Back in February, we all had to sit through those ominous commercials about the digital conversion telling us our life’s media blood would be sucked into a big black hole if we didn’t immediately run and buy a converter box. Whew! Then we got a four-month reprieve to sit through more ominous commercials. Well, a new study finds that over 2 million households never got the word. And, by the time you read this article they’ll be sitting in front of their big black-holed TVs and frantically re-positioning those rabbit ears to no avail.
So here’s the lesson of how this ties into marketing. If your high-tech campaign can’t be viewed by your lower tech audience it’s going to negatively affect your return on investment.
Not a day goes by that I don’t have an agency asking me for the newest of the new IPhone marketing techniques. IPhones are cool. IPhones are highly publicized. But did you know that out of all cell phone users in the United States only 10% (as of February) are IPhone users, according to Nielsen. Essentially agencies insisting on running IPhone-only targeted campaigns or technology are cutting out 90% of the general U.S. cell phone audience to take advantage of a snazzy new trick. Smart marketing idea? Ya know, I’m thinkin’ not so much. Unless of course you are selling an IPhone app.
There are times to run micro-targeted campaigns to very small segments of the population deemed to be especially responsive to certain messages. But the real trick is to know when those times are, and not to use “the trick” for everything just because it’s available to you.
Sure it is a heck of a lot more fun to pitch a client on some newfangled technology. But are you going to also tell that client that they’re missing out on a considerable segment just for a sexy gizmo?
When I was at a former company, I kept a really old PC we nicknamed “Irv” at a desk in my department. Every time my boss came up with a new tech trick that was the “flavor of the moment in the trades” I’d have my team do it and test it on the old computer. If “Irv” couldn’t see it, we didn’t do it.
New is good. New is fun. New is fabulous for promoting new things. But jumping on the “new” bandwagon for the sake of new just to say you’re doing it…is old. Nobody wants to look like they’re behind or chasing their competitors. But, the answer is to test out the “brand new” technology in a way that works for your brand and will pay off. Not just to use it.
So here’s how you take the numbers and translate them into campaigns that make sense. In that same report, Nielsen says “the number of U.S. mobile Internet users has jumped 74% in the past two years.” They go on to say, “about 50 million Americans used the Internet through their mobile devices in February, up from about 29 million two years earlier. “ Those are the kind of statistics we marketers live for! But, let’s look at what this and what this isn’t saying.
A mobile message with a click-to-WAP (wireless application protocol) in order to watch a video will be a message that reaches this audience in a way that most can receive and view. It’s a smart way to take a statistic such as the one from Nielsen and use a “new-ish” technology in a way that really gets the word out. An MMS (multimedia messaging service) message with a streaming video within the message will be received and viewed essentially by that 10% we discussed earlier. So, if your goal is to only hit higher-income, early adopters with a product or service geared only for that group then you’re making a really big impact. If you’re promoting to a larger audience, than you are missing your mark in a big way.
Advertisers can’t assume that the general population (especially in this economy) is on par with the nifty new ideas that we’ve got the capacity to develop. We all want to be the ones with the “talked about” campaigns. But if no one can see what you’re doing, your new idea is just a big black hole.
Carol Lustig is marketing director of Options Media/1Touch Marketing, Boca Raton, FL.
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