In their latest add campaign Orange use a serious of individuals speaking about the people who have influenced their lives and made them what they are.  Using the phrase “i am” followed by the individual and how they influenced them.  I actually like the adverts but that is not the point of the post.  On top of the television ads they are also running radio spots which, in the final line, urges users to search “i am” on Google.  So I did just that, I went to my Google homepage and I searched on the phrase “i am”, half expecting to see the whole mobile phone industry lining up their PPC ads.  But low and behold, they weren’t there? All that was there was two Orange listings (the main site and the i am microsite) and a sleeping bag seller, lippiselkbag, who have cleverly engineered the i am message into their creative (nice product, check it out!). 

Surely somebody associated with tmobile, vodafone or O2 should have picked up on this keyword seeding and have slotted the keyword into their PPC campaign?  All it would have taken is a bit of creative thinking to get the phrase into their creative and you never know, they may have got some business out of it.  yet another example of big businesses (or their agencies) failing to innovate in paid search.

The Listings:

An article in this weeks edition in Marketing Week questioned the future of direct mail in the face or increased pressure from digital direct response channels.  With direct mail volume dropping 7.4% from 2006-2007 and showing a continual decline in since 2004 has the measurability and accountability of digital mediums put pay to the direct mail industry?

For a two page, center piece article  I have to say that this seemed to me like a massive over reaction to the success of digital in the past few years.  The article eventually comes to some sensible conclusions about the evolution rather than death of direct mail and EHS Brann CEO Matt Atkinson makes the most valid point “consumers are not saying they don’t want direct mail, they are saying they don’t want junk mail!”.  it is not about cutting direct mail from you marketing mix but rather becoming more intelligent and targeted in your activity.  This is likely to mean volumes will drop but not necessarily that return will follow, more likely you will just become more efficient.

Every piece of the marketing mix has a benefit, either direct return or impact on other media.  Do you think there would be so many searches for finance companies brand terms on the search engines if the companies didn’t do so much offline activity? Of course there wouldn’t, it is all about striking the balance and appreciating the impact one media has on another.  I have experienced it first hand when a company has cut offline activity as they are getting better returns online only to see a drop in overall performance as their offline exposure stops pushing people to the search engines.

With the growing emergence of digital channels it was always going to impact other channels in one way or another, after all, economic circumstances aside, there are only every going to be a finite number of people in the market for your product at any given time.  It makes sense then, that if a percentage of these people start to use the Internet to find a supplier then the number of people using the other channels should see a dip.  What marketers really need to consider though is how to make the most of the whole marketing mix in order to maximise the opportunities the market holds, and rather than wield the sword at the under-performing media, stop to think about the impact they each have on one another.