Azim Alibhai

A Direct Response specialist at heart, Azim brings over 8 years of experience in combining tangible results with brand objectives.

As Group Director at Genesis Media Inc, Azim's mandate is to ensure the disciplines of Direct Response and digital media work cohesively to build client brands and strengthen their business.

A University of Toronto graduate, Azim's career stops have included positions at OgilvyOne Worldwide, MindShare Canada and Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG. Recognized in 2004 as one of Marketing Magazine's Ones to Watch, Azim's work has been commended on numerous occasions within industry publications.

2008 - "The Return of the Brand as King"

Yes I know, it’s a poor word play on the final installment of Tolkien’s famous trilogy, but I couldn’t help myself...

Every New Year brings with it lists of glorious predictions for the upcoming 12 months and an equally glorious set of lists recapping the trends that defined the outgoing year. The pundits are abounding with opinion; there is some interesting stuff out there. I’ve posted a few good links at the end of this entry, enjoy at your leisure.

Some common themes for 2008 cited by the experts are social media, all things digital and the morphing of various disciplines (media and creative, advertising and marketing etc.)

It is now accepted as a universal truth that advertising/marketing is a permanently dynamic practice. There is no single best practices hand book to help us navigate this progressive new world, just the one that is being rewritten in real time, as we all learn from experience.

But you already knew this. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 3 or so years, none of this is new anymore. It is all that we have been hearing about, and consequently agencies and clients alike are responding, slowly but surely.

But how much during the past 3 years have you heard about branding?* Especially branding as it relates to today’s environment where consumers are exposed to thousands of messages a day and a new media outlet is created roughly every 7 seconds?

Well no matter how much you have already heard, I don’t think it is enough. 2008 should be the year where all we hear about and discuss is the brand. It is no longer about media (gasp, I can’t believe I just wrote that), technology or even the consumer for that matter. It is about the brand and media, the brand and technology, the brand and the consumer and most importantly the brand and long term strategy.**

The landscape has shifted so radically, most of us are so busy trying to keep up with the changes and the impact of these changes on our businesses that we are failing to see the forest from the trees. Former Adage Publisher Scott Donaton coined a great term, which epitomizes the situation, GMOOT- short for Get Me One of Those. It refers to a “…phenomenon that helps explain why there are so many lousy viral videos and half assed new media initiatives out there. They’re not the result of a real end strategy, but are done for the sake of doing something…”

It is time to step back and take a holistic view of our business – a 50,000 foot view if you will.

I think what we will find is that many of the fundamentals of branding still apply. Brand strategy is still the key to success, and your brand’s core values, the essence, the DNA, must remain static. We as marketers have never been in charge of our brands, this notion of consumer control is nothing new – a brand has always resided with the individual because a brand is a gut feeling*** of how a person feels about a product, service or organization. We as Marketer’s have always provided a framework for how we wish our brand to be perceived but we have never been able to control the end result of how it is finally internalized by the individual. The difference is that in today's WEB 2.0 era, we are now forced to hear what individuals really think and feel about our brands – and I say forced because this happens, whether you like it or not. Embrace it, factor it into your brand strategy. Now more than ever we must do as we say.

In 2008 watch for “The Return of the Brand as King.” Interestingly enough a sequel is already rumored to be in the works, the working title is “Brand Strategy leading Business Strategy…”

Some notes:

* The CMA put on a great conference 2007 entitled “Branding in a Sea of Change.” The follow up conference in June 2008 is one to mark on your calendar from now

**A great article in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review, titled, If Brands Are Built over Years, Why Are They Managed over Quarters?, provides great support to the seemingly forgotten notion of long term brand planning.

***Marty Neumeier thoughts, a good read.

Links:

The Pundits - Media In Canada

Marian Salzman - EVP/CMO JWT Worldwide – especially insightful, the mention of radical transparency and cooperative consumption.

Sunni Boot – President/CEO Zenith Optimedia

Scott Goodson – CEO StrawberryFrog - mentions QR codes, a few campaigns have been executed in Canada using this technology but it is still far from mainstream. Semacode is a great Canadian company that has been involved with using the technology since 2003.

Maggie Fox – Founding Partner Social Media Group. Kudos to Maggie about being more optimistic than I am on the state of the nation. See “What surprised you this year.”

Bruce Claassen – CEO Genesis Vizeum

Tony Chapman – CEO Capital C

An Aggregation of great digital and internet prediction lists, a must view!

The Truth About Media

So it seems that pretty much everyone has something to say these days about the state of media and the fragmented landscape, especially consultants. The latest big name to weigh in with their findings is Deloitte, with a report titled, "State of the Media Democracy". This study follows in the footsteps of another consultant report, Big Blue’s 2006 “The End of TV as we know it” (A pretty interesting read…)

The Deloitte report provides some good US stats by category groupings based on age. I imagine the deeper insights, such as the use of the term “democracy” within the context of media, are reserved for paying clients…
That said, the question du jour is why all of the interest in media? Why now? Is it even warranted?

Truthfully speaking, all of this attention is actually rather flattering for us media folk, we are still only getting used to our “superstar” status. After years of being relegated to the last few minutes of creative presentations (I never understood how 80% of a client’s budget got such little interest) media is now at the forefront, as I would argue that it should be. But do you think it should it be?

Join the conversation.

Apple’s Dirty Secret – Deja Vu?

With all the anticipated fanfare and then some (read about the guy who forgot at the border to declare his much visible iPhone) the long awaited iPhone hit US stores just over a month ago. Although an official launch date for Canada has not been set, analysts expect the phone to be in stores before Christmas. Yes, this phone is going to sell like crazy here in Canada, it sold over 270,000 units in its first two on sale days in the US, but I for one, will not be buying one.

Now let me preface the rest of what you are about to read with the following disclaimer:

I love Apple, I love the creative work that their long time agency TBWA does. One of my favorite vices when I travel is watching episodes of Entourage on my iPod and learning new profanities from Jeremy Piven’s “Ari Gold” (see Season 3 episode 26). I know a fellow CMA’er that recently started working at Apple and I couldn’t be happier for him. Any brand that can inspire a high school teacher from Orange County (now infamous George Masters 2004 Ad) to create such good work is A OK with me.

But here is the thing – the new iPhone has it’s own dirty “not so secret” secret that is ironically related to, of all things, the battery. For a refresher on the original dirty secret, click here.

Although the impact of the Neistat brother’s initiative on Apple’s decision to expand their battery replacement policy is debatable, there is no denying the reach of the short film that was covered worldwide by over 130 sources and his been viewed millions of times since.

So back to the iPhone – the issue at hand is the fact that as sexy as this device is, the battery, which is sealed inside the phone, instead of being attached as a removable piece like most CE products, can only be replaced by Apple, for a $79 USD charge. Purchasers of this est. $600 piece of hardware will also have to pay an additional $29 USD fee to rent a temporary replacement during the phone repair period. Apple estimates the battery should last well over a year, delivering approximately 300 - 400 full efficiency charges before any decline battery effectiveness.

I don’t get it, what was Apple thinking?

I accept that batteries within CE devices eventually will need to be replaced, but in most cases, I have the CHOICE to do this myself and multiple suppliers to call upon for the needed hardware. Yes I said it, CHOICE (use of this word not meant in the context of a painful buzzword, as in the following vexatious terms: “engagement” “consumer control” “ROMI” etc). But here is the icing on the cake – as with the case of the iPod battery, Apple never reveled beforehand that the battery would not be removable or replaceable by the end-user until July 2nd (est.) days after the product launched and only after mass backlash. This latter point is debatable, other sources claim that the battery issue was reported long before the launch – a classic case of he said she said. I think Phillip Elmer-Dewitt does a good job detailing the timeline. It doesn’t seem to matter though because it turns out that quite a few people are unhappy about the battery replacement issue. A class action law suit was filed in Illinois along with complaints from various consumer advocacy groups.

When all is said and done, I still like Apple, but why does this brand or (Caution: PAINFUL BUT SMART COMPANY CREATED TERM TO FOLLOW) lovemark, if you will, have to hurt me so?

Funny thing is, corporate mistakes such as the iPhone battery issue happen all the time, they are even, for the most part, expected. But this is Apple that we are talking about. It is human nature to be harder on the ones we love because there are expectations.

In this case, I'm not keeping it a secret, my love for a brand has negated the sale. Go figure.

Merging of Disciplines not new – It just finally has enough scale to get noticed…

A recent report released by the DMA , titled “The Integration of Direct Marketing and Brand” concludes that the lines between DM and brand marketing have all but disappeared.

So what exactly does this mean? Having spent a good part of my career in direct marketing and direct response, quantitative research supporting the secret that I have been sharing with clients over the last few years really gets my attention. The cat is now out of the bag…well sort of…

Some key findings of the report can be found here. So back to the question of what this report really means when all is said and done. Ultimately what it means is that there is yet even more credence and credibility supporting what a few select marketers have known and practiced all along – direct response and direct marketing tactics, working in tandem with traditional branding, can help to build stronger brands.

This type of thinking has manifested itself over the years, with the term, “brand response” becoming a self descriptive notion for an amalgamated version of the practice. Of course brand response is not the same as direct response – they are two entirely different practices, but more on this later.

Now I must clarify – direct response and direct marketing alone is not enough to build and sustain a brand – witness the current plight of Dell, a piece of business that in its heyday was at the pinnacle of DR advertising. I worked on the business for a period of time and let me tell you, it was science at work. The dynamic model, forecasted with good accuracy, the impact of all controllable inputs (ad vehicle, offer, positioning, day of week etc.) on weekly unit sales. Of course, ROI was the ONLY success measurement. Terms like brand awareness, brand health, and brand equity were all deemed to be foolish irrelevant terms reserved for those who couldn’t stomach the harsh realities of applying what we deemed to be rocket science to data. Ah the “D” word – data…

Data and the use of data is one of the major differentiator’s between direct response and brand response advertising. DR is all about getting a response – that’s it. Response mechanisms such as toll free numbers and url’s along with a strong offer or two are used to illicit a consumer response. The currency of measurement is the “cost per” metric – cost per contact, cost per lead and cost per sale. The “conversion to” metric links all the “cost per” stages together and ultimately ROI is established. The end goal of the data is to help establish a clear and visible link to dollars invested and dollars returned. The data’s only function is to define success through the dollar

Brand response or BR is really about ensuring that essential brand practices are used to encourage a response. “Cost per” metrics are important, but they are not the definitive success metric – sales and brand awareness are. Where DR is considered to be a hard sell, BR is considered to be a soft tell. We have executed BR campaigns where the metric of success was an opt-in email address along with identification of the respondent’s nearest product dealer. Yes – perhaps we couldn’t completely verify how much of our advertising spend resulted in product sales, even in the best DR Campaigns this is difficult to do. However, what we could say for certain was that several hundred people reached out to us and accepted our invitation to have us communicate with them on a regular basis. We now had an interested group of “brand respondents” - time to implement a solid CRM initiative.

Risk taking or benchmarking?

A recent post, in reference to marketing ideas, posed the question, “Where are the risk takers?” This really got me thinking – I mean really thinking – why do clients/marketers fear moving outside of their comfort zone? What does risk really mean in terms of marketing, and why, and this is the honest truth, is DIGITAL still outside of the comfort zone for many clients?

Accountability has a lot to do with the “risk aversion” that many marketers experience. Any brand manager who is coming off a reasonable year of growth is going to ask – why should I depart from what I know works? But here in lies the paradox. The alternate scenario of the brand manager who is coming off a poor year, may likely exist because new learning, trying something new, taking a risk, wasn’t done when the going was good.

Too often we wait until we are forced to react to market conditions such as a poor sales quarter before we attempt to move outside of our comfort zone and embrace new ideas. This more often than not leads to poor results because we are reacting to a situation that has been defined for us, rather than one that was proactively sought.

The solution to the risk challenge has to start with honestly defining the risk. What is it that you are really putting on the line with this new out of the box initiative?

The end game for marketing, the sole reason why we ultimately exist, is to sell. If what you are about to do will definitively impact the number of units you move, or customers you acquire, (in other words if you are a direct marketer with solid data), then yes you are taking a marketing risk. But if the initiative you are about to undertake is one that is a result of proper due diligence and has a clearly defined objective, your probably not taking a risk, it’s more likely that you’re setting benchmarks.