By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
Performance marketers are held to the highest standard of accountability possible – return on investment (ROI). We live and die by key metrics that make our clients successful.
If we must be held accountable for every facet of our campaigns, shouldn’t the President of the United States be held to the same accountability standards?
No matter who wins, performance-style metrics should factor into measuring the President’s success.
As I outline in a new white paper, “The CMO’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing,” there is a five-step process for performance marketing success. It’s a process that will benefit not only the next President of the United States (if he were inclined to engage a performance marketing campaign) but every CMO who is seeking an edge in the era of accountability of online marketing.
Let’s review each of the five steps as they relate to the work of CMOs and Presidential candidates.
Step 1: Define the Goal. For a CMO, this means defining the desired outcome of a campaign, be it a lead or a sale that generates a specific volume of consumers; specifically, which audience to target. For a Presidential candidate, this means the campaign or platform that he stands for, the audience he wishes to target and the overall deliverables to which he will be held accountable by the American people.
Step 2: Choose the Network. CMOs need to conduct due diligence before engaging an affiliate network. This is accomplished by comparing specific areas of performance, including an affiliate network’s tenure, financials, industry/vertical expertise, etc. A Presidential candidate’s most important network, of course, is his cadre of advisers, including his Vice Presidential running mate, all of whom will help him or her represent the views and values of their campaign and political party. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
MediaWhiz’s performance marketing experts share their wisdom in a new white paper, “The CMO’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing.”
CMOs can no longer ignore affiliate marketing’s customer-acquisition benefits.
Long dismissed as a niche form of online marketing, performance marketing has become a powerful force in the digital media ecosystem. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau performance marketing generated $21 billion in online advertising revenues in 2011. Affiliate marketing comprised the largest share of revenue growth for this marketing channel.
For CMOs, performance marketing is no longer a marketing strategy that can be ignored or delegated to junior-level marketing managers. It is now a driving force behind many brands’ online growth and customer-acquisition efforts. It requires CMOs’ devout attention to properly utilize and scale in order to realize long-term customer-acquisition value.
With that in mind, MediaWhiz has written a new guide for marketers, helping them understand the brand-building and customer-acquisition value of affiliate marketing. The guide provides a how-to resource for senior marketers and CMOs who are looking to take their online marketing campaigns to the next level through affiliate marketing.
MediaWhiz’s guide to affiliate marketing provides practical advice on how CMOs can activate an affiliate marketing program for their brand. It’s a how-to resource for senior marketers who are seeking authentic and measurable ROI from their online marketing campaigns. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
What’s Premium in the Post Homepage Era? | Digiday
Search was first to put a serious dent in the primacy of the homepage. Now, with social and mobile gaining steam, publishers are left without the big, splashy homepage premium ad placements.
The fact is, most publishers see half or more of their traffic come in through the side door, whether through search, social or other means. That means publishers need to create new premium placements in a world where “every page is a home page.”
Coupon Sites Prove Attractive for Retailers Doing Affiliate Marketing | Internet Retailer
When it comes to affiliate marketing, coupon sites have proven far more valuable than content and comparison shopping sites for Bake Me a Wish, an online retailer of cookies, cakes and brownies, says says Joseph Dornoff, the merchant’s vice president of marketing and operations.
Why Big Bird Remains Powerfully — and Globally — Significant | Harvard Business Review
Big Bird has had a big presence in the collective conversation lately, thanks to mentions in the first two presidential debates. The outpouring of support for the giant yellow puppet that followed the first debate is a testament to his and Sesame Street’s continued relevance in people’s lives. Sesame Street, in fact, is a great case study of a brand that has managed to remain powerful over decades and across cultures.
Tweets Spawn Ad Campaigns | The Wall Street Journal
Consumers’ tweets are starting to influence and find their way into brands’ traditional, online and TV ad campaigns. What impact will that have on how brands engage with consumers online and the efforts they take to develop digital consumer advocates via social media?
What Red Bull Can Teach Content Marketing | Digiday
The marketing world woke up recently with Red Bull envy. At a time when brands talk of being publishers, Red Bull showed how this can be done on a grand scale: enabling Felix Baumgartner to complete a historic (and awfully cool) skydive from “the edge of space.” Red Bull’s bold sponsorship of Baumgartner’s historic jump shows a glimmer of the future of brand content marketing.
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
Editor’s note: The following post was originally published in MediaPost.
Long considered the ugly stepchild of digital marketing, affiliate marketing has grown to become one of the leading drivers of brands’ online marketing success. It accounts for more than $21 billion in online advertising revenues in 2011, according to the IAB.
For CMOs seeking ways to guarantee ROI without sacrificing brand affinity or customer value, affiliate marketing is a channel worth considering. It helps them achieve their ROI goals by utilizing publishers to conduct their marketing efforts via multiple media channels on a pay-for-performance basis.
Affiliate marketing’s success for brands is realized when three key parties — advertisers, publishers and affiliate networks — all work toward the same goal: acquiring customers.
The advertiser is the product or service; the publisher, commonly referred to as an “affiliate,” is paid for marketing the products or services. In between the two is the affiliate network, which acts as the media planner, tracking system, creative assistant, compliance monitor, optimization engine and bank. In this structure, the advertiser pays only on performance and does not risk any media spend.
The affiliate marketing channel, therefore, helps generate significant value for CMOs since scale is unlimited. Paying for performance is a strong benefit, but there are several others to consider: (more…)
By Ori Carmel | VP of Performance Strategy
To understand the impact of mobile on the lead-gen industry, and online marketing as a whole, one should head to Ghana. That’s right, Ghana.
Say bye-bye to your Madison Avenue office. Hail a taxi JFK bound and ask Siri to book a flight to the villages around Accra, where you will find some of the most advanced, sophisticated and interesting examples of how mobile can and will impact the lives of consumers and the advertising and marketing agencies who aim to influence their purchasing decisions.
Lacking infrastructure, entire regions in the developing world have leapfrogged the PC era. People in these regions rely on mobile technology to operate and streamline many aspects of everyday life, including business interactions, regardless of how large or small those businesses are. At the click of a button individuals can conduct their entire business cycle, including acquiring new customers and solidifying existing ones through mobile-optimized e-commerce and lead-gen platforms. (more…)
It’s been a busy Advertising Week for Whizzes!
On Monday, SVP of Media Peter Klein spoke on the OMMA Response panel “Accountability & ROI: Guaranteeing Results.” The panel focused on how marketers reach that holy grail for clients: guaranteeing their results. In addition to Klein, panelists included Rebecca Madigan, moderator and executive director of the Performance Marketing Association; David Naffziger, CEO, BrandVerity; and Andrew Zucker, chief revenue officer, Publishers Clearing House. As always, Klein offered a strong defense of the role and value of affiliate marketing and for more stringent self-regulation in order to enhance the industry’s reputation.
Check out some photos from the panel here.
Additionally, Adam Riff, SVP of digital strategy, sat on the OMMA Display panel, “Data Out: Solving the Attribution Conundrum.” The discussion focused on the trying to figure out how to assign credit — and blame — in display advertising campaign’s performance. Joining Riff on the panel were a bevy of digital marketing luminaries, including: Erik Huddleston, moderator, EVP of product and chief technology officer, Dachis Group; Pascal Bensoussan, chief strategy officer, Aggregate Knowledge; Jeff Greenfield, chief operating officer, C3 Metrics; Dave Ragals, SVP, client services, IgnitionOne; and Matt Wakeman, director of analytics, The Archer Group.
Thanks to MediaPost and Advertising Week for having us, and we look forward to next year!
(more…)
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt of an op-ed that was originally published in Revenue Performance magazine. Read the full opinion piece here.
Source: Revenue Performance magazine
The lead generation industry has matured and is now reaching an inflection point. While some companies will fall by the wayside, it represents a positive change and will create many new opportunities.
The good news is that “Online Darwinism,” for lack of a better term, has effectively eliminated many companies that refused to adhere to the basic values that once made them successful.
The great news is that new service and marketing channels continue to arise to support the marketplace.
And the best news? The future offers endless possibilities for those companies that operate in an ethical manner and add value for their partners.
Lead generation is growing up. Advertisers want strategic partners to provide true performance marketing, which includes lead generation and lead nurturing to a sale. They need expert guidance to develop proper technology and intelligent media plans rather than short-term profit taking.
Technology platforms are getting more robust, lead quality can now be monitored on the front- and backend, and marketers are graded more extensively on consumer engagement. A full suite of products is available to anyone wanting to engage in online marketing and will help drive marketing efforts through the next decade. (more…)
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
The national debt continues rising, the stock market undulates up and down by hundreds of points on an almost weekly basis, and yet online advertising spend continues to soar. Clearly advertisers see online as a viable channel to reach consumers and maximize ROI in these difficult times. And clearly CMOs are being pressured to deliver results instead of just pure branding.
Advertisers have seen the value in online marketing for more than a decade.
Over the last five years in particular, significant shifts from traditional media to online have taken place throughout many industries — a trend that is only going to accelerate. In fact a 2011 eMarketer report found that U.S. online ad spending will nearly double from $26 billion in 2010 to $49.5 billion by 2015.
The important thing to note, though, is that whether you are a CMO, vice president or any other decision maker in the marketing division of your company, you need to be thinking seriously about how to clearly demonstrate the ROI on your marketing efforts — and more importantly, the ROI on your job. Whether we are in a recession, depression, or bull market, there can never a bad time to invest your marketing dollars wisely.
I sincerely hope this resonates with the marketing budget controlling masses, as you don’t have to know anything about media channels to be successful. You just have to know basic math — and the online marketing community is here to make you turn that math into better marketing and job performance.
Certainly the status quo has never gotten anyone ahead. In the words of William Wallace: “You know what happens if we don’t try? … Nothing.”
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
We’re big fans of the semi-annual industry confab known as LeadsCon. For this summer’s event, LeadsCon East, we’re hosting a special workshop aimed at helping marketers garner better value and more leads from their digital marketing campaigns.
On Wednesday, July 25, our workshop, titled, “Guaranteeing ROI and Accountability: The Benefits of Online Channel Integration,” will help marketers understand how they can effectively utilize online channel integration to generate results in an accountable and measurable fashion. It’s about more than just placing an ad across various online channels. Our panel of experts will discuss how they utilize multichannel integration to keep the leads coming in while ensuring real ROI for their brands.
We’re excited to host this workshop and invite all who will be attending LeadsCon East to attend. Session details are below.
For more information or to schedule a private meeting with our sales team while at LeadsCon East, please contact Keith Trivitt at ktrivitt@mediawhiz.com or 646.264.0144
Be sure to check out the MediaWhiz booth at LeadsCon. Visit booth #111 for cool giveaways and to chat with our friendly sales team.
MediaWhiz LeadsCon Session Details
Session: Guaranteeing ROI and Accountability: The Benefits of Online Channel Integration
Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Time: 9–9:45 a.m.
Room: Rendezvous Trianon, Hilton New York (more…)
