I recently returned from Spain and spotted a few things whilst away. Even when wearing silly shorts, with ice cream on tap, marketing is still on the mind.
High-flying media claims
Online digital advertising has been winning the KPI war for a number of years. A large proportion of online marketing content can be targeted, optimised and measured, making it a preferred channel for marketing teams. Whist offline can often demonstrate larger reach, measurement is harder to attribute.
However, air travel advertising might have a distinct advantage; with air passengers set to double in 20 years, this is an opportunity to get a message in front of an affluent traveller with few distractions. On my return flight, I even saw a media advert making the bold claim that 78% of people will act on seeing an advert in this magazine.
This leads to an immediate question: how do they know people are acting? A flick through the ads showed limited specific codes, URLs or reference for companies to track advert success. Plus, what do they consider an ‘act’ to be – visiting a website, making an enquiry, buying a product, writing a blog post? It goes to show that digital has led print media platforms to evidence their success and justify companies investing in the medium. It would be interesting to see the data in more detail.
Brighten up your recycling
Big rule of consumer behaviour change: If you want someone to do something, make it easy and fun for them to do. I’ve heard a lot about recycling bottles, paper and card, but I saw a great example of encouraging people to recycle bottle tops. I recently heard that when recycling, you need to remove the bottle tops from bottles, as coloured plastic tops are tougher to recycle than clear plastic.
This town in Spain has turned its recycling of bottle tops into an art form. A fun way to capture bottle tops, by creating a piece of art. Residents can also see how far they are progressing with their recycling too. I wonder how recycling can add colour to your town?
Facebook planning
Whilst away the Facebook scandal broke, with them admitting to 87 million users’ data being improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. The political consultancy was then able to profile users to target ads at them. A recent article from BuzzFeed shows that consumer profiling by obtaining data through quizzes is still active on the Facebook platform.
A large part of paid campaign planning is to ensure that we can target the right message to the right audience in the most efficient way. If this can result in additional earned coverage, with people sharing messages with friends on social network sites, then that’s even better. Online platforms allow you to profile and target messages to audiences. As a planner, you want to ensure messages are reaching the right audience. However, as marketing professionals, we need to ensure that any information shared for targeting is done in the right way.
CitizenMe
The problem with these quizzes is that people are not clear how the information they supply will be used. One solution is the CitizenMe app (citizenme.com). The App allows you to complete short quizzes for rewards and choose what information you want to share from your own personal data cloud. The power lies with you to help influence organisations, information is gathered in a transparent way, and it’s up to you how much information you share.
This means you can share your data on specific secure platforms, and just use Facebook for sharing those holiday photos of you in silly shorts eating too much ice cream.