Last week, WhatTheyThink.com spoke with Bob Lieber, the CEO of Lieber, Levett, Koenig, Farese, Babcock - a subsidiary of Omnicom. With all the talk about new media and its impact on print, we wanted to gain a perspective from a leading advertising executive. LLKFB is a direct communications agency, founded in 1996 when its five founding partners left management positions at Lowe Direct to start the new venture. The company has offices in Manhattan with 86 employees and capitalized billings in excess of $120 million. LLKFB experienced 40% year-over-year growth in 2002 at a time when most agencies were struggling to stay even.

LLKFB has done extensive marketing and advertising work with IKON, Indigo (now HP Indigo) and Xerox, which Lieber says has helped keep them current on digital printing technologies, since in the course of supporting those clients, they extensively promoted and used the technologies. Lieber shares insight relative to the trends over the last several years that are driving more communications to new media, as well as his perspective on how to keep print competitive in today’s high-speed, high-touch world.

ROI is a major requirement for marketers today – they want to know what their return is from marketing investments. If we’re motivating specific behaviors in communications, we can track whether those behaviors actually happened and what it cost to motivate those behaviors. From a strategy, execution and measurement standpoint, clients have found this approach to be quite compelling.


WTT: Having been a part of Omnicom now for the last couple years, how frequently do you find yourself interacting with the rest of the network?

BL: We joined Omnicom in November 2000. Omnicom is the only one of the major advertising agency holding companies that has continued to report increased revenues and profits through the last two years, reporting double digit earnings growth, an exception in a category that has been suffering. Omnicom's branded networks and numerous specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries. We find ourselves partnering with other agencies in the network on existing business as well as on new business acquisition in order to take advantage of the vast array of talents the network comprises. .


WTT: How much printing would you say you control on an annual basis?

BL: We don’t measure that specifically, but my guess would be in $10 to $20 million in direct mail packages, sales brochures, sales kits, and other marketing materials. If you add print advertising buys to the mix, it’s another $10 to $20 million.


WTT: Going back to your roots at Lowe Direct, I am assuming pretty much everything you produced then ended up in print. These days, from a project perspective, what percent would you say is print-centric, versus broadcast, versus electronic?

BL: Interestingly, right as we were leaving Lowe Direct in late ‘96, we created Dell’s first transactional web site, so electronic media was just beginning to enter our world. Today, it would be rare for us to do a campaign that was only print. Most commonly, we are doing a combination of print and electronic, at a minimum, and oftentimes all three, including broadcast. There is actually very little that is exclusively electronic.


WTT: And why is that?

BL: At the leading edge today is multichannel interaction. In case after case, it turns out that the most valuable customers to any marketer are the ones that interact across multiple channels. For example, if you are a Sharper Image customer and you buy through the catalog, the web, and the retail store, you are likely to spend more, and buy more often, than a customer who just buys from the catalog or just on the web.

Multichannel customers are higher value customers. The more opportunities I have to interact with you, the more selling opportunities I have. The more times I make it convenient for you to do business with me or talk with me, the more opportunities I have to deepen my relationship with you. A multichannel customer may see something they like in a store, but can’t find their size; they know they can go right to the web and find what they need. They may want to place a catalog order at 2 AM when they happen to be online. And phone sales can be supplemented by the web, with the caller and the sales person both viewing information in that medium.


WTT: How do you see that mix trending over the next few years?

BL: On the one hand, use of electronic communication is at a more advanced stage in business marketing because most people, as Dr. Joe pointed out in his column (02.14.03 column), have access to the internet from their office. I believe we have achieved an access threshold that means you can minimize or eliminate print in some cases. Just think about the number of times you used to send hard copies of a PowerPoint presentation to people. Today, we routinely attach that document electronically to email and send it off with a click.

Remember how three or four years ago, we did a lot of fax back campaigns? That’s virtually dead these days, replaced by e-mail and web surveys. How many electronic newsletters do you get in a day or a week or a month? That’s a great example of something that has migrated from all print to perhaps a majority of electronic media in the world of business marketing.

From a consumer perspective, the transition has been slower. Part of the reason for that has been broadband deployment. We now have about 10-15 million households on broadband, and that is starting to be a significant driver on the consumer side of things. That means that it becomes easier to deliver multimedia communications to the consumer, which has much more impact on behavior than text e-mail or paper mail. That is really the battlefront. Besides the fact that electronic communications are significantly less expensive, I can deliver something that is more impactful, and I can get more attention share from you.


WTT: What do you mean by "attention share"?

BL: Several factors have led to the "clutterization" of the consumer’s mind: More advertising, in more places; more contact points (e.g. multiple email boxes and voice mailboxes, cell phones, PDA’s). Marketers are spending more to get to you. Spam. Junk fax. Pop-up banners galore. The list is endless. Now, it’s my turn as the marketer to reach you in a meaningful way. How do I even have a prayer to capture your attention?

It turns out that electronic communication is shortening our attention spans. That does not bode well for print. If I used to spend 10 minutes reading a magazine article, today I scan the same article on the web in 100 seconds, or perhaps I am getting the message through a lot of visual stimuli, or "eye candy," instead of reading a lot of body copy. Print just can’t keep your attention like it used to.

That’s not to say that print – and printed magazines – are going away. I was reading an article recently that indicated that Time-Warner is actively pursuing the creation of new titles. What I think has happened here is that cable and satellite TV has really moved segmented communications into the mainstream, and so print, which used to own the domain of segmented audiences, must get even more targeted, addressing ever-narrowing niches. Print isn’t dead, but competitive media are doing things differently to up the ante in terms of demonstrating effectiveness in communications.


See part two