From AdAge (original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For some marketers, a new year means a new agency. If that’s your company’s annual resolution, you should know that line of thinking will lead to a bad reputation in adland.

Agency new-business executives and industry search consultants report a growing blacklist of sorts, composed of marketers that tend to put ad duties into play every year or two. Thanks to rapid turnover in the chief marketing officer seat (a CMO’s tenure averages 28 months, according to the most recent figures from executive search firm Spencer Stuart) and pressure to perform amid the troubled economy, long-lasting agency-marketer relationships are becoming more rare.

“I have a huge disagreement with people changing their agencies like they change their underwear,” said Jane Bedford, partner at the Bedford Group, a consultancy based in Atlanta. “Our clients tell us it takes them about three to six months for them to get fully engaged with their agencies. It’s very difficult for an agency to get up and running, and totally please the client, within the first year.”

And that’s coming from an exec who actually benefits when accounts go into review.

Take Chipotle: In January 2004, the burrito chain tapped Mother, New York, to be its first advertising agency. Six years later, that account has cycled through four different shops: After Mother came TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder, Colo.; Devito/Verdi, New York; Butler Shine Stern & Partners, San Francisco; and, its latest, hired this month, Compass Point Media, a division of Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis.

Thinking twice
The regularity with which Chipotle changes its agencies is more than most. But it’s hardly the only marketer with a penchant for flitting from shop to shop. Retailer Ikea and luxury automaker BMW are known for frequently reviewing their creative and media accounts, and Mitsubishi Motors North America moves its ad business around a fair amount as well.

Too many reviews could also mean that, over time, the very best shops will think twice before going after those accounts. “Agencies do a risk assessment when deciding whether to pitch an account, and there’s definitely a toxicity factor they look at. If [a client] does a lot of reviews, the client gets blacklisted,” Ms. Bedford said.

Even at a time when agencies are hungry for more revenue, such flip-flopping has consequences: Two different new-business executives said two accounts they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole are 1-800-Flowers and Quiznos, as the businesses seem to be too volatile, regardless of their billings. The marketers did not respond to requests for comment.

Another consequence is cost: Constantly opening reviews can be incredibly costly and disruptive to both the marketer — for whom travel and other fees associated with agency reviews racks up — and the agencies, which shell out thousands of dollars in the hopes of crafting the perfect pitch that could win the business. If they do land it, there’s often an added cost of having to quickly ramp up freelance and full-time staff to work on the new account.

Michael Houston, chief marketing officer at Grey, New York, said the window for agencies to prove themselves has lowered dramatically.

“Results in our business are no longer evaluated on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, but on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis,” Mr. Houston said. “Couple that with the level of dollars attached to the advertising line item on a client’s balance sheet, and we find clients forced to justify their marketing ROI in a way never seen before. In that process, agencies sometimes become the scapegoat, with the easy solution being to call an agency review.”

Consistency
What’s more, “serial reviewers” risk damaging their brand with inconsistent marketing messages.

“Clients shouldn’t be constantly jumping ship,” said Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at AAR Partners. As communication between consumer and client evolves, “they need to work together with their agencies. If that foundation is constantly changing, the marketer is hurting themselves in the long run in terms of building brand loyalty with the consumer.”

The Association of National Advertisers, the marketer’s trade group, doesn’t exactly see it this way. The ANA’s position is that conducting formal agency evaluations on a regular basis offers the best chance for fixing problems before frustration sets in. It believes that the companies that have two-way assessments at regular intervals have the most-productive relationships. “Having a formal agency evaluation process is always imperative but even more so at a time of heightened focus on marketing accountability,” Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the ANA, has said.

Said Grey’s Mr. Houston: “Desperation may be something new to many industries in the recession, but it’s something the agency business has known, embraced and perpetuated for decades. Agencies only have themselves to blame by playing right into the hands of these serial agency-review ‘players’ [and] making it too easy for the client to bully us.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs.com) for American Express Open Forum:

Dec 29, 2009 -

What do bacon, Bogota, yumberries and Foursquare have in common? They are all on the list of 100 Things to Watch in 2010 by the marketing communications company JWT.

Certain trends on the list suggest clear implications for businesses. JWT’s Ann Mack says that many items on it reflect broader shifts, like a growing action around health and wellness and environmental issues, to crazy-fast developments in the tech space.

There are also a number of trends tied to the so-called Great Recession (“trip bundling,” for example) and those that speak to various demographic, political and economic power shifts (“East Africa Wired,” and “TV for Tween Boys” among them). Interestingly for business, Mack says, the list “points to the way industries are redefining or reinventing themselves to survive or to fully leverage these power shifts.”

What trends might affect your small business in 2010? Here a subset you might find worth watching (as well as a few I found just plain interesting). The full list is in alphabetical order, below.

1. 3D at Home
3D is the new HD. Having successfully invaded the big screen, it’s on its way to the small screen: James Cameron, director of the new 3D film Avatar, will promote Panasonic’s 3D sets, out next year, which will compete with versions from Sony and Samsung.

See Rest of List

AutoWeek Credits Success of First iPhone App to Mobile Campaign

Why some iPhone apps become must-haves while others languish is still a mystery to many marketers. But AutoWeek, a 51-year-old magazine breaking into the app market for the first time this winter, has learned that promoting one properly plays a pretty important role.

For its first iPhone app, AutoWeek stuck to the basics: it would stream news, photo galleries, and auto show highlights from the magazine’s Web site. The challenge was getting the word out to the target audience: auto hobbyists as well as consumers in the market for a new car.

To reach its existing audience, AutoWeek put prominent ads for the new app, which was available free, in its magazine and on its Web site. But to reach car enthusiasts on their cell phones, they enlisted AdMob, the mobile ad network that Google recently agreed to purchase for $750 million.

“Even while we were working through the design phase of the app we worked directly with AdMob, took a lot of their input up front about what kind of app would play best in the market,” Marc Mathies, interactive operations director at AutoWeek, said. “And then when we went to market they helped us very rapidly get an adoption of the app and downloaded the app more rapidly than we could have done on our own.”

The app, which was created in conjunction with a third-party developer, launched on November 2nd, and did fairly well in its first week, reaching number 37 on the list of news apps. The AdMob mobile display campaign in the U.S. launched November 10 and ran for only two days, with simple text ads appearing on mobile sites popular with car enthusiasts directing them toward the AutoWeek download.

By the end of the brief U.S. campaign, the AutoWeek app had reached number 10 in the news category and had broken into the top 25 list of iPhone apps overall. The app experienced four times the number of downloads during the week after the campaign than the one before it.

An international mobile campaign followed, again lasting just two days. Afterwards, the AutoWeek app climbed from number 18 to number 5 in the U.K. news category, from number 37 to number 8 in Canada’s, and most notably, from number 90 to number two in Australia’s.

AutoWeek, which is based in Detroit, did not track which downloads came directly through the AdMob ads. But Mathies is confident that the app wouldn’t have performed nearly as well without the mobile promotion.

“Generally we see very small growth from promotions on our own media, so I would attribute 90 percent or greater to the AdMob effort,” he said.

More than a month after the end of the campaign, Mathies said the app continues to move briskly. “Since the promotion has finished we still are maintaining several hundred downloads a day, so I would say even though the marketing efforts are finished, the residual effects keep going.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro Advertising and Marketing Agency

By Geoffery A. Fowler and Yukari Iwatani Kane for the Wall Street Journal

A new generation of mobile-phone software is helping consumers shop smarter this holiday season.

Browsing at a Best Buy Co. store last week, 33-year-old Erik Olson picked up a Blu-ray version of the movie “Heat” and used the camera on his Motorola Inc. Droid smart phone to scan the DVD’s bar-code label. Using an application called ShopSavvy, his phone checked prices for the movie at other stores. Best Buy wanted $26, but the phone told him Walmart.com was charging $19.

“I ended up just buying it from Walmart.com,” says Mr. Olson, of El Cerrito, Calif. “If I see something at a store that catches my eye but the price seems kind of high, I’ll double check the price.”

Many shoppers are accustomed to using the Internet to research products and prices before they hit the mall. But now, mobile-shopping apps take that research on the road. Apps such as Big In Japan Inc.’s ShopSavvy and TheFind Inc.’s Where to Shop identify stores in the immediate vicinity that have a product you’re looking for, and then tell you which product is cheapest and closest. The apps, which are downloaded through the wireless connections on iPhones and other smart phones, ask users to share basic information such as their location and what they’re looking to buy. Some automate that process by collecting location data from built-in GPS sensors and cameras that can scan bar codes on products.

The technology is new and still has its kinks, such as sending shoppers to stores where the products are out of stock. Pricing information is obtained from retailers’ Web sites or by tapping into their databases, but may be flawed if retailers change prices at the last minute, for example. And sometimes, flaky mobile-data networks that can render apps slow or useless.

Nonetheless, this is shaping up to be the first app-powered Christmas. Compared with last year, there was a 77% increase in downloads of shopping and shopping-tool apps for Apple Inc.’s iPhone on Black Friday, according to ad-exchange company Mobclix Inc., which tracks such usage. ShopSavvy said its app for the iPhone and Google Inc.’s Android operating system was used 18 million times over the long Thanksgiving weekend, compared with about one million times on a regular day.

“The distinction between shopping online and in store is disappearing,” says Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind, which collects more than 400 million product listings from Web sites and stores. “Today’s reality is that you have to match prices, or else somebody will walk out of your store,” he says.

For many shoppers, the apps reinforce whether they’re getting a good deal, especially since prices quoted are updated by the mobile service. Indeed, the movie Mr. Olson bought for $19 is now selling for $14.99 at BestBuy.com and $16.32 at Walmart.com. It’s prices differences like these that shoppers can leverage with a store manager to get a better price.

Read Rest of Article at WSJ

Need Mobile Solutions – Contact Endeavour Marketing and Media TODAY

by Garrick Schmitt for AdAge

ust a few short years ago, if you had asked most marketers about the future of mobile, their nirvana most likely would have been a consumer strolling down the aisle of her local grocery store receiving text messages offering 50 cents off a bottle of ketchup or jar of peanut butter.

But not so much today, as industry heavyweights and upstarts like Google, Facebook, Twitter and SimpleGeo are racing to map out a digital, geo-tagged future where our physical and virtual worlds will increasingly collide. Soon a simple coupon delivered via SMS or Bluetooth will seem like an idea from a different era, like Pong or the Hula Hoop.

Everyone, it seems, is looking to take advantage of the demand for location-based services created by GPS-enabled devices, such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android 2.0. Even desktop operating systems, such as Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard will soon contain location-awareness features — so too will browsers, as we’ve seen with the latest Firefox releases.

Now come the services. Just this week, Google launched What’s Nearby, a location-based search that’s part of Google Maps on Android and will soon be more widely available. The service allows consumers to simply access a list of the ten closest places of interest near their physical location via their mobiles.

And that’s just to start: Google Latitude allows users to share their locations with friends and view their friends activities on a map; Facebook has rewritten its privacy policy, foreshadowing its entrance into location-based services; and Twitter has rolled out its Geotagging API, which will allow popular Twitter apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck to display the location from where a tweet was posted.

But geo-location APIs and GPS-enabled mobile devices are just part of the “location equation.” Here’s a look at the most promising geo players who are making location-based marketing a reality for brands today.

FOURSQUARE AND GOWALLA: Foursquare and Gowalla are the two most buzzed-about leaders in location-based services. Both companies provide game-like experiences for their users that allow them to “check-in” at various locales (bars, restaurants, etc.). But it’s Foursquare that has recently made the first play for advertisers. The company recently debuted its Foursquare for Business program, which enables retailers to provide offers to their users and track the success of location-based campaigns. Industry analysts are understandably enthused.

Read Rest of Article

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro Advertising Agency

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone app, a cost-efficient approach the automaker said is a first for the industry. Read Rest of Article

From BusinessWeek (video on page):

It’s easy to shrug off the kooky world of apps. The bite-size software programs people load onto their mobile phones or tap into on the Web seem mostly to be silly games and pointless novelties. But look past the beer-drinking apps and flatulence programs and you’ll see something significant taking shape: a bustling app economy that’s creating new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changing the way business gets done. Read Rest of Article