Just imagine if your car told you about a fuse about to blow; your furnace called a service person about a malfunction; or your garage door told you it was open in the middle of the day. 

We’re seeing more smart applications like this and getting involved in helping manufacturers connect their “things” to local dealers and consumers using the Internet.  Here are some recent articles that illustrate what smart companies are doing in this space:

1) Control my home thermostat via mobile and desktop browser.  I saw this last week from Nest Labs at the AHR (Air Conditioning / Heating / Refrigeration) show in Chicago last week.  Very cool.

2) Alert me and my dealer about a part failure on my farm equipment, or if my equipment might be stolen.  John Deere FarmSight is the service offering that helps keep our farmers at peak productivity.

3) Did I forget to close my garage door or turn the lights off?  The LiftMaster MyQ service provides online access to control — and ultimately peace of mind.

We’re excited about the possibility of a world where we have control of our things — and we give them permission to alert us and our trusted service professionals to potential trouble ahead.  It’s one more logical extension of Web technology to connect your local dealer and consumers.  One more opportunity to create customer loyalty, provide great service and sell more.

Now, if you’re in the agency business this is a bad story because P&G is talking about laying off people who are working on paid media.

However, if you’re a brand manager you should take note that the traditional way of thinking about advertising is rapidly changing and if you change with it, you can save a lot of money.

From the article:

P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.

He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.

We see our client’s reacting in much the same way as they are adding more and more ways to help local retailers advertise online beyond paid media in their marketing portals.

From the same article P&G’s CEO Robert McDonald says,

In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

We think the logic that P&G is using works even better for local advertising where retailers need to watch every penny.  Now it’s time to think more about online media, especially social.  Another big advantage besides FREE media is that digital is much easier to change, control and monitor.  If you’re spending a lot of money on co-op administration, imagine how much you can save if every item is pre-approved and automatically tracked.

Change is good.

The first thing that jumps out is how much more effective Google is as compared to Yahoo/Bing.   Just look at Q4 clickthrough rates and you’ll see that Google is way ahead with 2.36% to Yahoo’s 1.61%.   Yahoo is having their problems lately and it may be awhile before they get back on track.

I’m not sure why Google’s cost per click went down in Q4 2011 vs. Q4 2010 but higher clickthrough rates at a lower cost per click sounds good to me.

For sometime we’ve been recommending the value of Google paid search for independent retailers.  It’s cost effective, market specific and easy to track and control when we host the landing pages for your retailers.   Consumers have moved online to find product information and making Google paid search a co-opable expense for your dealers will greatly increase your brand presence online without touching your marketing budget.  You just have to make it easy for your retailers and our online marketing portal will automate the process for them and you.

They claim from doing a phone survey of 15,000 people that the printed Yellow Pages are the single source for local lookup by 33% of  consumers in metro areas and by 49% in rural areas.  It gets even more unbelievable when they claim  only 27% in metro areas use online exclusively and 9% in rural areas rely solely on the Internet for local lookup.

Tracking back to Market Authority it seems they have a business model that, in part helps Yellow Page sales people sell the printed Yellow Pages.

The comments on the Internet for the most part don’t believe the study and hypothesize that this must be skewed toward an older demographic.  Market Authority didn’t share the demographic breakdown of respondents.

You always have to consider the source when you  look at research and while this study is being universally panned, we should still remember that the printed Yellow Pages are still a player when it comes to local market advertising.  Not anywhere near to what they were pre-Internet but a medium to be used.

That’s why your online marketing portal for your dealers should do both old and new media.  So many offerings today are old and only do print or new and only do digital.  You still need both.

I think the only surprise here is that it took so long for this to happen.  Consumers have been spending far more time online gathering news and information about the world and doing research for products and retail outlets for years.  It’s about time the advertising dollars have finally shifted to reflect time spent by consumers.

There are several reasons that this has taken so long.  The first has to be that online advertising is a moving target.  What worked yesterday may still work today but be trumped by the newest thing.  Search engine marketing maybe the best example as early on search engines didn’t even exist  and now a retailer can use the Google ad network to buy a “local” ad on the New York Times site that will only be seen by consumers in his market.    Buying a local ad on a national site is still beyond the comprehension of most local retailers.

Another reason the spending for online took so long to pass print spending is that so much can be done on the Internet for so little money.  The local ad on a national site program from Google costs a fraction of what a 3 col. x 10″ ad costs in a local paper.  A mere fraction.  Social sites are effective marketing tools for local advertisers and there is no publication costs at all.

The third reason this has taken so long relates to the second, it’s cheap.  Because it’s so inexpensive it’s hard for traditional agencies both large and small to make money on such low cost efforts.  So we don’t have anyone, especially in local markets representing the value of the Internet to local retailers.  The Internet is a self-serve business model and local retailers just don’t have the time to keep up with all that is happening.

The lesson for national brand managers in charge of local advertising is to provide local retailers with the insights, assets and capability to promote themselves online.    Thank goodness there are marketing platforms that can help with print and the Internet making life much easier for retailers and deliver better ROIs for brand managers.

This study is from Prosper Mobile Insights.

The challenge is that smartphones and tablet computers allow consumers while in a store to search for a different product or better price elsewhere.  Even buying from Amazon online.  Not a good business model for your retailers who spend a fortune each year on their showrooms.

What are your retailers to do, short of jamming smartphones and tablet computers in their store?

The first step is to make sure your retailers have a mobile and tablet friendly site loaded with your product information and brand message.   Then, they can at least entice modern shoppers out of their competition’s showroom.

A great site will also help consumers shop while they are shopping.  If today’s  consumer would rather look at their smartphone then talk to an associate, then we have to be ready for them.

Also a good mobile site and a sales associate with their own smartphone or tablet becomes a much better sales person.  It’s a great way for a sales associate to show video and direct the comparison shopping process for a savvy consumer.

Most brands already have the digital assets needed to help a dealer present their product online.   What they lack is a marketing portal that allows retailers to customize and dealerize that content and make it attractive for mobile devices and tablet computers.  And, even better, if the marketing portal hosts, maintains and tracks the dealer branded site,  it’s even easier for the retailer and better for the brand to stay in control.

Local marketing is changing and the best brands have to change too.

Not too surprising that much like every other study we’ve seen, projections for traditional media are flat or down while the new media is up.

The biggest growth is predicted to come from social, mobile, email and SEO.  The biggest cuts will come in radio, TV, direct mail and print.

We have to remember that this is a percentage of budget change and not total dollars, even though print may be down as a percentage, the total dollars spent will certainly be greater than social media spending, where it is difficult to spend much money because so much is free.

The takeaway here is consistent with everything else we are seeing, the transition to new media is still a work in process.  As a marketer we have to be good at both old and new and we have to help retailers continue with the old, as they move to digital.

We’ve written here about the rapid acceptance of tablet computers by consumers and we’ve seen several studies that indicate consumers are using smartphones at retail already.  Amazon even has an app that allows consumers in a store to scan a product bar code and then Amazon gives the consumer their price and chance to order from their phone, right in the store.

Most independent retailers aren’t closely following all of these changes in technology, so while others may say the chart above indicates that dealers aren’t thinking too much about using tablet computers by sale associates, I’m rather impressed with these numbers.

41.7% of retailers are currently piloting or thinking of having store associates use a table computer in the next twelve months.  ( Heck, only 50% or retailers think Elvis is dead.)

We’ll keep an eye on this percentage but as more retailers use their own tablet computers at home or see consumers using them in their store, the faster the idea will hit them.

For someone involved in retail advertising for a brand there is no time to waste.  Once the tablets are in the store, in the hands of a consumer or a sales associate the more important it is to have more and better digital content available for the retailer to co-brand and present to the consumer.

Imagine your online ad builder/marketing portal where the dealer adds his content, price and promotion to your promotional template for that product.  This e-promo page instantly becomes part of the retailers site and is readily accessible on the associates’ tablet consumer and/or smartphone to show to interested consumers.  No paper, no delay and probably loaded with great video.

Bring it on.

 The article cites a lot of statistics about the growth of digital advertising and how it has eclipsed  everything except television spending and might one day soon, even exceed that.

A good quote in the article is attributed to Tony Weisman president of Digitas Chicago

“Weisman said that online advertising will get even smarter going forward, creating an ecosystem that will track and target individual shoppers throughout the buying process. With that continued evolution, and mainstream media migrating to digital platforms, the fastest-growing advertising category circa 2012 may be increasingly difficult to define, or perhaps even an anachronism in the not-too-distant future.”

In general and when done properly, digital is cheaper, better and faster than the old mediums we have had to rely on in the past.  It can be easily targeted,  tracked, modified, published and then republished like nothing we have ever seen.

I think the digital story is even more powerful on the local level especially when you consider all of the ways retailers use things like social media that doesn’t even hit their advertising budget nor your co-op account.

The challenge is to make sure that the message your retailers are publishing online is in sync with your brand and your message.  And, changes at a moments notice.

The best way to help your dealers take advantage of digital media and for you to control the messaging is by utilizing a modern online marketing portal the helps create, track, publish and republish dealer co-branded messages on a platform that you control.  The message can be in the form of a landing page, a micro site, an e-promo page, a facebook tab, banner ad, email effort and on and on.

If your marketing portal only helps retailers create printed pieces, it’s time for an upgrade to one that works for both old and new media.

On December 27, 2011 WebVisble abruptly shut its doors.  They were a company that preceeded Yodle and ReachLocal in that they too sold SEM and SEO services to local retailers.  To most local retailers the Internet is still a black box and they don’t know what works and what doesn’t.  So when they get a phone call from an aggressive sales person, who promises the moon, they often times take a chance on spending some money expecting to get  their phone to ring more often and for their site to appear higher up on Google’s search engine results page.

According to a blog post on Screenwork.com this is what was happening at WebVisible:

• There was no organic/SEO strategy to complement the paid approach
• There was no real technology for a very long time; just bodies which negatively impacted the capacity to optimize campaigns and get traffic cost-effectively
• My sources reported customer churn that was “over 300%” per year
• SMB customer service was apparently “terrible”
• Like others the company took a large chunk of the SMB ad spend off the top, leaving much less for the media buy
• The direct sales strategy “probably accelerated” WebVisible’s decline (and burn rate) but wasn’t chiefly responsible for the failure

A 300% churn rate per year means that the only reason they stayed in business as long as they did is that there were enough potential customers out there that they didn’t have to keep their current customers happy.  Of course, even though they had over $37 million in investor’s money, a bad business model sooner or later goes away.

This is a very real problem for great brands that need local retailers to promote themselves and the brand.  Wasting money on bad Internet marketing companies and programs often times means wasted co-op dollars and always means less effective advertising.

A story like this doesn’t even touch some of the other issues like the abuse of call-tracking numbers that does irreparable damage to a local retailer, and other nefarious programs that take advantage of all the confusion in the marketplace.

A smart brand combats this waste of money by providing an online portal that helps their dealers navigate the ever changing landscape by informing, aiding, producing and tracking local advertising efforts.

Thank goodness the technology is available today that can solve this problem.