Today In I Don't Get It: Awards

Stop Stalking Us

After reading about the Oscars this week, I'm left with my usual reaction... and that is that, just, well, I just don't get why people care about such things. And before you get the wrong impression, this isn't about who got nominated, or the recurring demographic breakdown of that group. Rather, it's why the awards exist in the first place, and why anyone cares about them.

I suppose it's fun to complain about things that don't ever change... wait, that's actually not fun at all. Plus, there's all of these columns about what needs to be done to make the show better -- as if the show ever really changes. Or who got snubbed, as if the snubbing weren't probably better for your economic prospects than to be nominated, but not win it. But beyond all of that, I just don't remember ever making a decision about watching a movie based on whether it won a statue or six. I watch movies based on reviews that probably never mention the awards, or because of the personnel involved.

At this point, you might start to wonder how we'll tie this into marketing and advertising... and, well, it's simple. Have you ever made the decision to hire a marketing and advertising professional based on the awards they have?

That's not a rhetorical, by the way. Feel free to testify to it in the comments. But when you get into my world of analytics fueling creative, lather rinse repeat, awards just aren't part of the flywheel. I'm not saying that we'd turn them down.

Just that we've honestly never even remembered to apply for them, mostly because we've been too busy doing the, you know, work...

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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.

The Danger of Monoculture, Or How Potatoes Should Inform Your Marketing & Advertising Choices

Long Fry Me

In my social feed this weekend was a marvelous rant about, of all things, potatoes. Don't worry, it applies to marketing and advertising, and most specifically, email work. But first, we've got to get the background, or What I Learned.

It turns out that there has been hundreds of varieties of potatoes in our past. The Incas are said to have had thousands, many of which have not been seen before or since. What has happened in the centuries since is that the commercial market has driven down the number of potatoes that are viable economically, which means that we're down to, at most, 50 or 60 kinds of potatoes today.

At this point, your eyes may glaze over a bit and say, um, Dave? It's a potato. How different can they be, really? If no one insisted that we keep eating them, maybe they tasted terrible. And the answer is... well, I have no idea, and you have no idea, and if we applied the same logic to birds, the world would be a lot less fun for a whole lot of people, and maybe the skies would be thick with nothing but pigeons. Not exactly appealing.

But leave that as it lies. The single biggest potato on the planet, from an economic standpoint, is the Russet Burbank. And the reason why the RB is such an economic monster is because it makes long and perfect French fries, which is to say, it's more or less the official potato of McDonald's.

Once again, I'm going to be rude and anticipate your reaction: you have a problem with McDonald's french fries? Dear Lord in heaven, no. I don't eat them much any more, because I am of the age where denying myself pleasures is its own strange reward, and once you start to consume them, its pretty much impossible to stop. So I just don't put myself in their path. (This is more trouble than you might imagine, in that there is a McDonald's within a 3-minute walk of my home. Troubling. Luckily, as I write this, it's too late in the evening to cave. Moving on.)

The problem isn't with the commerce; it's with the potato itself. RBs are adored by more than just fast food lovers. They also bite the dust to every fungus, weevil, blight and microbe that you can imagine. In terms of sustainability, the RB is a fainting violet. If it were a heroine in an action movie, it would faint a half dozen times, and be abandoned by the hero for something with a little more meat on her bones. If it were a stock car at Daytona, it would lead after five laps, then explode. It's just not meant for massive cultivation.

Which means that, well, we have to force things. Massive micro-management, fertilization, et cetera. You pretty much need soil that grows nothing but RBs to grow RBs... which puts us right into a rather substantial point in human history, at least as it relates to people related to me. The Irish Potato Famine, which happened in the 19th century when there was also a monoculture that couldn't overcome a blight, and flooded America with so many Irish, it makes for all kinds of old-school anti-immigrant moments now. But let's walk it back from the political.

In email and digital marketing and advertising, testing to a monoculture is depressingly easy. You A/B test to the point of optimal efficiency, usually around a single metric if you want to set up maximum possible fail, or just make one number. Let's say it's open rates, or click, since that's easiest to monitor. Then the world changes -- ISPs stop delivering that kind of subject line, consumers stop responding to that call to action, dayparts fail and so on and so on -- and hey presto, you've got a monoculture that's failing, and all kinds of Crisis. With no data that says, um, let's try Next Best Potato and see if we can get 95% of what we had.

There's a better way, of course.

A rich biosphere, with an environment that looks at multiple metrics. A tolerance for "losing" art, so long as it provides a good learning point. Re-testing "optimal" practices to make sure the world hasn't changed dramatically without your notice. Understanding that some campaigns might be better served by multi-use, or video run times, or tracked acquisition, or synergy to other marketing channels and collateral. And so on.

It's a lot more complicated than just making one kind of potato, and maybe even a little less lucrative.

But only in the short run.

Oh, and there's also this...

We're marketing and advertising people, not farmers.

And we have a hell of a lot more fun, and learn a hell of a lot more in the doing, when we make more than one kind of product.

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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.

Testing Versus Winning

Something Like This

Here's a dirty little secret about marketing and advertising.. a significant percentage of the people who do this kind of work pretty much *hate* testing.

There are reasons for this, of course.

Testing takes time, and discipline. It can be screwed up in any number of ways, many of them just plain maddening, and if you don't catch the mistake, you can do true damage with a false reading. It requires you to be willing to "waste" a significant percentage of your inventory on creative that no one is rooting for. Worst of all, it can take your brand-new work, the stuff that you are exceptionally proud of, and fast-track it to the dumpster, because data just won't be stopped, really. And if you want to be truly doctrinaire about it, once you start testing, you never really *stop*, because it acts as your de facto insurance policy, to ensure that your control is still optimal.

I've had any number of clients refuse to run a test, just because they were so in love with the new art, and/or that dissatisfied with the control. In each and every case, I've tried to push back for all of the direct marketing virtues. In most of these cases, the client stayed with their gut and ran without a test, and (here's where the direct marketing purist in me feels ill) it sometimes really worked out for them.

Note the pronoun there: them, not me.

This is also where a couple of cross purposes come into play. Part of being a marketer is being a scientist, and that science doesn't really have an end goal. The journey is the thing. Creative can always be optimized more, there's always some new clue or option not tried from the data, and the world will give you clues, if you're open to hear them.

The executive can look at this and wonder when the law of diminishing returns kicks in, or question the talent involved from creative professionals who would subject themselves to the long work of incremental steps to optimal. It all seems like something that you wouldn't get from top tier agency work, or a process that would lend itself to automation... but that's never been the way it's worked out for me, or how it seems to operate in the real world.

Now that we've gone through all of the reasons why people don't do it, the reasons why it's still the best way to work: it ensures that you never damage your client. It ensures job security, because you've either got a lift, or you've got learnings that will later result in a lift. (Or marketability for a future client.) It creates either single variable steps that take you were you want to go, or if those aren't driving enough of a data difference to pass statistical significance, bigger swings. And if you're fortunate enough to either work in a position where you can see a lot of tests go through the pipe, or in a cross-medium or category house, one where you can bring in learnings from another field, you can seem a lot smarter than you actually am.

I've been fortunate enough to work in this kind of business for decades, and have never felt "burned out"... because we've tested, and learned, and used the results from that testing to fuel the next chapter in the story. Plus, with technological changes, the ability to beat a control has never been "easier", or more important.

So if you're one of those marketing and advertising pros that considers test to be just another four letter word that's not worth the trouble, or beneath your talents...

Well, actually, stay just the way you are.

Because you might be smarter than me, or more talented...

But you won't be more effective.

And I might need to beat you one day.

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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.