Putting Non-Viewable Toothpaste Back In A Viewable Tube

Note: Not Going Back In

On some level, you knew this was coming -- a backlash, in actual print, against the idea tha advertisers should only pay for viewabale ads. (No, not providing a link the column that inspired this, because rewarding idiocy with traffic is not on my list of things to do.)

Well, as you learn in political science, hear the other side. And there are problems with the sea change in ad campaigns, where KPIs go out the window for the single point about the display nature of the ad. If other performance metrics are being reached, what's the good in insisting on 100% viewability, right? Leave well enough alone! Viewability is a bogeyman! (Yes, this was said in a real live column, on a real live site I respect. And no, still not linking to it.)

Well, um, no... because knowing that any part of your ad buy is, on some level, fraud is intolerable. Has always been, should always have been. And fraud is just not something that any reasonable person can, or should, ignore. Just because it was how the industry did its business for a very long time doesn't mean that it was right then, or will be right now.

Does that mean you should only run a campaign if the ad impressions are 100% viewable? Well, that should be the goal... but there should also be a correction in rates, because 100% viewable online banner ads are intrinsically more valuable than other ad formats. Some non-viewable impressions are legitimate, because search bots are how the Web works, and just part of doing business. There is also no such thing as a 100% viewable outdoor or print ad. All radio and television spots have some aspect of non-delivery, because they are subject to channel surfing, inattentive viewers, second-screen distractions, and so on.

If you are only paying for 100% viewability on a million impressions today, you are getting a dramatically better list and deal than you were before. As well as something far more impactful than other mediums.

In the long run, the market will do what the market always does: correct itself. People who argue for the old standard of widespread malfeasance will be drummed out of the business by clients who are not willing to be victims, which is to say, they'll be drummed out of the business. After a significant period of make-good and adjustment to new performance standards, prices might even rise.

What will not happen, however, is toothpaste going back into the tube, or victims of fraud signing up for the same old con. That ship has sailed, never to return.

Now, if we could only get to the magical realm where increased traffic from viewers who saw an ad, but didn't click on it (because, well, other tabs and windows exist, and so does brand awareness, and all of the other aspects that marketing used to get credit for)...

Well, we might actually have a business that more accurately reflects the reality of an ad buy. Sounds like a great new day, doesn't it?

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A great new day begins when you like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Ad Blocker Stockholm Syndrome

You Will Believe It's Fun

On my radar today, there's a piece in Ad Age (no, not linking) which talks about how the rise in ad blocking software shouldn't result in people trying to block the blockers... but to make ads better.

I'll give you all a moment to blink slowly at this spectacular embodiment of Stockholm Syndrome.

But getting back into the gist of the clickbait...

1) It's a big problem! Ad blocker usage has doubled since 2013!

Um, 2X of not a very meaningful amount is still not a very meaningful amount. Besides, if you really want to sound the alarm, talk about mobile, which is where the traffic growth is actually happening. Oh, and it might also be relevant to note how younger demographics are leaving TV in droves, which kind of means that the Web is winning, at least in comparison. Sky? Not falling.

2) People hate advertising!

Gosh, that's new. Imagine if online ads were actually intrusive, say, in 30-second unskippable audio and video chunks. Or printed on paper and placed in a mailbox that you had to clean, or on billboards that you can't help but look at, or... anyway. Online ads are certainly so uniquely onerous as to encourage scofflaw tech.

3) Let's focus on improving the advertising experience!

Shockingly, this is kind of what ad pros have been, well, trying to do all this time. We have to conform to a wide range of conditions, mostly based around brand standards for our clients, sizes and other restrictions... but I've never been in a creative meeting, in over 15 years in the field for an unspeakable number of clients, when anyone spoke to a desire to have a terrible advertising experience.

4) Because at the end of it all... advertising is a form of content!

By this logic, I am a form of NBA player, because I watch a fair amount of it.

Um, no. Advertising is adjacent to content. It may be, with targeting and relevance, something that is appreciated or valued by the user, but it is, well, trying to sell something, either directly or indirectly. That's not content.

5) We need to invest in creativity!

News that we haven't been doing that, actually.

I could go on, but you hopefully get the point. People who block ads are breaking a de facto social contract, and making everyone else pay more for their malfeasance. They do not need to celebrated or coddled. Advertising does not need to get better because of them; advertising needs to get better because it is advertising, and advertising always needs to get better, because there is no other way to beat a control, or improve how you are telling a brand's story.

Ad blocking is just another aspect of how tech exists that lets us do something that we really should not do. Blaming the tech, or the conditions that led to the tech, is bass ackwards. And that's all I've got to say about that.

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If you've got something to say, let's continue the conversation. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Five Suggestions For Twitter's Next CEO

Fail Whale At Night, Posters Delight

With speculation rising as to who the next person to fill the seat will be, I think we might be missing the point -- which is, making the site more usable to more people, so that it goes beyond its current dependency on its heaviest users. Let's get into the weeds, at more than 140 characters.

1) Put in daily post limits.

The single best point about Twitter is how expansive it can get when a topic gets in heavy rotation, with sudden flurries on topics far out-pacing the abilities of traditional journalism to compete. This is also Twitter's worst point.

A quick and simple way to fix this is to limit the number of Tweets that one account can issue in a day (I'd go for less than ten, myself, but I tend to be diligent about the editing). Do this, and your content providers will take more time crafting their words, and less time just reacting to what everyone else is reacting to.

2) Automate hashtags, but don't count that against the character count.

As much fun as it is to come up with your own hashtag words, this doesn't really make for a better platform, or easier search points for general users. What I'd like to see happen is for the service to start scanning works, then adding hashtags for the user to opt out of. I'm sure the v1 of this will be wonky, but in the long run, you'll save a declining asset from the tragedy of the commons.

3) Add micro-payment and bitcoin tip jars as a social option.

Favoriting Tweets and re-tweeting content to your followers is nice and all, but if Twitter is killing blogs (it is) in many categories, you really should try to do something to get back those penny-ante blog publisher CPMs. Twitter will likely take a cut of this action, which is only fair, and helps to tell a diversifying revenue strategy over time.

4) Get more local to get more competitive.

Why did Yelp grow in the age of Twitter? Because Twitter never conditioned its users to expect or even select content based on their local region. This should be relatively easy to engineer, and make the service more likely to pick up a bigger footprint in narrowcast advertising.

5) Video up.

As much as I'd like the world to stay with text, especially short and pithy amounts of it, it's not what the new to file users are very interested in. There's nothing that exists on Vine that shouldn't be on Twitter, and the fact that the former came on board with little in the way of response from Twitter is not a great moment for the old management. There is still time to get the horse back into the barn, but those doors swung wide.

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While I'm being neither brief and pithy, let's continue the conversation with you. Please like or share this column, connect with me onLinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Protecting Your Brand Against Success

Sorry, or really sorry?

There was a small but telling moment of celebrity brand management last week, and it reminded me of some of the things that I have ran into at past start-ups. It also ran into one of my personal interests – stand-up comedy – and an increasingly common aspect of modern life. That would be the public celebrity apology, delivered under duress.

Anyway… the back story is that comedian Amy Schumer, who made her reputation with edgy work that played with race, sex and class, apologized after an initial spate of defiance for the following one liner.

“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

For the record, here is Schumer’s apology.

“I wrote this joke 2 years ago. I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this. I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize if I did.”

I have a few issues with this.

First, the joke in question? It does not strike me as the least bit dumb, and here’s why – it works with just about any noun you’d like to swap in. Schumer could have used it for local crowd work to call out a college. She could have gone for a political edge, made it absurdist with a non-human species, called out an entire gender, or even directed it at herself. She is on a national tour later this summer, and could just put in the name of a different comedian every night. It really is that versatile, and especially on stage, quick hitters are always welcome. Had Schumer simply not been a growing star, not used a racial term, or someone with, well, a lot of eyes on her, I doubt anyone tries to pressure her to move off this kind of material.

Secondly, we are in something like a golden age of comedy right now. Between podcasts, streaming channels, a growing number of outlets and paid options, there are literally dozens of extremely strong pros working right now… and good work does not come from telling these folks what they cannot joke about. Or, even worse, that we need to consider the demographic of the speaker before judgment can be made. If a Hispanic comic had used a variant of the joke, is there a hue and cry? And if we have to determine who the speaker is before we decide whether or not it is OK to laugh, are we simply making the act of edgy comedy more or less impossible?

Finally, what does the degree of your celebrity have to do with the relative taste and appropriateness of your joke? Schumer has been a stand-up for over a decade, and has clearly served up far redder meat than this. Should her work come with a date and a context as to where she was in her career before anyone gives her a Tweet?

My suspicion is that Schumer was particularly sensitive to her past in the lead-up to promoting “Trainwreck”, and simply worked up as sincere an apology as possible in the middle of a press run, so that the movie would not get co-opted by PR. I also suspect that as a successful stand-up in the midst of a booming career, she might be looking to expand her repertoire to prove her chops in being able to work up new material. By apologizing, she gives herself the most precious gift a creative person can give themself -- a deadline.

But on some level, I’m hoping that success in this field brings liberty, rather than restrictions. The best example to set for future generations is to stay as funny as possible, as long as possible. If the reward for many years of club work and a great writing and acting performance in your first starring movie is a correctness straitjacket, that seems like a terrible payoff.

Oh, and as to how this relates to past start ups? I've worked at places that have shut down lucrative consumer categories once we got to a certain revenue level, because it was The Wrong Kind Of Business. Never sat well in my stomach, because it seemed to be so very far afield from Real Capitalism and Business, but PR is its own world. And so are start ups.

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In the way of a better payoff, I’d love to continue the conversation with you. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

The Year Of The Internet Where You Live

Drive Carefully

A brief moment of storytelling. Indulge, if you will.

In January 2005, I was working at one of the world's most advanced online marketing companies. We served up behaviorally targeted work in a proprietary window, with fantastic targeting opportunities, cross-traffic analysis, and best-in-class reporting. I had the advantage of data driven insights in hundreds of properties and consumer categories, and it was incredibly fast-paced, with creative turns coming in a near real-time environment.

I was also in strong need of a vacation, especially at the end of the busy holiday season, and took one of the bigger ones of my life, a 2-week trip to New Zealand.

New Zealand in 2005 was, in terms of the Internet, about a decade behind the red-hot Silicon Valley scene that was my day to day. Wifi was in its infancy, cell phones (none all that smart) didn't work for much of the area, and connection speed was frequently open to question. I'd log in at cybercafes or in the evenings, clear my email, and took a couple of interviews with press and direct marketing companies while seeing the sights.

I also thought long and hard about emigrating. The country was (and presumably, is) incredibly beautiful, the food was great, and every time we went someplace new (we rented a car and went from the North Island to the South), it got even better. Professionally, I also knew that on some level, I had a tactical advantage of knowing what the future of the country would look like, and could use that to benefit clients. But in the talks that I had with many of the players there, it became clear that overcoming skepticism and conservatism would just be too frustrating, and starting over entirely new wasn't going to work on a personal level. If I had been 10 years younger, I probably would have decided otherwise, and my life would have been very different.

The broader point of bringing this up is the stark differences stayed with me as an opportunity not taken. Knowing when your industry, country or consumer category is, rather than just making the Naturalistic Fallacy of assuming that is what is true for you is true for all, is a strong consideration. And the relative when is only going to get more complicated with the advent of what's referred to as mobile today, and will be better understood later as the Internet of Things.

There are tactics (personalized recommendations, dynamic content, community and social media) that are done in, say, e-commerce... that have not come to pass in other categories or countries just yet. It's also possible that they might never; given the Web's downward pressure on profit margins for brick and mortar, you can see why some actors would prefer that this "progress" would not come their way.

But the same forces that made the lower fruit fall from the tree should, eventually, take care of most of the higher pieces. What happened to the music industry predicted, with cruel certainty, what happened to journalism. Connectivity across devices will speed things like showrooming, consumer reviews, social interaction into brand marketing, and so on, and so on. E-commerce efficiencies will start to intrude on last mile business where location has mattered more than connectivity. Targeting for lead generation and CRM was already used to great effect in the 2012 and 2014 political cycles, in ways that took many by surprise, but no one who works in high touch e-commerce.

So what does the savvy marketing and advertising pro do, to take advantage of this condition? Monitor not just your category, but others that match your demo -- especially if they are more technologically advanced or web-savvy. Consider how trends in the overall Web (social, mobile, changing browsers and platforms, wearable/IoT) might be used to impact your business, and lobby internally to have a proactive, rather than reactive, road map in development. Keep your eyes and ears open, because when the world changes, it doesn't do so with polite updates.

After all, we're thirty years and counting into an ever-widening role of connectivity changing our lives. If you can take advantage of being further along in the story, you've got a better chance of making that story work for you.

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Speaking of working for you, I'd be happy to. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the quote boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Marketing By The Numbers

Negotiations

He say seven, I say eight. He say eight, I say nine. I got plenty numbers left. Huh! When I start, I no stop-a for nothing. I bid 'em up. I go higher, higher, higher, all the time is go higher.

Chico Marx in “Cocoanuts”, the first Marx Brothers movie, showing Essential Marketing Wisdom

In Start Up Land, it’s very important to be able to pivot for changing market currents. Especially in Ad Tech, what makes money this year might not make money next year, and when it comes to making quarterly projections, you need to be able to adjust on the fly.

Ad Tech also tends to create new and very interesting numbers, because that is the nature of Big Data. Cross-traffic analysis, lifetime value on a channel basis, performance lifts over the control. All of it seems very exciting and Web 3.0-ish, and helps point the way to a better world of targeted buying and lead generation.

That is the good part of the business. The bad is when you hit numbers that do not matter, because, well, they help to distract people from what is going on at higher levels.

This can really come into play at a lead quality level, when you get tasks like the direction of so many followers in social media, so many new addresses for the house list, and so on, and so on. What matters, from a measurable standard, can and should get granular, especially when you have a complicated and substantial marketing program in place.

However, the core of what matters has not changed with technology, because business is not like that. Number and cost per lead, conversion percentages, and lifetime value of said leads, all of which boils down to Return On Investment, or ROI.

At far too many start ups, middle management likes to get into the weeds of measurement… and it manifests mostly as a way to cover themselves in the case of a down cycle. Sure, the company revenue might be stagnant or in retreat, but look at how many times we rang a bell, fixed a problem, made some multiple of some past quarter, or hit the turn on a dev cycle.

Except that the bell ringing might have been for trivial contracts, the problems may have been internal and never affected revenue or turnover. Or that the multiples over quarter did not matter because, well, they did not track to revenue, and the dev work was, once again, not tied to revenue.

If you find yourself in the presence of management who likes to cite these additional numbers in the case of a weak quarter, or as a way to distract or tell the story of how the quarter was mixed instead of down…

Well, you are in the presence of people who are covering a real agenda.

They might be doing it for the best of reasons. Maybe they are trying to alleviate employee turnover or panic, to keep the stock price buoyant for a merger or additional funding, to create a more positive environment so that the venture capital does not turn tail and run.

Or maybe, and somewhat more realistically, they are lying for less noble reasons.

In any event… if and when this passes the smell test, you will get more of it. Then, it will perpetuate, and maybe even spawn additional pointless metrics.

Bovine Stuff tends to create more Bovine Stuff.

It does not, however, usually create a stable, profitable, and long-running business.

Or a place you will really want, or get to, spend too much of your career at…

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If you found this interesting, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

If We Treated Offline Ads The Way We Treat Online...

Stop Hitting Yourself, Stop Hitting...

Imagine, just for a moment, what the world of offline marketing and advertising would look like, if we treated it the same as we do online.

(These are the kinds of things that online advertising and marketing pros dream about, especially on summer Fridays, when Problem Clients call at 4:45pm to tell you, at length, why they are unhappy and why you should be unhappy, too. Good times! But I digress.)

So...

Outdoor billboards: A portion of the placements only get to charge for the percentage of drivers that view the art. The others only get to charge for the number of people who directly respond, probably via a special phone number or URL. No one cares if these results come from a sign that's on a busy road, or one that's only seen on Google Earth. Oh, and any billboard that's particularly attuned to the needs and wants of the driver causes many journalists to mount a piece of furniture, pull up their petticoats, and shriek about privacy.

Television ads -- Viewers need to be stationary and in the room for broadcast to begin. For a percentage of the campaign, payment only occurs if the consumer takes an action following the ad. Finally, the ads all need to comply to outdated production standards of small file size, and a portion of the flight has to be in analog film, because a number of channels refuse to invest in infrastructure to get to newer standards.

Direct mail -- Not charged for postage unless received by the consumer and opened, so anything that goes straight into the recycling can is free to the person who rents the list. Since this medium has been around longer than others, anyone that works in the field is scorned by other producers, despite the solid ROI.

Radio -- Again, only charged for direct and attributable action from the consumer, so the content is constantly surrounded by a thick covering of constant advertising. Since there is no branding advantage accepted, a tragedy of the commons impacts all but the most highly rated programs.

Event sponsorship -- Thanks to our perfect reporting of those who directly engage with the brand, event sponsors only pay for the subset of attendees who can recall, in a post-event survey, the association.

Anyway... you get the point, right? The idea that offline ads are the only way to establish brand, and online can not have branding impact because we can measure response so well... it's been this bubble point that everyone who works on one side of the desk knows has to end one day, while the other side just keeps on insisting that things continue the way they are. Because there's more inventory than opportunity, and the technology allows advertising to match the personal profile instead of the demography of a particular site, branding benefits in online have always been a non-starter.

Will anything ever pop the unreality? Well, maybe. I'm a big believer in data and analytics eventually winning the day, and when we add in the Internet of Things to give us additional distribution and data collection moments, maybe the targeting gets so good that we have to accept the de facto branding. If the fragmentation of mass media continues, maybe that accelerates the market correction as well.

But man alive, some of us have been taking the myth of no billable impact for online brand awareness for decades now. When do we get to stop hitting ourselves with data?

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If you found this interesting, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Women In Comedy, Or The Everett Question

A Force Of Nature

Last weekend, Comedy Central did something fairly interesting as part of their ramp-up to the release of Amy Schumer's movie "Trainwreck." They premiered an hour special from one of Schumer's favorite acts, a cabaret-style performer named Bridgett Everett, in between showings of one of Schumer's stand-up performances. (Yes, I'm aware that I write about marketing and advertising. We'll get there.)

If you haven't had the Everett experience... well, there really is no one to compare her to in popular media. She's a cabaret singer who performs in character, and the character is over the top in every way. She uses fairly unique physicality (Everett is, well, a large person) and unrelenting energy to create subversive comedy that provokes jaw-dropping astonishment. Her act takes exceptional editing to make it fit for broadcast, both for language and for visuals, and the devotion that she inspires from her audience is also remarkable.

Everett's voice is, like everything else about her, formidable. Like Schumer, she's utterly fearless in terms of selling out for the laugh. There is a courage here that's exceptional, and I have no doubt that in today's fragmented media marketplace, there's a place for her as one of a growing number of prominent and increasingly successful female comedians... though to call Everett a comedian is really a loss of accuracy, given how much of what she does is more musical theater than traditional stand up. Fans include Chris Rock, Peter Dinklage, Sarah Jessica Parker, Fred Armisen, Patti LuPone and more. Everett will perform on the Oddball Fest, a major comedy tour headlined by Schumer and Aziz Ansari.

So where does the marketing hook kick in? Because we are at the start of what is looking to be a long-overdue correction in stand-up comedy, where another art form and profession becomes more open to a wider swath of demographics. As a comedy nerd (and very occasional performer), I approve, because with each new approach, what's possible becomes a little wider, and a little more creative.

But what Everett does is so different from everyone else who is working today, so this also kind of counts as a litmus test to see what's possible, and in a lesser fashion, whether Schumer will be able to bring others with her on her rise to mainstream acceptance.

If Everett succeeds on a mass-market level, it speaks to a more diverse set of entertainment and casting options. Maybe more acceptance of bigger people and fashion options, or art forms (cabaret, in particular) that have been marginalized to certain groups and areas. (Oh, and maybe some *very* daring sponsorship opportunities.)

She's clearly not for everyone. But Comedy Central has put her in a position to be seen by a lot of people who have never heard of her before. Will it catch fire, or just stay in its own world? I have no idea, but anyone who can get a crowd of strangers to sing these songs, with these lyrics, out loud... is not somehow you want to bet against.

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If you found this interesting, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the quote boxes at top right of the page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Deep Content Marketing, Or Making Money The Dead Way

Sell Thee Well

I am old enough to remember a time when music was (a) not something you could download, or (b) not something you could access at any point in the program. In addition to this dating moment, this: as a kid, I had the first Sony Walkman cassette player, with headphones, and used it relentlessly while delivering newspapers. Everything about that sentence probably made everyone under the age of 50 do a double-take. But from this old-time start, modern marketing takeaways await.  

Any number of people in my feed and life have been talking about the Grateful Dead’s final show at the end of a 50-year career. There are obvious lessons for modern marketers, about community, authenticity, craft, and so on. However, what is important is that the content went deep, with merit beyond the immediate hook. Ask any Deadhead what their favorite song is, and few will be able to keep their list below five, and will usually qualify it further by detailing the time, place and line up. While the Dead are a bit of an extreme example of this, you can get similar experiences from any band of the era.

For deep content bands like this, songs exist, and even to a limited degree, singles, but the more valuable unit of time is the album side. I am not a huge Dead fan – that is my older brother and sister’s domain – but the front side of “American Beauty” is a more or less perfect mix and experience, and I can not, to this day, feel satisfied with just the opening cut (“Box of Rain”). Ask a Pink Floyd fan about the first side of “Dark Side of the Moon”, or Dire Straits’ “Making Movies” (first album I ever bought), and you will get looks of reverie.

Compare this to the modern music experience, where you will rarely hear an entire song outside of your dedicated purchase, because no one wants to hear anything more than the hook, or at most, the chorus. Songs or sections that might reveal themselves to the listener on multiple listens (“deep cuts”, in the lingo) do not really exist, and it is not just a matter of short attention spans. The commerce dictates that most new music will break in soundtrack moments, in hook increments only, with only a very small percentage of the audience ever getting a chance to engage in deep content. Trust me on this: the modern bands would *kill* to have the Dead’s financial wherewithal.

Now, compare this to general e-commerce plays. In travel, the equivalent of a hit single might be a low price on a route that is useful to the traveler… but unless they get to a club membership, or start to engage with upgrades on a routine basis, they will just slide to the artist that has the next hit. Same with e-commerce with retargeting plays based entirely on price, or the “winner” in a search engine push, or buyers from a coupon site.

Getting to the deep content is not just good marketing, an opportunity to sell on customer service, or a chance to justify a CRM program. Rather, it is the key to transitioning away from shallow sales and limited lifetime value, and into sustainable profit margins, true word of mouth secondary sales, and growth that goes beyond the business quarter.

There is, of course, no shortcut to this stage. Just as it took the Dead decades to get to a self-sustaining community that meant filling live venues was rarely a problem, it will take a similar commitment on the part of your brand.

It is also not optional, assuming you are in business for the long term.

Fare thee well…

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of this page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

If (when?) the Apple Watch fails, the IoT will be just fine

Limited Failure, Really

Two unrelated but conflicting items in the news feed this week:

1) Apple Watch sales fall 90% from the launch rush, speaking to how this is a bleeding edge product that mainstream users are not taking on.

2) IBM announced a breakthrough in computer chip manufacturing, which basically means that the next generation is going to be half as big as the current ones. (FYI, we are also now getting into the molecular level, with special facilities that eliminate all vibration, because Ye Gads, we are manufacturing things at a molecular level.)

So here is where I get to out of this. The Internet of Things is still coming, but it is not going to do so directly.

A wearable watch is, well, still a watch. There’s an entire generation of people who more or less missed that choice in apparel, and expecting them to just latch on because it’s tech now was always going to be a bit of a stretch.

However, what is most telling is that three million users went for it anyway, with many more going for FitBits. Other providers are joining the fray with lower cost items, but even if the eventual connected band market is 10X the current Apple Watch world, it’s “only” 30 million, or about 10% of the populace. Significant, but nowhere near smartphone numbers.

But those super-thin, super-small components? Well, those could go anywhere, really. Individual SKUs on apparel, to replace bulky security devices, and provide much more information about consideration and browsing behavior. Once the user owned the apparel, the pieces can communicate with each other and get to a baseline for health. Imagine, honestly, how much better preventative care could be if the populace has the option of frequent monitoring. Your clothing could save your life… and back to an e-commerce standpoint, items at a wearout stage could potentially alert a vendor.

The point is that the Internet of Things t will not be about a handful of high-touch, high-consideration screens that you, as an individual consumer, will purchase. Instead, it will be immersive, easy, and driven by market forces that speak to marketing and advertising efficiency at the consumer level, and manufacturing and shipping efficiencies on the front end.

So don’t take the Apple Watch sales as the canary in the coal mine for IoT. We are barely in the first few minutes of a very long game, where the benefits / players have barely begun to take the field. I realize that we are all on hyperspeed now, but this trend is going to be determined by more than monthly sales of a couple of SKUs.

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Using Demographics In A Programmatic Age

Not shown: Work Experience

By way of introduction, this was inspired by recent pieces that talked about how demographics are dead (Dead! Dead I tell you!) in regards to marketing and advertising plays now. Dead being, as far as I can tell, clickbait for creatives. Anyway, let’s step back from the ever-present device and discuss how your traditional training and thought process still has value, even in a data-driven age.

If you are a marketing and advertising pro with any shrewdness or time to spend on the task, you monitor what your competitors are doing. It is simple enough to do with subscribing to email newsletters, and if you really want to go above and beyond the ability of most, you also know about Moat, a graphic search engine for display ads. However, there’s a simple enough tactic that can go one step further for you.

Demographics get a bad rap these days in terms of campaign targeting, and that’s justified, for the plain and simple reason that you can do better with programmatic and remarketing plays. Reaching the right consumer is more important and efficient than reaching the right type of consumer, because the data just shows a win for the former, and even the slummiest of content sites is patronized by a handful of optimal prospects. Buy the prospect, not the site, assuming that viewability isn’t broken. (It is, but that’s a problem for another day.)

The key takeaway? Just because demographics are no longer the best or only way to find prospects, doesn’t mean that they are no longer important to marketing and advertising pros. It just means that they are not as important in terms of the mechanics of reach in lead generation.

Where the demo still matters is in creative, in establishing and protecting the brand. Brand marketing also tends to get short shrift in data-driven and direct mediums. The argument is that you have already established brand value, especially in remarketing plays, and you are better off using optimal practices, including but not limited to aggressive pricing, functionality and dynamic elements.

The problem with this approach is that it treats your prospect as an entirely logical individual with his or her thought process, as if everyone in the prospect pool was engaged in a bot-level buying decision. Which means that your margins are in for a bad time, and so is your lifetime value.

Happily for vendors, there are better ways to run a campaign.

The first is to know your consumer category, and to take into consideration your brand value. For e-commerce plays like apparel, shoes and niche plays with high tactile impact, the brand and individual SKUs matter much more. You are not buying a dress because you have seen the exact same piece at five different stores; you buy the dress because it matches your style, and you trust the brand to make pieces that make you feel good when you put them on. That is a fundamentally better place to be from a margin standpoint.

The second approach is to look outside of your consumer category for inspiration and optimal practices. For our apparel play, check out how non-competing providers handle their work in, say, beauty or accessories. For upscale travel, consider financial services, premium personals or high-end consumer electronics. You can often find inspiration and great testing points that will take you beyond an execution-only optimization moment, and into something that is far more actionable for future iterations.

Finally, there is the possibility of co-promotional marketing opportunities and swaps from his kind of research, especially in niche plays. If you can reach a similar prospect list without going into the heavy lifting of finding and building said list? That’s where dramatic and powerful growth can happen, on an affiliate-style level.

It’s a swing for the fences technique, to be sure, but doesn’t it sound a lot more promising than just trying to beat your control? Or tossing everything you know about your buyer demos in the dustbin of history?

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of the page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFP is always free.

A Business beyond Marketing and Advertising

Fun Is Imminent

Over the July 4 weekend, I took my kids to a place they have been to at least a dozen times. I spent hundreds of dollars, drove about seven hours round trip, and did loads of stuff we have done, well, many times. I am likely to do it again in a few months, if not sooner. When we do this again, the kids will call their friends to see who can go with us, and try to find someone that has not been with us on this trip yet, because they love to tell new people about it as much as I do.

What I am talking about is Knoebels, a family-run and operated amusement park that is in its 89^th year of operation in central Pennsylvania. It is the largest amusement park of its kind in America, in that admission is – get this – free. So is parking. Admission to rides are by tickets or armbands, with rides ranging, on the most part, from $1 to $3.

What are the rides like? Start with world-class wooden roller coasters. The Phoenix gets raves for “air time”, which is when you float along with the coaster, rather than stay in the seat. I’m also a fan of the hardcore workout and force of the Twister, the park’s highest and fastest ride. There is also a new retro-cool Flying Kites ride that runs without a track.

Going beyond coasters, I’m a big fan of the old-school bumper cars with true punch. Some prefer the well-done dark haunted house, or appreciate the huge section with smaller-scale rides for little kids. There is also a great big pool and waterslide area, an ancient carousel where you grab brass rings for a prize, a Ferris Wheel, old-time trains and cars, and more, more, more.

Every year brings new rides, because the management is constantly on the lookout to add ride assets from the open market. (This year, it is a metal looping roller coaster. I am not a fan of upside down, so you will have to ask someone else how good it is.)

Knoebels has a social media feed, though it almost seems sacrilege. They have also done some local spot TV advertising, and I am sure there is some channel and affiliate marketing done. But all of that seems besides the point, because to my eyes, Knoebels is a business that is done so well, it doesn’t need marketing or advertising.

What it needs is word of mouth, which is good, because it is plainly phenomenal at generating it.

There is, honestly, nothing that I want to change about this place. You can bring your own food, and even your own dog, if you like. If you buy food, it is great quality and fairly priced. You can actually win prizes in the arcades without unnatural skill or costly persistence. The mix of food for sale is downright amazing, with everything from the usual carnival fare (meat on a stick, ice cream, cotton candy, etc.) to an impressive array of healthier options.

Wait times for rides rarely get long enough to negatively impact your day, and even if they do, you aren’t as stressed as you are in big admission parks, because you aren’t trying to make sure you are getting your fair ration of fun per dollar. That also means that everyone in the park is in a better mood, and there is no horrible class system of fast pass privilege to help generate meltdowns.  It is as safe as houses, to the point where you find yourself giving your kids the green light to go off and have their own adventures. Try this place once, and you may never get your kids to go to the big name places again.

Even on my toughest day at this park – a day where multiple children brought flu with them that then got worst at the park, which meant I had to cut the visit short and drive them home with a car filled with nausea – everyone involved has thanked me, profusely, for taking them, and wanted to come back soon. That is because Knoebels runs their business to encourage true evangelism from their guests, and long-term, repeat business. That is why they are free to enter, free to park, and free to enjoy, at any activity level. They want to be the amusement park that you call home.

At this point, you might be wondering where the catch is, or if Knoebels is one of my agency’s clients. There are no catches, and my only interest in Knoebels is as a fan, and as someone who wants to make sure the place is around for future generations.

They do not need my agency’s services, because their product sells itself. It also markets itself, too. Such is the power of transcendent customer service.

May it always be so!

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Speaking of making customers happy, I would like to ask you to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP box at the top right of this page.  We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Confessions of a Smartphone Hater

Filled arms, empty minds

Today, I gave up the ghost of my badly aging smartphone and upgraded. I was well past my contract past due date, the device was losing integrity on battery life and performance, and my work requires an effective mobile device. 

Joining me in the exercise was the CTO of my small business, AKA my wife, a gadget enthusiast who knows tons more about these things than I do. The agency’s shareholders (AKA my kids) were also very happy about the purchase. To be fair, they have put up with my growing frustration over the old device’s performance, particularly while using the mapping feature in my cab duties for their social lives.

As for me? I had so little enthusiasm for the transaction that the clerk at my local phone store felt moved to beg for a good survey result. She may have also given me more than expected on the trade-in value just because I seemed so nonplussed by the experience.

I am old enough to (a) remember when this tech was beyond the dreams of James Bond directors, and (b) really, truly enjoy the limited amount of time when I do not have the device on me. (Mostly during workouts and yard work. But I digress.)

It seems incredibly ungrateful to complain about the failures of any smartphone. Even on its worst day, the phone that I gave up today was a marvel of technology, received information from space, and made me more productive. If it only had continued to work as well as the day when I got it, I would still be using it.

I’m also enough of an environmentalist and fair trade capitalist to consider the incredibly short lifespan of these devices to be a true scandal, and feel complicit in multiple crimes by making a purchase, let alone being a customer.

The ambivalence goes deeper still. This is my fourth smartphone in the past 15 years, and it is the first with a virtual keyboard, rather than a real key QWERTY machine. Sure, I could have stuck to my guns and kept the feature, and the amount of typos and auto-correct fails might drive me to distraction, but you have to make too many other compromises to justify it. As a marketer, I need to be in the mainstream.

My first smartphone was a Blackberry in a holster, with quick-draw email speed and the expectation that the device was for work first, with all that implies in terms of time off meaning time away. The fact that these are now so ubiquitous, with the majority of Web traffic coming on the platform (admit it, you are reading this on one, aren’t you?) Does not fill me with joy.

But when I dig down deep enough, what’s the real objection?

It is one thing to know, intellectually, that the world is moving away from text to images. That ship sailed in the monochrome monitor age.

It is quite another point to get a reminder of that, emotionally, every time I look at the screen. A screen that I will look at more than any other, over the lifespan of the device.

And finally, something else entirely to know that as an advertising and marketing pro, I can either learn to love this screen, or fail to keep pace with the prime demographic that most of my clients want to reach.

No one ever said progress was easy, right?  

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Speaking of reaching a moving target, I would like to ask you to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit my agency’s site. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Saving Privacy For, Well, No One

Privacy Warriors

Remember, you are fighting for this woman’s honor, which is probably more than she ever did. – Rufus T. Firefly (aka, Groucho Marx in “Duck Soup”)

Let us wrap up the first half of 2015 with a quick word about my favorite online advertising and marketing straw man… privacy. It has said to be growing an importance as a problem that needs solving, what with the explosion of mobile, cloud and Internet of Things computing. For the fearful, there is an ever-growing amount of coverage about identity theft and malware-controlled machines to drive impression fraud, along with services to cover the problem. Programmatic and remarketing spends makes all of this more obvious and wearable… well, yeah, I cannot even finish the set-up.

Privacy concerns are nearly as old as the Web, and what has been true all along is that the younger you are, the less you seem to care about this, and willing to trade it off for any kind of personal benefit. I have worked at start-ups that made software that served ads based on clickstream, which any number of people would pule against… but it did not stop nine figures of downloads over a short span of years, for the simple trade of free software. Once that concern went sideways, the same basic trade-off was achieved, but with cookie files and without apps, and that’s more or less the industry standard now.

What happens next? More intrusive technology, with greater targeting capabilities, and cross-platform learning cycles. Fevered reactions about how some brands are cyber-stalking individual consumers, and some consumer categories getting special attention from ad exchanges, because they will be deemed as too over-the-top or out of bounds. Then, the Internet of Things, which will multiply the pace of all this by a factor of ten.

How? Well, wearable tech really is a game changer, especially when it has cross-device information. Monitoring health features for fitness is just the first moments of a very long game, with greater iterations doing more to establish a baseline of health to prevent for seizures, strokes and other significant issues. It’s not all going to come from your watch or your phone, of course – your car will also monitor your body for performance issues, and maybe even your mattress, toothbrush, eyeglasses and so on.

That is not controversial at all, really. The idea that wearable tech might be able to save your life, or in the case of an automobile, others, is a product that sells itself. However, when it turns into ads for products that seem delicate for a shared screen or too far down into the bloodstream of the individual user… well, that is where the privacy problem falls away really. Screens are just too ubiquitous, and there is no reason for a screen to be shared by anyone, especially to younger demographics. Combine this with the willingness to trade private information for any sort of gain, and it is, once again, a virtue that will not be fought for.

Finally, this. We presume that ads that are “too targeted” violate privacy… but what if such ads are rare, beneficial, and even of a high value due to aggressive offers and price? If you are willing to share your photos with social media, your preferences with publishers and e-commerce sites, and your email address near and far… well, why would you have a line for anything else?

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Speaking of a targeting with value, I would like to ask you to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or make an RFP at the top right box.  We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.