Direct Marketing & Digital Marketing Agency - Ashley Bolser Agency

There are some big changes coming in the UK towards the end of this year and nobody is doing anything about it! Yet…

What’s going on?

The Government is committed to saving 1p in every pound it spends, before the end of this year, that probably equates to 3 or 4p in the budget it has left to spend, and its only the start.

There are big changes coming and we in marketing should be thinking about preparing for them. The cuts are going to be big and they are going to hurt. Not just the lovies in marketing and advertising but to the man and woman in the street.

There’s going to be a sudden realisation, that sooner than we imagined, our state benefit is to be removed or cut back, overtime cancelled, our jobs taken away. Our pensions cut.

People are going to get nervous, nervous about spending money, nervous about the future. The papers are going to have a field day with “I told you so” smugness and confidence is going to ebb away from the economy and society, as the real impact of that nostalgic word “austerity” comes home to roost.

In the credit crunch those who suffered were, the bankers, the hedge fund managers, property magnates. The greedy. The new austerity will be harder and more bitter than it was before. This time it’s going to be the average worker who is going to fund the previous excess and suffer the radical changes that are afoot.

What will this mean?

A Fin du Siècle approach by many. We’re going to party hard up to the end of the year and to continue the metaphor, we’ll get a huge hangover in January 2011.VAT will also be up, driving sales volume in December. All the sales will begin in early December and there’ll be a great big hole in spending in January.

What should we do?

Sell eggs and flour. Home baking boomed in the credit crunch, Restaurants and pubs did badly.

Do vouchers, last time even the rich and famous used money off vouchers, we know, we did the biggest and best, Pizza Express.
(Speak to us and we’ll tell you how to do it properly.)

Get back to the basics, do what you do well at a good price, be reassuring, plan properly, save money, be effective.
Export stuff to America, we’re relatively cheap now…

Stay digital, its cost effective, entertaining and relatively cheap for people to use.

In the long run there will still be a massive market for lots of things, Luxury still will be the new necessity, we may just put off purchases that are not essential, but values like family and security will always be important. In two years, for many people, this will just be a slightly uncomfortable memory.

Creatives are often asked to produce a number of versions for a client. If the only purpose of this is to provide you with a choice, I’d wonder whether your money was being well spent.It’s the takeaway menu version of the creative process. You’ll receive a choice of toppings for the same idea. And no matter which you choose, it’s still a cheese and tomato pizza underneath it all. The Creatives will be happy to tell you their personal preference. And they’ll probably give you a long and passionate explanation of why they think it’s the best on the menu.

But what if you’re not in the mood for pizza?

If the Creatives are asked to add value to your brief, instead of providing versions, they’ll think of different ways to satisfy your hunger. They’ll consider all the influences on the decision, including how much money you have to spend, how much time there is and how to get the most satisfaction for these. At the end of this process, there may be two very different yet equally appetising restaurant suggestions. They’ll present both ideas and talk you through how each experience differs. You can then choose the one with the menu that most tickles your tastebuds.

Ask the Creatives to give you versions and you’ll get a menu. Ask them to add value and you’ll receive the Michelin Guide. One can be picked up for free almost anywhere. The other is worth paying for.

As a company we were recently asked to think about what’s happening in marketing, I challenged everyone in the business to produce 3-5 ideas to get a feel of the “zeitgeist” of the nation and their views about the future.
What I got back was Gold Dust!
I felt proud that the people in this company had such a wide diversity of thought and brilliant insight as to what’s happening in the world. I’ve pulled together the seven ideas I liked the best and these are listed below.
Frankly we have no idea that these will be big or hot or happening but no one else does!
Here goes…

Marketing as dialogue
Not just transmission of, but reception of ideas
This trend will lead to more consumer generated advertising in which the consumer is not just the star but leads the creative as well, not new but will develop over the year.   http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/808509/Brand-Barometer—Sony-camera-ad-clicks-right-boxes/
And by the way, TRUTH will become very important in these types of ads…

This ties in to
Democratic Product Development
Customer builds their own product, this already happens with AUDI, I went to the factory and found out that no two cars come off the production line the same. The logistics of this are mind boggling and vastly impressive. The same could be true of a mobile phone. The customer could choose the camera they want,  the memory they want, the tunes and applications they want. The cover they want, the keys, size, battery etc. upload photos and contacts to be pre-loaded with personal photo on case.

Change the system
Revolution not evolution
The world is changing, the traditional methods of doing business are falling away. This means that the old ways of charging are in decline. Take music, it used to be about charging for delivery of creativity. Now delivery is free and it’s getting harder to charge for creativity. Live music experiences are the place  bands/artists can make money because they can’t be reproduced digitally.
The same is happening with film/TV/video.
We believe there’s scope for a revolution in the charging structure of most services, including mobile phones.
Consumers would pay what they feel a product or service deserves. Like Radiohead’s album on the internet, people paid what they thought it was worth and what the band deserved for the music. We don’t know if it was successful but the PR coverage alone was probably worth it.
Our idea is to get people to pay what they feel is fair and reasonable for things like books, video and even porn.
Why not get famous for deconstructing the standard business models!

Trusted editors and selectors
The rise of mediation (or you only get to see/hear about things you are interested in)
Too much choice, too little time. Not enough knowledge
We like it, a trusted third party recommends what you might like based on knowledge, Artificial Intelligence or an understanding of you.
We all love consumer reviews and can make the distinction between brand/company sponsored stuff and the real thing.
Look at Trip Advisor, Reevoo, spotify etc. all growing massively along with the rise in importance of word of mouth from friends.
Also this ties in to the growth of devices which screen out things we don’t like (SKY +, Tivo, Itunes etc.)

Applications built on the back of social media
Artificial trend engines
http://be-a-magpie.com very interesting advertising Twitter site
Also
http://thunderthimble.com/
Same idea across lots of other media, called Thunder Thimble the other day that allows you to track a brand’s popularity on the web. It currently supports just Twitter but they have plans to extend it to watch other stuff. Simple thing is to advertise but there’s more that can be done here to map trends, influence the agenda etc.
This is really hot at the moment.
Also Qik will become the new Twitter, instead of 160 characters people will Qik video live to the internet, and it’s on Nokia’s web site, Ovi already.

Marketing Applications that suit your way of life
Helpful things on your mobile phone
App downloads are big business.
There’s an obsession with healthy lifestyles, so develop  scanning devices on mobile phones – can be used to scan food products throughout the day to calculate calories/fat.
We thought about developing this to an app that shows how balanced your life is, tie in with GPS on your phone, heart rate monitor, and log what you eat and where using the bar code scanner linked to a bar code database.
This would give you an all round check of calories burned consumed etc.
Fun approach would be to get people to rate the balance of items consumed against, good for you, good for the planet, money, happy etc.

Cloud based applications
Get all the power of a super computer in your hand
Cloud computing uses the distributed computing power of tens of thousands of connected devices to deliver great software to the phone, perhaps providing a computer generated cartoon of your photo interacting inside a virtual game.
No single device has the power by itself but together they could do so,
Massive social good programmes like the search for the cure for genetic disease would be done on loads of connected computers and phones.

Austerity, Make do and mend culture, what are we doing about this? EDF “this ad was made from recycled film clips” “this ad was made from recycled ideas…”

Green is a way of life not an outward statement

These days there are loads of companies claiming to be experts at everything from direct mail to ecommerce. It’s a fact that marketing services are one of the most “over served” business areas in the whole economy. I think that’s because there are almost no barriers to entry in marketing and advertising .Too many companies running after limited client spend.  On the other hand most agencies will admit to a certain amount of frustration with clients not doing what they are advised to do.

So we decided that we would run our own ecommerce site to give us the practical knowledge of setting and up and running of a shop on the internet. This included all the things you might expect - digital elements like web site design and build, functionality, style copy etc. Also areas like secure transactions and accounting, notification of despatch, delivery etc. had to be thought of and solved.

Unlike most of our clients we also had to come up with a product and range, we had provided a simple web site for www.off-the-wall.tv and like the fact that they were a UK manufacturer with their own design.  So it was then that www.justtvstands.co.uk was born.

We buy product from them and some other select suppliers, load it up to the web and let the customers do the rest. We’ve had the opportunity to develop and learn in areas we don’t normally get involved with like credit card fraud. And to put it bluntly it’s been interesting, very interesting.

Top tips to prevent fraud

1. Look for stupid customer names especially ones without capitals and lazy ones like tuppie tuppie.
2. Look for emails that make sense with the name of the customer, some elements of the name are good
3. Look out for repeated mobile numbers on your customer information with different names and of course repeated delivery addresses.
4. Let bona fide customers call you on an area code number, we have one for Leeds because we are in Leeds
5. Hold dodgy looking orders and call the numbers provided, real customers don’t mind the call.
6. To date we’ve been very successful with Tens of thousands of pounds of sales being made to UK customers.
7. And we’re happy to keep developing tools like the customer feedback and review sections because they help confidence and sales.

Check out the site and let me know what you think?

Actually whilst I’m thinking about the media I think it’s really, really negative and irresponsible to boot.

I wonder what they actually want. Do they want a housing crash, fuel protests, food inflation, general poverty and malaise?

Are we going back to the austerity of gloomy post war Britain? Sometimes I think the papers want us back to those days, of dark cold winters, food rationing and deference to your betters?

I wonder what the agenda is. I’ve really given up reading the papers as I end up depressed, worried and annoyed! I can’t bear the morning comic given out on the train, really I could do better!

About 7 years ago the papers were full of stories about recession and how far we were going to fall and talk about the economic “bounce”, would it be V shaped or U shaped, how much pain were we going to get? I lost my job because I was optimistic and my peers were pessimistic, OK the following week, the Twin Towers came down, throwing everyone into a crisis and generating shock waves across the world. No company or Country is immune to that type of event. But it was not predicted by anyone and most economic sectors really didn’t suffer over the longer term.

We are better off than previous generations, we don’t have to fear for our children’s future, we will probably adapt to climate change and develop the technology to help with Carbon emission and absorption.

I don’t want saccharine sweet stories but how about some more balance? What about looking at the real facts, what about solutions, what’s wrong with positivity?

This week I was asked if the business was recession proof. It’s not easy to answer that question with lots of economic indicators looking bad for business and consumers.

Even worse, the media seems to be in a frenzy of negativity about almost everything!

Thinking about my clients and what we do, I’m hoping that as long as we can measure and put a value on the work we do, we will continue to claim a reasonable share of marketing spend.

In fact during the last two downturns (recession is too strong a word for the economy over the last twenty years) client money moved from less accountable awareness advertising to direct response spend.

In hard times many companies need to keep advertising to maintain sales and market share but they also need to know where the money goes and how effective the spend has been. That’s where we come in.

Direct has also changed over the last few years, digital is now a fundamental part of our work. It’s the revenge of direct marketing over above the line. The world has come to our industry to use our skills to get customers to buy things, order stuff and get involved with companies.

So we’re not immune from the general economy but we could weather the storm better than most.