Putting Numbers To Nonsense

Ever run into a situation where your client is just insisting on what you know is a poor practice?

It happens a lot, especially in digital, where metrics can be learned pretty quickly. At some of my gigs, I've been front line with clients who just had to do things in a certain way, even when it meant they were leaving money on the table.

(A small aside: of all the places to leave money, isn't the table one of your better choices? At least there, you'd think you'd be able to get to it pretty quickly. Moving on.)

You'd be surprised, honestly, by just how hard it is to change some processes, especially in more conservative verticals. Bringing in more aggressive e-commerce practices and design work can seem like you are downgrading the brand or threatening the margins.

In moments like this, your only real course of action as a marketing and advertising change agent is to try to put numbers to the practice. Ideally, this is done in a test cell, but if you aren't getting enough traction to change the poor practice in the first place, maybe a test is also asking too much.

Here's the process that I usually take.

1) Defuse the situation. Often, changes can be seen as a threat to outside creatives, or a situation where you can come off as insensitive or threatening. So what you need to do is point out that your motives in making this recommendation are for the long-term success of your client. It seems like something that's so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but believe me -- it needs to be said.

2) Clothe it in a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) moment. If a competitor is doing better because of the practice, if you feel like you've established a little bit of rapport, then show the better practice in question. While you should never quote a performance boost in a way that seems promissory for obvious liability issues, quoting a general "up to" number can be effective. 

3) Don't get doctrinaire. You don't need to make this a my way or the highway kind of approach. If your new way of doing things inspires a test because it speaks to a new thought process, that may be a bigger win that what you were recommending. Remember, the point isn't to just improve performance; it's also to learn something significant.

4) Make it seem like their idea. If you can tie the thought process from your clients's supplied materials, it's a spoonful of sugar. Again, it's all about where you get to, not who will get credit for the direction.

5) Identify the blocking agent, and if necessary, set yourself a reminder. Every meaningful change tends to come all of a sudden in most testing situations, so if you do find yourself blocked, keep in mind the name of the person performing the block, and a 3 to 6 month window where you ask again. Persistence pays, especially if you work in a restrictive environment.

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Persistence can also pay off when you like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit our RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Intrigue In The Inbox

Must... Look...

In the Gartner Group's most recent Hype Cycle Research Report, published about a month ago, there were literally thousands of technologies discussed. On the left side of the axis is all of the stuff that gets venture capital dollars, where the hype starts to build around advancements that will either change the world or just waste a lot of money. Bioacoustic computing, smart dust, human augmentation, 3D bioprinting systems for organ transplant, and so on, and so on. There's no difficulty in getting excited about what these might do, if only they, well, work.

As we move deeper, and the tech becomes more and more real, the slate of development becomes known as the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Here, we've got stuff like self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, wearables, and so on. Stuff that's real, but where all of the kinks haven't been worked out, or how it's supposed to make money.

The next stage is the Trough of Disillusionment, where the hype burns off and we're just left with the realization that while the product might be real, it's also no longer owning a limitless field of potential as to how it's going to change the world. Gartner puts cryptocurrency (aka, bitcoins) here, along with augmented reality and hybrid cloud computing. This is the state where start ups shake out to just the survivors, where the venture capital gets antsy and starts to look for the next new thing, and folks in the space are just getting irritated that what might be an actual business is just getting nicked for a lack of sex appeal. Survive that, and you get to the Slope of Enlightenment, ending in the Plateau of Productivity.

Email, as you might guess, doesn't appear anywhere in this graph. People have been making money in email for so long, you are much more likely to hear how the channel is Dead, rather than anything with any kind of monetization and appeal.

The truly funny thing? There may have never been a better time for the channel.

Why? Well, the obvious point is mobile, which means that the daypart to get emails in front of the audience you need to reach just became, well, damned near 24/7. The average person checks their smartphone over 100 times a day, and so long as the device is latching up to email -- more on that later -- it's just an always-on channel. Send at a time when no one else is sending, and you might get full attention and unmatched consideration.

The next part is, well, the comparative misery of so many other channels. TV has a massive demographic problem, plus ad skipping for additional monetization misery, for anything but DVR-proof live events. Online ads are getting blocked with a vengeance, and have viewability and maladvertising problems to boot. Print and outdoor and radio -- it's not as if any channel, other than email, has actually had life get better recently.

There are, however, problems, and they are major ones. Young people don't read email. They live in social networks, IM and chat... and while they might eventually graduate into email, they also, well, might not. Reading isn't exactly on the rise compared to image-based work, and the channel is under constant stress from overuse, filtering, deliverability, and all of the other challenges that pros have worked on for, well, decades.

But there's still that device in your hands, and the plain and simple fact that when you read an email, there is nothing else on your screen, or in your mind. HTML5 will let you incorporate video and conversions without a landing page visit, and reaching an affluent audience is entirely possible. There are major tactical advantages here that no other channel can match.

Email doesn't sizzle. It just works. And might for decades, or a lot less.

More intriguing than you realized, no?

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Feel free to 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.

How Fast It Goes

Timeless?

This last weekend for Labor Day, I took the family to our favorite amusement park for our annual holiday tradition.  As I rode down the modified ski lift that the kids insist on taking as a low-energy palate cleanser between thrill rides, and saw the whole of the valley and park before me, the kids lazily kicked their heels up with their cousin on the bench ahead of us. It was all very serene, and more than a little wistful. My wife took out her cell phone and took a minute-long movie for her Facebook feed. I just looked, becoming very aware of the cinematic nature before us, as more and more of the park revealed itself from the trees.

While the view seemed timeless, it really was anything but. There were new rides that we had never seen, an ever-growing mix of people, changing lights and so on, and so on. As usually happens around this time of year, the trees are just starting to turn, and the mix of smells from the forest and the food is never quite the same twice. Change is the only constant.

Changing even faster than the park were the passengers in the car ahead of us. My kids are 10 and 15, and while they both still love the place, things change, and at some point, maybe vacations together might seem more like an obligation than a treat. Also, well, my eldest keeps getting attention in ways that haven't happened before. There may come a day when she decides she has more interesting things to do than hang out in the same old park with the same old parents.

Life Is Changing. It's changing really, really fast.

From a marketing and advertising standpoint, I'm well over halfway done on the legal limits of parenting, with changes to my demographic class coming up quick. And the need to keep in touch with new technology, thoughts and and ideas has never been greater, really.

But the funny thing about those changes? The kids are going through them with speed, too. We were in a hotel room for a couple of days, and the TV screen never went on. That wouldn't have happened just two years ago, when we took our last vacation. It's also not because my kids are that virtuous and active, but because they'd much rather spend time with their personal screens (phones and tablets), where the content is more under their control, and they have more privacy and interaction.

Media buyers will note that their business is just fine, really. They sound a lot like record labels a couple of decades ago, or travel agents, and so on. That's just how fast it goes, and nothing is slowing down. Or probably ever will.

Even in the most timeless of places.

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Feel free to 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.