On Demand

To GroupM's global chief digital officer, NFL scandals may be a bellwether for a shift away from big-league entertainment in favor of innovative new celebrities on fresh platforms.

Facebook and LinkedIn rightly make a powerful case for their platforms on the premise that their users register using their real identity and that all their users are logged in with that identity.

@RobNorman, GroupM Global's Chief Digital Officer discusses real online identity via social platforms Facebook and LinkedIn and marketing.

You don’t need to be an engineer to be intrigued by how things work. You don’t need to be a philosopher to wonder how the world fits together. What you do need however is the will and the encouragement to believe that context is valuable, that curiosity is the key to context and the belief that those around you will reward that curiosity. Curiosity may have killed the cat; lack of it may kill our chances of developing the next generation of talent.

A significant proportion of the advertiser and agency community is ready for the arduous annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Lions and a view of the industry through rosé tinted spectacles...

This post was first published on May 20th 2014 on Jack Myers Mediabizbloggers @jackmyers.com 

The following speech was made by robnorman at the International Advertising Association in Beijing on May 10th addressing the issue of the changing nature of the media business and the relationship between advertisers and their agencies.  

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share how they turned setbacks into success

Late in 1993 I was on the London Underground, on the way to work as a media director at Chris Ingram Associates. Sitting next to me was an American man. I knew that as he was wearing a trench coat and brown brogues shined so finely that they appeared to be made of walnut.

Decomposing the structure of Gangnam Style (beyond the song itself) to identify the planned virality and network effect of the piece has been attempted before: 

Use the popularity and / or notoriety of a star

Add a supporting cast that has large and varied social followings

Connect via a cultural meme (in this case the K Pop diaspora) to the world at large

In short a combination of cultural and social triggers that created a remarkable outcome.

My latest Influencer post on LinkedIn addresses women and maternity leave, and the complex issues they face when returning to the workplace... 

Almost without exception mothers, in many countries and businesses, believe that maternity leave compromises their prospects of either becoming employed or of promotion within the organization. At the organizational level at best maternity is tolerated and supported, financially and emotionally but rarely is it celebrated.

What is a revenue event? In my latest as a LinkedIn Influencer, I go deeper into its meaning as well as the planning and analysis of such events. The insight taken from these events can help answer the question of which part of your business to advertise.

Does your company have the good kind of Chief Digital Officer, or the bad kind? Either way, the future of this title seems bleak, and we may even wonder why we even had it. 

As originally published in The Economic Times (2/26/14)

In 2018, no company will have a chief digital officer. In fact, many will wonder why they ever had one. The CDO was a response by the management of many manufacturing, services and agency businesses to the emergence of a set of networks, devices and protocols that created new consumer behaviours, new businesses, new media and communication experiences.

Of course those same technologies that unlocked opportunity for some vaporised the legacy models of others. Those who followed the adage that you 'should do something that is inevitable before the inevitable does it to you' were more likely to survive and prosper in the changing world than those that did not. Many companies responded to change by the appointment of a Chief Digital Officer and often an entire digital organisation. There are two kinds of CDO; the first kind, the good kind, lived at the heart of the business process.

They were and are charged with infusing digital expertise into the fabric of the organisation or function. They were asked the questions. How and when change would affect what we do, how can we leverage technology to execute more effectively, grasp opportunity and know what we can build, what we can protect and what we should abandon as it will become redundant?

They were purpose driven change agents. The second kind; the bad kind, was set up down the hall. Either as a trophy; "it's okay, we have a CDO so we 'get' digital." Or as human Band Aid; "that's OK we don't have to think about digital because we have someone who does and when something starts to bleed he will fix it".

The truth, of course, is that it is no longer satisfactory to have a Chief Marketing Officer that separates digital consumer behaviours from analogue, or e commerce channels from retail. It's a division that no longer exists in the mind of the consumer and so should no longer exist in the enterprise. It's no longer appropriate for a Chief Information Officer to separate social data from survey data or scanner data from e commerce data in the pursuit of either information or insight.

It is wrong to have a Chief Creative Officer who loves television but rejects YouTube and Twitter. It has become equally artificial to separate desktop from tablet from the handheld mobile device. Digital is about breaking down old barriers not building new ones.

The demands on the organisation and the CSuite are simple, get digital or get out. Maybe it's here that the catalyst for both the birth and the extinction of the CDO lie. The change in everything created first by broadband and accelerated by mobility happened so quickly that entrenched business practices and thinking simply could not deal with it, and "the rapid removal of inertia from the system." (I borrow this quote from @ShekharKapur at WPPStream in Jaipur recently).

Put simply, the speed and democratisation of information had such a profound effect on consumer behaviours, that a whole generation of managers, along the entire length of the supply and demand chain, have been intellectually shipwrecked. Only a few have had the ability and presence of mind, to ride and survive the wave.

Those people have digitised their own office, populated it with people with respect but not slavish attachment to the legacy and allowed the new generation to lead as well as educate, changing themselves and creating transformational strategies at speed and a cohort of managers to occupy the C Suite of the future and increasingly the present.

Every year we go to CES hoping to get a glimpse of the biggest (or smallest, really) and best technology. This year, the emphasis was on connectivity. The advancements in technology at CES enabling the connected consumer to live a seamless life show us the lifestyles of the future - full of sensors reacting to everything that we do.

My first LinkedIn Influencer post of the new year takes a look at "hard news" in relation to advertisers and how advertisers have no obligation to support it, though it would be good for business.

As originally published on MediaBizBloggers (11/26/13)

Paid advertising is infinitely scalable but at a cost that advertisers increasingly seek to defray by accruing earned media impressions or interactions.

Earned media is broadly defined as an exposure, view or interaction with a commercial message via an impression that was not purchased by the advertiser. Engagement with a paid impression is a reward for good creativity and targeting but is not earned in this context.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (comments from all are welcome) offer the opportunity to build communities around a brand and the notion of a “soft opt-in” of followers, friends or subscribers creating a level of permission in marketing. This seems both desirable and straightforward.

In Twitter's case the equation is simple to understand. If A follows B then all B's tweets find their way to the Twitter stream of A. There is no algorithmic filter.

An advertiser tweets, its followers see that tweet (or more accurately have the opportunity to see if they see that part of their stream), the exposure is earned. An advertiser promotes a tweet, the media is paid. If the recipient re-tweets, views of the re-tweet are earned.

This is not the case with Facebook. The Facebook news feed is algorithmically filtered for relevance. Facebook themselves say “as Facebook users make more connections, and those connections all share more content, each year there's more content available than anyone can reasonably consume. Newsfeed is the place where this sport plays out – and the goal of Facebook is to make newsfeed as useful a place as possible for its users”.

The effect of this is that the more frequently A interacts with B, the more often B's posts will appear in A's news feed. Infrequent interactions mean infrequent exposure and, in some cases no exposure. Simply put, the value of a friend on Facebook diminishes or increases in relation to the frequency of engagement. In Facebook's case, therefore, earned media is restricted to the organic posts that make it through the algorithmic filter, the subsequent shares of those posts and the shares of posts that arrive in the news feed as paid impressions. Facebook's reach is massive and that has undoubted value, it's just not free and the earned to paid ratio is less than some marketers had hoped for -- yet it remains worth pursuing.

YouTube is different again; any brand can post a video or create a channel on YouTube. On occasion a miracle may happen. The brand video, often fueled by the oxygen of a little paid media may go viral yielding a huge earned dividend on the paid investment. Inevitably this is the exception rather than the rule. As someone once said, “like self-immolation it's hard to do more than once.” More often the vast majority of the views to brand videos are paid, with a single digit percentage of earned views accruing to the advertiser via shares. As an aside “the brand video hit parades” that fill many a column inch around the world don't distinguish between paid and organic views. This is rather like a ranking of commercials by volume of GRPs and passing it off as a measure of popularity.

In all these cases the message to the advertiser is clear. Earned media is first and foremost a function of the assets you create and your willingness to promote them. The degree to which they are shared, used and engaged with is a helpful measure of their value and an important ingredient of the creative brief.

This is a truth that has dogged every advertiser and agency from the beginning of Internet time when we created web sites, celebrated our organic traffic and then turned resentfully to banner ads, Google and Yahoo to bring the eyeballs we craved as the next million web sites appeared. We learned that the more utility we created through commerce, service, high value information or entertainment the greater the organic return.

We did exactly the same with our first Facebook Fan Pages. At first they came by themselves or from a prompt on TV or a shopping bag; then we had to buy friends (we've all done it) and now we pay to reach the friends we have already bought, albeit at a discount to buying new friends and strangers. And so it goes on. Today the story is repeating itself in the world of app development in which we have learned quickly that organic discovery is often ineffective and that a combination of paid promotion and usefulness are necessary nutrients on the path from install to persistent use.

Paid, owned and earned is a well-worn (but not stupid) taxonomy of messaging but it is one that demands context. Unless you choose, with more or less justification, to place a massive multiple on the value of an organic like, view, interaction or share you will be faced with the crushing inevitably that while it may not be able to sing or dance; money talks.