What EA Sports can teach Arts Marketers

Chris Erb from EA SPORTS was a key note speaker at Ad:tech Sydney. For those who don't know EA sports is not just a giant in the gaming sector but also the global sports sector, and as a purveyor of discretionary entertainment spend there's a lot the arts can learn from them.

According to Erb, the main reason EA has become such a powerful sports brand is because it gives fans of sport serious and powerful engagement over an above the more passive consumption of a rival like ESPN. (Yes, they see ESPN as their main rival not other game developers.)

The success of EA is built on attracting known brands (NFL, FIFA) to licence them to develop games then delivering extremely well on the promise of those brands.

Some stats: EA Sports has 19 million facebook fans and 80% of users play 20 hrs per week or more - that's huge engagement.

The EA Sports mission is to build and drive connected experiences. Although the arts don't have games - what ways can we make our product more active, less passive and how can we drive engagement be it physical world or virtual?

EA does a lot work on "surprise and delight" features for instance, you can unlock a hidden passage of 3D gaming within Madden Football. But to do this you had to buy a special brand of Doritos chips to get the code and free glasses.

With regards to pricing EA stands for good value, doesn't gouge and only works with authentic collaborators (i.e. Football fans eat chips!).

They always keep the consumers at the heart of how they market their product - asking how would our gamers react if we did this?

Their BIG NEW THING currently is building offline experiences to strengthen connection with their predominately online brand. This is done by the development of themed EA Sports Bars, including ones on cruise ships and EA Sports shops in airports. The arts already is strong in the physical world, if EA is clamouring to offer physical experiences we need to realise what a strength that is for us .

EA's customer knowledge is HUGE for instance they can find out, of all of the people playing NFL Madden online last Thursday, the percentage of people who always pass to the right on the third down. The arts also has access to comparatively much more data than the usual retailer and needs to look at it with fresh eyes.

Erb also says that gamification isn't just the domain of video game makers, anything can be made into a game and many corporates are using game-type play to strengthen positive buyer behaviour - I have further notes on gamification and will expand on this in a future post.

The key take homes for me from Erb and EA were:

• Look for ways to make the arts experience more active, more two-way and less passive one-way. 
• Look beyond your niche to know your true competitors. 
• Think about surprise and delight features. (a live band in the foyer, free wine tastings, unscheduled announcement to join the cast after the show) 
• Think about real, authentic corporate relationships that make sense to your consumer. 
• Leverage our real-world strength - that people come and interact with the arts in a physical sense. 
• If you have access to rich data - even if not quite as rich as theirs - use it. 
• Make a game of it! People will do things they might not otherwise if you make a game of it. 

What Ad:tech taught me about email

The effectiveness and list management of my work's email marketing list has been a matter of concern for us at Canberra Theatre Centre for at least three years. Managing the needs of patrons versus the demands of commercial hirers is a constant challenge.

As I stated in a previous post, almost no one at the cutting edge of the digital marketing industry is taking email seriously. This could just be that it's no longer the 'cool kid' in the class room, it might also be that what most creative agencies did with email was generate viral campaigns which was very easily moved to social once these streams gained traction.

Either way the breakfast panel filled with suppliers to the industry was the only session devoted to email. Here's what I learnt.

STATS

• Microsoft Outlook still accounts for 21% of all email traffic.
• iOS accounts for 16% and growing. Think about how your emails look on mobile devices - especially Apple.
• 26% access via Hotmail 
• 10% via gmail 
• Mobile web traffic will over take desktop traffic in 2014 
• 15% of emails are read on mobile – 85% of that via iOS 

STRATEGY

Look beyond just push marketing, think about every customer touch point in your customer relationship and whether email can play a role. It may be that this medium in your business needs to shift away from being a core sales tool and more towards being a tool to influence post-purchase behaviour, re-activate lapsed client and the like. 
But to do this it means that targeting is important, looking for those trigger points, phases in a customer cycle (ie: Say the 18 month time frame where a performing arts patron might become a lapsed patron). These things are nearly impossible to do manually, so you need systems to help them become if not automated but programmatic and system driven.

It is proven that customer service emails have a high rate of acceptability, moving your email relationship to one where you are seen as a helpful friend can only benefit your business in the long term.

EMAIL MARKETING LIFECYCLE

OLD conversations – frequency of contact and design of the email
CURRENT conversations – targeted lists
THE NEXT WAVE – programmatic emails, triggered at key points of customer relationship, integrated with social media.

Some simple ways you can do this in the performing arts are: Don't just target the one broad list or even genre based start to include recency, frequency, click through, open rate, basically whatever you can to talk to your 'active list' rather than wasting money hitting the inactive not-yet-unsubscribed. 

DON'TS

• People HATE Bait email – companies like like Wotif – who you might only use once or twice in a period of time for a specific service but you have now being 'tricked' into receiving daily emails from.
• Whatever the rationale never, ever charge more for people to purchase online.

DO's 

• Creativity is still really important, good copy, nice design are important regardless of the media
• 35 characters MAX in your subject headers.
• ALWAYS Optimise for Mobile
• Test across different email systems
• Think about “images off” and how your EDM looks.
• Use Facebook to drive email sign ups and vice versa 
• Set key long term targets and get the stats to check on it. 
• Make sure your call to actions drive engagement such as check the video of this musician rather than just "Buy Tickets".

FINALLY 
ALWAYS Make your real world experience meet the demands of your online one – eg: if you have an e-bookers queue in your box office make damn sure that it moves faster than the non-e-bookers one!

The actions we are doing as a result of Ad:tech and these notes are:

• Redesigning InBOX so it reads better for images off.
• Working on better integration with our ticketing database for smarter, more integrated list pulling and better measurement of ROI.
• Putting more pressure on our technology partners about systemising things like "About to lapse" patron campaigns. Currently these would be too driven by manual list pulling and excel spreadsheet manipulation.

Anyhow I promised more detail from my Ad:tech notes. This was the email one look forward to more!

ROI on Social - a quick thought bomb

We've all heard it from our managers - "This social media thing is all well and good but what return are we getting?"

The best answer to this is "Well what return did we hope to get?"

It is amazing how often that little question goes unanswered at the very beginning of a campaign.

On a high level it is relatively easy to use even just facebook insights to track reach and engagement (virality they call it - 2% or greater per post is good). If you have the basics of Google analytics set up you monitor traffic to your website from your various social outlets and hopefully you can even go one step further and attach this to sales. (This is of course just the starting point there's a world of tools out there to help measure social effectiveness)

But in reality what should happen is you plan a campaign in which social is a factor and you say "what role do we want social to play in this campaign?" and then develop measurable tactics to achieve those aims. Often it won't be pure sales, it might be customer engagement, 'likes', reach, exposure - social for the arts is great for anticpation building and pre-show knowledge building. If you define success from the outset you will be in a much better position to justify the investment with your boss.

An interesting counter point is whether your business approaches social from a campaign by campaign basis or from an 'always on' basis. I think it is important that you have this conversation internally as they are two very different things with different benchmarks, one is quite outcomes/sales driven and the other is more about the brand and customer relationship - the need different benchmarks.

Think also about the wisdom of being always 'on'. Human relationships are not always 'on' some of my dearest friends, I may not speak with for months on end, the relationship is not weaker because of it. Natural relationships ebb and flow, start-stop and start again. As an organsiation you may not need to be posting to your "friends" every day, it might be better to only talk to your likers when you have something to say that is of interest to them.

I hope to expand on ROI further in coming weeks thanks largely to links and resources provided by @stephenellis_ and @artsoz watch this space.

Five things from Ad:tech Sydney

It has come to my attention that I kind of ramble on a bit so I'm keeping this post really short and a pointer to possible future content. Back in March (Hey I know, sooooo current!) I was lucky enough to go to Ad:tech Sydney and I've got lots to share from that experience but the five big things were really...

1. Digital Display Ads: Go big, go smart or go home.Small ads buried down the bottom of a secondary page in a website don't work, you need to think of online display advertising almost like a TV spend. You have to throw decent money at it if its going to work. The caveat is if you are a niche product and can target niche websites which are cheaper.
   
   Going smart, well it's an area I know little about but those who are big on analysis know that its about using the metrics at your disposal, learning about re-marketing and tracking your customers. By way of example we are looking very closely at the Canberra Times online. Their weekday unique visitors outstrip their daily circulation and the advertising is 100% 'viewership' rather than CPI which makes it good value. We will shortly be giving this a serious trial and looking very closely at the metrics (when I get time to skill myself up!!).
   
   If you can't afford to go for impact then it really is best to look more so at Google Adwords, Youtube and Facebook Advertising instead. Which is certainly not second best, in fact many professionals who can afford to go big actively choose not to and use these tools more often instead.
2. Optimise for mobileThe universal trend was that if you aren't currently optimising for mobile then you are already behind, speaker after speaker was ramming home this fact, 16% of all web traffic is currently done on mobile and in a year's time this will be 32%. Also mobile web traffic happens closer in proximity to the purchase, be it in time or geography (such as if the item requires attending a bricks and mortar location like a restaurant). If you aren't giving a good mobile experience you are about to not be in the game.
3. Take Part is potentially a really valuable engagement toolTake Part is a new initiative at my work, the basic premise is that the impact of the arts is magnified immeasurably when people are given the opportunity to engage more deeply with that product, learn more about the story and artform and artists, Take Part is our sub-brand for advertising these opportunities. It basically makes for more affected and loyal advocates.This basic premise was repeated in more business-like terms often throughout the conference, the Commonwealth Bank was heavily focused on using social media to herd people toward engaging with the Comm Bank at a local level at real world events. Other businesses were clamouring for that elusive path between social media engagement and real world engagement that I could see we already had.
4. No one really knows what to do with EDM'sThe agencies weren't even pitching campaigns with email components, not one case study featured the words "and then for the email we did..", even the paid-for-by-stallholders breakfast panel of EDM solution suppliers didn't really know what do say, I've never seen a more maudlin bunch!
   
   So EDM's are a bit like newspapers and faxes, yesterday's news and at the beginning of a slow decline BUT your business has all these email addresses still right ? Maybe a few less than five years ago, maybe with lower stats but it's still a powerful resource right?
   
   The best take-homes from the panel was get smart, smart, smart! Sophisticated slicing and dicing, preferably with some systematic automation to make it workable during your business day is the key to maintaining this resource. Hitting just the right customer, with the right product at the right time is the key. Having an about-to-lapse trigger, a trigger when for when X consumable would be just about empty and hit them with an offer to re-purchase. These are the ways forward, and the arts industry patiently waits for its ticketing systems to catch up!
5. This simple yet powerful brainstorm process – define the problem, define the solution then ask “what’s the magic?” and don’t stop until you find it.Dave Whittle of MC Saatchi was running this little workshop of case studies and this simple yet powerful phrase "What's the magic?" really resonated with me. He also said "Never ever start a campaign with 'what will the poster look like?'" which is so true, start with Problem>solution>MAGIC! then maybe later you'll need to design something, but first go for the magic, the idea, it may not even be a designed focused idea it could be anything. Starting with the poster constrains your thinking. 

Umm hows that? Not so short huh? Sorry will try harder next time, in the meantime keep asking yourself "What's the magic?", I know it's simple and a bit obvious but it's really powerful if you let it in.