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.

The Next Scandal in Online Advertising Is…

Harder to do online?

It has been a rough year for online advertising, mostly from two long-standing concerns, both of which seem to be gaining in importance. The first is privacy, the second is viewability. But with other media choices having their own issues, and the field doing well in terms of increased reach via mobile, the tide seems to be turning on the pure numbers. But we are not out of the woods yet, at least to my eyes, because I see a fresh problem on the horizon.

To explain it, I will need to go through a brief history lesson.

In 1977 in the U.S., Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act. The purpose of the bill was to end the practice of redlining, which was where financial institutions would use maps to discriminate against lenders, primarily in minority areas. Redlining goes beyond cautious lending and straight into discrimination, as it does not take the individual’s qualifications or trustworthiness into account. It also seems like something that the free market would punish, since a redlining institution leaves money on the table, but that is not the point I am trying to make here.

What is intriguing about online marketing and advertising is how even though the technology is new and ever-changing, the challenges are the same as before. Offer, list, creative, in roughly the same ratios as before, for direct. Context, timing and buying cycle, with benefits for cross-channel penetration and frequency. And in the case of remarketing / retargeting, combined with cookie information or device targeting… well, redlining. But this time, it’s more about the individual.

Let’s take this out of the theoretical, so we can make this a little easier to understand.

Two different prospects come to an apparel site that caters to style-forward affluent individuals in the 18 to 25 demographic. The first is highly active on several social media sites, creates content on their own, and is highly active in the category. They also add items to a cart easily, abandon those items often, revisit on mobile, and do not respond to email.

The second prospect comes to the same site for the first time. The visit is out of character or category for the individual, as they usually spend their time on content sites that do not index to the apparel demographic. They are less active in social, spend much more time with email, and do not have the same level of use from mobile.

In the first case, we likely have a dramatically better prospect for lifetime value and referrals – and, in all likelihood, one that is much more sensitive on price. The second is, at best, someone who might use the site periodically for gifting purposes. At worst, we might be in the realm of a fraudulent purchase.

From a business standpoint, it makes sense to float the first profile a better price. In any event, it makes sense to pitch them on a loyalty program, which is a relatively uncontroversial way to offer different pricing levels. But it also makes sense to make the more competitive deal right away.

So far, we are still on the side of defensible business decisions and matching the individual prospect. Nothing too controversial here, unless you are the second prospect, and find out about the practice. 

But it is a very short, very slippery slope into more unseemly areas, where the higher price comes because a brand wants not to reward a higher lifetime value prospect, but to “protect” the brand by having it more likely to appear with desired demographics. The capacity for abuse is, of course, a lot greater with bigger ticket items like financial services, and much easier to disguise, since it is not on an easy to comprehend discrimination level, like a map.

Targeting allows for all of this to happen not in a dark future dystopia, but right now. Public relations risk and the sheer complexity involved in multiple pricing models makes it unlikely, not impossible. There are already recent news stories about how cell phone companies are complicit in the practice, by the way. This isn’t a problem in theory.

Some of these moves may be defensible, both in a court of law and in the court of public opinion… and in all likelihood, it will not be the last that you have heard of it. Especially in an election year, with net neutrality showing as something that activates public interest.

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Speaking of a targeting with a relevant offer, 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 the page. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.