Making Your Own Fun, With Numbers

Dave Atell Rules

This week at my gig, I've gone into serious nerdery as an analyst... all in the pursuit of making something simple for the end user. Taking inspiration from the sabermetric baseball analysis that first fired my imagination as a kid, I'm attempting to role up a myriad number of metrics into one index. The goal is to give my co-workers and clients something where they don't have to deal with all of the complexity, but still get a sense of what makes for a better and worse campaign, both in its own category and as a global performer. It's been a ton of number crunching along with heavy thought processes, and there are times when I just have to get up and take a walk, before my eyes get fixated and my brain fogs up.

It's very different from past gigs, but the reason why it's fun -- and yeah, hours with numbers can, honestly, be fun -- is because I'm learning new things about our consumers and clients, and what I learn today frequently opens up something new I can learn tomorrow. There's also the fact that I'm learning not just from what our internal teams are doing, but also what runs through our pipes that originated in outside sources.

I can't get into the absolute details of this, of course, because that's proprietary, and something you need to be a client to learn. But what I've got is a mix of right and left brain, numbers producing actionable creative moves, creative moves creating discernible differences in analytics.

This isn't the first time I've had this kind of professional experience, and honestly, once you've had it, you pretty much don't ever want to work a gig that doesn't offer that opportunity. I'll even go one further. If you are at a company that's at a certain headcount or early stage in its evolution, you might need this kind of learning engine... and if you don't have it, you're probably not going to make it in the long run. (There have been gigs where you would think that you were going to get this, but the reality was less than that, mostly because of shortfalls in other teams.)

The key, of course, is actionable insight, from statistically significant sample sizes, and in aspects you can replicate at scale -- and to not lose your edge from the number work. These aren't easy to find, but they are out there, especially in industries that aren't at the forefront of innovation. Or, that you can port from other consumer categories.

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Feel free to comment, as well as 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.

Five Paths To Terrible Marketing

A good friend of mine is a DJ for a college radio station, and needed a theme for her set before an upcoming fund drive. On a whim, I suggested "Love Songs For Terrible People," because the kinds of challenging singer-songwriters that make me happy tend to go in that direction. She's taken the suggestion, and the set will happen this week. Happy to help, really.

As I took my dog out for his walk this evening, I started together my own play list of songs that would meet the criteria. Then, I had the small thought; what would tips for terrible marketing and advertising pros look like? And the suggestions came even faster than songs. They include...

5) Focus on single metrics only.

Do you do banner ads? Concentrate only on click rate. Email? Only open rates matter. Radio and outdoor are wins if you can track the placement to call center volume, business reply cards to mail-in reply rates, and so on, and so on. Anyone that tries to discuss complexity in these matters is clearly trying to disguise weak creative, or some other issue. The world isn't complex, and marketing success or failure is all about making one magic number move.

4) Aggressive short-term strategies are totally worth it, especially in online.

Hey, remember that magic metric stuff? Let's spike your click rate. No one remembers things like fake close boxes, Windows-style UI, clickbait treatments and other gray / black hat moves. Plus, the Internet is filled with easy going people who never complain about anything, and aggressive testing just goes down the memory hole. You also totally won't lose clients and staff over this sort of thing.

3) Testing is for the untalented.

You just know this is going to work, right? So much so that you don't need to isolate the variable, get a clear sense of the impact moving forward, document the findings to convince other clients to roll to the winning practice, and so on. Don't let anything slow down the speed of your genius! (Including hidebound concepts like statistical significance. That's just for academics.)

2) Ignore the history.

Hey, it's a brave new world where all of the rules have changed. Social media isn't anything like social media of the past, mobile won't follow a similar path to desktop and laptop, and the fragmentation of the audience that's been proven out in broadcast doesn't have any impact at all on your business. Oh, and seasonality is for offline. Has no bearing in what you do.

1) Your industry is unique, and has nothing to learn from other consumer categories.

Your customers are very, very special snowflakes, who never overlap with other demographic rules of the road, and consequently, can only be spoken to in the way that they've already been spoken to. (Shame, really, we might have been able to do something creative.)

Anyway... hopefully you've gotten the point by now. Marketing is actually very complex, because the world is complex. There are very few marketing mediums that work in total isolation, with no carry over or other considerations. Direct response in any medium is great, but if it doesn't convert well or profitably, you're not going to have a business pretty soon. Making everything simple works only if you can get everything down to an ROI metric, and even then, you have to judge in context to opportunity costs, and with the likelihood that less trackable channels are not getting enough credit.

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Got any other paths for terrible marketers? Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Media We Deserve

The News Process

Going off the reservation today, and working outside of marketing and advertising. We'll get back to it next week, I promise.

So in the past week or so, the following items have hit the news.

> There is a strong possibility of blue skies and water frozen under the surface of Pluto, of all places. If there's heat being generated under the surface, which seems likely... well, um, possibility of life? Seems unlikely, but no more than water, really.

> The Hubble Telescope is pointing at a cluster of highly unlikely matter just at the edge of the Milky Way, which is either a combination of wildly improbable geographic events... or maybe, just maybe, a massive planned structure befitting an advanced alien civilization.

> The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out confirms that objects can manipulate others at a distance, which means that monumentally fantastic stuff like loopholes and teleportation just might actually be possible. No, seriously.

> There's a massive asteroid that's just going to miss the planet in less than two weeks. Ye gads.

Did you miss these stories? More likely than not.

Now, did you miss the "news" that a movie from the '80s that involved time travel hit an anniversary? Or did you miss the "news" that there is a new movie coming out that dates back to the same era, and has excited lots of people who like to dress up in costume outside of Halloween?

No, no, no, you did not.

The potential for life, and another place in the solar system that might one day be a useful way station in our eventual migration to other worlds, should be an astounding deal. I would, personally, love to hear what major religious figures would say about what this would mean for the various books. (I'm thinking that other worlds are just for practice.) Wormholes could make the game-ending distances between worlds less, well, game endish. An alien civilization would simply be the biggest news event in human history, and create a massive consideration of whether or not contact would be worth the risk. Our own history of interaction with life that has lower forms of technology is not particularly encouraging on this front. And a big damned rock entering the atmosphere would be the biggest weather story ever.

But by all means, folks... let's talk about a movie or two some more. Since those have sponsors.

There's an old saying in political science circles; people get the government they deserve.

I guess the same goes for media now as well.

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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 top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.