The Danger of Monoculture, Or How Potatoes Should Inform Your Marketing & Advertising Choices

Long Fry Me

In my social feed this weekend was a marvelous rant about, of all things, potatoes. Don't worry, it applies to marketing and advertising, and most specifically, email work. But first, we've got to get the background, or What I Learned.

It turns out that there has been hundreds of varieties of potatoes in our past. The Incas are said to have had thousands, many of which have not been seen before or since. What has happened in the centuries since is that the commercial market has driven down the number of potatoes that are viable economically, which means that we're down to, at most, 50 or 60 kinds of potatoes today.

At this point, your eyes may glaze over a bit and say, um, Dave? It's a potato. How different can they be, really? If no one insisted that we keep eating them, maybe they tasted terrible. And the answer is... well, I have no idea, and you have no idea, and if we applied the same logic to birds, the world would be a lot less fun for a whole lot of people, and maybe the skies would be thick with nothing but pigeons. Not exactly appealing.

But leave that as it lies. The single biggest potato on the planet, from an economic standpoint, is the Russet Burbank. And the reason why the RB is such an economic monster is because it makes long and perfect French fries, which is to say, it's more or less the official potato of McDonald's.

Once again, I'm going to be rude and anticipate your reaction: you have a problem with McDonald's french fries? Dear Lord in heaven, no. I don't eat them much any more, because I am of the age where denying myself pleasures is its own strange reward, and once you start to consume them, its pretty much impossible to stop. So I just don't put myself in their path. (This is more trouble than you might imagine, in that there is a McDonald's within a 3-minute walk of my home. Troubling. Luckily, as I write this, it's too late in the evening to cave. Moving on.)

The problem isn't with the commerce; it's with the potato itself. RBs are adored by more than just fast food lovers. They also bite the dust to every fungus, weevil, blight and microbe that you can imagine. In terms of sustainability, the RB is a fainting violet. If it were a heroine in an action movie, it would faint a half dozen times, and be abandoned by the hero for something with a little more meat on her bones. If it were a stock car at Daytona, it would lead after five laps, then explode. It's just not meant for massive cultivation.

Which means that, well, we have to force things. Massive micro-management, fertilization, et cetera. You pretty much need soil that grows nothing but RBs to grow RBs... which puts us right into a rather substantial point in human history, at least as it relates to people related to me. The Irish Potato Famine, which happened in the 19th century when there was also a monoculture that couldn't overcome a blight, and flooded America with so many Irish, it makes for all kinds of old-school anti-immigrant moments now. But let's walk it back from the political.

In email and digital marketing and advertising, testing to a monoculture is depressingly easy. You A/B test to the point of optimal efficiency, usually around a single metric if you want to set up maximum possible fail, or just make one number. Let's say it's open rates, or click, since that's easiest to monitor. Then the world changes -- ISPs stop delivering that kind of subject line, consumers stop responding to that call to action, dayparts fail and so on and so on -- and hey presto, you've got a monoculture that's failing, and all kinds of Crisis. With no data that says, um, let's try Next Best Potato and see if we can get 95% of what we had.

There's a better way, of course.

A rich biosphere, with an environment that looks at multiple metrics. A tolerance for "losing" art, so long as it provides a good learning point. Re-testing "optimal" practices to make sure the world hasn't changed dramatically without your notice. Understanding that some campaigns might be better served by multi-use, or video run times, or tracked acquisition, or synergy to other marketing channels and collateral. And so on.

It's a lot more complicated than just making one kind of potato, and maybe even a little less lucrative.

But only in the short run.

Oh, and there's also this...

We're marketing and advertising people, not farmers.

And we have a hell of a lot more fun, and learn a hell of a lot more in the doing, when we make more than one kind of product.

* * * * *

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.

Testing Versus Winning

Something Like This

Here's a dirty little secret about marketing and advertising.. a significant percentage of the people who do this kind of work pretty much *hate* testing.

There are reasons for this, of course.

Testing takes time, and discipline. It can be screwed up in any number of ways, many of them just plain maddening, and if you don't catch the mistake, you can do true damage with a false reading. It requires you to be willing to "waste" a significant percentage of your inventory on creative that no one is rooting for. Worst of all, it can take your brand-new work, the stuff that you are exceptionally proud of, and fast-track it to the dumpster, because data just won't be stopped, really. And if you want to be truly doctrinaire about it, once you start testing, you never really *stop*, because it acts as your de facto insurance policy, to ensure that your control is still optimal.

I've had any number of clients refuse to run a test, just because they were so in love with the new art, and/or that dissatisfied with the control. In each and every case, I've tried to push back for all of the direct marketing virtues. In most of these cases, the client stayed with their gut and ran without a test, and (here's where the direct marketing purist in me feels ill) it sometimes really worked out for them.

Note the pronoun there: them, not me.

This is also where a couple of cross purposes come into play. Part of being a marketer is being a scientist, and that science doesn't really have an end goal. The journey is the thing. Creative can always be optimized more, there's always some new clue or option not tried from the data, and the world will give you clues, if you're open to hear them.

The executive can look at this and wonder when the law of diminishing returns kicks in, or question the talent involved from creative professionals who would subject themselves to the long work of incremental steps to optimal. It all seems like something that you wouldn't get from top tier agency work, or a process that would lend itself to automation... but that's never been the way it's worked out for me, or how it seems to operate in the real world.

Now that we've gone through all of the reasons why people don't do it, the reasons why it's still the best way to work: it ensures that you never damage your client. It ensures job security, because you've either got a lift, or you've got learnings that will later result in a lift. (Or marketability for a future client.) It creates either single variable steps that take you were you want to go, or if those aren't driving enough of a data difference to pass statistical significance, bigger swings. And if you're fortunate enough to either work in a position where you can see a lot of tests go through the pipe, or in a cross-medium or category house, one where you can bring in learnings from another field, you can seem a lot smarter than you actually am.

I've been fortunate enough to work in this kind of business for decades, and have never felt "burned out"... because we've tested, and learned, and used the results from that testing to fuel the next chapter in the story. Plus, with technological changes, the ability to beat a control has never been "easier", or more important.

So if you're one of those marketing and advertising pros that considers test to be just another four letter word that's not worth the trouble, or beneath your talents...

Well, actually, stay just the way you are.

Because you might be smarter than me, or more talented...

But you won't be more effective.

And I might need to beat you one day.

* * * * *

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.

Let's Get iHacky

Very, Very Different

Let's just get this out of the way quickly. I'm probably the wrong person to ask about the importance of personal privacy as it relates to personal electronic devices.

Why? Well, I've worked at companies that were successful, for a time, because they correctly predicted how little consumers actually cared about it, at least when it related to shopping behavior, and how they had the opportunity to trade parts of it in for discounts. I also grew up in a time and economic background before ubiquitous personal technology, which means that I've never completely cottoned to the idea that I should give a screen all of my secrets. Or that such things were actually all that valuable, or interesting, to anyone, really.

So when the point comes around to discuss, as everyone with a column seemingly must, where the world should sit in terms of Apple's continued battle to avoid hacking their own gear... well, um, I have a few questions. Independent of the powerless propagation of one of two opinions.

1) Hasn't this entire discussion for the past few days made Apple's products, well, must-own equipment for criminals?

They're going to bat for you, bad people. Patronize them accordingly! But you probably want to act fast about that, since...

2) Isn't the iPhone the single biggest target on the planet for hackers right about now?

All we've heard for the past week is how incredibly powerful and valuable a hack of this hardware would be. If you've got the skills or the contacts, you'd have to think this would be on the top of your to-do list now. After all, if you can hack a phone -- just one measly phone! -- all of the rest of them become incredibly vulnerable to any criminal mischief you can imagine, and you can sell your hack for bitcoins on the dark Web, which is where I presume all such spectacular fits of criminal behavior are patronized. Speaking of which...

3) How is it that we don't have people capable of this tremendous criminal mischief on the public payroll?

I have to say, I'm a little bit disappointed. Any number of television dramas and conspiracy theorists have assured me of the remarkable degree of State Power, from black helicopters to drone warfare to extradition and Edward Snowden's adventures and so on, and so on. And yet, here's a maniac's phone, the same phone that millions of other people have, and no one can crack it. It's very disappointing, really. Next, you'll be telling me the moon landing wasn't faked, there's no aliens in Area 51, and there aren't treasure maps on the back of historical documents. Is there nothing left to believe in?

As for the actual privacy issues here... well, what we've got is a crisis of invention. No one invented a perfect car trunk that could never be opened by anyone but the owner of the car, but if they had... well, there probably might have been law enforcement having an issue along the way. Particularly if this was a relatively new feature to trunks, since the iPhone didn't have the current level of encryption just 18 months ago.

I'm not a fan of rampant government access to my devices; no one is. But the idea that a company gets to profit when unintended criminal consequences occur... well, um, not usually. I'm also not quite sure why your special little phone gets to be different from your computer, your car, your home, your safety deposit box, and so on, and so on.

But then again, I'm the wrong person to ask about personal privacy...

* * * * *

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.