Warts Within Reason: Cultivating Effective Customer Reviews

Not Every Commenter, Honest

Let's say you sell stuff over the Internet (radical concept, I know, but take it as a theoretical). And let's also say that what you are selling has interest to your users, maybe to the point where they might know more about it than you do, or want to share their opinions about those products. Finally, let's suppose that, as the Internet has shown, these opinions may become a tad unseemly, or over the top. What should you, as a marketing pro who is concerned with your vendor relationships and branding, do about this?

Well, as much as I'd like to save us all a great deal of words and cut to something pithy... the answer from my experience is, well, It All Depends. Here's the factors that you need to keep in mind.

1) Your company's bandwidth, and commitment to, reviews.

There are sites that don't moderate comments, and those sites become, well, unfortunate. Eventually, automation software will be able to filter out the obvious spammers and purveyors of unrepentant profanity, but until then, you're probably going to have to throw some human eyes at the task. It's actually a fairly great gig for an intern (assuming they have a stomach that can take the harder stuff), since it can provide a deep and quick education on product merits, and a fair amount of entertainment value. But if you don't have one handy, you may need to do it yourself. If so, scan for trouble words, rather than obsess over the content. It's an impersonal medium, with a high degree of anonymity. Poor choices happen. Try not to dwell.

2) The likelihood of your suppliers to go off the rails over a bad review, and whether this would put you at risk.

I used to work for an online reseller of musical instruments, which is an industry where there were more resellers willing to carry a brand's goods than there were, well, goods. At least for the top providers. Which meant that if you offended a certain purveyor of guitars or amps or whatever, you risked losing that account as a provider, and giving your competition an extra bullet in their gun as they attempted to end your existence. Needless to say, we learned, with speed, which brands were going to see (and flip out) over someone's poor opinion of their goods, and who were not. (Hint: it's the same guys who threaten to go ballistic over MAP pricing, or anything else in your agreement. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.)

If your category doesn't have this feature, filtering out over the top negative reviews, assuming they aren't profane, is more trouble than it's worth. If you are at risk, it's not. Simple as that.

3) The technical strength of your community.

The best reviews aren't 100% positive, because that sets off the skepticism of anyone but the tragically naive. Besides, there's always something that's falls on a different point in the Great / Affordable / Durable Venn diagram. So what actually moves product? A strong and vibrant consumer base that generates its own content, preferably in defense of the product's merits. If three reviews are positive, then one troll slams it, and gets shouted down by the next two or three? Ca-ching.

A very important point on this: you can either censor an entry for being spam, profane or legally actionable, or you can let it run as is. Do not, under the fear of a firestorm that's far greater than any possible problem caused by the original review, edit the work in any way. Your approval process should not seem arbitrary. Even if there is rampant misspellings, criminal use of punctuation, or anything else that offends your sensibilities as a copywriting pro. The integrity of your review and comment boards is at stake, and if you start to "clean up" copy, the only thing that's going to happen is that any positive review will seem like a plant. (Oh, and don't plant. For reasons that are too obvious to write, and rhyme with beagle, and crass traction paw fruit, and clawed, but with more a of a fr sound. If you catch my drift.)

Besides, and this one is really hard to admit as a copy writer... those amateur comments with the poor wording, repetitive phrasing, etc., etc.? They've won in many an A/B test, depending on the consumer category, because they just seem more "real" to the prospects. Some days, being a copy writer just isn't fair.

4) The demographic bent of the buying audience.

Well, OK... but what if your demographic is kind of edgy and uses coarse language as a matter of course? Monitor for abuse, but allow. Similarly, if the demo is older and more conservative, or strong in regions with more of a chance to cause issues for your customer service, delete. And if your audience is all over the place, censor to the more stringent crowd, because...

5) Reviews usually provide a reason to buy one product or another. They rarely create business on their own.

Which means that having reviews, and a fair number of them, is important, but no review in and of itself is critical. Finally,

6) Auto-date the work.

The quality of brands changes over time, and a 5-star review from 5 years ago can, and should, carry less weight than opinions from last month. Your goal as a marketer should be to give the prospects honest tools to help buy, not a biased tool that will only produce one outcome. Remember, your reviewers are some of your most loyal and best lifetime value customers. Don't burn them for short-term gain.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.

You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com.

And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Fixing Ad Viewability: A Simple And Unacceptable Solution

On A Clear Day, I'm Getting Hosed

Item: In Q1 2015, view- ability rates for online ads on networks and exchanges, which is to say all non-direct digital ad inventory, which pretty much means a vast amount of programmatic and RTB placements, was...

(drumroll please)

41.8%.

Down from Q4's 42.6%.

Which means over 5 out of every 9 ads, ads that are presumably bought and paid for by advertisers, are never seen by a human.

(Source: Integral Ads Media Quality Report.)

The scary part of it is that the report is actually "good" news, in that the numbers are up about 5% from the worst numbers of 2014, with mobile and video viewability leading the charge. Mobile wins on this metric because it's downright difficult for ads within an app to not be viewable. Video wins because it's expensive enough to avoid the truly awful remnant inventory part of the market. Direct sales to publishers also score higher than exchanges and networks, which should surprise you not at all, and have only a quarter of the ad fraud issues.

Some of those unseen ad impressions are legitimate, of course. White hat robots are how search engines work. Not every ad impression in offline realms are viewable, especially in print. There's a very real possibility that viewability numbers for other ad mediums aren't so much better than, well, 4 out of 9.

But since you can measure digital, and watching just one video of a black hat machine in operation can make you crazy with rage, all of this smells of Capital F Fraud. So it's the hot button story for 2015, and the major threat facing the industry today.

Now, ready for the truly bad news?

The industry defines a viewable ad impression as one where the ad is at least 60% on screen, and resides there for over one second.

Does that seem viewable to you, Dear Reader?

Publishers and ad exchanges, of course, have a vested interest in not ratcheting up the standards, because it's just an added measure of self-punishment. But this is just not a sustainable product and standard, especially if you are trying to argue for any kind of branding benefit. Your ad was half on the screen, for the time it took you to blink your eyes three times. Pay up.

There's just one way out for this, and it's a brand of medicine that no one wants to take, but it's just this.

Fraud, and robots, never, ever move as slowly as people.

If viewability is defined as not 1, but 10, seconds on the screen, you will more or less end the issue. You'd also have a product that businesses and advertisers will want to buy. But the ad would have to stay around even on screen scroll and pan, which means that publishers would have to change their ways to accommodate it.

Finally, you'd have all kinds of legitimate traffic fail to register as an impression, because humans can, and do, reject content in less than ten seconds. (By the way, if they do, and it means the death of a lot of bad content sites? I think the world would be a better place, and we might see less clickbait or slideshow garbage. But I digress.)

Oh, and the CPMs involved would have to more or less multiply by a factor of 10.

Easier to just talk about native and mobile, right?

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Five Predictions For Mobile Ads, Based On A Life In Online Ads

300 Baud, Aw Hell Yeah

Some days, Dear Reader, I feel like I'm living in a movie. Or, more accurately, a remake. (See that sweet machine above the header? My first ride. Made money with it online, in 1985. No, seriously.)

Anyway... having made money from online advertising for the past 15 years, I've seen enough iterations to recognize patterns that will repeat. So here's five predictions about mobile that are really more about market forces, rather than the medium. Let's get into it.

1) Direct response will flatten

Every time someone invents a new way to advertise (expandable, mobile, native, video, etc.), sales for that method triumph the numbers as the New Best Thing, sure to eradicate older methods. And mobile has spiked higher than most, just because it's got the newness factor multiplied by the fact that it's much easier to respond in error. (Just consider if you've ever "butt dialed" anything on a laptop.)

But beyond UI issues, the history of response in a new platform or market is clear. You can get 10X CTR today by just showing your ad in China, and I guarantee you that there will be spectacular old-time response metrics in Cuba or North Korea when regime change makes interactivity commonplace. Mobile is the same. It will start hot, then flatten to a true level of responsiveness, and from there, the metrics will be more about deliverability and viewability, rather than the method.

So mobile response is a nice story now, but in the long term, it won't be any different than what we already know. T'was ever such, and will always be.

2) A new production standard for publishers and consumers will take over.

A small history lesson. Flash backed into being the de facto standard for online ad work, because HTML4 loaded in a piecemeal fashion, and Web connection speed used to be such a concern. (Still is, depending on where you are, and the quality of your Wifi. But I digress.) The other great problem with Flash is that it's backwards compatible, which means that it's increasingly insecure to black hat coding.

HTML5, the new standard that's more and more common on a daily basis (mostly because it plays nicely with mobile, and HTML4 does not) is said to not have the piecemeal loading issue. It also avoids much of the legacy coding problems, since it's only a few years old. For some time, some skeptics believed that publishers and back-end networks would prevent the transition, and that the long tail of Flash would run for years more. But with recent malware infestations in Flash coding, along with the clear and present advantages of easier video and mobile, that friction will be overcome. Besides, it's not as if anyone is still on dial-up.

3) The 80/20 rule will repeat (and it's more like 90/10).

Pity the poor coder and QA people. So many formats to check, and so little time to make sure they all work out! The only issue here is that sentence could have been said about browsers from 10+ years ago, email from 5+ years ago, or mobile today.

What will happen is that the industry will design for a handful of market share leaders (iPad, iPhone, Android), and give short shrift to less prevalent players. This will only change if and when the world changes. Coding and designing for a wide range of formats has never been an optimal way to work, and isn't going to start now.

4) Personalized creative will dominate.

At the start of the century, there was pushback about how behaviorally targeted ads were too personal, especially in sensitive categories like pharma and services. Five years ago, the same objections were brought up about dynamic retargeting and remarketing for e-commerce. Now, it's a question of cyber-stalking and geo-targeting causing a backlash on mobile.

The commonality is that information about the individual user, when utilized in the ad unit, is said to cross a line of privacy or propriety. While I'm sensitive to the fact that this does occur on the individual level, there's no great evidence that this is a mass public concern. Especially if frequency is capped, or the user has the ability to opt out of receiving similar messages.

In other words, it's similar to the many prediction of doom that have been set to social network advertising, and how those can't possibly keep making money, once everyone gets outraged and deletes their profile over privacy issues. There just isn't a special level of distaste for this kind of advertising, and there won't be in mobile, either. So the market will gravitate to it, for the simple reason that it works better.

5) Brand marketing benefits will continue to be disregarded.

This is such an ingrained attitude at the agency level that I just can't see it changing for another generation. The need to tell a story in long-form video in broadcast media, with high frequency, will go away once the data gets to the last mile of narrowcasting, and social media backlash might cause some brands to shy away from high repetition campaigns. But there's still something to be said for the security for brands in the 30-second slot during a must-see live event, and that reach and impact will continue to trump the drip-drip-drip saturation pattern of pre-roll spots over the diaspora of individual channels.

It hasn't mattered, up to now, that the Internet has been the only way to reach the affluent for the prime waking hours of their day (i.e., at work and cyberslacking). It hasn't mattered that mass broadcast audiences have continued to disintegrate, or that younger audiences are increasingly unlikely to ever be in front of that big set screen. Mobile will be like desktop/laptop, in that we will measure the metrics and share them with our clients. And if you can measure it, the brand marketing benefits are forgotten, because having the data just prevents any other thought pattern from coming to the surface. Maybe in another ten years.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.