Fun With Twitter Data

Probably Not Actually Failing

OK, I have odd ideas of fun. But still, have you seen the Nielsen review of the 2015-16 TV season's most tweeted moments? It's a pretty great view into what people are talking about, and when, and should be required reading for anyone in marketing and advertising.

The most telling point to me is how much live sports drives Twitter, and how NFL football drives live sports. The Super Bowl got nearly as many tweets as the rest of the top 10 events, with six of the top ten events also being, well, football. This also came with the game being something of a snore this year, though it's a compelling point to wonder if a competitive game makes for more or less Tweets. I know from my own experience that my Twitter use will increase when the game is out of hand, because the telecast just isn't occupying my attention as much.

We've also got to assume that as the world continues to move from laptop to mobile (and to a lesser extent, tablet), that these counts still have some way to go. Whether that's on Twitter or not is another matter, as social media networks seem to have a shelf life, and Twitter's growth has been slowing year over year. Still, I'd have to guess we're at least 2-3 years away from a peak usage, given the growth in non-U.S. traffic, and Twitter's increasing use of emoji and non-typed content, along with longer Tweets. (Note how much capacity for growth seems to occur from greater Twittering about, say, soccer.)

There's also the possibility that we're missing a major factor in this set of data, which is the lack of the NBA Finals. The data runs from August 31, 2015 to May 29, 2016, or a period of time that almost perfectly excludes the June finals. Especially with the interest shown in this year's teams and top players, and the controversy involving suspensions. If my theory holds true to non-competitive games provoking more usage, this year's NBA Finals in particular may be through the roof. Or whether the US Presidential campaign also turns into an event push for Twitter. (So far, that seems more like a Facebook experience, which also seems to be a demographic phenomenon.)

Where this becomes truly intriguing is how it monetizes from a marketing and advertising standpoint. Social media use could be seen as something along the lines of live + DVR traffic, with greater broadcast spends justified by the apparent use. Broadcasts without a Twitter tail could also be seen as a softer spend, with easier to negotiate levels. Or, at least, this is how I'd spin it if I were negotiating for a client. Whether it's a successful tactic or not is another matter.

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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.

Guns: A Disaster-Proof Industry

Once More Without Feeling

I might lose some business from this, but so be it. Sometimes, you've got to be willing to walk away from money.

Besides, how likely is it that gun manufacturers or the National Rifle Association actually need marketing and advertising assistance, really?

Yesterday's news from Orlando, where an armed gunman was able to kill 50 people in a gay nightclub with a handgun and an assault rifle in the most deadly shooting in American history, is all over the news as I sat to write tonight's column. This kind of event happens so routinely in this nation now that we've got all of the reactions down cold -- demands for gun control that will never go into effect, demands for increased carry liberties in the naive hope that non-maniacs will somehow limit the death toll through exceptional marksmanship in chaos -- and a well-known cycle of thoughts and prayers, debate that goes nowhere, and soon enough, another tragedy. The idea that we'd be able, as a country, to do anything about this after 50 adults died in Orlando, when we weren't able to do anything after 26 were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, 20 of them children, is ludicrous.

So, to bring this around to a marketing and advertising perspective... is there a single industry, ever, where disasters improve the bottom line of the industry and lobbying efforts of the companies who seem, well, at least tangentially responsible?

Gun sales have gone through the roof during the presidency of Barack Obama, who has, whether you think this is a coincidence or act of heroism from the NRA, seized no guns from no one. Sales spike after every massacre, because the belief among the true believers is always that this will be the one that sparks a legislative or executive order, but honestly, gun buyers should just relax and avoid the rush. We see people dead from these kinds of events all the time now. No reason to ever rush to the gun store.

It's also hard to imagine that this would be a defensible hobby or lifestyle choice if it were, well, novel. Imagine if guns were a new invention, and not mentioned in the Constitution, how successful they'd be as an industry. Vaping technology, frankly, seems more highly regulated. Despite the dramatic differences in death counts.

We also can, frankly, dispatch with any comparison to the relative regulation of automobiles (frequent testing, technology upgrades to prevent tragedies, strong administrative oversight through state department of motor vehicles and police enforcement) to guns (loopholes all over, objections to simple counts from the Center for Disease Control, "smart gun" tech blocked at an industry level, background checks more or less stalled in Congress despite strong majority approval, even from NRA members), That hasn't mattered up to now, so why would things be different with another few dozen dead? Better to focus on the motives of the killer, which will easily distract with fear of a religious or ethnic minority. Because the fact that the tools are always the same is somehow not relevant.

So, to sum up. Disasters increase your bottom line in the short term. No disaster ever increases your risk of long-term sales. The rate of disasters is ever-rising, and the answer for every disaster at the individual level is to buy your product. With social media fervent that makes your target (sorry) demographic always have a sense of urgency to buy.

What an incredible business, selling guns. With no end to the good times!

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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 Future Of The Inbox: Five Upcoming Changes

Flood Coming

Email marketing is one of my favorite things, because it's got incredible advantages over other formats of marketing and advertising. Instead of worrying about whether you've got share of mind due to the world of multiple screens, you've got the same direct marketing metrics that you've had for, well, decades. You also get a get out of jail free card from fraud and viewability statistics, and don't need to worry about DVR skipping, massively expensive creative costs, or rendering issues at different sizes, assuming you've managed concur responsive coding. It may be the only form of advertising and marketing, especially on the digital side, where the world has gotten better in the last five years.

But that doesn't mean that the field is immune from change, or won't have to deal with new challenges in the next few years. Here's where we see the field going.

1) Dayparting will become machine driven. If you only ever read transaction email from e-commerce outside of business hours (because you work in an open office and don't want to be unprofessional as to be reading your personal email on someone else's dime)... well, the transaction email provider, if possible, should only want to send that email to you in the evening. And if the situations were reversed, so should the dayparting. 

Some marketers will hate this, because it will be another moment of automation over a professional service, and if that kind of thing happens enough, you're out of a job. But it's just too much of an engagement rise to be anything but ubiquitous later. 

2) Responsive coding will go away, because email will project. Just this last week, email went holographic thanks to Microsoft, who debuted a virtual reality goggle set that allowed the reader to experience 3-D and video in email. But who wants to walk around with goggles, really? A far more shovel-ready product is the idea that mobile phablets will just be able to show email in screen sizes that aren't limited to the mobile screen size. This already exists in some robot phones in Japan.

3) Subject lines will become verbal. As audio-assist tech (aka, your smartphone being able to handle your voice) becomes better and better, the in-box will become a matter of conversation, more than reading, because your list will have the option to have Siri read your emails. As you might guess, this is going to hit broader e-commerce plays harder and faster.

4) Creative will match other channels from dynamic elements. If you've seen a banner and gotten a coupon code, a follow-up email will need to pull in that code... or you've given up the ghost of knowing the actual credit for which part of your marketing and advertising mix generated the actual business. It would also help to match optimal offer, and help to optimize around this point. (If you hate paying for shipping but don't trust or react well to percentage off copy, your follow up email needs to have the first offer. It's just that simple, and can only work as automated elements.

5) Metrics will evolve. Opens, clicks, bounce and unsub rate are all well and good, and fantastic compared to what other marketers have to work with... but a live eROI is far more potent, and currently way too hard to determine. Heat map tracking to determine how long your creative is being viewed and where would also be a great step forward, along with a sense of how much scrolling happens to get a sense of how deep you can go before it's just you talking to your compliance team. 

The single best thing about email marketing is that it's always been data-driven; creative has always benefited from a Darwinian model of optimal work wins, rather than succumb to noise about branding elements. As we continue to move from appointment media to always-on, from controlled platform to catch as you can, the field will adapt. It always has.

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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.