Topics for New Playbook - Please Add Yours and Comment!

[Steve Rappaport (ARF)]

Community members are suggesting new topic areas, which are:

. social media
. social networking
. gaming
. mobile
. experiential marketing
. participatory advertising
. intragency politics and the barrier to effectiveness
. why digital integration doesn't work: social and cognitive issues in the agency workplace
. The Future: It's not just advertising.
. has social networking participation by brands created brands that are more social?
. is engagement too scary for enterprises when ad agencies and technology companies talk about "customer-facing" marketing, social media and user generated widgets?
. Does on line advertising specially the social media challenge the very fundamentals of advertising?

What would you like to see added? If you have research, white papers, articles or cases that should be considered for the next edition, let me - and the community - know.

[Joel Jewitt]

Hi Steve, I think this topic list looks good and interesting. As you know I'm more of a silicon valley technologist than a knowledgable consumer marketer.

I can see the Rapleaf components fitting into the outline under Online Measurements / Newer Metrics used to Guide Strategy -- the Rapleaf service would fit as an example of direct search of user published content tied to social media, kind of like "clinical targeted snapshots of the massive amounts of data being published by consumers about themselves" to help corporations ground themselves about who and where their consumers are on the social net

Topic Suggestion:

I'm not sure where this fits, but I noticed the absense of the term 'social graph' in the topic list. Maybe it goes in the Futures section but I think if we want to shoot just a bit ahead of the current market, so that the book stays in the sweet spot for awhile after it's published, we should deal with the social graph and maybe give it a seat in the main part of the book. One sense of it is that an emerging important measurable characteristic of a person to predict behavior is who they are connected to (which is now being made explicit through social media links). I'm sure you have the ATT study about this (happy to forward it) and there are no doubt other references that can be used as inputs.

Again I'm no consumer marketer so the following is just a guess, but in the same way that 'behavior' has been given a new measurability on the internet over the past decade, maybe 'social graph' will become a newly usable component of how marketers characterize people and their likelihood to take an action, and so be a big input into the formula of how companies market to consumers.

As an example we're starting to work with credit card companies by telling them who is friends with whom within their own consumer list. Two ways they might use this information: (a) if someone buys a financial product, send an offer for that prodict to the friends of that person (algorithmically -- ie it's a feed into their program that determines who gets what offers), (b) if an applicant for a card would have been rejected by the automated grading system, but they have friends who are good customers of the credit card company, those people will be 'rescued' and reviewed again as a potential applicant -- again this is because their relationship with responsible customers indicates a likelihood that they will be a responsible customer as well.

I'm sure many many more uses of the social graph will emerge over time.

I also apologize if this is already an old topic somewhere on the thread!

Joel

[Joel Jewitt]

Steve, here's an AT&T study (failry well circulated by now) that describes a test where products were sold to friends of current consumers with substantial lift, even though there was no requirement that the customer had ever mentioned the product to the friends.

A seminal discussion of the social graph is here: http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

So again the idea is:

* there's this thing emerging on the internet, which is an explicit web of connections between people (the social graph)

* studies are showing that being connected to someone implies that you are likely to behave like them in various ways

* the social graph will become a fundamental input to models of likelihood to buy, in the way demographics, psychographics, transactional history are today

* an online advertising playbook of the future will include some handling of the social graph to optimize direct marketing campaigns