Short Term Or Short Sighted

One of the things that I do at my day job is read white papers and take in Webinars on trends in my industry. And what you see, over and over, is the move from mass adtech moves, and spray and pray distribution, to custom work, dynamic generation for personal relevance, and a concierge level of service.

There's a simple reason to this: custom work is a service, instead of a commodity, and making money from commodities isn't fun or sexy or what venture capital likes to see from adtech start ups. Commodities are always subject to third-world offsourcing and your revenue model getting hacked, because, well, hey, commodity. As an old manager told me once, you don't want to be the guy putting sugar in packets; you want to be the guy putting some zero calorie sweetener in packets, because that's going to get you a margin premium. (I have no idea if he was right on the sugar, by the way, but the point is still valid.)

And all of this seems fine and inevitable and sensible, especially when you've got consumer segments that are lucrative and small... but this also runs straight into the wall that is scalability, while also taking some serious damage from the possibilities of cybercreep and privacy actions.

Having worked on the front lines at a number of places where the tech allowed us to do wildly targeted tactics, what I can tell you from personal experience is this... abusing the potentials does not pay off. What winds up happening is that a sizable percentage of the group gets spooked by your messaging, and quickly takes steps to make sure that you lose this kind of access. Also, to let others know about the practice.

But in the short term, it works, but only if you look at things from surface and immediate metrics. And you get to look proactive about driving better rates, especially if your goal is short-term success that will prove you should be around for the long run.

Unfortunately, what inevitable winds up happening is that you eventually get to a better metric: return on investment, or ROI. That's not always a great moment for marketers, especially if the new customer acquisition turns out to be, well, a very unprofitable kind of customer. To wit; if you have only ever conditioned them to buy on price, to expect a deal if they don't buy right away, to never pay for shipping or without a coupon code... well, how good does that boost in short-term rates look now?

The better way to run your business, in my opinion, is to get to the metrics that matter as soon as possible, and to get buy-in from your management on a more holistic and long-term approach.

With the obvious caveat that, well, you need good management to get to this better place.

But if you aren't working for good management in the first place, I have one piece of advice for you... hit the short-term goal.

And make sure you're looking for your next gig, and getting paid as soon as possible for this one.

Because bad management can end more than your marketing gig, if you catch my drift...

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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.

Love Your Outliers

Go Right, Young Marketer

Today in the column, I'm going to do something odd: direct you to a long-form piece that has nothing to do with marketing and advertising. So go read about "The Lazarus Effect" in the New York Times Magazine, then come on back. (Oh, and if you refuse to click, the story covers what cancer researchers use to refer to the phenomenon of a drug having an unexpectedly great outcome for a patient, which isn't predicted based on past performance in the sample group. That's where the phrase of "extraordinary responders" comes in. It turns out that part of the massive undertaking in curing cancer is that each person's fight has aspects of unique genetic coding, and we just don't know enough yet, but are learning more than we ever have before, partly through, well, studying the outliers. This isn't meant to give false hope for a cure, because the awful nature of cancer progression is that all of the great aspects of evolution are at work in reverse, but yeah, it's OK to be hopeful anyway.)

This week at my gig, a marketing program brought in a startlingly high response rate, about 2X more than predicted, for a very mature program. The amount was statistically significant, in a reporting system that's stable, and possibly explained due to creative and tactical choices. Needless to say, I'm thrilled by the performance, and staring it down to see if I can replicate it with other programs. But in and of itself, it's just one campaign, just one data point in an ever-growing sea of numbers, and might not be a breakthrough.

Now, the other side of the street. I also performed a post-mortem on a challenged campaign, where the client tried something very different from our usual practices, and wound up producing numbers that were substantially below our medians. A co-worker who is new to this sort of analysis called the result terrible, and while I don't disagree, I had to bring in my perspective... which is that no data is terrible, especially because we didn't know what metrics the client was anticipating. While the set of numbers we got in this instance looked like underperformance, we will only really know that later, once these metrics prove out as ordinary, or give us an outlier.

So if your marketing programs are delivering consistency and certainty and a narrow performance array, shake it up. Push your levers, either creative or tactical, more to the margins (in, of course, a test cell). Even if this means that you leave some money on the table from something that you'll later think "Well, of course that didn't work," it's still got crazy value, because it puts a number on the practice, and lets you counsel clients later away from trouble.

Because if you are in this for the long-term benefit of your client and career, you quickly learn that the outliers drive the learning... and that any marketer or advertiser that isn't learning isn't, well, likely to make a career of this.

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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.

Why People Hate Marketers: Back To School Fuel

Like This, But With More Money

In my marketing and advertising feed today? Back to school sales, forecasts, and strategies.

No, seriously.

And I understand the rationale. Planning ahead is required in this line of work, as any number of August projects with icicles and Christmas trees in my past have shown. There's only so much in the way of Dads and Grads that you can pitch, especially since all of that stuff should have been in the pipe a month ago, and July 4 just doesn't hit that many consumer categories, or extends to that much spend. But the thing about back to school is that unlike those projects, they don't hit you straight in the teeth of something you might already be struggling with. Thinking about Christmas in the dog days of summer can actually be kind of pleasant.

To wit, it's mid-May, folks. There's still a month left in the current school year here in the mid-Atlantic region where I live. Weeks of rousting the kids out of bed to do something they don't want to do, weeks more of slogging through the interminable paperwork, weeks of trying to keep their eyes on the prize of grades and attendance when they already have eight months of pulling on that rope. They are beaten down. I am beaten down. The sun is finally coming out, and the days are getting longer, and the distractions are getting thicker than the lawns on a daily basis. Dances. Concerts. Proms. Bike rides and blockbuster movies and cousins visiting from places where the school year is already over, and all of it -- every single last distraction -- is more interesting to them, and me, than the day-in day-out of the last six weeks. Especially the last two weeks, when the schedules go all sidewise because we don't want to spend on air conditioning with our tax dollars.

It's the last mile of the current run, which is always, well, the one that takes the most discipline to complete. Oh, and admitting any of this out loud? Does you no good. Gives the kids the great hint that, well, no one really cares that much about their science fair project, how important the recital is, or anything more than the grades on the report card. Not even how they got them, really. There may be parents out there who are hitting on every cylinder at this point of the year, but I, personally, don't know any of those people. The rest of us need some time away from the grind -- you know, the good four to six traditional weeks of summer vacation -- to look forward to those eight hours a day where the little darlings, um, get far away from the house. Rather than the current eight hours a day when we're trying to make sure they are doing what they need to get through.

So, to my fellow marketing and ad pros? Do what you need to do to get your BTS work cleared. Don't lose any business, hurt your chances of getting out for the Memorial Day weekend, or not look proactive to your clients.

But when the media calls to ask you about how the year's looking, when the sales are going to start, and how the new hotness is getting in the stores before anyone has ever been before?

Don't take the call, or give them the quotes they need to write the piece.

Because the life you save may be your own...

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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.