ScreenScape at Dx3 2012

Welcome….thank you for the reception. Those of you milling about on the sidelines I’d like to encourage you to come in and join us. I’d like to welcome you all, I hope you’re enjoying your Dx3 experience thus far. It’s nice to see some familiar faces in the crowd. My name is Mark Hemphill, I’m the founder of ScreenScape. We are a little company from PEI that’s been growing quite rapidly. We now got a presence in more than a dozen countries. We’ve been named by Deloitte as one of Canada’s top ten companies to watch. We count among our growing roster of companies names you will recognize like Bauer Hockey, Castrol brand Motor Oil, and a little company called Proctor & Gamble. But I’m not hear to sell you ScreenScape. Not directly any way. If you want you can come visit us over at booth 331. If I can get just 15 minutes of your time I’d like to talk to you today about Marketing. In fact I am going to pick on marketing today....or some activities that we have become accustomed to calling Marketing. I consider myself a marketing person. I, personally, love marketing people. But at the same time I think a lot of what is passed off as marketing today is actually completely ineffective. It’s not working. It’s a waste of money. In a way this cynicism we have for marketing that is ineffective is, in some part, what fuels us at ScreenScape, and I’ll explain why.
Here’s an interesting question. If you run a business I would be willing to bet you’ve asked yourself this very question at least once or twice. Why spend money on marketing? Surely we have good reasons to spend money on marketing initiatives. But, perhaps it’s not so obvious. There’s a lot of businesses out there right now that are spending an awful lot of money on marketing that don’t know whether it is working or not. So the question is why? To get at the answer to this let’s back up even further. Let’s start with an even more fundamental question: What is marketing?
The American Marketing Association says that Marketing is the activity, that set of institutions and processes for communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners & society at large. Almost looks like it was created by a marketer, don’t you think? Very good. We know what marketing is…..but think again of that first question. Why do we spend money on marketing? I’m not sure this definition gives us the answer….it’s not giving us the real reason we spend money on marketing. This is a means to an end. What is the purpose of marketing?
I would submit….that the primary reason…if not the only reason we spend money on marketing….is simple….it’s about increasing revenue. It’s about sales. I think if you ask most executives that aren’t involved in marketing, if you ask most CEOs, and if you ask most shareholders…..they would agree with this. That the point of marketing is, at the end of the day, to lift sales. For our purposes let’s say that it is. Effective marketing leads to actual sales lift. That’s easy to say….but not necessarily easy to do…..at least not in today’s marketing landscape. Now, let’s shift gears a bit and look at what’s happening in the world of communication that’s making it difficult for any marketer to do this job..to actually lift sales.
This is a slide that many of you will understand. As I’m sure you all know the world of media has grown increasingly fragmented over the past thirty years. I’m not talking about media ownership here I’m talking about the channels through which people access information. Back in the 80s…the cluster on the left….you had print, television, radio, outdoor advertising and direct marketing. Today there are hundreds of channels…each of them recursively becoming more and more fragmented. If you are a marketer that’s trying to identify and address a core audience, and do so cost-effectively, ….this is posing a big challenge. I find it interesting that social media, the advent of the likes of twitter, facebook, and Googe+, have actually served to accelerate this….and while many businesses are rushing to jump on the social media bandwagon very few are asking why, or better yet, few are measuring their effect on actual sales.
Fragmentation isn’t the only problem for marketers when it comes to social media. Literally millions of voice have become activated…..we now have 500 million plus one-person media outlets out there and they are spewing information and creating their own conversations with their friends and the public . It’s creating a noisy confusing mess. So now we have two problems….1. our means for identifying and addressing our target audience has shattered into a hundred little pieces…..and when we do address them we have to find ways to be heard above the noise of a million voices. Some marketers are trying to tame this beast and harness it’s power. But the vast majority will fail go generate actual sales lift this way and they’ll spend thousands of dollars simply out of a feeling that they must keep up. This new media landscape is obfuscating the marketing process and making it difficult for a marketer to find and communicate to its key core audience. Part of the problem is the feeling it gives us that technology itself is the answer and that if we just keep up with the next big thing we will succeed as marketers. But often that takes us further away from the basics of marketing…the basics of communication: know thy customer, be customer-centric, treat customers as individual, and so on.
How do we respond to these problems? How do we get back to basics and communicate more effectively with our customers and with our target audience? Well, given that it’s becoming increasingly difficult, and increasingly expensive to speak to mass market consumers in an increasingly fragmented media landscape…..I believe the answer lies more toward the right of this spectrum. We can learn a lot by looking at the selling process itself. We should be looking for more practical, more cost-effective ways to identify our customers, and our qualified prospects and align the marketing function around our actual selling processes.
Marketing is a funnel…..but the trick today is not to push people into the funnel, that’s more mass marketing. Today it’s more about creating a gravitational pull. You need to suck customers into this funnel.
If you are a retail business….it’s about being customer centric and aligning your marketing initiatives around your actual selling process. The vast majority of buying decisions are actually made where the products and services are sold. Even when people come into a store with a clear sense of what they’ve come in to buy they make important brand decisions right there on the spot. And they often leave with more than they intended to come in for. It’s about increasing your revenue per visit. It’s about getting people to return to your store just a little more often. And if you care about margins it’s about delighting them with product differentiation and value-added services that are tangible, visible, and appreciated. If you are a retail business it’s about paying more attention to what’s going on, or what’s not going on, in your store. Bank story. This is why place-based media is going to be so important in the years and decades ahead. This is why ScreenScape is the fastest growing place-based media enabler on the planet right now.
Place-based media is about optimizing the use of digital media on screens to cater to a specific audience at a specific place and time. It includes the world of mobile communications but it starts like most traditional forms of retail marketing with visual cues, in this case, on a screen, that help, when you walk into any place, to enhance the visitor experience.
A lot of the magic is actually happening in the cloud…but that’s just the technology……for end customers it manifests itself….this some call to action…some visual cue, some key reminder or timely incentive. Place-based media has some heritage in the area of digital signage and digital Out-of-home but it is actually native to the Internet. So if you know much about the world of Internet marketing……Place-based media is to digital signage and digital-out-of-home what display advertising is to television.
The physical area in which a product is bought in sold is the most hotly contested real estate in businesss.
Providing our customers with a tool that helps them to lift sales is central to what we do. But to the early adopters of ScreenScape, those businesses that use ScreenScape to create their own place-based media network, we represent something even more strategic. Place-based media is a powerful new weapon in the battle for influence at the point-of-sale. That means whoever controls it has the ability to be the gatekeeper of a new very powerful sales & marketing channel. This in itself is a currency.
The physical area in which a product is bought in sold is the most hotly contested real estate in business. As we speak there is a kind of land grab going on….a race between retailers, distributors, wholesalers, network operators and brands to own the process. This helps them to control and effectively monetize the management of place-based media as a resource that everyone in the value chain has an important stake in.
Big retail is just one example. Mega retailers like Kroger, Safeway, and Costco have recognized for some time the value of an instore media network. In fact these are the average weekly audience numbers for the leading instore media networks , with Kroger there on the right with an average weekly audience of 68 million viewers as compared to American Idol, the number one rated television show having only 21 million weekly viewers on average. These retailers understand the value of a their place-based media network and they are using it to offer new and interesting, and exclusive value-added marketing services to their suppliers.
Big retail, and places like shopping malls and airports, all of which have huge foot traffic, were the first to seize upon the advantage that place-based media represents. But over the course of the last few years, companies like ScreenScape have dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of running these networks. And now any kind of business, any size can reap those same advantages. Regional food & beverage chains, small hotel chains, car dealerships, coffee shops, you name it. Again, my name is Mark Hemphill, thank you for you time!
Welcome….thank you for the reception. My name is Mark Hemphill, I’m the founder of ScreenScape. We are a little company from PEI that’s now got a presence in more than a dozen countries. We’ve been named by Deloitte as one of Canada’s top ten companies to watch. We count among our growing roster of companies names you will recognize like Bauer Hockey, Castrol brand Motor Oil, and a little company called Proctor & Gamble. But I’m not hear to sell you ScreenScape. Not directly any way. If you want you can come visit us over at booth 331. I’d like to talk to you today about Marketing. I am going to pick on marketing today....or some activities that we have become accustomed to calling Marketing. I think a lot of what is passed off as marketing is completely ineffective. This cynicism we have for conventional forms of marketing is, in some part, what fuels us at ScreenScape, and I’ll explain why.
Welcome….thank you for the reception. My name is Mark Hemphill, I’m the founder of ScreenScape. We are a little company from PEI that’s now got a presence in more than a dozen countries. We’ve been named by Deloitte as one of Canada’s top ten companies to watch. We count among our growing roster of companies names you will recognize like Bauer Hockey, Castrol brand Motor Oil, and a little company called Proctor & Gamble. But I’m not hear to sell you ScreenScape. Not directly any way. If you want you can come visit us over at booth 331. I’d like to talk to you today about Marketing. I am going to pick on marketing today....or some activities that we have become accustomed to calling Marketing. I think a lot of what is passed off as marketing is completely ineffective. This cynicism we have for conventional forms of marketing is, in some part, what fuels us at ScreenScape, and I’ll explain why.

ScreenScape at Dx3 2012

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