Top 10 things we've learned this year

Sorry it's been a while, but the reality of agency work is that the less you hear from us on this blog, the busier we are. Anyway, let's get to the good stuff, and if most of this seems email-centric, well, that's what we've been doing. You are what you eat.

1) Dayparting continues to adjust. 

One of the easiest ways to goose your positive metrics is to send your emails (a) when people will see them, and (b) when everyone else isn't. So if you've never tested your times, don't think that they vary from summer to winter seasonality, and aren't taking advantage of evening and weekend work for highly motivated readers, you are just leaving money on the table. Anymore from 5 to 20% of it, actually.

2) Your body copy probably never mattered, and it really doesn't now.

After a year of extensive testing for a steady client, I've learned that email service providers are not analyzing body copy and content. They are analyzing subject lines, list hygiene, frequency, complaint rates and so on -- but the stuff that your marketing team really sweats over and edits as if it matters? Not so much. Inboxing, open rates, spam filtering -- that's all on the subject line. Plan accordingly. 

3) Your total list isn't helping you.

That's because for most clients, attrition and obsolescence is going to make the unresponsive parts of your list an active detriment. Send to them, and your rates will go down, your sender reputation will tank, and you won't be able to reach the people who actually want to hear from you. Reactivating lapsed users is small beer, by the way -- worth doing, but it's not a game changer. Send only to active members and write the back end off.

4) Go organic, if your brand allows it.

Emojis used to seem like hack work or gimmickry, but since the world has gone away from them, ESPs see them as evidence of human activity again. Odd punctuation, a not quite polished quote copy, something that seems just a little bit off in a way that's more human and less AI? It's all going to work, because it's all going to seem like it's from a human, not a machine. The more tech we have, the more we want humanity.

5) File sizes will not be enforced.

Once upon a time in email, you had to optimize your images to the point of pain, limit animation cycles, worry about deployment times and worry a lot about ESPs gating heavy messages, to the point of always sending plain text test segments to make sure you weren't harming the campaign. Now? Yes, an animated image might take a second or two to pop in, and you shouldn't make your messages huge for the fun of it, but otherwise, don't sweat this. It does not matter.

6) Single KPI sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck. 

No marketing department will stand up in public and say that they only care about say, acquisition without conversion... but they will also inevitably prioritize one measurement over all others, because humanity wants to operate on works/does not work binaries, when reality is a continuum. Measure the top of the funnel, the middle, and the close -- or risk your business to myopic moves that will optimize one factor, often at the cost of your entire business.

7) A secret sauce metric: read/glance/skim.

A top client uses Pardot for email, which leaves a lot to be desired, but does have one winning feature: a pixel that loads and tells the marketer if the reader has viewed the email in question for less than 2 seconds (glance), two to eight (skim), and over eight (read). Like all metrics in email, take it with a shaker of salt, but when you compare emails against each other and one has a dramatically better read rate? That's a clue on the efficacy of your body content, formatting, and so on. Don't ignore clues.

8) Check the tail.

Many email analysts will look at metrics after a small period of time and never look again -- but that's another clue that is being ignored. Some emails, dayparts, offers, content and so on is going to inspire interaction for much longer after delivery. That could lead to content changes, different tactics, and so on. It will also impress your client.

9) Email continues to underuse some tech, and overuse others.

Want AI to write subject lines for you? Sure, that's easy (and dear God, just hire a good human already; tech that ends honest work should not be celebrated). How about dynamic content that matches the user's interests, or fits into larger marketing efforts with CTV, AR, QR codes, banners, direct mail and so on? Not so much. (Alas the poor QR code: it's just never really going to be a thing. Especially when a bad actor inevitably uses it to promote malware and it becomes a media firestorm. Inevitable, that.)

10) Painting outside the lines still works.

The single biggest win for one of my clients this year was with an unusual format (a 2 minute broadcast spot), featuring very different creative (a comedy skit) in an unexpected setting (a nation-wide college football broadcast). A steady diet of this would not work, and there was a lot of unique aspects to this that made it happen; the game was a blowout and social media decided the ad was a lot more fun to talk about than the game. Having this be a replicatable success seems unlikely, but it did a lot of good for the client, reinforced the brand, and energized the internal team. It also wasn't an all-in gamble. Consider the wisdom of all of this.

There's more, of course, but we need to save a few things for your next engagement with us. We look forward to working with you.

On losing and loser clients

Ocean's Gate, Like Heaven's Gate

Many times in my decades of consulting, I've been directed to do a dumb thing by a client that's paying me to, well, steer them away from doing dumb things. (And yes, this post was inspired by a small group of obscenely wealthy people dying in the ocean, causing untold expense to find out what happened to them, all of which is money that could have been spent on so many, many better ideas.)

It's the single worst part of consulting, and the hardest judgment call you'll ever make. If your client hears your counsel and chooses to keep in their bad course, you are honor-bound to execute it to the best of your ability. All while knowing that, like a failed military coup in politics, this refusal to bow to expertise, math, etc., is just setting the stage for a deterioration of the relationship later. 

Most agencies lose 1 out of 4 clients every year, and most marketers don't stay at one gig for life, especially in aggressive categories. You acquire a past as being either too ineffective or too inflexible, the client acquires a past as being obstinate or resentful that you are telling them that they are wrong, and the seeds for a future separation are shown.

I'm not really sure how to solve for this, honestly. I've tried at most of my gigs to make it about the math, under the theory that math can solve a disagreement without emotion, and gives everyone a great way to walk it back from a bad decision. Test don't guess, and the only real way to fail is to not test, or at least, not test effectively.

But the trouble with this approach, and the reason why M&AD hasn't been able to elude the gravity that every other agency is subject to, is this: "the math" isn't binary. Which is an odd thing to say about math, but hear me out. It's never about a single key performance indicator. If it were, you could do your job forever and the only real issue is ducking AI or boredom, because your job is simple AF. 

But for most clients, if I drive leads to your business cheaply, you can say I've done my job -- or you can point to lifetime value and ROI and say I'm done nothing useful. I can say it's your site or your offer or your competition, and now we're back to the world of emotions, not math.

For clients like this, you win so long as you do the thing that makes them happy. You try to make yourself bulletproof by getting them to change the way they look at the world... but reality is that most people do not change the way they look at the world. And if they do change, it's not always for the better.

And that's when the job starts to lose its fun, its vitality, its candor and its color... and you start to think about the client that's going to replace this one. Which is also why agencies are never not looking for new business. Ping us accordingly.

What We've Been Up To

 Because, well, it's been a while.

Falling out of love with the NBA. (Whoops, wrong blog.)

Working for a non-profit with the damned near holy mission of protecting free speech in America. (You may have seen some of our TV spots in the Philadelphia area. Check it out.)

Finishing up assisgnments for consulting clients in insurance, programmatic marketing, online education, SAT prep and others.

Which is all a long way of saying that if you want to get on our dance card, we've learned some things and have less bandwidth than before, but still some. Reach out; we know more than ever, and have value to add.

Seeya!

Deactivating Twitter

So that happened today, for both the sports and business blogs. It was surprisingly easy, honestly, but I never really loved the site in the first place.

A few things:

> I have no idea how much this business was worth before Musk decided to have a nervous breakdown in public and light more money on fire than anyone has ever lit before, but you have to assume it was more than nothing. Which is what it's worth now.

> There's really no reason to think that social media as a business model, which wasn't exactly swimming in profit before this insanity, should survive this dumpster fire. Sure, some of the smarter people from Twitter are going to land on their feet, but you just had a brand that was known worldwide cease to exist. There's reasons for that beyond the bad ideas of a delusional maniac. 

> Anyone who is still working at Twitter should be presumed a grifter. There's no way that the 25% that are left are there for any reason other than to take the money Musk has got left. One presumes that there is some.

> I'm not certain that if I drove a Tesla, I'd feel good about it now. I get that they are great cars, but you are driving something that used to be known as a premium brand and forward thinking, and is now a source of ridicule. Can't be good for the resale value. And they were always expensive to fix.

> If this gets us to a better world of less snark and international influence on the decisions of nations from outside actors, I'm OK with losing out on the joke room pitch fest that was my feed. If it just means a world with less bad ideas of fun, also a thing.

> If you want to draw a similarity here between Musk and Alex Jones, or Musk and the content apocalypse going on with HBO Max / TNT Et Al... well, I'll see your supposition and raise with the following. There's been too much content for anything approaching economic sustainability, and we're probably going to a place where everyone is going to be presumably entertained a little less. Or just differently. Emphasis dark.

> If you'd like to imagine a dystopia where everyone stares at a TikTok feed of AI-driven quick twitch junk food for the intellect, yeah, that too. I'll be listening to podcasts instead, but I'm also not delusional; most folks are going to do the easy thing. You don't have to be like them, and if you've read this far, you probably aren't. Feel good about that.

What You Learn From Bad Clients

Folks, the life of a consultant may be lucrative. 

But it isn't easy.

Something that happens when you open your shingle to the world is that, well, the world isn't all great people. You run into folks who traffic in bad faith, deal in all or nothing thinking, behave emotionally, and your reward for all of this is, well, the paycheck. And nothing but the paycheck, because the value you add will feel like a bad exchange later. 

During the engagement, you make yourself believe in the client, because not believing in the client is, at least for me, impossible. Once we commit to a job, we're doing the job, but this is all at-will work where the role was available. It's often available for a reason the client won't admit. That's the fun of dealing with people who deal in bad faith.

In the past couple of years, we've had clients who:

> Ranted and raved about colleagues as if they were, well, children (in need of medication)

> Scheduled entire days of meetings, then never showed up on time for any of them, fostering an environment where time waste was endemic

> Forced goals on junior personnel that were ridiculously higher than the historical production rate of past teams as a bad faith exercise in office politics

> Engaged in "I got mine" leadership of more or less washing their hands on controlling the excesses of executives

> Preached values for public consumption that they utterly failed to uphold on a personal level

> Committed the naturalistic fallacy (what is true for me is true for all) as if self-doubt or self-reflection was a virus

> Treated Covid precautions as a sign of weakness and/or mockery

> Assumed the worst of everyone for everything (well, game recognizes game)

> All while claiming that said excesses were made up for by some other virtue (loose hiring, flexible hours, lavish lunches, etc.)

It's sobering. 

Discouraging. 

And in the long run, always, always, always a plus to get away from.

So what have we learned?

> Bank and save, so you can take on fewer red flag clients

> Practice gratitude, so that you don't turn into the bad client

> Trust your gut. Especially on things like using your own credit card for reimbursed expenses.

> Know that even if the bad client seems to thrive from their bad behavior in the short term, they won't be able to escape who they are. Character is destiny, and time wounds all heels.

> Live well. It's the best revenge.

Forward!

What We've Learned (So Far) This Year

Also, that Simpsons Memes = You Are Old

M&AD's business is, as I write this, up over 20% at this time from 2021. (Go us!) We've also got a pivot movement happening right now, as an old major client offboards for business reasons, and a new significant player hops on. So I thought I'd take a moment, as we've got time enough to write and share, to explain what we've been working on, and more of what we've learned.

> Sustainability is the new hotness.

Our pivot involves consulting and SEO work for folks in this space, which just makes all the sense in the world, really. It's a perfect marriage of channel and purpose, and what's encouraging here is that the prospect base aren't just skim and click folks. You have to write for brains as well as thumbs. Just a better place to be when it comes to the work.

This sector was always highly interesting to us from our historic position as a resource for first movers (prior: augmented reality, cannabis, remote learning), but it has special urgency with +$5 gasoline, not to mention the fresh incentive to not buy fossil fuels from terrible people. More of this, please -- and not just for M&AD.

> B2C tactics continue to work on niche audiences.

Some clients in special and highly regulated markets seem surprised when tactics from outside of their industry bear fruit, but the plain and simple of it is that marketing is about offer, list and creative... and the same eyes that looked at that e-commerce play five minutes ago are looking at this B2B one now. We don't magically ratchet up our attention spans, lose our preference for headlines that snap, or put our brain's desire to look at pictures over text away just because it's Business Time. Execute accordingly, while protecting brand.

> Small universal big levers still work and hold their value.

Consider the humble Sender Name in a commercial email. It rarely gets testing focus, and it's a hard thing to test very often for branding reasons -- but when you can if/then test to a winning one? You dine at the +10-15% table for a really long time after that. (Similar bonus point: waterfalling ads by placement to increase fill rates.) Some in this industry scoff at incremental improvements, but at M&AD, it's against our religious business faith to leave money on the table. Especially money from weak execution.

> People see through bells and whistles, even in a recovery.

A recent client was enamored of animation in their decks, all while missing the blocking and tackling required to make a major account feel secure in a commitment. This has been proven over and over again in our 20+ years in the business, but sizzle is a powerful spice. Use rarely and with great care, or risk arousing (justified!) suspicion from your prospect. If every slide is animated, no slide is.

> New holiday, who dis?

Twice in the past 14 months, Wal-Mart got resoundingly slapped down on social media for trying to monetize Juneteenth in a remarkably tone-deaf fashion. We are reasonably certain that at some point in our lifetime, the newest federal holiday will safely and positively celebrate Black Excellence (and, well, capitalism) in a way that won't induce cringing and social media disdain. This is America, after all.

We're also very certain that the movement will not be led via a special ice cream flavor or cookout section at a big box store. (And yes, I'm leaving some things unsaid in this note, and yes, you can ask me about it offline...) 

The Subroutine Problem

Or moles instead of subroutines

So here's a way that I think I can discuss the current political situation in re the Supreme Court that, with luck, will allow me to say something useful... without removing M&AD from professional consideration from a significant portion of the business community.

One of the ways in which I am blessed and useful, in a business context, is that I have a helpful amount of disassociation and distance from my physical self. It's something that I think may come easier to those of us who don't have to deal with, say, the issue of menses, and if I'm speaking to full privilege, the fact that I'm also currently abled, the majority skin tone, not living near heavy industry or under challenging policing conditions, hetero-normative, etc. I am a dream patient for doctors; I deliver the meat bag and I give them no trouble. These are tactical advantages under our current conditions, and will likely remain that way. If you want to end the pay gap, you actually have to pay women more than men, and in some places and industries, you do. Not enough, but it is better than it used to be, and independent of the activities of the week, that trend will hopefully continue.

Steering out of the tangent.

Let's imagine that the human brain is akin to your computer, or if you prefer, your phone. Too many programs (or aps) running all at once will cause heat, slowness, inefficiency, irritation and if done for too long, a system crash. Maybe even viruses and the early obsolescence of the hardware. Too few programs will improve on all of these things, but it will also be, well, boring as hell and not particularly useful. 

Finding the right mix and/or increasing your processing power and speed is the goal, but it's a balance. As soon as you add RAM, as it were, you also tend to add stuff. If you'd like to keep this offline, swap in age and commitments. You can kid yourself into thinking that your machine is special and can handle the abuse, and that may be true (especially if you were born lucky and aren't running all of those other aps I mentioned earlier)... 

But eventually a limit will be reached. Maybe you stop running the Kindness to Fellow Drivers or Service Workers ap, or the Charity ap, and maybe you even pat yourself on the back for being so smart as to do that. Life hack! One that I hope the majority of us will not adopt, because, y'know, it leads to devolution and horror. But I digress, and callous billionaires are heroes to many.

The past (five? who can tell?) years has forced a plethora of subroutines on *everyone*. No matter where you stand politically, you have ran the Covid subroutine. You are probably running the Ukraine subroutine. Maybe you are running Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Climate Change, Culture Wars, Immigration, Crime, Inflation and Media subroutines, too.

Whole lotta subroutines. On top of any of the personal ones.

And now, the Court.

You can, of course, shut down *any* of these. All you have to do is disable them, along with the Conscience and Empathy Aps.

But it won't make the world any better, won't protect those who really need protection, and won't give you any comfort at all when the next turn in the road arrives, and you are just along for the ride.

From a personal standpoint, I can not fathom how some of the folks who I oppose on this matter sleep at night, where they get the absolute self-confidence to know that their flawed position is somehow correct, and why they would want to live in the world that their actions would create. 

I am also sure that they probably think, if they care to, the very same things about me.

So I'll try to remember that these are human beings, and that if I engage my full ire about it... well, I'm just running the subroutine, probably so much that I can't do anything else.

And well, people need me to do more than run that subroutine. 

If only, so that others can.

Good luck getting past your own subroutine issues, folks...

Taking It Personal

A few months ago for a side project, I listened to "The Godfather" on audiobook. This quote in particular stuck with me.

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

A lifetime ago (aka, the lifetime of my eldest child), I took an intensive self-improvement and leadership class. It was many days of very difficult work, and it has served me well ever since, because it gave me the tools I needed to diagnose and act when my performance, either in business or my personal life, was lacking. In this course, I learned that what really makes me move is creativity, leadership and integrity. Whenever I've held back on any of these, it hasn't gone well.

A little while ago, I worked for a client where leadership knew exactly what it wanted -- even when other members of the team did not concur. I pushed back a little but over time, leadership took less and less input, to the point of rudeness. They also negotiated the price of the contract down, then ended the relationship in favor of a "fresh faced" hire. They have also had a lot of turnover and not a lot of real growth over the course of the business. Their output since our relationship ended, either at a business or creative level, has also slowed.

You can, and should, read that kind of behavior as a client that just wants cheap and deferential. You can, and should, also take that as a relationship that will never re-start, or one that, if they came back to us again, we'd just reject. 

But you'd be wrong, because I never say never, and I've seen enough reversals in my career to know that I don't know how everything works out. 

I also know that in deferring to leadership (as we had no leverage at the time), I wasn't acting with integrity -- and in the event of a re-start, we'd have said leverage, and would.

So yes, at M&AD, we take our work personally. We're also currently working for clients that are letting us fire on all cylinders... and man alive, are they getting a lot of value out of the relationship

So much so that this is the first post in a month, happening on a Sunday afternoon, before we get back to it. 

Because that's the thing about when you get what you need from management. You get a lot more back. T'was ever thus.