There Is A Real Dynamic

  • “Live as if you were to die tomorrow”

    Maximising the potential of each day with two priorities : living the present and preparing the future.

    Ghandi

    For many who knows me, I am slightly hyperactive – meaning that I am not considered on the sick-side of the scale but rather on the annoying side – I do have a feeling that being fully in this right now prevent me from being fully in something else right now too.

    Life become an internal competition of immediate importance – at least in the positive sense of importance.

    Giving the necessary time and importance to what you are doing right now.
    Strangely enough, when I wish to be in the present, it becomes every difficult for me to keep in touch with my distant friends and family; the ones that are not part of my daily life. This was impossible to maintain – as I am not dwelling on Social Media to witness other people’s life – without making me feeling really sad so I decided to create time for planning this moments.

    The conclusion is: Present yes, but future too.
    Also having been a traveller on a shoe string, despite loving spontaneity, maturity as shown me better ways to act – and that includes not splurging on last minute city break that cost a month of rent. Money and buying power can be very relative, not keen on feeling I should have planned ahead when that was possible.

    In my daily routine – when I feel a bit tired or not really up to do anything – I ask myself: “if you were to die tonight, was that how you wish to spend your last day?” that usefully make the trick to separate good fatigue from basic laziness.

    Not being Tibetan help me a lot to not apply this proverb literally, but I still actually dream to be able to go down that path as I truly sense the power of living this through.

    But we are not Tibetans, aren’t we? Let be ourselves first.

    I do feel committed to more present moment focus – even more in the current attention based society. So I exploited quite a lot of the digital minimalist tricks to avoid being hacked on my time. If you are interested to know more about this, let me know and I will write something dedicated to it.

  • Keeping Advertising yearly commitment in check

    I wrote this post for the company I work for – MMT – it is also posted on their blog

    Every year in June we hear about the Upfront market in the US, and this COVID year, particularly as it, could not happen in its normal sense. But the other markets or media are not exempt from this seasonal exercise: the negotiation of yearly advertising is a global practice of the industry and exists for all media. Let’s clarify what these are, who they benefit, and why it can make sense. 

    What are media yearly commitments? 

    The idea behind yearly media commitment is for advertisers and agencies to commit to a level of spend for the year with a specific partner. Long term plan of media investment is signed as a contract with publishing houses, tv channels, web giants, and so forth. The contract is binding and disengaging has consequences – usually financial – to guarantee respect for the conditions: spend per quarters, level of visibility, etc. 

    What are the benefits of yearly commitments? 

    An essential reason for commitment is visibility: it keeps publishers able to provide the quality content that brings the quality audience to tune in. 

    In return for their engagement, advertisers benefit from:

    • Discounts: promising funds offer great discounts rates on top of agency ones. 
    • Beat yoy inflation: As part of the discount, there is also the engagement of not applying year on year inflations. Long term partnerships have led to some advertisers having discount rates off the charts. 
    • Visibility: it guarantees the impressions and can also include the placement quality 
    • Mention: it is the unofficial part of the deal where editors accept to mention or not mention brands as part of their “support” to the publishing house. It is very important in the fashion industry in the female magazine industry
    • Access to data: Data from WG are so scarce that advertisers are trading data as part of the commitment: “tell me who are interested in my product and I engage more”. 
    • Free services: As part of the package, Publishing houses can offer a strategic recommendation, community management, content production, insight, and so on. 

    The goal is to secure as much budget as possible from the advertisers and new revenue streams for the teams

    What are the cons of committing?

    Advertisers are legally bound: they actually have to spend! You are committed to an entire year; so change of market – like 2020 –  requires a lot of negotiations to maintain flexibility, goodwill, and rates. That requires a lot of creativity in the way of building the right balance between benefits and engagements

    There is no reason for any publishers to not try to help you remain competitive and accept to modify when commitments cannot be met. But this requires an investment in resource and time, strong negotiation skills, and grit!

    Which type of clients are recommended to engage in yearly commitment? 

    Any advertisers investing over 300,000€ on a single partner may consider negotiating extras by committing their budget. Obviously, this commitment makes sense when there is a clear correlation between advertising and sales volumes / ROAS and financial flexibility is not in discussion.

    Also, when premium visibility/positioning is a priority and guaranteeing presence around key events, long lead time helps to secure these spaces. 

    Finally, when budget performance is your priority, it can push the needle an extra bit for ROI results. 

    How does it work in practice? 

    As a newcomer, you benefit from new business negotiation rates/agency rates if you use one. Generally, major advertising investors (two digits million euros) are organizing these sessions to gain the benefits mentioned above. 

    German market negotiations kick in in October for all media publishing houses, OOH, audio, walled gardens and so… The objective is for everyone to maintain a form of visibility on a base level of investments. Obviously, advertisers do not have to engage all budgets in commitments, they can decide to keep some “buffer” for last-minute deals.

  • Is your communication attention worthy?

    I am on LinkedIn, like a lot of professional, I wish to participate into this great sphere of sharing. But I also notice a lot of not-so-worth-it content shared by companies and spread by individuals (usually employees of these companies) to create the “buzz”. It shows how blurred the lines between internal and external communications are: Companies are using internal communications message on external platforms like Linkedin. It creates background noise and make the search for useful information somehow more painfull.

    I found myself hesitating sometimes to connect as I have some fear to waste my time reading a lot of internal news from companies I am acquainted to and little content which really help me grow my professional acumen.

    As for personal life, the business world is more and more cluttered with information and content and everyone is trying to be louder than the next, more present by posting more regularly. Unfortunately it is a vicious circle that serves mostly content producers and PR experts (sorry guys…) and less the fame and profit of businesses.

    For small businesses, where most communications are in-house /freelance generated content; the direction to make communications efficient to bring business or recruit is to focus on external communications messages. Let me bring some tips to the table to help you navigate external engagement.

    Just to set the scene, i would like to remind the basic of « Newsworthyness » in the old fashion way of journalism. the formula was basic :

    Impact x Timing / Currency = worth of the news => the distance the news could travel : local, national, global

    How is impact calculated:

    News Impact = Proximity x Human interest x OR (Proeminence ; Angle ; Bizarre)

    Let use an example : A house is burning.

    Proximity = how relatable is the news to the audience => Your neighbour’s house relate to your community, the city townhall burning relate to the all city inhabitants;

    Proeminence = how known are the protagonist => The White House burning attracts the global news-sphere.

    Human interest = how does that speak to our humanity => Your neighbour’s house is burning where one firefighter got hurt relates to your region, even your country when fires’ death are uncommon.

    Bizarre = how => Your neighbour’s house hosted anything special – from wild animals, Dark Magic Cult and it can become national worth.

    Currency = Seasonality has its trends => The house burns on Valentine’s Day and kill 2 people because of the candles around the house, it can make the News because it is related to current season.

    Novelty / Angle = Anything that present a new characteristic is of interest => a house burns in LOndon, no novelty. First time a house burn on Mars, novelty!

    Timing = easy one = the most recent the best.

    Ok, That enough for the « newsworth-attention-grabbing » for TV? print reporting, I am sure you got the picture.

    What’s in for the business communication? What brings efficiency ?

    The corporate communication has evolved from news stream to content stream, from informing to grabbing the attention for the longest time possible. Corporations participate into this flow not always knowing ways to measure the positive impact of their activities because they have not always pin down the « why? » behind their external communication.

    => So your first step is « what is your goal ?» let check the TOP 3 Answers

    Top 1 answer: « selling more »

    – that works – and then you need to know what makes your product attractive, what is its USP ?
    It is the USP you will need to illustrate using newsworthy attributes, get right potential customers to get a clear understanding of your benefit and a trigger to push them down the funnel, one step at the time.

    Top 2 answer: « build brand awareness »

    – sure – considering the clutter, you wish to be remembered fast and then repeat the message often enough (not every three hours, this is called harassment) for the brand to stick. be careful, Brand awareness is neither top of mind nor brand association. It is the fact of knowing the brand so people are comfortable enough with it to consider buying it. The most memorisable stories are emotional ones, the one you connect with.

    Be careful though, be idea is to be remembered as a brand, not just a good story that the brand quickly disappears from. The typical example is:

    «  you remember that ad where the dog is singing – funny, isn’t it? what was the brand behind it?? »

    Because there is no particular reason to associate the brand in question with a dog, the association is not obvious (maybe this ad was directed to dog lovers who usually sing in their car ?) => it makes it kind of a niche audience for a TV ad in this case.
    ok enough hints, I let you find out here.

    Top 3 answer: « build loyalty »

    – that works too and then your business needs to know who are your customers, what do they wish to learn and experience with your brand before starting producing content. Loyalty will come with care and understanding but also Support = many customer ask support questions on companies social media page, be ready to address these questions fast and professionally.

    Your external communication should be about addressing the experience they wish to have, and learning you can offer (for free) from you business acumen. Here your business brings value to the community as a whole.

    This post is already too long to go on, I will follow up on the topic next month on the internal communications topics.

    If you have any remarks or questions about this post, please get in touch!

  • Right message at the right time – why is timing important ?

    « there is a time and a place » for everything …

    Over the last two months we mentioned the evolution of media and the importance of the message to be heard in a fragmented space. We now need to approach another important point of communications. Timing !

    The Status quo is simple : No one can live without habits or our brain would be overloaded with permanent choices to make, a study says that we make 35,000 decisions per day that we need to prioritise. Everyone builds habits, patterns they follow in their daily routine, and that includes the media they trust to provide information and news.

    When talking business and time together, we all have in mind « time is money » about the financial trade in general. It is not completely excluded of Communications as well, we can define for reasons for which time as to be taken into account for any marketing plans:

    The objective of your communication influences its timing:

    When one knows that the actions led by a communication will take a long time and will require planning to execute (for instance offline sales vs. online phone based registration), it is essential to understand the best timing for your clients to act – for exemple catch them on the way to the shop on the radio, with a SMS in front of the shop, or online when they search for ideas.

    Modern platforms offer opportunity to adapt the message to the time of the day and the context

    TV has always offered day-part copy rotation, digital communications increased a great level of flexibility including contextual adaptation. Morning advertising for a restaurant can push breakfast menu where evening could present today’s dinner special’s adapted to the type of audience.

    Communicating all the time is expensive, observing right timing create efficiencies.

    If your business have opening hours and your communications objectives if for people to call you, you may consider advertising during your opening hours only, or change your company client support system to adapt to the marketing campaign.

    Catch your audience at the right moment for them to be open to receive the message.

    Attention span is shorter, people are over exposed with thousands messages a day. It is necessary to cut through the clutter, but with what? If you have bigs bucks, the sprinkler approach works : you communicated all the time, which reach in mind to guarantee high repetition. If you do not have big bucks : choose your moment.
    There is a space in which your place can be found in the routine, which would instil the message your company wish to pass.

    Need any help to create efficiencies in your marketing plan?
    Get in touch.

    Stay tuned and do not hesitate to request more details.

  • Misinformation – Who to trust?

    In these troubled Corona times – where everyone is at home and our screen time average is through the roof – I cannot help being shocked how many confusing messages and unfounded information are circulating and shared amongst us. I realised how ill prepared people are to confront these claims despite the emergence of the « fake news » which shed light on the phenomenon some time back, notably after the 2016 presidential elections.

    The Colombia Journalism Review published a research from Claire Wardle which identify the most common misinformation techniques – check Details here:

    1. Authentic material used in the wrong context – by changing date, location and / or context
    2. Imposter news sites designed to look like brands we already know – creating a feeling of trustfulness
    3. Fake news sites – a fully worked website with no rooted truth or impartiality
    4. Fake information – a created piece of content made to look like a real information without roots in reality.
    5. Manipulated content – transforme content (for instance statistics) in a farfetched way to make a point
    6. Parody content – satire, sarcasm or jokes to convey an ambiguous message about a topic

    If you do not feel like reading, listing to her interview on « your Undivided Attention ».

    When I thought international media in the 2013 – the question remained around the biais between editor and advertisers who financed the news. Editors use to merely avoiding the hot topics from their « patrons » as revenues from subscriptions were diminishing and advertising was compensating for some time the influence keep growing.

    It was clear the editor aims to preserve their independence despite strong headwinds from the newly created digital sphere’s ambitious players since iPhone was created and the evolution of the media consumption because most of the consumed content is on platforms that are not held responsible to provide sources and check facts broadcasted through it.

    But this became different, a good proportion of adults (even a vast majority when considering lower education and income groups) consume news on Social Media as if they were a publisher, this was clear during the latest Presidential elections in the USA. Many study tried to understand this changes with clearly identifying the influence of news consumption (Check Pew research 2017).

    People lacks the training to identify trustful sources and fact-checked information and we have the tendency to remember better the first information heard even if a correction has been published. The problem is not new.

    Everyone feels more comfortable with facts and events that already suit our values and beliefs. One actually remembers these even better – even if eccentric – it is called the confirmation biais. This is leveraged very well by social media, but it will require a separate article to explain this.

    What to do then ?

    There are a great amount of opportunities to improve our fake news literacy – as well as avoid its amplification – that anyone can easily grab. I am not the expert in the field, but I try to protect myself and those who I love by checking out a few details when anything seems ambiguous:

    • Do not let yourself share anything without being certain it can be trusted ! whatever hilarious it looks to you
    • Illustration: is the illustration coherent to the story, to the context? reverse search the illustration to see if it has already been used => https://tineye.com/
    • Expert quote: do you know this expert ? where does s.he practice? has s.he got any references?
    • Web of origin: is it a known source of information? if not, where is it from? is it relevant to the news it broadcasts ? some basics that are useful
    • Statistics: Can you read the details of the question asked, when the research was run and by whom.

    Ok, as the Chicago Tribune Editor said « …the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. », it just makes me hope that it helps to bring positive tips to the table.

    We will be back with « timing » as the second part of « what is more important in media » in June, stay tuned.