Where the focus is everything about online marketing, including key business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques, emerging advertising trends in technology and much more.
Big Brands are spending more money online, and traditional ad agencies have to adapt or wither.
Traditional Madison Avenue advertising agencies have taken their share of lumps lately. More companies are spending bigger bucks to advertise online than ever before. Overall spending on advertising is expected to reach $279 billion this year.
That's a 5.4 percent jump over 2004. However, Internet advertising is forecast to grow 15 percent over last year and hit nearly $8 billion by the end of the year.
The trend has been building for years, but now many traditional ad agencies are scrambling to change or be left behind.
Ogilvy & Mather is one of the world's largest ad agencies, with annual revenues of $752 million, and is among those that have quickly adapted to the changing online environment. The agency's OgilvyOne is a leader in customer relationship management and interactive advertising. As general manager of consulting for OgilvyOne North America, Michelle Bottomley is at the forefront of the seismic advertising shift and is responsible for the data, strategy and direct channels (teleweb, email marketing, partner marketing) practices at the agency.
She joined Ogilvy in 1998 to lead the direct and interactive marketing engagements for the firm's travel and transportation accounts. Two years later she branched into other areas and launched the relationship marketing practice. During her career, Bottomley has led targeted marketing initiatives on behalf of a number of brands including American Express, Cisco, DuPont, Enfamil, FM Global, Ford Motor Co., Jaguar, Nestlé and Unilever.
Prior to joining Ogilvy, Bottomley was vice president of marketing at Epsilon, an American Express subsidiary, where she led teams responsible for the development of marketing data warehouses, statistical analyses, loyalty marketing programs and data-driven marketing communications as the client service director for Amtrak, BizTravel.com, Dayton Hudson, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, ITT Sheraton, Nordstrom and Walt Disney Attractions. Bottomley also managed comarketing partnerships between American Express, Amtrak and United Airlines. She began her direct marketing career at Bronner Slosberg Humphrey (Digitas).
Revenue Editor Lisa Picarille spoke with Bottomley to discuss the current state of advertising, what's happening with big brands online and why the Net has become such an attractive option for advertisers over the last couple of years. They also discussed what Ogilvy has done to adapt to shifting client needs and where advertising - both traditional and online - is going over the next few years. It's definitely not a onesize fits all world when it comes to advertising online, Bottomley says.
LISA PICARILLEDo you think traditional creative agencies have lost their way and their relevance? MICHELLE BOTTOMLEY The need for a clear and compelling brand proposition creatively expressed is not going to change. Great traditional agencies define an ownable and compelling brand proposition that reflects the passions and strength of the organization. Being able to define the soul of the brand and establish a unifying message architecture that can be expressed through every communications touch point is among the most important marketing challenges and the core strength of a traditional creative agency.
LPWhy have most agencies been slow to adapt to the change brought by online? MB For the most part, agencies, and certainly Ogilvy, [are] leading the revolution to make online or digital marketing a more prominent part of the communications mix. A key debate in the next two years will be the role digital media plays in the overall mix among agencies, their clients and the major media-planning and -buying organizations.
Agencies need to push this forward through understanding the target and developing innovative digital brandbuilding ideas to reach them, but clients and media organizations will need to reallocate existing budgets to bring these ideas to the marketplace. In 2004 Ogilvy launched VERGE, a series of conferences for the agency and clients that feature top thinkers and companies in the new media space, to forward progress in this area.
LPWhat is Ogilvy doing to adapt? MB Ogilvy's 360-degree branding is a philosophy and approach that integrates marketing communications to build client businesses. As an extension of our 360-degree branding philosophy we are working on ways to integrate the best of the advertising world with the best of our direct and interactive capabilities in the areas of creative, production, strategy and analytics.
This integration will improve our ability to target smarter and bring ideas that embrace broad and targeted media, including online, to our clients, as we have done already with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. This campaign has driven considerable business growth for Unilever, and lives online, on digital billboards, out of home and in print in the United States and around the world as one campaign.
LPHow has the change been received by your clients? MB Very well. Our clients will always ask for big brand ideas, but more and more for the use of nontraditional media, which includes digital marketing via online, digital phones, digital billboards, etc. - media that can surround the targets where they live, work and play. We believe that digital media are a tremendous opportunity for brands to deliver unique messages and offers to their targets and achieve superior ROI from their marketing investment.
LPHow hard of a pitch is it to convince big brands of the importance of the online adspend? MB Not hard at all, and it's been getting better. Big brands such as IBM and Ameritrade have long understood the importance of digital marketing and have incorporated it as a significant portion of their marketing plans. Our largest clients are pushing digital marketing further through the use of behavioral advertising, personalized messages, long-form video and dynamic marketing responses to interactions and to improve conversion of hand-raisers to buyers. There is more experimentation than ever before around bringing the right targets into the marketing funnel and nurturing those leads to accelerate conversion to sales using a combination of digital marketing.
LPWhat about branding? A few years ago most concluded branding couldn't be done online. Has that changed? MB Some of the most relevant branding is happening online - in the context of where the target is already going for trusted advice and information. IBM led the way in this area through their sponsorship of the Olympics and U.S. Open years ago, using online to broadcast events and scores "powered by IBM." Online marketing has helped brands move beyond product-specific advertising to creating branded experiences as a way to foster an emotional connection. BMW films were famous years ago for attracting and swaying the right audience online through edutainment - building the brand - while sparking hand-raisers to come in and test drive.
LPAre big brands increasing online ad spending? MB Yes, and even a few percentage points from traditional budgets start to show big increases in online spending.
LPWhat about the traditional ad formula doesn't work online? MB The old model of one-size-fits-all messages has evolved to include more use of search and contextual messages based on where the target is seeing the ad or where they have been before online. Continued on Page 2...
Print
Email
Digg This
