The Wrong Questions

The coffee is tired, too

As a marketing and advertising consultant with access to proprietary data and analytics, I get asked any number of questions by our clients on optimal creative practices. I'm always happy to help, and always do what I can to answer the question directly... but the answers rarely close the matter. I'd like to take some time to discuss why, and how to get to a place where the questions are likely to drive to a better conclusion.

The simplest stumbling block is when a client becomes fixated on the answer to questions that only have, at best, temporary answers. These include points like optimal dayparting, mobile formatting, subject line conventions, call to action language, and so on. Even when you actually have a good answer to one of these fishing expeditions, it rarely satisfies, especially since a perceptive client will understand that you are answering the point with something like frustration.

But it goes beyond the understanding that tactics will need to be checked, or might evolve over time. Moreover, it's the stratification of winners or losers, as if the march of a campaign is always a smooth ramp upward.

Because, well, it never works that way.

What happens instead is a matter of stops and starts, with gains punctuated by drops, based around seasonality, the rise and fall of certain practices, and how other, outside influences might impact your marketing channel.

There are optimal practices, and winning tactics... but there are no golden calfs, no rules that can never be broken, no tests that are definitive and closed. Even the most basic points, such as making sure there is a call to action or fast access in a scan or preview mode, might become losers later. But there are orders of priority in regards to testing, and moves that are unlikely to be your best or most pressing point to test.

That's where the comprehensive nature of data and analysis kicks in and becomes meaningful. Typical marketing and ad pros usually have visibility into just how their individual handful of campaigns did in the real world, and even in the best and most rigorous of cases, they tend to tap out after a dozen or so cells in a calendar year. After all, you are in the business to provoke better engagement, rather than run a response lab as a social experiment.

But if you are at the wheel of an adtech provider that serves multiple clients, hopefully with a wide number of sub-brands?Well, that's when the visibility becomes incredibly useful, and if you are very fortunate, inspirational on a cross-category basis. (I've been fortunate enough to be in that position for over 15 years now, at four different gigs, and it never fails to make me seem, well, far smarter than I actually am.)

So the right question isn't what specific creative practice is optimal, at this time and in this execution. Rather, it's what's new to the field in the last two to four business quarters, even if it's not 100% germane to what you are trying to promote right now.... because that can, and will, inspire the next breakthrough. Preferably in a clean test cell, which will hopefully convince some future client to test something

And if we wind up with a client that wants to just do what they do, regardless of our recommendations?

Well, that is valuable as well, if only to continue to give us a control against the likely better idea...

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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.

Intentional Disasters, Or The New Way To Market

More Free Media

I really tried, honestly, to avoid writing about the Republican National Convention this week.

You see, as a consultant, it does me no good at all to get into the red versus blue nature of American politics right now. We've done work for all kinds of concerns, and for people on both sides of the aisle, and will continue to do that in the future.

But when you have something like what happened last night -- where Republican nominee Donald Trump's wife was caught plagiarizing a far from coincidental amount of speech from Michelle Obama during the Democratic convention eight years ago -- and you have to start wondering. Or, at least, I do. (Don't worry, this all comes back to marketing and advertising later.)

I can't quite square my mind around the idea that this was a simple mistake, sabotage on the part of a spurned speechwriter, or anything but, as unlikely as it sounds, intentional. Because the plain and simple fact of the matter is that Trump's branding efforts are so unrelenting, so much about dominating every news cycle whether for good reason or bad, that I can't quite discount the idea that this was the political equivalent of an Easter egg, or a news media cheat code.

In an era where political conventions are naked infomercials, and the public has an untold number of other entertainment options, making a spectacle of yourself might be defensible. Especially when, if you are Trump or one of his advisors, some part of you know that free media has been the key to your success all along, and the efficiency of paid spots has been under serious doubt for the entire cycle.

So why not sprinkle in a plagiarism minute? It's not as if it's going to shake your supporters, given that the candidate has said literally hundreds of other things that have stopped the media cold in the past year. Ginning up a controversy seems like second nature to the campaign, and the media seems incapable of not jumping into it with full force. If this sort of thing is damaging Trump's chances of winning the election, I'd wonder what has changed in the past 24 hours, as opposed to the past 12 months.

And if this pays off in the long run, and our field winds up covering the events of this campaign as the first and most brilliant example of a ju jitsu style of reverse marketing?

Well, the field would get a lot more, um, creative. Yeah, I guess creative is the most diplomatic word...

(Oh, and if you want to think about how that might look, consider the long-running Domino's ad campaign, where the chain denigrated its past efforts at food. And did that for years, to considerable free social media exposure.)

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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.

Coup D'Tweet

Coup Or No, Cats Don't Care

We live in amazing and ridiculous times.

This showed itself again over the weekend, where a failed military coup in Turkey hit home in a major way for me. A good friend and her son were trapped in the airport in Istanbul, with her husband (and one of my best friends) was posting updates on their condition while in the U.S.

The drama played out, both on networks and our various personal feeds, in real-time. There was chaos, F-14 fighters spreading sonic booms over populated areas, taking cover during crossfire, calming walking through people chanting for hangings while trying not to betray soul-shattering fear, bridges taken and flights canceled, and finally, Turkey's embattled president taking to a social media channel that he's frequently tried to shut down, rallying his supporters to counter the action, effectively. There are even some who doubt whether this was indeed a real coup, given the immediate and effective counter strikes by the government, who has instituted mass arrests and punitive measures that are still unfolding as I write this.

While my friend and her son are safe now, they were in no way safe during the proceedings, and the final death toll is likely to astound. They are witnesses to history many times over, and while I want to wish them well and a homeland they can safely visit again, that might not be likely again in our lifetimes. Turkey is just too fragmented between the secular cities and the religious in-country, and the fact that we all have our own channels to view during this is unprecedented in human experience, and a likely continuing unsettling element.

It's been on my mind a lot. How are nations supposed to continue to exist when the media isn't only polarized and fragmented, but increasingly incapable of maintaining a sense of continuity and unity... because everyone knows they are corrupt, and would rather view their own feed? Why should Scotland stay with Great Britain when they would rather be in the EU, or London with the same reasoning, when borders are more or less meaningless from international interactions? Why should our own Red vs. Blue United States remain, well, United, given that we clearly want different things, and don't even believe common facts?

To overthrow a government used to be a relatively simple thing, to the point where the Wikipedia page for Turkey's coups now has six entries. Simply enough, you just needed to have enough people in the military become convinced that the political class had gone too far, then roll a few tanks down the main roads, round up the leaders and reboot. Turkey has been unique in its status as a relatively stable and prosperous nation that also had fairly routine takeovers, but it's not as if they were alone in their process of living through coups.

Now? There's no playbook, no sense of what happens next, what's real and what's stagecraft. And I'm not just talking about Turkey, of course; all of this applies to the UK, and maybe the EU, and all kinds of countries in Turkey's neck of the woods, and maybe further. Social media is something like a contagion. And there's no telling how it will spread next, and what the final result of every one being their own media network, will be.

So from a marketing and advertising standpoint... you know where this is going, right? Away from broadcast, away from broad blasts, and into the micro and niche and dynamic. It's where the people are, and will be.

For good and ill...

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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.