Fall+2008+Section+07-SS+Week+7

=Class Discussion For Week 7= Mednet

Mednet is an online medical reference (maybe WebMD?) that receives its revenue by selling advertising. Problem: Windham came to Mednet and said it was going take some of its advertising money away and invest it with Marvel. Position in the market: Serving people who are interested in solving their own health care problems by providing evidence based medical information that is free and user friendly, developed by an educational board (physicians and journalists), tech people, and community tools (blogs). Position to advertising: We produce sales, branding opportunities, profiles and sales leads (before actual sale) with the capability of giving the advertiser estimates of how many people viewed the advertisement (impressions), clicked and access to the advertisers target market (ie pharma co. that sells a cholesterol lowering agent to someone that is searching “high cholesterol”). How does an advertiser value their dollar with Mednet? 1) Sales: How to track sales? Mednet had printable coupons/vouchers with a barcode that can be tracked back to their website. 2) Brand Buiilding: Impressions= the number of times you were exposed to the brand (in 1,000’s). Impressions could looked at as potentially providing product awareness/exposure and product knowledge. The problems with this metric are similar to those with off-line media. How do you know exposures lead to brand building. 3) Clicks= sales leads Fraud?: 1) Click through may not be an accurate measure of sales leads because of potential error or fraud (resulting in overestimation). You are also dealing with people, so in turn, variance. Elliot said “You can not eliminate the variance, but you can try to reduce it”. 2) Who monitors the impressions? Also, it is hard to know at the user level who is using the CPU Competitive advantage: Mednet claims that they generate more knowledge and awareness than the competition. They can provide evidence of this by how much time someone spends on a page or how many pages people look at vs. Marvel. Elliot said that the “problem with this is how can you determine how much an extra minute is worth”? The only way that you can do this is to actually survey the people that viewed the content and see if they retained the information. Suppose Mednet is saying:


 * || MedNet || Marvel ||
 * Time per page (in second) || 45 || 20 ||
 * Number of pages (average) || 5 || 2.5 ||

So, based on this information can you conclude that Mednet is a better place for Windham advertising dollar vs. Marvel? No. You still can not measure that Mednet gives advertiser more awareness, recall or shifts brand attitudes more effectively than its competition. You would still have to poll to measure recall and brand attitudes.

Can Mednet make a case that they are more valuable from a sales point of view? Yes


 * Item || Mednet || Marvel || Source ||
 * Visitors per month || 4,300,000 || 19,000,000 || Exhibit 2 ||
 * Impressions per visitor || 4 || 3 || Exhibit 2 ||
 * Total impressions || 17,000,000 || 57,000,000 || Exhibit 2 ||
 * Cost per 1000 impressions || $100 || $0 || Exhibit 2 ||
 * Cost for advertising || $1,720,00 || $0 || Exhibit 2 ||
 * Click-through rate || 3.00% || 1.40% || Exhibit 2&3 ||
 * Number of click-throughs || 516,000 || 798,000 || Exhibit 2&3 ||
 * Cost per click || $3.33 || $0.54 || Exhibit 2&3 ||
 * Purchase % || 6.00 || 2.00 || Exhibit 3 ||
 * Cost per purchase || $56 || $27 || Calculation ||
 * Est. contribution per sale || $150 || $45 || Exhibit 4 ||
 * New customers || 30,960 || 15,960 || Calculation ||
 * Revenue || $4,644,000 || $718,200 || Calculation ||
 * Net Marketing Contribution for Windham || $2,924,000 || $718,200 || Calculation ||

Mednet is claiming that they attract different kinds of customers that are searching their website vs. Marvel thus, giving Windham “good” sales leads.

What about Cholesterol.com vs. Mednet? For Windham it would depend on what they are looking for. For example, benefits such as, sales, sales leads, awareness and branding. Elliot said “This is marketing….it is always about what you want to do, how you are going to get there and EXECUTE”.

Google Analytics Considered the “gold standard” If you are the “website owner”(administrator) and have a Gmail account you can attach it to your account to give you analytics about your website for free. It gives you things like: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, new visits ect… What did we notice about our class WIKI site? It was definitely not a normal distribution. Visits=2,688 and Absolute Unique Users=2,493 How could this be useful if you were, for example, a web base clothing store owner? You could look at what day(s) customers were shopping, what they were shopping for, what months were your busiest months and you can count “visitors” to your online store without having to physically be there as you would if it were a “brick-n-mortar” store.

Google Case Position statement to users: Google targets internet searchers (users), providing relevant, simple, unbiased, free, fast, unintrusive ads and information via its state of the art search engine technology (PageRank). Position statement to internet advertisers: Google provides motivated eye balls, a large audience, verifiable(click fraud-resistant) information, ease of use, “cost-effective” precision/efficiencies, through AdSense (44% of revenue), AdWords (55% of revenue), brand, size of audience and analytics. Problem: Should Google diversify? Google’s brand really stands for internet search engine. Elliot said that this is a “classic case of engineers trying to be marketers”. So far this is a brand that you would think could be leveraged but it has turned out to be not the case. Alternatives: 1) Keith said “Google should create a different brand for other products”. So everything that is not related to search engine give another name. 2) Go into other media outlets because Google can not capture verifiable data (ie. Digital radio and digital t.v.) and provide that info to its advertisers. Try to leverage its brand name into new segments. 3) Stick with what Google does best….search engine technology.Denny said: "Look at rule number 10, from exhibit 5, which states, “Great just isn’t good enough. Always deliver more than expected…” and at rule number two, it says that “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” "

Google has a very narrow established position. If they want to expand (actually change) it, they need to do it deliberately, over time, and communicate the new position. It would make no sense for you to catch your plumber fixing your car, and he says, "Oh yeah, I'm fixing cars now too." Instead of reinforcing or strengthening their brand, they are confusing the market, and muddying their value propostion. Instead of fast ,relevant search, with Google you now may get slow, interruptive, irrelevant ads thrust on you on TV or radio or something. As an advertiser, you may now have the opportunity to pay Google for advertising that is not fast, not relevant, the users haven't asked for it, and the metrics are "squishy". The only new message we know for sure that they have sent to the market is that they are very capable of introducing a lot of unsuccessful products/services that are definitely not "the next Google."

Dinner Break Sandwiches were served with a side of Cool Ranch Doritos.

Bzz Agent Position Statement: Bzz Agent serves businesses by providing word of mouth awareness and product knowledge, sales, and feedback because it has a large agent network and can manage word of mouth. The company is a leader in word of mouth marketing. Bzz Agent cost per CPM is $638 vs. a cost per CPM for traditional advertising of $20 per CPM. This is not cost effective for awareness. Bzz Agent has demonstrated success through sales via sample market studies and comparison. Companies pay a much higher price per CPM, but would normally pay a small amount repetitively over time for tremendous reach and FREQUENCY for awareness, then product knowledge, then to influence product liking, then to get people through their consideration set and purchase intent to the sale. Managed buzz is a much abbreviated model requiring, apparently, much less frequency, a lot fewer "M's" since the prospects are real prospects, not just eyeballs being interrupted by mass media, and much higher conversion to actual sales.

“OLD MODEL” which has a high level of control



“New Model” which requires you to give up some control which can be an uneasy feeling for a marketing manager. This is the participation world and if you over manage it is a prerequisite for failure because people see it a fake.

Great graph: EE

What makes this more effective than the Traditonal model? 1) Bzz Agents are talking to people that they know. Referred by a friend is reported to be the single strongest reason for purchase. 2) Bzz Agents have to like the product (if they do not like the product it will not work) 3) Bzz Agents are in the right interest group. 4) Bzz Agents are like, from the book “Tipping Point” mavens that are connectors, maintain lots of information and like to talk about it. 5) Bzz Agents are experts who like to connect with others.





Traditional media are pretty good at measuring action to customer impression. Non-traditional media may be better at measuring the link between customer impression and customer action (sales) because the measurement of customer impression is more certain.

Problems: 1) Bzz Agent can not keep its socialization blogs going because of low buy in from employees. 2) Board members are against the time being spent on the blog partly because it is uncontrollable whereas you can get things that you do not expect, both positive and negative. 3) Bzz Agent must provide a space for Agents to connect with each other. If the company can't provide a space that is credible then your agents will find another place to talk instead. 4) The program is likely to fail if it is over-managed or over-controlled, and therefore likely to be seen as insincere. Ex: the 90 days blog. This blog was written by John Butman, an author of 14 books, an excellent idea but it made the blog feel insincere and made up. One comment that was received on the well written blog was "...But John's blog doesn't feel real to me. It is all too cleaver or edited or something. And the comments even seem made up or coached." 5) How does transparency bring value to word of mouth? How do you measure success? Elliot says:, “if you can not measure it you can not manage it.” But he also said: That rule may be becoming less important in an era of less control. It may be have to be modified to say,"We have to live with less management and more flexibility to respond,



We added two-way arrows because everything (info & communication) must go back and forth openly and transparently with no control because everything breaks down once you try to control it. Participation is about creativity, being organic, letting go of control, transparency, ability to deal with chaos, ability to let go of (some) control, ability to be open and recognize that it is really hard to measure.