Hype(r) Targeting Ads

Does Not Seem Very Selly To Me

There's an odd little prank that's been making the rounds of Reddit recently. In it, a marketing pro does a concept exercise to see if he can do a Facebook campaign to an audience of one -- that one being his roommate. Using personal information of issues and interests about his target, the pro makes copy-specific creative and launches. Said roommate notices the ads, posts to his stream about how creeped out he is by this, and pulls out of Facebook before the prank can be revealed.

The short lesson from this is, of course, do not take a marketing pro for a roommate. Or, at least, not this one. The longer lesson is a little more actionable for our purposes.

Some background. I've been at three different high impact adtech companies, and while all of them were smart enough to avoid personally identifiable information (aka, PII, or the thing that ad tech companies never want to have, for reasons that Rhyme With Beagle), that didn't prevent us from making strong claims about how great our data was. And, by the power of inference, how you would have to suffer with less if you used our competitors.

Need to reach someone the instant that they were about to buy from a competitor? Three start ups ago had just the thing, with 100% deliverability and viewability in a proprietary ad format. How about doing the deed in dedicated emails where you were more polite, but had high control on frequency? That was two start ups ago, with high legal compliance and all kinds of auxiliary programs to make sure you were on the side of the angels. Want to not just reach, but deepen the lifetime value through showing additional SKUs that were certain to delight your prospect and make the cart size bigger? That was the last start up, and those recs would follow you around the Web like a bloodhound if the spend was high enough. And so on, and so on. Ad Tech Land is not exactly shy about telling you how truly wonderful their data is, and how the targeting makes a marketer's life far more lucrative and rewarding.

And yet, as you might guess from my current professional standing of not working for any of those guys, many campaigns at all of these stops would underperform, especially when you factored in ROI metrics that take into account higher spends to reach that juicy audience. How do you fix it? There are a lot of ways, from simple analysis of creative to see if the blocking and tackling (calls to action, entry points, etc.) was up to snuff. Testing the offer to see if it was truly right for the brand. Varying by daypart, platform, recency, and so on. Changing bid levels or payment methods. There's a lot of options, but sometimes targeting is not enough. Brand, offer and list trump creative, and always will.

But if you are very far apart from an acceptable ROI threshold on v1, for whatever reason, you'll never get the chance to iterate your way to tolerable. No client wants to hear that the things that can't easily be fixed -- their brand and, likely offer -- are at fault more than the targeting. And before you fold your tent and just blame the list anyway, some clients will try to complete the Hail Mary pass by making the art "stronger" with downright creepy and over-the-top targeting copy or imagery.

So, for the benefit of those about to waste good time after bad... your potential future customers do not now, and have not ever, cared about your efforts to put together a great list. Telling them about such things is pointless at best, and when you combine that sort of thing with cyber-creepy copy ("Still interested?" "We miss you!" "You forgot this!"), it not only irritates the prospect, it can also harm the brand. Oh, and it doesn't generally work in control cells against other executions, and if you do this kind of thing often enough, you can easily train a client base to wait until after a cart abandon to get a margin-crushing price. It's not easy to make retargeting a bad idea, but it can be done.

I've had any number of clients that felt compelled to tell the prospects of how special the targeting was to reach them, or how long it's been since they were on site, or why they are getting this offer now. Sometimes, they even go through with it despite my strong recommendation not to, and at that point, we're in the realm of my special Law of Dumb Clients. Which is: "If a client is going to do a dumb thing, and you've told them why it's a dumb thing, and they insist on doing it anyway... do the dumb thing *quickly*, while getting their payment ASAP, because they will be out of business soon enough from doing dumb things."

Anyway, back to the creepy text and selects. Beyond the ethics and lack of efficiency, if your list choices are tight enough, you can't scale. (And congrats, by the way, on finding an online advertising method that doesn't scale. That takes talent.) If you tell the prospect what you know about them, you are wasting everyone's time and being off-putting.

Instead, give your super-targeted list a different offer. Make the creative execution more about the SKU in question. Add a one-time coupon code and clock to redemption. Give them a price break at higher spend levels. Link to testimonials, social media plays or other reasons that would get someone over the last mile. And give them the option of a fine sausage dinner, rather than a documentary on how it's made. You'll both eat, and sleep, much better afterwards.

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You have read this far, so feel free to connect with me onLinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can hit the quote box at the top right of 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.

On the awful, awful practice of using data for ad targeting

(sung) I'm Against It...

I read a study recently where, news of news, it was discussed that respondents didn't want to share their data in regards to the ads they see. (Here it is, in case you want to see the shocking news for yourself.)

Good thing you were sitting down for that, right?

Rather than point out all of the things that advertising does for the Internet -- i.e., more or less pay for highly attractive and useful chunks of it -- I thought I'd just add this small fact to the list of things that people don't like.

> Getting ads that are not relevant to their interests

> Getting ads that are targeted from their personal data

> Paying for content or apps

> Having content sites with ad formats that might get noticed / i.e., paid for

> Getting older

> Getting fatter

> Having to prepare food before eating it

> Having to clean up, rather than having someone else do it for them

> Spending money, perhaps on people that prepare or clean up after food preparation

Anyway, you get the point. And while I really don't want to come off as a cranky realist or apologist to overly aggressive forms of advertising, the plain and simple fact is that without a reasonable revenue stream, quality in content has only one direction to go. Take a look at all of the solid blogs in every consumer category that are no longer with us. Or how online newspaper sites are continually pivoting from free to paywall access, and also shedding staff. I get that this is a generation raised on the wisdom of crowds and the opinions of their friends, but that doesn't fund quality journalism, new music, books, etc... at least, any of those that don't exist in protected and proprietary distribution methods.

But to all of those who believe that the laws of marketing physics do not apply because the new tech is just so very very different from the old tech... well, do you enjoy getting untargeted ads?

And maybe a very large number of them, since they don't work as well as as the targeted ones?

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You have 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 hit the box at top right for a project. .

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.

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

Height isn't everything

This isn't going to start as marketing and advertising, but hang with me, we'll get there pretty quick.

Tonight in Cleveland in the NBA Finals, Golden State coach Steve Kerr tried something he hadn't done all year, in nearly 100 games. He benched his starting center (Andrew Bogut), moving his power forward (Draymond Green) over to the center position. With the empty slot, he brought Andre Iguodala, a versatile guard/forward, off the bench to start.This made his team very "small", and put them at a considerable risk for not getting enough rebounds of missed shots. It also meant that more players on the floor were offensive threats, as Iguodala is better than Bogut in that respect.

You probably couldn't get away with this kind of move all season long, because your shorter players would get worn down and injured from having to go against bigger players every game. Kerr did the move because his team was down 2-1 in a best of seven series, and from an odds realism standpoint, in serious jeopardy of losing the championship to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers if they didn't win this game. They had trailed for most of the previous three games of the series, and had lost home-court advantage. And in the first few minutes of the game, as Cleveland used its taller players to control rebounds and race their way to a seemingly instant 7-0 lead, it looked like a disastrous gamble.

Kerr called a timeout. Golden State started playing better, with Iguodala in particular having his best game of the year. The smaller players increased the tempo, and got to more loose balls to mitigate the rebounding problem. Cleveland's tallest player, Timofey Mozgov, had his best game of the series, but the Warriors took the early lead and never let it go. The series is now tied, and Cleveland coach David Blatt is under pressure to somehow adapt to the Warriors' short lineup. (By the way, to real NBA fans, this is an overly simplistic narrative. Please forgive me; as noted before, we're going to a larger point about marketing and advertising.)

Kerr probably didn't want to do this. Bogut has been a great player for him, and Iguodala has been terrific at leading the Warriors bench players in limited minutes. But he felt that, due to the 2-1 disadvantage and how the play had gone for the first few games, that he had no better option. What he was doing wasn't working, and to just keep losing the same way was not an option. He had statistical evidence that his team did well when they went small, and knew that increasing the tempo with faster players would help his team, but he doesn't make this move from a position of strength.

Now, back to the marketing and advertising.

I've worked on campaigns for thousands of clients over the course of my career. Frequently, I've been brought in to "put out fires", as performance has not met expectations, and we needed to increase the actionable rates to retain the business.

You might think this is, well, a bad way to work. Deadlines are short, tempers are frayed, pressure is high, and everyone knows the cost of failure if you can't hit the numbers. Sometimes the client is downright angry on calls when things have gotten to this point, and challenge your expectations or ability to serve. People can also get very defensive about what is working, what isn't, and who needs to step up their game to save the relationship.

Here's something you might not expect: this is frequently the most efficient creative cycle for new projects, and it's been the source of some of my favorite moments in business.

When a campaign is at risk, what you have is a pain point. Something needs to change, and change immediately. So much of the blocking agents for offers, creative practices, copy and more are dramatically scaled back. You also can usually work faster, with fewer revision cycles. Treat the project carefully, with professionalism and proactivity, and you can create your most attached long-term client.

The phenomenon is not limited to sports or creative, of course. In politics, campaigns that lose primaries might switch messaging and try to change the narrative. Financial analysts will change their recommendations or investment mixes. Musicians might try new formats, writers new categories, and so on, and so on. Success, seen in this light, can be something of a trap, and curtail learning and innovation.

So the next time you encounter a crisis, consider it for what it is -- a limited-time opportunity, with a fantastic payout if you turn the situation around. And even if you can't, your chance for learning is higher here than anything else in your workday.

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You have 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 hit the RFP box at the top right of 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 a free quote..