Deep Content Marketing, Or Making Money The Dead Way

Sell Thee Well

I am old enough to remember a time when music was (a) not something you could download, or (b) not something you could access at any point in the program. In addition to this dating moment, this: as a kid, I had the first Sony Walkman cassette player, with headphones, and used it relentlessly while delivering newspapers. Everything about that sentence probably made everyone under the age of 50 do a double-take. But from this old-time start, modern marketing takeaways await.  

Any number of people in my feed and life have been talking about the Grateful Dead’s final show at the end of a 50-year career. There are obvious lessons for modern marketers, about community, authenticity, craft, and so on. However, what is important is that the content went deep, with merit beyond the immediate hook. Ask any Deadhead what their favorite song is, and few will be able to keep their list below five, and will usually qualify it further by detailing the time, place and line up. While the Dead are a bit of an extreme example of this, you can get similar experiences from any band of the era.

For deep content bands like this, songs exist, and even to a limited degree, singles, but the more valuable unit of time is the album side. I am not a huge Dead fan – that is my older brother and sister’s domain – but the front side of “American Beauty” is a more or less perfect mix and experience, and I can not, to this day, feel satisfied with just the opening cut (“Box of Rain”). Ask a Pink Floyd fan about the first side of “Dark Side of the Moon”, or Dire Straits’ “Making Movies” (first album I ever bought), and you will get looks of reverie.

Compare this to the modern music experience, where you will rarely hear an entire song outside of your dedicated purchase, because no one wants to hear anything more than the hook, or at most, the chorus. Songs or sections that might reveal themselves to the listener on multiple listens (“deep cuts”, in the lingo) do not really exist, and it is not just a matter of short attention spans. The commerce dictates that most new music will break in soundtrack moments, in hook increments only, with only a very small percentage of the audience ever getting a chance to engage in deep content. Trust me on this: the modern bands would *kill* to have the Dead’s financial wherewithal.

Now, compare this to general e-commerce plays. In travel, the equivalent of a hit single might be a low price on a route that is useful to the traveler… but unless they get to a club membership, or start to engage with upgrades on a routine basis, they will just slide to the artist that has the next hit. Same with e-commerce with retargeting plays based entirely on price, or the “winner” in a search engine push, or buyers from a coupon site.

Getting to the deep content is not just good marketing, an opportunity to sell on customer service, or a chance to justify a CRM program. Rather, it is the key to transitioning away from shallow sales and limited lifetime value, and into sustainable profit margins, true word of mouth secondary sales, and growth that goes beyond the business quarter.

There is, of course, no shortcut to this stage. Just as it took the Dead decades to get to a self-sustaining community that meant filling live venues was rarely a problem, it will take a similar commitment on the part of your brand.

It is also not optional, assuming you are in business for the long term.

Fare thee well…

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of this page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

If (when?) the Apple Watch fails, the IoT will be just fine

Limited Failure, Really

Two unrelated but conflicting items in the news feed this week:

1) Apple Watch sales fall 90% from the launch rush, speaking to how this is a bleeding edge product that mainstream users are not taking on.

2) IBM announced a breakthrough in computer chip manufacturing, which basically means that the next generation is going to be half as big as the current ones. (FYI, we are also now getting into the molecular level, with special facilities that eliminate all vibration, because Ye Gads, we are manufacturing things at a molecular level.)

So here is where I get to out of this. The Internet of Things is still coming, but it is not going to do so directly.

A wearable watch is, well, still a watch. There’s an entire generation of people who more or less missed that choice in apparel, and expecting them to just latch on because it’s tech now was always going to be a bit of a stretch.

However, what is most telling is that three million users went for it anyway, with many more going for FitBits. Other providers are joining the fray with lower cost items, but even if the eventual connected band market is 10X the current Apple Watch world, it’s “only” 30 million, or about 10% of the populace. Significant, but nowhere near smartphone numbers.

But those super-thin, super-small components? Well, those could go anywhere, really. Individual SKUs on apparel, to replace bulky security devices, and provide much more information about consideration and browsing behavior. Once the user owned the apparel, the pieces can communicate with each other and get to a baseline for health. Imagine, honestly, how much better preventative care could be if the populace has the option of frequent monitoring. Your clothing could save your life… and back to an e-commerce standpoint, items at a wearout stage could potentially alert a vendor.

The point is that the Internet of Things t will not be about a handful of high-touch, high-consideration screens that you, as an individual consumer, will purchase. Instead, it will be immersive, easy, and driven by market forces that speak to marketing and advertising efficiency at the consumer level, and manufacturing and shipping efficiencies on the front end.

So don’t take the Apple Watch sales as the canary in the coal mine for IoT. We are barely in the first few minutes of a very long game, where the benefits / players have barely begun to take the field. I realize that we are all on hyperspeed now, but this trend is going to be determined by more than monthly sales of a couple of SKUs.

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Using Demographics In A Programmatic Age

Not shown: Work Experience

By way of introduction, this was inspired by recent pieces that talked about how demographics are dead (Dead! Dead I tell you!) in regards to marketing and advertising plays now. Dead being, as far as I can tell, clickbait for creatives. Anyway, let’s step back from the ever-present device and discuss how your traditional training and thought process still has value, even in a data-driven age.

If you are a marketing and advertising pro with any shrewdness or time to spend on the task, you monitor what your competitors are doing. It is simple enough to do with subscribing to email newsletters, and if you really want to go above and beyond the ability of most, you also know about Moat, a graphic search engine for display ads. However, there’s a simple enough tactic that can go one step further for you.

Demographics get a bad rap these days in terms of campaign targeting, and that’s justified, for the plain and simple reason that you can do better with programmatic and remarketing plays. Reaching the right consumer is more important and efficient than reaching the right type of consumer, because the data just shows a win for the former, and even the slummiest of content sites is patronized by a handful of optimal prospects. Buy the prospect, not the site, assuming that viewability isn’t broken. (It is, but that’s a problem for another day.)

The key takeaway? Just because demographics are no longer the best or only way to find prospects, doesn’t mean that they are no longer important to marketing and advertising pros. It just means that they are not as important in terms of the mechanics of reach in lead generation.

Where the demo still matters is in creative, in establishing and protecting the brand. Brand marketing also tends to get short shrift in data-driven and direct mediums. The argument is that you have already established brand value, especially in remarketing plays, and you are better off using optimal practices, including but not limited to aggressive pricing, functionality and dynamic elements.

The problem with this approach is that it treats your prospect as an entirely logical individual with his or her thought process, as if everyone in the prospect pool was engaged in a bot-level buying decision. Which means that your margins are in for a bad time, and so is your lifetime value.

Happily for vendors, there are better ways to run a campaign.

The first is to know your consumer category, and to take into consideration your brand value. For e-commerce plays like apparel, shoes and niche plays with high tactile impact, the brand and individual SKUs matter much more. You are not buying a dress because you have seen the exact same piece at five different stores; you buy the dress because it matches your style, and you trust the brand to make pieces that make you feel good when you put them on. That is a fundamentally better place to be from a margin standpoint.

The second approach is to look outside of your consumer category for inspiration and optimal practices. For our apparel play, check out how non-competing providers handle their work in, say, beauty or accessories. For upscale travel, consider financial services, premium personals or high-end consumer electronics. You can often find inspiration and great testing points that will take you beyond an execution-only optimization moment, and into something that is far more actionable for future iterations.

Finally, there is the possibility of co-promotional marketing opportunities and swaps from his kind of research, especially in niche plays. If you can reach a similar prospect list without going into the heavy lifting of finding and building said list? That’s where dramatic and powerful growth can happen, on an affiliate-style level.

It’s a swing for the fences technique, to be sure, but doesn’t it sound a lot more promising than just trying to beat your control? Or tossing everything you know about your buyer demos in the dustbin of history?

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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of the page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFP is always free.