We rarely carry agency stories on Cream, although as with most rules, there are always notable exceptions. 

I'm going to resist the temptation to make jokes about disaster-themed storylines on the Archers, and instead just share the news that Inferno has joined forces with Farm. 

Inferno has hired the founders and Executive Creative Directors of Farm, Owen Lee and Gary Robinson, along with other Farm staff to bolster its talent pool in light of the agency’s spate of new business wins, including Nokia, NSPCC and Legal & General. A number of key clients will also be moving with the Farm team.

Cream regulars will recognise Inferno for its contributions from Bambos Neophytou and Robin Jaffray. As a special treat, you can also catch Inferno's strategic planner Jani Cortesini, deliver his brilliant presentation from Extra Life: The gaming guide for brands. 

By Giles Ivey

Online advertising needs to be more transparent, accountable, and also more engaging. Marketers who believe that engagement starts and ends with the click of a Facebook ‘like’ button are missing the point.

We need to think about how brands can move away from more traditional ‘look-click’ ads, and instead work towards building stunning creative that drives deeper audience engagement and participation. This type of creative can deliver measurable results with the metrics that marketers need to demonstrate ROI.

The term ‘engagement’ has come under fire lately. The great marketing buzzword is now seen as little more than smoke and mirrors term designed to get brands to part with their cash. Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but we are seeing a backlash from brands against some of the traditional forms of engagement marketing because much of this activity is inherently unaccountable.

Flooding Liverpool Street station with dancers at 11am is one tactic, but this type of stunt engagement is at best difficult quantify. It’s also somewhat haphazard in that it is almost impossible to know exactly who will be passing through the station at that time. That’s not to say it isn’t a clever marketing trick to raise awareness of a brand or product, but in these tough times brand owners need something more than ‘clever’; they need results. They need to be able to see people interacting with their brands and they need to know their campaigns are delivering. Unfortunately, much of the time, we don’t really know that this is happening. Yes we can surmise, or guess, but we don’t know for sure.

The fact is, to corrupt the famous line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, some forms of engagement are more equal than others. For one thing marketers seem obsessed with Facebook ‘likes’, but what is the real value of this if brands are driving people to Facebook but then doing little with them once they are there? It would be interesting to see exactly how many people come back to a branded Facebook page after clicking the ‘like’ button. Currently these stats are conspicuous in their absence.

Like for like's sake: The rush for empty engagement

For engagement to work, it needs to lead to a consumer action rather than simply being engagement for engagement’s sake. Clicking the ‘like’ button is not enough…spending time with a brand online, sharing something on social networks or making an online purchase directly from an ad are actions that can be measured and quantified.

Over the past decade, we have seen an increasing migration away from traditional media towards digital. This has led to brands looking for new ways to connect with their target audiences. Times were a lot easier for marketers when all they had to worry about was which paper to run their ads in and what time slot to show their TV ad. Today they have a raft of choices, yet the reality is consumers are most likely to interact with brand advertising online or on some sort of mobile device.

However, the current structure of online advertising leaves a lot to be desired. The go-to model for online advertising is CPM (cost per thousand), with brands paying every time someone navigates to the page their ad is on. Not surprisingly CPM doesn’t deliver staggering results – an industry standard of 0.3% or 3 clicks out of every 1000 page impression, and how many of those are people clicking on them by accident?

CPE (cost per engagement) on the other hand is a model that delivers transparent and measurable results, as well as a click through rate of 1% (almost 300% more than CPM). How does it work? By putting a time delay on expanding online ad units (normally a 3-2-1 countdown), advertisers are only charged once the online ‘experience’ has fully loaded – this removes charging for any erroneous rollovers. These online experiences can include anything from video, to games, to social network interactions. And they are also measurable. We can tell exactly how long people have stayed with the brand experience, what they have done and also, where they have interacted with a social network - way beyond anything you could possibly hope for via CPM.

The fundamental basis of CPE is about creating online experiences that encourage consumers to undertake an action on behalf of the brand – sharing, posting, tweeting, starting a conversation or watching a video. Through CPE consumers spend an average of around 23 seconds with brands. This is as powerful as any other form of engagement marketing channel and can be crucial when it comes to building relationships between brands and audiences.

No media channel is 100% measurable and there are faults with every measurement. But an engagement online when you are putting a message in a certain environment, where you know your target market will be and only paying when someone actually spends time with your brand, has got to be more appealing – and indeed more transparent – than trying to capture the attention of whoever happens to be walking through Liverpool Street at 11am on a Tuesday morning.

Giles Ivey is UK Managing Director of SAY Media.

The idea of brands telling stories is a hot topic right now. Coca-Cola is all about "liquid and linked" content, Heineken has had some amazing success with its global content strategy and the theme at this year's Festival of Media is based on the "science of storytelling".

Popular wisdom suggests that the future of brand content lies in video, and video is undoubtedly an exciting and powerful medium, but the popularity of e-readers and tablets has revitalised the written word, albeit in digital form.

In our experience, the tablet edition of Wired is the standard by which other digital magazines should be judged. The technical team at Condé Nast has created a superb platform for brands. Full page ads still appear in the ‘book’, but they are now rich with content and limited only by the imagination of the advertiser.

The whole content paywall debate still continues; but users are culturally adapting to the idea of paid-for content and its value over the free general clutter that is the bulk of the internet, as demonstrated by this infographic:

by Bambos Neophytou.

The combining trends of social-commerce and increasingly accurate user-data will enable highly targeted campaigns for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Earlier this year, I made a number of predictions for 2012, one which we have already seen evidence of, which was the return of heritage formats: articles in the British press last week reported how “A spokesman for HMV has said that the high street chain is planning to step up the amount of vinyl it stocks in response to demand from customers.”

Another trend Inferno is confident we will see realised this year is the one we called ‘Friendship Groups are the New Target Audiences’. What we mean is that marketing departments and agencies will create products, offers, campaigns aimed at discreet and specifically identified groups of individuals who are connected socially based on four key motivations:

1. Widespread dissatisfaction with current consumer targeting models
2. Social media makes newer targeting possible (Youtube, Flikr, Facebook, Twitter,etc)
3. Advanced analytics deliver increasingly accurate data on coherent social groups (statistical analysis, predictive modelling, behavioural targetting)
4. The irrefutable logic that trusted peer recommendation (word of mouth from your family and friends) is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchase

Even a brief discussion of each of these ingredients, would be beyond the scope of this piece, so let’s assume 1 and 2 are understood and accepted and deal with the plugging in of the old truth of 4 into the modern marketing engineering of 3.

The truest truism is sometimes the least fashionable thing to say. No one gets a applauded for pointing out that word-of-mouth recommendation is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchases. But this is the crux of why targeting friendship groups make so much sense.

By targeting comparatively small groups of peers through social digital media, brands have never been in a better place to use the overwhelmingly powerful force of peer-endorsed recommendation and mutual endorsement.

How this plugs into 3 can be seen in how the advanced analytics is quietly and behind the scenes revolutionising how we do marketing. Advanced analytics is being used to model customer data and make accurate predictions about which messages, channels and offers are more likely to elicit positive responses from the audience.

An example, on a macro scale, is Adobe’s use of the tools made available to it through the company called MarketShare Analytics to optimise its marketing activity on a weekly basis to reach its targets. For an example on a micro scale take a look at the examination of how time, weather and mood (among other variables) can all be factored into mobile behavioural targeting in the ‘Next Best Offer’ article (Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2011). Reaching individuals with personalised offers at the right time (so often thought of as the Holy Grail in promotional marketing) is not only within reach, but is being practised as we speak by the cutting edge people in your field.

The next obvious step is to tailor offers to the shared interests of a group of friends.  Social media community managers working on behalf of brands already identify coherent groups within their followers and friends. All it takes is for the visionary marketing/product clients to produce assets designed to the uniquely detailed understanding that community managers can give them of the groups available to talk to.

And so back to ingredient number 1: There has always been something vaguely unsatisfactory with the idea of ‘the target consumer’. Apart from being a fiction made up of patches of statistical data, it rarely does the main task it is supposed to, that is create a clear target for communications and marketing activity. Instead, it fills the world with jargonistic labels for demographic groups and spurious pen-portraits of no-one in particular. But it is the ‘particular’ that characterises and defines us as individuals who respond to marketing messages. Roderick White has written eloquently about this: “within a given category market, true segmentation is hard to discern: on most criteris customers of competing brands are broadly similar … segmentation is not just frustrating but pointless and has been roundly condemned in the academic literature as technically unsound” (Roderick White in Admap, quoted in  Guilt Trip, Hesz & Neophytou, 2010, p.76).

But perhaps, like ethical foreign policies and benevolent banks, the target consumer is a myth most of us dangerous free-thinkers can abandon.  By targeting real people in their real social groups we can lead the way forward. Both the ability of the marketing community to engage with individuals and the explicit opting in by individuals to commercial messaging has never been greater. So it is up to those who can see this opportunity to make it happen.

Bambos Neophytou is head of strategy at Inferno.

Cream's 'Campaign of the week' newsletter is out now - featuring IKEA's brilliant work on the Paris Metro, LG's mischievous flat-screen heist video and some advice on two-screen strategies from Billington Cartmell's Dan Machen. 

'Campaign of the week' delivers a weekly shot of inspiration,innovation and insight straight to your inbox. Subscribe to it on the Cream homepage or read it here. 

For a magazine enthusiast like me, the words 'online magazine' don't often conjour images of anything exciting. I like my mags to be little works of art. I'm a mag-snob, and I'm not ashamed to say so. Monocle might be pretentious, but I love it. I happily pay the premium for Wired (US) instead of the UK version as the American edition is much more fun, even if the design is a little reckless. Another current favourite is the quarterly M/I/S/C, edited by the brilliantly monikered Idris Mootee, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the world of media and creativity. I especially love trawling the newsagents of Soho, looking for those enormous coffee-table busting magazines that boast gorgeous front covers and limited print runs. 

Online, things are often a different matter. Publishers, as a general rule, make bloody awful website versions of their magazines. They know what looks good on paper, but fail to translate that skill online. This is often because of a technology gap that requires the services of an IT department. Before you know it, a crystal clear artistic vision get trampled upon by HTML code and search optimisation creating flabby, ugly, inflexible content graveyards.  

Fortunately, things are beginning to change, thanks to the work of folk like those at SAY Media , the digital publisher and consumer engagement specialist. They have raised the bar for online magazines with the redesign of its international home interiors website, Remodelista.  The new publishing format makes it easier for editors to create beautiful, cross-platform media experiences, readers to navigate and discover relevant content and products, and advertisers to reach highly-engaged audiences. New features include better tools for writers and a modern content management system that creates an “art department in a box” allowing for richer content experiences for readers and advertisers.

New search and navigation tools allow readers to search Remodelista’s entire content library by room, colour and type of product, from bathroom fixtures to flooring. The site’s variable scrolling function allows readers to focus on featured content while easily accessing new content in a separate reference bar.

The new City Guide section features more than 1,000 posts on hotels, lodging and restaurants all over the world, organized according to location. Weekly issues give readers a quick means to browse back issues by theme and date, and enhanced sharing capabilities allow them to pass on relevant content more easily via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

 Remodelista’s new design features a premium environment that gives advertisers a clutter-free canvas to engage a highly influential and specialised audience. Similar to Remodelista’s sister site xoJane.com the site features one large brand ad unit per page. The new adaptive scrolling technology increases brand visibility by lengthening the time the ad unit remains on-screen – an innovative approach to online marketing.

"Remodelista’s redesign brings many user-focused improvements, including the City Guides section that will give the editorial team an exciting opportunity to grow our audience here in the UK. City Guides are a natural development from Remodelista's keen interest in design from around the world." - Christine Hanway, London-based Executive Editor of Remodelista

By Bambos Neophytou.

Stay one step ahead with these predictions and tips for 2012. Are we heading for a world without Apple?

Detail goes into 'pretail'

Despite the ever evolving ways that agencies and clients use digital technology to enhance and encourage retail experiences, the realisation will come that digital is at its most effective prior to the point-of-puchase, and that’s where efforts and budgets will be spent.

Friendship groups are the new target audiences

The combining trends of social-commerce and powerfully accurate user-data will enable highly targeted exclusives for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Big bold brand entertainment

Amid the doom and gloom or global economic meltdown, there is a huge appetite for big, bold, fresh live entertainment experiences. There will be a resurgence of brands putting on big events and experiences (as Nokia did at Millbank), and with activity building around Jubilee and Olympics. If the experience is impressive enough, products will act as souvenirs that people will want to take away from the live event.

Nokia Lumia projection event at London's Millbank tower

The beginning of the end for Apple

The shine starts to fade,  Andoid’s 70% market share starts to erode the iPhone’s perceived dominance, and their share of computer sales still does not exceed 5% of the market =  Apple’s leadership credentials without Steve Jobs start to look considerably more shaky.

Designed in China, made in Europe

As the East moves further west, Chinese brands will start to enter mainstream awareness, and the current designed/manufactured duality will begin an irrevocable reversal.

Splendid isolation

In its pursuit of an increasingly impossible tightrope act, the UK (distancing itself from Europe, yet being unavoidably drawn in to its economic vortex) will invite all the world in for the Olympics, but behave is an unusually insular and self-regarding way, initiated by the spectacle of the Queen’s Jubilee.

The revenge of heritage formats

Analogue trumps digital, as new media gurus espouse the value of print media and paper books (cf. Clay Shirky). The tangible, multisensory experience of using cassette tapes, vinyl, old printing presses provides a thrill which proves irresistible to those who did not grow up with them.

Initiatives like Record Store Day reflect the rise in popularity of traditional media formats.

Death of despicable brands

Only the fittest and most necessary brands will survive. The new logic of necessity will obliterate a host of familiar brands that have no (functional, emotional, experiential) reason to exist, whether old school badly integrated retailers, or fmcg dinosaurs that have no visibility.

An eruption of niche business models

Youtube is revenue sharing with users for popular uploads, other brands are involving ordinary folk in monetising their consumer generated ideas and content, there are no boundaries to the kinds of new business models that brands and consumers can co-create. Co-creating content with no revenue stream is so 2009.

Bambos Neophytou, Head of Strategy at Inferno, specializes in retail, environmental issues, cognitive science and author of Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon.     

By Pete Davis

One of the trickiest parts of any sales promotion campaign has always been predicting how your target audience will react to any given type of promotional activity. A lot of the science of this is based on how people have reacted to previous similar campaigns, but this does not help with targeting a specific audience, on top of this it can also leave you vulnerable to statistical errors and so-called “black swan” events, where unpredicted events hit redemption figures.