Kodak's Bill Sullivan Blog

Cross Channel Marketing: Brainpower and Muscle for Multi-Channel MSPs

By Bill Sullivan, Eastman Kodak, Center of Excellence Lead, MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions

How much does it cost to move into multi-channel marketing? Well, if you try it and get it wrong, the sky’s the limit. It could cost you your business. So, despite all the hype and loose talk about how becoming a cross-media marketing services provider is the way of the future for printers wanting to move up the value chain, this is not a business transformation that should be undertaken lightly.

When Kodak first started thinking about how it should be preparing to help its customers make this kind of transition, there was a lot of debate about what they would really need. What we’ve come up with, over a period of more than two years, is a practical, affordable system that combines a robust, dependable technology backbone with some very smart software tools that can work wonders when it comes to getting the best out of limited data.

The result is Managed Campaign Services. It has real muscle when it comes to executing multi-channel campaigns across a range of media that includes variable data print, email blasts, SMS text messaging, personalized URLs (pURLs) and landing pages. But it also has brains, including software tools that can enhance and manipulate data and introduce powerful and surprising elements of predictive modeling.

One way to develop a marketing strategy is to rely on brainstorming, black coffee and inspiration. Another way to do it, though, is to look at whatever data is available to you – often nothing more than raw customer data files – and find ways to analyze and segment these records to classify customers into groups that can be addressed with targeted offers. This analytical approach offers a much higher certainty of success. If you, as a marketing services provider, can offer your clients the ability to identify the most profitable customers on their lists and devise multi-channel campaigns that will reach them and engage their interest, you can virtually guarantee great response rates and loyal, satisfied clients. 

By providing access to advanced data enrichment and predictive modeling tools, backed up by the support of skilled data scientists and marketing experts from the Kodak MarketMover Solutions  team, the Managed Campaign Services package helps you ensure your clients are able to deliver the right messages in the right media to the right people.

We have chosen to focus a lot of our efforts on data, because data is always the key to cross-media communications, no matter what output channels you end up using. Everything leads back to the data. The more value you can build into the data files, through the processes of data cleansing, data hygiene, data manipulation, data enrichment, and predictive modeling, the better the eventual marketing ROI will be. 

But how does a printer with no previous experience of handling the intricacies of marketing data use these sophisticated techniques to add value for the customer? The best answer is a combination of good software and good advice – and that’s what Kodak can provide.

Data enrichment, for example, could involve loading a basic customer records file and then overlaying it with other files containing census data or geo-tracking information. Doing this allows demographic details to be added in about household make-up, educational levels and incomes, or about travel time to a store or entertainment venue. Within Managed Campaign Services, this is a quick, painless routine that immediately gives more depth to the customer profiles. Our customers can either do it themselves or get Kodak to do it for them.

But if data enrichment is a first step, predictive modeling takes the manipulation of the available data a whole lot further.

Our team has taken an established statistical model known as MID (multi-variate interaction detection) and built it into our technology platform. MID has been used for years, in various forms, to forecast the effectiveness of direct mail activity, based on predicted values and past performance. Kodak has adapted and updated this concept and operationalized it within the software so that it becomes an amazingly powerful tool, both for developing marketing propositions and for deciding which media should be used for specific customers.

Just running the MID software against a customer file produces a tree-type representation of the entire data file. This groups individuals together into statistically relevant populations and highlights what they have in common, providing insights that make it easier to create offers that will appeal to them and to choose the right mix of communication channels. 

This focus on enriching, refining and exploiting the data, before you even get round to thinking about campaign logistics, numbers and production issues, is unique to Kodak. Nobody else has thought it through and put together a package that pays so much attention to data quality and data analysis, even leaving aside the unique potential of the MID-driven predictive modeling techniques.

But the whole point of cross-media communication is that it builds a relationship over time. The final element of our technologyis a superb set of inbound response monitoring and post-campaign analysis tools that close the feedback loop and ensure the data gets more and more valuable after every bout of activity.

Managed Campaign Services brings together both the data science needed to create the right multi-channel campaigns and the processes needed to execute them, putting the user in control of both, from a single dashboard interface. If you already know the ins and outs of data manipulation and managing and producing multi-channel output, you can buy the system outright. But for most print service providers that are moving in this direction, it makes a lot more sense to take the pay-as-you-go approach.

This involves paying a monthly subscription fee for the basic service and adding on exactly what you need, in terms of assistance from Kodak’s data sciences consultants and marketing advisers, at least until you become familiar with the tools and techniques. With the experts at your elbow, you’ll soon learn what works and what doesn’t, what information your clients should gather from their customers, when to use overlays to enrich the data, and how to tap into the power of predictive modeling.

We’ve seen this side-by-side approach work very well over the last two years with digital print service providers, commercial printers, direct mail specialists and high volume transaction output companies. The costs to these companies depend on what services they choose to use, but a basic monthly subscription ensures their early steps towards multi-channel marketing won’t break the bank.

And the payoffs? In the longer term, what is it worth to reposition a business in an area where it can offer a premium service that measurably boosts its customers ROI and keeps them coming back for more, year after year?

We have already seen examples where predictive modeling and impeccable execution have helped Kodak’s clients lift their customers’ response rates from 3% to 18%. Nothing is certain in this world, but if performance like that doesn’t guarantee real customer loyalty, it’s hard to know what will.

Let me know your opinions on Cross Channel Marketing and how it affects your business >>>

Cross Channel Marketing: What’s The Best Way To Make A Start?

Anyone can set up a new business as a multi-channel marketing services supplier. Well, not quite anyone. You’d need to have some resources and some kind of vision about how you wanted to operate and where you wanted to get to. But the basic task of setting up from scratch would be relatively simple to plan and execute.

What is always going to be harder is moving in this direction from within an established business, with customers to be managed, plant to be utilized, staff to be deployed, and bills to be paid. In some cases, the road ahead may seem fairly obvious. In others, the best advice may be the traditional countryman’s observation: “If you want to get there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”

So can you do it? And if so, how?

Any generalizations I offered now would inevitably be too broad to be much use, in practical terms. But I would claim that there is one very pragmatic, realistic innovation we have come up with at Kodak that can help enormously. This is the idea of a transformation assessment process that can give detailed, specific advice to a company that is toying with the idea of making this kind of strategic change.

We’ve done these assessments many times now, and they work very well. If a company does seem like a promising candidate for transformation into a cross-media marketing powerhouse, the assessment will provide much of the background data and analysis that will feed into the transition process. If the assessment shows there are insuperable difficulties, the advice not to go ahead may save the business from putting its head in a noose.

Assessments are not free. But if you saw the level of effort and resources involved, that would not surprise you at all. In terms of their significance to a business, they are an absolute bargain.

Our experts do the job properly. They spend a lot of time on site, talk to people, look at where the company is, from a business, sales, and operations standpoint, and produce a report that highlights strengths and weaknesses in sometimes astonishing detail. The cost of the assessment depends on the size and complexity of the business, but  I have yet to meet anyone who has been through the process who doesn’t feel it was well worth the money.   

Cross Channel Marketing: Experience Says Rebrand And Relaunch

What’s in a name? You may have pondered that one before, in different contexts. But one thing we’ve certainly noticed at Kodak is that names have great sticking power, for better or for worse.

While we’ve been working to refine the application of our MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions with print companies that have ambitions to become multi-channel marketing service providers, we’ve noticed how a name can get in the way.

Even if it’s a good name, a name that stands for quality, value, and service to your customers for five or ten or twenty years, it can still work against you when you’re trying to move a business on and make radical changes.

After a couple of years working with companies making these transitions, one of the things we consistently recommend is that they should take the trouble to rebrand themselves as a marketing services provider.

Whether they keep a portion of their name or not, that’s up to them. But as you launch new technologies on the output end, such as a Prosper Press, and you embrace the platform and get into being able to provide marketing sciences support and data support, relaunch with a new name and typically the end clients take notice much faster.

There’s no overwhelming logic that says that should be so – I can see arguments both for and against – but this is one of those areas where there’s no substitute for hands-on experience. We’ve seen both, and we’ve seen which approach works, so we’re able to pass on advice that comes to you straight from the real world.

The last thing you want is for potential customers to turn away thinking “Solid print provider, yes, but I don’t see these guys being able to stretch themselves in that way.”

Cross Channel Marketing: The University That Raised Its Game

I’m very enthusiastic about multi-media, multi-touch, multi-channel marketing. You could say that’s my job, but it really does go further than that. I’ve seen enough to know that we’re on to something pretty important here. And we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

The potential is just enormous. But what I find really exciting is the fact that it’s open to everybody. It simply isn’t true that you have to be big to make it pay. And that goes for suppliers, too, as well as marketers.

Now that we have hosted, managed solutions like Kodak’s Managed Campaign Services, the barriers to entry have come right down. Becoming a smart, fully integrated cross-media marketing services provider no longer means investing in a lot of people, software, and equipment before you start to see results. You’ve got instant access to amazing software tools and the accumulated wisdom of a small army of data scientists and marketing gurus on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no upfront investment.

So what are the returns like? Obviously, that depends on the customers you can attract, the loyalty you can develop in them, and the work you can secure. But, above all, it depends on your customers’ ability to see how what you do brings in better returns for them. If they can see a massive return on their investment with you, they are not going to take a lot of persuading.

We’ve had a good example of this recently, with a campaign for a university that needed to grow its alumni activities and boost donations from past students. There was an existing campaign – more of a routine, really – that had gone on for nearly ten years, bringing in the same response rate and the same amount of money every year.

The challenge for our client, with the support of our MarketMover consultants and technology platform, was to refresh that operation completely and show that it could be done a whole lot better just by making better use of the data. So they looked again at where ex-students lived in relation to the school and burrowed down into the deeper demographics of who these alumni were and what they were like and what channels were most appropriate for dialogue with them.

Then they went out and executed superbly, handling the tools and the workflow through the single dashboard interface you get with the online system, tracking, tweaking, refining, and going again with progressively better targeting.

The results were spectacular. No end customer is going to quibble about the bill when a 3% to 4% response rate suddenly jumps to 15% to 18%. And the quality of the response was better in cash terms, as well, with the donations total up by 25% almost immediately.  

Cross Channel Marketing: Brainpower And Muscle For Multi-Channel MSPs

In case you hadn’t noticed, there are a lot more people going round talking about changing paradigms and business transformation than actually doing it these days. That’s not surprising. It’s hard to really change a business for the better – and the stakes are high if you get it wrong.

But look around you at our industry. What do you see? Squeezed margins. Fierce price competition. Lots of worried people and not a lot of loyalty. A little bit of inspired business transformation would go a long way, if it led to added value business where you gave your regular customers the kind of service that couldn’t be undercut on price and kept them coming back for more.

For many companies in this sort of situation, the dream is to expand and develop into a powerful, respected marketing services provider, able to offer real multi-channel communications expertise supported by traditional print disciplines.

It’s easier said than done. But I’ve been part of a multi-disciplinary team at Kodak that has spent more than two years putting together a toolkit and a methodology to help companies that want to follow this route.

The success and feedback we’ve been getting have been tremendously exciting. And we’re learning all the time, too, from the experience of those we’re helping.

So, for example, if a well established commercial printer wants to go down this route, we can provide a hosted multi-channel solution called Managed Campaign Services that can do wonderful things in the way of data cleansing, data manipulation, data enrichment, and predictive modeling.

That’s available as a pay-as-you-go type subscription service. It can help the company plan, set up, execute, and track really effective multi-media marketing campaigns with very little hassle and a great deal of control.

But, of course, you don’t need to advertise to your end customer that so much of the knowhow is built into the system. It’s not foolproof, and you still need to exercise your judgment and creativity, but the service sure can help you along the way.

Data is the key, of course, in all forms of marketing. But in multi-channel campaigns, more than ever, everything depends on what you know, what else you can find out, and how you can exploit that. Alongside the technology platform, we’ve put together practical consultancy teams built around both data scientists and marketing analysts, so that companies that are new to the dark arts of data science can learn from the experts as they go along.

All this support has been stepped up a gear from the beginning of 2011, as part of Kodak’s enhanced MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions initiative. With the flexibility of the pay-as-you-go hosted service, the barriers to entry are down – and so is the exposure to risk. For the right companies, with bright ideas and realistic ambitions, there’s the opportunity to develop the skills of a multi-channel marketing services provider without betting the farm.

Kodak Gets Data Scientists Working For Print Service Providers

An OutputLinks Conversation With Bill Sullivan, Eastman Kodak Company, Center of Excellence Lead, MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions

Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, had the opportunity to speak with Bill Sullivan recently about Cross Channel Marketing and its effect on the business of print

Ian Shircore: Bill, as one of the key people involved in Kodak’s plans to give print providers the tools and back-up to develop into multi-channel marketing service providers, you must have an opinion about what’s real and what’s hype in this area. Why is everybody so sure this is the direction printers must take to get away from problems like squeezed margins and commodity pricing? 

Bill Sullivan: Ian, let’s look at this from the end customer’s point of view. If I’m a print company, what is it that I do that adds value for my customer? What’s the real value?

For that end customer, it’s all about how you’re going to sell your products, how you’re going to make your promotions more effective, how you’ll get more value out of your marketing dollars. Everything else is secondary to that. Multi-channel campaigning really does help the end customer get more value from those dollars.

Ian Shircore: Well, we know the theory’s sound. But who’s going to be in a position to put it into practice?

Bill Sullivan: You’d be surprised. While we’ve been developing our offering over last two years I’ve worked with a number of different people. Our direct costumers have been commercial printers, digital print service providers, and transactional printers that are getting into marketing services. Their clients run the full gamut from retail to business-to-business, automotive, financial sector, and non-profits. In all these fields, we’ve seen the ability to give a big lift to their customers’ campaigning and effectiveness. They’ve been very successful so far. We had one non-profit, a university alumni donation campaign, which had been basically flat for ten years. Suddenly, the response rate was up from 3% or so to 18% and the cash donations figure was up 25%.

Ian Shircore: So what is it that you – and they – actually do to achieve these good results?

Bill Sullivan: It all starts with the data, with using data in ways that customers haven’t been able to use it before. Data is really the key to cross-media communications, no matter what the output channel is going to be. Data has value. And that value grows as you add to it and refine it over the entire life cycle of a campaign. Each time you do something in the campaign – and even when you decide you won’t do anything in the campaign – that adds intelligence into the data file and makes it more valuable. So the data is central, and the potential lies in what you can do with it.

Ian Shircore: And what can be done with it to boost the end customer’s response rates?

Bill Sullivan: Oh, some very smart stuff. The Kodak system is built around a technology platform that we used to call InSite Campaign Manager, but is now part of what we call Managed Campaign Services. It pulls together a lot of different tools into a dashboard, so you can manage all your campaign activity from one place. As far as the data is concerned, you start off by feeding into it your raw customer data. Then you can add files that can be used for data enrichment – things like census or geo-tracking data that can be overlaid on the customer files to give you more information about the individual. Then the system can handle data cleansing, data hygiene, and data manipulation, and even predictive modeling. By the time you’ve done all that, you are dealing with something that’s much more informative than your original customer data file.

Ian Shircore: Data enrichment sounds like the kind of added value service customers might not expect from a traditional print supplier.

Bill Sullivan: Exactly. For example, in retail you might use geo-tracking information to determine how far individuals are from the store location. That can be important information for your marketing campaign. Census data can provide information, of course, around the demographics – educational background, wealth, family size, and a variety of other information. Our technology supports that type of data enrichment. We encourage our customers to do it, and we also provide that type of enrichment as a service.

Ian Shircore: And that’s a service the budding marketing services provider can buy in from Kodak?

Bill Sullivan: Yes. We’ve set up our MarketMover consulting team with both data scientists and marketing scientists, and they are there to share their expertise and help solve any problems that come up. In particular, when our costumers first start out, they are typically green in the area of data, and certainly data enrichment. It takes a lot of time to build up the expertise and skills. So we generally suggest bringing us in for some time, so that they can learn alongside us as we do it. They can learn things like what information to gather from their customers and when to overlay and enrich to get to a predictive modeling scenario that is going to make for a more refined and productive campaign.       

In our technology platform, we have taken a model called MID (multivariate interaction detection), which is a statistical mathematical model that’s been used in direct mail for many years to predict future performance based on predicted values and past performance. We’ve operationalized that model into the software. When you run it against a client file, it comes back with a tree-type representation of the entire data file, putting people into statistically relevant populations and telling you what is relevant, why they are in a population together. For the marketing person, that helps in formulating the marketing messages and [decisions about] who the marketing messages and promotions should go to. It also determines what types of output are suitable. Maybe this group should move to email only, and this one should get direct mail, print, and a pURL [a personalized website]. The marketing person and our client can interact directly with those models, pulling out those populations and doing the logic for the messaging and the output channels directly in the dashboard interface. 

Ian Shircore: There’s obviously huge potential there, but I can see why it’s a daunting step for a print company that has never ventured into this area of data manipulation before. The ability for Kodak customers to buy in this expertise as a service seems an important option, as an intermediate step.

Bill Sullivan: This is why we’re offering different levels of support, for companies with different levels of experience. They can buy the software or they can use it as a managed service, hosted by Kodak. But Managed Campaign Services is the newest option, which we’ve just launched in 2011. This is where we supply both marketing and data science consultants and offer a complete campaigning package for our clients. That enables them to give their end customers a fantastic level of sophisticated service, without necessarily having to go through the learning curve themselves.

Ian Shircore: And as they develop their familiarity with the tools and the techniques, do they move on to take more control?

Bill Sullivan: That depends on what works for them. Either they will settle down into a business model where they have Kodak as a regular partner in this kind of work and it works well for them and their end customers. Or they will become less and less dependent on us, over time, which is what we prefer. Then the cost for them goes down and their expertise builds fast. And if they become very successful, then they will eventually make the move and purchase the technology from us and bring it all in-house. The new factor in the mix is the capability to enhance the data. That enhanced data can influence your planning and allow you to effectively execute your program over the full range of media and communication channels.

Ian Shircore: So the added value comes from squeezing and massaging the data? 

Bill Sullivan: Oh yes. We really believe the value is in doing statistical analysis on the data, doing predictive modeling and really targeting your activity. Obviously, on Day One, that’s not easy for print providers to get their hands around. But that’s where we can help, by bringing in our expertise to get them into those higher value campaigns faster. That’s going to be important. If you don’t do it, you just rely on the end customer to provide all the data for you and then you are just doing the execution. And then the conversation very quickly goes down to the level of “OK, what’s the cost per thousand?” That’s what most of the technology that’s out there today is effectively doing – moving the service provider towards that execution-only model. We’re proposing a different path, where the provider develops new skills and takes more responsibility, and credit, for the success of a sustained campaign. 

This approach starting with the data and data modeling and flowing it through a multi-channel campaign, building in what we get from the results, tweaking the campaign, and refining the promotion over and over again – that’s really where success is going to be. Success is not in how many pURLs you can do or how many prints you can do. It really is in the total workflow.

For our customers to be successful in the direct mail area, for example, they need to offer a new range of services. Those include both new output technologies and new marketing science disciplines, using data in a way that they’ve never done before, and looking at data as something that has value over a long period of time.

Over time, these direct mail specialists have become very good at getting in tune with the end clients’ data and therefore with their marketing and their clients. As they follow through and take on board the feedback and refine the execution, they become more valuable to their clients in new and different ways, which leads to stickiness and long-term customer loyalty.

Ian Shircore: So the main focus is on direct mail specialists, is it?

Bill Sullivan: Oh no, not exclusively direct mail. There’s a lot more to it than that. Our largest client to date has been a high volume transactional printer, mainly focused on the automobile industry. It’s everybody from the smaller, digitally savvy marketing services providers to the higher volume direct mail and transactional output companies that are using our high quality inkjet technology. For Kodak, it’s ideally a question of bringing the advanced inkjet innovations of the new Prosper Press together with these smart software tools and value-added services – keeping up the volume and increasing the value of the print that’s coming off the high quality color inkjet machines.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence of the way it’s working, too. We’ve gone through the full annual cycle now with some of these campaigns with our customers and their end customers. We launched several holiday-based campaigns supporting clients and we’ve seen the response rates on the activity increase for all their customers. Now they’ve all come back with further refinements again for the holidays, so we’ll soon be able to measure how much better they’ve done than the year before.

 

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