Q&A with Holger Dohmen, Group Head SEA at QUISMA

In this Q&A, Holger Dohmen, Group Creative Director shares his thoughts on QUISMA and MediaCom's 'SEAT does SEA - Users who look for cars, should find car dealerships' project, nominated in the Automotive category at The Masters 2015. See the full list of nominees here.

What do you think really made this project stand out?

The project stands in particular for media spent to be more quantifiable: The success of media plans can be measured more clearly by evaluating the amount of car and service sales which have been purchased. 

How do you build the perfect team?

Our team is made up of specialists from different business areas:

1. Seat employees - who are responsible for dealers and can provide the necessary know-how on dealers and also the individual needs of their customers.

2. Seat Marketing specialists - who implement the dealer campaigns in their digital strategy

3. The Content agency - which supplied relevant content for all necessary topics

4. SEA experts - who created regional individualized campaigns thanks to the information of all other parties

Which campaigns have you seen recently that are defining the marketing landscape?

In my opinion there are two different kind of campaigns that are recently defining the marketing landscape:

1. The Dell-Tough Enough campaign – an outstanding example which demonstrates the efficiency of insight based content approaches in a B2B environment
2. The Mediamarkt – Osterhasen Rasen (Media market: Easter-bunny grass) – Engagement approach within live TV commercial  

What types of company do you see excelling at marketing at the moment?

At present, the market is primarily dominated by two types of companies:

Companies which do not only understand to analyse data but use them thought-out to leverage the return of investment, e.g. by sophisticated ad delivery along the whole sales funnel.

Companies who understand content not as buzz word but know how to develop the appropriate content for each channel.  

Marketing is becoming more and more data and technology-driven, how can marketers ensure the right balance between creative thinking and scientific marketing?

As a performance-agency at heart, QUISMA stands very much for the aspiration to deliver highly efficient results for our clients, therefore relying heavily on data. In the classical sense of performance-marketing, this approach covers only a part of the customers’ decision processes and is highly focused on selling the product itself. This is the right way to engage with users who have signalled a demand or interest for a product. Once you switch perspective to a more customer-based approach into the more passive phases of a decision process, you are automatically forced to think in more creative paths. Goals like earning the user’s attention, getting him to interact and share, really demand new messages and campaigns to be formulated. Creativity is key to derive campaigns which offer the customer emotional and functional benefits beside the product, while being deeply rooted in the brand’s core value set, at the same time expanding the set of available messages for all campaigns deeper down the sales funnel.

What do you see as being the biggest trends of 2015, and do you see examples of companies capitalising on these as part of their marketing campaigns and programmes?

From our perspective, 2015 has been about two things. Firstly, we saw a rising need for brands to step into a dialogue with the customers in all phases of their own decision processes. This means creating integrated content strategies which are tracked and measured against the same KPIs as classical performance campaigns. Secondly, and connectedly for client’s with an offline distribution network, we are chipping away at the walls between the online shop and the brick and mortar business, in order to deliver the right campaign to the customer who is offline or on a mobile device outside of his home. Right campaign means, deciding between our different possible messages based on data, locality and other data points.

For the content part of things we have seen a number of great campaigns, but this also means a future rising in competition for the users’ attention. The second part is still in the fledgling state, with many obstacles to overcome in what are often traditionally grown distribution organizations within the companies.

How should companies be defining and measuring marketing excellence?

At QUISMA we strongly believe in the relevance of the ROI. But in order to get a clear picture of their marketing’s success, companies need to compare their most relevant version of return to the most sensible definition of investment. This asks for a KPI framework which enables high level strategy decisions and performance comparison but also allows for planning and controlling all the gears working towards initiating and closing your customers’ journeys to run at the right speed and yielding maximized results.

What are the core elements of inspiration to be found within marketing?

The one source of inspiration in marketing are every company’s customers and their needs & desires. Providing solutions to their problems, answering their questions, meeting their needs, but also satisfying their desires as well as waking those desires that are dormant. Doing this, always with the right message, so that they can be confident that the time they share with your brand is time well spent. Meeting this challenge means being on constant lookout for every little glimpse into your customers’ motivations and transform those glimpses into inspiration. And also all this may sound poetic, the number one place to look for theses glimpses is a totally unpoetic one: Data.

What inspired you to enter The Masters this year? What would winning an award mean to you? 

Working together with our client SEAT towards making each and every one of their dealerships visible in Google Search was a huge challenge we met by creating highly efficient processes and a solution which shows, that this can be realized by many companies in very different verticals. The dedication our team put into this, was an inspiration for our company as a whole, and we want to honour that by shining a light on this effort – winning the Masters award help us do this with a very distinctive spotlight.