Azim Alibhai

A media aficionado at heart, Azim brings over 10 years of experience in combining tangible results with brand objectives.

As President of The Media Cottage, Azim's mandate is to ensure that media solutions work in tandem with client business strategy to build strong brands and deliver results.

A University of Toronto graduate and a member of the CMA’s Branding and Strategic Planning Council, Azim's career stops have included positions at OgilvyOne Worldwide, MindShare Canada, Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG and Genesis Vizeum.

Facebook and the 300 Million Number

You may have heard the recent news ,the impressive reveal that Facebook now has a staggering 300 Million users worldwide. Even more impressive is the news that they are cash flow positive, with a 2009 revenue forecast of $500 Million.
Wow. 500 million in revenue from a business model that is consistently under heavy scrutiny is not bad, or is it?

What I mean by this is that Facebook makes money selling adspace and sponsorships, just like any other online destination. The biggest selling points for Facebook are the sheer scale of its users and the stickiness of the site.

But what does this mean for marketers if Facebook is making money? To me it reinforces the widely accepted belief that many of us are still struggling with how to integrate the powerful reaching social media phenomena into our plans.

Buying an ad on Facebook and contributing to their positive cashflow is not a viable tactic to engage in social media. So if you have been feeding the beast in this manner, please stop. Here is some research that discusses the impact of ads on social networking sites vs. other sites. Although the data is from Nov 2008, the findings are widely accepted.

It is important for most companies to be involved in social media but the level of engagement depends on the relevance of the various platforms to your target and the reason why you would like to be involved in the first place. Are you looking to drive sales? Are you looking to learn more about your potential customers? Are you looking to interact with your current customers? These are all questions that will help guide your strategy, which in the end should be tied to a business objective.

One must avoid the GMOOT at all costs (see The Return of The Brand as King). Dove Canada is a great example of how social media, in particular Facebook can be leveraged. Read some of the comments that are posted by some of the 2,309 fans - who wouldn’t want their brand to have these fans…

June 16, 2009 – One more certainty to boot…

“…In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

Benjamin Franklin’s famous words are timeless and universal in their truth. I propose though that we as marketers consider one more certainty – the brand.

The issue du jour is social media. How do we do it? What do we do? Is it facebook, is it twitter, how about a blog? Is it all? Is it some? is it nothing? The list of questions goes on and on. And this is the beauty of our craft – the dynamism of marketing, especially today.

The point though is that all issues du jour are just that – the hot topic of the day. Every hot topic from the past, for example media, engagement, ROI or ROMI and every hot topic in the future will always undeniably be tied to the brand.

This is why I believe that the CMA’s Brand Insight Conference is a must attend event for all Marketers.
Here is a snapshot of what you can expect on June 16 2009 at the Hilton Toronto:

-Mitch Markson will talk about goodpurpose – a fantastic global initiative that builds “mutual social responsibility” between brands and consumers.

-Gerry Frascione, the CEO of BBDO North America will share some amazing examples of how his clients have been able to tell compelling brand stories that have resonated in today’s environment.

-George Pneumaticos, the Global Brand Architecture Director for Nokia promises to deliver a compelling lunch keynote on how the world’s number one phone brand innovates through the brand.

-Tony Matta, Vice President of Marketing for Frito Lay will discuss the highly successful recent play of letting the Consumer name the newest Dorito flavor. The winner receives $25k and 1% of the flavour’s sales…

Yes Ben, in life 2 things are for certain but in marketing only 1 thing really matters – the brand.

In the spirit of authenticity, the author of this post wishes to disclose that he will be attending the conference on June 16.

A Changed Vowel that is oh so Fowl….

Have you ever had one of those moments? You know, one of those brilliant moments where you come up with a campaign for a brand that is genius? You realize that perhaps your campaign idea may be fruitless because you don’t even work with the brand but because you love what you do, you can’t help yourself. Well this time I think I have done it, I really have. And this one should fly…

iTrade Canada, (formally E*Trade Canada) launched their rebranding campaign in early March with creative print executions, a new spot and host of other initiatives. All fine and dandy, but here is my big campaign idea: I propose that they re-launch the current campaign but instead of featuring a red Scotia power ball as seen here , the new executions should feature a common but highly underutilized animal, the chicken.

Beavers have been done (RIP Frank and Gordon) and thanks to TAXI’s long legged ingenuity, Telus has used just about every animal one can think of without it getting tired, BUT to my knowledge they haven’t used chickens yet. Come on Capital C, grab those chickens before TAXI does….

So where did this fowl campaign idea come from?

In July of 2008 Scotia Bank purchased E*Trade Canada for the tidy sum of $442 million U.S. dollars, immediately making them a legitimate player within the Canadian discount brokerage business, after years of trying. No offense to the anemic Scotia Direct or Trade Freedom brand, which are also owned by Scotia, intended here but E*Trade was the crown jewel.
The key for Scotia in this transaction was not the $4.7 billion in assets under management that came with E*Trade, but rather the undisclosed number of customer accounts that made up the $4.7 billion in AUM. Within the online brokerage business, the highest value customers are your heavy traders. Those select individuals who trade upwards of 50+ times a month are worth big bucks, and they are the hardest ones to get. Although it is not known just how many high volume trading accounts Scotia picked up from E*Trade, one can certainly guess that it was enough to justify the price tag. On an important side note, $442 million dollars presumably* also bought Scotia the rights to the once ubiquitous E*Trade Canada Brand.

Now this was a good brand, possibly even a great brand, especially when compared to the rest of stodgy category. It had a fun, cheeky personality; it was the anti bank (oh the irony of a bank purchasing the anti-bank and then axing it…). E*Trade Canada was the place with attitude that knew and understood the mindset of the self directed active trader. The recent US baby campaign is a fantastic demonstration of the brand’s DNA. E*Trade is also famous for starting the great Canadian price war. Thanks to them, lucky day traders are paying south of $10 bucks per trade today at their respective brokerages. But no matter, even though the singing baby is absolutely hilarious and the price has always been right at E*Trade, it is child’s play when compared to the chicken rebranding I propose…

When the news broke of Scotia acquiring E*Trade Canada, amongst the people for whom it really mattered, active traders and clients of E*Trade, the response seemed quite clear. Keep the brand intact, keep the trading platforms intact. Keep the E*Trade we love. Evidence of this sentiment is easily found on various sites – the comments and feedback from this CBC story are quite telling. Although it is only a small cross section of opinion, it would've certainly raised a red flag for me were I Scotia.

At every step of the rebrand from E to I, the signs must have been very clear to those involved...Some logical points that would have been raised are listed below:

"Maybe rebranding E*Trade Canada, a brand with more than 11 years of Canadian presence, a rich pedigree and brand recall scores that are through the roof, may not be the best idea."

"Perhaps the rationale of amalgamating our existing splintered trading platforms with E*Trade and eventually introducing a new trading platform, primarily to E*trade clients, because they now make up the bulk of our accounts, doesn’t make sense."

"None of these clients asked for a new brand or a new trading platform, they were happy with E*Trade."

Somehow the rationale listed above was addressed adequately - it must have been in order to proceed with the rebranding. No matter I say, chickens will fix it all!

And I say chickens because key people were too afraid to take a stand behind the E*Trade Canada brand. Perhaps they were afraid of the decision maker at the very top, the one who put the gauntlet down and said, “We are changing the vowel to “I” and that is final!”

Or maybe they were afraid because after doing all of the rebranding work, it finally dawned on them. A simple vowel change does not transfer the equity from one brand to another. “How can our red power ball compete with singing exchange trading babies?” They must have asked. Of course by the time they asked the latter question, too many red balls were in motion. Eating crow and reverting back to E*Trade was not an option.

Of course the competition is happy, probably even ecstatic. If the boys at Disnat and TD Waterhouse were consulted, they would’ve agreed with Scotia’s decision to scrap E*Trade Canada. “Why eat crow?” they would’ve said, “Chicken tastes much better and none of us have to worry about the anti-bank anymore. Trust us Scotia; you are doing a good thing by not listening to your new clients…”

* Scotia continued to operate under the E*Trade brand for several months, signing up new accounts until iTrade launched in March of this year.

The Sony Coup

I need help, help of the serious kind I might add. Now what I am about to share is extremely confidential. In fact it is somewhat embarrassing, but I am going to share it with you anyway because I trust you, and I owe you. So here goes…deep breath – I am a flyer junkie. I can’t believe that I just said it, quite liberating. Yes, I am an FSI fiend. And no, I do not mean the boring stuff like your national newspaper flyers or even your “Canada’s largest circulation newspaper” junk. I am hardcore. Metroland community paper flyers are the only way to go. None of this flyerland.ca stuff for me. That is the equivalent asking a sportsfan to watch a recorded hockey game that they don’t know the outcome to. Enjoyable, but somehow not as fulfilling. Nope it must be a tactile experience in the Alibhai household.

Friday is a most anticipated day, it is when the big stack of goodies arrives, setting the tone for the weekend plans. The relationship I have developed with flyers is so personal and reliant that at one point, and I am not kidding, I even called to complain when we weren’t receiving them. It was a dreadful two weeks because I had no idea how the prices of my drug of choice (electronic items) were faring. That was a long time ago and all is good now. In fact I have even received audit calls to ensure that my flyers are being delivered. I am a happy man, or at least I was until last weekend…

Friday came and the excitement was at its peak level. The North York Mirror had finally arrived, albeit later than usual but who keeps track of these things anyway….I grabbed my Future Shop fix and it’s elder “no commission blue and yellow jacket” brother, Best Buy and set off to my study to lounge and peruse the deals of the week. My usual pattern is to scan Future Shop, top to bottom, then look at Best Buy and find comparable items to price against. The reason is simple. Find a cheaper item in the Best Buy flyer, take it to Future Shop, price match, save 10 percent and haggle as much as you can…No commission Best Buy means no negotiating room, which means no sale to Alibhai…

So here I am, my red and white comrade commanding my full attention. I take in the cover and am mildly amused. I flip the page taking a cursory glance at pages 2 and 3. At this point my amusement turns into irritation. I say to myself, “I can’t believe this, they didn’t do this.” Instead of taking in the items adorning the glossy stock pages that would normally have me salivating, I am forced to turn the page to confirm my sneaking suspicions.

Oh the horror!

That feeling of knowing what was coming next but still hoping that you could be wrong. Then the accompanying pangs of the aftermath. Feeling silly, cheated and disappointed because you knew it all along but couldn’t accept it – kind of like hoping your poker opponent doesn’t have two hearts, because you made a set on the flop that coincidently featured 2 of Cupid's suit. The turn was non factor but fifth street yielded one more Valentine - Your gut tells you something is up but your innate machismo refuses to listen - all of this from pages 4 through 7.

Brilliant and foolish all at once is my take, but you decide. The electronic version is still up for a couple of more days if you must see it.

Sony Canada managed to pay enough MDF/Coop funds to the lucrative, money making, weekly piece that only their only products (save some accessory blu-ray titles and CD’s) dominated the first 7 pages.

Bravia TV’s from series S to Z, Blu-ray players, Vaio laptops, cameras and camcorders, even the lowly $99 car deck had a place to shine. Future Shop redesigned their entire flyer layout for “Sony Days”

Brilliant. Sony had the moxie, coin (we are taking serious dollars) and product to fill up the first seven pages of a national retailer’s flyer – with distribution in the neighborhood of at least 8 million pieces, maybe even closer to 12 million pieces, I see why they did it. Big Box sales account for a very significant amount of product sales. The Sony Store is really just a brand experience, probably even a money loser…

Foolish. I can’t say if Sony moved enough product on line and in store to cover the expense. I don’t even know if that was their objective. Some may try to justify and sell the non-existent brand building merits of this initiative; I wouldn’t buy it, not even for the price match and 10% discount. Flyers don’t build brands (see Dell strategy circa 2003)

Brilliant. What a way to shut out the competition. The folks at Panasonic, Samsung, LG and the like, all who offer a similar array of products, though perhaps not to the same depth as Howard Stringer’s behemoth, must have been peeved. I mean really peeved. The ongoing battles that they have been waging with Best Buy Inc, routinely trying not to be held hostage to committing their full MDF/Coop budgets for a minuscule amount of space has just been taken to a whole new level.

Foolish. Future Shop sold out its suppliers and its customers. Those other peeved electronic manufactures mentioned above do hold some clout. But the real losers are Future Shop's bread and butter, the consumers. A flyer should, as much as possible, act as a non biased comparative shopping tool. If I, for one, were interested in a Sony Style guide I would have picked one up from the aforementioned Sony Store. Even my wife, who hardly looks at the “guy pages” commented right away that Sony must have paid mucho dinero for this. It was almost insulting because you could see right through it. But man I loved Sony for doing it.

Brilliant and foolish all at once, a non-event in the grand scheme of things.

Were I Sony I would have pushed for this execution, what a coup! Were I Future Shop I would have refused, flat out. Although I wonder, who initiated the idea?

Perhaps 2001 Audio and even, heaven forbid, The Brick flyer deserve a second chance in the Alibhai household…

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!