Online Brand Identity

WW: First of all, could you explain a little bit about your role with Google?
I have a role which didn’t exist before. For six years I’m now at Google and the first 3 or 4 years I was head of research. I looked at consumer journeys and did studies about it. So I became a strategy-person bridging the online and the offline world. At one point I discovered that advertisers used digital the same way they used TV – they would just take the TV-commercial and put it online. At some point I realised that we could successfully use the unique form that digital has, like digital targeting for example. Because I was a researcher I was asked to prove this first. But in my opinion, we had to do it first and then measure the success. So I discovered that as a researcher I cannot help advertisers to go through this digital transformation, because they have to do it first. It’s more of a strategic form of trying new things, not something you can prove on data. Then I wrote the description of the role I have now – I wanted to concentrate on digital transformation. Today, I run full day workshops with a very clear vision of where the process is going – for advertiser and branders who are willing to transform first and measure later. I’ve been doing this now for one and a half year.

And what made you write a book about this topic?
I discovered in the workshops, that people who understand digital very well don’t understand brands very well and vice versa. I’ve tried to combine both in a model that takes all the important information for branding that is timeless and brings it in digital thinking. It’s a model how you built your brand in a digital media mix. I don’t think there is an advertiser who does everything at the same time very well. The complete transformation takes you a few years. But every part of the model has been done already by at least a few advertisers. So every part of this model is illustrated with practical examples. The book also has some exercises to build your own strategy.

But digital transformation is very complex. How can a book give all the instruments needed to go through this complex process?
Digital Transformation is very complex. And if you look at the whole process, it seems to be too much to even start. Also it’s not something you can do based on data. Instead you have to look at the process which needs a learning curve. And then you need to bring it back to experiments that you can already run tomorrow. It took my around 4 years to get all these layers right.

Can you summarize the whole model?
What happens if you ask digital people about what branding is in their heads, it turns out to be kind of a fluffy thing. Some think, doing a little bit of online-video is branding. Or they think you’re wasting all the money, because you can’t measure it. So I start my book with a new definition of what a brand is: The brand is basically what people think, feel and say what it is, based on all the experience they have – with your products, client service, your communication, and maybe the press. So it’s not just communication, it’s everything people associate with the brand. If you try to build the online-brand-identity, you have to acknowledge that there are so many associations with the brand already and you have to communicate differently.
Based on that, everyone who creates something that is in contact with the consumer is a brand builder by definition. If you’re a digital e-commerce person, you can’t say branding is a task of the brand manager, everyone is a brand builder. Also, branding is not a fluffy thing, it’s a long term business. If you look at the brand promise for example, it stands for everything the company is doing.
So, the brand promise is like a long term business model – a business strategy choice that affects everything you do.

So, branding for you is less about image and more about a business-strategy choice?
Yes. Branding can be seen as a focus on long term sales impact; it is about making systematic business trade offs to provide a consumer experience that is consistently in line with the unique promises you make.

This means, digital transformation is a holistic process, a painful reorg – it takes years to transform…
If people hear about: «You need to think different about your audience, you need to start measuring different, and that for you need different technology» suddenly it looks like a very big thing and people don’t want to start. That’s why I try to bring it back to five small experiments. These are all kinds of things that you can already start testing today basically. If you do all of them, then you automatically start breaking with old habits.
The main problem for traditional branders is, they think that one message fits for every channel, don’t quantify engagement and then also don’t diverse the different kinds of contacts. But there are totally different levels of engagement. On youtube, for example, you can skip ads. The impact of a true view versus a forced video is about 2.8 times higher and a forced video online is again 1.5 times higher than on TV. And the opt-in choice is even higher again. And then you might have interactive videos. So there’s maybe a one-in-thirty impact difference and if you just quantify reach and not engagement, you just overlook that whole thing.

How to start the digital transformation?
As a new campaign is coming in, just take the one-size-fits-all messaging and taylor it for two types of people within your audience that are so different from each other that it is actually weird you have been serving them the same branding ads all the time. Then start measuring, find out which fits better. And then you can try to find a third audience. At some point, the extra impact you get is going to flatten out, and the video is going to cost extra money – so that’s where you find the border, the optimal number of marketing segments within a branding campaign. This is just one of the experiments you could do already today. Another one would be the testing with the true view format. If people choose to watch the video, you got a signal of interest and you can put it on the marketing list. Next time you can serve a different message, maybe even longer than the first one. So now, if you would evaluate the reach of a forced message only, you would just play the first video all the time and also repeat it to people who are not interested. If you follow the system of different videos building on signals of interest, you are more meaningful to consumers and you learn more about their interests. If you test a sequence of videos like this, you will see that view rates increase every time you serve a new video after a signal of interest.

What kinds of opportunities are offered through this targeting?
If you start the digital transformation, traditional measurements like reach are no longer useful. The new measurement system is all about organizing data across the Consumer journey. Then you start realizing things like, for example, not every purchase is caused by the last click. The data base gives you new information. If you start integrating CRM data and real-time-data, and manage everything in one system, then gradually your data starts to look like your consumer journey. As you have that, you can already start to quantify the financial value of consumer interactions earlier in the consumer journey. So this is something you can just start doing separate from all the other experiments.
And then, the final one is bringing together creative people and technical people, to see what kind of cool stuff you can do with digital.

You’re saying in your book, that the costumer is becoming pickier: «people only watch the ad they want to watch and at the time they want to see it».
Yes. What you see in the states and also in the UK is that people actually exchanging their TV subscription for online. And this year in the Netherlands you could see that TV was going down. Even if the linear watching was very stable for a long time it looked like nothing changed, but now we see that the quality of the watching went down – people are using different devices while they watch TV. This year is the first time, where the watch-time of TV also goes down, not only the quality.

Switzerland is not there yet, but already in the first phase where you see the attention is less.
And then at some point people are really watching less, that’s the point where the advertisers wake up. This is actually quite late. If you take the TV-commercial now and put it into digital, people will accept it far less as there are much more possibilities to avoid ads online. Now everything becomes digital. People will not accept advertising-blocks of ten commercials anymore, five to ten years by now. So you have to change the model. And there are two kinds of mechanisms to make that happen: one is the data, so you can be more relevant by knowing more about the costumer. The other lies in the creative opportunities that you have, like create cooler stuff or all kinds of tools to be more meaningful.

You mean tools like the content strategy of your model?
For example Nivea offered a bracelet for parents going at the beach. You could put the bracelet around the arm of your child and on your smartphone you could define how far the child can walk, so your alarm would go off if the child was too far.
You can have several ways of creating content, like branded entertainment for example. The art is to find something that really fits your brand. Right now very often you just have a program saying «sponsored by…» which is not a very meaningful link.
If your build your content strategy, first think of all the people who are important to your brand and very different to each other. Then you start to think about all the moments in their life where you could be meaningful as a brand. In some moments people just go online and they need information, at some moments they go online and they need inspiration, sometimes they need entertainment or utility.

What is the main reason to start digital transformation now?
The first thing is to understand the sense of urgency. Soon the old way isn’t working anymore because people are pushing into a digital world. Also, the new way of advertising is very different from the old way. This means, you need a learning curve. So if you start in the last minute, then you’re actually kind of too late. Start with small exercises today.