Love Your Outliers

Go Right, Young Marketer

Today in the column, I'm going to do something odd: direct you to a long-form piece that has nothing to do with marketing and advertising. So go read about "The Lazarus Effect" in the New York Times Magazine, then come on back. (Oh, and if you refuse to click, the story covers what cancer researchers use to refer to the phenomenon of a drug having an unexpectedly great outcome for a patient, which isn't predicted based on past performance in the sample group. That's where the phrase of "extraordinary responders" comes in. It turns out that part of the massive undertaking in curing cancer is that each person's fight has aspects of unique genetic coding, and we just don't know enough yet, but are learning more than we ever have before, partly through, well, studying the outliers. This isn't meant to give false hope for a cure, because the awful nature of cancer progression is that all of the great aspects of evolution are at work in reverse, but yeah, it's OK to be hopeful anyway.)

This week at my gig, a marketing program brought in a startlingly high response rate, about 2X more than predicted, for a very mature program. The amount was statistically significant, in a reporting system that's stable, and possibly explained due to creative and tactical choices. Needless to say, I'm thrilled by the performance, and staring it down to see if I can replicate it with other programs. But in and of itself, it's just one campaign, just one data point in an ever-growing sea of numbers, and might not be a breakthrough.

Now, the other side of the street. I also performed a post-mortem on a challenged campaign, where the client tried something very different from our usual practices, and wound up producing numbers that were substantially below our medians. A co-worker who is new to this sort of analysis called the result terrible, and while I don't disagree, I had to bring in my perspective... which is that no data is terrible, especially because we didn't know what metrics the client was anticipating. While the set of numbers we got in this instance looked like underperformance, we will only really know that later, once these metrics prove out as ordinary, or give us an outlier.

So if your marketing programs are delivering consistency and certainty and a narrow performance array, shake it up. Push your levers, either creative or tactical, more to the margins (in, of course, a test cell). Even if this means that you leave some money on the table from something that you'll later think "Well, of course that didn't work," it's still got crazy value, because it puts a number on the practice, and lets you counsel clients later away from trouble.

Because if you are in this for the long-term benefit of your client and career, you quickly learn that the outliers drive the learning... and that any marketer or advertiser that isn't learning isn't, well, likely to make a career of this.

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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.

Why People Hate Marketers: Back To School Fuel

Like This, But With More Money

In my marketing and advertising feed today? Back to school sales, forecasts, and strategies.

No, seriously.

And I understand the rationale. Planning ahead is required in this line of work, as any number of August projects with icicles and Christmas trees in my past have shown. There's only so much in the way of Dads and Grads that you can pitch, especially since all of that stuff should have been in the pipe a month ago, and July 4 just doesn't hit that many consumer categories, or extends to that much spend. But the thing about back to school is that unlike those projects, they don't hit you straight in the teeth of something you might already be struggling with. Thinking about Christmas in the dog days of summer can actually be kind of pleasant.

To wit, it's mid-May, folks. There's still a month left in the current school year here in the mid-Atlantic region where I live. Weeks of rousting the kids out of bed to do something they don't want to do, weeks more of slogging through the interminable paperwork, weeks of trying to keep their eyes on the prize of grades and attendance when they already have eight months of pulling on that rope. They are beaten down. I am beaten down. The sun is finally coming out, and the days are getting longer, and the distractions are getting thicker than the lawns on a daily basis. Dances. Concerts. Proms. Bike rides and blockbuster movies and cousins visiting from places where the school year is already over, and all of it -- every single last distraction -- is more interesting to them, and me, than the day-in day-out of the last six weeks. Especially the last two weeks, when the schedules go all sidewise because we don't want to spend on air conditioning with our tax dollars.

It's the last mile of the current run, which is always, well, the one that takes the most discipline to complete. Oh, and admitting any of this out loud? Does you no good. Gives the kids the great hint that, well, no one really cares that much about their science fair project, how important the recital is, or anything more than the grades on the report card. Not even how they got them, really. There may be parents out there who are hitting on every cylinder at this point of the year, but I, personally, don't know any of those people. The rest of us need some time away from the grind -- you know, the good four to six traditional weeks of summer vacation -- to look forward to those eight hours a day where the little darlings, um, get far away from the house. Rather than the current eight hours a day when we're trying to make sure they are doing what they need to get through.

So, to my fellow marketing and ad pros? Do what you need to do to get your BTS work cleared. Don't lose any business, hurt your chances of getting out for the Memorial Day weekend, or not look proactive to your clients.

But when the media calls to ask you about how the year's looking, when the sales are going to start, and how the new hotness is getting in the stores before anyone has ever been before?

Don't take the call, or give them the quotes they need to write the piece.

Because the life you save may 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.

GPS Sugar Beets: Tech Disruptions

Precision Food Inc

Here's something that I didn't know until recently... one of the hidden but potent benefits of global positioning systems involves doing a better job of feeding the planet. It turns out that the tech can be used for something called precision agriculture, where plants are optimally placed and watered, with exceptional control over the yield and livelihood of the crop. For items like sugar beets, which have exceptional fragility to go with delicate needs in terms of the mix of water, food and sunlight, the tech is wildly popular among farmers, because the return on investment is just a constant. All without any of the queasiness of genetically mutated organisms, scary chemicals, or anything else that would bring up moral issues.

Now, if you had seen ahead for this application of tech, you could have made some nice coin, either from starting a company that made the gear, or from providing venture capital at good rates to farmers that were looking to make the change, and so on. And that's how this all pivots back to marketing and advertising, which is what we discuss here.

No one, we can assume, makes mobile tech with the pure and unadulterated interest in impacting something as mundane as email... but, well, that's happened. In a big way. Responsive templates are now table stakes because you can't be sure what kind of platform and screen your lead will use to access your material. Subject lines are now subject to not just ISP filtering, but to truncation from smaller display screens. Geotargeting, once seen as creepy and ineffective because e-commerce plays for brick and mortar weren't going to match an office or home laptop to a shopping situation, is now increasingly necessary to close the last mile of a sale.

By the way? That pace of change is going to just keep growing. Smartphone use while commuting is going to go from text to voice, as laws and social prohibitions against distracted driving kick in hard. (Honestly, look for texting drivers to be treated like drunk drivers very, very soon.) Syncing email across devices and dayparts will be table stakes. Mobile sizes could easily change again, either through different sized screens (I still long for the error-free typing of a full qwerty keyboard and holstered phones, but I'm beyond the event horizon of prospects, I know), or through the inevitable introduction of holograms to more optimal screen sizes, or heads-up VR through appliances.

The point is this: change, even in something that seems mature, is inevitable. Thinking through such things, and keeping an eye out for trends that could impact your business, is just required.

After all, these sugar beets aren't going to grow themselves, Neither is your business.

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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.