I’m afraid we might have created the same situation with our new MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal…

Our desire was to create a one-stop resource that you can refer to throughout the quarter to give you ideas, insights, and (dare I say) inspiration to drive ROI with testing and optimization. The Research Journal includes never-before-published social media research along with content that our loyal blog readers will recognize – all in one convenient package.

However, with so much information in the same place, the initial reaction might be to take it all in at once. According to Internet Standard Time, after something has been posted for five minutes (the half-life of a tweet), it is old news.

We take a different, principle-based approach to marketing. As opposed to a relentless pursuit of the latest “everyone-else-is-doing-it-and-so-must-I” practice, we share higher-level principles that apply across media, timeframes, and executions. We pair those principles with tactical advice to help put them into action the right way for your organization right now.

With that in mind, here are three simple ways you can get value out of the MarketingExperiments Research Journal every day this quarter…

Research

What is your biggest marketing challenge today? Email? Social media? Your website? Go to that section and read the applicable research or actionable insights. Again, don’t try to push through the entire Journal in one day, let each day’s challenge dictate your intake.

Relate

As opposed to pure or theoretical research, we focused on ROI-based marketing research that can help the evidence-based marketer drive results in her organization. Combine the principles from our research with your own experience knowing your business inside and out. It’s not up to the tools to make it happen. It’s not up to rote adherence to best practices. It’s up to you.

Respond

This Research Journal, along with everything MarketingExperiments publishes, is meant to be just one part of a conversation with you. How can we better educate you? Take our three-minute survey. What works for your organization? Send a letter to the editor. What success have you driven? Share your story for a chance to win a Landing Page Optimization package.

Related Resources

MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010

Methodology

2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour

What’s the story?

We are currently running tests with a large subscription-based news service that has a large direct mail (DM) aspect to their marketing campaigns. We saw this as an opportunity to test some of the hypotheses we have been formulating related to the connection between offline and online efforts.

Now, as with most DM efforts, their campaigns had a call-to-action that included an online option. For those interested in signing up for the offer online, they could go to a specific URL. The URL was unique, the path was clear, and the impact of the direct mail campaign would be easy to track. Right? Well…

Those DM rebels

We wondered how many DM recipients were wandering off the beaten path of a nice clean and trackable vanity URL. We questioned how many people who received the offline campaign were rebelling against the directions and forging their own way to what they wanted. And overall, how much of this company’s generic website traffic was taking part in this underground rebellion?

All these questions led us to test the notion that DM pieces might be having a greater impact than planned for and that we might be underestimating the significant opportunity created by our offline efforts

How we set up the test

So we set up a split test that would integrate some of the messaging from the offline DM campaigns into a generic, but similar product offer page on their website. The elements we tested initially were mainly images. The DM pieces relied on strong images and, to create continuity, we used similar images on the generic website pages (see below). This test was also specifically set to run during the time that the direct mail piece would be landing in mail boxes. (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these pieces):

Original Offer Page:               Direct Mail Offer:                New Offer Page:

Our thought here was that if there was any traffic coming from the direct mail to these generic offer pages, that the images would increase relevance and have a positive impact on conversion if many people were coming from the DM campaigns. We were hoping to see a difference in the results over time related to the offline campaign.

The Results – A 124% increase in subscriptions

The results were stunning. During the two weeks that the DM was out, we saw a 124% lift in subscriptions for the new page. After the two weeks, however, the conversion rates for the page that integrated imagery from the DM campaign went back down to its historical average.

This supported our hypothesis that offline efforts have a larger impact than might be expected and that people don’t necessarily follow the prescribed path of a DM campaign. For this company, many ended up on generic product pages.

What does this test mean for all of us? I believe we can learn two things:  1) If you are running offline campaigns, be aware that they may be having a larger impact than you think and 2) Identifying where response to your offline campaigns overlaps with your online visitor’s engagement, and establishing a connection between the two messages can generate significant response.

For this company, discovering that overlap and connecting the messages meant 124% more subscriptions. What might it mean for the rest of us?

For a deeper explanation and analysis of this experiment, activate your FREE MarketingExperiments email subscription to be notified when the replay of this web clinic is available.

Related Resources

Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions

Do you support your web site through offline media?

Should offline and online design elements be the same?

At the same time, the publishing industry is falling all over itself to promote the supremacy and fresh capabilities possible with every new digital distribution tool (Heart is even looking at buying digital-marketing firm iCrossing). It is quite a post-modern experience for my print version of The Wall Street Journal to try to sell me on reading that issue on the iPad instead.

The way the publishing industry has reacted to the digital world is akin to your wife trumpeting how wonderful your marriage has been at the same time she suggests you would have been much happier with her sister.

I kid because I love

I kid the publishing industry because I love it so much. In my job, I read every publication I can get my hands on, and savor the knowledge awaiting me in every bound issue that arrives in my mailbox.

But I’m also picking on the publishers because I don’t want to turn that harsh spotlight on myself and my fellow marketers. Truth be told, while all these digital developments are exciting and spark the creativity inherent in marketers, they’re also a little scary.

And while there are sublime examples of marketers combining the traditional with the 2.0, many marketers are losing money by not putting the puzzle pieces together correctly.

On our free April 28^th web clinic – Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124% – we’ll share the latest discoveries to help you do just that. In the meantime, here is a look at how your peers are making the connection…

Start with the problem

For too long marketing budgets have been set and then an arbitrary percentage, say 10%, went to online without a true understanding of its impact. My firm, WCM, no longer differentiates between traditional and online because the separation is not necessary and new tools are constantly being developed. Online is mainstream.

Moving forward: Start with the business problem. Then make a list of the techniques you can use to solve that problem with marketing. Prioritize the list and diagram the best course of action. See where the connections lead – I suspect traditional is driving interaction through online channels.

Example: For a hospital network, we are creating pre-scheduled, topic-specific discussions on Facebook. (Most companies still use Facebook as a broad discussion board). By using traditional marketing (TV, radio, posters), we will drive patients and caregivers to the daily discussion and grow the loyal and active fan base. Monday is a discussion on nutrition and diets for those combating cancer, Tuesday is all about fashion tips (“looking beautiful when your hair is gone”) etc.

Marketing tool selection should be based on how you want to interact with your audience, but more importantly, how they prefer to be communicated with. For example, those struggling with cancer generally crave interaction with people. Social media makes it happen.

– Rick McKenna, President of Wallwork Curry McKenna

The hub or the mirror

There are a thousand different techniques used to integrate online and offline marketing. For a lot of companies, the website is the “hub” that all other marketing efforts connect with. And if the website is not a “hub” then it works as a “mirror” to reflect what other channels are promoting.

With that in mind, online and offline marketing work best in tandem. And they work best when there is a common strategy with outlined goals and pre-defined benchmarks for evaluation.

Here are some obvious techniques:

• Developing a plan for accounting for untrackable web sales (it’s going to happen)
• Making sure a website’s URL can be used as a response mechanism
• Including the URL in all marketing efforts (if it fits strategy)
• Allow the website to “enhance” the content or messaging of your offline efforts
• Other than the URL, make sure your site can be found; using keywords in offline marketing that are mirrored through paid and organic search

In the end, your customers do not necessarily care about the techniques used, only that their ease of shopping or ordering or learning, etc. is as seamless and unobtrusive as possible.

– John Kennerty, Director of Marketing at Sinclair Institute

Communication and eliminating silos

You must first align your goals, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) around one strategy and then speak the same voice across all channels. The communication internally and externally must mesh and meet the customer’s expectations in each channel.

Beyond this, cross promotion and teasers are great. Examples:

• In your catalog, place the copy of a hot blog, but only put the first couple of lines and refer to the blog. Or have a fun fact and point people online to learn more.
• Make your homepage either match any direct mail or retail pieces that are active or at least have a space for it.
• Have a virtual catalog online and/or a virtual showroom.
• Have your email messages, direct mail, direct response television (DRTV) or other advertising hit at the same time with the same message. Make sure your promotions/discounts are available through any ordering method.

There are many other examples and ideas, but at the core you must stay true to your brand and message in all channels.

– Steve A. Cates, VP of Multichannel Marketing at Carrot-Top Industries

A detailed method

Here is a strategy we tested that has worked successfully for us since 1999. We used it for over 30 Fortune 500 clients, mostly publishers. Word of warning: excellent technology will not take a bad campaign and make it good. However, if you have an otherwise excellent effort, it’s worth adding powerful technology behind it. Passing some of Marketing Experiments’ exams would truly help you understand the power of this method.

Overview:

1. A direct mail piece goes out with a common URL and a unique login ID for each recipient.

2. There is an incentive and a deadline to encourage recipients to log in.

3. When they do, the campaign owner will be notified.

4. Additional enhancements (leads delivered by email, SMS, stored and exported to delimited or mainframe formats), are all possible to add value to your client (if you are an agency).

A brief non-technical explanation:

Direct mail list (database if you will) gets an additional field, let’s call it UniqueID. This number can track each individual as well as campaign constants (campaign ID, incentive used, etc).

The recipient is offered an attractive incentive in the mail piece to log in with their unique ID (raise motivation).

When a login occurs, the campaign owner is notified. If a form must be completed, the information we already have about recipient can be conveniently pre-populated (reduced friction).

Notice how even if they DO NOT proceed to claim your offer (but just log in) you are still notified, giving you the ability to identify “warm leads.”

If the user is supposed to complete a form, this can be pre-populated with variables which display values from the same database used for the mailing. When they log in, the form they are supposed to use for ordering is already filled out (they can correct any mistakes / update info and continue).

Some marketers make intentional mistakes, to “push a button” in people to correct a misspelling (and in the process subscribe to something they offered).

Simply having the technology (your prospect receives a mail piece that allows them to log in to claim a desirable bonus) puts the merchant in a better light (reduced anxiety).

If the campaign is an email, the login step can be eliminated. Clients can click and land directly on a pre-populated form or personalized welcome / landing page.

This is something I’ve done for a decade and I can elaborate at length, if anyone is interested in the technical details.

– Dan Banici, Business Analyst at Incentive Server

Win a free ticket

Are your worlds colliding? Or are you a smooth operator at making the digital and the analog flow seamlessly together? Let us know how you integrate traditional and digital marketing in the comments section. Our favorite comment will win a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Paul Pacun, winner of a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

Related Resources

Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124%

Press Releases — How we tested the impact of press releases on website traffic and inbound links, and found that effective PR can deliver an ROI superior to PPC advertising

Are video clips medium-agnostic?

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and love is in the air all throughout the MarketingExperiments lab. In honor of this well-marketed holiday, we sent a few virtual Valentines to our favorite advertising and marketing industry news sources.

Cuddle up with your favorite blog and watch the love flow…

Now here’s a little recap (for some link love)…

• Research Analyst, Adam Lapp, made like Pepé Le Pew with Vandelay Design Blog
• Yours truly got all weak in the knees about AdBusters
• Director of Marketing, Pamela Markey, said “You had me at click here” to Creativity
• Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, composed a sonnet about CNNMoney
• Senior Manager of Research and Strategy, Boris Grinkot, was our irrepressible Don Juan who refused to be locked into just one site…but he did confess to cruising Twitter in search of something appealing
• While we couldn’t drag our director, Austin McCraw, in front of the camera, the man behind the magic told us that his muse was Smashing Magazine

Nothing is harder than confessing to a (possibly) unrequited love. Now that we’ve walked the line, we want to hear from you.

What advertising or marketing industry news source do you really love? What blog or website just completes you? Send us your virtual Valentine via email, LinkedIn or as a comment to this post. We’ll publish our favorites in a future post right here on the blog…so be creative.

Facebook announced today that they will be implementing terms of service for Facebook ad providers. In their blog update Nick Gianos called it straight.

“Over the past year, we’ve focused on providing an environment for developers that rewards high-quality, third-party advertising and monetization practices. Through this process, it’s become clear that while you are working hard to monetize your applications in a safe and reliable manner, it isn’t easy to ensure that ad and offer providers are following the same terms and guidelines that you adhere to.”

We have been testing Facebook advertising on affiliate offers with some excellent results. As more and more advertising dollars are shifted to Facebook, it’s no wonder that Facebook is looking to tighten the belt on what is considered acceptable behavior from the ad providers. People will often try to get away with anything they can until someone tells them they can’t, especially when it comes to making money online.

To show they’re serious, Facebook is asking for names of CEOs and COOs on their Ad Provider form. Whether they actually follow up on these names before working with the provider or if they’re just there for later reference, isn’t all that clear.

One thing is clear though. Facebook has a lot to gain by running a clean fight for audience attention and in the end, if they do it right, everyone will win.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

But, like my fellow fans of the 20 teams that didn’t make the cut, I’ll find someone to cheer for during the playoffs and will ultimately enjoy watching a Cinderella make some magic happen in the Super Bowl. And of course, I will enjoy this annual celebration of advertising as millions watch every Super Bowl commercial almost as intently (and sometimes more so) than the game itself.

Watching Super Bowl commercials is fun, but as a marketing researcher I have to ask the question – what is the return on this investment? Are you filling the stadium for your brand or playing to empty seats?

Every day I talk to marketers from all over the world. Companies like Royal Bank of Canada, Johnson & Johnson, and 1-800-Flowers who are asking the same question about their advertising budgets.

MarketingExperiments conducts research to not only help marketers answer this question, but find the most effective use of their marketing budget.

If you never ask, you’ll never know

Sometimes marketers are afraid to question the status quo, but in a time when every dollar counts we must ask the hard questions and find answers with real data rather than just intuition.

So, to my friends in the marketing departments of the national network Super Bowl advertisers, I offer you this: Share your objectives, metrics, and results from your Super Bowl campaign with us and we will help you determine the actual ROI from this media spend by constructing a model, analyzing the data (our specialty), providing short- and long-term ROI projection modeling, and measuring the financial impact to brand value.

All of this we will do FREE of charge and present the results to you and your team in a manner that is both powerful and easily understood. If your Super Bowl campaign was a winner, we’ll make that win easier to socialize. If you didn’t get the value you expected, we’ll help you understand why so you’re more informed next year.

Maybe your favorite NFL team won’t win the Super Bowl. That doesn’t mean that YOU are eliminated. Win the marketing Super Bowl this year by being the hero that brought in the experts (for FREE) to show how big your win really was. Email or call me at (904) 339-0068 and we’ll talk about the details.

Q: You discussed the 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Survey on a recent Omniture webinar. What surprised you the most?

Well I won’t say this surprised me. Maybe saddened is a better word. The survey asked “How frequently is online marketing testing employed in your company?” About half of the respondents said infrequently or never.

Q: Wow! That is pretty shocking, especially considering that these people are already familiar with testing through Omniture or MarketingExperiments. Maybe I could understand if this were the general population of marketers. But why have testing tools in place and not test? Why do you think half of them are flying blind?

Well people know they need to test. They probably know their competitors are testing and getting results. But the idea of executing a test is such a paradigm shift in the way that they’ve always done things.

Those that are higher in an organization tend to be more experienced. And if they are more experienced, they may be locked into the advertising agency way of doing things from 30 years ago, just like the doctor who overlooks recent findings and does what worked best for him when he went to medical school.

Q: Change is difficult. But still, thirty years ago these same people were also wearing polyester and doing the hustle. I’m a little skeptical that they would still try to shoehorn old media principles into new media.

It’s not intentional. If something has always worked for you, why change?

But what we really have is the tyranny of best practices. I’ll give you a great example. Many marketers still believe that they must have the call to action “above the fold” on a web page. Yet testing has shown this to be an utter myth.

Q: And nothing disproves a best practice better than a test that shows what actually works for their specific situation.

That’s the thing. Once companies start testing and see the ROI they are absolutely hooked.

Q: How do you take that first step? For, say, an email marketing manager reading this, how do you create a culture of testing in an organization?

Business-level executives don’t care about optimization or testing or even online marketing really. What they care about is results. So you need to talk to them in their language.

At MarketingExperiments, we publish all of our research and it is available for free. So go to the research archive and pull some experiments so you can show example results and make the business case for testing. At this point, all you are looking for is a small budget to begin testing.

Those first tests will help you establish a beachhead that you can use to further penetrate the organization. Because once businesses see the results they can gain from testing, it can get addictive. It’s like eating chips while watching a football game, you just can’t stop.

Q: The challenge is to just get the ball rolling. This sounds great in theory. Do you have any real-world examples?

I have countless examples. Since we started this conversion by talking about my recent webinar with Omniture, let me tell you about a Research Partner that first got interested in testing by attending an Omniture webinar that featured Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

Companies that test usually like to stay anonymous because they view this process as such a competitive advantage. So I’ll just say they are a very large financial institution.

So this marketing manager attended Flint’s webinar and was totally sold. He was convinced that they should begin testing. But he’s only responsible for a very small patch in this giant company. It took him six months to get the approval to begin testing, doing the things I previously mentioned.

Q: Six months? It’s easy to get discouraged in that time. I’m not sure how many people would see it through.

But here’s the kicker. That marketing manager and his boss are now charged with trumpeting this win across the entire organization. He is now in front of his boss’s boss’s boss presenting his test results. In fact, in a few days he will be presenting in front of the SVP committee that advises the CEO.

Q: Well then he must have achieved some really out-of-this-world test results. What did he get…three digits…four digits? I mean, how common is that?

They got a 38% revenue boost over what the agency was doing.

Q: Well, that sounds decent, but a committee of SVPs really cares about 38% in one test?

You say that because you are so used to the power of testing, so you just want to see huge numbers. Let me put this another way – by not testing they would have been leaving 38% more money on the table since the cost of testing was infinitesimal compared to their massive marketing budget.

And that’s the thing. This company has a huge marketing budget. They sponsor the Olympics. They name stadiums. They purchase a ton of media. And since they don’t have space to sell in most of these executions, they’re driving everyone to the website. So if they find they could make more 38% more money without having to increase any of these huge marketing spends, the increase in ROI is humongous. Even a one or two percent increase could make or break a quarter.

Q: I see. I didn’t make the connection to that old media marketing spend. But I would think it goes beyond just old media driving people to a website. Online marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. I would think companies want to make sure they are getting a return on that investment as well. According to Forrester Research, digital spending will nearly double over the next five years at the expense of traditional marketing.

Forget five years from now, even today companies spend more than $25 billion on interactive marketing – things like mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. That is 12% of all advertising spending. So when enterprises, like that financial institution I discussed, learn that they can take just a tiny fraction of the spend on this growing segment and invest it in a way that ensures the effectiveness of everything else they do – with real-world, statistically valid data – they get very excited.

Q: And I would think, for the employees that can tell management “I know how to get the best ROI from this” – not think or have an opinion, but know with real numbers – that’s quite a smart career move.

If other people are discussing so-called “best practices” and you’re showing real results, then you become the go-to person. The one who knows how this stuff really works. Because nothing defeats the tyranny of best practices as well as the audacity of testing.

And if you’re the guy that knows the right things to do in an explosively growing field like Internet marketing, while marketing budgets on everything else are falling, you’re in a good place no matter what the economy is doing.

How did you get the ball rolling on testing in your organization? What are your biggest challenges to create a culture of testing in your organization? Share your triumphs and challenges in the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

• What keywords do you plan to target?
• What is your advertising budget?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are the demographics of your customers?
• What time of the day should your ads display?
• What day of the week should your ads display?
• Do you have an optimized landing page?
• What do you want people to do when they visit your landing page?
• Does your landing page do any lead capture?
• How do you plan to measure effectiveness of your ad?
• How will you track conversions?
• Do you have a list of negative keywords?
• Do you have a list of negative qualifiers?
• Do you have a plan for formatting your ads?
• Do you plan to split test your ads?

Of course, each of these questions has a lot more behind them, so before we could actually get down to setting up the ads we had to spend time covering what each of these questions meant.

So after we spent about an hour going over these concepts, and he spent several more hours thinking about the information I gave him, we were ready to actually place the ads. Setting up Adwords ads is fairly easy, if you have all of these questions answered before you start. Having your ad text ready and knowing which keyword you want to use saves you a lot of time.

Next, I’ll be working with the business owner to help him come up with a list of keywords that he can target with different ads to bring more traffic to his website. That part takes a good bit of analysis both on my part and his. I’ll come up with a list of keywords that have high search volume and low competition, and he will have to determine which of those keywords are relevant to his business.

It really is as much of an art as a science.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Join the forum discussion on this post – (1) Posts

Letterhead is the primary instrument to start your business. In fact, the true professionalism begins with the introduction of your letterhead. However small you are, you must produce a letterhead to make your company known to your customers. A nice and clean letterhead bears a feeling of a professional attitude of your company in the eyes of the people you deal with for your business.

Making of a resourceful letterhead requires reflective thinking. You have to appreciate the reaction of the recipient of your letterhead and in view of that you should proceed. Whether, it would be a colorful flashy design or an easy style, depends upon your wish. There are ample choices to create your letterhead printing useful. You can follow some guiding principles that are normally attached to the making of a letterhead.

You can follow some guidelines that are normally attached to the creation of a letterhead. If you are not a bank or some relief organization, you should select colorful letterhead. You should produce a letterhead to draw attention from clients. A competently designed colorful letterhead rouses interest in customers.

If you are not a bank or some relief association, you should decide on colorful letterhead. You should produce a letterhead to make impression on clients. A competently designed colorful letterhead rouses interest in customers.

You can use single color both in your logo and letterhead to make a simple type of material to create encouraging reactions from your customers. You should be careful not to make it boring or repulsive. You should place the logo of your company in the letterhead in a subtle way to make additional impression on customers. Logos are considered to be the main attraction of the letterhead printing.

You must know that your letterhead is going to appear in direct mails and other relevant communications for the purpose of your business. You should create a competent logo so that customers recognize it and identify your company. Another important aspect of your letterhead is the quality of the paper used in it. It should be bond paper bearing watermark and a fine texture. Your customers will evaluate the company by your letterhead.

You should give relevant information about your company in the letterhead like the name of the company, its full address, telephone and fax numbers, email, website and sometimes the owner’ name or the name of the head of an institution if it is a school. Matching envelopes in the same quality paper with the logo and address of the company is a must with letterhead printing.

Many often feel that it is not worth purchasing promotional torches. Yes, it is true that a promotional torch will not function the same as a more expensive one would, and they are also not expected to have the same durability. However, you those that think of them as useless and an unrequited expensive could not be more wrong. Promotional torches are to used as part of a large campaign, and to gain exposure to your company and brand.

Rather than looking at promotional torches as being functional objects you can instead focus on them for their sheer aesthetic and novelty value. This opens up a wide range of new and creative design options that would otherwise be unattainable. Try thinking of it this way; you are not creating a torch that a plumber will use under someone’s broken sink, but rather a promotional torch that your clients will take home probably show option or family and even bring back to the office and show to their coworkers.

If your company is looking for a serious torch maker, there would be no way that you could consider creating a hot pink starfish shaped torch. However since this is a promotional torch a hot pink starfish shaped torch may be just what you’re looking for if you’re promoting a cruise line or a fish store. In fact choosing a specialty shaped promotional torch may actually move your promotional torch from being a disposable novelty into a curiosity that may be kept around for a long time. There are no guarantees of course that your specialty shaped promotional torch will make this jump however you might as well stack the marketing deck in your favor anyway that you can.

Another form of creativity that a promotional torch offers, is the ability to change the color of the LCD bulb. You can design your promotional torches into what ever shape you would like and then you can find an appropriate color light bulb to match. For example, it you have designed your promotional torch into the shape of a heart and choice to make the heart pink, you can then utilize a red LCD bulb, to give it more appeal then a plain white light bulb.

An interesting possibility could even be using a tricolor light that packs a red green and blue LEDs in the same package. These will likely be an order of magnitude more expensive than a traditional white light, however some situations require you to create a bigger impression. If you are passing out your promotional torches at a normal trade show then you’ll probably want to go with a white LED light, however if your company is attending the biggest event of they year then you may wish to invest the extra money and really make a promotional torch that will leave a lasting impression. It can be said with almost absolute certainty that a tricolor promotional torch will not be headed straight for the dustbin at the end of the convention.