16 AUGUST 2007

Want To Lose Half-A-Million Bucks?

We just had a call from a colleague operating a small business, wanting to know a bit more about this new Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007, coming into effect in three weeks.

He’s been sending out regular email bulletins to a few hundred accountants for several years and was looking to add some more email addresses to the list. He had the sudden thought that maybe this new Act might complicate his plans and wanted some advice on the topic.

We had the unpleasant task of breaking the news to him that not only could he not add new email addresses without risking a $500,000 fine – his existing mailing list would be in breach of the new Act as well, since he has no permission from any of those accountants to send them emails either.

His impassioned comment “I’ve been sending out these emails for years. Doesn’t that mean I have their permission and can keep sending them the same sorts of stuff?”

Sadly, no. If you have an existing email mailing list but don’t have the Express Consent of the recipient (in the form of a direct indication from that person that it’s okay to send them messages, e.g. a “Subscribe” request) then you’ll need to obtain it, unless you have either Inferred Consent or Deemed Consent.

Inferred Consent

Inferred Consent is when the person you wish to contact has not directly instructed you to send them a message, but it is still clear that there is a reasonable expectation that messages will be sent. For example, the address-holder provided their email address when purchasing goods and services in the general expectation that there will be follow-up communication. Another example is swapping business cards.

This is the part of the Act which is most likely to be most quoted as a defence: “Your Honour, I’ve been sending these emails out for ages and no-one’s ever complained.”

Unfortunately, as the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) specifically states in its own guide to the Act, "if someone has been on your existing address list and has not ‘unsubscribed’, it does not mean that consent can be inferred."

In other words, the onus is on you to obtain explicit consent. If you are not confident that the existing relationship is strong enough to infer consent, you should obtain express consent.

Inferred consent is limited in its application. For example if people join a tennis club you can infer consent to send them a tennis newsletter, but you could not infer consent to send them an investment newsletter.

Another interesting example cited by the DIA makes it clear that emailing to lapsed customers also breaches the law:

“Natalie manages a gym and sends out a fitness newsletter to 1,500 people. Gym members were asked to provide an email address when they signed up but many of the addresses on the list are not current members.

“Natalie has the inferred consent of her gym members but not from those people on the list who are not currently members. Natalie will be in breach of the law if she continues to send her newsletter without knowing if recipients have consented to receive it.”

Deemed Consent

The third category of consent, Deemed Consent, is when someone conspicuously publishes their work-related electronic address or mobile number (e.g. on a website, brochure or magazine). However if a publication includes a statement that the person does not want to receive unsolicited commercial electronic messages at that address, consent cannot be deemed.

Note, though, that the message sent must be relevant to the recipient’s business. For example:

“Joe notices a sign that publicises the email address of a car yard. He sends an electronic message to that address advertising the office furniture his company sells.

“This would be considered spam as Joe’s message is irrelevant to the car yard. However, if Joe’s company sells goods and services related to the car industry, this would be considered deemed consent.”

So, unfortunately for our colleague and the many others out there facing similar predicaments, you have just three weeks to make email contact with your existing mailing list and ask for their express permission to continue sending them emails. After September 5, such actions are criminalized and you’ll automatically become that most heinous of outcasts, a spam-meister.

So what is spam? Not a delicious foodstuff sold by Hormel Foods but, as defined by the Act, “unsolicited commercial electronic messages.”

The first thing to note is that it's not just email that's captured by the Act. The definition of ‘Electronic messages’ as enshrined in this new legislation encompasses emails, instant messaging, SMS text messages, multimedia message services and other mobile phone messaging (not including voice or, sadly, fax).

In order to be considered spam the electronic message must also be commercial in nature – for instance marketing or promoting goods, services or land, or directing the recipient to a location where a commercial transaction can take place (such as a website).

A nasty little caveat for non-profits, NGOs, schools, clubs and the like: providing a hyperlink to a company web page in the signature of an otherwise non-commercial email may make it commercial, if the web page markets or promotes goods, services, land, a business or an investment opportunity. In other words, if you’ve managed to find a parent whose business has agreed to sponsor that PTA email newsletter, you may have just turned your school into a criminal communicator!

There are many commercial electronic messages that can be sent legitimately. They are only spam if they are sent without the consent of the recipient – as unsolicited messages.

Specifically, the Act states that the following common messages between organisations and clients/customers are not considered commercial electronic messages:

• Responses to a request for a quote or estimate

• Messages that facilitate, complete or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient previously agreed to

• Warranty information, product recalls and safety and security information about goods or services used or purchased by the recipient

• Factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan or similar ongoing relationship

• Information directly related to employment or a related benefit plan in which the recipient is currently involved

• Messages delivering goods and services, including product or upgrades, that the recipient is entitled to receive under the terms of a previous transaction.

By the way: a single message may be spam. The message doesn’t need to be sent in bulk, or received in bulk. So don’t even think about sending those messages out one at a time – you’re still busted.

Even If You Have Consent

In addition to prohibiting spam, the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 lays out rules for sending out those commercial electronic messages that do have consent. The message must contain:

• Accurate information about the sender of the message, including how they can be contacted – in other words, Signature Files are suddenly compulsory!

• A functional way for the recipients to indicate that they do not wish to receive such messages in the future – that they wish to unsubscribe.

Taking Your Medicine

The Act specifies a number of options that are available to enforce the legislation, depending on the circumstances. The range of possible activities includes formal warnings, infringement notices and court actions.

A business that is found to be in breach of the Act may be subject to a court imposed penalty of up to $500,000. The business could also be made to pay the victims compensation up to the amount of loss suffered or damages up to the amount of profit that was made as a result of sending the spam.

At the end of the day, it’ll be up to the Courts to interpret the law and decide what is or isn’t Inferred Consent or Deemed Consent, and exactly how much to penalize those wicked conspirators who stray across the boundary.

More Information

If all this suddenly sounds both serious and urgent and you’re desperately seeking more information about spam and the new Act, wander over to www.antispam.govt.nz.

Note also that seminars relating to the Act will be held around the country, starting in Auckland next Monday – head to the Marketing Association website for details.

On the other hand, if you’d just like to see the Guide to the Act as prepared by the Department of Internal Affairs, email us for a free electronic copy.

But please do remember you’ve requested it, so you don’t suddenly think we’re commercially unsoliciting you …

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Three Months In
It’s not even walking yet, but three-month-old Freeview, free-to-air digital TV platform, is handing out cigars to celebrate 21,000 set-top boxes sold!

That’s not a bad start, considering that all Freeview has to offer at the moment (apart from TVNZ Sport Extra, a channel devoted to all the extended, commercial-free sports coverage for which TVNZ has the rights, including “a feast of top international netball, soccer and motorsport”) is the same old channels you can already get for free in analogue – just with better reception.

The Freeview service has thus far been promoted as offering “a major leap in quality”, an enticement which has proven compelling for 21,000 households (on top of the estimated 20,000 homes already watching through free-to-air satellite set-top boxes). By the way, we’re talking about quality of reception, not quality of content - whether it’s a good or a bad thing to be able to view Paul Henry or John Campbell without interference is a personal choice, we suppose.

Anyway, come September Freeview box-providers will have something to sell at long last – with the launch over the next couple of months of two new channels and the long-awaited switch of two familiar channels to widescreen.

September 22nd sees TV One, TV2, and TVNZ Sports Extra go widescreen on Freeview (although their analogue broadcasts will remain in the traditional format). TV3’s been widescreen on their digital broadcast platforms (Sky and Freeview) for several months – now the state broadcaster follows suit.

The big launch, however, happens on September 30 with the debut of TVNZ6. This channel, the first of TVNZ’s two new digital channels for the Freeview platform will feature advertising-free programming with between 50% and 75% local content.

TVNZ6 programming will be divided into three separately-branded services:

• Kidzone, targeting preschoolers (50% local content);
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• Family, going after families (70% local content);
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• and Showcase, aimed at adult viewers (75% local content).
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None of the services will carry advertising but limited sponsorship opportunities are available.

TVNZ6 Kidzone
Kidzone will carry programmes for preschoolers from 6:00am until 4:00pm. Indicative programming: You and Me, Engie Benjy, Bumble, Fireman Sam, Fraggle Rock, Buzz and Poppy, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Boblins, Number Jacks, Party Animals, Miss Spider's Sunnypatch Friends, Sing Something Simple, Angelina Ballerina, Oswald, George and Martha, The Dress Up Box

Click here for a Kidzone preview

TVNZ6 Family
Family’s mission: programmes that families can watch together, screening from 4:00pm until 8:30pm daily. Programming is divided into several strands, including:

LOCAL LIFESTYLE
Location Location Location, Pioneer House, The Zoo, Ground Force, House Call, Changing Rooms, Colonial House, Going Going Gone

TWEEN TIME
The Boy From Andromeda, How 2, Darcy's Wildlife, Mirror Mirror, Tricky TV, Being Eve, Thunderstone, Mai Time, Globo Loco, The Killian Curse

CLASSIC KIWI
It's In The Bag, A Dog's Show, Country Calendar, Wonder Dogs

FAMILY FACTS
Science Shack, The Truth About Climate Change, Epitaph, Natural History NZ Docos, Wild Thing We Love You, What's Good For You, Beyond Tomorrow

LOCAL DRAMA
Shortland Street Catch Up, Karaoke High

Short Programme Content:
Meet The Locals (in association with the Department Of Conservation)

Click here for a Family preview

TVNZ6 Showcase

The Showcase mandate: programming for adults, from 8:30pm until midnight. Showcase segments include:

CREATIVE CULTURE
The Gravy, The Book Show, Talk Talk, Mercury Lane, The Living Room, Closet Tales Of Australian Fashion, The Big Picture, Kiwi Arts Docos, Bollywood Bosses

KIWI FEATURES
New Zealand Films

DRAMA (Both local and international)
Flight of the Albatross, End of The Golden Weather, Jubilee, Clare Mataku, Doves of War, Street Legal, Orange Roughies, Duggan, Cover Story, City Life, Mercy Peak, Taonga, The Clinic, Cold Feet, Roy Hollsdotter Live.

LOCAL LAUGH
Matthew & Marc's Rocky Road, Havoc & Newsboy, Market Forces, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

LOCAL DRAMA CATCH UP
The Games, Mataku, Doves of War, Street Legal, Orange Roughies, Duggan, Cover Story, City Life, Mercy Peak, Taonga

LATE LAUGH
The Games

Short Programme Content
NZ student short films

Click here for a Showcase preview

And The Next Envelope, Please

October sees the arrival on Freeview of the curiously-named Triangle Stratos, offering free content from a number of sources:

• programmes provided by regional stations around New Zealand;
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• programmes provided by ethnic and minority groups around the country;
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• and international news services and current affairs shows from prestigious global broadcasters including Germany’s DW-TV, Voice of America and Al Jazeera.
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To add to the mix, not all programming will be in English.

As the name suggests, Triangle Stratos will be programmed by Triangle Television, who already offer a similar programming mix through their non-commercial regional channels in Auckland and Wellington. It’s intended for Triangle Stratos to provide a nationwide outlet for regional TV content from around New Zealand. As we’ve found ourselves when sampling local Triangle shows, the channel provides a welcome diversity of views in a largely homogenized television environment.

More Freeview Channels

Other channels are on their way, although few have been publicly announced. One high profile exception, TVNZ7, currently planned to launch in March 2008. TVNZ7 will be a broad based factual channel with news bulletins on the hour, every hour, along with sports, documentaries and current affairs programming – a mix more like BBC World than Sky News.

TV3 operators MediaWorks have multi-channel capacity on Freeview and have previously (before their recent change of ownership) pre-announced plans to add another channel to their lineup. They’ll also be mulling over offering their programming in High Definition, however – which chews up a whole lot more bandwidth – a move which may become more urgent if Prime starts broadcasting in HDTV next March as has been suggested.

Going Terrestrial

The next major milestone for Freeview: going terrestrial, a move planned for March/April next year. Currently Freeview is a satellite service, delivering the same signals across the country. The Digital Terrestrial service – which 75% of the population are expected to receive on launch day, courtesy Kordia – will be broadcast from largely the same sites that are already beaming out analogue. If regional TV operators want to continue to serve their regions, they’ll have to make the move over to FreeView terrestrial offerings

If you already get good analogue reception then your UHF aerial should be sufficient to receive Freeview’s digital terrestrial signal. But you will need a set-top box that’s different to the box required for Freeview’s satellite-delivered signal.

That was looking to be a communications problem for Freeview and its resellers – but the job just might have gotten a whole lot easier, with the news leaked in The Press last week that Sony plans to build a Digital Terrestrial TV tuner into its Playstation 3 games console next year, a move that would turn every PS3 console sold in New Zealand into a Freeview set-top box and programmable TV recorder.

What a magnificent tool for Pester Power: “Mum, I only want to get the PS3 so that we can still get free-to-air TV. I’m thinking about the whole family here.”

Death To The Analogue Devils!

As we’ve pointed out before, Freeview is a necessary step as we move ever closer to the day when analogue television is switched off forever. It’s a lot closer than you think: Sweden’s already done it, Holland almost, the first UK region (Whitehaven) goes 100% digital in just two months. And the United States flips the switch in about 18 months, turning off analogue completely on February 17 2009.

We might prefer to stall – our political masters have yet to name the date that we bid farewell to analogue – but the world’s analogue-making machinery is switching off as well. We might have to look to some sort of wind-up, steam-powered television system if we wait too long.

It’s the Customer, Stupid
You know, and we know, that none of us can stay in business without customers. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Unless your business is really, really small – and wants to stay that way – you’ll have to figure out some way of winning and retaining customers.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a vital function of modern business, enabling us to reach out en masse to our customers, interact effectively with them and manage our relationships with expertise and finesse.

Or at least that’s the theory.

In practice, things don’t always work so smoothly. So we were quick to grab the latest white paper from salesforce.com, proudly entitled “Eight CRM Essentials: An Executive Guide to the Eight Must-Have Elements of Every Successful CRM Initiative.”

According to the sales bumpf, the guide “distills best practices, lessons learned, and collective insights from salesforce.com’s 32,000+ customers—as well as industry experts—across various company sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.”

So what did we learn? Well, understand that this is a white paper that’s been put together to highlight salesforce.com’s particular offerings (on-demand CRM), so the problems and solutions highlighted do tend to reflect their capabilities. Nevertheless, the paper does provide useful insights. Keep its self-interested origins in mind, however, as we take you through a quick summary of the Eight CRM Essentials, with our accompanying commentary where appropriate:

CRM Essential #1: Rapid Time to Value
(our translation: how to get earning, fast)

Instant messaging, 24/7 customer service, shorter development cycles… today, businesses and their customers move at a rapid clip. Buy decisions are made quickly, and in fact entire businesses can succeed or fail in a matter of weeks. No-one has the luxury of waiting months or even years to install a traditional, expensive, client/server CRM application. The competitive advantage today is on-demand CRM.

On-demand CRM solutions are better suited to today’s fast-moving businesses. You can be up-and-running with on-demand CRM in a matter of weeks, so you can focus on delivering greater value to customers, rather than worrying about installing and maintaining hardware and software.

[This is a fair summation of the benefits of born-on-the-web software solutions, whether in CRM or elsewhere; just understand that it’s a not-quite-objective evaluation.]

CRM Essential #2: Point-and-Click Customization

No CRM solution is going to fit like a glove right out of the box, because the reality is that no two companies’ customer relationships and processes are exactly alike. However, because many traditional CRM solutions are difficult and expensive to customize, some organizations are forced to alter their business processes to fit the capabilities of their CRM technology. The key to success is a highly flexible CRM solution that allows you to keep pace with changing customer needs and your evolving business environment.

[This hits at the heart of the debate between “software written specially for you” and “out of the box, for anyone” remotely-hosted solutions. If you’re going to use an on-demand product, satisfy yourself that its customization capabilities match with your needs before you buy.]

CRM Essential #3: A 360-Degree Customer View

The quality of the customer experience makes and breaks companies. Customers are becoming increasingly demanding and sophisticated, and they’ll take their business elsewhere if you don’t deliver the superior service they feel they deserve. Companies today are challenged to integrate and manage the complete customer lifecycle—seamlessly and effectively—to win and retain those highly desirable most-profitable customers.

You need a CRM solution where:

1. Leads go directly to the right sales team or individual rep, are well qualified, and include the right information.

2. Marketing gets real-time visibility into the status of every lead, sees which lead sources drive the most revenue, and plans appropriate customer marketing campaigns.

3. Service and support organizations get visibility into which products or services the customer is using and any pending sales opportunities, and can alert the sales team to potential cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

4. Back in sales, reps get insight into any outstanding customer service issues so that there are no unpleasant surprises when they make their sales calls.

[These are pretty much minimum requirements for any CRM solution worthy of the name.]

CRM Essential #4: Real-Time Visibility

To stay competitive, businesses must “mind their metrics.” Constantly monitoring the health of the business, determining what’s working and what’s not, and making adjustments to improve operations and increase revenue are essential to surviving and thriving in today’s competitive market.

Analytics can be addictive, and there are literally hundreds of CRM metrics you can track. Your CRM metrics should track to your organization’s other financial and business objectives. In addition, the CRM metrics you choose will be specific to your company’s size, product lifecycle, and your corporate mission. The key is to get good insight without becoming a slave to the metrics. To avoid that, it’s best to identify the smallest number of performance metrics that can still properly encapsulate the business objective.

For example, a new company with a promising but unknown product will need to invest heavily in marketing campaigns to solicit customers, build product awareness, and establish its brand. The company would want to keep close track of metrics such as new leads per marketing campaign, sales opportunities per campaign, and opportunities closed per campaign.

On the other hand, a company with a well-established brand, a large customer base, and a mature portfolio of products would want to focus on metrics that help identify its most profitable customers and show which programs further increase their customers’ spending and ensure their loyalty. This company would want to track up-sells and cross-sells with metrics such as the number of products or services per customer and average profit per customer.

Even small investments in dashboards and reporting for all your customer-facing employees can have a profound impact on business performance. Metrics motivate.

CRM Essential #5: No More Dirty Data

Almost every company suffers from “dirty data” syndrome, and few have any idea what to do about it.

Consider the findings of the IBM Global Data Management Survey of 600 major enterprises: 75 percent of the respondents reported significant problems as a result of defective data, including violated contract terms, failure to bill or collect for services or products delivered, delays in or abandonment of new systems projects and extra accounting costs.

You can’t be successful with CRM until you find a remedy to the data integrity problem that is prevalent in organizations of all sizes and in every industry. A three-step approach to quality data management can address this issue so that your CRM initiative will be free of dirty data.

1. Capture. If you don’t capture it, you can’t measure it. In order to capture all the data you need to get an accurate analysis of your business, you need everyone in the company to use your CRM system rather than store data in unintegrated or offline sources such as spreadsheets. To get quality data, high system adoption is critical.

2. Clean. Once you have the data in your CRM system, you need to continually weed out bad data by removing duplicates, synchronizing changing data, and updating information.

3. Augment. Merely cleansing your data is not enough. Maintaining high data quality also means filling in the blanks. For example, some of your account records may be missing company information such as revenue, number of employees, key executives, and so on. You can augment your data by leveraging data service providers to help you fill in the gaps.

CRM Essential #6: High Adoption

There’s nothing worse than investing in CRM and having no one show up. Too many CRM projects fail due to poor user adoption. After all, technology is only as good as the people who use it. To ensure that people do use your CRM system, it must be easy to use, accessible, and scalable, and significantly enhance productivity, efficiency, and visibility.

A look at successful CRM initiatives uncovers several best practices for driving user adoption.

• Build support for CRM early on.
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• Go top down, bottom up, and sideways.
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• Focus on people and processes.
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• Make your users’ lives easier.
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• Let them take it on the road.
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• Keep it simple.
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• Train your users in advance.
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• Give executives—and everyone—a bird’s-eye view.
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• Reinforce adoption with carrots and sticks.
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• Give everyone a voice.
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[The white paper goes into rather more detail about these best practices – we’ve just captured the essence here].

CRM Essential #7: Extending Your Success

Business is about evolution. Smart and successful companies are flexible enough to adapt as necessary while never letting go of the core mission and values. If your business must be nimble to survive, why should you commit to a rigid, unflexible technology solution for something as important and core to your business as CRM? The ability to tie-in additional best-of-breed applications that address other key business initiatives and processes is essential to the long-term success of your CRM solution.

[This Essential Tip, which goes on to highlight various Add-Ins available to extend the functionality of CRM, makes a worthwhile point about integrating CRM into your other business applications.]

CRM Essential #8: A Broad Community

Community-building Web technologies and sites are some of the most popular and fastest-growing areas on the Internet today. Through blogs, wikis, social and business networking sites, and much more—people are increasingly engaging with each other online. At the same time, companies are realizing that nurturing their customer communities and engaging with customers can yield dramatic results in terms of customer loyalty and brand awareness.

You can facilitate the growth of a strong customer community by providing online forums for a variety of topics of interest to your customers, including:

• Best practices. Encourage customers to share tips, tricks, success stories, and ideas, etc.
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• Ideas and voting. You and your customers can share ideas on the future of your products and services. Providing the opportunity for customers to vote on ideas is an excellent way to get feedback, drum up participation, and help customers feel invested in your company’s future.
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• User groups. You can set up local user groups and provide an online forum for communication and planning among the local members.
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[Online communities are hot right now. This is a smart piece of advice, firmly linking CRM with customer engagement].

The “Eight CRM Essentials” white paper provides some worthwhile perspectives on the topic, and is worth a read if you’re considering implementing or upgrading CRM. We do have a copy, of course, but we’re going to encourage you to get yours from salesforce.com, so you can see if their own CRM practices match their advice.

Location, Location
Local Searchers, people who seek products, services and information online for specific locations, are proving to be a big boon for shoppers and — potentially — for marketers. A large US study from comScore Networks commissioned by TMP Directional Marketing reveals the following facts concerning consumer behaviour and attitudes while searching:

• 82% of Local Searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase, emphasizing the importance for marketers to integrate their on- and offline information. Of these, 61% made purchases.
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• 33% of all consumers still consider print yellow pages as their primary source of local business info, and 90% feel it’s valuable because it gives more information such as accurate phone numbers – which should make the new owners of NZ’s Yellow Pages fairly happy.
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• Internet Yellow Page and local searchers are savvy and fairly affluent.
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• 90% of the 3000 online panelists still find print yellow pages a “valuable” resource.
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“Offline local search, White Pages and Yellow Pages directory advertising is a $15 billion market and fairly static," said Stuart McKelvey, CEO of TMPDM. “Online local search is a $1 billion market and growing. The fact that two thirds of our online panel use online search as their primary source of local business information suggests that advertisers should consider the allocation of offline vs. online local search investments.”

What does that tell us? “The consumer is there and ahead of the advertisers,” McKelvey added.

• 60% of searchers online looking for local businesses think that the top results are most relevant. 25% don’t want to have to scroll down.
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• Traditional advertising triggers branded online searches. Between 60-90% searches for heavily advertised categories such as pizza, insurance, banks and financial institutions were branded;
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• 30-50% of keyword searches were general in nature for low branded categories including Auto Service and Home Services.
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If you’re going to take note of this localizing trend and target Local Searchers, a few words of advice:

1. Name those locations.
If you have multiple locations, make sure that local address details are included on your website and in any online listings.

2. Include relevant local content.
Locals searching for mufflers in Christchurch will quickly decide they need to include the words “mufflers” and “Christchurch” in their search queries, if they’re going to get meaningful results.

3. Get local links.
Get yourself listed on location-specific websites such as those operated by local councils, chambers of commerce and the like. You’ll find such listings are sometimes free. Good price.

4. Track your results.
If you’re going to put in the effort, make sure Local Search is worthwhile – always track the sources of your leads.

Blockbuster Goes Digital
Blockbuster Inc. last week announced its acquisition of movie download service Movielink, giving the company access to one of the largest libraries of downloadable movies and a large array of television content.

Movielink - created in 2002 as a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios to fight back against download pirates – offers customers the ability to legally download entertainment content for rental (VOD) and for purchase (EST).

The acquisition of Movielink (which has VOD and EST license agreements with the five founding studios, as well as more than 30 other studios, television-content distributors, and foreign and independent content providers) means that Blockbuster will be in a position to offer consumers downloadable entertainment content via their PCs, portable devices, television-connected home networks and approved set-top boxes.

"The studios' goal with the Movielink service has always been to make digital entertainment content more conveniently, more widely and more securely available to consumers. This acquisition should further that goal," said Jim Ramo, Movielink CEO. "With Blockbuster's ability to leverage its store network, online assets, and marketing expertise, Blockbuster should be able to grow the market for digitally-delivered entertainment content, and we believe that's good news for consumers and content providers alike."

In other words, when it comes to internet-delivered movie & TV downloads, Game On!

What We’re Reading
Richard Grammier of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a decorated hero of American space exploration; many NASA missions owe their success in part to his dedicated project management. His latest project, called Deep Impact, was extremely complex: its goal was to fire two space probes 83 million miles into space to intercept a comet – one probe to hit the comet hard, creating a deep impact (hence the name); the second probe to fly by the comet, observe the impact and collect science data to determine the chemical composition of the materials excavated by the impact.

Grammier described the challenge of this project as “shooting a flying bullet at another flying bullet, while having a third flying bullet observe the impact and collect science data.” It was no easy feat, to be sure.

Moreover, Grammier inherited a mess of a project. He summarized his management challenges in terms of the following four fundamental problems:

1. Rigorous processes either not understood or not followed.
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3. Inability to perform a project validation and verification programme.
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5. Incomplete or insufficient project process reporting.
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7. Inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans.
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Marketers attending a conference at which Mr Grammier spoke were asked to consider whether they had faced these four problems in recent marketing campaigns. The answer was Yes, even for some of the best marketers in the world.

Now, you might be thinking that, for a project like Deep Impact, of course extensive process and measurement need to be central to the way things are done. After all, there’s a lot of money at stake and a very narrow window to get it right; otherwise it might be years and years before another opportunity presents itself.

What we found fascinating, though, is that the total annual cost of Deep Impact is less – a lot less – than most big US marketers spend: it’s somewhere around US$87 million a year (for a grand total of $350 million over four years). In stark contrast, Ford alone spends $1 billion in a single year on advertising. And don’t marketers have a similar narrow window for success?

You know the old saying that half of your advertising is wasted (but you don’t know which half)? Well, turns out that only around 37% of your advertising is trash. Sadly, that does equate to quite a lot of money – US$112 billion out of a total annual adspend of around $300 billion.

That happy statistic (and the tale above) come from the recently-published treatise “What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails And How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. Here’s how these two cheer-germs introduce the topic:

“Marketing is failing. CEOs sense it; top marketers know it; and our research proves it. That’s a strong statement – but we can back it up, from our experience and our research.

“We’ve conducted extensive research over the past 5 years, with over 30 major marketers – blue-chip companies such as Ford, ESPN, Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Kraft Foods, VeriSign, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen and Philips, to name just a few. They hired us to measure the impact of more than $1 billion in advertising spending in a revolutionary new way that shone a light on some very serious problems & opportunities.”

“What Sticks” has as its goal to help marketing and advertising professionals understand and improve marketing productivity through the use of new approaches, new thinking, some science and quite a few ideas based on what they’ve learned from their research with leading marketing departments in Fortune 200 companies.

Along the way, they also show us how to apply a little rocket-science thinking to marketing, inspired by the way that Richard Grammier addressed his four problems on the Deep Impact project:

1. First, Richard ensured that his team understood and was working with the proper process. The authors outline a marketing equivalent, a Communications Optimization Process, which (as with NASA) can make the difference between success and failure.

2. Next, Grammier and his team fixed the inability to perform adequate validation and verification tests. For marketers, this translates to testing different consumer motivations or alternative advertising messages to see which works better, or testing different consumer targeting strategies or different media mixes.

3. As with Deep Impact, marketing needs to fix its measurement and data reporting in order to provide a clear overall picture of the success of individual marketing elements.

4. And finally, Grammier addressed the inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans in the same way that marketers will need to follow: develop a clear definition of success and what actions to take if certain elements of the campaign are off base (scenario planning).

If you can’t find it in your local bookstore, you can order “What Sticks” by following this link to Amazon.

Eye On New Zealand
At G2 we’ve begun presenting the latest Eye On New Zealand research study to our clients. It’s a snapshot of our nation – what 500 Kiwis aged 18-64 think about the land of the long white cloud – containing some fascinating insights on our attitudes to money, the environment, our future, advertising … and how happy we are with our daily lives.

Marketers who’d be interested in seeing the Eye On New Zealand presentation are invited to contact Sarah Norrie, G2 Managing Director, 09 914 4739 or send us an email.

The G2 Blog
You'll find our blog at http://www.G2.net.nz.

ABOUT GREYgroup
GREYgroup, a subsidiary of WPP, has 568 offices in 152 cities across 87 countries. Within New Zealand GREYgroup offers multiple solutions under one roof. In NZ we have three operating divisions:

• G2 is a next-generation advertising agency that combines the best of traditional marketing, direct response and interactive disciplines: the human insights of traditional marketers, the Direct Response focus on results and the detailed data/process approach of the web-savvy.
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• Grey Healthcare offers innovation in specialist healthcare communications, whether aimed at healthcare professionals, administrators, public sector health interests or consumer targets.

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• MediaCom is one of the world's largest and most respected independent media planning and buying organisations - small enough to be flexible, nimble and closely in touch with our clients. But MediaCom is also the local arm of a global media powerhouse, ranked #6 in the world and looking after more than $17 billion in worldwide billings.

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