valuator, alias BAV. In short, the book argues that consumer “top-of-mind awareness, trust, regard and admiration for not a few but thousands of brands” are dropping. And “in essence, they’re concentrating their passion, devotion and purchasing power on an increasingly smaller portfolio of special brands.” This, they write, is a big problem taking shape. “In 2006 Fortune magazine conducted a survey indicating that 72% of the Dow Jones Market Cap is now intangible. Accenture estimated that intangibles accounted for almost 70% of the value of the S&P 500 in 2007, up from 20% in 1980.”

In other words, brands are of increasing value to stock markets at a time when most are of diminishing value to consumers. The Henley Centre has studied the erosion of brands and in 2007 the Carlson Marketing Group found “in 2000, four in ten consumers showed a genuine preference for…one brand, but that dropped to one in three consumers in 2001 and crashed further in 2007 to less than one in ten consumers feeling committed to a single brand.”

One reason: there’s too much advertising.

James Surowiecki in “Decline of Brands” wrote in 2004: The average American sees 60% more ad messages per day than when the first President Bush left office.”

It’s not that consumers are exhausted by it but that “Brands have blurred into a sea of sameness.” Choice has become overwhelming. So, 160 million phone numbers in the US are on the “do not call” list; 43.6 million households have some form of PVR to edit out the ads.

Furthermore, and crucially, most advertising today is dull and uninteresting because, as the authors put it, “many companies confuse risk avoidance with risk management.” Today, people want to see brands being courageous. They want brands to stand for something other than just making the directors filthy rich.

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Profero’s Alice Marsh circulated the new For the Love of Wispa campaign before Christmas and it provoked a very interesting question: What, if any, is true value of nostalgia advertising?

While the campaign to bring back the Wispa bar has been up and running for a year or so now, with user generated groups on Facebook and other social networks driving the push, that Fallon have now taken on the project under the watchful eye of Cadbury’s suggests two things. Firstly, that there is some level of “people power” at work and the brand has responded to that (however cynically). And, secondly, there is enough faith in advertising the past that this is deemed a worthwhile investment. 

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This really effective ad from Sky has been doing the viral rounds and really hits the mark. It is a pretty simple, fun concept, nicely executed and really gets to the heart of armchair support - a kind of geekish fascination with the possibilities of sport and sportsmen and women. 

This short editorial appeared in The Guardian on 01 December, and then on the Guardian CiF site the same day. That we are facing a global recession is by no means news, it has been reported as an impending fait-a-compli by many for between six to twelve months. Nor is it news that all the accompanying problems that come with an economic downturn will have a dramatic effect on consumer confidence and behaviour. However, as the article points out, this is the first real recession since the emergence of the internet as truly mass experience, a recession “superimposed on a new phase of internet expansion, the web 2.0 boom.”

The drying up of capital and the failure of competing businesses, both big and small, is already underway and rapidly gathering momentum, but there is perhaps a grain of comfort for digital properties and brands. Although online sales have, inevitably, started to dip the use of search engines and comparison sites to buy online or bolster high street confidence has risen by up to 10% and Nielsen has reported over forty-one million visits to voucher discount sites offering money off in retail outlets. These are not digital natives searching for bargains, but the mainstream consolidating their shift to digital to search out ways of countering the hard times. 

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Know The Signs is the latest website created by Heineken. It’s a bold, but responsible, move for an alcohol brand to address directly the dangers of excessive drinking and an even bolder one to do so by creating a site that is actually enjoyable to use, but this execution really feels informative, with a strong engagement. Heineken has not created anything ground-breaking but that restraint also shows an understanding of the brand/topic relationship. 

The level of interaction, which encourages users to send details to friends, download to mobile and download widgets feels very much in line with the tone of the message and should appeal to the target audience. This is well thought out and executed piece of work. 

At Creative Espresso Profero strategist Enzo Annunziata has highlighted the changing face of recent Mastercard campaigns. Their latest, Pep Talk (below), is a great piece of branding that has eschewed the humour of previous executions and aligned the brand to more emotive notions of collective aspiration, success and hard work - a sign of our economic times, perhaps. It is beautifully executed and powerful ad and one that sustains Mastercard’s strong advertising heritage.

This new campaign for Saw V launched a few weeks ago and, frankly, it is hard to believe that it made it past the origination phase. Spoof calls and stories are such a tired mechanism, used by many films and TV series, including The Ring, Dexter, Burn Notice and Breaking Bad that these ideas must be close to reaching critical mass. It’s vaguely amusing if you’ve never heard or seen it before, but different brands churning out the same idea time after time surely smacks of creative poverty.

Great brands are able to use variations on themes that provoke trust, nostalgia and consumer confidence (see Guinness, Stella Artois, Adidas, Nike even The Guardian and Penguin) but they do not reciprocate absolute ideas. Innovation has the potential to be fantastic. Innovation with intelligent additions, inspirational. Innovation copied and repeated is tired and lazy.

After the euphoria of Obama’s fantastic US election victory there has been a great deal of talk about his slick campaign strategy, headed by David Plouffe, and his use of digital media and technology to rally and maintain support and create a genuine dialogue with the electorate. Campaigning on a ticket of change, hope and inclusivity, the Democrat’s game plan feels perfectly acclimatised to the progressive, digital generation. There seems to be no objection to the consensus that this was the tightest, most well-oiled and effective political campaign in US, and arguably world, political history and there also seems to be little argument against new media being at its heart. It’s perhaps not even hyperbole to call Obama, as The Business Standard in India have, the first “digital president”.

Yet for me what remains one of the most fascinating elements is that this could be moment when the mainstream were mobilised to embrace digital communication as the central pillar of modern media consumption in way that previously we had not thought possible. That young voters would be attuned to the power of Obama’s use of digital was in little doubt but, strikingly, his campaign’s use of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, widgets, micro-blogging, in-game advertising, mobile, podcasts and a number of social networking sites, seems to have tipped over into an older, less “internet-savvy” audience.

From the brilliant, broadstroke inclusivity of his dedicated YouTube channel (with 130,000 unique subscribers and over 19,000,000 views) and informative individual, daily campaign video updates (see below), to the Obamablog, BarackTV, Flickr and text messages reminding subscribers to switch-on, log-on and turn-on to interviews, rallies, press briefings, talk shows and hustings as and when they were happening, this was all brilliant thinking. 

Furthermore, and an indication of how Obama’s team are taking digital communications seriously not only in reaching the electorate in the run up to voting but also, crucially, in maintaining serious interaction with the population after their victory, the Democrat strategists have launched a post-election site inviting users to track “change” and Obama’s movements, policies and public addresses. It also includes a simple but, in keeping with the tone of “your campaign”, effective channel enabling voters to include their election stories and their role in creating history. 

Here are a few links that provide a greater insight into that strategy and some examples of the digital campaign:

Tracking change: http://change.gov/

Obama’s social media advantage here, here and here

Combining traditional and digital

Obama and Twitter

The Obama campaign was not old-style antiquated and distant political sermonising but, in the most literal sense, people politics. Politics that made the voter connected and involved. It seems that the victory has not only had a profound effect on a nation’s attitude to tolerance and social progress, but also to the power and effectiveness of modern technology and communication. The first digital president? Why not?

A couple of further examples of exciting executions can be see at Creative Social here and YouTube here

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