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With our ability to target digital media these days, it’s easy to focus on Right Place and Right Time at the expense of Right Message. The first two are just so measurable and defendable, right?

But a recent report from ComScore shows that the display ads that work hardest for brands are the ones that go beyond inviting the click. They’re the ones that consider strategic drivers in the messaging.

In a study of digital display ads (rich media, banners, rectangles), it was found that the minority featured traditional strategic drivers. In fact, only 17% of the display ads studied had a “brand-differentiating key message.” Positioning was, sadly, at a minimum.

The study found the following elements present at the following levels:

• New product / new feature information – 19%
• Brand differentiating key message – 17%
• Superiority claim – 13%
• Competitive comparison – 10%

Yet when the campaigns that contained those elements were measured on their ability to drive sales, the ads that had those strategic elements present were consistently more likely to deliver better results. The message mattered.

Every ad is a brand ad. Saying “Oh, this tactic is just to drive traffic” can undermine the overall strategy. And in our increasingly fractured media world, every opportunity needs be taken advantage of to further build the brand.

It may be easier to measure the click-through. But it’s still the message that matters.

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

“I’ll have my phone on me” carries a very different meaning these days.

We have a saying around the office: In the battle between the TV and the computer, the winner is the phone. And the implications for businesses are flying at us freight-train fast. Smartphone stats are all about “more…”

More users. Based on Nielsen numbers, an estimated 51% of the U.S. population will have a smartphone by the end of 2011.

Spending more time. eMarketer reports that consumers spend an average of 50 minutes a day on their mobile devices. And time spent with mobile is rising faster than all other media.

Enjoying more control. According to Microsoft Advertising and Compete, 46% of smartphone owners compare prices on their phone while in the store.

Recognizing more utility. 56% of respondents to a Deloitte Consulting survey who owned both a smartphone and a laptop agreed the smartphones were replacing “many of the roles” of these computers. This number is up from 41% just three months earlier.

Evaluating more touchpoints. A study from ClickZ reported that 33% of online shoppers also visit online retailer from mobile device.

From more devices. Android has been growing. BlackBerry has been faltering. And Apple has been holding steady (for the moment). According to a recent MediaPost piece, each had about 28% share as of December.

The numbers are in. Your brand can win by going mobile. So what more are you doing?

[More smart stats for smartphones can be found here.]

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

I wrote last week about the importance of asking the right the question towards the end of getting to the best solution. Being able to frame questions and situations appropriately is a valuable – and often underrated – skill.

And consistently asking the right questions has a cumulative effect. It gets you – and your team – in “The Ballpark of Breakthrough.” This is important because, truthfully, the biggest ideas aren’t always the ones we set out to find.

The concept of intelligent memory suggests that A-Ha Moments come when our analytical and intuitive sides work together to look at something in a new way. Creative thinkers are always connecting. Always creating. Always innovating their personal intellectual inventory.

@LeeClowsBeard recently tweeted another 140-character gem: “Great ideas are often on strategy before the strategy is ever written.” As someone who writes strategies for a living, I tend to agree.

Google was borne from a graduate project attempting to apply data mining algorithms from bricks-and-mortar retail to e-commerce companies. Nobody set out to invent Post-It® Notes. And the concept of gravity was triggered by an apple falling from a tree.

But each idea was harnessed by someone – or a group of people – familiar enough with the bigger picture to make meaningful connections. I see far-smaller-scale examples of this on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Recognizing the potential for breakthrough ideas is made easier if you are familiar enough with the strategy to recognize opportunities for it to be improved upon.

Which goes back to asking the right questions in the first place. And being confident enough in your questions that you can realize the best solution might actually answer a yet-to-be-asked question.

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow for a solution.” – Bertrand Russell

There are no shortage of ideas in the world. If you get three of your co-workers together – right now – you could likely come up with a few good ones by the top of the next hour.

But would they be the right ideas? The ideas that would move needles? The ideas that would change games?

If a co-worker called with an urgent need and you had to provide an answer in an hour, how soon would you transition into idea generating mode? Five minutes? Five seconds?

What if you spent more time better framing the question? How would your recommended ideas and solutions change?

Strategy+Business recently published an article on innovation by William Duggan called How A-Ha Really Happens. The basic premise is quite shocking to anyone who has ever attended a brainstorming session: The concept of a having a two-sided brain (“I’m a right-brained person”) falls into the ever growing category of widely-accepted – but thoroughly outdated – theory. Apparently neuroscientists have known this for the last dozen or so years, but forgot to send Corporate America the memo.

A newer model of how our brains work is intelligent memory – a concept that already won its contributors a Nobel Prize. The short of it: Get on board with UPS and learn to love logistics. Dugganʼs article recaps a book based on the breakthrough, award-winning work:

From the moment youʼre born, your brain takes things in, breaks them down, and puts them on shelves. As new information comes in, your brain does a search to see how it might fit with other information already stored in your memory. When it finds a match, the previous memories come off the shelf and combine with the new, and the result is a thought. The breaking down and storing process is analysis. The searching and combining is intuition. Both are necessary for all kinds of thought.

Breaking down and storing? Searching and combining? Developing ideas is about about organization. And connections. Donʼt “turn off” one side of your brain to attack a problem. Instead, explore how best to innovate your inventory. Thatʼs the way to get to A-Ha.

Spending the appropriate amount of time stating the problem is essential. Framing the question is an art. Focusing your attention accordingly is the first step to finding the best solution on your shelves.

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

I used to have an IT guy whose only solution for a problem I was having was to restart whatever it was I was having the problem with. Frozen computer? Restart. Printer not printing? Restart. It became something of a joke. Stuck on a presentation? Restart. Don’t have the needle-moving idea? Restart. You know what? He was on to something.

Brands – and industries for that matter – are in constant danger of becoming frozen. Just ask Blockbuster. Or record labels. And, yes, I’m looking at you radio.

The thing is, most of the players deemed losers by the new economy aren’t taken by surprise. They are smart, passionate people. They get it. Blockbuster knew Netflix was a gamechanger. Newspapers considered themselves vulnerable as early as the 1970s. Both are examples of smart people recognizing the game had changed. But not re-setting their businesses to win with the new rules. They didn’t hit restart.

Now, this is not an argument against experience. Experience is one of the most valuable assets in business. But I’d argue a close second is the ability to look through The Lens Of Right Now.

Ask yourself “What if we had to hit restart?” What if our product / service / brand / industry was the new entrant in the market? How would we approach things differently? One of my favorite related cartoons is titled “If Newspapers Just Came Out Now.” One twenty-something excitedly says to the other “You don’t have to get your news online… They print it out for you!”

You’ve got the equity, the experience and the assets. What if you hit restart? How would you innovate?

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

I watched The Future We Will Create this week. It’s a 74-minute documentary about the TED conference. If you are a TED super fan, it’s worth the effort. I thought the scene with Al Gore and Anthony Robbins was great. If you are new to TED, your time would be better spent watching any four TED talks. Each speaker, you see, gets only eighteen minutes to present their “Idea Worth Spreading.”

And it’s that structure that provided one of the movie’s most memorable moments. An attendee remarks that it is “much harder to do a short speech than a long speech… it forces them to get the quintessence of their message across.” That eighteen-minute – and sometimes shorter – framework makes a speaker focus. And get to the core. But the output is worth the effort.

As marketers, it’s easy to create laundry lists to – theoretically – make a point. And, unfortunately, those lists are often supported by copy testing. I recently came upon a book called Marketing Myths That Are Killing Business. With a name like that, I looked forward to identifying the killers.

According to the authors: “[Copy testers] learn… that if one concept has 50 words and talks about 5 attributes and benefits, it generally scores higher than a concept that has 25 words and talks about 2 attributes and benefits.” I’ve seen this in action. Basically – and not surprisingly – the more you say, the greater people’s interest in buying the product will be. You have more of a chance to make a point and convince them of something. And that works for copy tests.

But real-world data suggests that “the more messages a company packs into an advertisement, the lower the expected recall of any one message and, in some cases, the advertisement of the whole.”

Francois FeNelon had it right, “The more you say, the less people remember.” Three centuries later, we’re still learning.

Think about this the next time you sit down to write a brief, a report, a memo, an email, an ad: Say one thing and people will remember one thing. Say five things and your reader may remember one thing. And it might not be the one that will actually change perceptions, attitudes or behaviors.

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me @casey_flanagan on Twitter.

I wrote last week about using the Lens of Right Now to be more effective with your learnings from your history and your data. It’s worth noting that, as with most truths, there are two sides to the story. The Long View is essential, too.

The trouble with predicting the future is that most people try to do so by looking at the immediate past. We see digital rising and print declining and declare print dead. Or we declare the death of the PC. Or the :30 second spot. Or whatever makes for a good “The Death of” headline.

This ignores the lessons of history. Human behavior is relatively constant. Sure, it evolves with and adapts to its environment – which is why The Lens of Right Now is essential. But history repeats itself relentlessly. That’s what makes “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” ring true.

There’s a lifecycle to everything. That’s life. As the saying goes, “The King is dead. Long live the King.” For every dead King there’s a living one ready to take his place. The same can be said for brands.

So let’s say you are a challenger brand in a mature category. Your playing field today may look and feel like your playing field last year at this time. It may even look and feel like your playing field from five years ago. But it’s not going to be that way forever.

To paraphrase a great quote I read this year: “You’re not going to solve the same old problems with the same old approaches. And you’re certainly not going to solve new problems that way.”

Explore what’s changed. Determine what’s stayed the same. What does that mean within the big picture? The best way to make sure you’re on the losing end of what’s next is to make decisions based solely on what’s happened the last few years.

There are few constants. Facebook is quite possibly not only the future of the internet, but the future internet. Or it’s the next MySpace. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Time will tell. And we’d better adjust our strategies, tactics and behaviors accordingly.

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me on Twitter.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana

It’s as apropos a way to start a new year as any. And to paraphrase a paraphraser (Sir Winston Churchill): We must learn from history or we’re doomed to repeat it. But as the marketing – and cultural – landscape changes ever more rapidly, understanding the horizon requires not only lessons from history, but an understanding of your current vantage point.

I agree that those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But I think an essential – if less snappy – addendum for the marketing world is:

“Those that have learned from history but fail to consider its new context are doomed to woefully underperform.”

I’ve written before about looking back to look ahead. The true benefit of good data is the ability to make better decisions next time. But even the best data is no sure bet. Taking a past success and projecting it forward is dangerous. Because the one thing that data – and history – can’t inform is current context. Think of the change over the last five years. History and data may be fact. But they’re not necessarily truth.

You can absolutely learn from your industry’s benchmarks. You should positively take learnings from your last campaign. But using either to look ahead can be dangerous unless they’re looked at through the Lens of Right Now. Which has never mattered more than, well, right now.

My advice: As you start your 2011, take what you know, what you’ve learned and what you believe to be true. Then look at it through the Lens of Right Now. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And what does that mean for your next big thing?

Interested in more stuff I find interesting? Follow me on Twitter.

[Ed. note: I’m big on holiday traditions. Including watching the same reruns and reading the same books every year. How The Grinch Stole Christmas has recently been reintroduced into both of those categories for me. So why not make it a hat trick and make it a blog tradition, too? This was one of my favorite pieces from last year. And an important reminder for anyone who works in the business of intangibles.]

We are faced with choices on how best to tell stories on a daily basis. Often times, the decision comes down to “do we / can we trust the audience?” Can we trust them to be smart enough? Engaged enough? Responsible enough?

I was reminded of this the other night as I read How The Grinch Stole Christmas. It was the first time I had read it in, likely, twenty-five years. And you know what? [Spoiler Alert!] Despite the promise of the title, The Grinch doesn’t steal Christmas. He can’t. That’s the point of the story. Here’s how the book ends:

And he brought back the toys! And the food for the feast!
And he… HE HIMSELF… !
The Grinch carved the roast beast.

The story ends with The Grinch carving the roast beast at the Who’s Christmas dinner.

When run through a committee, the story would have been called “The Unsteal-able Holiday.” Or “How The Grinch Couldn’t Steal Christmas.” Or, maybe most palatable, at least in hindsight, “How Christmas Saved The Grinch.”

But it wasn’t run through a committee. Or made into a literal translation. It was told by someone who believed strongly enough that this was the exact right way to tell it. And that people would get it. The good Doctor Seuss used a title that was, in reality, the opposite of what the story was about.

And the story has been told and retold ever since.

Happy Holidays.

Last week, I wrote about data being powerful. But it isn’t naturally powerful. Data needs help. Thought must be given to both its organization and presentation. At it’s best, data is illustrative. At it’s worst – well, we’ve all sat through those meetings. Three rules of the road for getting the most out of your data, without having to change how you collect it:

Make it pretty. There is a false dichotomy between data and creativity. The presentation of data should be interesting, engaging and relevant. Data can change perceptions. Data can affect behavior. Don’t think of numbers like a textbook or a spreadsheet. Think of them like an advertisement. A great, recent example? The connections Facebook makes – a map of human relationships.

Make it simple. Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It’s an important idea that should be applied to every research presentation. Everywhere. Always. The common misperception is that numbers are scary. Numbers aren’t scary. How they are presented? That’s another story. Complexity is a choice. It’s one that must be avoided. Watch Hans Rosling take 200 years of population data for 200 countries and make it make sense. In four minutes.

Make it a story. There was a great piece in the New York Times a few weeks back titled Stories vs. Statistics that made the point that with stories, we suspend disbelief. But with statistics, we suspend belief. That’s insightful. Make sure your numbers have a point. It doesn’t matter whether they are interesting or rational, surprising or expected. Make them memorable. Make them sharable. Tell a story.