As marketers shift budgets from traditional media that they buy through advertising to the more labor-intensive social media, it’s natural that media agencies would want to grab a piece of that action. This week we learned from the Wall Street Journal that Interpublic’s Universal McCann and Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki are building out entire divisions dedicated to social media.

But is that a good idea? No, for two reasons that I’ll get to in a minute. But first, a disclaimer: I spend the last year as social-media manager at McCann Erickson (Universal McCann’s sibling agency within Worldgroup). In other words, until I joined Advertising Age last week, I was that guy.

Essentially, I have two issues with what’s being done — where the social media practice is being built, and that it’s being built at all.

Media Buying and Social/Earned Media Don’t Mix
Universal McCann’s expertise is in media buying and planning, an agenda wholly antithetical to everything that is social-media marketing. Yes, media planning should encompass outlets of all types, and thus must take into account planned activity in the social space when allocating funds. However, it’s what UM represents — buying increments of attention through which brands broadcast messages to consumers — that I find so contradictory to the dynamics of social media and, consequently, marketing on social platforms.

Namely, in order to generate the buzz and really tap that word-of-mouth potential, the best investment a brand can make is time. It takes living, breathing, human beings devoting their time to converse with consumers to get a feel for what they want from the brand. It takes time to win their trust. Only after the relationship is built can the strategists and creative teams jump in to leverage that rapport for the purposes of a marketing campaign (or customer service). And even then, the goal is to earn the attention of your audience by providing something valuable, functional, or entertaining, not to buy it.

As such, I was quite surprised to hear that UM is the division of McCann Worldgroup charged with housing Rally and spearheading the social-media initiative for the one-stop-shop. While there are many IPG subsidiaries that may lay a valid claim on social media, Worldgroup, IPG’s “one-stop-shop,” houses only a few viable options. And UM, the branch devoted to purchasing ad units and 30-second ad blocks of attention, is not the one I’d associate with expertise in social media and earning consumer attention.

My only thought is that perhaps as “buying attention” becomes less effective, the intention here is to consciously push UM into a new space via this manufactured evolution.

It’s not that they don’t have a place in the conversation, they do, and it’s in research and metrics or Facebook homepage takeovers that drive to a campaign — areas that naturally flow from traditional media planning — not thought leadership, not campaign development, not strategy. That’s just too far from their core area of expertise. This is why I am utterly confused as to why Worldgroup chose them as their flagship in this space, especially when they are also made up of McCann Erickson and Weber Shandwick, both of which may be much better suited for the role.

Divisions Upon Subdivisions, When Will it End?
Secondly, beyond the confounding undertaking by Universal McCann, we have the industry-wide movement to continuously create new divisions dedicated toward every novel platform or technology as it emerges.

Creating separate divisions like this is essentially admittance that the rest of the organization is too lazy or too stupid keep up, not something I’d like to broadcast if it were my agency. The solution these agencies are looking for is one of education and consistent reeducation, creating a baseline knowledge that obviates the need for entire sections of company to focus on something everyone should understand.

Is there ever reason for bringing in a few specialists when needed? Of course there is, but in leadership roles. And even then, the goal must be to absorb their expertise to the point that it is fully integrated within the work flow structure. The fractal model of building divisions within micro-agencies within agencies is not a solution.

Think about it: As big agencies evolve and grow their capabilities by adding specialist departments, they are simultaneously, and intentionally, building an added layer of separation into the work-flow process. While it may seem like a necessary byproduct, it will only serve to hider efforts and create discord in the long term, and needs to be addressed at the inception point, not as an afterthought.

The more personnel committed to such exacting specialties (the extreme being embodied by these dedicated divisions), the further the agency moves in the wrong direction. The only reason for building out these sub-practices is for branding and positioning. The ultimate goal of these tactics is the generation of additional revenue, not the legitimate development of services or expertise.

Posted by David Teicher on 07.20.10 @ 04:50 PM

Methodological problems throw spending figures off wildly. There is some good news, though: Competitive tools for digital display aren’t useless, and you can glean lots of other competitive insights from the data your agency gives you.

First, let’s talk about how you ought to use digital competitive tools:

Do: Leverage Competitive Tools for Creative Insights

While competitive tools might miss details of competitors’ buys, they’re pretty good at giving an overview of what the competition was running over a given timeframe. You’ll be able to see their banner ads and other forms of display ads, and thus get a fairly good idea of what competitors were trying to achieve with their campaign. Seeing “Click Here to Buy” messages in the frames of a banner ad means the ad was part of a direct sales campaign, whereas a “Click Here to Sign Up For Our Newsletter” call to action means the campaign supported CRM. If a competitor was supporting a brand objective, a social media support objective, or a promotion, you’ll be able to tell from the creative that was running at the time.

Do: Use Competitive Tools for Media Strategy Insights

Competitive tools are pretty good at giving a snapshot of where competitors were running last month or last quarter, and once you have an idea of what ran, where and at what time, you can put together some accurate guesses as to why. Competitive services don’t track all sites and don’t necessarily pick up all ads, but you can discern the basic media strategy of a competitor by looking at where they ran.

For instance, if a competitor ran an all-out blitz covering the home pages of the major portal sites for a day, that’s indicative of a buy that seeks to cume reach very quickly — perhaps support for a sales event. Looking at the creative that ran on that day can confirm any suspicions you might have. Your ad agency might also be able to look at a list of sites on which a competitor ran activity and tell you whether or not the buy was likely executed with an ad network. Knowing a bit about where competitors run ads might give you some insight into how they approach their buys, and how they value digital display media.

Do: Use Competitive Tools to Detect New Efforts

If you or your agency are regularly reviewing competitive reports, you’ll see whether activity is showing up on new sites or whether new ads are replacing old ones. When new messaging appears in digital display ads, the competitive tools are pretty quick to pick it up. In fact, you might learn about a new effort or integrated ad campaign first from your digital competitive tools.

Now let’s look at the pitfalls of digital competitive reports, and what you ought to avoid:

Don’t: Trust Spending Figures

You might have already compared your own reported spending to your actual spending and wondered why they were so far off. (If not, please do so — it’s a valuable exercise.) The inaccuracies are the result of a methodology problem that has existed for more than a decade, and no one is likely to solve it soon.

What throws off the figures are three vexing challenges: The first is an incomplete picture of a competitor’s ad campaign, because the competitive service is unable to track every impression on every ad-supported site. The second is the guesswork these services do to predict the volume of the buys they do pick up. Finally, the competitive services are off with their spending figures because they have no idea how the agency bought the inventory. Was it a $20 CPM premium buy, or a 50-cent CPM remnant buy? Maybe it was bought on a performance basis. The competitive service doesn’t know.

Whereas in traditional media, competitive spending is usually off by a predictable radio, too many variables contribute to digital’s variance for digital spending numbers to be off in a consistent way. So don’t trust the numbers.

Don’t: Assume Every Bit of Display Activity Was Picked Up

If no ads were picked up for a competitor last quarter, that doesn’t mean they were dark. Competitive tracking services have trouble picking up targeted buys. Your competition could have run a few million dollars’ worth of behaviorally targeted, geo-targeted or profile-targeted advertising that flew under the radar of the competitive services. Furthermore, your competitors could appear invisible to you if they advertised deep into the long tail — whether buying directly on smaller sites, or using networks that reach people in places other than on the web’s top ad-supported sites.

Don’t: Think You’re Getting the Whole Digital Marketing Picture

Competitive tools will give you some guidance on digital display activity. That’s what they’re built to do. But you’ll need separate tools to tell you about a competitor’s share of a category in search. (We had to build our own tool to address this gap.) Neither will you get meaningful data on what competitors are spending in social media (unless the display campaign has a significant component of supporting ads on Facebook and the like). Nor will you get guidance on what they’re doing in CRM, mobile apps or in other non-display areas of digital.

Obviously, there are some deficiencies in how we track competitive activity in the digital realm. This guide will give you an idea of what’s real and what’s not — or, at least, what questions you ought to ask your agency, the next time they tell you what’s going on in your category.

Tom Hespos AdAge Digital Next

Two clever social-media technology companies, Syncapse and Vitrue, took a crack at answering this seemingly simple question. I say seemingly simple because, in reality, the “value” of a fan can mean lots of things such as actual sales value or value as evangelists or value as a research resource in a crowdsourcing campaign.

And given the ad hoc nature of measurement today, it’s no surprise, therefore, that we see wildly divergent answers from these two companies. Syncapse, for instance, assigns the average value of a fan at $136.38, and Vitrue pegs the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60. The wild differences, of course, lies in what you are measuring. Let’s take a closer look.

The Syncapse approach
I got to hear Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons present the findings from a joint, proprietary research study his company did with Hotspex. It was designed to calculate the value of a fan based on a set of attributes as described by Synapse in the study:

* Product spending — Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
* Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) — Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
* Propensity to recommend — 68% of fans are “very likely” to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
* Brand affinity — 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).

Together these attributes (and a few others) roll into a sophisticated formula which yields an average value of $136 per fan. Now, I love the idea of these metrics. I love the scope that these attributes reach for. I appreciate how cleverly they assigned a dollar value to intangible attributes such as brand affinity. And rightly, the study spends a fair amount of time acknowledging that the value is highly dependent on lots of variables.

Yet, the study requires us to take some pretty big leaps of faith since the data is self-reported — not behaviorally tracked. This somewhat stacks the data deck – after all a fan means they are already favorably predisposed.

But even if one is willing to take these leaps of faith, what are the practical applications of this information? Does a marketer then use this measure to justify shifting dollars from one media into Facebook? Is it a “dollar for dollar” shift? Or is this information best used as a theoretical baseline for some objective measure of progress? While I like this approach because it is innovative and ambitious, its practical application remains to be seen.

The Vitrue approach
Vitrue’s approach to the question, “What’s the value of a Facebook community?,” is to associate fan value to the value of impressions generated in the Facebook news feed. It then applies display banner advertising pricing to the number of Facebook fans (at $5 per CPM) for a value metric. The results of the study are based on Vitrue’s own client data that had a combined 41 million fans. With this approach, one can theoretically increase monthly media impressions significantly so that, for instance, a marketer with a large Facebook fan base that posts twice a day can deliver 60 million more impressions/ month. Here is a recap (and many thanks to Webtechuniverse’s blog post) of the formula: 1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions 60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000 $300,000 x 12 months = $3.6M $3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60

This approach is valid and similar to the methodology used to assign media value to publicity received in the news. “It’s important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you’re leveraging it,” said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue, and they provide a nifty tool to help you measure your value Facebook fan page.

While this approach is more focused than the Syncapse approach (though less strategic), even within the more limited scope, here too we must be willing to take a leap of faith, which is that all impressions perform equally irrespective of environment within which those impressions are delivered. And then the inevitable “Now what?” problem also raises its head because we are not clear on how to apply this learning in the real world. Does this suggest that a wholesale dollar shift will deliver comparable results? (I’d love to hear from the Vitrue folks on this point.)

Conclusion
I fully appreciate the need to put an ROI face to the question (pun intended), and I much applaud the efforts by these companies to give guidance. But it seems fair to step back for a moment and ask ourselves a bigger question: “What is our Facebook marketing investment worth?” The way to answer that bigger question might be, in fact, to reframe it within the context of specific marketing campaigns like direct marketing rather than looking at this problem in a “monolithic” sense. As David Armano, senior VP, Edelman Digital, observed in a session on Facebook; we would do well to think of Facebook as part of a larger marketing “ecosystem” where there are practical and actionable set of measures like customer lifetime value, acquisition costs and sales.

The way forward
There is a rising chorus of voices demanding a coordinated industry approach to metrics and methodology used in the measurement of social media that integrates the disparate trade organizations’ efforts while introducing the best thinking from innovative companies like Syncapse and Vitrue. This will allow the industry to come up with an accepted standard set of metrics that provide true actionability. It’s time we roll this initiative out in earnest — so if you have a voice or want to help, feel free to e-mail me.e-mail me

So what did I learn about the value of a Facebook fan in the last week? At least I learned enough to say, “It all depends…”

Judy Shapiro, Digital Next, AdAge.com

The world’s greatest sporting spectacle, the World Cup.  You might think from the prevalence of its “Write the Future” campaign on the web and in pop culture, that Nike is an official World Cup sponsor. It’s not. Nor is Pepsi, whose “Oh Africa” has been racking up millions of views on the web since May. Rather, the official sponsors are Adidas and Coke — and both have also produced compelling online videos in association with their campaigns. As we all know, brands often pay significant sums of money to be the exclusive sponsor for high-profile sporting events including the World Cup, Olympics and Super Bowl.

These sponsorships typically include a number of elements and are supported by TV, on premise and promotional support. To their credit, the event organizers themselves go to great lengths in order to protect the value of the sponsors, and the relationship they have with the event. Before the Beijing Olympics, the government assumed control of the outdoor ad space so that the sponsors would be given access to it. For as long as brands have sponsored these events, other brands have tried to ride along on the brand equity of the events as well.

This concept — known as “ambush marketing” — involves running similarly themed campaigns around the time of the event without actually mentioning the event itself. A famous example of this was American Express’ campaign around the Barcelona Olympics, “You don’t need a visa to go to Barcelona” (Visa was the Olympic sponsor). Aware of this practice, sponsoring brands usually think ahead of how to counteract them on site or on TV. Enter the web… As Nike and Pepsi have recently demonstrated, the open distribution and virality of the web create a whole new path for ambush marketing. In the “Write the Future” campaign, Nike produced a video starring their top-tier talent. They then used the web as an initial distribution ground. Two weeks and 15 million-plus views later, Nike has created a brand association with soccer, and likely the World Cup itself. Adidas also produced a very compelling video using talent as well — only it debuted a bit later and was far less seen or distributed. While Adidas may have a significant TV or local presence planned over the next two weeks, it got hijacked online.

So what can a brand do to protect itself, or alternately, what can you do to best position yourself to steal someone else’s thunder?

Start early! While you might not be able to own the conversation, you can at least start it. Plan far in advance — it is better to be a bit early to the party than to miss it completely. Starting the conversation immediately allows you to insert yourself into it.

Spend early! Don’t just plan your viral campaign to start early — adjust some of the spending cycle as well. Social media, rapid news cycles and thousands of bloggers are all affecting marketing plans in ways no one would have predicted 10 years ago. With these new tools, people have more outlets to talk about big events way in advance and websites actually have incentives to do so to increase search and other referral traffic. As a result, there is no shortage of relevant content to associate with from a very early stage, and users are in the right mindset well in advance of where they were years ago. As a frame of reference, type World Cup 2010 into Google — you get 196,000,000 results. Think about that –- there are close to 200,000,000 million pages that have already been indexed about the topic and the event hasn’t even started yet. Be clear While Keith Richman assume that event sponsors have many restrictions on how they can market their association, it is increasingly clear that subtlety does not work online.

As creative as the Adidas video is, it does not directly refer to their sponsorship. Wow factor The videos produced by Nike and Pepsi both have what Keith Richman call “the wow factor.” You watch the video and want to share it as a result of the story and creativity. Adidas and Coke also produced high quality content that was interesting and compelling –- but needed more “wow” to succeed online.

Target an audience! Targeting a specific audience may seem like impractical advice when talking about events like the Super Bowl or Olympics, which are inherently broad and have mass appeal. In reality though, you need a core group of evangelists to help spread the word for you, or you will never reach the broad audiences. Reach out to these evangelists early, let them know what is coming and get them excited.

In today’s world, the web and social media are rewriting the rules of marketing. This presents both new opportunities and challenges for brands, but in any event, is a factor that must be considered when hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorships are on the line.

Keith Richman, Digital Next, AdAge.com

The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in South Africa, making it the first World Cup since the explosion of social media. The growth of social media since the last tournament in 2006 has led some bloggers to predict that the tournament will be the biggest event to ever hit Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, due to its international appeal (compared to other events that have been popular in social media such as the United States presidential election, the Super Bowl or the Oscars). Matt Stone, head of new media for FIFA (soccer’s international governing body), recently declared, “This is the first social media World Cup, where ordinary fans can become instant pundits from their living rooms.”

The World Cup is also a massive groundswell of marketing activity. This might be social media’s first truly global marketing foray and, based on what I have seen, social media marketing strategies will be at the heart of the 2010 World Cup. Advertisers have already harnessed the power of this; major World Cup sponsor Sony Ericsson is focusing its advertising dollars on social networking, shunning traditional marketing in the process. Sony has launched what they are calling the Twitter Cup, which will pit tweets from countries participating in the World Cup against each other. Coca-Cola will also be running an ad exclusively on social media during the World Cup.

I’m surprised that FIFA itself hasn’t been more robust in social media during the days leading up to the World Cup. Sure, it has developed The Club, FIFA’s own social network which has 1.6 million users, but it feels like a missed opportunity that FIFA hasn’t created an official Facebook application to capture the immense global anticipation and to join together the global elements of the tournament.

Consider that the 1.6 million users of the FIFA application pale in comparison to the 400 million member reach of Facebook, many of whom are soccer fans. It feels as if FIFA hasn’t really leveraged the significant power of the social networks that already exist (and where people already spend their time).

So, what are the key marketing takeaways from this?

If your company wants to engage in social media, do so in the users’ native space rather than trying to aggregate it back to your own website.

Consider the difference in approach between Sony Ericsson, whose goal is to use Twitter to play in the supporters’ space, and FIFA, who created its own social network rather than leverage what already exists (and is popular).

In any case, when the world’s most-watched sport and the world’s most-used social media sites meet this Friday for the first time, it will be an interesting experiment in old vs. new media. Surely some tweets, websites and advertisers will rise above the rest as the go-to sources and innovators. Regardless of whom you’re cheering for, how social media plays out during the month-long tournament is something that will definitely be intriguing to watch.

HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

by Michael Learmonth (for the New York AdAge)

Call it a hand-holding tour. Yahoo and Microsoft executives and a small army of consultants will be making the rounds to agencies and marketers this summer to tell them what they need to know about the integration of the two search engines to create a stronger competitor to Google.

Meanwhile, the planning phase is over and both sides have embarked on the complex task of connecting Yahoo’s search front end to Bing’s search technology. The entire process is scheduled to be complete in October, but much has to happen between now and then. There are a lot of moving parts, and historically, these things don’t go smoothly. So what should you watch for in the Yahoo-Bing integration?

The fourth-quarter timing
The timeline doesn’t give marketers much leeway to test the system before the holiday season. “Launching in Q4 seems to offer marketers a lot of risk for very little reward,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of digital agency 360i. Yahoo execs say if it appears they can’t reach desired quality levels, the deadline will be pushed until 2011. “Our priority is to transition with quality — quality judged by achieving business results for advertisers and publishers,” said Mark Morrissey, Yahoo senior VP and head of the search alliance.

Marketers’ learning curve
Theoretically, search advertisers know how Yahoo ads perform and how Bing ads perform. But how will they perform together? And will marketers take the plunge before the holiday season or move spending to Google? “We don’t know exactly, but we’re anticipating that it will be a blended average, so bids will adjust to appropriate levels,” said Kevin Lee, CEO of search-marketing firm DidIt.

Can Microsoft execute?
Every Yahoo-Microsoft advertiser will need an AdCenter account to use the combined system, but AdCenter isn’t ready for the volume. Key to meeting the deadline will be whether Microsoft can deliver two new releases of platform, the second built to handle the additional volume. “Largely, it is about Microsoft hitting delivery dates that will dictate the schedule,” Mr. Morrissey said.

Yahoo and Microsoft’s working relationship
Microsoft isn’t the easiest company to partner with, but there’s a sense that this can’t be allowed to fail, and so far, so good. It doesn’t hurt that the head of Microsoft advertising, Qi Liu, once ran Yahoo search, and several other Microsoft execs also worked on Yahoo’s Panama platform. It also doesn’t hurt that about 400 Yahoo search employees are migrating to Redmond. Meanwhile, former Microsoft search advertisers have to meet their new sales reps from Yahoo.

Will it matter?
Fundamentally, advertisers go where the queries are, and so far Bing’s gains appear to be coming directly from Yahoo, which won’t help in the competition with Google. “It’s like pulling change out of your right pocket and putting it into your left,” Mr. Weiner said. If the search transition was finished today, combined query share would be 29.5% in the U.S. What will it be when October rolls around?

With estimated spending by 14- to 34-year-old consumers of $1.2 trillion at stake, per market researcher Mintel International, it’s not surprising that a conference last week in California focusing on new ways of communicating with that population segment drew some of the nation’s top marketers, including Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric and Activision Blizzard.

But a survey of the 35 CEOs and senior marketers attending the PTTOW conference did reveal some surprising results.

One key finding: today’s youth are extremely “cause” conscious. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said that it’s important to tie marketing campaigns aimed at them to social movements, such as the environment or education or other cause-related initiatives that could affect social change. (Watch video highlights from the conference.)

The survey also revealed the extent to which social media has become integral to marketing efforts in just a few short years — each respondent said his firm is now using social media in some form to connect with consumers. Almost half reported that they believed online and social media will be the “most impactful media in connecting with Generation Y over the next two years.” Another 34 percent said mobile would be the most impactful.

Location-based social media functionality will grow dramatically in the near term, per the survey. Nearly two-thirds said it would become a “key element” in social media over the next year.

Executives at the conference stressed that while implementing social media components is important, it’s not easy to do right. And while many companies are investing in social media platforms, the return on those investments is not clear — yet.

“We’ve been rethinking the complete digital ecosystem” over the past couple of years, said Greg Johnson, global creative director at HP. “In many ways we’ve been thinking beyond hp.com and trying to figure our role on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others that are creating communities around specific value exchanges or other types of interests that we need to be aware of,” he said.

From a marketing perspective, said Johnson, brands need to immerse themselves in new and existing digital communities to determine “which ones work and which don’t.” The new landscape, he said, “is complicated, sometimes messy and sometimes hard to get down to things like success metrics.”

“I don’t think any brand has figured it all the way out,” said Johnson. “We’re still in the midst of watching the changes as they continue to happen. We’re going from a world where brands were adjacent to content and would try to grab attention from people to one where content is actually coming from the brands themselves.”

Johnson and others at the conference agreed that social media platforms have an important role to play in marketing to younger consumers, but they aren’t likely to displace traditional media anytime soon.
Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at the Coca-Cola Co., said the array of social media is one of the “many great ways” that marketers can reach young people today. Social media are best at building “brand love” and other relationships with customers, she said. Mobile is versatile and good for both broad reach and narrowly targeted messaging. “But we probably know even less about the effectiveness of mobile,” she said. “We’re learning as we go along.”

And traditional media such as TV, out of home, radio and print remain important as well. “The key is to integrate paid media with earned and owned media,” Kruse said.

The metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of social media are a work in progress. “In many cases marketers are still measuring effectiveness of what they do in digital impressions and clicks,” said Mike Murphy, chief revenue officer at Facebook. But that doesn’t adequately assess the value that a community like Facebook brings to the table, he asserted, where “customers are opting to have a two-way relationship with their favorite brands. That creates value.”

HP’s Johnson agreed. Audience size is of less importance in today’s fragmented media landscape. “We have to measure things like resonance and value and frankly the durability of the impact that we’re having,” he said.

According to Kruse, a new campaign revolving around the upcoming World Cup in June illustrates how the marketer is using social media to build and strengthen its relationship with soccer-loving consumers. The campaign, known as the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour by Coca-Cola, allowed thousands of fans in 86 countries over 225 days to get an up-close look at soccer’s grandest prize.

The project has a dedicated YouTube channel and ads drive traffic to the site. “We’re building a global community around our consumers love [for the] World Cup and their favorite teams,” she said.

Adweek may 2010

Adidas’ 11th official World Cup ball is named Jabulani, which means “to celebrate” in isiZulu, one of the 11 languages of South Africa.

The official South Africa FIFA World Cup ball also features 11 different colors representing not just those 11 languages, but also the 11 players in every team and the 11 South African communities.

Heineken’s brilliant campaign; Make your six-pack real pretty.

Average six-pack not good enough for you? Heineken might be able to help you out with Your Heineken, which allows beer drinkers to order customized six-packs for themselves or as gifts.

Consumers can submit their own pictures or designs or choose from 42 pre-designed sleeves. They can preview their creations on theYour Heineken website, which provides a 3D visualization of the customized bottle. Pricing varies according to country.

What a brilliant way to reach and triggers concumer’s interaction and creativity!

The boundaries separating advertising, PR, and digital are more than blurred — they’re gone. Today, the most effective approaches take the best, most successful elements from each area of marketing and combine them into something that’s far greater than the sum of its results-focused parts. The top tactics are triple threats, blending the control of advertising with the credibility of PR and the measurability of digital.

That philosophy is being reinforced on a number of fronts. Most recently, an Opinion Research Corporation survey sponsored by ARAnet measured consumer response to five different types of online advertising. For the second year, the survey found that the type of online ad that consumers most likely read and act upon is one that has traditionally fallen under the public-relations domain — articles that include brand information.

Wait — the most successful online ad type is one that utilizes a PR-centric approach? It’s not that much of a surprise: Public relations practitioners have seen the benefit of content-rich messaging for a long time, and have relied on it to engage with consumers on a number of fronts, from traditional newspaper and magazine articles to emails to blog posts. And now it’s becoming apparent that consumers seek this same type of information in their ads. Article-based advertising incorporates client brand information into informative content on high-profile news and information sites, and can either follow a PPC or flat-rate model.

In the ORC study, conducted in March, respondents rated their likelihood to read and act upon five types of online advertising: banner ads, pop-up ads, email offers, articles that include brand information, and sponsored search engine links. Respondents said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and respond to:

• Articles that include brand information: 53 percent compared to 51 percent a year ago
• Email offers: 51 percent compared to 47 percent last year
• Sponsored search engine links: 40 percent compared to 39 percent last year
• Banner ads: 28 percent compared to 25 percent last year
• Pop-up ads: 19 percent compared to 13 percent last year

There are several important lessons to apply from this data, which encompass the “marketing melting-pot” convergence trend, including:

Content is king — especially in digital
The survey adds a data point to the voices of marketing pros and bloggers who are saying that many online ad methods aren’t cutting it anymore. The data tells us that the most sought-after marketing audiences — the young and high-income consumers — want more. They want content — and more context. Compared to banner ads or other options, these consumers respond better when they can read an informative article, evaluate it, and then decide to click through for more information.

Build brand storytelling into every tactic
The survey found a correlation between article-based ads and search: 57 percent of adults said they initiate web searches “very frequently” or “somewhat frequently” for products and services they read about in online articles. Younger and high-income people are even more likely than the rest of the population to conduct a search after reading online articles. These long-form articles are an excellent method of not only boosting search, but also of telling your brand story. It’s also possible to integrate brand-focused messaging into nearly every tactic, online and off, as consumers engage more deeply with messages that feature rich, impactful content.

Seek complementary results
Media exposure in one channel tends to have a positive effect on other channels, and enhances the performance of each. And when a single tactic helps you meet several objectives, all the better. Look for tactics that achieve multiple marketing goals, like articles that also drive SEO, or PPC ads that also build your brand.

Update your measurement
These integrated tactics require an integrated measurement system. Counting clicks alone doesn’t cut it anymore. In addition to traditional ad and digital metrics, you’ll also need to rely on or develop softer methods of measuring impact on your brand, and gauging customer engagement via social media.

Pay attention to attribution
It’s easy to attribute a sale to Google after someone visits your landing page, but what other media exposure actually inspired the user to search for your product? In order to truly attribute customer action to the right tactic, make sure to keep an eye on the interplay among all of your media, and how each channel supports the others. We often hear from our clients that their other media — including paid search — performs better when they’re running a branded-article campaign.

As the lines continue to blur among marketing disciplines, pros can bank on this here-to-stay trend: A combo platter of improved measurability, better ROI, faster action, and a stronger connection to constituents.

Scott Severson is the president of ARAnet Inc.