E-Ciggarette brands battle to keep marketing rights

As an avid smoker myself, I was particularly interested in this blog written by Colin Daileda on Mashable in regards to e-cigarettes and their marketing campaigns that allegedly causes a negative impact on children and teens.

It states that a gluttony of these e-cigarette companies have been forced to defend their marketing campaigns due to increased pressure in regards to the impact of e-cigarette advertising that it has on children and teens. Now for those of you who have been living under a rock for the last couple of years, these e-cigarettes are basically “electronic cigarettes” that are battery powered vaporizers which stimulates tobacco smoking by producing an aerosol that resembles smoke.

It generally uses a heating element known as an atomizer, that vaporizes a liquid solution know as e-liquid. Sounds fair enough to me, and as an owner of one of these bad boys, I can personally tell you that I smoke these beauties like a chimney. But I am not a pre-puberty teen, and there is a moral high ground when it comes to ethnics in regarding to advertising to children.

Latest stats have shown that adolescent exposure to e-cigarette TV ads has gone through the roof and the usage of e-cigarettes have doubled amongst high school students in the US from 2011 to 2012.

But how much of this does it actually correlate with marketing? There is absolutely no argument that kids will smoke, just to be cool, or at least seem to be, and seeing ads on TV definitely encourages them to follow down the dark alleyways of smoking. But putting aside the obvious health risks that come hand in hand with smoking, what kind of message are marketers sending out to kids when planning these campaigns?

Jay Rockefeller, who chairs the Sentate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in the states was quoted on saying that “these products are relatively new, and their long term health effects are unknown at this point” Ah well then, rest assured. From a personal standpoint, I sleep well at night knowing that such advertising is banned here in Australia, away from the innocent eyes of our children.

Jason Healy, president of Blu, who are market leaders in the e-cigarette industry according to the blog- “did not address concerns over ad imagery, but rather shifted the conversation to what he said are the benefits that e-cigarettes have for adults”. As far i’m concered, there is absolutely nothing wrong with marketing these e-cigarettes to adults, because adults are capable of making rational decisions (well at least most of us) and that consumers should be freedom to make these conscious decisions upon purchasing a product.

But the ethics of it all is that whether or not these children and teens should be allowed to be exposed to this type of advertising, in my opinion, they shouldn’t. In this this day and age, where does one draw the line between affecting the health of children and making a buck?

References

1. http://mashable.com/2014/06/18/e-cigarette-brands-marketing/

2. http://mashable.com/2014/04/24/liquid-nicotine/

3. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/02/us-advertising-ecigarettes-youth-idUSKBN0ED15N20140602

4. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/business/the-e-cigarette-industry-waiting-to-exhale.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

18-35's leaving social media?

One of the most interesting topics on the digital business stratosphere recently has been the demise of the so-called “key” demographic 18-35 leaving social media.

This blog written by John Lynch recently caught my attention on the digital marketing website digitalmistry.com, and it is quite a fascinating read disclosing the parameters in which display the results that there has indeed been a dip in users on social media, albeit not a drastic change.

Social Bakers the online social media statistician guru website released their Socially Devoted: Q4 results and it had indeed shown that in January of last year, Facebook went from 982 to 972 million in that January period alone. Now the real reason for this sudden decline boggles the mind, but it could be down to one of a million different reasons, and I sincerely doubt it is because our generation of kids (18-35) are all of a sudden “getting over it”.

Now the writer says that “there is still a lit of steam left from Asia only on 4.99%. But taking a closer look at this and you see that the three regional population powerhouses China, India and Indonesia are stuttering”. Now for me, I am by no means surprised by the lack of penetration for social media in Asia, especially from China, as the country’s ruling authoritarian powers have banned Facebook amongst other social media outlets from being accessible in the world’s most populous nation. The Great Firewall of China as the boffins like to call it.

As a matter of fact, there are only 70 million Facebook users in China, compare that to China’s own version of Facebook -Weibo, it boasts up to 264 million users, this in a market of 520 million users, the writer says. In India however, there has been somewhat of a plateau in growth since the start of January, with those aged 25-35 years seemingly leaving the social media projection. And Indonesia is showing almost a 3% drop with 14-18 years old.

If i could convert your attention to the graph below for a second,  you can see that Asia amounts the highest number of Facebook users with over 274 million in total, swiftly flowed by Europe with 251 million and North America with 239 million, followed by South America, Africa and Oceania rounding out the top 6. But if we look closely at the penetration figures which show the percentage of users compared with overall population, Asia has only 6.75%, meaning although that region of the world has such high population figures, it has only a small drop in the ocean in terms of the amount of people who accessing Facebook on a regular basis. No doubt due to the fact Facebook is banned in the most populous nation in the world, China.

We can also see a decline in traditional power markets such as the US and the UK both losing 2.29% and 4% respectively over a three-month period. Key indicators have shown that it is indeed the 18-35 demographic who are dropping out for whatever reason, but the question to experts alike is this, Is this Facebook, or is it social media generally? Nobody really knows.

I’d like to focus a little bit on trends for a while, as we ask ourselves the question of whether or not trends are up or down. Is it because we 18-35’s aren’t being felt engaged enough or is there another phenomenon to describe this trend? We all know now that the mobile device is apparently helping with increased engagement as defined by Mr Zuckerberg who said “the company is both reaching more people and keeping them more engaged on the service and making more money from each minute people spend there”.

For me, this can only mean one thing- supply and demand, and as the demand for Facebook drops so can the price for advertising. Our good friends at Social Bakers had dropped the average pay per click price from $1.13 to $0.75 back in the start of 2013, with the decline in demographic the main indicator for this decision.

Once again, we have the seen the power that consumers possess, and as consumers become slowly uninterested in Facebook it could, according to the writer “mean that the audience remaining is of lesser value as it stands to reason that less competition from advertisers would drive the CPC and CPM down”. My question to you is, are these figures really accurate? Or are we witnessing a power shift in the social media realm?

References

1. http://digitalministry.com/AU/articles/1817/The+%27key%27+demographic+18-35+are+leaving+social+media/1

2. http://analytics.socialbakers.com/home/charts/

3. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4707107

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project

The Inherent Flaw of Digital Analytics?

Recently I read a rather interesting blog on the flaws of digital analytics written by Dave Chaffey  recommended to me by my Digital Business & communications professor.

In this particular blog, the writer starts of by my mentioning, “In theory, analytics can tell you anything you want to know about your last digital promotion- expect whether or not it was successful”. From what i can gather he is merely trying to present to the reader that analytics is not the be all and end all in terms of your digital promotion, because all they can give you are your numbers, which Mr Chaffey describes as saying “which are meaningless unless you have something to compare them to.

Mr Chaffey also speaks briefly about the importance of benchmarking in order the fill the digital marketing gap. Now, you may be wondering exactly what benchmarking is, to put it simply, benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other industries with dimensions typically measuring quality, time & cost.

In the process of best practice benchmarking, management identifies the best firms in their industry, or in another industry where similar processes exist, and compares the results and processes of those studied (the "targets") to one's own results and processes. In this way, they learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, the business processes that explain why these firms are successful.

Basically, according to my understanding, he is attempting to manifest that numbers alone do not suffice unless you have something to compare them to. For me as a Sports Management student, I always attempt to relate what I discover from these topics to relevant examples in the real life sports world. For example if we look at the figures from the current FIFA World Cup currently staged in Brazil, we can see that Nike’s latest advert featuring superstar footballer Cristiano Ronaldo was shared with his 26 million twitter followers. In a matter of days, the advert had been seen by millions, commented on and promoted across the web.

It seems like big brands like Nike are starting to lower their TV marketing budget for the World Cup as they make greater use of social media to reach massive, engaged audiences online.  Their competitor Adidas however, is actually spending more on online marketing efforts than on TV broadcasting surrounding the tournament, and according Adidas CEO, Herbert Hainer, about half of Adidas’ media expenditure around the event will go online, versus the fifth which was spent during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

If you compare these two brands and their marketing strategies, in my opinion, Nike wins, they have flooded the market with their products and superstars during this period of mass attention whilst Adidas have kept quite a low profile in terms of their digital marketing, no ads, no cool gimmicks and definitely no David Beckham playing football on the Copacabana.

This to me symbolizes a shift in the digital media landscape as it has changed dramatically since 2010. Sneaky Nike, always trying to ambush market Adidas at every major tournament, you can almost get the feeling that when every single major tournament rolls around, people assume Nike are the major sponsors since they are the ones that people see on their respective social media feeds and realms.  I guess you really have to “risk everything” in order to survive in this cut throat digital world.

Moving further on, the writer notes how more and more brand managers and agencies are starting to see value in the context brought to their entire digital marketing strategy beyond promotions. He goes on to mention that “some customers use benchmarks in the planning stages of a campaign to set challenging yet realistic expectations”.

For me, this demonstrates that a certain cutting edge is needed in order to differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition as more and more customers are expecting a better and more engaging customer experience online. The writer finishes off with a quote from Facebook extraordinaire Mark Zuckerberg “we all want to know what our friends are up to”; implying the transparency that is desired from the respective competitions in this fickle market.

As I read deeper into this article I am overwhelmed with fascination and interest as the writer gives an alluring insight into developing a formal rating system based on competitive benchmarks.

He annotates that “indexing is the easiest and most objective way of measuring success”, now for those of you that are reading who are still unclear on what indexing entails, it is basically a method of collecting and storing data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval.  It is indeed quite a handy tool to disclose vital information that all digital marketing aficionados will use in their digital campaigns, and according to my understanding you must be able to maintain a better understanding of how your competition is performing in order to define your own success.

Overall from gathering my own beliefs on this topic, the writer gives quite a discernment advisory comprehension on digital marketing strategy. For a novice digital marketing enthusiast like myself, it has given me a much clearer insight into the certain strategies and methods that more and more brand managers and agencies are utilising in real world scenarios.

Dave Chaffey is editor of many of the 7 Step to Success Guides on Smart Insights, He is a bestselling author, consultant and speaker who enjoys sharing tips, tools and techniques on all things digital. You can receive his latest insights or simply ask a question on his LinkedIn or on Google+.

References

1. https://www.benchmarking.com.au/news/
2. http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/hot-topics/world-cup-brazil-2014
3. http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/flaw-digital-analytics/
4. http://www.htmlbasictutor.ca/search-engine-indexing.htm