Super Bowl of Real-Time Marketing - $4 Million for 30 Seconds Airtime. Heavily overprized!

With more than 100 million viewers, the Super Bowl game is America’s highest rated television program and unquestionably the ruler of yearly sporting events. It is well known that it is one of the best times for companies to sell their products and messages to consumers.

Companies paid around $4 million a 30-second spot during this year's game!

Image courtesy of Budweiser

This outrageous sum obviously didn't even include the production costs, work and hours invested in creating an attractive and powerful advert; an advert that would have much impact on the public’s awareness, and possibly even become a trending topic on Twitter and Facebook alongside.  Oreo cookies succeeded strikingly as their message was retweeted 10,000 times in the first hour, picked up 18,000 likes and 5,000 shares on Facebook.
According to statistics, the right blend of humor and emotion carries the highest success rate as past Super Bowls has shown. 

Promoting the products started long before the Super Bowl itself;  as part of the "pregame", brands dropped tantalizing Super Bowl tweets and tried to find unique ways to amuse Super Bowl visitors with product sampling, live entertainment and even arranged accommodation for them (e.g. Bud Light Hotel, a cruise ship hosting 4000 Super Bowl fans).

At such monstrous prices and costs involved for the production of an advert and its airtime, industry cynics rightfully questioned whether a legitimate ROI is even possible. 

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB) explained that ”there is plenty of brand awareness for Anheuser-Busch products, but sports marketing is about so much more".
Entertaining fact is that Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB) will need to sell around 5 million cases of beer just to break even on the cost of their Super Bowl ad time, not taking into account their advert production costs.

What a 90 sec advert could have bought Maserati for the estimated costs of $16 to 17 million dollars*?

• 52 full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times
• 60 double-page color spreads and a load of premium digital placements in Forbes
• Every ad in the New York Times tablet app for six months
• 6,000+ spots on CNBC
• 2-minute spots on the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Grammy's
• A 30-second spot every hour in prime time on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News for 4 months
• A national 12-month deal running 90-second spots throughout on cinema
• Every promoted Tweet to the entire U.S. Twitter base for 85 consecutive days

Where would you have invested your money?

* Estimated cost included a 90-second ad (+/- $11 million), production costs of the spot, USA Today cover wrap, Yahoo home-page takeover, paid search and digital display advertising

Image courtesy of http://www.adrants.com

Ageism – discriminating job seekers over 40 – a big mistake!

Prepare yourself for the next trend; make way for 40+-ers!

At some point in our professional lives we will all experience it - the uncertainty of when employers have "enough of us". It might be that they reorganize their company and we find ourselves without a job, for some of us ….again.

It’s daunting to compete for a certain position with young, good-looking youngsters, willing to work for a low salary. Many times, that’s quite discouraging.

Anyone over 40 surely has experienced it….When he/she is invited for a job interview, courage plummeted when a candidate at least 15 year just left the interviewer’s room before you,  applying for the same job that you do.

At this stage you prefer to just walk away and leave, since you believe that you don’t stand a chance…Let’s face it - age shows! Up to now, you might have been able to hide it somehow in your resume, but now at the moment of truth, it’s a different story. During the job interview, you only have one shot to convince the interviewer that the few grey hairs your kids have caused you over the years, combined with lots of work experience, are beneficial for the company and that you are the right candidate for that job.
Once I read that the person who gets the job is the person who is able to sell him/herself best for the job. I honestly believe that this statement is correct.

Therefore, at the job interview, you need to sell yourself. This means that you have to sell your skills, experience, knowledge, maturity, flexibility and all you have to offer. You need to master your fear that this great-looking youngster (who just graduated from university), lacks the life experience and the skills essential for the job. You gained those throughout your life, and promoting it will give you a better chance of getting the job you want (and deserve!).

Image courtesy of
8tracks.com

Empower yourself with pride before your job interview starts. Tell yourself that this job is YOURS, and you will see that your self-confidence will help you convincing your potential future employer.

We might be 40+ but our job is to convince companies that they have a whole lot to gain from what we offer!

If you want to learn more, you can contact me

Mission Impossible: Hiring a Super(wo)man Marketing Person

Trying to catch up with today’s developments in Social Media Technology and Networking is extremely time-consuming. It is a fulltime job to be an expert in all the relevant social media groups and be active in them.

But, in order to be a relevant candidate for a marketing job, you simply do not have a choice – you are asked to be social media-savvy.
During my job search, I encountered multiple requests for not only classic multitasking skills that every passionate marketing professional  should have,  but also to be able to write marketing content, preferably technical content, and have broad experience in social media.

Be honest, who has time to do all of this?

Anyone who is or has been working in the marketing field has experienced at some point during his/her career that regardless how much fun it might be, it’s also extremely time consuming. It requires not only an "eye for detail", but also ongoing creating and posting of fresh content. In short, it requires talent and takes up a lot of time.
It means that employers expect their marketers to catch up with emails, special projects, budget discussions and event arrangements, to write articles, press releases and any other publishable text in addition to be active in all kinds of social networking groups.
But writing (and I mean writing an interesting article that is read from beginning to the end!)  requires skills which a "classic-called" marketing person was never trained for, is not being trained for and most likely will never get trained for.
For all those companies who wish to employ a "super-marketing" person who claims to have all of these skills, please adjust your expectations.

Writing is a skill and requires aptitude, a state-of-mind and lots of time, a condition which is generally a luxury in a so-called standard working atmosphere. The same applies to the social media.
So do yourself a favor. To get the best results with the best talent, start outsourcing! Get dedicated people whose expertise is to write your articles for you, publish them on all the relevant social media and groups. You will not only get high quality, but also make your marketing team happier!

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Marketing ROI – Feasible to Measure?

When reading this article about measuring marketing expenses versus its outcome and (hopefully) profits, you will quickly understand that ROI is not the best way to measure marketing performance. You will also need to accept that questions such as "was my marketing campaign worth the investment?" and "can I measure and verify profit from a marketing campaign?" might remain unanswered.

Image courtesy of marketoonstudios

The reason is simple: there is no correct answer to these questions and moreover, it depends on several factors:
* The kind of marketing campaign used (e.g. using coupon redemptions, publishing a white paper on the companies Facebook page, advertisement on television)
* Is it is a "one-time" campaign or "long-term" running campaign stretched out over several months
* Are you able to accurately measure the cost of marketing your product and through which marketing campaign your customer buys your product.

In order to know if you can validate the success of your campaign, let me give you some basic information about ROI and how it works.

Return on Investment is a financial term and has an authentic financial formula:  Income Earned - Expenses / Expenses. This simple formula is tricky to apply since there are many components involved. Defining revenue made from marketing efforts requires the correct usage of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Through CRM, marketing methods which resulted in a sale, as well as the revenue made from it, can be tracked.

This is not always easy - Let's look at a few samples:
Coupon redemptions. One of Isracard's marketing campaigns encouraged buyers to spend above a certain amount at Ikea. Receiving the redemption coupon required the downloading of a coupon code through Isracard's App. This is a classic example of being able to calculate the investment versus revenue made as the expense of the campaign (television commercial, newspaper ad) is deducted from the income earned (how many products did Ikea sell and at what price) and divided through its overall expenses.

Measuring Online marketing campaigns is not an easy task. When launching a campaign on Social Media Groups, it makes expenses much more difficult to measure. A commonly forgotten expense but a very high one is time. Many times overlooked, dealing with the Social Media is very time consuming.
If you use Online advertising and your goal for example is to drive more traffic to your website than Google Analytics can provide you answers. If this is not your goal, than calculating if the campaign was worth it, becomes almost an impossible task.

Offline  marketing campaigns are probably the most difficult to measure as it requires surveying and statistical sampling in order to accurately evaluate why your customer bought your product.

Having given these samples, another issue when calculation ROI is the expected life-cycle of your product (seasonal versus product running for several years) and how much time you expect it will take to make a sale. Sometimes, it can take months or even years for a product to be developed, marketed and even sold. Trying to calculating this in your ROI is an impossible task!

Conclusion:
Trying to calculate your Marketing ROI is important but very difficult. It requires great precision and precise tracking methods in order to capture even moderately good quality data.

Good luck.

3 MUST-DO Tips for Marketing & Sales Professionals

From experience I can tell that companies not always understand, or do not wish to understand, the cohesive bond and close relationship marketing and sales departments have (or need to have) in order to conduct a profitable business!
Company size doesn't matter, since the foundation and structure for selling products is always the same; the goal is to close a deal!
As marketing juggles its magic box of tricks, the horse is brought to the water; sales will then convince the horse that it is in its best interest to drink.

Image courtesy of: Bob Moran

So, how is this done?
Though there are many more guidelines than the ones listed below, the most important ones are:

1. Set periodic cross department meetings between marketing and sales.
Determine through market research the sales goals and recognize the target audience.
   • Schedule follow-up meetings in order to examine the outcome of the completed actions.
   • Take the time to evaluate what has been done, its effectiveness, and if it reached the target audience.

2. Initiate and evaluate customer surveys (in many companies this is even standard practice as part of their ISO standards and Quality Assurance policy). This is a respectable way for  customers to express feedback on the service received.
In general, companies feel somewhat offensive when negative feedback is received, but it should be embraced!
   • Only customers who care for your company/product will take the time to fill in the survey and submit negative feedback. They are your best customers!
   • Negative feedback should be seen as a challenge to improve your service.
   • Last but not least: this is your opportunity to "WOW" your customers. Take immediate action and amaze your customers by not only making up for the bad service they reported upon, but also to give them something unexpected, something remarkable!
A must: Always thank the customer who took the time to fill in the survey and reassure him/her that the remarks are evaluated and will be considered in changing the company's policy.

3.Schedule meetings with customers. Listen to their needs, let them do the talking. Ask their opinion about a campaign carried out by you, what attracted their attention, their expectations from you, and so on.
Make sure to afterwards recap all accumulated information and share it during your internal cross-departmental meetings.

Good luck!

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