Fighting The Good Fight

The Only Option, Really

This weekend was filled with strong Guy Fun for me, with three events that I enjoy a lot, but are in no way guaranteed to bring satisfaction. The first was hosting my poker game, which went well, with a mild cash in the tournament, and break even in the later cash game. The second was a round of golf at one of my favorite courses, with great weather and good play (had a tap in birdie at a picturesque hole, which is a very rare event for me) making up for slow pace. Today was watching my pro football team (never mind which one; it's not germane to the conversation) and tracking my fantasy football team.

Well, two out of three isn't bad, right?

My teams, both real and fake, lost handily, and both defeats were utterly maddening, in that they didn't play well, but were in contests where just giving up and not watching would have been giving up before the loss was assured. So it was bad time after good, and a situation where I didn't just feel bad about my teams losing, but worse for wasting the time to watch in the first place. (I've also gone on record as not believing in my real team this year, even back in pre-season, and feeling that they were doomed so long as they had the current management... but, well, being right is of no comfort, really.)

Logically, it's a pretty simple solution -- just stop watching the games. I've honestly got enough to do without this amount of timesuck, and my other hobbies are far more participatory. But I've had bad times playing poker and golf as well, and if you give up every hobby that doesn't work out for you every time you do it, you'll be out of hobbies very soon. Besides, I'm a creature of habit, and just losing one isn't very likely, no matter how exasperating my team is. (And yes, they are powerfully exasperating.)

We pivot, as always, to insights about our chosen field. There's been any number of times in my career when, in the back of my mind, I pretty much knew the project was doomed (just like my football team, really)... but had to put my whole heart into it anyway, and find reasons to convince myself to become a fan of it. It's not as if you get into a level of true self-delusion, but without some measure of hope, creative execution of a marketing or advertising program will fall into the dread valley of going through the motions. And no one ever made a good ad or marketing piece that way.

But in the back of my mind, if you had asked me off the record which approaches were going to tank? I almost always knew. And tried like mad to forget while doing the job.

Not every project is going to be a winner. Same as any poker tournament, golf round, sports game, and so on, and so on. But self-sabotaging the process with negativity before hand doesn't make the struggle any easier, or give you any points when it goes off the rails. The only thing it will do for you is give more time to prepare your excuse. And who, really, needs that?

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Stop Saying Ads Must Get Better

Fighting Dirty

In one of the best moments of "Inside Amy Schumer" this past season, there's a skit where a self-defense class is taught, but instead of physical combat, it's emotional combat as part of a male-female romantic relationship. In the middle of many solid laugh lines, a male student tries to get a word in edgewise, and is told that he can never raise his voice... with the joke being that, well, he hadn't raised his voice.

But there it is, the perfect way to escalate an argument into nuclear warfare: tell someone they are doing something when they aren't. (Oh, and if you want a bonus one on this, feel free to accuse someone of always thinking they are right. Well, um, does anyone really argue for things that they think are wrong, without being, well, psychopaths? But I digress.)

We now turn to the reason you read these little musings: the point in re marketing and advertising.

The purveyors of ad blocking software, in a remarkable bit of conflation, seem to believe that blocking ads will (magically?) make advertising better. The argument is that native is great (um, sure, if you've got great content producers who don't mind working in the gray area), and the current ad situation, especially vis a vis mobile, is so bad that you are going to have to burn the village down to save it.

There's some merits to these arguments. No one can, with good conscience, argue that the mobile Web and advertising experience is what it should be. Defending the status quo is borderline impossible, especially when you consider how viewing ads has recently put people at risk from malvertising, let alone data plan costs. Like file sharing before it, the existence of the technology seems to argue for the use of the technology.

But, well, lots of technologies exist that you just can't use any way that you like. Plenty of markets are nearly as messed up as online advertising, not the least of which is healthcare. But pointing a gun at a doctor and demanding service, or bringing a bazooka into your local pharmacy to debate per pill costs, is not going to work. That would just be obvious theft, and result in either incarceration or societal chaos... and asking doctors or pharmacists to fix the healthcare market, since they now have this new stress to make it better, would be insanity. Online advertising will get better when it is properly priced, and when we stop making it dance on the heads of pins (I'm talking about clicks here) that other ad channels don't have to do.

Also, well, how exactly should ads get better? No one wants to give up more of their information to make them better targeted. No one wants to give them more time and space to tell a story. And truth be told, the vast majority of ads aren't supposed to be Great; they are supposed to make you more likely to buy something. Great ads are mostly great for the people who make them, not the companies that run them.

Finally, this. I've worked on more ads than, likely, anyone you have ever met. (Thousands of clients, 15 years in online. It's been fun.) The number of ads that were not the best we could do, given the size of the contract and the need to make a deadline? Damned near none, really. It's what professionals do; you work to the best of your ability, even if the client has challenges (maybe especially if they have challenges). We didn't shortchange anyone. We made the best ads we could. So does, well, just about every ad pro in the business.

So stop saying ads have got to get better, because they are already just about as good as they can be. What needs to improve is the technology and bandwidth around the online experience, the pricing for viewable impressions for branding value, and the understanding from consumers that without some form of value exchange, most professional and quality amateur content will have to go behind pay firewalls, and the Web as we knew it, where traffic meritocracies could spring up based around a roughly fair system of monetization, will end.

With the same quality of ads as any other medium has.

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The Five Impressions Rule

Classic marketing -- and by classic, I mean the stuff we learned when everything wasn't through our own very personal screens -- held that if a marketer was going to have any chance of making the case to sell to a new prospect, they needed to reach that prospect in a wide variety of ways to establish branding and legitimacy. While there were always a few people who had an immediate need, or might buy just on impulse or price, most consumers went with a trusted brand, and that level of trust was achieved through a long tail of broadcast, radio, print and more.

Now, those factors are still important, but they seem increasingly subservient to just in time marketing impressions through digital modes. Word of mouth still matters, but it might come from social media or a blog, rather than a moment in the market.

Where the rubber hits the road, however, is building a brand. Even for online-first brands, broadcast is where the story is told, because that 30 to 60 second spot is so ingrained in the story format that's expected... even if it's not needed. And perhaps those just get ported into online video, with ad-blocking being the only issue to overcome.

Well, that and the fact that public acceptance of ads, especially in the mobile platform, is so low that the blocking software is getting pushed as a performance, bandwidth and security saving measure. Rather than just, well, simple theft.

My belief is that despite the commonality of everything still coming through that single screen, different channels make your look and feel of that screen very different. If something's in your social media feed, that's a different place in your consideration set and mental acuity than an email, native ad, interstitial, audio ad in a podcast, and so on. Daypart might also make for a very different brand impression, on a very different platform, with more or less time on their hands.

It's an open question as to whether the market will support this supposition, because it's all new, and the screen is personal enough to make some think of stalking. But it won't be an open question for long. (Yes, that's a bit of a tell.)

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.