Author: Drew Neisser

Brands Need An Alternative to Facebook

Posted on by Drew Neisser

While the rest of the industry hailed the announcement of Facebook Timeline as a great leap forward, I can’t help but wonder if Zuckerberg & Co. have pulled a fast one on brands and their fans.  In the pre-Timeline days, brands might have felt they actually owned their fans or at least had some control over the relationship.  In the post-Timeline era, it is now clear that Facebook owns these fans and brands can rent them if they want to pay for them.  And while I have no problem with Facebook “monetizing” its network, after all it needs to make the post-IPO math work, it still seems a little shocking that brands have so little control on their part in the social network.

You have 5 more days to become a visual storyteller
Pithy posts may have carried the day on the old Facebook, but Timeline puts a particular premium on images and videos. Not only is there an enlarged photo “cover” on the landing page, but photo albums are featured more prominently. Brands can also “star” images, allowing them to expand across an entire page. And while all of these changes should increase engagement, brands without an arsenal of images will need to assemble one mighty quick. (Ready or not, Facebook will convert all brands to Timeline on March 30th, 2012)

Fan acquisition costs are rising
One of the beauties of the old Facebook was that any brand could build up a following at little to no out-of-pocket expense.  Add some compelling content, throw up a “fan gate,” and you could watch those Likes rise like the national debt.  With Timeline, Facebook seems to favor paying advertisers at every turn. Sure — “fan gates” are back as of late last week after Facebook fixed a technical problem, but you can only drive traffic directly to these pages if you pay to do so or link to them via a post.  Otherwise, the default landing page is your Timeline home page and the fan gate will be on one of your secondary “tabs.”

Fan engagement costs are rising too
Prior to Timeline, brand communications were filtered through Facebook’s mysterious algorithm to an unknown subset of fans. Well, that mystery is no more. Facebook announced that marketers will be able to reach only 16% of their fan base for free. If you want to reach more fans, you’ll need to pay to do so via the “reach generator,” which enriches Facebook but not necessarily the brands that support it. A number of brands have already seen their engagement rates drop substantially after making the switch to Timeline.

If you don’t have a history, you have a few days to make one up
For illustrious brands like the New York Times and Coca-Cola with long and well-chronicled histories, Timeline is a dream come true. These brands can now publish “milestones” as far back as they want, adding a rich texture to their Facebook presence. For new and younger brands, Timeline will take a lot more creativity. Perhaps these folks will hearken back not just to the inception of the business idea, but to the conception of the founders themselves!

Pin your hopes on the weekly pinned post
With the cover photo now taking up so much prime-time real estate, much of a brand’s content will now fall below the typical screen viewing area. To help address this, brands will now be able to “pin” one particular post to the mid-left side for an entire week. Deciding what to pin will become a weekly ritual — but one that perhaps belabors a minor issue, since so few people actually return to a fan page after their first visit.

Engage – or else everyone will know you’re not
Facebook is so serious about pushing brands to become engaging storytellers that they will now make it easier for everyone to see how you’re doing. A quick click on the Likes box just below the cover photo reveals not just the number of Likes and “people talking about this” but also the most popular week, most popular city and most popular age group. A nifty little graph tracks new Likes and “people talking about this,” accenting the probable correlation between engaging content and fan growth.

The good news: managing complaints just got a lot easier
Most brands will welcome the fact that Timeline includes an optional Message tab that allows consumers to contact them directly and privately rather than just post a complaint publicly. In theory, this will help weed out the whiners who broadcast their complaints from those genuinely seeking immediate assistance. Taking unpleasant conversations “offline” is a customer service department dream come true — and should hasten the integration of social and service-related activities.  (It also appears that brands can avoid unpleasant posts altogether but electing to approve them in advance.  This sounds good but could lead to complaints escalating in other venues so brands will want to try to be as transparent as possible dealing with complaints.)

Bottom line: it’s time to develop a Plan B
Time will tell whether the new Timeline actually improves a brand’s ability to engage with its fans via Facebook. What we do know is that the cost of engagement with all your fans just went up, and that Facebook will not hesitate to impose its will upon your efforts. So while few brands can afford to be without a Facebook presence, given how much time consumers spend there, this is as good a time as any to start thinking about how you can engage YOUR fans in other less dictatorial arenas.

FYI, Renegade converted to Timeline two weeks ago.  The process is relatively easy although digging up all the old content to fill in timeline is indeed time consuming.  If you have yet to make this conversion for your company, Facebook will do it for you on March 30th!

Updated Brand To Do List for Facebook Timeline

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Like it or not, all brands will need to convert their pages on Facebook to the new timeline format as of 3/31/12 or Facebook will do it automatically.  A number of brands have already taken the leap and offer a preview of what your brand page might look like:

  • Ben & Jerry’s – example of a “heritage” brand taking advantage of timeline with old pics
  • Verizon Wireless – integrating user photos into their “landscape” visual
  • Redbull – fun scavenger hunt game to encourage fans to explore their timeline
  • WalMart – promotes feedback and local WalMart tabs
  • Natural History Museum – example of how another NYC landmark is integrating their history and archival pics into timeline
  • NY Times – highlights select moments from their 160+ year history

Here is a quick check list of things you’ll need to from a design/content standpoint all of which can be done relatively easily.  My 3/5 updates are in italics:

  • Find and post a primary visual (no offers) to serve as your new welcome banner.  Facebook does not wants brand to turn this visual into blatant ads and they are no longer allowing “Like” gates
  • Find, back-date and post content to fill our your historical timeline (you need not do it all at once)
  • Decide which four “applications” (formerly known as tabs)  you want featured just below the banner as thumbnail images since all other applications/tabs will now be hidden
  • Pick a post that you want “pinned” that will remain on the left hand side of your page for up to 7 days
  • You will also be able to “star” posts which will enlarge the visual associated with that post
  • Review your current application/tab pages since they can now be wider (from 520 pixels to 720 pixels).  If you don’t want to revise these, they will simply float in the middle of that page
  • Individuals can now send brands direct messages and brands are allowed to respond up to two times to a consumer DM

The far bigger issue/opportunity is how advertisers will be able to use Facebook to achieve their business objectives.  Since Facebook currently limits the exposure of any one post to 16% of a brand’s following, marketers will now have the opportunity to buy exposure to their full network. Lucy Jacobs, COO of Spruce Media, a company that specializes in Facebook advertising, believes this is a watershed moment, noting that ” the official lines between paid, owned and earned media are now officially gone.”  Here are a few more implications of the new Facebook Timeline for brands according to Jacobs:

  • All ads in Facebook will now all begin as content posted to a Facebook Page, brands will no longer create separate ad copy. Brands will publish content and the content which drives the most engagement will gain distribution as ads through news feed and mobile.
  • Facebook users will be able to “like” and engage with this page post and news feed content, initially people will like and engage with brands page post content and then brands can “amplify” this messaging through paid distibution (I.e. Ad spend) — (FB reach generator product). Facebook quoted a stat today the the average fan sees 16% of page posts updated, reach generator extends this reach to 75% for brands through paid media (reach generator product).
  • FB has created a flexible, engaging and scaleable advertising model combining the best of digital and traditional advertising in one platform with close to 1BN consumers (half who log in every day). New formats will double engagement rates and traffic to Facebook pages which implies ad dollars go further. Ad Units are now an extension of content and engagement with pages drives ads to be cheaper so brands have 200x the reach to reach fans through socially aware ads.

Stay tuned. There other important implications especially for mobile advertising.  Undoubtedly you’be reading about this just about everywhere in the coming days including these helpful posts on AdAge, Mashable (thank Todd Wasserman) and MediaBistro.

Social Presbyopia is Curable

Posted on by Drew Neisser

According to the National Library of Medicine, Presbyopia is a condition in which the lens of the eye loses its ability to focus, making it difficult to see objects up close. I’m afraid that many in my generation are also at risk for social presbyopia: the inability to acknowledge the seismic shifts in behavior driven by social media and, worse yet, the reluctance to personally embrace these changes themselves.

Sure, baby boomers are catching on to Facebook, but I still find tremendous resistance to the notion that social media is more than another dotcom fad. To quote one such reader of my recent MediaPost article on the future of social shopping: “Sheesh. There is nothing–NOTHING–solid out there, yet, to suggest that social media (SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!) is going to have much of an impact on, well, anything.”

Clearly, this particular gentleman is fed up with all the social media hype, or perhaps he’s simply overwhelmed by the seemingly endless drivel he sees on Twitter and Facebook. But regardless, he does have an acute case of social presbyopia, one that is undoubtedly aggravated by his inability to focus on what’s happening below the surface. You, however, can avoid this problem with the following prescriptive steps.

When in doubt, scan the search results
On the surface, Google+ is a classic example of over-hype. Its rapid enrollment of 100 million users seems mythical; its purpose is not easily differentiated from Facebook; and its role in the marketing mix is still unclear. But stopping here would miss the point. If search results matter to you, as they do to 99.9% of brands, then consider who owns and operates this social network. Google is already indexing Google+ posts, quite favorably it seems, so frankly, it’s be there or be missed.

Peek beyond the pictures
After attracting over 12 million unique visitors last month, Pinterest has become the poster child of the next new thing. Given the simplicity of this online “pinboard,” which simply aggregates pictures people find “pinteresting” into virtual scrapbooks, it would be easy to dismiss it as the domain of young women with too much time on their hands. In truth, many enlightened brands like Oreck, Chobani, Mashable and GE have discovered that Pinterest is a traffic-driving dream come true.  (Shareaholic reported that Pinterest ranked 4th in referral traffic in January — just behind Google!)

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/167886/how-to-avoid-social-presbyopia.html#ixzz1ngX0hoc3

It’s time to start seeing double
Social TV is one of those emerging ideas that gives traditional couch potatoes’ fits while the CE industry and start-ups from the Valley to the Alley try to figure out how to integrate social media with TV viewing. Considering that over 12 million comments were shared socially during the Super Bowl, including a vision-blurring 10,000 tweets a second in the final three minutes, it is apparent that having a second screen open while watching TV is a new behavior worth monitoring. Clearly, waiting for the water cooler to share reviews is simply passé, and also it’s time to take a closer look at social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso.

Keep your eyes on mobile
MoSoLo is not a new neighborhood in Manhattan but rather an acronym for the dynamic combination of mobile, social and location-based applications. Unfortunately, with FourSquare’s growth out of the headlines, this trend also could be dismissed as a fad and marketers might be tempted to throw the mobile social baby out with the location-based bathwater. Bad idea. Over 50% of shoppers consulted their mobile devices while at retail this past December; therefore, having a multi-tiered mobile strategy is essential for just about any brand. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, fix that. Next, think about apps that deliver genuine value, integrate social and capitalize on mobile functionality like barcode scanning, GPS and voice.

Don’t get trapped in the current fog about blogs
Blogging, one of the early wonders of the web, has been losing steam lately, particularly among B2B marketers. Some are undoubtedly distracted by newer social channels, while others find the commitment to generating quality content on an on-going basis a bit overwhelming. Big mistake. Blogs are still among the best ways to improve natural search results, as well as provide genuinely useful information to ultimately appreciative prospects and customers.

Final Note: Optical presbyopia is far from fatal and typically corrected with glasses, contact lenses and even laser surgery. Similarly, social presbyopia is hardly terminal and can be fixed with a steady diet of social experimentation and the vision to see past the naysayers.

If this article looks familiar, it’s only because you read it on MediaPost.com.  By the way, if you liked this post, feel free to show your love by subscribing to my blog.

Effectively Using Your Marketing Metrics

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the reason’s I love marketing is that no two challenges look alike and there is always something new to learn.  I had the pleasure of talking with Janet Roberts, CMO of Syniverse, a rapidly growing private company that provides roaming and networking services to mobile operators all of the world.  Janet has been on a world-wind journey to raise the bar on the marketing metrics her team gathers from around the world and across multiple communication channels.  Since I only used one quote in the related FastCompany.com article, here’s a lot more of what I learned in our conversation.

DN:  Can you give me a quick overview of Syniverse…
Syniverse is a quiet brand because we work behind the scenes in the mobile ecosystem. The company began as a very small department within GTE 25 years ago, and bridging the space between mobile operators is in our DNA. We’ve transitioned from serving mainly North American operators with mobile roaming capabilities to providing sophisticated interoperability and intelligence solutions to mobile service providers around the globe.

DN: So how is business?
In the past five years, we’ve grown our customer base from 330 mobile operators to more than 900 mobile service providers including operators, cable providers, ISPs and enterprises. During the same period, we’ve more than doubled our revenues.

DN:  Tell me about your customers…
A significant portion of our customer base continues to be mobile operators in all regions of the world. However, the mobile ecosystem is an interesting place that is constantly changing and expanding. Cable operators, internet service providers, enterprises and big brands are part of the mix now, and we serve each of these segments.

DN:  Right, so it’s all B2B, and I imagine it’s a long sales cycle.
It is B2B. As for the sales cycle, it’s a very high-touch interaction where we employ a consultative selling approach, so the average sale takes a few months. It’s not the type of sale made by a customer placing an order directly on a website.

DN: So how does this consultative selling work?
We work very closely in partnership with our customers and prospects to understand their business issues and proactively offer solutions to help them grow revenue, protect their brands and manage their businesses efficiently.

DN: Can you give me an overview of your marketing activities and associated metrics?
Let’s start with our website. In 2011, we completed a major refresh where we improved the navigation and added functionality to better serve additional segments. We also added much more video to illustrate use cases and our consultative approach.

Regarding metrics, we look at overall impressions, time spent on various Web pages and the pattern by which visitors navigate the website. One of our team members is dedicated to analyzing Web activity and search engine optimization programs to measure marketing effectiveness.

DN: So what other kind of data are you gathering?
We gather data to help us measure the effectiveness of our events, PR and media outreach, customer publications, and internal communications. We employ surveys to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback, measuring progress year over year or quarter over quarter. We conduct customer satisfaction surveys, which are a bit broader and help us see how we’re trending with respect to corporate performance metrics.

DN:  Some say that if you can’t measure it, you should not do it.  What do you think?
We try to find a way to assess all of our programs, so we can prioritize for the highest impact. Personally, I think you can always find ways to measure effectiveness, even if they are not obvious at first.

DN: Do you also have metrics to internal communications?
We conduct an employee satisfaction survey annually and include questions that specifically address our communication effectiveness. We’re always introducing new internal outreach programs and regularly survey our internal audience to assess usefulness and gather ideas to further add value.

DN:  What are the metrics that matter to you the most?
Because our website is the centerpiece of our communications, it is very important that we understand our trending online. Web usage data tells us a lot – not only the sheer numbers of visitors but also their usage patterns. We can then identify what is resonating with our audiences and determine where we should add content.

DN: What about harder to measure things like PR exposure?
That’s a good question. Of course we look at impressions, media mentions, numbers of speaking engagements and more. Some results can’t be quantified in the usual way but are important to our business. For example, I recently learned from two product group colleagues that visibility of the company’s capabilities gained from an interview I did for a business publication directly led to a partnership opportunity for that group.

DN: Where are you in on what a fellow CMO calls the metrics journey?
Though we have a lot of tools and measures in place, we are still in the boarding process of this journey. We would like to get a look at our trending in near real-time so that we can increase effectiveness and better serve our customers with the information they need.

DN: Do you have a metrics dashboard?
We’re in the process, as we speak, of evaluating how we’re going to report our marketing effectiveness dashboard on a consolidated basis. We have a lot of good data that we consider on a micro dashboard level, and we recognize the need to roll it up into a blended dashboard to be indicative of where we are.

DN:  So is this a dynamic challenge or what?
Yes. Since we need to address existing customers plus an expanding market that includes emerging members of the mobile ecosystem on a global basis, we need to figure out what makes the most sense to reach all our audiences. There are a myriad of channels – traditional and emerging as well – so it is important to understand and measure effectiveness. Between new segments and new marketing channels, it makes for a job that is always interesting, especially when you couple that with being in an industry like mobile, which is changing all the time. Even with very good success, you can’t ever sit back and rely on a formula. You never know when the next game changer will be introduced, so you must be one step ahead.

The Importance of Having a Metrics Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Dan Marks, CMO of First Tennessee Bank, is a big believer in learning from his peers. Having seen him speak at The CMO Club Summit in NYC last year, I would say Dan gives as much as he gets, if not more. As such, I was delighted to be able to catch up with Dan a couple of weeks for a conversation about marketing metrics. Dan is also responsible for orchestrating one of the most effective marketing metrics program I’ve heard about, a program that can not only look backwards at the impact of 84% of his marketing spend but also has the ability to predict with “reasonable” accuracy what will happen when budgets get cut.  If you are a marketer and don’t have a metrics program in place, you’ll read this and weep.

DN: Please speak to the advantages, to you as the CMO, of having a strong metrics program in place.
The advantage of having strong metrics in place is it helps you understand how good the creativity is and helps in conversations with the rest of the business.  So for instance, when you’re talking about changing resourcing between business lines or overall budgets you’re able to quantify the impact of your actions, maybe not to an ultimate level of precision but good enough that it lets you have a comparable type conversation to other investments the company makes.  At the end of the day, marketing is a huge line item at any company.  And so having the same level of accountability and quantification that you might have in other areas puts you at equal conversation and helps raise the credibility of the conversation.

DN:  Have you been able to move the conversation from where marketing is no longer just a cost center but is rather a revenue driver as a result of having the metrics in place?
We’re on that journey.  I’m not sure we’re completely there yet, but we’re definitely on that journey to more precisely quantify the linkage to revenue and to be able to quantify the revenue impact of different marketing approaches. Marketing is a matter of talking the customer’s language, right?  So when you are talking to sales and you can show a stack ranking of your marketing programs and their benefit, all of a sudden you’re talking their language because they stack rank their salespeople.

DN: One of the terms that you used that I really liked is the notion that creating a metrics program is a journey. Talk to me a little bit about the journey.
The revolution really is in saying, let’s not have a separate set of metrics or let’s, at the very least, connect the marketing metrics to the core bottom line revenue and costs and profit objectives.  And so that’s the journey. The measurement approach varies by type of marketing activity and channel. So the stages of the journey start with direct marketing, where the linkages and the science are the most developed. Even in B2B, if I can quantify that I’m helping create opportunities from introduction or helping move things along the pipeline, all of a sudden now you are speaking the same language that sales is.  One of the most elusive goals and one that’s still not there yet is the overall full media mix impact–what’s the cumulative impact of everything working together?

DN:  If you could measure the impact of the full media mix, what would be the benefit of that?
Other places that spend cash have ability to quantify the impact of that cash.  So in operation, it might be a cost per output or what my cost is to deliver a dollar of revenue.  And so it allows that same sort of conversation around marketing, what is the revenue impact of a dollar spent with me as I make decisions and look to optimize it–is that getting better or worse? And so it’s several layers of precision, of getting to be more precise and being able to forecast the impact of different decisions.  And then track what happens and continue to optimize– that just adds that much more credibility and confidence in making marketing decisions and the organization.

And related to that is giving you the confidence to be able to pursue it scientifically.  So we can creatively think of a few different ideas and then decide based on the risk tolerance or the level of uncertainty we’re willing to approach.  We may try a very uncertain idea at a lower spending level knowing that, okay, we’re going to take a chance on that huge one, but we’re not going to bet the farm on something that’s very unknown.  Yet we’re going to take more incremental experiments around more proven ideas.

DN: I want to make sure that we clarify language.  What’s the difference between an outcome measure and a diagnostic measure and then can you put them in a priority order relative to job security and doing your job well?
Sure.  So when I think of outcome measures, [these have] impact on revenue profits and margins.  These are the key results that the CEO and board ultimately care about.  And so those are the cardinal metrics.  Diagnostic measures are important to understand outcomes.  So for example, we look at awareness.  But my team still cringes when I say, ‘You can’t eat awareness.’   But it’s important to understand that customers do go through this buying process of awareness, consideration, purchase, all this kind of stuff.  But our goal is not to create awareness.  Our goal is to get people to buy stuff and generate revenue.  We have to understand the buying process.  We have to understand if we’re having trouble getting people to buy stuff, is it because the awareness low, do they not know about the product, or are they are trying it but not repeating it therefore the likelihood to recommend the product to others is low or the experience is bad?  When I said diagnostic metrics, these are things that help us understand what the potential actions we should take are, and the prioritization of those actions based on understanding the customer, the customer and the marketplace, and the buying process and the competition.

DN:  Do you use Net Promoter Score?
We look at likelihood to recommend, we look at it in the total likelihood and in net time basis.  But we don’t just rely on that.

DN: Do you look at the various points of contact in the customer experience and measure each of those?
We look at it both overall and after a key experience point.  So after you’ve had an interaction at a branch, after you’ve had an interaction with a business banker, after you’ve interacted with some of our online technology.  So we do — we definitely understand how they are all different.  And we’ve studied it.  So we also know that our experience scores and our recommend scores strongly correlate/predict future changes in retention and revenue.

DN:  So when you see your experience core decline, you can go to the CEO and say, ‘sales are going to be down next quarter?’
Well, maybe not quite that quickly!  We know over time if scores are trending down or scores are trending up, that will translate into a strong probability of having lower or higher revenue in the future.

DN: Give me a sense of how often you’re looking at numbers.
Well, we do have an alert mechanism.  So if poor scores are spiking, we know that pretty fast.  But generally speaking, we look at our customer experience and customer buying metrics on a monthly basis– and that’s where you see trends.

DN:  Is a commitment to a metrics space approach sort of a guarantee incrementalism
Well, that’s something that we talk about a great deal.  And I think misunderstood, it could. But I would say it’s better to spend a little bit of time on testing than to take a huge leap of faith and fail.  And usually your level of urgency is not so great that it doesn’t make sense to spend a little bit of time testing it.  It’s a lot easier to scale something up that is successful than to pull back when it’s not.

DN:  So at some point is it possible to spend too much on analytics?
At the end of the day, it’s some expensive people and some expensive technology but in the grand scheme of things that’s still, in the neighborhood of one or two percent of your budget.  And I have not talked to anybody yet who didn’t say after they started getting better analytics, they weren’t able to reallocate at least 10 percent of budget.  You spend one percent to find out that 10 percent of your budget is not working or not working as well as it could be.  And, that’s a 10 to 1 return.

DN: I’m assuming that there was a budget cut at some point in the last three years?
That’s right because everybody had one.

DN:  So were you able to predict how the marketing budget cut would impact your business?
Oh, yes.  And the level of prediction was pretty close.  I mean, not a hundred percent.  No model is completely perfect, but it’s definitely useful.

DN: What three pieces of advice do you have for CMOs about to start the metrics journey?
First, definitely have the conversation with your key partners, whether it’s your CEO, CFO or sales leaders. Figure out who is going to judge your performance and collaborate with you because most of the time CMOs can’t actually sell stuff themselves. They’re influencing sales activities. Have that conversation early on, and ask what metrics are important to them and what are the outcomes that you should focus on. And number two, I would definitely commit to a program of optimization and continuous improvement of marketing results.

And then thirdly, I would say for sure, connect to and focus on giving back to the community. And there are a number of different ways to do that– The CMO Club is one example. There are also several great CMO type organizations that exist to help CMOs share information. And you’ve got to do that, carefully. You don’t want to give away trade secrets, but there are great resources out there to help talk about common challenges, common best practices. And every CMO has got something to add to the conversation, and what you give, you get back in spades.

You can follow Dan on Twitter @wdanmarks

How This Major Brand Incorporates Social Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Turns out a number of folks tuning into The Grammys last night didn’t know who Paul McCartney is.  Really.  See Buzzfeed. That’s just one of the challenges the folks at The Grammys face when marketing Music’s big night to multiple generations of music fans.  For the record, this particular boomer blogger thought the show rocked and the associated marketing was worth singing about too.  As such, I am working on a case study/article that should run next month.

In the meantime, I thought it would be timely to share part of my interview late last year with Evan Greene, the CMO of the Recording Academy, the folks behind The Grammys. Greene offers savvy insights into how his team developed their new campaign, how they measure success and how they integrate social media into their campaign from the get go.  (And by the way, if you are an app fan and a music fan, you’ll probably enjoy the We are Music iPhone app.)

DN: So, what are you doing new this year?
What we’ve really tried to do is continue to find innovation both from a macro and a micro standpoint, and as you and I have talked about, it really is about feeding the conversation, finding new and exciting and engaging ways to feed the conversation all throughout the year.   As we prepare for the Grammys again this year, we will again create a campaign that gets noticed, that gets talked about across the digital and social space and becomes more and more deeply into society and pop culture.  We’re going far beyond the idea of just promoting a television show or entertainment event.  We want to make sure that our message starts from a social standpoint and we emanate from there.

So, our campaign will be something that is easily translatable across all media, both traditional and digital media. It will be accompanied by a significant mobile presence, will be a micro site accompanying it, will be an app accompanying it.  We wanna make sure that we are part of the conversation in as many relevant and organic places as possible.  And it terms of sharing specifics, were about to launch the campaign and I can tell you that in terms of what I can share, I can tell you that in the past, you know we’ve really focused on music’s inspiration and its ability to connect us to a shared community.

DN: So this year’s idea is…
Its called, “We are Music,” and it’s about creating a visual interpretation of music, because if you look at the way music shows are traditionally promoted or marketed, its very simple, its “Hey, watch “x” show and see stars.  And the challenge is that its very one-dimensional and it doesn’t really say anything about the brand itself, and a lot of these award shows share talent anyway, if you watch one show versus another, you see the same artist in two or three or four of them. So, rather than just say the same thing as everybody else, how do we differentiate ourselves? We have to differentiate ourselves by becoming part of the story of people’s lives.

DN: Tell me more.
Were focusing on the idea that when we listen to music, we surround ourselves in it, it becomes who we are, part of our DNA, an extension of our personality, inexplicably linked with our identity, and our campaign, like music itself, is a driving pulse and is infused with energy and music.  So we think that just with that kind of simple concept that is executed very dynamically, that we’ve got something that will really excite people.

DN:  You said something really interesting in your intro; you said you wanted to make sure that the campaign starts in social. Why and what do you mean by that?
I think a lot of brands take the position that they’ll come up with an idea and then create a bolt-on digital solution or a bolt-on digital extension and what we’ve really endeavored to do and we’ve kind of indoctrinated this into our DNA here at the Academy, that everything starts from a digital place, everything starts as part of the digital conversation. Because, candidly, that’s how people are really communicating these days in a more aggressive and dynamic way, and so rather than create an idea that we think makes sense for a traditional “above the line” media approach, we started from the standpoint of “let’s create something that’s meaningful and organic socially” that can then and if we can achieve that, we think that the next natural extension is to be able to extend and engage across the board.

Because it’s hard to retrofit your idea into a digital realm and have it really make perfect sense.  So if you look at what we’ve done over the last several years, not only during the Grammys, but throughout the year, we’ve really been looking for ways to continue to feed the digital conversation around us.  And that’s really all that our campaign is, it’s another way to feed the conversation, its not the end all be all, the conversation’s going on, we’re all having the conversation all throughout the year, and the digital music conversation is certainly something that we’re part of for the other 364.  So really all were doing is finding ways to, more innovative ways to engage and get people interested in the conversation.

DN: I’ve seen the stat that showed that your ratings were up 35 % in 2010 due in part to the success of your “We’re All Fans” campaign. How did it go in 2011?
I’ll tell you, after 2010’s monster numbers, we were hoping that our campaign and our 2011 efforts would be good enough to remain flat but what we found was that our ratings were up over 3% in the aggregate, which is an extraordinary number for us. And the thing that’s really been gratifying and reassuring is that while we’re up 3% in the aggregate, we were up 4% in teens and young adults.

DN: Do you have an agency that helps you stay on the cutting edge?
We’re now on our 5th year of our AOR relationship with Chiat/Day, and many of these things that were talking about specifically related to our telecasted campaigns would not have been possible without Chiat.  We give them a brief of what we need to achieve and they do really some incredibly creative and dynamic things, so I couldn’t ask for a better creative partner than Chiat.