No frills, and no thanks to Ryanair

Last week I had the opportunity to experience two very different no frills concepts. First was Riders Palace, a snow hotel in Laax, Switzerland. The owners obviously know what's important for boarders who travel without kids - a bed, a good shower, proximity to ski lifts, a lobby bar. Period. There's no real need for a telephone, 24H room service, minibar, TV or horrible kitsch art on the walls as you'll anyway be sleeping the whole time you're in your room. It cost less than 160 pounds for three night including a three-day ski pass. And it's cool, using only concrete, wood and glass as materials. Brilliant, if not no-frills chic.

I also experienced a Ryanair flight to Friedrikschafen that cost less than a hundred pound on paper and 200 pounds when including luggage, payment fee and a 10-pound online check-in fee. The total price and first two extra items are reasonable but the last is tricky to categorize under "no frills" as you just can't board a plane without checking in. Anyway, I had forgotten to check in and had to do it at the airport. My bad, and I kind of understand I had to pay 20 pounds extra to check in at the airport without being refunded the 10 pounds I had paid for online check-in. This is according to our terms and conditions as a lady trying to get a queue of people like me organized explained to me in a bored manner. But I also lost my right to check in online for the return leg and had to pay another 20 euros extra on the way back to London. Also brilliant, but in a very different way. In a way where you think: gosh, they must have a team of lawyers and extremely creative product managers to figure out more ways to fuck your wallet in the ass, no lube. (Mom, I only use this kind of language when talking about Ryanair, I promise). What's next after charging for using toilets? Charging for life jackets under your seat and pilots that have had their eye-sight checked in the last 24 months? Despite loving low airfares (and 200 pounds for a 2-hour flight is not that cheap, is it?) I guess I have to say no to the thrills and chills of flying Ryanair in the future. If you ever fly them, make sure you don't forget to check in beforehand.

Notes from Marketing Tailormade seminar

Today I attended Marketing Tailormade, a seminar where you can choose your own program depending on your interests and needs. I love the idea and warmly recommend attending, despite one of the sessions being an absolute waste of time today (you can just pick another session if this happens, capisce?)

Random ideabytes aka notes to self:

Do I sound like a bloody marketer?

Blood, sweat and viral marketing

Shit doesn't happen. Shit takes time and effort.

I was recently in a meeting where co-founder of a next-big-thing-startup, when probed about marketing plans, said something to the line of we'll do something viral so we don't need to worry about marketing too much. Right. I'm in no means a viral marketing expert but this much I know: viral marketing does take time and effort.

There seems to be a widely spread misconception that viral marketing doesn't cost anything and that if you do even tiny bit of it, customers will turn up on your door or website like zombies. In my view this is only true on four occasions. First, companies like Skype or Facebook whose product is so viral in nature that they seem to grow "just like that". Second, brands like Apple or Obama that have such loyal followers that every step they take is echoed on blogs, social network profiles and T-shirts of fanboys across the world. Thirdly there are those whose idea is just so spot-on that no-one can refuse to pass it on to a friend. Blendtech's Will it blend? campaign is a good example of that. And lastly, some just get lucky because a celebrity blogger somewhere happens to like it.

That leaves 99% of folks to make viral marketing happen with their sweat and/or marketing dollars. I've seen the behind the scenes of quite a few viral campaigns, and none of them have been super cheap or super easy to do. Take my recent task of generating blog coverage for Pledgehammer. I now know I have to do about a dozen units of work (this can be an email, blog comment or a guest blog post) to receive one unit of coverage. I've made north of 250 contacts to get about 20 people interested and writing about Pledgehammer. That's good many evenings and weekends spent on creating "something viral". (Luckily the weather has been rubbish). See here, here, here (got to love this one) or there for results, more links are available on Pledgehammer blog.

Long story short - viral marketing is a powerful thing, definitely worth some experiments, it just takes time and effort to work.

Want Tartu Entertainment?

This text ad is fresh off my Gmail account. It left me somewhat confused. Targeting works - I'm in UK and probably have quite many Estonia-related emails in my mailbox. But what's Tartu Entertainment? And what does Visit Online! really add? That I should visit the country online, not in person?

Visit Estonia folks, if you ever read this and wonder who was the one person that clicked on that ad, it was me.

Behind the scenes of the T-Mobile ad

By now you've surely seen the new T-Mobile ad. Such a great idea! A friend who was in the video told me they had five full days of rehearsal, at first in some huge building in North London where the life-size plan of Liverpool Street Station was drawn onto the floor and at night in the station itself thereafter. They shot the thing six times with 16 (or was it 14) cameras, with half-hour breaks between the shoots. Dancers were carefully choreographed to leave corridors between them so no-one would miss their train and there were station official present to green light the beginning of each take. Which all makes it a great idea that is also executed brilliantly.


The only thing I couldn't understand is that the guy I spoke with reckoned that 40.000 pounds was paid out to the dancers. With 400 dancers involved, can it really be just 100 pounds per hard working dancer?

Great ideas

Coming across great ideas is so ... great. Here's another piece of copy from Blik packaging:

Seeing your room with blik for the first time is kinda like seeing a guy with a mustache. Come to think of it, it's nothing like seeing a guy with mustache. Although both are cool and make a statement about who you are, our wall patterns don't hurt when you kiss them. Not that we'd know...

Or consider Beauty Engineered Forever, this Greenpeace ad or this no smoking sign. I know I run the risk of sounding like a cheap copy of Seth Godin now but anyway, kudos to these people that come to work, drink their coffee and do great things rather than bland mediocre ones. And kudos to the bosses of these people, and owners of companies that have hired such people for asking them to do so.

And a sanity check to end this rant - do you know of any truly great ideas that have failed miserably?

Your marketing budget as an investment portfolio

I made a presentation at a marketing seminar organized by Äripäev, Estonia's business daily. My topic was treating marketing budgets like investment portfolios, a simple idea that stuck with me years ago.

A financial investments portfolio usually includes some assets that preserve capital (such as cash or government bonds) and some that grow it such as stock funds. An aggressive investment portfolio would also include a risk fund, a small share which can finance riskier but at the same time potentially more profitable investments. If it works out sour, the loss is capped at only being a tiny bit of your portfolio. And if it works, the tiny bit of your portfolio can quickly grow to be a large bit. Simply there is more to win than there is to lose.

What does this mean for marketers

In marketing it's exactly the same. Some of the things we do are very basic, like using point-of-sale materials when selling fizzy drinks or placing an ad on a classifieds paper when selling real estate. These involve very little risk, but they don't guarantee a successful result.

Then there are things like having a snappy product name or a great media campaign. These involve a little more risk, and they're also more likely to generate returns. The unfortunate thing is that competition is very likely to do the same things, so you'd need to be slightly cleverer to do better than them.

Which neatly brings me to the third kind of possible investments into marketing. The risky but potentially very rewarding kind. A different niche as target audience, a completely different media strategy or messaging that stands out like a Bruce Lee in a sea of Steven Segals. And I'm not saying marketing should go all wacky. Not at all, it's just that there should be a small "risk fund" in every marketing budget that can finance novel trying out new things. Think iPint or the Mynthon outdoor ad that also served as a samples dispenser.

Time is money

The size of your risk fund can vary based on your marketing goals, size of your budget, conservativeness of your business (or boss) etc. I reckon 10 per cent is minimum. The good people at McKinsey go further:

marketers must push to ensure that they spend 75 to 80 percent of their money on proven messages that are placed in proven media vehicles and supported by proven dollar levels. The remaining 20 to 25 percent of spending should finance well-structured experiments.(Thanks, Robin, for pinging me this)

The mistake I've sometimes done there is not allocating enough time for experimenting. Having a creative idea is the easiest thing on the planet. Selling it internally, executing, measuring, analyzing effectiveness and reporting it back to people involved is a different story. I say the rule of thumb is that 10% of experiential budget needs 20% of time to handle it properly. YMMV.

This sounds good but how to measure it?

Touché! Measuring usually proves to be the difficult bit, especially in non-internet channels. But unless your budget or risk fund of that budget is gigantic I wouldn't go anal with measuring. Paying attention and any reasonably-easy-to-set-up measures are enough. If it works brilliantly, you'll know. The outlets in the proximity of your outdoor ad/dispenser will be sold out, competition will start to copy it or there will be a divine thumbs-up from between the clouds. And if it's a complete waste of money, you'll know too, and probably in a not-so-pleasant way.

Grass is greener online

Measuring becomes much less of an issue online, provided you have taken the time to dig deep into numbers. Also, experimenting is usually much cheaper money wise but not time wise. Carling knows exactly how many people have downloaded the iPint. At Skype we often create several versions of the same email or web page because that's the best way to know whether something is working or not. Duplicating the "buy" button at the top of the page and at the bottom of the page may result in twice as many people buying from that page. Starting an email with a photo rather than an illustration may get you more people clicking through. Talking about a discount as 50% off may work better than half price - at least with Skype users. With users of other types of software, of financial institutions or of porn it may be a different story. Experiment, and you'll know.