Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing

Having spent more than 15 minutes within the “World of Wall Street” and since migrating to the fringes of Madison Avenue, we’re always intrigued to notice how the world of marketing and advertising continues to merge with Wall Street-style advertising buying and selling schemes. As best evidenced by Media Post Communications latest initiative,  this Madmen enterprise seeks to emulate respective roles of financial behemoths Standard & Poor’s aka “S&P” and Dow Jones’ by providing an index that enables tracking of real-time benchmark pricing for ad placements.

The initiative’s goal, profiled by Stuart Elliott in today’s NYT Advertising section starts with a new index called “RTB”, which stands for Real-Time Buying, is to provide a gauge for pricing based on the top 500 on-line publications.

Suffice to say, we’re fluent in the topic of index trading, whether in form of exchange-traded-products (ETFs), futures contracts and/or options on underlying indexes. These products are intended to provide pricing transparency and the means by which ‘investors’ can manage investment portfolios. The world of advertising, according to most industry experts, is bereft of pricing transparency. It is a world that until recently has been stuck in the ’60s, no different than the days gone by in which Wall Street fund managers were dependent on telephones to communicate with brokers who could provide visibility as to latest pricing for stocks and bonds.

The good (or bad) news is that Madmen from Madison Avenue have embraced a broad assortment of trading technology tools and strategies typical to today’s financial markets.. Below excerpt courtesy of Stuart Elliott’s column

“There is so much sophistication being brought into the marketplace,” said Robert D. Liodice, president and chief executive of the largest trade organization for marketers, the Association of National Advertisers, “and through programmatic we are giving ourselves the ability to understand data better to help in our real-time decision-making.” Mr. Liodice said he was told about the MediaPost plans by Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, who has been testing the index for more than a year with colleagues like Jeffrey A. Loechner, the company’s president.

MediaPost plans to have the index go live on Thursday. The index, using 100 as a baseline, will be available on the MediaPost website, mediapost.com, as well as in MediaPost newsletters like Real-Time Daily. There will also be 15 subindexes covering websites by categories like entertainment, games, magazines, music, newspapers, portals and sports.

 

Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing

How To Use Social Platforms To Boost Reach: 6 Ways to Get More Social Media Shares for Your Blog

We are used to observing social media sharing on a routine basis; as soon as we connect to the internet and login to our social media accounts we see likes, tweets and pins. These social media platforms are great ways to expand the reach and share content across the digital border. In the digital world of businesses, it is rightly said that “Content is KING.” However, what I believe, whether the Content is King or “Jack of All Spades,” it must be truly optimized for reaching your audience via effective social sharing.

Here are 6 ways to get more social media shares for your blog.

1) Use floating social bookmarking widget to increase the shares. The sharing bar keeps moving when a person scrolls down the post.

2) You can use two or more headlines (aka double-whammy headlines) for the post to grab attention of the readers. Much like the approach we use in this blog.

a) How to use social platforms to boost the reach

b) 6 ways to get more social media shares for your blog

3) Reframe the content each time. Do it by posting a part of a blog with an image and tag the link of the whole blog in the end. For instance, you have seen many articles and blogs saying Click here to read full article or See more.

4) Repost your content after a specific interval of time such as 3 months or 6 months to get it noticed by new followers.

5) Use Popup to encourage users share your blog.

6) Last in sequence, but not in importance. Make sure your sharing button is not hidden or dead and it is always prominent at the eye-catching location.

Do you have more ideas to increase the social sharing? Let us know your experience in the comment box…

How To Use Social Platforms To Boost Reach: 6 Ways to Get More Social Media Shares for Your Blog

Are powerful Brand Mantras really helping increase Brand Equity?

The answer is straightforward; YES, they can magically increase the brand equity and its vital components such as brand awareness, brand resonance, brand perceived quality, and brand loyalty. Brand Mantras are 3-5 small word phrases (not a Tagline or Slogan) that confine the overwhelming promise and essence of the brand and its values.

The term Brand Mantra was initially coined by an American advertising executive, Scott Bedbury, former Nike and Starbucks marketing specialist. It encapsulates the point-of-differences (PODs), point-of-parities (POPs), and the competitive frame of reference into one brand idea. Fundamentally, the brand mantra is an imperative part when marketers design the strategy to position their brand. Great brand mantras can effectively position the brand in prospective buyers, creating highly perceived overall value of the brand.

Mercedes – “Quality and Prestige”

According to Scott Bedbury, he invented this term during his tenure in Nike, giving probably the best brand mantra ever for Nike, i.e. “Authentic Athletic Performance.” Remember that brand mantra is something different from slogans and taglines, because Nike’s slogan or tagline is what everybody knows, “Just do it.”

Actually, marketers derive taglines from brand mantras and they serve as a critical building block not only for the brand tagline, but for the complete brand equity or organization itself. When brainstorming mantras, marketers should focus on their core values, vision, mission and the corporate culture of the organization, without compromising on the brand positioning aspect as well. Your brand and your values should incorporate with each other. If there is something tricky between these two elements, then on off the chance that you’re on wrong track and your customers might perceive the branding as negative. Some people also describe brand mantras as the DNA of the organization that can effectively help in decision making process for branding strategies and user expectations.

In my experience, creating great brand mantra could help you hit the targeted audience smoothly in positioning world of brands. The mantra is an emotional attachment of a brand that let people knows how uniquely it will benefit them and how they feel using the certain branded product. So you can say that powerful “Brand Mantra” not only provides the brand positioning and brand image, also helps decide the prospect of the brand and organization.

Are powerful Brand Mantras really helping increase Brand Equity?

Importance of Business Process Outsourcing

Before going into an in-depth detail about outsourcing, let’s clear it here that the concept of outsourcing is not new at all, but the term dates back to the 1970s, when enterprises started outsourcing some subordinate processes of their businesses to outside forces.

Did outsourcing work well at that time? The answer is yes, it did well, and the practice of outsourcing started getting popular across boundaries. With the passage of time and success stories of outsourced business processes, companies got into the culture of outsourcing major parts of their business processes. Today, it can be easily noted that big corporations as well as mid-level companies outsource 50% to 60% of their business content to outside firms.

It is worth-mentioning that most of the large organizations outsource half of their IT operations, while some other prefer outsourcing their all back office operations including IT, HR and accounts. Chances are in the near future all business functions would be outsourced because currently companies are outsourcing different horizontal and vertical business units. The cross functional approach adopted to follow a process horizontally across a company is called as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

With the emerging trend of business process outsourcing, it is no more only a method of sharing your responsibilities with outside sources, but it has become a strategic move. Big organizations do not even hesitate quoting business process outsourcing as the secret behind their business success.

How BPO Contributes in the Success of Company?

The answer may need long detail, logical back up or evidence; while keeping it short and simple it can be noted that there are two major parts of every organization namely, administrative functions and strategic planning.

Administration functions contribute in running, monitoring and management of all business units. Be it finance and accounts, human resources function, production team or IT support all these are part of administrative functions. Tough schedules, project deadlines and meeting stress and all other business functions, take focus away from strategic planning that result in static business position. It means that a business keeps on running smoothly, but it does not show growth because companies lack focus on strategic planning.

Secret behind success of most big corporations is that they outsource all efficient processes and keep core focus on strategic planning for the company. They keep on expanding their visions and targeted goals and then formulate strategies to achieve those goals and keep growing in the competition.

The JLC Group provides diverse service portfolio for business outsourcing, including but not limited to:

1)      Marketing & Corporate Sales Strategy

2)      Brand Awareness

3)      Public Relation Consultancy

4)      Social Media Campaigns

5)      Corporate Sponsorships

6)      Competitive Analysis

7)      Strategic Partnerships

8)       Corporate Web Design and Development and more

Importance of Business Process Outsourcing

Learning is Proportional to the Accountability

New research proves that people only confront failures when they cannot find ways to attribute failure with something – or someone – else.  But when we avoid accountability, we detach ourselves from learning.

In the recent working paper of HBS (Harvard Business School), researchers identify, “How internal attribution and ambiguity of responsibility affect learning from failure.” Almost every one of us have had heard many quotes from intellects, emphasizing on the connection between “Success & Failure,” “Failure & Learning”, and “Experience & Failure.”

For instance, take a look on Bill Gates’ famous saying, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

To explain why most of the saints, scholars, and other super minds always link success with failure is straightforward, because they never found a way to success other than failed experiences. In other words, they got learning from failures and sooner or later, make themselves accountable to combat failure without giving excuses and reasoning or blaming external circumstances.

But in some cases, where a person is unclear if he/she is directly responsible for the failure then there is chance that a person would not attribute the failure internally and ultimately less likely to learn from failure. The dilemma of real world is that we cannot easily decrease the ambiguity of responsibility when it comes to failure because most of our assignments and projects involve team players and colleagues as well.

So is there any way managers can encourage learning without accusing others of responsibility?

One of the authors of working HBS paper, Christopher G. Myers, gives some recommendations;

1)      Remove barriers creating ambiguity in the priority.

2)      Carefully designing the job roles, scope of responsibilities and reporting structure.

3)      Creating a psychological safe culture within the organization, where employees are encouraged to accept and learn from failure.

4)      Make a norm of experiencing new tasks as the challenging opportunity for learning process, rather than as a threatening stress.

5)      Analyzing root-cause of the failure without penalizing anyone when team fails, this can increase the thirst for learning among employees.

In my experience, learning is more about failure than success. When a person fails, his curiosity for success increases but the person should be sincerely curious about his work and life. In the end, all we need is to prepare ourselves to be accountable and responsible for the particular failed attempt rather than pinpointing others and uncontrollable external factors.

How beautifully it is summarized by Zig Zigler in just once sentence,

“If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.”

Learning is Proportional to the Accountability

Palantir: Goes Boldy Where Marketers Had Only Dreamed Of

As profiled by the most recent edition of the Sunday New York Times, 10-yr old Palantir Technologies, a software company whose investors include the US Central Intelligence Agency-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, Palantir helps clients unlock secrets. In the world of marketing, and more specifically, within the context of marketers who now foam at the mouth when provided tools to extrapolate insight from tons of metadata, for those Mad Men (and women) intrigued by the rhetorical question”What’s Next?” within the framework of marketing technology and applications, Palantir is very possibly the next generation’s Google Inc; irrespective of the assortment of privacy-related concerns that go hand in hand with the company’s secret sauces.

An audacious call perhaps, but this blogger was [presciently] one of the very earliest proponents of Google search technology in the late 1990′s, well before this company went public in 2004. It has forever since become a ubiquitous tool for research, and of course, a Wall Street darling. Now this blogger is banging the table and shouting “Pay Attention to Palantir.”

Palantir’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., house computer monitors galore, not to mention more unusual desk décor, a cot and games. Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Though Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp says he eschews the notion of monetizing this business enterprise via a public stock offering (much to the chagrin of its early and latter stage venture investors), the company’s list of corporate clients now extends across every industry, including the world’s biggest financial companies, manufacturers, and healthcare concerns. For those using Palantir tools to analyze buying decisions, trends and for projecting just about anything a business (or government) would want to forecast with reliability, Palantir software is seemingly light years ahead of Google and the assortment of other tech czars focused on number crunching and data analysis.

For the full story from the NY Times, please click here.

Palantir: Goes Boldy Where Marketers Had Only Dreamed Of