Five Paths To Terrible Marketing

A good friend of mine is a DJ for a college radio station, and needed a theme for her set before an upcoming fund drive. On a whim, I suggested "Love Songs For Terrible People," because the kinds of challenging singer-songwriters that make me happy tend to go in that direction. She's taken the suggestion, and the set will happen this week. Happy to help, really.

As I took my dog out for his walk this evening, I started together my own play list of songs that would meet the criteria. Then, I had the small thought; what would tips for terrible marketing and advertising pros look like? And the suggestions came even faster than songs. They include...

5) Focus on single metrics only.

Do you do banner ads? Concentrate only on click rate. Email? Only open rates matter. Radio and outdoor are wins if you can track the placement to call center volume, business reply cards to mail-in reply rates, and so on, and so on. Anyone that tries to discuss complexity in these matters is clearly trying to disguise weak creative, or some other issue. The world isn't complex, and marketing success or failure is all about making one magic number move.

4) Aggressive short-term strategies are totally worth it, especially in online.

Hey, remember that magic metric stuff? Let's spike your click rate. No one remembers things like fake close boxes, Windows-style UI, clickbait treatments and other gray / black hat moves. Plus, the Internet is filled with easy going people who never complain about anything, and aggressive testing just goes down the memory hole. You also totally won't lose clients and staff over this sort of thing.

3) Testing is for the untalented.

You just know this is going to work, right? So much so that you don't need to isolate the variable, get a clear sense of the impact moving forward, document the findings to convince other clients to roll to the winning practice, and so on. Don't let anything slow down the speed of your genius! (Including hidebound concepts like statistical significance. That's just for academics.)

2) Ignore the history.

Hey, it's a brave new world where all of the rules have changed. Social media isn't anything like social media of the past, mobile won't follow a similar path to desktop and laptop, and the fragmentation of the audience that's been proven out in broadcast doesn't have any impact at all on your business. Oh, and seasonality is for offline. Has no bearing in what you do.

1) Your industry is unique, and has nothing to learn from other consumer categories.

Your customers are very, very special snowflakes, who never overlap with other demographic rules of the road, and consequently, can only be spoken to in the way that they've already been spoken to. (Shame, really, we might have been able to do something creative.)

Anyway... hopefully you've gotten the point by now. Marketing is actually very complex, because the world is complex. There are very few marketing mediums that work in total isolation, with no carry over or other considerations. Direct response in any medium is great, but if it doesn't convert well or profitably, you're not going to have a business pretty soon. Making everything simple works only if you can get everything down to an ROI metric, and even then, you have to judge in context to opportunity costs, and with the likelihood that less trackable channels are not getting enough credit.

* * * * *

Got any other paths for terrible marketers? 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 top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Media We Deserve

The News Process

Going off the reservation today, and working outside of marketing and advertising. We'll get back to it next week, I promise.

So in the past week or so, the following items have hit the news.

> There is a strong possibility of blue skies and water frozen under the surface of Pluto, of all places. If there's heat being generated under the surface, which seems likely... well, um, possibility of life? Seems unlikely, but no more than water, really.

> The Hubble Telescope is pointing at a cluster of highly unlikely matter just at the edge of the Milky Way, which is either a combination of wildly improbable geographic events... or maybe, just maybe, a massive planned structure befitting an advanced alien civilization.

> The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out confirms that objects can manipulate others at a distance, which means that monumentally fantastic stuff like loopholes and teleportation just might actually be possible. No, seriously.

> There's a massive asteroid that's just going to miss the planet in less than two weeks. Ye gads.

Did you miss these stories? More likely than not.

Now, did you miss the "news" that a movie from the '80s that involved time travel hit an anniversary? Or did you miss the "news" that there is a new movie coming out that dates back to the same era, and has excited lots of people who like to dress up in costume outside of Halloween?

No, no, no, you did not.

The potential for life, and another place in the solar system that might one day be a useful way station in our eventual migration to other worlds, should be an astounding deal. I would, personally, love to hear what major religious figures would say about what this would mean for the various books. (I'm thinking that other worlds are just for practice.) Wormholes could make the game-ending distances between worlds less, well, game endish. An alien civilization would simply be the biggest news event in human history, and create a massive consideration of whether or not contact would be worth the risk. Our own history of interaction with life that has lower forms of technology is not particularly encouraging on this front. And a big damned rock entering the atmosphere would be the biggest weather story ever.

But by all means, folks... let's talk about a movie or two some more. Since those have sponsors.

There's an old saying in political science circles; people get the government they deserve.

I guess the same goes for media now as well.

* * * * *

Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Blood Money

Bail Or Bleed

There's a story in the New York Times today that's just amazing in its awfulness, but wait for it; there's marketing and advertising later. But first, the story.

In a rural town in Alabama, there's a circuit judge who has decided, in his infinite wisdom, to present poor offenders with the following choice: donate blood or wear handcuffs.

No, seriously.

This isn't a case where you've got a judge who has just gone off the reservation with his own cleverness. He pretty much refused to talk to the NYT's journalist, which isn't what you do when you are in love with your own brain. No, what we've got here is abuse of the underclass, done by people who are acting as if the poor are just a free resource to be exploited. It will likely stop with sunlight, and there's few source of light to equal the Times.

But while I suspect the terrible judge that did this is well on his way to a post-professional career as a cable news pundit, simply removing the egregious problem is far from good enough. The bail system, along with the prison-industrial complex, is just one of those hidden horrors of American life. Feel free to go view the John Oliver clips for more detail on that. And in the extremely unlikely event that you are not getting why it's awful that poor defendants are being given the opportunity to contribute to a blood drive with the promise of a reduction in sentence, well... legal precedent, folks. In that it's not like you need both of your kidneys, either. Or eyes. So long as you are treating the most vulnerable in a society as if they were not worthy of humane treatment, no half measures.

Which brings us to the promised marketing and advertising bridge. Just like our backwater judge, the Web experience without ad blockers has been this forced bargain for users, who have been treated as if they had no palatable choice in the matter. Most have just shrugged and rolled up their sleeve to take the pinch, but once you have an out, you're going to take it. You might have even been inclined to donate before, but being forced to took all of the goodwill out of the equation.

Finally, this is a value exchange that seems antiquated, just because it has been in place for a very long time. That doesn't mean it will continue, of course. But when a poor exchange gets a spotlight, it's usually not long to stay.

With any luck at all, really.

* * * * *

Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.