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Bill Flitter is founder and chief marketing officer of Pheedo. Bill is an established expert on blogging, podcasting, RSS and online marketing trends and best practices and speaks regularly on these topics at industry events. Prior to Pheedo, Bill founded Email Shopping Network and directed its sales and marketing activities until its acquisition by eUniverse in 2002.

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Really Simple Success! An Insider’s View of the Rising RSS Tide

Written on
May 3rd 2006
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by Bill Flitter  |
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The Shiny Hood Ornament

Matt MacQueen, Experience Planning Director for Arc Worldwide, has done a lot of work with podcasting (and video podcasting) — using RSS primarily to distribute the video and audio content as part of marketing campaigns.

For MacQueen and his team, RSS is very much an emerging medium, and not a sure-thing for marketing success. Clients first need to understand what they’re getting into and measure results, and not just jump in because it’s the next new thing.

“I think that right now podcasting and RSS [are] the shiny new hood ornament on a lot of marketing presentations and trade shows,” comments MacQueen. “But it’s just like any other channel, it needs to be held up to the same amount of strategic rigor and measurement of anything else we’d recommend.”

Arc Worldwide works with client Purina on both RSS and podcasting efforts to help evangelize and create loyalty for the Purina brand. “One thing that we’re really interested in is the podcast as a vehicle for increasing the depth of the relationship between the people and the brand, rather than trying to reach your mass.”

An Education Sell

Stacy Malone, vice president and interactive media director with Universal McCann, has a bullish outlook for emerging media, and views RSS as part of this growing category. “We are really taking a proactive testing strategy and actually testing all types of emerging media, so RSS definitely falls in that category,” she states.

For Malone, scalability and adoption of RSS presents the biggest challenge to its growth and attractiveness as an ad vehicle. “The scalability is a big issue, even if we find that it’s performing well; just how scalable is that opportunity that was performing well?”

RSS is still a learning experience. “I don’t think we’ve totally cracked the nut of how best to use RSS for a marketing vehicle, and so I think that’s a little bit frustrating in that we do get results, but yet, I think we still need to do some more testing regarding how to really harness the use of RSS.”

Client interest in emerging media is increasing almost on a daily basis, according to Malone, who states, “I think that openness [to testing] has definitely increased a lot even in the last six months.”

Education is just as important as testing. A recurring theme is that clients are hungry to learn about RSS, but also need to see it in action. “I would say that the clients don’t necessarily, totally get what RSS is,” Malone adds. “On the client side, they haven’t necessarily used RSS feeds. So when you talk about these ad opportunities, you kind of have to showcase what it is — show them. I think showing them what the actual opportunity is, it’s very helpful.”

At ID Media, the world’s largest direct response media services agency in the country, RSS efforts have been largely driven by the agency. “We have been doing all the pushing from our end,” comments Jeff Hinz, senior vice president, director of client services. “Once we bring [RSS] to their attention there is interest as way to help them to meet their objectives.”

Hinz agrees that there’s a considerable learning curve for clients and consumers. “I don’t think they understand it. The acronym is hard to understand. As consumers, they don’t have grasp of what it is, which makes it difficult to make advertising decisions based on that.”

It’s very much an educational process with clients, Hinz adds. “I think that the way we educate clients is through case studies, and also try to relate this to something they are familiar with. This is not taking an old media model like television and putting it online, this is something new.”


The Consumer Calls The Shots

From TV and digital video recorders to satellite radio and podcasts, consumers are taking control over their media consumption, and RSS is another step in this direction.

Universal McCann’s Malone looks at RSS as a new manifestation of what is happening every day with what she dubs the ‘new consumer’. “This ‘new consumer’ has a lot more control, a lot of choice, but there is also so much content out there for them to get their arms around; the content choices are just unbearable. And the thing I like about RSS is that it really puts the user in control of actually sifting their way through all the content out there and choosing what they want to be sent to them. So, it’s putting them in control, and also helping them manage all of the content of the web out there, in a way that is very efficient for them.”

Arc Worldwide’s MacQueen sees huge potential for RSS as the ‘ultimate opt-in stream to the brand.’ “[RSS] is the direct opt-in line to the consumer. It’s a customer-focused solution that puts them in control over how and when they receive the content and who they want to listen to. The consumers are calling the shots.”

Another critical factor for increasing investment in RSS advertising is simply the need for a larger user base. Malone comments that for RSS to become a mainstream ad medium, two things have to happen. “The first thing is user adoption has to definitely ramp. Then, secondly, I just think that we need to be more creative in the ad opportunities.”



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