Interviews Archives - Page 25 of 43

CMO to CEO in One Knight

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Drew Neisser

With the world abuzz about the newborn English prince George, it seems appropriate that I finally feature my interview with a real-life knight of realm, Sir Terry Leahy. Sir Terry was the CEO of Tesco, a company he helped build into a global retailing powerhouse. I caught up with him after his keynote address at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit earlier this year where we discussed his new book, Management in 10 Words. Although this edited interview is longer than most of the ones I post, I expect you will find it well worth your time, since Sir Terry is one of a handful of CMOs who not just rose to the CEO position but also became one of the most effective in recent years.

Drew Neisser: Simple is one of my favorite words in your book. But Simple is hard, especially for big businesses. Why is that?
Sir Terry Leahy: Yes, simple isn’t easy. But, it still is the right thing to do. I think it’s a mindset. You have to accept that as organizations grow, they will become more complex. So, you got to counter that by deliberately navigating in search of simplicity. As organizations evolve, they do so around a series of decisions. And it’s when you make those decisions, you have the opportunity to choose a more simple route, as oppose to a more complex route. And in a way we have to counter the way we all educated.

In education sometimes you’re rewarded for length. I was reminded of the old Mark Twain story when his editor asked him for two pages in two days. And he came back and said, no can do. I can do ten pages in two days. But it’ll take me two weeks to do two pages! And what’s that getting at is you have to think about it. You have to think about how you can actually simplify the way you deliver a product or a service to a consumer.

Drew Neisser: With all the big data that’s out there, does this make it harder to get to simple or does it make it easier?
Sir Terry Leahy: Well it potentially makes it harder. There’s a real danger that an organization can be flooded by data. And information can get in the way of actually accessing the things that really matter for the consumer and what will really drive your organization forward, if you make decision on those things. Our data is so complex now. So, powerful. It’s even a danger that it can become detached from most ordinary people. And that can be very harmful for an organization. You want data to be more accessible and to be placed right at the heart of the organization. Right where the decision are made.

Drew Neisser: How do you get to where data becomes simple?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think it became simple once we were able to know things about customers. That was the big breakthrough for us. We had product data with the [advent of the] bar code. Which transformed our retail industry. But, we didn’t know anything about the people who bought the products.

Once we launched Club Card that allowed us to gain information about those individual customers. And their shopping habits. What they bought when they shopped. And that really illuminated the world for me because then we knew more about how customers shopped and what they needed. And what they’re interested in. We could tailor [messages.] We could target our products our services to meet those specific needs.

Drew Neisser: One of the words that you used was Courage, which is another great word. I would use the word chutzpah but that’s because I live in New York. And a lot of companies don’t have the courage to make big bets. In fact, they sort of go for incrementalism. Talk to me about the importance of courage and big bets, and the risks of such an approach.
Sir Terry Leahy: Courage is an unusual word in the context of business. But, I think it’s at the heart of business. And in fact, I think entrepreneurs would understand that. They take the biggest bet of all with their livelihood, when they start a business. But, in an organization it still applies. Many people are fearful of upsetting their boss and affecting their promotion prospects.

Actually, you’ve got to be prepared to risk everything. Even your career in order to do what you think is right in a situation in the job that you hold. One of the big bets that I made was the launch of Club Card, which gave this information around customers. In order to do it, we had to incentivise customers. That was going to cost us at the time a quarter of our entire profits. If this had gone wrong, and many predicted it would go wrong, I was finished.

Drew Neisser: So, one of the things that really distinguishes you particularly in the world of big data and CTOs is that as a marketer, you became CEO. Why do you think you were able to beat the data guy to the CEO spot, and what could marketers who aspire to be CEOs, learn from that experience?
Sir Terry Leahy: Yeah, it is unusual. And I think we need more CEOs who come from marketing or come from technology. It happens obviously in the technology industry, but outside that industry, it’s pretty rare. And, I think that’s a great shame because those are the two most valuable commodities for business systems to work with–customers and data knowledge. I was able to use Club Card and some other innovations to be the voice of the customer in the business. So, I was able to give leadership for the company from the marketing position. And that, therefore, was a small step into the CEO office.

And I think other CMOs can do that. I think that they can step forward and lead the business from the marketing position. Particularly, if they harness the customer. And the customer is the biggest power base within an organization. And if you use it in the right way, it’s hard for [a colleague from] Finance or Operations to challenge the voice of the customer. If you have the customer on your side, you’re the most powerful guy (or woman) in the organization.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. So, one of the words that’s not on your ten words, is the word intuition. And in this world of big data does intuition still have a role?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think it does. You read the psychology books like I do, and they look at how the brain works and what would probably happen is that we’ll all be better at absorbing data about the things that we work on and work in. And then we’ll have an intuitive response that seems like a gut instinct.

But, actually it’s drawing on all of that data. All of that information that you’ve been putting in there over the last weeks and months and years. And largely, that’s probably the right way for it to come. A combination of the two sides of our brain, if you like. And that’s how most people will work.

Drew Neisser: Let’s get back to the CMO for a moment. How does that CMO who’s not a data person, make sure that they are looking at the data or getting the data they need to really inform their strategies?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think the days of the CMO not being data person are passed. I don’t think you [the CMO] have to be a math genius. The technology right now is making [data] so much more accessible. It’s about the CMO who’s curious about the world around them and how they use data to inform them about that world. And that’s what CMO’s are naturally are. Their naturally interested in people. Interested in how the world works. And they just need unlock data to inform their decisions.

Drew Neisser: One of the words in your book is “Values.” Let’s talk about that. Every company that I know has values. They put them on their website. They put them on a wall in the kitchen. But, they’re not realized. They’re not activated. They’re just platitudes. How did you make sure that the values that you established for Tesco became a real part of the organization?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think you have to look at the organization. And you’ll find in the history of the organization or in the narrative of the business the core values. And if you can draw those out and articulate them and build on them, I think that’s a much more solid foundation. I think after that it’s — you obviously have to live those values. People will listen to what you say, but they’ll watch what you do. Integrity comes from a consistency between the words and the deeds.

And you’ve got to live it every day. It’s incredibly powerful in business as in any institution or organization. The foundation are a code of values that says this is what we’re here to do. And in any situation, this is how we’ll behave. And people can identify with them. It’s so much easier for people to sign up for that.

Drew Neisser: One of the words you have in the book is, “Compete.” When some companies see what their competition is doing, they try to replicate it. How do you compete and look at your competition, but make sure that you remain true to yourself?
Sir Terry Leahy: What’s interesting in the first ten years of my career, essentially I copied the competition because our competitors in my industry were outstanding firms. The best in the country. Arguably the best in the world at what they did. So, I didn’t have to look far for ideas. I just copied them.

But, what I found was as we got closer and closer to this benchmark, we could never overtake them because, you know, if you just like the original people will always choose the original. And it was only, when I stop copying the competition and started following our own customers and letting they be my lead, that we overtook them within a year.

It was an amazing thing that I learned. From that day forward I respected and learned everything I could from the competition. But, I never followed competition. All the focus was on the customer. And then what you did was much more original. Much more authentic. And customers spotted that you were doing it first and doing it for them. You weren’t doing it because some other competitor did it first.

Drew Neisser: To wrap up here, let’s talk about the future. If you were training now for the CMO job ten, fifteen years on the horizon, what would you be focused on?
Sir Terry Leahy: Well, I think it’s a really exciting time now because back when the Club Card started, Tesco was one of the first in the world using data, as soon as computers were powerful [enough.] Now, the opportunity to access data from social networks, from shopping data and from so many other things, from operations, it’s without limit. And, yet, organizations don’t use that data. They don’t bring it in and use it to inform the way products are developed, to drive the direction of the business. So, I think that still is the opportunity. How do we make business decisions on the basis of knowledge–knowledge of the world around us.

Nice Companies Finish First

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Drew Neisser

The proper German pronunciation of my last name is actually “nicer” as is in “nicer than the other guy.” It is little wonder then that I have a natural predisposition towards nicer people, especially people like Peter Shankman who is championing the cause of being nicer on a global scale. I was lucky enough to have a video interview with Peter at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit from which I pulled the Q&A below.

I think Peter makes a really compelling case for why niceness is not a ‘nice to have’ component of your go-to-market strategy but instead could become a ‘must have’ element to gain competitive advantage. Importantly, Peter says niceness needs to start with the CEO and then permeate the organization. Let me know if you think there’s a seat in the boardroom of your company for a Mr. Nicer.

Drew Neisser: Tell me about your new book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over.
Peter Shankman: I realized when I sold my last company that the reason the company did so well and was purchased was not because I had an e-mail newsletter, an e-mail mailing list but it was because I was nice and I had a personal relationship with all 250,000 people on this list. It sounds crazy but I realize that nice was actually the reason the company did so well.

Drew Neisser: Wait, you had a personal relationship with 250,000 thousand people?
Peter Shankman: It sounds crazy but you know when was the last time you were on a newsletter mailing list that came from a person? You know every corporate mailing newsletter comes from “do not reply”, mine came from Peter@shankman.com from the day I started to the day I sold it.

Drew Neisser: I got some of those [HARO] e-mails. So then what?
And so people would reply to me, “I know this won’t go to the owner but…” and I’d reply, “Oh, actually it did, how can I help you?” [Seeing the power of being nice] I spent the next two years really studying and interviewing companies from Fortune100s all the way down to mom-and-pop’s. We found out that the companies that focused on nice, focused on treating their employees nice, the customers nice and their clients nice, treating the environment nice, actually wind up doing anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent higher revenue than companies that had that sort of 1980s Gordon Gecko mentality.

Drew Neisser: When it comes to being nice is this something that companies can systematize or is this more about random acts of kindness?
Peter Shankman: It’s a little bit of both; it has to start from the CEO. CEO has to understand that being nice for the sake of being nice is the greatest thing in the world, that’s what people want to do, but let’s face it, that doesn’t necessarily generate revenue. The concept of being nice for a company really comes in two parts. You want to be thought of as nice, no question about it, you want to do nice things, because this is a good thing to do, good karma and all that. But what we found in the book is that the more you do nice things the more consumers actually look at it, and say “okay you know what, as a customer I was treated really well by this company, I want to tell my friends to use this company as well.” And so what we found out is that when you combine being nice for the sake of being nice with being nice because it is profitable, you wind up making your stockholders happy as well as the customers, the [vendors] and the employees.

Drew Neisser: Who are some of the companies that you found doing nice things?
Peter Shankman: We found a food truck out there where one day a week for an hour, they give away the food to the homeless people, just because it is the right thing to do. There is a dry cleaner that if you are homeless and you have a job interview, you can bring [your clothes] and they will dry clean it for this job interview for free. My favorite example is when Morton’s steakhouse jokingly met me at the airport because I jokingly tweeted, “I want a steak” and they showed up at the airport and that generated double-digit revenue for them.

Drew Neisser: Amazing. Tell me more about the Morton’s example.
[After seeing my tweet Morton’s social team realized] he comes here a lot, he eats a lot of steak and so let’s do something nice for him. And I was so blown away [that they showed up at the airport with a free steak dinner that] I told my friends and two days later I’m on the ‘Today’ Show, and they had double-digit revenue, six months after that. It is incredible –double digit revenue growth, from showing up at the airport because some guy jokingly tweeted about it.

Drew Neisser: So let me play CMO for a moment and ask how do you scale that?
Peter Shankman: You don’t have to scale that, not everyone needs a steak at the airport. You can do something that when you show up, when you make a reservation, at Morton’s they say hey, it is a special occasion? And if it yes, it is my mother’s birthday, oh what’s her name? Nancy. They walk in, “Happy Birthday Nancy”, on the menu. It’s this little, tiny things that really make you come back.

Drew Neisser: So we have this logo behind us from the IBM logo, Smarter Commerce Conference, so how does nice and data, and big data come together?
Peter Shankman: That’s my favorite part, we have so many tools now and you can know everything about your customer before they walk in the door. But it is not enough just to know everything about the customer; you have to learn how to take advantage of that. We’ve worked with hotels to do this. You can determine when a person’s walking in to check in, are they frazzled? You know, are they tired? If they’ve had a long flight, you can see things in their body language. You can look at what they are saying online, look at what they are talking about, what are they posting–Are they angry? Are they happy? Are they sad? And if they are happy make them happier; if they are upset, make them happy. The greatest thing in the world is when you go to a hotel that you don’t expect to be treated [royally] and they do something out of the ordinary like they have a hot towel, anything like that, it really is amazing.

Drew Neisser:Now this phenomenon of niceness certainly probably parallels the rise of the service economy, what are you — how does an auto manufacturer — they make hard goods, how do they do nice?
Peter Shankman: When I worked at America Online, that was my first job out of college and it was also my first job in a big company. At that point I think they had 1800 employees and everyone had to work, in the tech-support or sales & marketing, because you know sales customer service group once for a full week before they start at their job, that’s how they learnt about the customer and things like that. And my first thought was, “Oh God, I have to work at customer service, this is going to suck.” You know what they did every Friday night, they backed up a beer truck, to the front door of the building, and they give out beer, and they give out soda and you can have whatever you wanted and the concept of treating the customer nice translated. You know if you are a big company, if you are an auto-manufacturer, well, are you treating your employees better than GM or Ford? You make [employees] want to take pride in their work because they love what they do.

Drew Neisser: So niceness starts at home.
Peter Shankman: It really doesn’t — it has to start with the CEO, if it doesn’t start with the CEO, there’s no point.

Drew Neisser: Got it. So I’ve got a group of CMOs here; do I get them to put a new line item on their marketing plan called Being Nice?
Peter Shankman: You’d be amazed; you can drop 30 percent of your marketing budget, simply being nicer. Here’s a perfect example — I was staying at a hotel in Dubai, three months ago. I get to the hotel at 6:00 pm, I’ve been out at meetings all day, I get back to my room, it’s been cleaned and there’s note, “Mr. Shankman we noticed that your toothpaste is running low, we went to the store and replaced it with the same kind you use, we thought it would make your day easier because we know how busy your schedule is.”

I was floored by that; took a picture of it and then posted on Facebook. I’m leaving two days later, the head of PR for the hotel, comes out to me, ‘Mr. Shankman just want to introduce myself, we were able to trace back in the last three days, three reservations that came in from your photo.’ And I’m thinking to myself, okay, and how much I paid for my room? Three reservations, freaking average of three days, that 39 cent tube of toothpaste netted them probably $12,000 to $15,000 in reservations. That is your line item.

Drew Neisser: Is every hotel in the world now asking you to come visit them?
Peter Shankman: You know what it is, it’s not even about — it’s about treating every employee — every customer not like they are me, but like they are anyone. The people in the back of the bus on an airline, don’t expect to board first or have their luggage come out first, what if once in a while you do?

Drew Neisser: So how does a CMO look a CEO in the eye and say, you know what, we are going to stop talking about “Price”, we need to start talking about “Nice.”
Peter Shankman: Well, you don’t have to stop talking about price, but you can start being nice. At the end of the day, what the CMO has to look at the CEO and say, ‘You know what; we’re going to do this, because it is going to generate more money and is it the right thing to do.’ Maybe you want to hear that as a CEO, maybe you don’t, but I’m telling you it’s is going to generate more money, and I’ve never met a CEO in my life who believes that cool trumps revenue. So if you come back with the concept of this is going to make more revenue, they’ll listen.

Drew Neisser: And are there tools to measure nice?
Peter Shankman: No question about it, I mean the simplest thing to measure nice — and IBM does this phenomenally is just measuring sentiment. As a customer service society, we expected to be treated like crap. Treat your customers one level above crap, doesn’t even have to be good, just one level above crap and they’ll talk about it. Go out of your way to do something amazing, they’ll share it with the world.

Final Note: this isn’t the first time I’ve discussed the power of being nice. In this blog post from 2008, I reference being nice on a list of 5 characteristics that make for great client / agency relationships. That post also mentions Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval’s book called The Power of Nice that discusses this topic way back in the pre-social media epoch!

CMO Insights: The Growing Power of Networks

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Drew Neisser

One of the reasons I love my career choice is that I get to meet so many clever people who bring fresh thinking to age old challenges. Porter Gale is one of those people, who’s four year tenure as CMO at Virgin America represented the triumph of the scrappy start-up over the intrenched Goliaths, rich with innovation from the seatbelt instructional video to the reservation system and multiple points in between. Having left Virgin, Porter Gale is sharing her some of things she’s learned via a new book, Your Network is Your Net Worth, a topic we discussed on video at the recent IBM Smarter Commerce Summit. Recognizing that most of you won’t want to devote 12 minutes to watching this video, here are the highlights of our conversation on the power of networks and how marketers big and small can capitalize on the growing importance of big data.

Drew Neisser: Tell me about your new book?
Porter Gale: It’s all about the power of connections and networks and it talks about how important our relationships are but there is also a lot of digital media strategy and conversation about how the world is changing because of social. So it is a fascinating book, lots of great interviews and my mom loved it and I hope that you will.

Drew Neisser: Talk to me a little bit about that how technology and social are coming together?
Porter Gale: Well, as you know I was with Virgin America for four years and so I think that is a great example of a company that has put digital in the forefront of their strategy. For Virgin, it is not only through the product experience (like WiFi on the planes), but also the whole marketing strategy is really focused on empowering the customer with digital. We’re talking to them through their [smart] phone, through their iPads and so I think we all have to recognize that the world is digital and it is not going back.

Drew Neisser: By the way, I love Virgin America, I fly it whenever I can from New York to San Francisco or LA and I felt this connection. I was on the plane and was having a little bit of trouble with something so I tweeted, hey @VirginAmerica describing my problem and they were on it. It was very impressive.
Porter Gale: That was probably Nick our intern who was running that Twitter stream and making sure that you were okay. The team there does an amazing job and they should be really proud of their efforts.

Drew Neisser: Where is all this networking happening?
Porter Gale: Networking can be inside the organization with just the employees and how they are connecting and collaborating and it can be with your customers, how you are networking with them too. What I really wanted people to think about is that if you put more energy on relationships, you can have a lot more productivity, more success, more happiness and that is true both personally and professionally.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. So specifically who is doing this well right now?
Porter Gale: Well, I work with a chef right now, Michael Mina who has 18 restaurants, and the thing that I find really amazing about him is that he really looks at each restaurant as an extension of his home and so he is really connecting with his customers, he knows all of them, it is very personal, he has great relationships with them and so that is an example of recognizing the power of that relationship with that customer.

Drew Neisser: You mentioned it is no longer six degrees of separation, it’s four degrees, where did those other two go?
Porter Gale: That is actually a fact. I worked with Peoplebrowsr and they analyzed Twitter data from 2007 to the present and they figured out the number of degrees of separation between people and the old saying “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” it’s now four.

Drew Neisser: Got it. So what are implications of 4 degrees of separation?
Porter Gale: What this means is that every single connection is more important than before because we are more closely linked, we also have larger circles of empathy which means that we are connected to more people, our thoughts and our feelings are impacting more people, there’s emotions that are spreading through social network and so the world — the way that we connect and talk to each other and influence decisions has completely changed. I like to think of it as the world getting smaller and smaller and that a connection that could change your life is maybe just one person away.

Drew Neisser: Do you think that all customers should be treated equally from a service stand point or are some customers just more important than others?
Porter Gale: Well, that is a very debatable question. You know the democratic response that I would have is that I would like all customers to be treated equally and that you can learn something from every single customer. If for some reason they are not as engaged or they are not as fanatical, you know you can learn from that. That said, I think it is important to really understand the segments of your population. So who are the customers that are driving most of your revenue? What are they interested in, what are their buying behaviors, what are they doing in terms of shopping. You need to at least acknowledge who the high engagement groups are and understand them but if you have the bandwidth, and you have the resources, treat every customer with love and respect.

Drew Neisser: Let’s talk about this network and the role that big data plays in all of this.
Porter Gale: Data has been the buzzword for the last couple of years but it [really] is completely changing the game. Let’s take the example of an airline. We might know your seat preferences, your drink preferences, what routes you like to fly. There’s all sorts of [opportunities for] personalization. That personalization improves your potential for networking because networking is really based on having authentic relationships that are connected and based on shared values and passions. So big data is just going to give us more information but the key is figuring out how to get the insights out of the data.

Drew Neisser: Is there an opportunity for small businesses to use big data?
Porter Gale: Well actually for the small business, I think there are some really great advantages, because one, you won’t get into analysis-paralysis because you don’t have the time and the resources, right? My advice for the small business would actually be to pick three core metrics that you want to focus on, find an analytics platform that is affordable to you. It could be something as simple as Google Analytics, but make sure that you are checking your data and figure out the important variables. Maybe it is your conversion rate that is really important, maybe it was the cost per acquisition but figure out the metrics, track it and make sure that you are staying connected and true to your customers. Net Promoter Score is another one; that is a really good one to track.

Drew Neisser: Can you provide an example of an offline company that is doing a really good job activating on mobile and engaging on mobile?
Porter Gale: Sure. One company that I think is very interesting is Uber. It’s a town-car service but what is amazing is that they have gone up against the taxicab business and they have completely changed how people order a car. So you have on your phone an app, the Uber app, which you have already pre-loaded in your credit card. Through GPS or location devices you hit the button and they know exactly where you are and so Drew if you need a car, you hit the button, you’ll have a beautiful car come pick you up and in a couple of minutes. You can see it driving on the Google map, so you know when it is going to get to you and then you don’t even have to think about payment, because they have your credit card. It is amazing, there is all sort of scoring mechanism, so you can rate the drivers. That is showing online and offline technology merging together and creating better customer experiences. I think we are going to see more of that in the future.

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Metrics Matter

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Drew Neisser

I popped out of the office briefly this week to hear Facebook’s Graham Mudd speak at the Integrated Marketing Week conference on the subject of measuring success across publishers. Graham, by the way, is the Head of Vertical Measurement at Facebook and is thusly well positioned to guide marketers on what metrics matter and which ones don’t. Given the seemingly universal obsession with Likes, I was quite curious what Mudd thought about this and other Facebook-related metrics. Here’s what he had to say…

Drew: Many digital media buyers are still obsessed with Likes and Clicks as a measure of ad efficacy. Is this a mistake and if so, what metrics should they be looking at?
It’s a mistake unless the business outcome they are trying to drive is either directly related or correlated to clicks or likes. If a marketer’s goal is to build a community of its strongest customers online or drive people to their website, then likes and clicks are a great measure of success. On the other hand, if they’re trying to drive sales, either online or offline, then they should be measuring sales, not likes or clicks. For instance, we’ve seen that for 99% of sales generated offline are from people seeing an ad online, not clicking on that ad.

Drew:For several years, marketers and pundits have tried to put a value on a Facebook Like. Is this a fool’s errand or have you seen cases where a Like ultimately translates into business value?
The degree to which the value of a like is important is really driven by the marketer’s goals. If the marketer wants to focus on building a community online or connecting with influencers, then understanding how much those customers are worth is obviously critical to understanding how much to invest.

If a marketer has more traditional goals like customer acquisition or driving online or offline sales, then they shouldn’t be paying attention to likes as much as how much their marketing efforts drove sales.

One thing that’s abundantly clear is that just like customer LTVs (life time values), there is huge variance from industry to industry and advertiser to advertisers in terms of the value of a fan.

Drew: Measuring cross-publisher effectiveness seems like a smart idea. Are there any barriers preventing this from happening now?
The primary barrier is siloed data. By that, I mean that each publisher is measured using a different technology/methodology so the ability to make comparisons across media partners is inherently limited. While there are definitely options out there, we believe there’s a real opportunity to focus on comparability and standardization of measurement across platforms, which is why we acquired Atlas recently.

We really believe in cross publisher measurement for three reasons: (1) our customers are pushing for this and we believe it’s good for digital marketing to be as accountable as possible; (2) we’re confident that when measured accurately, Facebook will perform really well as a marketing platform; (3) we recognize that marketing budgets generally aren’t growing, so in order for us to grow, we need to work closely with brands and agencies to demonstrate that we are a cost effecient and effective channel.

Drew: How exactly do you measure cross-publsiher effectiveness?
Really depends on the marketing objective: If the marketer has direct response goals, then we believe multi-touch attribution is the best methodology for understanding and valuing all the ad exposures that ultimately lead to a conversion. The last click before a purchase shouldn’t be getting all the credit for exposures and actions taken along the way to purchase. If the marketer has branding objectives, then we believe they should be measuring and optimizing on reach and frequency using a tool like Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) or comScore VCE. They should also measuring brand lift and if possible, offline sales. Our customers are working with a company called Datalogix to measure how ads on Facebook impact lift in advertisers’ in-store sales.

Drew: Can you provide any real world examples of brands/agencies that are measuring cross-publisher effectiveness and how this is working for them? (What kinds of things are they learning?)
Many major direct response advertisers in verticals like Telecom, Financial Services and e-Commerce are using highly comparable measurement techniques like multi touch attribution. Within campaigns and from campaign to campaign they are constantly learning how various publishers perform and can reallocate budget accordingly.

Brand advertisers use tools like Nielsen OCR and comScore VCE to understand which publishers are deliver their desired audience with controlled frequency and maximum reach.

Drew: Marketers tend to look at Facebook as exclusively a B2C channel. Can you give me an example or two of B2B marketing campaigns on Facebook that are moving the needle?
HubSpot is one that comes to mind right away. It wanted to promote its brand as a thought-leader in the business-to-business field on Facebook to lead fans to its Page and ultimately engage them with other content and drive customer engagement and generate more leads. The company ran ads that targeted different age segments, including 24-34, 35-44, and 45-44, along with Likes and Interests such as “marketing director,” “marketing manager,” and “marketing manager.” HubSpot increased engagement on its Page by posting updates about marketing conferences and e-commerce tips as well as links to demos and videos. As a result it saw 71% sales increase from Facebook over the course of three months and 39% increase in traffic coming from Facebook during the course of three months

Drew: Should B2B marketers look at different metrics than B2C brands when putting together a Facebook and/or cross-publisher ad campaign?
Just as is the case for B2C marketers, B2B should try to use whatever metric mostly approximates or directly measures their business outcome. Measuring sales leads using MTA is certainly possible if the lead generation occurs online. Recently we’ve developed the capability to allow advertisers to upload CRM data to Facebook and reach customer segments on Facebook using a targeting feature called custom audiences. This is a really powerful tool for B2B marketers — and because CRM databases typically track transactional data, marketers can effectively connect exposures to ads on Facebook (and other online and offline channels) with conversions.

Drew: Big companies with big budgets tend to have more sophisticated tools to work with. Can a small advertiser measure cross-publisher effectivenes and if so, how?
Smaller advertisers that have DR objectives often utilize ad products that are more straightforward from a cross publisher perspective. Tools like coupons or discounts, such as our Offers product, can be tracked on a redemption basis, which is easy to compare from publisher to publisher. Same is true for online conversion measurement — Facebook and others provide conversion pixels which can link ad exposure to buying and be compared across sites.

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Going Viral

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Paul Greenberg is CEO of CollegeHumor, a division of IAC that is growing faster than you can say Rodney Dangerfield. At this point, it is easy to believe that Greenberg’s mission for his organization, “To be the best and largest multimedia multi-platform comedy studio,” will be realized soon enough. In the meantime, I thought you would appreciate more insights from Paul on making viral videos, budgeting, how marketers can work with CollegeHumor and lastly, how to lead a creative organization.

Drew: Is one type of video more likely to viral than another?
Often the ones that go really viral are new sketches. Because it is a new idea, it gets introduced, people latch onto it, they love it and they send it around. And so for example, we did one that was called, Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends. The thrust is, let gay men marry each other because if not, they’re going to marry your girlfriends and they are going to be much better husbands than you would ever be!

Another one that went really viral was called Look At This Instagram (see below). And it wasn’t again in the Zeitgeist per se but it was a great take on how people use Instagram and it really kind of turned it on its head and parodied it beautifully and people just kind of I know I’ve seen those pictures a million times, I know what they are talking about, and so we really hit those.

Drew: Are series any different from a virality standpoint?
With series you are less apt to get into the Zeitgeist really quickly and so you build an audience over time. So we’ll often see in a series episodes further down the chain do better than the original ones or we’ll see them catch up. People will discover Very Mary Kate on its 10th episode and go ‘oh wow, I didn’t know about this, and I am going to go back and re-watch all of them. We see binge-watching all the time, people just come in and they watch fifteen videos at a time, and a lot of times it is going back to start series when they’ve come in the middle. Not that everything is serialized in terms of its plot, but it is just obviously thematically serialized and so we want to make sure that people love to go back and check it out.

Drew: So how do you budget for production?
We work a monthly basis. So, I say to the team, ‘here is your pot for the month, some you are going to spend more on some and less on some and you know do what you got to do.’ And we work very closely as a team to make sure that if, for example, we are going to go for broke on a Batman video, we are going to do a couple of more Hardly Workings or batch-shoot those and try to do things cheaply. Overall, we’re very efficient in terms of costs. We have figured out lots of ways to cut corners: we shoot in the office so we don’t have to pay location and we batch-shoot sometimes. It’s very efficient.

Drew: Are your videos the primary driver of traffic and new users?
To an extent, although sometimes the non-video content gets shared just as much as the video stuff. For example, the article Eight New Punctuation Marks That You Need got over a million views because it just got shared everywhere. And now there is interest in a series of it. So it really depends, [non-video] content can really drive a lot of view as well.

Drew: Do the video creative team also create the other stuff?
No. We have a separate production team including separate writers who have to be very topically driven.

Drew; Okay, do we get to the point where there is a cable station called CollegeHumor?
No, I don’t think so. I mean I feel like being the multiplatform studio that we are, we are as close to a new age cable channel as you can get.

Drew: So tell me about Coffee Town, your upcoming movie—did you write this in-house?
We actually did finance it but we didn’t write the script. Our agent UTA found Brad Copeland who was the writer for Arrested Development. Brad wrote his own movie script and was looking for somebody to help to allow him to produce it and direct it. So we were the studio. Brad wrote it, directed it and we produced it. We went out to LA and hired a film crew, a real legitimate movie crew, etc. (see trailer here)

Drew: I would suspect you are hoping to rally your army of CollegeHumor fans to see the movie, right?
Yeah, oh yeah. We’ll definitely use the army without question. A big part of this is the fact that we can mobilize 20 million people immediately to say or to at least raise awareness if not to get them off their butts into the theatres. And if we put it on iTunes, we can say, hey click here and you’ll be able to watch CollegeHumor’s movie.

Drew: What exactly is native advertising and what are you doing in this area?
Native advertising is when the advertising blends more with existing content and it becomes less distinguishable as an ad. We’ve been doing that for five years whether we called it branded entertainment or branded content or branded advertising or native advertising, About a year ago, we reorganized an entire group around native advertising. We hired two comedy writers just to write branded content and native advertising pieces and we also reorganized a production team so now we have a native advertising production team that just creates videos for advertisers. Out of those 50 videos we create in a month, maybe less than half are advertising video. But it still feels like CollegeHumor content and people — advertisers [like KFC, AXE & Listerine] come to us because they are interested in our sensibility.

Drew Neisser: What’s the best way for marketers to work with CollegeHumor?
Great question. We need to understand what you are trying to do. Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to just increase your brand perception? Are you trying to increase relevancy? Are you trying to activate an audience to go do something? Is about getting more Facebook likes? What do you want as a brand? And then we can help you come up with content that fits that goal.

Drew: How involved are you in the content decision making process?
Not that involved, at this point, certainly not day to day. We have a phenomenal team of very creative people who are very good at what they do. I get involved at a high level making sure that we have a strategy and we are trying to follow it and everybody knows what that strategy. I’ll get very involved if something is questionable from a legal perspective or a taste perspective. But on balance, and that’s how I try to manage my team – hire the best people you can, hopefully people who are smarter than you, and who are experts at what they do and you get obstacles out of their way and you let them do what they do. And so I don’t see any need to micromanage the content team. Besides, I’m not that funny.

Drew: Have you gotten funnier since you joined?
Much. Much funnier–I’m hilarious. Actually it is intimidating in a way because these guys are really funny. And they are so quick. We have our weekly staff meetings and even a lot of the executives are standups [comics], and they are just hilarious. I mean it is like somebody took all of the best class clowns and put them all together in one room, it’s hysterical. It is a really fun place to work.

Drew Neisser: Do you ever say to yourself, ‘I can believe I have this job?’
Yeah. Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Drew: How about a few secrets to your success?
One is, never stop working ever; just be as aggressive as possible and want to win and do your work your absolute hardest because there is always somebody who is going to work harder than you are and ideas are wonderful but they are a dime-a-dozen. Everything comes down to execution and doing it right and doing it well.

Drew: Do you have any advice for new or aspiring CEOs?
The advice somebody once gave me for managing is, only do what only you can do and spend your time doing that. To that end, I wrote an article on this recently that identified five things that CEOs should spend their time doing:

Set the strategy for what the company needs to be and what we are trying to accomplish and what’s our mission and where are we going. And that’s not done in a vacuum per se, that’s done with the team but ultimately the leader has to be the one who puts his or her stamp on it and say this is the direction we are going to go.
Then it’s making sure that the strategy is communicated very well and that everybody knows what’s going on and that there’s absolutely no misunderstanding. And making sure that everybody is coordinated so that ad sales and editorial and marketing and PR all know what each of the other ones is doing, to help support that overall strategy.
Then its hiring and firing. Personnel. Putting the right people in place, and making sure that they are — smarter than you, they’re experts in their field and they are great.
Then it is getting obstacles out of their way and letting them do their jobs and not micromanaging them but making sure that if there is something wrong, that you are there to help them.
The fifth thing is making sure there’s enough capital to run the business and making sure there is a business plan that can be executed.

Drew: You’ve been on both sides of the creative development process including being a voice over talent and a radio announcer. Do you think that has helped you as a leader of a creative-driven company?
Yes. If there is somebody who is never been a creative before and never been on the talent side, you’re going to make decisions purely based on the bottom-line and probably potentially the wrong ones.

Note: this is the 2nd part of my interview with Paul. Click here to see the first part.

Funny Business: Humor Within Content Marketing

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: So, a rabbi, priest and the content marketer walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “well gents, what’ll it be?” The rabbi glances around the crowded room lamenting, “I see you are serving some of my tribe here, would you mind sending them to temple on Friday night?” The priest, echoing the thoughts of the rabbi, says “yes and if you would send my flock over on Sunday that would be most kind.” The content marketer, ignoring his companions’ discretion, jumps onto the bar and shouts at the top of lungs, “Drinks on me everyone, our ‘Sobriety Rules’ video just went viral!”

Now that we’ve established there are no jobs for me in comedy, let me introduce you to a veritable lion of laughter, Paul Greenberg, the CEO of CollegeHumor Media (owned by IAC). Paul and I had a lengthy chat a couple of months back about the inner workings at CollegeHumor, part of which is transcribed below. I think you will agree after reading this that Paul has one of the best jobs around, working with funny people to make other people laugh AND making money doing it. Look closer and you’ll also see how I was able to glean a few of the 18 Things College Humor Can Teach You About Content Marketing for an upcoming FastCompany.com post.

Drew: When did you join CollegeHumor and how its been going since then?
Sure, I joined two and a half years ago. I was brought in to help grow the company and we have grown 40 percent year over year in traffic over the past two years. We’ve also grown our revenue and we’ve grown 40% in traffic, we are now the eighth largest YouTube channel with over 4.5 million subscribers; we have 15 million monthly unique visitors which again is up, way up over from where we were a couple of years ago; we do a 100 million video streams per month.

Drew: So you’re a lot more than a website?
Yes, look at us as a multiplatform, multimedia studio. We’re not a website. We create enormous amount of content and we publish it on our O&O website, we publish it on YouTube, we publish it to game consoles, we publish it to connected TVs and now we are starting to create traditional long-form television shows and are very close to several deals with major cable networks to do that. We are also going into lots of other areas of business like publishing three books, numerous DVDs and have shot a full-length movie called Coffee Town that will be released in July (see trailer here).

Drew: Tell me about the video production process.
We do about 50 videos per month and it’s all created in-house. We have a production team here in New York a team in LA. It is all original content; we have our own writers, we have our own directors, we have our own producers and editors and it’s all created under the banner of CollegeHumor.

Drew: Do have some kind of schedule for your series like Jake and Amir?
Yes. Jake and Amir comes out every Tuesday like clockwork and Hardly Working comes out every Friday. Some of the other series we do more in seasons. Very Mary Kate, for example, will have a run of 15 straight weeks with an episode and then it’ll take a break. It really depends on the production schedule and the actors, the writers, and how we can work around their schedules. But we try to be consistent and let people know when things are coming out — that’s the best way to build an audience.

Drew: I happened to watch an episode of Very Mary Kate (Drinking Party) and I have to ask, has there been any pushback from the real Mary Kate?
You know I can’t speak for her, from what I understand, completely anecdotally she is a fan and she thinks it’s very funny.

Drew: How do the parody movie trailers fit in?
There are two kinds of videos we do; one are series, which we just talked about and one are just one-off sketches. And a movie trailer for us is like a sketch. It is just like a Saturday Night Live skit that we do and if it hits, we’ll do more and if it doesn’t hit, we won’t do more. So for example, the Dora trailer was an enormous hit — not only was it a hit in the sense of people who said we want to see more of this kind of thing but we also wished this were a real movie. So we made a 12-minute movie which is out in three installments and that was responding to the community.

Drew: How do know when to stop doing sequels to a sketch?
We now have three of the Startup Guys but that was enough. We didn’t want to beat the joke to death, So it really depends on the kind of life that a sketch will get, we have a series we call The Six which is The Six girlfriends you’ll meet when you are back home, The Six dads that you could have — we started off with The Six dads and that did really well so we thought, all right there’s something here and now we have a bunch of Sixes.

Drew: When you say “really well,” what does that mean in terms of traffic?
Once it starts to get to the half a million level, we start to really pay attention. And we don’t just look at views, we look at Facebook likes, we look at shares on Twitter and shares on Tumbler, we are a very social media oriented company. We have a lot of data and we spend a lot of time analyzing data, loking at the ratio between likes and views, if this getting shared a lot but not watched a lot? Do we need to give it a little push somewhere? Is it getting watched a lot on our site but not shared very much? Is there something that doesn’t make it go viral? And we are very good at making content that goes viral and gets shared and so we are always sort of tracking those metrics about social media.

Drew: So you’ll know pretty early whether it is going to be successful, and if you think you see those early signs do you then do more to fuel the fire?
Yes, absolutely. We look at it and we say all right, we got to keep this on our homepage, or we need to make sure we post it again to Facebook or something like that. Creatively we have something called The SIV, which is our secret formula for viral videos and so it needs to make sure that certain videos have certain aspects about them and we keep that very tightly protected, as you might imagine, but it is the sort of the secret sauce of how we create viral videos and we have a team that has honed that art. You know, not everything hits, obviously but I’d say our track record on balance is pretty good and we are very happy with how it is doing and the team is great at it.

Drew: Is there a dedicated team to social media?
We have one person who is a social media manager; all she does is spend her time on social networks. She’s completely in the loop in terms of what’s happening and what is coming up in terms of our schedule, so she’s always out there pushing it to our PR partners. We have another person in our marketing group who pushes stuff to other partners, so we have a well-oiled machine that is constantly making sure that we’re getting our tentacles out everywhere.

Drew: How does Hardly Working fit in?
Hardly Working is a sort of playground for us. That’s where we put the weird ideas into motion, the ones that we want to experiment with, so we are less concerned about how that does. It is totally bizarre and fun and interesting and it gives us a safe place where we are not expecting huge amount of traffic. We do get some that blow up like Startup Guys [which started as a Hardly Working sketch.] Not everything starts there, but it is one place that things get started.

Drew: So it really is all about sort of rapid experimentation?
Exactly. You can’t be afraid to fail, you have to be willing to put yourself out there every day with something new, and they’re not all going to be gems but you get enough hits so that people start to realize wow, these guys have something interesting going on and I’ll go along with them when something is not as great, but I know when I come back there’s going to something for me.

Drew: If we look at, I’m just focusing on the video, we talked about 50 a month, how many of those have to be hits for that month to be a good month?
Two or three big hits, I would say. Which is not as easy as it sounds!

Drew: We’ve been noticing this with business related videos that length matters a lot. What’s ideal for you?
Absolutely, we try to keep it under 2 or 2½ minutes. Anything longer and people really just glaze.

Drew: Are you guys into Vine? Must be tough to do any fun in six seconds?
We’ve done a lot of Vines actually and they are fun experiments. We did a very funny thing for the Oscars–we recreated every Best Picture nominated movie as a Vine.

Drew: Do you ever say to yourself, “I can believe I have this job, this is so great?”
Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Footnote: Paul also appears in some Hardly Working videos as himself. Here’s one of them.