Your Choices In Crisis

Small fingered fist

Late last week, my teen aged daughter was asking my wife and I for advice, as she was overbooked and overwhelmed between commitments. "I feel like I can't win," she said, in detailing her options, and I was able, in a minor miracle given her age and nature, to get a word in edgewise. "Well, actually, you can't *lose*," I said, and pointed out that the story of how her weekend could go also had the same ability to be spun in a positive manner. My pitch worked, her outlook changed, she got her work done, and we're that much closer to the (blessed, blessed) day she starts college.

If you read my columns routinely, this is where you might expect the pivot to marketing and advertising matters. Not yet. Hold on for a little while longer.

Many people in our industry, since our work tends toward urban areas and diverse staffs, have felt personally impacted by the regime change in the U.S. this month, and even more directly by this weekend's changes to immigration policy. Even if you haven't been personally impacted yet, it's easy to find people in your network who have, either from travel uncertainties to social pressures, concerns over health care, and so on.

Personally, I find myself increasingly irritated by the amount of distraction and stress created by all of this. The silver lining from one party in charge of all branches of government was supposed to be a better economy, thanks to job-creating deregulation, better trade deals, badly needed and wildly delayed investments in infrastructure, and so on. Instead, there's been comedic overreaches about things that shouldn't matter to anyone, a continuing move of the goalposts in regard to conflict of interest disclosure, and now, censorship and a piecemeal immigration ban that seems more about where the family of the Oval Office resident owns hotels, rather than any real improvement to our national security, either in the short or long term.

So instead of being able to just focus on the day to day of your, well, day to day, you get to navigate this mine field of social media firestorms, and the alarm of people in your network who have already been negatively affected. Which all seems like a race to the bottom of seeing which side can make the other break first, either through executive actions or effective protest, legal challenge, and so on. American elections are among the longest in the world, and now, we've got one that will seemingly never end. (And before anyone feels that this is just how the losing side won't get over it... note how Trump's infamous Twitter feed dismissed the immigration opinions of Senators Graham and McCain by noting that they are both failed presidential candidates, as if this invalidates their opinions whenever it disagrees with his.)

Still with me? Good. Here's that pivot that I promised you.

As marketers and advertisers, it seems like we can't win. If we choose a side in this circus, we cut our audience. If we don't, we risk looking complicit or irrelevant. And if we are somehow mentioned in the dreaded Twitter stream, our stock prices tank, and all of our efforts are put in the media spin cycle.

But what's also possible is that this is a situation where you can't lose. If your product or service delivers a good and simple benefit, it's going to seem downright refreshing in the current climate. Boring is the new safe, and safe is the new peace. Consumer loyalties are going to grow as more and more of our brain cells are taken up by the viral politic. If you are a new player to the field, there will never be a better time to engineer a viral message by picking a side. Opportunities are, frankly, rife for both leading brands and challengers.

Worried that no one is paying attention to your ads in a multi-channel age? It's my belief that if the current condition is the New Normal, any number of people will begin to opt out of the social media channels altogether, or at least, to limit their time, because you can only block so many people before the exercise just seems pointless. Yes, we may have finally found a way to increase television ratings, or to get print media numbers to stop shrinking.

A final personal aside. Last Friday night, I held my every 3 weeks poker game. With my regulars bringing in more and more new players, the game has never been more popular, and we had the most players ever in my space. I've also made things trickier on myself by switching to playing records for background music. So I'm up and down a lot, tending my turntable, playing my hands, keeping both rooms aware of the blinds and ante levels, and such. In the hustle and bustle, I lost track of my phone, and didn't have it back in my hands for a solid eight hours, until the last hands were dealt, and clean-up was completed.

So for all that time, I had no idea what the Administration had done, what my network thought about it, or any of the noise of the outside world. I just had my friends, and my poker game, and my music.

I didn't win money on Friday night. I was fortunate enough to break even.

It was also the most fun I've had in weeks... and I think I'm going to be smart enough to start losing my phone more often.

Because choosing not to engage in a crisis is also a choice, and an increasingly refreshing one.

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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.

What Mobile Means To Email

Going Mobile

Email is one of my favorite channels to achieve goals in marketing and advertising, for the plain and simple reason that it works *and* has incredible advantages over other channels. (What advantages? Exceptionally undistracted awareness in a multi-channel age, very little of the issues that digital ads have with no skipping or blocking, cheap to make, easy to test, and in a better competitive state than they were in the past. I could go on, honestly, but I've addressed many of these points in past columns, so I'm going to leave that be for now.)

However, since emails aren't the focus of huge budgets and high fees to achieve distribution, and the metrics tend to stay consistent because there's usually a certain inertia to the metrics you expect to achieve, there's a certain... well, I don't want to say laziness or conservatism when it comes to email design, but it is what it is. Especially in tried and true consumer categories, or transactional pieces and automated work. There are aspects of email marketing and advertising that have not changed in decades, and likely won't for as long as the channel is viable. If you'll forgive one more aside... email's death has been predicted for over a decade now, with texting, apps, IMs and various ills that have hit the channel all said to be why it's gonna die. All that's happened is that more of it goes out. Moving on.

So, what's happening to change this sleepy little channel? Well, the device that's in your hand, if you are reading this on a smartphone. Which isn't news, except that it's still easy to forget that it is, well, news.

Depending on the consumer category, list and daypart, the vast majority of the emails that you send, as a marketing and advertising pro, will be seen first (not read or responded to, always, but seen) on the phone. Which means that open rates and unsubscribes have both taken turns for the worse, while also opening up the available calendar, away from just business hours.

Knowing that, why would you send your email outside of business hours, if mobile open rates and unsubscribes are both worse in that environment? Because email doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your message competes with potentially hundreds of others every day, and moving away from the crowd, especially if your piece is designed to do well in a mobile triage situation, or your audience are always-on professionals who will do evening laptop or desktop hours because they are just that way, could be your best move. As always with anything that has a direct marketing connection, let the data drive.

But you'll need to take more than dayparting into account for a more effective mobile campaign. You'll also need to think harder about subject lines, with an ever-greater importance on front-loading copy with benefits. Frequency is also a big key, especially if you are reaching a higher number of Ios9 (Apple iPhone) users, since those folks now see work with a much greater emphasis and ease to unsubscribe. Pre-header copy doesn't move the needle as much as subject lines, but it still matters, as do entry points that work for mobile use (not too small or close together, and with use without too much of a scroll). You should also code for responsive, run your HTML through an emulator to make sure you aren't running into issues with other mobile platforms and formats, and, well...

Consider the whole sea change as an opportunity, rather than a hassle.

Because in my experience, any execution that you do because you have to, rather than because you want to?

Becomes an execution that doesn't thrill you when it's done.

And if all of this seems like too much trouble, or that you are jumping into the deep end of a pool when you don't even know if the water is warm, or what's below the surface?

Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we, um, know some people that you can hire for help with that sort of thing...

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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.

High Resistance

Hello, Friends

A window into the kind of person that I am, and yes, this will have marketing and advertising overtones.

I've got an Excel spreadsheet that has the data from all of my workouts since 2013. I've kept it updated on a daily basis, when I started running as a way to keep eating badly, while still maintaining my weight and overall health. Before then, I did a mix of different things, from hockey to biking to racquetball to golf, but didn't keep it tracked so meticulously.

I thought that if I was active enough, I could counter a slowing metabolism, keep the blood pressure and cholesterol down, and stay on my goal of living without prescriptions and keeping up with my kids. All while throwing down as many sodas, cheese steaks, pizza, pretzels and carbs that I wanted, because this new step would clearly make up for the rest.

The first year, I set a goal of 1,000 miles, and made it. I then added another hundred miles for the next year. I also tried to make sure that I kept doing weight training as well. With each year, I've added another 100 miles. The increasing goal has made me re-train my stride to ease stress on the knees.

But that wasn't enough. So I changed my diet to add much more water and a daily multi-vitamin. Cut my sodium intake. Increased my fruit and probiotic consumption, and started to count and reduce calories...

And all of this has worked, but not to the extent that you might think. I've kept the same weight and dimensions, had overall good health, and get a lot done. But the running has never really gotten easy, and if I lapse for any reason whatsoever, I feel it, with a quickness. Plus, my blood pressure and cholesterol crept up a bit last year.

Truth be told, I am just not as efficient as I'd like to be. Too many of my miles are walked, rather than ran. (I get cramps and hamstring pulls.) The time commitment is annoying. But I'm getting better, and have ideas for how to improve. I'm certain that these plans will change later when I fall short of my goals, because that is just what happens, and everything can always improve.

Now, the pivot.

When you do marketing and advertising for a living, and have access to the data, you are frequently able to drive improvements to the status quo. Which is, after all, the reason why a client wants you around in the first place. But the same processes that led you to the first win should bring you to the second, and the third, and so on down the line, because that's the way it should work...

Except for, well, it doesn't.

Not always, in any rate. Just as age, a slowing metabolism and the demands of life can mitigate my efforts, so can environmental factors cut into the effectiveness of your work. From client needs that run contrary to optimal engagement practices, to lowering response rates from user fatigue and increasing competition from others in their competitive space, you are rarely, if ever, going to have everything on your side in your attempt to beat the control. Optimal practices change over time, without warning. Good creative wears out, and the plain and simple nature of digital advertising is that response and engagement is always eroding, because we're always getting a little bit more of it then we used to.

It's easy, especially as the calendar goes from the start of the New Year to the cold and misery of deep January, to stop going to the gym. But if you do, your life won't be better later, and catching up may be extremely difficult. Just as if you stop trying to top the control, or try to convince your client that the new performance metrics are all you can achieve...

Well, there's probably someone else in your field who has kept doing the work, and will seem more attractive to your client. And, well, is.

Because if you don't love the journey, you're in the wrong line of 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 Best/Worst Mistake

Or with incomplete data

As a marketing and advertising consultant, I'm frequently asked for my opinion on spends by medium, or to put things in a less jargon-intensive way, how a client should best spend their money. (Independent of my fees, of course. That expense is always defensible. Moving on.)

This comes from a good place: the desire to spend every dime as if it were your own is a virtue that I applaud. Marketers and advertisers can and should always look for ways to optimize their spend, because the cash you save can help the business in any number of ways, some of which multiply quite nicely. So I'm in favor of the instinct... but sometimes, very leery of the approach.

The simple fact of the matter is that ad mediums are like tools. You may have one that you like more than others, but if you only ever use one, you probably aren't terribly crafty, or able to complete a number of different projects to optimal conclusions. What's even more telling and basic of a mistake is when a client wants to turn off a medium entirely, usually because they've got data that shows one approach is wildly more effective than others. "(Medium X) just doesn't work for us." Hmm.

The most common target in the current environment? Ad banners in the digital space. Especially when the client has been doing lowest cost work with programmatic approaches, and find themselves disappointed with low click rates. Or even worse, clicks that didn't translate to sales in e-commerce plays, where the client might feel that the traffic was fraudulent.

To be clear about this, banners have issues. Dynamic work with a retargeting component are historically your best bet for higher response, but those can easily get into issues of retraining your audience to abandon shopping carts for a better price. Banners that appear on questionable sites from run-of-network buys don't do much for your brand, and many marketing and ad pros aren't thrilled with bankrolling bad actors like click fraudsters, fake news sites. or dark web tricksters, which is a sizable percentage of digital advertising right now. With all of that in play, it's a hard sell to spend more, not less, on the channel, mostly by switching up to premium sites, and away from remnant inventory.

But here's the not so dirty and not so secret point that old-school marketers always knew, and new-school folks miss because they are being misled by incomplete data... very few consumers come to a purchase decision from a single channel. Even a customer that buys from a clear attribution stream can have that data polluted by offline messaging, or have their decision making impacted by ways that the data never catches. For instance, a reminder email that brings a customer back to the site after a banner got them there in the first place, or a click on a banner after search engine work for the previous visit. Just because a channel took the consumer for the last mile, does not mean that all of the previous miles were worthless.

In a time before digital, marketers knew that a diverse messaging plan was optimal. Consumers would see a television spot, a print media piece, hear a radio mention, and maybe even see a billboard, possibly all in the same buying cycle... and that buying cycle might last years. Since we had no data that claimed to isolate channel effectiveness, a diverse plan was protected, because you didn't "know" what didn't work. Even call center or direct mail data was inherently suspect, and you rarely, if ever, made a decision from a single set of data. (More often, you just used that data to try to negotiate a better price.)

But until we have true multi-channel attribution, possibly from technology that doesn't even exist yet or a consolidation to everyone using and consuming through a single device (best bet: smartphones, and even that seems unlikely for a good long while, given how problematic it is to make some purchases that way), what we have is the worst of both worlds. Uncertainty, with the illusion of certainty.

If you are the kind of person who can't tolerate that level of vagueness in your day to day, or just have a jones to kill channels with certainty in your heart, there is a way out. Pure old-school A/B testing, where you split your audience in separate but equal groups, then expose them to different advertising mixes. The trouble is that it's usually slow, not helpful unless you have enough data to achieve statistical significance (and if that comes back to relatively rare events like sales tracked by digital channel, that can be *really* slow), and still prone to cross-channel pollution, so your significance levels have to be quite high. You also have to have the discipline to leave short-term money on the table, since the less effective method will have to play out. If your managerial situation is more shoot the messenger than learn from deviations from the norm, all of this can be quite uncomfortable, in a social and professional sense.

Or you can do what I usually wind up recommending instead, and to consider the following point.

Think about the best in class advertising players of the age, or even the best players in your space, and ask yourself the following question.

Do they turn off entire channels of communication with consumers?

(Probably not.)

And if they don't, and have you outspent or outgunned in experience and exposure...

What do you know that they don't, and how confident are you in that knowledge?

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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.

Access Versus Experience

Grains of Experience

A very smart business leader said something in a meeting that I was privileged to attend a few months ago, and it stuck with me. His theory is that there is a paradigm shift going on in our world, away from possessions, and towards access. Streaming services for media, instead of cultivated libraries. Transportation companies (well, OK, ride share companies) that don't own cars. Cloud computing instead of concrete servers, selling platforms without inventory, and so on.

Everything through your smartphone that could realistically go through your smartphone, because that device has such an emotional resonance and always-on connection. Information and data that travel with you from place to place and provider to provider, because that's the way to exceptional customer service. Everyone with their own concierge, really. It made a lot of sense to me then, and still does now... but there's a hole in the theory that you can drive a truck through, and part of that is from what I did just before starting to write this column.

Here's what I did.

I got up from where I normally write and went to the back of the room, to a present that my wife got for me for Christmas. It's a possession; even more so, it's a machine. I opened the top of the device, and loaded it with a clearly antiquated and inconvenient technology, taking special care not to damage it, because it can be very easily damaged. Making sure not to do anything else at the time, because I haven't had this tech for so long as to make this second nature, I then placed the device into operation and adjusted to taste.

Every 20 minutes or so, I need to tend to the machine. I can't pause it, or send its output anywhere else. If I let it go untended, the machine will complete its intended task and keep going without reset, and potentially become damaged.

There are no software upgrades for this. It is, simply, a set and finite flaw.

We'll move past the pointless suspense here: it's a turntable. Actually, it's a retro combo turntable, which also plays CDs, cassettes, radio and even your Bluetooth-enabled device, because why not, really. Needless to say, the vast majority of the use has been the turntable.

More surprising is how young the market for the product is. According to MusicWatch, 54% of vinyl customers are 35 and under, and while it's clearly a niche product for the music industry, it's one where the revenue model still makes sense.

I won't get into the sound quality argument, because I can talk to both sides of it, knowing the science as well as the marketing. At a certain point, human discernment is just not generally capable of telling a difference between analog and digital files, mostly at higher sampling rates. I also don't have the best set of ears on the plane, which is actually a help, in that I'm not going to splurge for the over the top sound system and additional speakers that true audiophiles go for.

However, the sound quality argument is besides the point for me. The simple act of tending to the record, avoiding skips and rapid access to favorite tracks, and the sight of that mesmerizing spin -- all of that makes for a potent cocktail of psychoacoustics, or the listening equivalent of a placebo. It sounds better because it feels better, and I'm racking up moments in my growing collection where I just get chills from the record that I wasn't getting from other formats. For me, at least, and for now.

Another consequence of the medium is that I am suddenly willing to experiment on other formats to see if vinyl makes it better. The format in question? Jazz, which as a writer, has never attached very well to me. John Coltrane and Miles Davis are starting to work their magic, though. My guests, in that the turntable made its debut for my home poker game last weekend, were also far more tolerant about what they heard than usual.

Here's another point for analog over digital: there's an exceptional vinyl store that isn't too far from me, which I've started combing for used finds to high success. Rummaging through stacks in this crowded emporium is less convenient than simply shopping online. Amazon carries vinyl, because of course they do. But the sifting and thrill of a strike (Richard Thompson! And more than a few titles!) isn't just a cost savings over shipping. It's the primal aspect of the hunt, the rapid calculation of what I have to have versus what I can live without, and the math involved in keeping my consumerism responsible. All in real time, because the stores isn't open 24/7, and I can't just spend all day here.

Access is important. It scales, it's got exceptional advantages, and even the fussiest mind will take it ninety nine times out of a hundred. Even in music, digital can and should dominate: many of the newer vinyl albums come with a free digital download, and no one's giving up solid state for mobile use. If you want your music with you at the gym or the car, or in settings where you can't keep tending to it, you aren't going back to the old ways.

But access isn't everything, because we aren't entirely (or even very) logical creatures. We close doors and open windows.

And in that window lies opportunity, for any marketing and ad pro wise enough to use it.

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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.

Working When Everyone Else Isn't

Ho, Ho, Oh No

When I was in college, far too long ago, there was a Thanksgiving weekend when I didn't have the cash to get home. So I stayed at school for the long weekend, and picked up four straight double-shift days at my work-study hustle job as a security guard. Sixty eight hours billed over four straight days.

I'm not going to mince words; it was terrible, even though the cash saved my holiday season, and I used the time well to catch up on all of my studies, along with an inordinate amount of reading, guitar playing, writing and so on. But there was one side effect that was valuable, in that no Thanksgiving since has been as bad as that. Also, that I was capable of that sort of sacrifice if I had to make it, which gave me a curious sort of pride about my motor, really.

When you work in advertising and marketing, you tend to take your time off at the same time as everyone else -- the week between Christmas and New Years', some time around Labor Day, and if you've got kids, maybe spring break. Which leads to the tendency among many in the field to wrap up the year in mid-December, since most of us have everything all set up well in advance of this time, and finding people who you work with is very hit or miss. Also, you might have a use or lose moment with your time off.

But just because many pros are fortunate enough to have this time, that doesn't mean your audience does -- or that there isn't major hay to make from last-minute adjustments and opportunities, particularly in e-commerce. You also might have contractual obligations to clear business before the end of the calendar year, which means you are doing more than you might want to, given the impact of seasonality on engagement. But if it can't be helped, and you find yourself churning while everyone else is getting their wassail on, a few points to keep in mind.

> Engagement might not be as big of a problem as it used to be. Smartphones make way too many people eternally tethered to their work or (especially) email, which means that the historical drop off might not repeat itself. You might even see a bit of a gain if your competitors close up shop early for the season.

> However, the send might be more harmful than you anticipate. In email marketing, unsubscribes spikes in Q4, because, well, people get too much of it, and take steps to control their intake. True email pros never neglect this metric, of course, but it's easy to disregard it in the face of revenue. Just remember that a spike in unsubs, especially if there isn't a strong corresponding intake of fresh addresses, is a serious problem for long-term growth.

> Don't overpromise. The worst brand moment for an e-commerce company comes when they can't fulfill their promises during the Christmas rush, and marketing and advertising that doesn't take this into account -- or, even worse, actively works to convince the leads that orders will be safely sent when they aren't -- is actively destroying the brand. Most folks in the space know this down cold, but unclear messaging on shipping is just not something many companies can survive, especially in a social media and review site age.

> Cramming rarely saves the season. If you've got a client that needs to change messaging on a daily basis, burns through creative like it's a free resource, and keeps you going 24/7 as if this activity is all that stands between them and a winning year... well, you are in the presence of a terrible managerial situation, and a business that can't survive in the long run. At a brand level, the client is training prospects to buy in low margin. At a business level, the client is keeping you from serving other clients to the best of your ability.

Don't think of it as squeaky wheel gets the grease. More, it's a lack of wheel stopping the entire cart. Oh, and the work's going to stink, too, because this kind of rapid fire force feed creates mistakes, fatigue, and turnover. Push back, if only to save your sanity. (Or get your resume out before everyone else does. That will also save your sanity,)

> Keep your perspective. Even the worst day in Q4 in marketing and advertising is spent (a) indoors, (b) without dealing with hordes of panicky and rude clients, (c) with no greater traffic or commuting problems than usual, and (d) for a salary that would boggle the mind of, say, the poor folks selling Christmas trees or working retail. There are, frankly, many folks in the work force who'd trade gigs with you in a heartbeat. Charity during the season is rarely a mistake.

And if all of that doesn't put a smile on your face, just remember... the holidays will be over soon enough, and then we'll be able to turn the page on a year that many of us consider to be among the worst in recent memory. 2017's got to be better!

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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 Next Level In Fake News: Content Attacks

As Seen On Not TV

There's a hard and cruel line in political science, which is that the people get the government they deserve. The concept is that if there's a tyrannical despot, and the people aren't rising up to overthrow, they are enabling it. That if there's corruption and graft, that the people are, on some level, comfortable with it, haven't been socialized or educated away from tolerating the practice, and so on.

It's a fairly cold and inhumane perspective, especially when it comes to moments like a violent overlord that is propped up by foreign action, but it's got the feel of truth about it. If you aren't prepared to commit to political actions to the extent that your opponents are, they will prevail. (A fairly famous quote from a recent symposium at Harvard of "I wouldn't want to win the way you did it" comes to mind.)

We pivot now to marketing and advertising, as we always do, because that's why you read this column.

The recent presidential election, and the continuing investigation by the CIA, is now at a point where it is clear that foreign powers tried to influence the results through the use of fake news stories that were designed to go viral. Whether or not these stories were successful in changing enough hearts and minds to sway the result is going to be open to interpretation; after all, very few people vote for just one reason or point, and it's not as if millions will recant their vote (or have the opportunity to).

But that's not the point.

The bigger issue, to me, is that the actors who just made money with fake news about politics aren't just going to go into hibernation now that they have developed skills and techniques, and where that goes next could have strong implications for our field. This also presumes that interest and traffic about politics eventually goes down, which might be an incorrect assumption. But anyway, let's move on.

I have one more concept to add to this message of worry, and that is towards a creative interpretation of ransomware. Ransomeware, in case you aren't up on your cybercrime, is a type of software that's designed to block access to a computer system until a payoff, usually in untraceable bitcoins. But instead of a program that's downloaded by mistake, fake news ransomware could come in the form of negative viral content about a brand or service, then the ask of the brand owners to pay for the content to get scrapped before social sharing.

If all of this seems a little far-fetched because people aren't going to be read and share a listicle about the top 10 things that experts don't want you to know about (targeted brand or service), well... I've got a pizzeria in Washington DC where the employees might want to have a word with you, in regards to your naivete about how much people will believe.

So what, if anything, can marketing and advertising pros do to try to safeguard against this threat? Much of the optimal practices that you should already have in place, frankly. Content that cross-links to well-established blogs in your space, so that organic search results won't pull up clickbait. Customer service that's so strong that your clients shout down the bad actors, or evangelize for you as part of a grass roots recovery plan after attack. A diversified revenue stream, so that an attack in a single consumer category doesn't imperil the entire business. An active social media program, in multiple channels, that helps get the word out about any issues you are encountering.

There's been a longstanding tendency in marketing and advertising circles, especially on the direct side, to deride the value of a Facebook like, a Twitter re-tweet, a Pinterest pin, and so on. But what you should really be doing is to stop trying to put a hard ROI figure on these activities, and start seeing them as an insurance policy against a content attack.

After all, the reputation -- and business -- that you save will 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.

The (Price) Race To Nowhere

Only one place to go

Twenty years ago, in the throes of the Christmas season, I knew what my big gift idea for the year was going to be. I wanted to get the woman who eventually became my wife a high-end leather jacket.

This wasn't the kind of purchase that you'd do over the Internet, especially not in those low bandwidth days. Fortunately, I knew people in New York City who trafficked in high fashion circles, and knew the right places to go. They also knew *how* to shop in such a setting, and prepared me accordingly. So instead of relying on a credit card, on the instructions of my experienced friend, I pulled my cash out of a bank machine, then spent the better part of an afternoon going from shop to shop in Lower Manhattan.

After four or five stops, we finally found what we were looking for, at a price that, to my non-New York eyes, seemed high but fair. It was, after all, a really nice coat. My very sharp friend agreed with the choice, and then approached the shop keeper.

What followed was something out of a play. My friend offered half of the price. The shop keeper looked at her as if she had insulted his ancestors, but she didn't flinch or seem in any way taken aback. He repeated the sticker price, at which point she noted the seasonality, how the coat was more of a fall piece and wasn't likely to move in January, and her original offer. He came down 10%. She went up 10%. He complained about his costs, and talked up the piece. She shrugged and made as if to leave. We got halfway out of the shop before he came down another 10%. She replied with 10% more, final offer. With a frankly uncomfortable amount of venom, he agreed to split the difference for a final 5% less, or 25% off the sticker price, but only if we paid in cash. Which we did, in a transaction that somehow didn't involve sales tax.

The whole experience took about five minutes, saved me a significant chunk of change, and gave me quite an education. From what I learned later about fashion, the shopkeeper probably still made significant profit from the transaction. (The fact that he was willing to risk his margins to avoid paying sales tax also shows that even at 25% off, he might not have paid full price for his goods, either.) But to me, and to anyone who might have witnessed the conversation in what wasn't an empty store, we were all quickly trained to the idea that paying the full price was just a mistake.

Now, let's pivot to the current state of affairs in e-commerce.

There are a myriad number of ways to avoid paying full price online. Comparison shopping among vendors can happen with just a couple of clicks. If you've got the time and inclination, abandoning a cart and seeing what might come your way in a retargeting offer can drive significant coin. Checking coupon sites for codes, or just typing in common keywords before checkout, can pay off handsomely. Using a rewards credit card, buying in bulk, taking advantage of seasonal discounts, bundling purchases to avoid paying for shipping... it's all there for you, and you don't even have to handle cash or haggle.

The challenge this brings to marketing and advertising professionals is considerable. How do you protect your margins while still driving enough revenue to matter? Can you protect your brick and mortar stores while still having a competitive online presence? And when connectivity gets even more ubiquitous, and wifi more widespread, are we all on a race to the bottom?

The answer, as far as I can see it, can only come from protecting the brand through extraordinary value and customer service. My favorite grocery store has exceptional prices across the board and a down-market esthetic that makes me think they'll always cut corners; I don't check their prices or fliers, because life is too short. Instead, I just load up on stuff when I'm there. The company that makes my poker cards just has a better product, so I wait for them to go on sale, or just pay full price if I have to, because there's no substitute. When my wife and I researched our most recent car purchase, we tried over a half dozen models, but wound up fixating on one model in particular... which led to a purchase with less leverage, since the only thing we could do was pit different dealerships against each other.

But if your brand doesn't have exceptional service or value, and there's no way to invent it with your work?

Well, then, you're in the race with way too many other entrants. With the fading hope that new prospects won't find out about all of the ways they can cut your margins...

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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 Internet Of Insertion

This Goes Inside A Cow; Ouch

On my Twitter feed (you aren't signed up for my Twitter feed? It's @davidlmountain, please, feel free) over the holiday, I noted how one of the things to be thankful for is that, in this lifetime, you aren't a dairy cow. (Yes, I'm presuming and yes, marketing and advertising is on the way. Patience.)

Another thing to be thankful for: that you aren't a dairy cow 130 miles northwest of London, where, if Bloomberg.com is to be believed,cows get Internet of Things transmitters placed inside the first of their four stomachs, so that they can be remote monitored for illness, going into heat, and so forth.

The weighted sensor is said to be about the size of a hot dog, and will last about four years, which is about as long as a dairy cow is productive. Given the expense of such animals, and the amount of product that a farmer can expect to receive from a healthy animal, as opposed to an ill one, it's a clear win for the farmers, and the animals don't have a say in the matter. But it also lends itself to a clear if this, then what thought exercise.

My dog, and maybe yours as well, has a microchip in his leg. It's about the size of a grain of rice, and he got it when he was a puppy. It causes him no pain, and he's in no way aware of it. It's there on the off chance that he ever gets lost and found by a professional with the right technology. My children, and maybe yours as well, have phones that can easily give the location in the event of crisis. My car, and maybe yours as well, has a transmitter on the windshield to allow for toll collection at speed, and the newer model that my wife drives has much more than that. All of that can be used to track our movements. Oh, and the vast majority of our purchases comes through digital technology, which is to say, easily trackable movements. My credit card, and maybe yours as well, rewards me to use it, and carrying a great deal of cash isn't just unseemly, it's dangerous.

Much of this is so commonplace now as to be barely worth mentioning, and yet they all add up to an ever-thickening web of connectivity, which only seems noteworthy when it's, well, new. Or invasive.

Now, we'll add another moment of technology, which is the introduction of a supercapacitor that can be charged by human body heat. This may seem like a development that doesn't have immediate consumer utility, but that would be wrong. Just imagine, for instance, a mobile phone that you just need to hold to recharge. Useful, right? So much so that it may be ubiquitous within a decade.

Where does all of this go next? Well, for my money, we're going to see real movement in wearable health monitoring technology, especially once the battery charge is more or less an afterthought from body heat. It's one thing to know how many steps you've taken, or your standing heart rate. It's quite another to know when someone with a chronic condition is at risk for any number of factors, or for someone who is post-surgery to be able to recuperate, safely, at home. No one wants to lose a loved one for any reason, let alone something that technology could easily prevent. Becoming a bio-mechanical hybrid also seems, well, off-putting. But probably less than being at risk. (Also, it leads to revolutionary possibilities in targeting, ad effectiveness, and so on. See, this all comes back to how we pay the bills.)

The question comes to this: where will the push/pull of utility versus discomfort, privacy versus health, security versus expense, fall?

Because, well, I love my dog. That's why I had him chipped.

And I don't love my kids any less...

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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 Delivery?

Fly-By Dinner

When I was a child, the Metric system wasn't just a logical unit of measurement. It was absolutely assumed to be the way the U.S. was going to go. There were any number of classes where teachers seemed incredulous that they still had to even give short shrift to English measurements. And yet, decades later, they are still, well, everywhere. Miles, gallons, feet, yards, Fahrenheit... all still out there for you. And no one, seemingly, is ready to predict when they will go away.

Fast forward to adolescence. My first start-up looked to take advantage of a newly dominant communications medium, one that had massive installation in business locations and world-wide use. We even changed the name of the company to match this exciting tech, in the hopes that it would make us more attractive for future partners. And that's how a small group of investors lost a larger amount of money on U.S. Fax.

The point is that all tech, no matter how sexy or inevitable it might seem when it's on the rise, has a very hard threshold to break to achieve dominance and true market changes. For every social media channel that seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, many have gone by the wayside. Even if something seems logical and inevitable, if the benefits to the average user are not enough to make the bargain work, the market (or at least, in the case of the metric system in America, the U.S. market) will reject it.

Which brings me to an event that happened in a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand this last week. A pizza chain (no need to say which, honestly) completed a delivery by drone. Food was winched up and flown to the customer's house, lowered and released, with the drone then returning to port. One assumes the transaction was covered online, so there's no need for the drone to collect funds.

The advantages are obvious. Drones would use a fraction of the fuel of the technology (humans driving cars) that they would displace. Instead of propelling a ton or more of car, the drone is pushing about 50 pounds or so. The positive environmental impact is intense, not just for the gasoline, but also the wear and tear on roads, and the presumably lower fatalities, since a drone accident is much less likely to result in human injury then, well, an automobile accident. Multiply these savings enough times, independent of the costs of labor, and there's clear market movement. Given the lack of delay from traffic, deliveries may be faster, and consumers may choose to patronize this option more, since you never have to deal with a tip, or possible awkwardness with the driver.

And yet, I can also see strong reasons why drones may not succeed, outside of a niche option in isolated markets. In the footage that I saw, the food was delivered in a box, instead of the usual thermal sleeve. Even if the box doesn't take very long to get to you, there are temperature issues from being high in the air and exposed, and rain or wind could also be a major issue. Add in the difficulties involved with high density living areas, and the starting friction with having to buy a bunch of drones and figure out how to use them, and it's safe to say that delivery drivers might keep their jobs for a very long time. Maybe even to the point of automated cars, and maybe even permanently, because it's not as if you can argue with the drone if the order is wrong.

There's also this: it's easy to imagine how drone tech would be outlawed, or made so expensive as to be impossible to use. All it would take is mayhem from terrorists that use the tech, and a public reaction that more or less makes the technology publicly untenable. Or highly regulated, or with excessive insurance costs.

Hard thing, predicting the future.

Harder still, keeping people employed during it.

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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.

Regression to the (very) mean

Stuck in the middle with you

Like many of you, I suspect, I've been struggling to move past the election results and determine what it all means. I also have the added benefit of being a professional with ample contacts in affected minority communities, and these folks are understandably concerned with the business and working environment in the U.S. now. Without getting too far into the weeds of partisanship, I'd like to bring my viewpoint as a data analyst, and student of American history, to provide some perspective.

My first love as a numbers guy was baseball statistics, and I'm still fairly current with modern thinking about the sport. Just this last week, I read a study of players with exceptional swings away from the mean; pitchers who were most likely to get fly ball or ground ball outs, and so on. The vast majority of these outlier players regress to the mean the next season, even though their particular style and ways to work makes them likely to, well, continue to produce similar results. And yet, the setting of baseball, and more data, corrects and mediates. Outliers, to a very high percentage, come back to the fold.

I'll pivot now to U.S. political history. After the end of the Civil War, nearly 2,000 African Amercians held public office in the South, from local levels to the U.S. Senate, in a period that came to be known as Radical Reconstruction. This did not last, of course; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the corruption of local law enforcement, led to a backlash and subjugation. Eventually, the pendulum swung back through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with moments like bussing, a growing tolerance for mixed marriages, and the election of Barack Obama all moving the cause further. You could make the argument that the revocation of the Voting Rights Act, and the election of Donald Trump, as more points to a backlash, and I'm certainly not inclined to disagree with you. But the greater point is that progress is rarely, if ever, a smooth line.

Finally, to my day job in email analytics. One of my favorite statistics to look at is unsubscribe, in that many providers fail to give it strong consideration, due to its relatively low incidence rate, and it's also-ran status against more impactful pieces like open, click and conversion. However, I've always seen unsub as a moment of high importance, since the user has to not just open the message, but hunt for the link and take direct action. Rarely do you get such clear indication of user preference.

This year, we've been able to make some design and coding moves in our better performing templates which have managed to cut our unsub rates, especially in mobile deployment. The effect has been to lower the likelihood that you unsubscribe in error, and for much of 2016, this systematic change has led to lower rates. That sort of thing seems like it would be a longstanding and happy development, but remember... regression to the mean.

I'd love to be wrong about this, but I'd put long odds on this happy trend continuing in the next eight weeks, and probably in the long run as well. The reason why is that we're moving into the heaviest part of the year for email usage, and in high send times, "good" emails (my firm sends marketing messages that also double as de facto education pieces) hit the in-box along with a surge of, well, everything else.

At some point, people start unsubscribing, even to pieces that they are interested in and getting beneifts from, just to get back some control of their inbox. When that happens, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. In addition, the year over year trend in email is for double-digit increases in the amount of time spent. That's a trend that just can't continue, because people are busy and not getting enough benefit to just keep increasing that time spend... and trends that can't continue, well, don't.

Regression to the mean is like gravity. You can escape it for a while, and there are great benefits from doing so. When you do it, it feels wonderful, and can seem like the new normal. But if you assume you are going to continue to do it, especially without effort, you are likely to catch a painful surprise. Perhaps, very painful.

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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 Company You Keep

Bad Company might have better songs

This week, I met up with a friend that I haven't seen for decades, when we were just kids, honestly. He's new to my area, needs to step up his network, and we had one of those 90-minute meals where the conversation never lagged. I left feeling completely energized, and followed up with some leads that hopefully helped him on his journey. With luck, we'll meet up again soon and do more. 

Which reminded me of, well, just how the people in my childhood brought me along in their wake, and how one of the shortest ways out of any personal funk is to think about how much I have to be grateful for. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and it wasn't easy; no funds (truth be told, my grades and test scores weren't strong enough), not much aid, and I had my heart set on a name brand, private, and pretty expensive school. It all worked out after many years of paying off debt, but the point that I want to make is that no one makes their way alone. Even once I got out of school, that same pattern of being brought along from the inertia of others reasserted itself at various stops in my career. 

So I know a lot of things about a lot of things, and it's mostly because of people I've had the honor of working with. I've said this enough times that it sounds like a canned laugh line in conversations with clients, but because of the actions and support of others, I've been able to seem smarter than I am. I've also been blessed with a memory, and the ability to focus on individual salient points. Which leads to the ability to tell a good story or two. So with luck, I've started to (hopefully) pay back what I've learned.

The point of this isn't to just tell you about myself. More so, it's to share with you how this came to be. Because the people that I've learned from are all over the map, demographically. That's not a coincidence. Your thinking, and your opportunity to think different things, just gets sharper and better if your peer group is diverse. Rather than getting stuck in the same patterns and tactics, you get outside of your comfort zone faster, hear different perspectives, and in general, just go to different mental places. 

Also, you wind up eating better, listening to more interesting music, seeing different movies, thinking different thoughts. It's harder to be bored, harder to get down on yourself, and just a better way to be. And once you find this kind of peer group, you don't give it up.

So this is where I pivot, perhaps obviously, to the election that's going to happen in a couple of days. One side has diverse support; the other does not. One side has endorsements, whether pursued or not, from expressly racist organizations; the other does not. One side has a higher percentage of supporters who are positively voting for their candidate, rather than simply against the other. One side spends much of their political advertising just simply repeating wildly inappropriate and divisive statements made by the other candidate, in the simplest "attack" ads in recent memory. One side relies on statements that are simply and easily shown to be not true, to a much greater percentage. 

This isn't a matter of getting to simply vote for the side that you normally vote for, or the one that's closer to your history. It's also, due to the clearly perverse nature of for-profit "news", a situation where we may never have a not-close, third party "safe" election ever again. 

That's why the polling for this election doesn't show the usual splits by income, but more pronounced by education level. This isn't a matter of insidious indoctrination into a political belief system; it's simple exposure to a diverse community. (The same thing applies to how one side does well in cities, where a mix is inevitable, as opposed to less dense areas.)

I'm not sure what happens next in our very broken system. This election has been an ordeal for seemingly all involved, and the only true bi-partisan point is that these take too long, cost too much, and just infuriate. But I do know that when you judge the sides by the company they keep, the choice seems obvious. So, choose accordingly.

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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.

What's Wrong With The NFL?

Roger Is Not Helping

Ratings for the nation's most popular television programs are off by significant percentages this year, which has raised alarm bells in various sectors of the marketing and advertising media. As I have a foot in both worlds, I'd like to dig into the reasons why this is happening. But first, some ground rules.

1) Before anyone throws my opinion out as being clearly in the tank for some other sport, or being anti-NFL in some way, my bona fides. I run a fantasy football league, play in another, write about it for a blog, take my mom to a road game every year, and watch way, way, too much of this stuff. I'm a lifer. I like the game. I'm not against it.

2) I'm going to try to keep this to new factors, since the ratings decline is also new. It's not as if people are suddenly discovering that the game is violent, that women on the sidelines are objectified, and that commissioner Roger Goodell is cartoonishly corrupt. Those are all known quantities coming in.

So, what's new?

Well, the most obvious point of order is that one of the more remarkable Presidential campaigns in the history of the nation has been taking up all of the oxygen in the room, but it's not as if these audiences are really the same. In any event, the debates haven't ran into football games very often, and the ratings haven't grown now that those events are over. So while this might be a factor in just limiting overall coverage, it's not likely to be a massive point.

The next factor has actually been addressed during the campaign, with one of the contenders (you can guess which one, right? Sure you can) taking issue with the new concussion protocols as somehow being too restrictive. I think there's actually a bit of a point here; if you were weaned on more thrilling displays of violence, maybe the weaker tea that the NFL is serving up now as a middle ground between player safety and viewer appeal just doesn't cut it for you. If this is a major factor, then the NFL's decline could be seen as a purposeful long-term controlled descent, as part of a more sustainable economy. But while long-time fans might grumble about these new rules, I kind of doubt that anyone is really not watching because of them.

Another possible factor is San Francisco 49er QB Colin Kaepernick's continuing symbolic protest against the national anthem, which seems to (a) really rankle some in the audience by its seeming intrusion of politics into sport, and (b) prove the point that if you really want people to pay attention to your political point, you really need to put it into non-political areas of society. Kaepernick's exploding popularity in jersey sales makes me think that the controversy probably isn't that much of a net negative for the league.

Now, I'd like to pivot this into factors that I think are at play here. The first is the seemingly constant deterioration of the officiating, and the murky nature of the league's rules. Things that should be as cut and dried as humanly possible -- what is a catch? what does a player have to do to demonstrate possession of the ball? -- are a constant source of shrug, wait for replay, and we're into the realm of conspiracy theory and random chance. Any time a game can have its integrity questioned, it's not exactly a win for the league's broad appeal, especially to more casual fans.

Which leads me to the next point -- the NFL's declines are, in all likelihood, entirely in the realm of casual fans. Lifers are hooked on the stuff; it's the bigger crowds that gravitate in for night games and playoffs that generate growth in a mature market. Which is a major issue for the league, since two of three night telecasts seem to show the league at its worst, rather than at its most appealing. Games on Thursday are much more likely to show random or lesser teams, with blowouts more common due to the odd schedule, especially when one team comes in with more rest. Those games also get the coverage of Phil Simms, who might be the most irritating announcer on broadcast TV now, if my social media feed is any judge of it. The Monday Night Game has more of the Thursday feel to it, with Jon Gruden matching Simms' obsessions with quarterback minutiae and self-branding. I get that this isn't exactly new styles for either man, but with each passing year, the tendency seems to be getting stronger.

Before we move off the schedule, a further point about this: why is the league so skewed away from 4pm EST Sunday games? This week, we had 7 in the 1pm slot, and 2 in the 4pm; if the Falcons-Packers game hadn't been close, that entire block of time would have been must-skip TV. Combined with the increasing presence of games from London in the morning (can't imagine those are terribly popular with West Coast audiences at 7am local time), and nearly half of the league's games this weekend were viewable on broadcast, spread over a half dozen time slots. Maybe more, if you live in a media market with bleed over coverage fields. There's not much in the way of mystery anymore, and the timesink just keeps growing.

Speaking of the mystery draining out, let's look at fantasy football... which has likely crested in popularity, especially with the boom/bust nature of daily fantasy sites for an expansion of gambling opportunities. With the exercise growing further and further away from something a hobbyist could do without a major time commitment, we're going to a place where only hardcore nerds and fast twitch waiver wire obsessives need apply. More and more people seem to be cutting back on the number of leagues they play, and the demographic group of these leagues also looks to be graying. Not exactly a great trend for marketing pros.

A quick word about the compelling year and World Series that baseball is enjoying, and that's this: there's no strong likelihood of MLB really poaching much of the NFL's market. In its heyday, the NFL would just rollover any contenders to their time slot.

Here's another factor that I think people miss out on... the NFL's probably on the wrong side of momentum with women now. The annual October "pinkwashing" isn't without controversy or detractors now, and the league's sadly erratic history with cutting ties with domestic abuse perpetrators can't be doing much to help its chances. More and more moms and dads are keeping their kids away from the game for safety concerns, which also can't be helping.

Finally, this -- the NFL underserves its market through artificial shortages, by only playing at one time of the year, and not expanding into more regional markets that are currently dominated by high school and college games. As an aside, more and more folks in my network seem to be growing more interested in the college game, especially when it comes to casual betting. If nothing else, the announcing teams seem better.

No, the more you think about it, the more you might be inclined to think that we haven't seen the end of soft ratings for the NFL.

The bigger question is... have we hit the bottom yet, and if not, what does the bottom look like? (My guess is a Thursday night game between Tennessee and Jacksonville. But your mileage may vary.)

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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.

You'll Pay To Know What, And When, To Really Think

Via tech

Here's a small but highly recommended way to seem smarter than you actually are... listen to podcasts. I cycle through a bunch, mostly in a constant effort to find new ways to think about my various projects. Which is how the grist for this week's column came about, which is a new way to think about the next wave of wearable technology.

(Don't worry, I'll bring it around to marketing and advertising eventually.)

Here's the germ of the idea. A research team that was conducting MRI scans of healthy subjects for a baseline study found that, well, it's hard to ask people to just lie still for a long time. Especially in an environment that many people find to be claustrophobic.

So they experimented with a variety of audio programs on headphones during the scan, and found that while music was good, podcasts -- particularly ones that told an engaging story -- were better still.

This probably doesn't come as a striking revelation. From your own day to day, I'm sure you find that when someone is telling you an engaging story, you are more apt to stay still and listen. But what's more telling and interesting is that the actual thought process of listening and learning shows up on the MRI as well.

Here's where I'm going to make two small but defensible leaps of logic. I'm going to presume that the brain is a muscle, and that it does better with routine exercise. And maybe not just the kind that involves sweating, but also the mental kind.

This is, of course, the entire raison d'etre of Lumosity, the "brain games" start up that is, not coincidentally, a frequent buyer of advertising space during, well, podcasts. So it's not exactly a big leap of faith to imagine that properly timed and individually prescribed mental exercises will also help cognitive performance. Also, that we can prove that it's worth doing.

Which brings us to the second leap of logic. A future version of wearables will monitor brain activity, and provide alerts to the user based on various mental conditions.

If you are predisposed to negative potential, you might go immediately to a dark place from this, with thoughts of mind control, exceptional privacy violations, censorship, and so forth. But my inclination is to stay with the personal and the positive, and imagine a scenario in which people struggling with depression are given, well, content at the time when it does them the most good. Or aging patients at risk of mental deterioration are given small puzzles that help them retain and improve. The potential could extend to patients with OCD, postpartum depression, drivers with readings that seem to indicate episodes of micro-sleeping, and so on, and so on.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much untapped human potential would reach the world from people who achieve some measure of additional relief from these conditions. Consider the possibility of lives saved from fleeting thoughts that lead to suicide, moments of regression in fights against addiction, or the more mundane aspects of better awareness and coping mechanisms for stress, and so on. How much more could we achieve as a species, if technology gives us the ability to act without these limits?

Let's bring this back to our bread and butter. So while you are considering all of these possibilities, let's also think about narrow-casting our messaging to people when they might be most interested in buying a product, or most receptive to hearing an advertising message / willing to be distracted from their current task.

After all, a dramatically better human experience?

Still has bills to pay.

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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.

My Trump Media Conspiracy Theory

Preach, H.L, Preach

I'm going to step away from the usual beat (marketing and advertising), because I feel the following point is being missed, and needs to be addressed before it gets wiped away on the whiteboard that is modern history. And for the record, I'd like to think that I'd hold this opinion regardless of my partisan position, but as it's probably going to be pretty apparent to you which way I lean, I'm not going to apologize or hide that.

In the last week of the presidential race, there has been two interpretations of the rhetoric coming from the Trump campaign.

1) That he's speaking truth to power, calling out the timing as well as the veracity of various news stories as suspect, and daring to speak of vast interconnectedness at the highest levels of finance, media, and political influence.

2) He's grasping at straws to spread the blame for a failing campaign, and setting up a future delegitimization of a Hillary Clinton presidency, which will help when he sets up a new media network for those in his influence. This is where Roger Ailes' role in the Trump campaign comes into play. Trump TV as an exit strategy has been more than a persistent rumor.

Now, I'm not going to convince anyone of the merits of either of these theories. We live in a time where convincing anyone about anything requires great tact, data, and expertise, as well as a background where you trust the proprietor of the opinion for past work.

But what I can assert, and maybe even reach some minds across the aisle from mine, is that there is some suspicion in the timing, but it's not necessarily due to a favoritism towards Clinton, or away from Trump. Rather, it's toward, well, profits. Ratings. Also, that a democracy that serves these needs in front of informing the populace seems more than a little dangerous.

There has been ample time in this campaign (we're going on what, the second or third year of it?) to vet the candidate from all of his various issues, without anything new coming out in the last few weeks. The bus tape that started the latest avalanche is over a decade old, and many of the women who have come forward with allegations could have been published some time ago. Sure, some of the client's own statements may have caused some to move forward, but a persistent journalist or staff could have, perhaps, gotten some of this out earlier in the calendar year. The graphic and easily understood nature of the tape gives it more red meat than, say, the Trump University issues, or some of the more racier stories about overtones of organized crime in the Atlantic City days, or past instances of adultery, but that's not what concerns me here.

Rather, what seems to be the case is that the media wasn't as dogged in pursuing those stories during the Republican primary, not when there was such a fountain of ratings and takedowns of various candidates to fill the news hole and bring in casual viewers. Some blame must also go to Trump's primary rivals, who clearly didn't do the same level of opposition research (witness Alicia Machado) that the Clinton team did. While it's clear that any single Republican rival that went that strongly against Trump in the primary would have suffered a direct counter-attack, it's also clear that the entire field would have been more likely to end the insurgency had all of the countering forces come out earlier, when support for him wasn't as entrenched.

Much about this campaign has seemed unprecedented, unique, and straight out of an over-ripe screenplay. But what it's also been is highly lucrative for a media industry that has done as little as possible to talk about differences in issues or policy, and has profited mightily from lowest common denominator news stories.

While we can hope that lessons have been learned, and this kind of phenomenon will get faster vetting in the future, it's hard to argue with money. Perhaps even more depressingly, that this is the new normal, where scandal and malfeasance is what will rule the day, now and forever more.

Also, the eternal, true and depressing adage that you learn very early in political science class, which you can also call out for the ratings being so high...

The people get the government they deserve.

And in the words of the late great H.L. Mencken, they'll get it good and hard.

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Even The Losers

More Losing Might Be In Order

Last weekend, I took my mom, a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan (OK, I am too) to a road game for our annual birthday tradition. So far, we've been to Cleveland, Indianapolis, Chicago, Tampa, Green Bay, St. Louis, and now Detroit. (We're 4-4, and my beloved team lost this last one by a point. We had a good time, because we always do, but it could have been better. Alas. Moving on.)

On the way to our parking spot, I saw the following PSA, which just made my day on many levels. Let's dive into it, shall we?

1) As a fan of a team that is nearly as futile as the Lions in terms of time between championships (1957 for them, 1960 for my laundry), I kind of like that this headline is a few blocks from the stadium. I'd like it more if it were close to Dallas, Washington, New England and New York, but you take what you can for smart aleck snarking moments.

2) On first blush, the ad pops and makes sense... but if you look at it more than five seconds, you'll catch a rather, um, glaring mistake. (I apologize for the image, but we were in the car and I had to rely on Google Earth for the grab.) Take a second look. See it yet?

Namely, um...

If you are losing, dude in the hoodie with the hands up in obvious distress...

Why do you have the mountains and mountains of chips?

Which you clearly have not lost, or at least, not yet?

Look, I get that outdoor ads are hard. You can't go for any concept that takes more than three seconds, the copy has to be pretty much header online, and you need obvious graphic relevance and stopping power. They cost real money and take significant industry, and even PSAs get real attention in the community.

But, um, how hard would it have been to show the chips being raked away, to back up the whole idea of Losing?

Or just not show the chips at all, since the hoodie, green felt and copy might have gotten the point across?

Which leads me to the following and final point about any marketing and advertising project like this one...

Maybe run it past someone who is actually in the target demographic of, well, actually having gambled in their lifetime? Before you put the damned thing up?

Play me out, Tom Petty...

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Dad's Favorite (Only?) Game

Sing It, Fry

This past Saturday saw another college trip for the eldest -- the third this month, and the seventh of her process so far. She's getting serious about this, on a lot of levels, and it's honestly great to see. But the nuts and bolts of that isn't what I'm going to get into here. Instead, I'll use the experience to answer an age-old question for some casual observers of marketing and advertising, which is why the vast majority of pitches in our world are geared to dramatically younger audiences. But first, back to the college visit.

The trip this time was a 3-hour drive to a state with dramatically higher costs for gasoline, as well as a toll road to get there if you want to save about 15 to 20 minutes of time. As we were late getting out in the morning and had a hard stop of when we needed to get back, this was all part of my consideration set, because, well, every dollar we save is a dollar we've got to help with the college costs in a couple of years. And at this stage in my life, I just enjoy finding new ways to save money. It's a Dad Game, to be sure, but a game all the same.

Which meant that I bought just enough gas in the neighboring state to get back. Also, that we left in time on the trip back to take non-toll highways, which also allowed me to drive at more mileage-friendly speeds. When we did get back, I filled up at my local warehouse store, where the gas is a few cents cheaper and still good quality. That also gave me the chance to grab a handful of groceries that were also a deal. While also using the cashback credit card, which doesn't carry a balance, because, well, we're avoiding the finance charges. The warehouse store also has a cashback bonus, so we're kind of double-dipping on that. And so on, and so on. I stretch dollars now in ways that I never did when I was younger.

Which leads me to the point I wanted to make, and the one that has been an abiding mystery in many marketing and advertising circles. Namely, why is so much marketing fixated on younger and less demographically advantaged users, when the older folks are the ones, well, with the money?

In automotive advertising, it's particularly striking. The average new car buyer is in their early '40s. Up to then, most buy used or increasingly just avoid the expense. (Personally, I didn't buy a new car until that age as well.) So when you see ads for cars that are filled with millenials, it's something of a miss, but understandable from the standpoint of the prospects wanting to appear younger than they are, or building brand for the long term.

If you want to tell a nice story about this, it's because younger buyers are presumed to be highly impressionable, and you can more easily change their buying patterns. The not so nice story is that older consumers are, well, cheap, and aren't likely to adjust well to the new price levels for things; consider the not overwhelming cash you might have gotten in cards from your older relatives back in the day.

But for me, what it really comes down to is being able to say no to myself pretty easily, whether it's for drinking free office coffee over premium stuff, shifting to store brands over premiums, doing my due diligence for price checks, and so on, and so on.

Saying no to the kid, especially if she gets into a school that could have a dramatic impact on her future life and earning potential?

Well, being Dad means you can't always play the game you'd like to play...

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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.