Brands that look to Tiger for his high caliber performance on the golf course will not be disappointed - his legendary play will surely live longer than his indiscretions. And, after all, that is what brands want - longevity. Because brands should be selecting athletes as endorsers for what they’ve accomplished in their profession, not based on their personal life.

Tiger lost AT&T and Accenture, among others, as his sponsors most likely due to his recently publicized family matter, however I’m not surprised that several consumer package goods brands remain his sponsor.

B2B companies seem to be more on the conservative side and tend to put more emphasis on the values of who they are doing business with.

On the other hand, consumer packaged good brands are selling a product and many of those are performance based. Nike and LVMH’s TAG Heuer, have stuck with Tiger since last year’s mishaps. And Tiger still stands for what these brands are looking for - performance and luxury.

Will some brands have difficulty using him as an endorser in the future? Absolutely. But if a brand is choosing a celebrity endorser for anything other than the reason why he/she achieved celebrity status, these brands should strongly reconsider aligning themselves with ANY endorser.

Conversely, while Tiger may be working on repairing his marriage, De Beers (they sell the giant diamonds), Hallmark and 1-800-flowers.com may now be more relevant brands for him to endorse, I think Tiger will be more selective of the endorsements he makes in the future.

Even over the past few months during his break from professional greens, Tiger has remained a fantastic golfer. He’s been a bad husband, a bad dad and maybe even a bad friend to those that know him best. But really, other than taking a hiatus from the game of golf, we have yet to see it negatively affect his profession. After all, he is a professional golfer and this weekend’s Masters will be the ultimate test of his professionalism…at least for now.

Tiger is an athlete. And history shows that athletes are forgiven their indiscretions as they continue to perform at a professional level. As long as the indiscretion doesn’t directly tarnish the integrity of the game (e.g., Pete Rose), Tiger will most likely be forgiven by the fans over time.  Tiger is not a politician and he’s not a priest - he’s an athlete and an entertainer. And the question isn’t whether he’s done right or wrong. Or whether he will win or lose this weekend. The real question is:  “Were you watching?” And the brands that stuck by him are banking that we will be.

The truth is every digital effort is unique. If a company is going to judge its digital campaign on an “industry standard” or on what a competitor has done, then the company is not giving its campaign an opportunity to work for its brand specifically.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
This is the reason why Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are so important to a digital campaign and should be outlined early in the planning phase. KPIs are no longer just a part of an e-commerce strategy. They now must be incorporated into an overall digital marketing strategy.

The idea behind KPIs is this - use the digital marketing and Web analytics combined with a company’s business metrics to validate the online spend and marketing decisions.

There is no easier way to validate what you spend on digital marketing then if you can show its residual impact within places other than marketing within your organization, such as customer service, sales, operations and shipping. Data can be provided for all of these departments when lined up with digital campaign reporting metrics (CTR, cost per click (CPC), impressions, etc.), telling a complete story of how a campaign has affected a business.

You may just find that your digital efforts are working harder than you thought.

For example:
Take a customer service group that creates a presence on social media channels to direct customer service inquiries from the phone to the Web. With this implementation a one-to-one telephone call becomes a one-to-many response that is automatically archived for future users to peruse before making their own call.

The effect is exponential and can cross business units. For instance, in this case this particular customer service group directed its customer service inquiries to its Twitter feed and to a specific customer service Web site. These two outlets (Twitter and the Web site) reach more customers on a daily basis than customer service representatives could have possibly answered on the phone in one day.

While each digital campaign is different based on overall brand objectives, below are a few starting points that should be considered in the development of your next digital campaign to position it for success.

Digital Campaign Starting Points For Success

1. Let your target audience know what you want them to do and focus your effort.
   Look at the page you are directing users to. If there are 15 ways for them to navigate away from your call-to-action the deck is stacked against your campaign and you’re not positioning yourself for success.
2. Look at reasons you are giving consumers to visit your Web site or to take action
   If your digital campaign uses paid digital and/or social media efforts, what incentives are you offering your target audience to visit your Web site - download a coupon, make a free appointment with a specialist, or access to a free whitepaper?
   
3. Provide multiple ways to convert.
   Understand that not every person that visits your Web site is going to convert immediately. There are different types of visitors; you aren’t marketing solely to one person. Length of time spent on your Web site, numbers of visitors, e-mail registrations, form submissions and friending/following are some positive examples of actions that should be considered success metrics even if they aren’t purchases.
4. If you don’t have a conversion in mind - make one up.
   Collect something, anything. Your campaign should be delivering something for the money you are spending.
5. Make sure EVERYONE knows the KPIs of the campaign and revisit them with key project milestones.
   If you’re going to be judged by KPIs at the end of your work cycle you better be aiming for them upfront and optimizing them throughout the campaign.

In short, this partnership combines the better technologies of both of these companies. Microsoft’s Bing™ will provide the technical search programming and Yahoo!’s paid ad serving technology will handle the pay-per-click and display advertising on both sites.

The reinvention of Live to Bing, which includes a few new features and nice high-resolution imagery, wasn’t enough to raise my interest in adding Bing to the search engine mix for our Clients. The old saying “lipstick on a pig” comes to mind. But now, with the combined share of these two companies, it seems we’ve got a bigger pig to consider, and consider it we should.

Managing search campaigns requires daily monitoring, ongoing analysis and report comparison. It takes a lot of time to manage a campaign on one search engine, let alone three. Before this partnership, the audiences for Yahoo! and MSN separately were too small to even consider adding in the mix for our Clients.

In a recent January 2008 survey from compete.com (see graph below) — an online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics — Google™ had 69% of share of Web search, Yahoo! had 17% and MSN with 9%. Why would I consider dedicating some of my Client’s limited budget — and more of our labor resources — on a search engine that gets less than 9% of the search share?

This partnership increases both search engines’ reach (Microsoft is really the big winner here) and potentially creates a valid second-tier engine for advertisers to supplement their Google campaigns. The partnership would bring the two companies’ combined share to nearly 30%, still less than half of Google’s total. That being said, the takeaway is that if you aren’t advertising on Bing/Yahoo!, you aren’t reaching nearly 30% of your potential search-using audience.

I wouldn’t sacrifice the budget of your existing Google campaign until the jury is back in on Bing/Yahoo!. But for some advertisers, there is sure to be an opportunity to see if a shift in budget results in more frequent sales/leads from the combined larger audience. If set up and managed effectively, a SEM campaign’s effect on sales is so transparent that it makes it a great avenue to test theories.

Google does search but it’s branching out into other software and mobile platforms.

Microsoft does operating systems but they are branching out to search. Yahoo! does…well it sounds like they are still trying to figure that one out.

It’s easy to sit on this side of the screen and tell these companies to play in their own sandbox, but Google learned with their radio project to cut their losses and refocus their efforts on core competencies. Google’s lead is formidable and if Microsoft can’t make this work with Yahoo! they should bow out of this battle for search supremacy.

Photo courtesy of Frank Sheehan

Baltimore has officially decided to “save” the Senator Theatre in Belvedere Square and sometime in the near future will issue Requests For Proposals (RFPs) from organizations with an aim of operating the newly-designated historic landmark.

However, someone could still buy it at auction for a winning bid of more than $950,000 and keep Baltimore from taking over. Either way, this post is meant to provide some strategic direction to the new owners — whoever they may be.

It’s been said that the city would be looking to keep The Senator as a single-screen theater or a community arts location — both ideas have worked for other theaters in different locations but won’t work for The Senator.

The Senator is a Challenger Brand in many ways and can’t just follow the status quo. If it becomes an historic single-screen theater that shows first-run movies, it won’t be doing anything different than what the previous owners intended and will face stiff competition from other theatres such as The Charles Theatre and the Landmark Theaters in Harbor East.

If it becomes a community arts location chances are it won’t see the same level of success as The Creative Alliance did with transforming The Patterson on Eastern Ave. There are already a number of destinations for community theaters in Baltimore and with Towson University just a short drive north on York Road, The Senator would most likely be a fourth- or fifth-tier destination for community arts enthusiasts. There are a number of reasons I don’t believe this city can sustain multiple arts districts spread out on every street corner, but I won’t go into them here.

The Senator should concentrate on the second and third tenets of the Challenger Brand Philosophy — Emotional Connection and Sacrifice — in order to save itself and compete with other attractions in the city.

Emotional Connection - Create an emotional connection to the consumer, a sense of relevance, understanding and common ground that the category leader cannot match.

As a historic landmark in an up-and-coming area, The Senator could create an emotional connection by appealing to families so parents can show their children Baltimore’s connection to history and what that has meant to The Senator in recent years.

One idea to draw more families to the theater is to offer membership opportunities just as other “edutainment” Baltimore destinations do that entertain as well as educate their audience, such as Port Discovery or the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The memberships are more than just donations to offset overhead and will offer discounts or special promotions and events for members. People interested in keeping these “edutainment” destinations up and running will most likely donate/join.

Sacrifice - Sacrifice the pursuit of secondary communications objectives until your primary objective has been achieved.

There are going to be some significant sacrifices that need to be made if The Senator is going to become a viable business opportunity as well as a premier destination with the community. As one such sacrifice, I feel The Senator should sacrifice first-run movies and daily show times for special features at select show times, run family-friendly movies as matinees during a few weekdays and select second-run movies for adults on the weekends. Others include leasing lobby space for pop-up retail or local artisans to showcase their products.

To appeal to a greater overall Baltimore audience, the proud new owner of this historic theater may consider adding more seating to potentially increase revenue, however would be better served by sacrificing seating to allow for table space and the offering of food and alcohol service.

The tribulation facing The Senator is indicative of a larger threat facing our area. Marylanders and Baltimoreans in particular are at risk of losing a lot of what makes this area unique. There has been talk recently about the waning interest level in The Preakness and I’ve noticed there is only a handful of duckpin bowling lanes open anymore. Point is, let’s not lose the last remaining single-screen theater in Baltimore which also happens to be an icon of our city’s history.

Contact me for further insights on what you feel can be done with the theatre and how the Challenger Brand Philosophy can help save The Senator. I have a lot of ideas and as a member of that community I have a lot of interest in seeing The Senator succeed.

It feels like it was on the ride home, but it may have been a day or two later, Sprint hits me with these 4G ads. What?! I thought 3G was it, da bomb, cream of the crop — whatever.

Do I sense another Razor War here? I think everyone should wait for 5G really. More is better, no matter what the application. I won’t scream conspiracy until I read about it in The Onion though.

I’ll begrudgingly keep using my 3G network and anticipating the 3.0 upgrade that will hopefully overcompensate for my “inferior” network.