There is a new market opportunity on the rise that has retailers and brands rethinking their business models. It’s called “Collaborative Economy,” a term used to describe “an economic model that leverages communities or crowds to rent, share, swap, barter, trade, or sell access to products or services.” (http://www.collaborative
economycoalition.org/
what-is-the-collaborative-economy/)
Ever heard of eBay? AirBnB? Zip Car? Those are some of the Collaborative Economy pioneers changing the retail world as we know it.

Why is this something all major retailers need to get on board with? According to Jeremiah Owyang’s research, an Industry Analyst at Altimeter group, 200+ startups who have amassed millions of users and over $2 billion of funding from VC’s, are facilitating this trend in retail. Consumers are finding new ways to reuse and renew products and services.  This essentially cuts the retailer out of the entire transaction and instead makes room for those businesses that are enabling this sharing. Jeremiah has divided this type of market into three distinct categories below:

The Three Categories of Collaborative Economy Markets
(http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2013/02/24/the-master-list-of-the-collaborative-economy-rent-and-trade-everything/)

Your consumers are becoming the retailers.  It is a movement that will be fueled by cost-saving opportunities to the consumer and a sustainable impact on the environment. This is where retail is headed and many brands are already starting to get on board. Below is a list of brands Jeremiah has identified as already  implementing programs to consider the Collaborative consumer:

Collaborative Economy: List of Brands and Corporations
(Jeremiah Owyang http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2013/02/26/collaborative-economy-brand-edition/)

1. BMW Drive NOW Premium Car Sharing by BMW i, Mini, and Sixt
2. Volkswagen Quicar Car Share by VW (Hanover)
3. Peugeot Mu Mobiliy Services Rentals
4. Daimler Car2Go Sponteneity on Wheels
5. RelayRides Uses OnStar technology
6. Toyota Rent a Car: Offers a wide range of cars to be rented, at dealer, Feb 2013
7. Barclays Cycle Hire: Barclays, a Financial Services firm offers Bike Share (2010?)
8. Radiohead gifts media, asking consumers to pay what they want, (2007) hat tip Nico Ibieta
9. Dodge Dart Registry:  Crowdfund your next car
10. Ford now was crowd sharing in Germany (submitted by Ford’s Scott Monty)
11. Walmart considers having customers ship their own products (Submitted by Joe Chernov)
12. Google rents Chromebooks for $30 (Submitted by Ned Boyajian)

Jeremiah Owyang will be presenting about his research on Collaborative Economy at the Digital Omni-Channel Shopper Marketing Summit, June 11-13 in San Francisco. He quotes,
“The Collaborative Economy is an unstoppable trend that brands must not avoid.  Consumers will act like retailers as they trade, rent, and borrow your products from each other –bypassing brands.”
Jeremiah plans to give his audience advice on
“How to take advantage of this movement and profit from it –not be disrupted from it.”

His speech will give a market interview, based on primary research, and forecast the future trends.  Most importantly, it will break down the specific opportunities for brands and give pragmatic advice on what to do to avoid being disrupted.

Interested in learning more about Collaborative Economy & shopper technology? Join Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and more as they release the latest research and recommendations on reaching your shopper at the Digital Omni-Channel Shopper Marketing Summit.

Click here to register now or learn more about the conference
 

But once a year, a very special time comes around. Signs foretell its coming when the weather begins to grow cold, our bank accounts start to deplete, and we find ourselves pushing work off until after the new year.  Amidst these fairly normal changes for the holiday season, comes one other very special event we at PMA look forward to every year…

THE REGGIE AWARDS!!!

“Why?” you may ask, do we get so giddy about it? Because it’s the one time a year we get to see the BEST and MOST INNOVATIVE marketing campaigns that happened during the past year. We get hundreds of submissions from agencies and brand managers alike depicting innovative thinking they used to solve marketing problems. From experiential marketing solutions, to National Consumer Campaigns, from Social Media Game Changers, to Shopper Marketing Technology – We see it all.

This year, we took our judging a step further and incorporated long-time judges from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. They will take part in judging the SUPER REGGIE giving the Gold finalists a chance to have their hard work viewed and credited by the very best.  To say the least, we are teeming with excitement about this relationship.

I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to resurrect the REGGIE finalist videos from last year. Have a look through our library of great submissions. And of course, if you think you have what it takes to win a REGGIE, submit to our 2013 Awards happening….RIGHT NOW!
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP! 

PSFK co-founder Piers Fawkes was a keynote at our recent Digital Shopper Marketing Summit in September.  Today he moderated a Google hangout that focused on trends for 2013.  Lots of good stuff discussed.  No analysis here, just highlighting a few things that stood out to me.

In addition to Piers, the hangout included:

• Aziz Ali (PSFK contributor)
• Rachel Schectman (Story)
• David Polinchock (AT&T Adworks Lab)
• Chase Jarvis (Creative Live)
• Jonathan Ford (Pearlfisher)
• Ari Kuschnir (mssgpeces)

Retail trends

• Traditional e-commerce sites opening physical stores.
• Metrics change from sales/square foot to community and experience
• People shopping both channels
• Older brands innovating the in-store experience. Ex: Banana Republic & Gap offering a coffee shop or manicure. Time is biggest luxury

Learning/education

• Learning has to be social from the ground up
• Educational institutions will lose students if they don’t transfer themselves into more immersive online experiences
• Future is about casual, social, mobile education. Bloated degrees no longer necessary. Skill-based focus will grow. Barrier mostly in the mind.

Culture

• Defined by the artifacts we leave behind.
• The challenge to education and retail institutions is the erasing of artifacts

Think about this: Successful brands of the future will be the ones that give you something that helps you optimize your life

FINAL THOUGHTS/WHAT’S AHEAD

Ari Kuschnir (mssgpeces)

Tictrac: tracking all your activities in one place. Feels like it could happen next year. Can us it to spot correlations by making a dashboard your life

Jarvis (Creative Live)
The era of context. Google glasses. Photography. Building context. Brand or healthcare. What is our relationship with our surroundings? That’s what we’re looking for. Let’s sew it all together

Schectman (Story)
Going digital this year. Bringing offline retail to life

Polinchock (AT&T Adworks Lab)
Google glasses as an example of “One-line,” not online or offline. Cool when we can overlay data onto the real workd we’re already in. Google Glasses

Ali (PSFK)
One Medical Group example. An example of technology and people filling in where traditional municipal and political institutions leaving a void

Ford (Pearlfisher)
Fantastic time for design. Design fundamental part of creating clarity and tangibility. His projects: Smart people thinking about new approaches.

Well done, Piers!

I have so many different feelings about web advertisements. As a consumer, I find them intrusive and quite annoying at times. Such as when they burst into song as soon as you visit a web page, announcing to the entire office you are surfing the web.  Or when they take over your screen and you find yourself shouting “NO I DIDN’T WANT TO CLICK THERE!!!” But, as a marketer my eyes gleam with the targeting opportunities I have to get my brand in front of my EXACT audience,  down to the type of sandwich they like for lunch.  So alas, I am torn between my pre-opinioned self vs. the opportunity they present.

I am not writing this post to tell you about the best way to go about running your online ads – we’ll save that for another post. Rather, I want to share some samples of “out-of-the-box” web ads to spark some innovative thinking for your brands. I found these all great examples of how to not only target your ads in front of your customers, but how to make them enjoy it rather than shun it. I encourage you not only to see these and think how you can creatively use these for you own web experience, but think further than that. How can you optimize interactive ads for mobile?

Make sure you check out an incredibly innovative French company who made a print ad transfer into mobile listed at the bottom of this post.

Example One:

THE APPLE NY TIMES TAKE OVER

I particularly like how the ads interact all over this page. Not only do they refer to the research ad about themselves, but then the two guys on the left that suddenly jump in are a total surprise. All around – great campaign.

Example Two:

The BATTLEFIELD BAD COMPANY VIDEO GAME

http://www.grupowprojects.com/ea/bfbc/tandembeach/tandembeach.html

Here is another example of ads interacting. There is no way you can’t pay attention to this when you go to the website it’s hosted on and it’s humorous as well. Really well done and if you were a video-playing male, I am sure you would have this game marked off as “AWESOMMEEE” in your head.

Example Three:

ORBIT MIST

http://bannerblog.com.au/2009/09/orbit_mist_wettest_gum.php

I enjoy how this ad takes you by surprise by interacting with an ad you would otherwise glaze over. It’s similar to the Battlefield ad but quite effective in catching your eye.

Example Four:

MADDEN TAKEOVER

This ad almost tricks you by making you feel as though they are running through elements on the page. The user doesn’t even see the space as ad space when they first come to the page. This is creative and probably more cost-effective since creative is all in one space and not coordinating with other elements on the page.

Example Five

FRENCH COMPANY BRINGS PRINT AD TO LIFE WITH MOBILE PHONE:

Okay, this was just so cool I had to include it. Talk about bridging the gap between print in digital! It’s assumptive that everyone will have an iPhone but not outlandish by any means. I really liked the interactive ability here. The only thing they could work on is creating less leg work for the user. They were  expected to put in the website in order for the ad to work. But, as technology stands today – pretty cutting edge!

(To see many more awesome examples, check out this site:  http://bannerblog.com.au/2009/08/nhs_magic.php)

Written by Marybeth Petescia, Manager of Marketing Communications, PMA

Retail remained in focus as Google’s Tim Reis presented A New Look at Retailers & Shoppers in the Digital Age.

Here are a few tips:

1. Optimize your site! 79% of sites do not have mobile optimized landing pages!

2. Leverage local and mobile commerce. Mobile represents $1 trillion in commerce while one in three searches has local intent. Mobile is not a tool, it’s an obsession.

3. Employ mobile at all points in the funnel. 50% of U.S. subscribers have smartphones; usually less than 3 feet away. 79% of them shop with it.

4. Embrace the multiple screen. 40% of smartphone tablet owners multitask by using mobile and watching television.

5. Embrace social everywhere. Google how Google does social to learn more.

Time for lunch and Terra Cycle’s Albe Zakes.

People often connote “experiential” with only live events—well, you can be sure digital and social media can expose consumers to significant “virtual” brand experiences as well.  Some questions that we’ve heard from marketers surrounding social media are:  How can it be best leveraged for my brand?  Is it really as low-cost as everyone says it is?  Why do I have to spend so much time maintaining my social network relationships?  Does it work to increase word of mouth?  The list goes on an on.

As part a committment by IMI International to deliver compelling insights on the most important new areas in marketing, IMI International has been considering how social media is changing the media landscape, how it can be measured for ROI and what you can do to help your brand succeed.

Of the list of questions further above, this post will focus on the final question, does social media work to increase word of mouth around my brand?  And, more specifically, how do product recommendations change in terms of likelihood of being acted upon as a result of the medium in which they are received?

Recent studies by IMI International indicate that there is a clear difference between youths aged 13 to 24 and adults over 25 years of age.  Across the spectrum, the results are clear that product recommendations are less likely to be followed up on as a result of being sent through social media.  This is attributed to the pure volume of messages innundating consumers on a daily basis and also speaks to the amount of unsolicited marketing information that is regularly received.  For adults who pass on recommendations to others, social media is simply not as credible as it is for youths and adults are more likely to trust and act on information received in person and over the phone.

For digital natives – youths under 25 – however, the fact that social media is so much more ubiquitous in terms of daily communication tools, makes the medium less likely to be an impediment to acting on product recommendations.  Versus in person or over the phone, youths are much more likely to accept recommendations, especially from friends and family.  Where recommendations are made by mere aquaintances, the level of reponse drops considerably, regardless of how the information was received.

So what is a marketer to do?  It’s clear that youths are still open to receiving and acting on product recommendations but they must be relevant, contextual, valuable and personalized, especially when sent over social media.  The days of spamming are over, and never really got off the ground for adults, while youths under 25 are still open to hearing and acting on those product recommendations that resonate for them and their friends.

For more information, please visit IMI International’s website for more experiential and social media topics.

This is how Google saw the year that was, based on search queries.

Hat tip: Chris Brogan

Disclosure: Google is a member of PMA’s board.

Experiential activations continue to grow as marketers embrace the idea of one-to-one consumer marketing.  What many agencies and clients have been doing thus far is experimenting in order to find out what works, and in the process, some have had spectacular successes and also some notable “we’re not going to do that again” moments. 

At IMI International, we’ve been measuring activations in and around experiential marketing for over 20 years.  As a result, a database of over 1,500 consumer measurement initiatives has been complied in order to find out exactly what initiatives are working and those which need to be reconsidered. 

Measuring experiential marketing is a three-step process:

1.  First, it’s critical to isolate the experiential impact of the activation.  This means that you are able to remove the other elements that can be driving impact in the marketplace, such as television ads, retail offers etc., and instead, simply focus on the activation on the streets, at festivals, sports events and other areas.  This allows for a “clean read” on the activation and for you truly know how it is working.

2.  Second, use consistent measures since they are extremely helpful.  Specifically, we leverage three types of measures in order to evaluate a campaign and its ROI.  These include: 

• Efficiency, meaning how successful was the activation in terms of reaching your target market;
• Effectiveness, namely how impactful the message was in making your target consumer learn new brand info, change an attitude or behavior (to have them do/buy/say what your campaign wants them to do; and finally,
• Cost effectiveness, or how much of an investment was required in order to make the activation work.

Used together, these consistent measures allow you to compare all experiential marketing activations using the same ruler in order to compare results, whether different events, tactic s or objectives for the same campaign, or different campaigns across an activity calendar.

3.  Third, compare your results, not just to each other in one-off campaigns, but to a much larger, more robust database, allows you to understand a more “absolute” level of performance across like-type initiatives and brands in the marketplace.  For instance, if 42% of consumers are more likely to buy your product as a result of an experiential campaign, is that good or bad?  Being able to compare against a large set of similar programs with actual in-market linkage (like IMI’s database) allows for context to be provided and to ensure your program is breaking through above and beyond its local competitors. If you only compare to your own programs you may never find the optimal level for your programs.

Standardized measurement is important since it allows for true understanding of the impact of your marketing program.  Measurement gives you credibility and protection against having to defend your budget for next year’s experiential campaign since you can prove its effectiveness.  Most importantly, it allows you to understand where your brand currently is performing and how you can optimize it for future incremental gains.

For more information, please visit IMI International’s website for more experiential topics.

We just announced our 2011 Call for Papers & Presenters yesterday.  This call is in conjunction with our upcoming Annual Conference–Game Changer: The Marketing Conference of Big Wins and Bold Thinking–which will be in Chicago on April 5-6, 2011.  This event is super special because it kicks off our Centennial Celebration.  That’s right: The PMA turns 100 in 2011!

We are looking for educational, insight-filled papers that explore new trends and research in any area connected to integrated promotion marketing.  Focus areas might include (and this isn’t an exhaustive list):

Edison Research recently released its study of Twitter usage, and some of the findings are:

• Despite high awareness levels (nearly 87% of Americans know about it), it is only used by seven (7) percent of the population
• Twitter appears to be disproportionately popular with African Americans, as 25% of Twitter users are African American, which is double the percentage in the overall population.
• Twitter users are three times more likely to follow brands than users on other social networks
• A higher percentage of Twitter users update their social network profiles and connect to Twitter via their mobile phones/smartphones that the average social networking site user.

Here’s the Webinar where Edison’s VP of Strategy & Marketing, Tom Webster, takes you through the results.

Twitter Usage in America 2010 from Tom Webster on Vimeo.

Download the report here.

Hat tip to Jason Keath