Friday, May 29, 2015

Rhymes Wtih Beagle: A Marketing Tale of Horror

Will For The Win
Part of a continuing series of moments from my career, in which great breakthroughs came from great setbacks. The point, as always, is to work away from fear, and learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for better stories.

One of the greatest gigs of my life ran for five and a half years, with an annual revenue rate in my department from $4 to $14 to $40mm in the first three years. I learned more there than I have at any gig before or since, and formed some of my greatest friendships and relationships in business. Somedays, I really think someone could make a movie about that company.

And it all fell apart, shortly after the lawyers came.

First, some background. My role at this company was to lead custom ad creative projects for behaviorally targeting ad placements. Our final product was a proprietary ad format that was co-branded for the advertiser and the ad company. So our clients could provide their own art, but waiting for that would delay go lives, and usually leave money on the table, since they were not attuned to this kind of work. It was also a "white hat" moment for the ad company, since we were providing "free" creative... with the caveat being, of course, that the cost of doing the art for the client would be more than covered by greater performance.

Our business was, however, highly controversial. We delivered ads that were based on the user's clickstream, in a medium with 100% deliverability and viewability -- a targeted center square pop up browser window, or, less often, a sliding window in the bottom right, or an additional window that was given less priority than your current browser. The ads were the price that you paid for downloading a supported application.

My company believed that since consumers had chosen to take on these additional ads (and confirmed this choice on a significant number of confirmation screens), and that since these ads were appearing in their own browser windows, an aggressive display model was justified. We also made uninstalls as easy as possible; 2 clicks and a simple wizard, which took less than a minute on a decent connection, would send you on your way without our ads.

Millions of users downloaded our application, and millions uninstalled it. So this seemed pretty cut and dried internally, and to the venture capital that backed us, and the hundreds of clients that used us for lead generation.

To the e-commerce and content sites that triggered these ads, and believed themselves to be negatively impacted by this business?

Not so much.

Lessons learned?

1) Do not trust anyone to read anything.

To get our stuff required significant time and interest, mostly though clicking on agree statements. Uninstalling the work was a simple matter of using Add/Remove Programs (it was only a Windows product, by the way). We told consumers how to shut down the application on every ad we ever ran. And to a significant portion of the audience, and in more courtrooms than anyone should ever be in, none of that mattered, because...

2) Take point, take pain. 

"Take point" is an old military term that describes moving to the most exposed, or lead, position in a live combat exercise. As the leading provider in a new advertising method, my old start up took point for old-school media content providers who needed an easy "hell in a hand basket" column to write, any activist who might equate e-commerce with intimate speech, and, well, anyone who wanted to tell you what the Internet was, and was not, for.

The funny part is that, if you look at what's done with cookies and profiles now, our position was pretty much proven correct by history. But many of the companies that have profited from this atmosphere didn't get to wear the tar and feathers that we did.

3) Your best analytics are not your first analytics.

Over 50 different programs drove sign ups to our application under an aggressive distribution campaign. Most of those applications were judged on cost per lead. Only much later, when we saw revenue per user per month at a channel level, did we learn just how little some of those low cost per leads were generating for us, and how the poor lead list was also the most likely to get loud with complaints. Cheap leads can be very expensive.

4) If you don't want it read out loud in a court of law, don't put it in an email.

Legal discovery is a phase where your company's communication systems can be utterly shut down in a massive search for anything that might be of relevance to a case. It's also about as conducive to doing business as turning off the power while letting loose vermin,  and about as much fun to live through. By the way, once you are served with a discovery order, deleting those emails is the same as the wilful destruction of evidence. So the "cover up is worse than the crime" cliche is accurate.

Having gone through this once, I've got the lingering lifetime habit of writing "rhymes with beagle" in response to dicey discussions, and picking up the phone to close a thread. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I suspect I'm not the only person from those days to have this habit. Needless to say, you don't need to use email in a way that puts your business at risk.

5) Negative actions will define a brand more -- much, much more -- than positive ones will.

To many who were in business during my company's rise, the eventual failure of the enterprise was something to cheer. After all, the end of an aggressive advertising medium rarely causes much in the way of regrets, and it's not as if our critics were hoping for our successful IPO. Our brand was defined by the method, and bad PR and lawsuits, much more than for anything else.

But for those of us who worked there, there was little in the way of angst or mixed feelings. We knew about our charitable works, how amazing our engineering achievements were, and the strength of our hires. To this day, I draw on the insights derived from the data, and rely on my fellow alumni in the industry to provide me with leads and references. I'd hire just about anyone who worked there in a heartbeat, and honestly, there's no finer praise that I can bestow on a co-worker.

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Seven Reasons Why UFC Is Winning

Why Can't We Be Friends
Last Saturday night, one of the regulars in my poker game hosted his own tournament in a brand-new basement space, and invited me over. The night at the tables went well, but that's not really the point. And yes, this will get back to marketing and advertising soon enough. Anyway...

My man has a fine new big screen TV, and had also splurged on the Ultimate Fighting Championship pay per view. I've been moderately familiar with the sport from just general cultural awareness, but had never seen an event up close. And while I'm long past the event horizon for becoming a fan, it's clear from just one viewing as to why the sport has made such inroads in certain demographics. Let's get into it.

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1) It delivers what it promises.

In 11 fights, there were definitive winners (knock out or submission) in six events, with clear decisions (unanimous judging) in four others. If what works for you in sports is a clear winner and a clear loser, there really isn't anything more definitive than the end of an average MMA contest.

2) There's no "slow" play.

There doesn't seem to be such a thing as pointing your opponent to defeat, a la Floyd Mayweather, in a long and boring event where only the most discerning eye seems to acquire any worth from the contest. With so many offensive disciplines on the table, defense in UFC seems to be a case of ending your opponent's efforts before they end yours. Waiting them out, not so much. Which makes for a far more compelling spectacle.

3) There's a set schedule.

UFC events are numbered for a reason, and that reason is that the people who are watching this one seem absolutely locked into watching the next one. Which will be in three weeks, and the one after that is already on the calendar as well. Unlike boxing, where fans have to sometimes wait for years to see the fight they want, UFC fans know when their next fix is coming, and can plan accordingly.

4) It's pretty much impossible to not watch.

As noted above, I'm not a fight guy. I was in the room to play poker. But when the fight was live, the game was not, because that's just the nature of two people who might, well, fundamentally alter the course of the life of the other, in front of you. There's a reason why this sort of thing goes back eons, and why the competitors who seem more skilled at drawing the ire of the crowd get even more attention than anyone else. You can call it a train wreck if you like, but you're still watching.

5) There's no learning curve to new viewers.

Football, basketball, baseball: all have fairly arcane rules that can cause a new viewer to, well, ruin it for experts in the room by asking basic questions. As advanced mathematics come into play for player evaluations, the barrier to entry increases, because no one wants to explain all of that as well. UFC has more strategy and statistics than a casual observer might imagine, but you really don't need to know any of them to understand what's going on. Two people are trying to do massive and sudden violence to each other. You can ignore the statistics if you like.

6) It's (cheerfully) niche and exclusionary.

If you find this kind of sport to be morally repugnant, or the human equivalent of cockfighting, or something that just shows the worst of human behavior glorified and made fiscally lucrative... well, you aren't going to be watching it. Ever. Which means that the people who are watching it don't ever have to hear from you, as football fans have to during the run-up to the Super Bowl, or baseball fans have to with people who think their game is dull during the World Series, or basketball fans, or hockey fans, or soccer fans, and so on, and so on. There's big money in MMA (UFC is said to be worth $2 billion now, or 100X what it sold for in 2001), and yet it still has the feel of a shared secret, without watered down fantasy league fans or office pools.

7) It's going to get bigger, and probably better, with international scalability.

Like big special effects movies, you don't have to show massive artistic worth to make this product cross borders (or, likely, even a translation). There's a reason why boxers used to be worldwide celebrities. MMA fighters may not have the same level of appeal or career length, but so long as the events come out routinely and avoid high impropriety, there's no reason whatsoever to think the top of the wave is in sight.

Is there a gating element on the horizon? Well, sure. The nature of the sport is primal and exclusionary, and at some point, a fatality might occur in a high visibility event. (Some Web research tells me that there have been a handful so far in lesser leagues, but so far, the incidents have been less than boxing, which isn't exactly the highest of praise.) That potential might keep mainstream advertising away, though there's certainly a lot of big brands already on the telecast. The history of combat sports is one of inevitable corruption, because gamblers only need to get to one person to create fraud. That's probably going to happen here, if it hasn't already.

But in terms of what I saw in the room? Mainstream sports wish they had this level of attachment from their audiences. Which means it's also a DVR-free experience, and a high value marketing and advertising opportunity for targeted demographics.

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.

Giving Up Control Of Your Web Site

Just the beginning, really
In work for my agency this year, the leading discussion in Web site development has been how designing for platform has become the new point of concern. It used to be that your job was over as soon as you had browser cross-compatibility nailed, but now, with people viewing work on all manners of platforms, that concern has expanded.

What most have chosen to do, up to now, is let the nature of the site determine the dominant design mode. E-commerce plays still generate most of their sales from desktop / laptop, and need to romance merchandise photography, so bigger displays ruled the roost. Content sites were the first to see big traffic gains from platform change, so you just design down on width, let the work scroll to eternity, and call it a day. Simple, right?

Well, not so much. E-commerce, especially on lower price, digital download or replenishment orders, is now moving to mobile as well, especially for anyone under the age of 25. As traffic from mobile moves well beyond the 50% mark, and SEO becomes more of a mobile-friendly play, a generational shift is at work. So if you want to be simple about it, everyone but the most lavish and older demographic e-commerce play should just say UI be damned, everything's mobile now, and thin is in.

However, this leaves one major issue out of the mix. Mobile screen sizes are far from static, and site design is enough of a cost and QA hassle that you really don't want to re-think this every year if you can help it.

Start with the aspect ratio discussion, which makes every UI issue a bit of an open question. While UX studies and surveys show a general preference for tablet users for landscape over portrait, the trend is far from total, and splits to a large enough percentage so that design decisions aren't likely. Tablet use as a whole may also have crested, with large "phablet" plays taking over. And while those phablets may seem set as a size from sheer incompatibility in a pocket or purse, they have been anything but to date.

Next, let's look at the history of what's been available for users. The status quo of a iPhone or large Droid display seems like it's the logical end of the process, but probably isn't. Imagine, for instance, how viral and useful it would be to use your handheld like a projector on any reflective surface, so that you could share content, and maybe even interact with it, with high resolution at the size of your choice. (While I'm wishing, I'd also like my phone to recharge from light, like my watch.) We could easily see displays in the next few years go back to old desktop browsers standards or larger, especially if it seems to be something that moves the needle in ROI.

So what happens next in site design? The only thing that can happen: responsive design work that reformats sites, at a machine level, to the best guess for the individual screen. A dramatic loss of control, at a brand marketing and design level, so you can have a fighting chance at cross-device functionality. A back to basics movement for sites that were using greater broadband bandwidth to creep up on code bloat and loading times. Tactical decisions, based on what's best for the individual site and user base. Maybe even a split by domain level, which would require a dramatic step up from the machine intelligence involved in SEO/SEM. And any number of rushed responsive coding jobs for e-commerce sites that have lived with the same basic site architecture for a decade or more.

Not the worst time to be in the agency business, in other words!

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Cost Per What? A Marketing Tale of Horror

Mo Money, Mo Questions
Part of a continuing series of moments from my career, in which great breakthroughs came from great setbacks. The point, as always, is to work away from fear, and learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for better stories.
When you work in the Wild West, otherwise known as the first 15-odd years of Web start ups, you really can not complain when the outlaws run through town and shoot the place up. You chose to try to make a living in frontier times for the possible gold rush gains. Risk is part of the landscape.
A moment of risk not working out hit me at the end of the last Horror column, when a billionaire decided to avoid the second round of promised funding, and my fun time marketing job evaporated without warning or severance. Which brought me, less than a month later, to another Sili Valley office in another interview session, where the gig was to oversee lead generation for a SaaS provider with some genius code under the hood.
Well, sure. Game on. The interview starts and is going well, with lots of good back and forth, and they are impressed by what I'm bringing to the table. So we turn to that portion of the program where the interviewer asks if you have any questions, and well, you want me to execute a program. I've got questions.
"What's your cost per lead?"
"Cost per... yeah. That's exactly the sort of thing we're hoping you can tell us."
To my credit, I kept my jaw off the floor and my head off the desk, mostly by just concentrating on my notes and writing this down as if it weren't terrifying. But hey, you are engineering geniuses. Let's just move on.
"What's your marketing budget?"
"Two million."
Phew. OK, it's B2B and SaaS, so that might not spend as far as you like, but I can work with...
"We've spent $1.8 million already."
Whoops. Well, it's mid-September when this interview is happening, so I've got 90 days to figure out your cost per lead and then get things moving in Q1...
"And our fiscal year starts on April 1."
April Fools! Wow, you guys really had me go... nope, not a joke.
Long story short... I wound up taking the gig anyway, mostly because the engineering really was best in class, the business looked highly scalable, and the value of the product was just breakthrough. It was basically a Cloud solution, only a dozen years before anyone knew what that was. Besides, I needed a gig, and the pay was good.
What happened next? Well, a neglected telemarketing team turned out to be a source of strength with a better script. A modest postcard campaign showed wins after brainstorming helped to produce a new control message. Educational webinars took the fear out of what we were proposing as a solution, and helped cut down the length of the funnel. Some delicate tap dancing with print advertisers got us some writedowns to free up other funds. The cost per lead was determined, and quickly cut by over 60%.
Lessons learned?
1) A lack of measurement is a wealth of opportunity.
As soon as you can start putting data on aspects of your program, you can start taking the emotion out of decisions, and the simple act of measuring will get you past a lot of poor ideas. It turns out that a good chunk of the budget was going to highway signs and radio spots. Which leads us to...
2) The wrong money will get you killed.
You will be shocked, shocked, to learn that premium marketing plays in outdoor and radio for a tech start-up with no brand equity, with a SaaS product that might only apply to 1 out of every 10,000 drivers, do not drive a great cost per lead. Why did they do it in the first place? Because a powerful board member wanted to be just like our biggest competitor, who was sitting on a quarter billion in post-IPO cash, and trying to impress the investing community with these spends. More about that later.
3) You can always negotiate, or, at least, try to.
With 90% of my budget locked down and six months to go before the end of the fiscal year, it looked like I had no options during ramp up. But it turned out that my employer had been paying full rate card, so simply going to their longtime partners and letting them know that, at the very least, that wasn't going to continue, led to some knowing chuckles and good-faith writedowns. If you don't ask, you don't get.
4) To avoid looking like you are bleeding edge, use old school methods.
We had aspects of the program that were far more techie than postcards, telemarketing and a webinar, and our SaaS product was ideally targeted to CTOs, as it was a very advanced platform and approach. Grounding the product in traditional pieces took the fear of bleeding edge out of the offer, and helped to shorten the funnel. Changing the copy to be more about benefits, and less about technical separation from competitors, also helped make lead gen more efficient.
At this point, you might be asking... where's the Horror? I promised you Horror, right up there in the header. And here it is...
5) If you smell too much smoke, you might be too late to stop the fire.
After 90 days, we had upgraded the control work, dramatically increased the participant count on webinars, driven dozens of high quality leads, identified the cost per lead, and then cut that number by over 60%. I was fired up by what we were doing, and so was everyone on the team. There was still a lot to fix, but we were making good progress.
Then, the board cut the funding for the company, and we were all looking for work. At Christmas, without severance. It was a very interesting year, really.
Why did the ax fall? Because our competitor was just deemed as too dominant, and the determination was made that it was better to take a tax write off than risk being just a break-even also-ran.
It didn't make sense to me then or now, but then again, neither does not knowing your cost per lead. It's not like I didn't have fair warning.
The Wild, Wild Web, folks! It's not for the faint of heart. But I did learn a lot, and hopefully, you have now as well.
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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page. 
In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Why the NBA Will, Eventually, Overtake the NFL

Adam Silver, Establishing Rank
Tonight, the conference finals (i.e., the final four of the NBA) began, and as basketball is one of my great loves, along with marketing and advertising, I have a few words to say about it. Trust me, we will get to marketing and advertising fairly soon.

When I was growing up (yes, too long ago) in the US, there was a much closer race for the top spot in American sports. For big events, nothing was bigger than boxing. If teams from big markets were in the World Series, it got a lot of attention.  More people seemed to care about tennis, horse racing, the Olympics, and golf. You would constantly hear about how soccer / rest of world football was going to be the most popular sport later. Pro and college football might have been in the top position, but it was debatable, and coverage outside of the regular season and playoffs was rare.

At the time, the NBA was in real trouble. While individual players were captivating, the Finals were on late night tape delay (remember, not nearly the same number of channels to put games). The league had major recreational drug abuse issues, more than occasional brawling ugliness, and a bloody civil war around the birth and death of a rival league. Pro basketball was a distant third among league sports, and in many major local markets, fourth, behind hockey.

In the past three decades, boxing has faded dramatically from its health risks and scandals, with elite athletes moving on to other sports. Baseball is fighting against very graying demographics, a seeming disconnect with the current pace of life, lower offense after the steroid scandals, and longtime inequities between markets that seem to sap the life out of less endowed franchises. The Olympics just do not have that same zing without Cold War tensions, and are rife with scandal. Horse racing and tennis have gone back to special event only status. Soccer is bigger than ever before, but still fairly fringe outside of World Cup years. The two leagues that have grown the most are clear – football and basketball.

At times, football’s prevalence seems total. The Super Bowl enjoys media cheer leading for advertising. Time-shifted television ratings has made the high numbers for NFL games much more comparably valuable. The off-season is much less shorter than it used to be, with massive coverage of previously ignored events like the scouting combine, draft, and preseason games. Every time that the league seems to be in danger – from domestic abuse scandals, head trauma cover-ups and settlements, prominent players going to prison, cheating scandals and more – the ratings only seem to go up. Arguing against the league just continuing to run roughshod over the rest of the American scene seems silly.

Yes, that is a tell.  The American scene.

The NBA, unlike the NFL, is in Los Angeles and Canada. Unlike the NFL, professional basketball is played on six continents, and the best players from all of those areas are in this league. International basketball from the Olympics has done wonders to keep the league in the hearts and minds of the world. There are legitimately great players from all over. Knowledgeable NBA fans routinely stare down players in minor leagues and overseas, and the league’s ability to develop its own domestic feeder league has done more to improve the quality of play.

It’s not just limited to these factors. Professional women’s basketball is also a worldwide pastime, with Olympic medals and leagues on multiple continents. (Professional women’s football… involves lingerie. Not really worth discussing.)  The NBA has amazing penetration on a merchandise and awareness level, especially in Asia and South America. Unlike football, players in their prime do not retire due to health concerns, and parents do not feel conflicted to let their children play the game. The best players in the game now (LeBron James, Stephen Curry, James Harden), unlike in the past, have the ball in their hands from the start of a play, rather than requiring a pass from a lesser-known teammate as they grind their way into position near the basket. Three point shooting from long distances has changed the game fundamentally to allow for more players of comparatively modest height to shine, and the league’s crackdown on flagrant fouls and physical play has made for a more free-flowing, aesthetically pleasing game, with more scoring. The NBA is already, by many measures, the #2 league in the US.

Taking over #1 will not happen right away. The NFL has a huge advantage in fantasy league play and gambling interest, an aggressive play towards games in London and Los Angeles, and rule changes on special teams and tackling to make the game less dangerous to the long-term health of its players. If the league adopted minor leagues with relegation, along the lines of English Premier League football, it could likely adopt a year-round schedule in 2-3X the number of markets, and grow dramatically, at the cost of MLB and college football. Even without dramatic upheaval, football is always going to win on a visceral level, and the comparatively rare nature of games will prop up the NFL #1 narrative for a long time.

Unfortunately, football without violence, on some level, is not football, and runs the risk of having a splinter league start to serve the part of the market that wants real contact.  As for big events washing away all problems, well, we could have said the same thing about boxing, not so very long ago.

Personally, I’m not really “rooting” for either. I’m well past the event horizon of being able to choose whether to watch a sport or not; I’m a lifer. Younger folks, newer markets, casual fans? That is where the movement will come. The parallels for marketing and advertising pros that may be outside of their target demographics, or locked into doing things as they have always done, are obvious… and who knows, this might also impact some of your long-term planning, in regards to sponsorships, signage, and so forth.

Oh, and one final thing… go Warriors!


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You've read this much, so connect with me on LinkedIn. And for the record, we do free RFPs for fans of every NBA franchise, and don't even increase the rate for Celtic or Laker fans. Honest.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Viewed But Valueless: Targeting, Tech, and Millennials

Another Kind Of On Demand
I am the proud and loving father of a Millennial, a 15-year-old girl, and we have a couple of shows that we like to watch on demand. As my local cable provider has not monetized that advertising inventory to the same extent that they have “live” ads, the spots are for just a handful of providers, and are (very) repetitive. You also cannot skip through the ads, so you wind up seeing them a lot. It is a worse viewing experience than a live approach, but we are not the best on scheduling, and we do not own a DVR.
On some level, it seems silly to have any complaint about this at all. We did not schedule ahead, but we are still seeing the shows when we want. The tech to skip ads did not exist until my daughter’s lifetime, and when I was a child, skipping ads was either technologically impossible, or required the use of a VHS tape and careful fast-forwarding. Only in the lifetime of this child have we gotten to one-button escapes from this level of irritation. So do we smile when we encounter these likely CPA spots, and think, “Oh well, so much of what we watch doesn’t have these, so I guess it is completely fine that we are seeing these ads a lot”?
Well, um, no. Seeing how that reaction would be right up there with being thankful for smartphones when they drop a call.
My daughter’s hatred of these ads is strong enough that I reach for the mute button to limit the damage. I have even explained the nature of CPA/CPM ad buys, in an effort to try to take her “behind the curtain”, and share just how much better she has it than, well, me, when I was a kid. Mostly, I just try to mute the ad and change the subject by talking about the show we are watching. We talk, or she picks up her ever-present phone and distracts herself with other content.
I share this not to complain about my kid, or dwell on how media is doing a poor job at monetizing on demand programming. Instead, the point is to show how the technology changes the landscape, and how viewable does not equate to valuable.  Every single spot from the on-demand presentation is 100% viewable. However, since 100% of the ads currently shown are not targeted to either my daughter, or myself, in terms of an ad buy, it is little better than black hat bot fraud. Since the last mile of relevant is broken, the spots are doing their advertisers more harm than good. (By the way, there are some very big providers at work on this issue. I will get to that later in the week.)
Beyond the waste… if my daughter or I were so inclined, we could reach a worldwide viral network of people with our mockery of the advertisers in question. Since we are both fans and occasional performers of stand-up comedy, it is possible, since a great source of material is to hit the stuff that everyone hates. Again, this 2-way and viral tech is new, and so is the changing world for the advertiser. A generation ago, an advertiser does not have this concern.
A final point about all of this, and something that everyone involved in marketing and advertising needs to know, deep in their bones… what we do *is* annoying. It may seem acceptable, because it is in a medium where it seems tolerated, or we work on campaigns with high budget and analysis of the creative. If we reach such a targeted list, or in a low visibility / complaint media, we might not ever receive personal blowback, but make no mistake about it. There’s a world filled with people who regard our work as ballast or worse, and would be very glad to be ad-free for the rest of their lives.
They do not believe that the amount that we pay for that exposure is what keeps the lights on for any number of publishers, brands and services. These deniers and degraders exist in every medium, from the people who claim to throw out all of their junk mail, to those who download ad blockers to run with their content in laptop and desktop, to those who DVR and skip everything or don’t watch, and so on, and so on.
As marketing and advertising pros, we can ignore this aspect of our work, or dwell on it, all we like. It is a matter of personal choice.
My choice is to view this as a transition phrase, and trust that tech and a free market will eventually produce a wonderful future of targeting solutions that make advertising safe, legal, and rare…
On the other hand, you can regard that as naïve, since advertising density has only gone in one direction, and expect this generation to eventually conform. They will accept your high frequency campaigns as the (free!) price to pay for preferred content. They will learn your branding, your jingle and your offer the same way that it has worked for decades. A strong creative execution and a saturation campaign to build brand and drive awareness.
However, if you are well and truly invested in that latter option, and cannot imagine things going in any other way?
You probably do not want to know how my Millennial finds out about, and listens to, new music.
Seeing as how that revenue stream also has changed irrevocably during her lifetime, and she is a lot more attached to the musicians she likes than the TV show she watches…
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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Niche Marketing Lessons, Or If You Love It, Put A Toe Ring On It

And Now For Something Completely Stupid
In my 15 years in online marketing and advertising, I have been fortunate enough to work for several high throughput providers that have also provided creative services.
Some of those clients were among the largest advertising plays in the world, in major consumer categories. These resulted in online ads that you have probably seen at one time or another, for brands that you have definitely heard of.
Others? Not so much.
This is what happens when it comes to new technologies. Sometimes, you get clients that are more bleeding edge than leading edge. If they are willing to spend, you do the business. Preferably by getting the money up front.
Looking back, I think my favorite was an outfit called Timmy Toes. They sold toe rings, and the merchandise was not, shall we say, subtle. So the SKUs ran into thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars, for stuff that just looked like it made walking or standing impossible.
The site sold just toe rings mind you, nothing else – and this was not a retargeting campaign, it was a broad jewelry placement. To users who were not just shopping for toe rings, since that select would have been a distribution set of next to nothing.
I am quite confident in saying that the team and I made the finest toe ring ads... that you have never seen.
And I am also confident in saying that you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that neither the campaign nor the business turned out to be a long-term success…
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So what do you learn from doing this kind of work? Plenty, actually.
  • Niche plays can be big winners, but usually aren't.
Toe rings notwithstanding, there has been a sizable percentage of winners that looked like oddballs at the start of a campaign. New plays to market always are more likely to fail, but as always with marketing, list and offer matter a lot more than creative. And when they get the right mix, it’s magic. Magic, you might know by now, is only magic because it's unexpected.
  • Competitive analysis is higher.
In niche markets, the players are all working in a very small space, and are much more aware of what the other players are doing – especially the lead dog. From price points to language and execution, speed to duplicate or enhance is just higher when there are only a handful of players to monitor. It also means that your niche provider might have competition for your interest soon, so make sure you've got your policies on category exclusivity set up ahead of time.
  • Your client contact is either a lifer or a transient.
If you have deep knowledge of a niche consumer category, you either love it and want to keep working with it for the rest of your days… or it is just a means to an end, and you will move along as soon as you can to avoid the business equivalent of type casting. (Which means this pro deserves your best service, since they are likely to find you again in some bigger category later. But I digress.)
  • Approval to innovate is generally all or nothing.
Legal or brand compliance is usually what is cited for why a new version cannot look or read very different from the control, but the real reasons are probably more idiosyncratic than that. Your best move is to ask for all past work, and see if execution moved off the control before.
  • Egos will not match market share.
The smallest fish in my career have had some of the most exact standards and stringent branding needs. Especially if you are dealing with a dominant market leader, you can find yourself with a client that is harder to please than someone with 100X budget. They will also fight you over what should be mentioned in the selling copy, usually in the favor of some deep benefit that’s far more meaningful to the maker than the buyers.
  • Their audience may not be as unique as they think.
Data-driven look-alike modeling proves this, but so does just general marketing common sense. Our toe ring vendor back in the day would have been better off compiling a young and affluent list who viewed non-traditional publishing sites. Instead he chose to test his work against people who spent similar amounts on traditional jewelry. (To be fair, when you have the idea of selling really expensive toe rings over the Web, how can you dial down your own genius long enough to listen to someone else's opinion or data?)
Please share your favorite niche client in the comments, and anything you have learned from the work. I would love to hear about something odder than mine!
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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Managing Creative Talent: Horses For Courses

Brainstorm
Horses for courses (British & Australian expression): Choosing suitable people for particular activities, because everyone has different skills. "Ah well, horses for courses. Just because a plumber can mend your washing machine, it doesn't follow that they can mend your car as well."
A small disclaimer before we get into Hurt Feelings. The following is not meant in total seriousness or sincerity, if for no other reason than I have been creative talent myself, and my best friends do this work. I also do not really know all that much about horses, or have any great like, or dislike, for them. Having said that...
If you ever find yourself with the great privilege that is managing a group of copy or design pros, you will find it to be a unique managerial challenge. Personality traits are much more likely to be part of the mix than in any other department, and the product of their professional work is more dependent on their mental state than most. You will also find a great mix of work requests, from template to breakthrough, or tried and true to break the mold. Which means that a good team contains...
1) War horses -- day in, day out workers who are capable of feats of great strength and low glamour.
Advantage: The warhorse stops for nothing. Durable, dogged, able to grind through tedious revisions and multiple executions. If you are running a shop that delivers on deadline and/or does many variations for different markets or seasonality, you might only have these folks on staff. (They also might not be suitable for traditional agencies.)
Disadvantage: A steady diet of tedious tasks will blunt the artistic edge of, well, anyone. Warhorses that are mistreated tend to go into engineering or management. (That is what we call a tell, folks.) In addition, when it comes to pure art or words, the warhorse is at a severe disadvantage against other pros.
How to handle: Do not let your warhorse know that their primary utility is the work ethic, as no one ever got into creative because they dreamed of working crazy hours. Give them low-leverage trick horse or race jobs from time to time to stretch their legs, but do not give them too much slack. Warhorses with time on their hands get excessively nervous about their job security, since it seems like everyone can just soldier on and get through a tough situation. (This is actually Not True At All, especially with creatives. Keep some of the types listed in this article at their desks past 50 hours a week, and all you will get is weak work, worse QA, and fast turnover. Moving on.)
2) Trick horse -- Innovative pros who are only happy when they are overcoming obstacles, through either experiments or moments of genius.
Advantage: Most likely to give you a great idea in a brainstorm, beat a control, or profitably break a template.
Disadvantage: Might need those hurdles to maintain interest in a project, and go off the brief to create the kind of situation where they are most comfortable. Turnover can be quite high if not properly managed.
How to handle: Make it very clear when innovation is, and is not, merited. Make sure to make space in projects to keep them occupied, and also keep a side list of "rainy day" projects (Q4 designs out of season is a good start) to refresh their batteries for when they've had to run in a straight line.
3) Thoroughbred -- high speed, cost and maintenance pros who are part of your biggest wins (and losses). What most people think of as creative.
Advantage: On the right day and track, frankly awesome to watch, and can do the kind of work that breaks down doors and gets people remembered and promoted.
Disadvantage: Can be temperamental, unable or unwilling to adapt to new conditions, and fail to improve the team dynamic and atmosphere. Usually do not do well with a very high workload.
How to handle: With enough deference that shows the talent is recognized, but not so much as to give the rest of the team the sense that they are all secondary players. In my experience, thoroughbreds also react well to light managerial training and responsibilities, as it compliments their method, rather than just their execution.
4) Dressage -- Disciplined high-art / concept folks who bring strict standards and training to their work. Typically bring advanced degrees to the table.
Advantage: Will keep a project on point with a discerning eye that ensures consistent standards. Portfolio level work comes from them routinely.
Disadvantage: Poor flexibility, throughput and speed, and can be a challenge to morale. If v1 never looks different from v2, you are working with dressage.
How to handle: Try to bring their good points to the rest of the team, while limiting the influence that they might have on deadline or low-leverage work. Dressage-style pros tend to gravitate to the same kind of jobs, whether it is branding, public relations releases, or any other single patron position.
So if you find yourself unable to relate to your team, going through a lot of personnel turnover, or on a performance plateau... maybe you just aren’t running them on the right courses.
Oh, and one last thing: do not ever tell them what horse you think they are. Because they will think the whole thing is demeaning, or spend too much time trying to be something they are not…
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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. You can check out my agency's blog at Marketing and Advertising Direction. The site has a growing number of posts and free content that you can use to improve your campaigns. I am sure that you will find it worth your time.
In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we will work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Frickin' Lasers: A Marketing and Advertising Tale Of Horror

I See Your Darwin Fish And Raise
Part of a continuing series of moments from my career, in which great breakthroughs came from great setbacks. The point, as always, is to work away from fear, and learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for better stories.

In early 2000, I took a gig with a hot start up. My new employers were a pair of college kids who started a Web site for musicians. Their concept was to start with a vibrant community by offering up great content, then expand it to commerce with peer to peer sales and online studio file sharing, then cap it all off by offering direct e-commerce sales. As direct sales to musicians were rife with hard sell abuse from commissioned salespeople and very high profit margins, there was definitely an opportunity to be disruptive. Besides, it was 2000, when you could get funding for the idea of shipping heavy bags of pet food over the Internet, just so long as you offered free shipping and talked about the Long Tail.

The site was beloved by a billionaire who was also a musician. The billionaire gave the kids $15 million in venture capital through his funding company, with the promise of as much as they could feasibly spend later, such was his love for the site and its vision. All we had to do was prove the concept and Get Big Fast. The kids hired some pros, and those pros hired more pros. I took the gig as one of the first dozen employees as a direct marketing manager.  Within three months, we had 60 hires, new offices, and plans to change the world.

My duties included generating a lot of selling copy for the e-commerce play, coming up with ideas for and doing the execution of sweepstakes to grow our house list, and serving as on-air talent at gear shows. My main duty on a week-in, week-out basis was to write e-commerce newsletters. We started from nothing, and through consistent effort, effective promotions, and appealing price points, quickly drummed up a six-figure house list.

The newsletters had some viral pass-along and good metrics on response and unsubscribe, and directly generated over 10% of all sales… but it started to plateau. I noticed that more and more of our competitors had better looking emails than we did. Ours were text only, with long URLs, and no images of the gear we were trying to sell. (Remember, it was 2000.) Theirs had images of the gear, and call to action buttons.

I asked our CTO, one of the two kids who started the enterprise, for help to bring us up to the new standard… and got pushed off, then pushed off some more. There were other priorities that we needed to take care of first. The newsletter ROI was doing just fine as is. Our core demo had low bandwidth (remember, 2000) and did not need rich media. We needed to wait for the second round of funding. And so on, and so on. Recognizing a wall for a wall, I worked on other stuff and waited for the second round of funding before I asked again.

Then one day, I came into the office and caught a whiff of something burning. Popping up from my cubicle, I found our founders poised over a conveyor belt with a complicated apparatus and monitor. This turned out to be an industrial engraving machine with lasers. They were using it to test for possible trade show use. The idea was that instead of buying stuff and paying to have our logo put on it, we’d burn our logo into goods. Well, OK then. I went back to my desk… and spent the rest of the week wondering when these kids were going to get tired of their new toy, as they pretty much turned into Beavis and Butthead in setting the laser on literally hundreds of objects, because hey, LASERS.

Within a month, the billionaire pulled out from the second round of funding. No one else in the industry stepped in to buy the company, since we hadn’t drummed up enough sales to prove the concept. (Also, well, they liked their old margins.) Nearly everyone lost their jobs. I still can’t see a scene in a movie with lasers in it without thinking of the experience.

Lessons learned?

1) In direct marketing, design is more important than copy.

Yes, this one hurts. I’m a writer, after all. Nevertheless, if your work cannot compete on a level playing field, there is only so much that you can do to overcome that. For the most part, it does not matter how good your copy is; imagery trumps.

2) Your competition is (always) watching.

Especially in email marketing, where signing up with a personal email address is beyond easy. If your work is not being looked at, your work is either too weak or compromised to be of interest, or your competition is criminally negligent. Our sweepstakes were copied quickly by the competition, and our pricing made life better for consumers in the category… but only for as long as we were around.

This also means that, in the event of company blowup, you might discover you have some fans. I wound up doing consulting work for another player in the space for many years.

3) The wrong venture capital or money will get you killed.

After this experience, I have ran into any number of people who have similar horror stories about the billionaire in question. He is infamous for it, really, though in fairness, the track record was not as pronounced back in 2000. Had we known the second round was shaky, there is no way we would have been as aggressive with our burn rate.

4) The wrong engineering will get you killed faster than the wrong money.

Why did my old CTO spend more time on lasers (frickin’ lasers!) than, well, something that might actually make money? Maybe because he already knew the jig was up, and selling more gear was not going to change anything. Maybe because he was in his ‘20s and really liked lasers. Maybe because he really believed that musicians in our world did not care about pictures. Maybe it was all an Andy Kaufman-esque performance art piece, or that we were secretly filming my reaction for a “Punk’d” style show.

In the end, the reasons do not matter. Either engineering gives you the tools you need to succeed, or they do not. And if they do not, you’ve got a massive problem.

5) Sometimes, it is better to ask for forgiveness, instead of permission.

If I had this situation now, I probably would not sit back and wait for the CTO to change his priorities to match mine. Instead, I would hire for the necessary skill, either on a contract basis or with a free-lance project, and run the test as soon as possible. If the test won, the CTO might have been annoyed with me for running an end around, but probably not aloud, since he would be on such poor political footing. If the test failed, I would give my blocking agent the good news that his future roadmap was now more open, and moved to testing other parts of the program, while learning something profound about our customer base. In any event, I would not have been sitting on my hands for the last month of employment.

6) Never sit on your hands.

Some sharks, even if they have lasers (frickin’ lasers!), have to keep moving to breathe… and so does direct marketing. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are told to just engage in a holding pattern and wait for some outside force to act, it’s time to start looking for your next hunting ground. 

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page. All quotes are free of sharks, lasers, and cost.