Blogging about social media » eMarketing and Big Brands

I've been attending today a full day seminar on eMarketing organised by the french Electronic Business group, with about 200 big accounts from Disneyland to Nescafe, Philips, L'Oréal Paris... and many others. It has been a long time since the last time I got so many insights bumping into my mind while attending such a conference I have to say, so the conclusion is that it was definitely worth attending.

Here are some of the insights I got from speakers and attendees, I'll quote the brands rather then mentioning the exact names of the people.

Session I : Speaking to your audience, at it's location (where it is located):

Cortal Consor said they are allocating 80% of their communication budget to the online world, within 2 main activities: display, search and affiliation.

Virgin Mobile explained the acquisition cost is less expensive online than offline. 90% of their investment online is dedicated to recrutement. They've made 2 campaign within Dailymotion and FaceBook at this stage. The idea was to give a participatory dimension to the brand, to go where the consumers are. One of the challenges : impossible to really estimate at this stage what the brand gets back.

Voyages-SNCF.com was very interesting: 25% of their revenu is generated online, which means 1.6 billion EUR, they've increased of 21% in 2007. Goal: doing 50% of their revenu online in the next 5 years. They want to reach the audience of young people, but this population request real content and "experience plus being in placed in a situation of meeting other people. Which life experience does SNCF bring to them ? The expectation is no more a speed one rather meeting people, life experience. Having wifi on the TGV-East led to new expectation from travelers who are demanding new services: this is leading to a new life experience. TGV brand is planning to launch a social network which will be called TGV Move, on the topic of mobility, meeting within sustainability values. Something else than traditional marketing has to be activated to ensure they can stay connected to the young audience which will be more and more key for them knowing that the french rail market will be open to competition in the next 5 years. To reach the young audience, SNCF has been staffing its team with young people who are talking the same language.

AOL: Internet has forced brands to accept dialogue with consumers and put their brands in the hands of consumers.

Session II: From media planning to cross-media

We got here the case of Mir (a wash brand belonging to Henkel) which was very interesting: they've been launching a buzz campaign via a website inviting people to vote at the time of the french presidential election for their favorite wash brand, creating candidates profiles and blgos for each of them. A special ad has been shooted for TV with a signature to get people back to the website, plus a set of very funny films featuring clothes describing the benefits of the wash brand behaving in a human way... Difficult to describe in text but very well done. Of course, all the communication sets in shops were also promoting the global campaign to reach the shopper. Mir's speaker described how difficult it was internally to get approval for this new kind of campaign but they succeed in getting the "go". They've also partnered with Yahoo! to sponsor a web tv shw and customize the home page to their campaign code.

Disneyland Paris Resort: the speaker was the VP Com Europe and he was really great. He shared his vision and understanding of the changes that had to be brought to Disneyland when he came and his story was definitely worth listening, He is starting with identfying precisely the brand DNA then he is following the process below:

1. Know your target, very well

2. Know what their media consumption is exactly

3. Know the steps of the buying process

From his words, coming to Disneyland Paris is all about living an experience, not about discovering a new attraction. It's about turning ordinary things into magic ones and to lead to dreams.

Regarding investments, 3 years ago, DPR was spending 1% of its advertising budget on Internet. Today it's 17%. The new websites has 25 millions unique visitors per year.

They've been producing a serie of shows with key stars for the the french TV around the idea of "tell us what your dreams are all about" in 2 minutes length interviews, of course the french TV have been more then keen to host these programs which were in fact presented as "sponsored by" rather then making pure ad placement as we are all doing in the vast majority. They've been creating a real content there.

The consumer has been placed back in the center of Disneyland. As a golden rule, he described the fact that we, as brand have the responsibility or our brand DNA, it's not the agencies which are working for us that have to do so. It's our mission.

He is by the way a strong believer in the fact that the agencies fee model has to be rethink from scratch and replaced by an incentive based one. Why should media agencies get 10% fee on their buying whatever successful the campaign they are orchestrating are ? The actual model is suffering from an internal competition within agencies services, each one fighting against the other to get the biggest part of the budget.

Internet is the only medium to be at the same time "medium and transactional".

L'Oréal Paris has been launching a website fully dedicated to people using iPhones to browse through it.

That's it for the first part, enough for today, back soon for the second part.

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Globally, everyone was agreeing to admit that web 2.0 campaigns were experimentations at this stage and that no one was able to show any transformation ratio to the buying act. You can not measure precisely how many people bought your product because of a campaign hosted on the web (except of course of you're a pure web player). Those who have been experimenting Second Life campaigns have all been disappointed, what I can easily understand. I don't believe in SL neither, knowing that the reach is so low and the technical barriers so numerous.

Disclosure: that's not at any point a personal reflexion, it's just a summary of key points I've collected today, more in disorder than in any order... It's about keeping track of these discussions and talks before moving along to thinking.