Mobility will turn us into direct, relationship and database marketers.

That’s the cornerstone message from two new studies —  Forrester’s “2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers” and Urbanairship’s “Connect with the Connected.” The keys to successfully making this transformation will be surrendering control to consumers while continuously creating relevant and resonant content. 

Let’s start with a few key facts. 

Mobile is here. By the end of the year half of all Americans will have smartphones.Most brand and marketers know this but haven’t put either strategy or infrastructure in-place. Mobility changes almost everything. 

Smartphones have replaced PCs, watches, rolodexes, maps, cameras, game devices, remote controls, landlines, books, boarding passes, coupons and loyalty cards. And they are closing in on wallets. People spend as much time with their phones as they do with TV. 

Smartphones are an appendage for younger consumers. They are their phones, which are very personal, heavily customized and in constant use. Don’t be surprised if Levi’s or Lees creates jeans with a special quick-draw phone pocket, which also prevents inadvertent butt dialing. 

Apps are “hit” driven. There are millions of them. They rise into and fall out of fashion as quickly as the Top 40. The average person has 40 on their phone but only really uses 8-10. Getting onto a consumer’s phone is tough. Staying on is even tougher. A successful app must either provide instant utility or repeatable entertainment. 

Open beats closed systems. Android is ascendant and will continue to be because it’s becoming ubiquitous. Apple may have a few tricks up its sleeve, but bet on Android, and many variations of Android, across devices and geographies to ultimately dominate.  

Soon apps and native phone technologies will work together and talk to each other. Think about how interoperability might impact your business. 

For example, the accelerometer notices you are walking funny and double checks with the pedometer. The GPS pipes up and says you’re off course on your way home. The med app then quickly checks your heart rate and blood pressure, and then signals the Walgreen’s app to reorder your meds. 

Context Matters. Where you are (location) and what you’re doing (attention) determine your mood and your openness to brands. “ Your customer is not the same person when they wake up as when they are working mid-day – each persona has different needs and desires.” 

Americans are putting computers in their pockets and expecting them to work and add value on-demand. Brands have to ask themselves, “ Are you interrupting them or making life a little better?”  To the extent that consumers use your app, you have an always-on virtual private network (VPN) connection to them. You have to respect this, insure privacy and use it sparingly. 

There is great opportunity for first movers to claim mind and heart space and an equal opportunity to frustrate, annoy and alienate. When you’re in, you’re in till you blow it. When you’re out; you’re out for good. 

The implications of these facts are staggering and challenging, especially for brands used to dominating their category, setting the product or sales agenda or deciding the communications cadence to their customers. 

In order to harness mobility, brands must master these 5 moves. 

Think Differently. Forrester put it this way.  “In 2013, the ultra-connected consumer base will continue to grow at a staggering pace, destabilizing marketing as you’ve come to know it. These customers demand personalized, relevant attention, designed around their needs and wants rather than around your marketing channels. If you don’t change the way you think about engaging these customers, you will quickly lose relevance.” 

Surrender Control. Interested and loyal customers prefer to drive the relationship. Enable them to set preferences for all aspects of their interactions with the brand. Let them tell you how often they want to hear from, what channels they prefer and which products or services they care about most. Ask permission to use location, purchase history and other data to customize their experiences. 

The guys at Urbanairship point out the marketing paradox. “When customers have the control to customize and limit a brand’s messages, they become more engaged. Less is more. Brands that focus on relevance over reach and value over frequency build enduring relationships and outpace the competition.”  

Target Context. Think about lifestyles, life stages, time of day and the customer journey with a UX and a service-oriented mindset. Smartphones and tablets are used to do distinct tasks – check an account, make a payment, find directions, grab a coupon, research a restaurant, compare prices, look up a word or a trivia fact or check product specifications. Figure out what your best customers do, when and where they do it and then map your brand to their lives.

Most of us are creatures of habit. We have predictable likes and dislikes and identifiable routines and patterns that can cue marketers about what we want.Where can you make things easier, simpler, faster, cheaper or more fun? Then craft content and messaging to deliver them at these critical inflection points.

Marketers need to collect, aggregate and process data to enable your brand to push relevant messages at relevant times or locations to your customers. Well designed “push” messages deliver increased app usage and brand preference over time. 

Don’t Sell. Smartphones and tablets are personalized tools. Overt selling, especially offers without opt-ins are strictly verboten. Brands can deepen the relationship by providing, utility, value and content, which, if done right, pre-sells products and services and engenders significantly more awareness, consideration and preference than traditional advertising. 

This requires nerves of steel and a bit of faith, especially if you’re on the hook for increased revenue or margins. But we are seeing the limits of and a backlash to SMS ads, in-app ads and social ads today. 

Selling is not so much about buying a product or service. It’s about buying into the gestalt, ecosystem, values and personality of a brand. These intangibles are best nurtured with personalized, relevant and useful content as much as deals, offers and coupons. There’s no happier customer than one who gets a pointed, personal message from a brand they love, at the time and through the channel they’ve chosen, with an offer about something they want. 

Make it Easy. People get frustrated with technology in a nanosecond. Invest in user experience and responsive design. Make sure that your brand assets render and display properly on all devices and that accessing your content, offers and products is easy, intuitive and quick. People on the move have ridiculously high expectations for instant gratification. When you meet them, you gain a special, but fleeting, moment of love. If you frustrate them; you are over and out. 

Making it easy also will require substantial investments in database software, CRM tools and other IT resources that can interact with consumers in real time and in the moment. IT and marketing must be joined and aligned at the hip. Increasingly brands will be judged by their ability to deliver what an individual wants on demand. Given where most of us are today, it’s a tall order.

Marketers have been manufacturing consumer loyalty through rewards and loyalty programs since the 1970s. The average American belongs to seven programs and 7 out of 10 are willing to join more programs. Most of us sign up for rewards from airlines, credit cards, grocery stores, gas stations, favorite retailers and a hotel chain or car rental firm. A third of most programs have members who have defected in-place without formally cancelling. Forty seven percent of respondents stopped participating in one of their programs in the last year. And yet in spite of competition and attrition, fifty-seven percent of respondents say they modify when and where they buy to maximize loyalty benefits. Forty-six percent say their choice of brands is a function of optimizing reward value. Loyalty marketing is personal, fickle, schizophrenic and well worth doing. Building and sustaining loyalty is tricky. Its part stimulus-and-response conditioning, part value exchange and part emotion or experience driven brand love. The dynamic mix of these rational and irrational elements in the context of larger macro economic factors, like a recession, or micro factors, like an awful experience with a store clerk, can change quickly. What looks valuable today; is piddling tomorrow. Too often the experience of trying to redeem points or miles is so frustrating, infuriating or just plain unfair that it destroys the rationale for collecting them. On the other hand a free trip, automatically applied coupons or discounts that yield free groceries or a first class upgrade can be sublime. Enter Maritz Loyalty Marketing who recently published its first US Loyalty Marketing Report, under the leadership of Scott Robinson and Bob Macdonald. They surveyed more than 6000 people in 30 national loyalty programs across six industry sectors. Here are the 4 key drivers of loyalty program satisfaction they discovered. Relevant Communication is Critical. Duh! While more than 9 out of 10 members want to hear from their loyalty programs only half (53%) see the communications are relevant. Fifty-seven percent of members read everything they get from their rewards programs while just 12% say it’s too much. Everybody wants to know the rules, the news and what’s in it for me. Duplicate Channels. Almost all participants (96%) want communication and almost half (46%) want it in at least three channels. Seventy-three percent want their mobile device to interact with their loyalty programs. But only a third (37%) see mobile as their primary loyalty channel. These are the people most likely to download loyalty apps. Loyalty loyalists want their communications on their terms and they want a choice of access points that they direct. Finesse the Cool-to-Creepy Spectrum. Sixty nine percent like and want personalized offers based on purchasing habits. These are the “do it for me” people. Sixty-two percent prefer to drive themselves. They want offers based on preferences that they manage. Both groups want rewards earned and applied to the stuff their care about most. Some consumers feel understood and appreciated when offers are based on their attitudes or behaviors. Others are entirely creeped out by the experience. Loyalty marketers need to segment participants to find the right balance and test the information-for-value exchange to determine consumers tolerances. More than a quarter (29%) of participants think programs require or acquire too much information prompting privacy concerns. There’s a built-in paradox here. If program satisfaction is a function of relevance and data collection drives relevance; without data you are doomed. If you don’t collect and use the data, you risk developing programs and content that nobody cares about. That’s probably why in spite of generalized privacy concerns a majority of Americans still trade personal information for relevant offers. Don’t Discount Values. On some level, loyalty is about brand awareness, preference and advocacy. Don’t let CRM tactics fool you. There is a strong link between personal values and brand values. Forty percent of those surveyed see their favorite brand’s values as “the same as mine.” People who see themselves in alignment with a brand’s values are much more satisfied with loyalty programs. This is classic branding strategy. Successful brands mirror image the personality, values, voice and tonality of their best customers. Loyalty marketing needs to focus much more on content and messaging to resonate with program participants. Its probably time to let consumers into the tent and ask them to co-create content and tactics that reflect who they are and what they believe in. In a plugged-in, on-the-go, ADD society, loyalty is a constantly shifting bogey. Yet this new data offers some insights, approaches and tactics that can create, capture and apply the longing for connection, recognition, reward and love in each person.

The cool kids have abandoned Facebook and headed to Tumblr.  Twenty-nine million unique visitors signed in four days each week to gain access to 44 billion posts on 102 million blogs. The average user logged-in for 154 minutes and looked at 30 pages per visit. One in eight used a mobile device to tumble. 

Tumblr users skew male, young (18-34), single, childless and rich (1/3 have household income greater than $100K). One in five is Hispanic and one in six is in the Pacific Time zone. 

Now that they’ve drawn a crowd, Tumblr is trying to figure out how to make a buck. They have a “Radar” feature, which highlights curated posts and is supposedly seen by everyone, although I can’t figure out which posts in my feed are the “Radar” ones. I checked my dashboard and couldn’t find an ad even though they sell access at a minimum of $25,000 a pop. Supposedly, a bunch of well known brands have used the platform. But I’ve never seen hide nor hare of them, nor do I follow any of them. Maybe they appear in the 50-odd content categories that range from Actors, Cute and Gaming to Poetry, Street Style, and TV. 

They’ve also rolled out a mobile ad unit, initially embraced by GE, Warner Brothers and ABC, that is served four times each day in their iOS and Android app. And they insist that ads appear as posts rather than as ads. I’ve never seen one of these puppies either.  

Buying Tumblr for brands is a challenge.  Blog content is highly visual and idiosyncratic. Like Facebook users only see content from those they follow. Unlike Facebook you can follow anyone without his or her blessing. So brands will have to develop significant followings to get substantial reach and or frequency against desirable segments. 

The content categories aren’t channels per se just convenient ways to find blogs to follow. And they don’t reflect anything by a tiny selection of the 102 million blogs. Brands can’t frame up appropriate messaging because there is no common experience. Each of the 29 million users follows a different set of bloggers for 29 million different reasons and nobody has crunched the numbers to determine what the patterns and affinities might be. 

The other consideration, beyond advertising competition from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is an undefined user experience and customer expectation set. Brands need to know why people use Tumblr and how either the people and their moods and behaviors differ from the other social networks. And we haven’t even started to talk about qualifying the audience or determining product and service use. It’s hard to imagine running contests, begging for Likes or distributing coupons to this crowd on this platform. So what’s a brand to do? 

As a focus group of one, for me Tumblr is a diversion; a time waster filled with startling images of people, places and things that I don’t see on Facebook. The 111 people I follow (fewer than the 133 average number of Facebook fans per user) post historical documents, travel shots, photography, cartoons, landscapes, portraits and very little copy. Posting short essays, I’m generally in the minority. And unlike Facebook, I don’t follow any brands and I don’t know or care how many followers I have. It’s a semi-private, self-constructed universe, where intrusive ads would be unwelcome. 

Tumblr faces the classic social media paradox. They’ve developed a sizable audience but they can’t yet package it and sell it to advertisers. And if they do, will Tumblrs hang around and take in the ads or will they defect and be off to the next cool thing?

Mobility has transformed e-mail. Unfortunately too many brands haven’t kept pace. As a result, they squander the power and impact of the most ubiquitous and most effective digital communications channel because messages don’t render properly or links drive users to pages that can’t be read or properly interacted with. 

Ninety percent of e-mail subscribers access the same e-mail account on multiple devices. Between 15 and 65 percent of e-mails are opened on these devices, according to the guys at emailmonday, often at different locations and with expectations than before. Savvy marketers are using “sniffers” to identify the universe of devices and/or turning to responsive design to automatically adapt and resize e-mail creative and technology for maximum impact. 

Everybody has to factor in basic changes. Mobile screens have different dimensions, usually smaller and narrower. You have to put the most important thing up top. Mobile users are on the go. They scan. They spend less time per e-mail so they need to get to the point faster and need different response mechanisms. You are getting partial attention and the flick of a thumb rather than a full screen, two focused eyes and ten fingers or a mouse for response agility. 

Your call to action must be clear and BIG. Increase the point size of text so it can be seen in any light and from any angle. Buttons, links and other response mechanisms need to be presented early and enlarged to account for fat fingers and finger faults. Put a link to your mobile website in the pre-header to offer an option to read the e-mail in the browser. 

Be sure that any destination is equally mobile friendly. Think about the entire experience from transmission/reception to interaction to destination/desired action. If you break any part of the chain, you essentially dump your customer or prospect. Too many e-mails opened on mobile devices take customers to pages that don’t work or look awful when they get there. Just kiss off those customers.  

The expectation of frictionless mobility combined with an in-the-moment intensity of interest amplifies the emotional reaction to your message. When it works its pure brand mojo. When it doesn’t your brand takes a bigger hit than if your e-mail doesn’t work right on a desktop or laptop. The good news is that simple planning and fixes allow you to maximize customer satisfaction.

CPG brands have had an off-and-on relationship with CRM and loyalty marketing over the years. Every brand attracts loyalists. Most brands fantasize about identifying, motivating and rewarding them since they buy more, buy more often and tell everyone they know about the brands they love. Every so often CRM becomes the flavor of the year in CPGland. 

But CPG brands haven’t succeeded in CRM for three fundamental reasons. 

Customer Ownership. Classically retailers built relationships with brand advocates and CPG firms paid the bills. They sort of cooperated with each other to reach and engage customers. For many retailers, CPG is the cash cow behind their shopper marketing activities and many retail chains make a huge effort to optimize CPG contributions often by including brands in promotions, circulars and loyalty card reward efforts. But CPGs and retail partners don’t always have the same priorities or marketing objectives. Retailers prefer to set the marketing agenda and choose the tactics that CPGs subsidize. Retailers rarely, and then only selectively, share customer data with CPG partners.. 

Digital, social and mobile media allow brands to side step retail relationships and develop independent relationships with their fans. New technologies can disrupt, circumvent or compliment existing retail loyalty or CRM programs. But CPG marketers haven’t figured out how to work with or work around retail partners and are reluctant to compete with or alienate them. 

Data Ownership. The pendulum, both in terms of customer sensibilities and CPG budget allocations, seems to be swinging toward building and sustaining direct consumer relationships. P&G, Nestle, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oreal and Kellogg’s have all initiated large scale data mart projects aimed at centralizing efficient data collection in service to relationship building and marketing or loyalty programs. With little or no data sharing from retailers, these firms are starting fresh, although they have the budgets to buy or rent big data to get started. 

These initiatives, which tend to provoke internal turf battles, turn on the ability to motivate consumers to opt-in and create cost efficient mechanisms to capture data and trigger personalized communications. Gaining access to consumers is easy. Convincing them to part with data, preferences, purchase history and/or real time behavior is a serious challenge. So is figuring out what to do with the data they collect and getting multiple brands within a portfolio to play nicely together. 

Relationship. Perspective CPG marketers see CRM as a cheaper channel to activate sales. These programs start with the premise that by communicating and couponing, they can inexpensively move more products faster. Control is a key factor. Nobody wonders about the kind, texture or frequency of relationship consumers want to have with their favorite brand. 

So what kind of relationship do consumers want with their favorite peanut butter, sour cream, hair gel or breakfast cereal? 

The evidence from social media suggests that strong brand relationships give consumers not marketers control. Consumers express preferences for channel, content and frequency of contact. Loyalists want insider information, early warning or access to new products and as many offers, deals and freebies as they can get. In many cases, marketers see this as unfavorably subsidizing sales they would ordinarily get anyway. 

If CPG marketers expect to eventually succeed at building genuine consumer loyalty programs, they need to commitment to a relationship building program over time, develop the infrastructure to support both corporate and brand level one-to-one communication and surrender control to their best customers. Anything short of these monumental changes will just be another failed experiment.

Very few us of are one-dimensional. Most of us have a spectrum of skills and interests which can be ordered, emphasized and monetized in different ways at different times. So far, I’ve had 7 careers ranging from educator to government worker to journalist, consultant, publicist, Internet entrepreneur and ad man. Who knows what will be next? 

Job change is personal growth. But change needs to be carefully considered and actively chosen. I use three criteria for assessing new opportunities. First, will the new job teach me something new and engage me in ways I haven’t been engaged before? Will it break new territory for me and for the organization I’m joining? This is mostly a logical exercise. 

Second, is the chemistry right? Will I fit in and do I have a realistic chance to succeed?  Are these my peeps? This is a visceral judgment that factors in the people, the politics, the place and the vibe. Third, will I have more skills and experiences to sell and more to show at the end of this job than I do now? This is a mercenary calculation. Will, this particular gig, open more doors looking forward in return for the door I’m closing behind me? I only move if the answer is “yes.” 

My dad, a 40-year Westinghouse executive, never understood the zigs and zags of my career path. A combat medic, he came out of WWII and married for life at home and at work. Security, predictability and an employer-employee social contract that no longer exists shaped his choices. 

I never enjoyed a warm corporate embrace. In fact, I experienced just the opposite. Early on it became clear to me that I would take much better care of myself than any large corporation, institution or business, especially since I had my own ideas and a big mouth. 

My first few employers tolerated me but taught me how to play the game by editing my impulses, my words and the way I expressed myself in different situations. Maybe I matured. Maybe I sold out. But my trek began and continues with a free agent mentality and a hearty risk appetite. For the most part, things have worked out okay. 

The key to successfully changing jobs or changing direction is hyper self-awareness.You need to know what makes you tick. Don’t bullshit yourself. You really need to have a clear picture of what you’re genuinely good at; how hard you’re willing to try; what makes you happy and how you compare to the likely competitors. Mapping yourself to a job opportunity requires self-reflection, tough love and discipline. 

You can’t allow yourself to fantasize about the job or yourself no matter how awful your current situation is. Make a hardheaded assessment of the tasks, the money, the boss, the firm and the upside. Then take your own emotional temperature about how the change will affect your finances, your mood, your commute and your general state of mind.  If, and only if, these things all add up  —- jump!

Reach, credibility and influence are the ultimate objectives of social media marketing. Reaching the right audience in ways that resonate, prompt viral distribution and drive action are the reason we get out of bed in the morning. 

In the scramble for attention, credibility and ad dollars the social channels jockey to make their cases. One has volume and global scale. Another has real-time immediacy; a third touts its influence and opinion leadership. A fourth is the playground of the too-cool-for-school crowd. 

Enter Technorati, who replaced the annual state of the blogosphere study, with a new report titled “The 2013 Digital Influence Report” based on data drawn from its blog network with a reach of 130 million unique users per month and a survey that included 6000 influencers, 1200 random consumers and 150 marketers. 

Evidently 75 percent of digital ad dollars are flowing to display, search and video but attention and influence are being accumulated by influential bloggers who get a measly 11 percent of the pie. “Where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value being influenced,” the report concludes.

Recognizing the practical difficulties of creating, measuring and buying blog networks, the report claims that “when making overall purchase decisions for consumers blogs trail only behind retail and brand sites.”  Furthermore “blogs were found to be the fifth-most trustworthy source overall for information on the Internet” trailing news sites, Facebook, retail sites and YouTube. 

Self interest aside, nobody disputes the role of blogs or their potential influence on consumers. The question is how to separate signals from noise and how to assess genuine influence from hyperbole. 

Consider ten criteria to assess the potential value of influential bloggers. 

1.     What is a blogger’s base audience day-in and day-out?
2.     Do they routinely generate significant buzz and virality?
3.     Is the buzz about what they think and say or about the blogger as a personality/guru/speaker?
4.     Can you immediately identify their insight or expertise?
5.     Do they generate original content or endlessly re-tweet others’?
6.     Have they written a book, done a TED talk or produced significant data?
7.     Are they independent or part of a group?
8.     Are they overtly or clandestinely supported or sponsored by someone?
9.     Are they looking for freebies and handouts?

Facebook’s Newsfeed re-design, the first since this feature was introduced in 2006, is aimed at increasing engagement, expanding time spent on the social network, overcoming Facebook fatigue and creating more inventory and more interoperability for advertisers. 

As usual Zuckerberg & Company will benignly dictate how a billion people see, interact and use the platform now described as “a personalized newspaper.” The new design emphasizes larger pictures, cleaner lines and new content streams that will look and feel the same across devices. This recognizes the fact that today a huge number of users access Facebook on tablets and smartphones and that those numbers will continually grow. 

Let’s look at the key changes.

Bigger Pictures. 50% of Facebook user posts are pictures. The Newsfeed has become a defacto photo sharing service and archive. It makes sense to improve the things your customers like best. 

Increasing the size of pictures, encouraging higher resolution, making it easier to upload albums (multiple pictures) and bumping up the size of thumbnails posted by friends and brands all cater to existing behavior.  Increasing image sizes will make the Newsfeed more magazine-like. In some cases it will do so while 2/3rds of screen is devoted to ads, which also will be bigger and clearer.  

More Discrete Content Streams. By separating out streams of activity by topic, Facebook hopes to create content segments and improve time spent on site by offering users a way to circumvent the Edgerank filtering algorithm. Separate streams featuring music, video, games and music could become ad-supported channels. Users will have the option to see all the content posted by friends, most of which is filtered out today, by selecting “all friends” or from brands that a user likes by selecting  “following.” 

Ideally this will give users more control and more incentive to stay longer and dig deeper into the content they care about most. It will also create opportunities to create inventory for heavily advertised categories where consumers frequently interact with each other. 

Consistent UI. Facebook will look the same on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. This is the first step toward creating a 24/7-device agnostic seamless brand experience. This too, will encourage more frequent access and dramatically improve the mobile experience. Down the road Facebook will sell roadblock ad packages that work across devices to enable brands to make bigger, bolder splashes. 

The implications, of the Newsfeed redesign, for brands and advertisers are four-fold.

1. Brands, like consumers, will have to be more visual using more, better, higher resolution images to get their messages across. Ads will get bigger and more intrusive. 

2. Segmented channels and clusters of users will become available. Brands have to decide the tone, manner, content and frequency with which they will approach them. 

3. Users will have more control over access to their Newsfeeds. Brands will have to earn the right to greater access and sharing by focusing on content and relevance. 

4. Advertisers will need to understand when and how users access Facebook and plan or parse content and ads to optimize awareness, preference and action. 

The implications for ad guys and marketers are enormous.

Netflix, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are developing TV shows, featuring name talent, to be streamed online. According to the New York Times, AOL, Sony, Direct TV and Twitter are not far behind.  The number of comparable entertainment sources and the amount of ad inventory could increase substantially prompting a price war. 

At the same time new research from IAB and Nielsen sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo documents the synergy between TV and online video and makes a compelling case for marketers to use both channels in-tandem.  Evidently video is the medium of choice even if viewers are not clued to the tube.

The lightest TV viewers watch more than twice as much video online as the heaviest TV viewers. The device they are using and the content might be different, but they are tuned-in and turned on. More women do more streaming in general, but men spend more time viewing says the new IAB Online Video Study. 

From an advertising standpoint, there is a reason to run ads in both media. If 15% of a TV buy is reallocated to digital media, reach spikes at lower costs. When the same spots are aired on TV and online as a campaign in the same time frame, key consumer brand metrics like awareness, recall and preference, outpace the performance of either medium on it’s own. Prior exposure of ads online (think Super Bowl ad previews) doubles the impact of TV exposure when spots are broadcast regardless of the program genre. 

The combination of channel synergies, new program sources and continuous growth of online and mobile viewing, force marketers to rethink of how, when and where we tell our stories and how we develop cadences for commercial messaging.

Four options come to mind.

Focus on Frequency. Use multiple devices to push a single impactful message. By previewing it online and then buying roadblocks and concentrated high frequency rotations you can drive greater awareness sooner.  The same message, more times on more devices equals higher reach and more persuasion and faster conversion. Creating a surround-sound of messaging could penetrate and persuade a target faster than ever. 

Sequence the Message. Using a combination of online and TV or cable channels imagine A sequencing a brand’s key message by parsing it out over time and through different channels. The additive value of sequential messages over a limited time period can expose more facets of a brand to create a more robust impression of a brand. 

Fractal Messaging. By assigning different parts of the message to different channels at the same time, marketers could acknowledge different facets of a brand’s appeal and expose different facets or offers at different times to different people in different content environments. The cumulative impact could rival frequency or sequencing tactics.

Orchestrate the Story. Another approach is to assign specific marketing tasks to specific channels in the same way that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms assigned specific roles to specific instruments. One plays the base theme. Another adds the variations. The third, fourth and fifth infuse the experience with complex harmonies or contrapuntal sounds. In this media scenario, TV lays down the basic message, while spots in online content channels amplify or expand the message.

And this is just the beginning. Synergies between online and broadcast/cablecast video and new video content sources are expanding our choices and our thinking about messaging and media. It’s time to start experimenting with new, creative media options.

If you pay attention, you can begin to see Facebook’s ad sales strategy coming together 

The announcement that Facebook is buying Atlas from Microsoft comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement of big data alliances. The pieces of Facebook’s future advertising juggernaut are emerging. 

First, figure out how to better engage advertisers by cross-tabbing and de-duping their CRM databases with Facebook fan bases so they can plan ads and campaigns more effectively. Second align with big data suppliers to enable segmentation building, intense precise targeting and personalization. Third, use the Atlas infrastructure to build more ways to dice and slice Facebook audiences and to serve Facebook ads with better precision and metrics. The game plan directly addresses the biggest objections in adland. 

The Atlas buy feels like a play to accelerate building infrastructure rather than developing a new third-party ad-serving revenue stream. The value of Atlas, widely considered second tier behind Google’s Doubleclick platform, is a head start on proving the impact and value of Facebook ads to a growing number of skeptical advertisers. With Atlas in-hand, Facebook programmers and strategists can start modifying and adding onto an existing platform, which will give them something to brag about and sell more inventory sooner.  

The combination of these three moves will allow Facebook to answer many of the outstanding questions on targeting, impact, metrics and ROI by big name advertisers who have embraced social media advertising tepidly. 

Data-centricity will fuel better targeting, tighter message strategies and the ability to drive sales in real time. The mother lode of data emerging from the combination of sources, not to mention Facebook profiles, will yield a huge competitive edge in identifying likely prospects, building propensity-to-buy models, scheduling ads and forecasting or driving sales in real time. 

Add this information to growing opportunities for advertisers to track conversion events like registrations or checkouts and the possibly inadvertent slip exposing a new metric called “return value” and you might get the idea that at Facebook, social media is morphing into direct and database marketing.