Marketing and Advertising Direction

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Thinking About Cell Phone Guns

Reach Out And Touch Someone

By now, social media has had weeks to deal with the land rush business involved in the gun that looks like a cell phone, seen at the top of this piece.

As a marketing and advertising consultant who has worked on a sizable number of client concerns that went against my own personal beliefs, I'm not going to get into how I feel about this. As a pro, you have to take the mindset of an attorney, argue the best case in the court of the marketplace, and trust in the verdict of the public. Doing anything less limits not just your billings, but also your opportunities to learn for future clients. I've learned some truly breakthrough points from clients that I rarely discuss. It's just the way of the work.

So what's really telling here isn't the existence of a weapon that looks like something else... but that it's the first of its kind. As the market demand shows, there's a strong desire for many enthusiasts to carry a firearm without anyone knowing they have one. We've also established that due to effective lobbying, restricting the hobby is rarely a legislative possibility.

So the question isn't whether or not there will be cell phone guns. More, it's a question of when the piece will be both, and much more concealable.

But let's go further, really. Why should things that a user wants to conceal look like, well, what you'd expect them to look like? Putting the same phone tech into something that looks like a compact mirror would seem to be easy, and a natural for a younger demographic, especially in a school setting. Make it more like a tape measure with a slide out screen for hard hat types, and yes, that's another seemingly simple transformation to firearm. I'd be surprised if an adult toy that allowed for a more discrete pass through an airport security checkpoint would be a tough product to sell.

Oh, and if you can combine all of these capabilities into one device?

I want to make ads for that product.

And have equity in the company that makes it...

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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.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Lurching Towards Progress

It's easy to see how the Internet has had a coarsening effect on modern culture. Just looking at the comments section, or a walk through social media, could convince you that we've never been less thoughtful as a species. But for every trollish moment and churlish experience, other points towards enlightenment come to the fore. I thought I'd share a few with you here, just to encourage.

1) The end of gratuitous laddie embellishment.

I used to work in marketing for music instrument retail, and there was no more embarrassing part of the business than the periodic photo shoots and "booth babe" use. While it was defensible on a pure mercantile and demographic level, it also seemed incredibly limiting, since the only way the field was going to grow would be to, well, become more welcoming to the very people who were likely turned off by the practice.

This is more or less what's happened, since the Web makes the use of models pointless... just like in "Playboy." This week saw the news that two of the larger surviving guitar magazines had done away with the practice. With those sort of models available to all whenever they want them, adding them to guitar shots has become passe, and amen to that. Oh, and as a further aside? Walk into an MI store now, and you'll find a much more welcoming environment towards women, and a great deal of different sized gear for different sized people.

2) An inexorable force towards, well, freedom.

While the Web has done no end of ill for professional journalism due to the considerable issues involved in monetizing content, it's also a clear factor in the uprising against repressive regimes across the world. From the Arab Spring to the Panama Papers, from Wikileaks to (perhaps) small campaign donors mitigating the impact of dark money PACs in the U.S., the Web has been the key leveling factor in systems that were previously thought infallible.

3) Activism can be done 24/7/365, and from nearly anywhere.

Fifty years ago, if you had an issue with something that was happening elsewhere in the world, your ability to do anything about it required extraordinary commitment, as well as personal flexibility in one's professional life. Now, social media makes action, even if it doesn't seem terribly sincere or effective, something you can do at any moment you've got a connection. It's not a coincidence that an expansion of personal rights, social boycotts, and buy-one give-one businesses have all exploded in the past decade.

4) Data has never been better, and it's always getting better.

This falls right into the wheelhouse of marketing and advertising, but for me, one of the great parts about working in adtech is that the data is always getting more exact and more telling. From greater verification to more esoteric calculations and ways of thinking about the numbers, there's clear inspiration from analytic-driven fields like sports and financial markets... and, honestly, more creativity than you might imagine. That kind of thing is only going to keep growing with the IoT and mobile-first use, of course.

5) Building your personal brand, and crowd-sourcing, has never been easier.

Mostly because staying in touch with friends and colleagues is something we all just do now, because it's really no trouble at all. And as a personal aside, some readers might remember a column where my niece did a personal piece of marketing to crowdsource her expenses in fighting off thyroid cancer. This week saw the return of a clear prognosis, and the transition to far more appropriate points of concern for an 18-year-old, such as college and the prom. Progress indeed.

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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

The IoDad

The IoDad Believes In Belt Holsters

How will the Internet of Things achieve true market penetration? By allowing consumers the ability to make their lives better, easier and more convenient... or by amplifying their original selves to levels that they were previously unable to attain.

Which is why, honestly, it's going to be Dad-driven.

I'll cut to the chase, because there's venture capital to woo. (Or maybe a YouTube viral comedy video to make. That's a pretty common intersection, actually.)

If you gave me the ability to:

1) Have every light turn off when someone leaves the room

2) Sound an ear-splitting alarm when dishes are left in the sink, especially when there's room in the dish washer

3) Turn off air conditioners and space heaters when there are no humans in the room

4) Record and play digital video clips when people (well, OK, children) fail to put items away, especially laundry, because laundry

5) All while calculating the expense involved and/or saved as a running tally, either to be deducted from an allowance or college savings account, with that tally...

6) Pushed to any available screen, via a Dad-only smartphone app that's on an old school belt clip, because nothing says IoDad more than holstering stuff on your belt

7) With the ability to auto-play speeches about the electric, heating, air conditioning or environmental reason why such things are important, and

8) Back it all up with a countdown clock as to when various family members will head off to college / military...

Well, um, just take all of my money already and give me this thing.

Then, take all of my family's money to take it away...

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Monday, April 4, 2016

Five Points From A Road Trip Vacation

Not if the kids aren't looking

A few points to share with you all from my recent vacation, as it loosely pertains to the stated life goal of marketing and advertising. We promise that more coherent and full-form work will result as we get back in the swing of things, assuming, of course, that you found the previous work to be coherent, and in full form.

1) Shockingly, South of the Border still exists, and will punish you with relentless outdoor advertising... that children will totally miss.

The tourist trap that beckons I-95 commuters, with the questionable taste in Mexican-American humor and the omnipresent road signs? Still doing land office business, at least in terms of outdoor buys. Perhaps the costs of outdoor ads in the Carolinas makes it a slam dunk, but judging from the impact in my own car with my own kids -- locked into phones, iPods, and in the case of my budding eldest child, a ukelele -- it's not a winning investment in the future. Only the parent drivers noticed, and we're not exactly the target market to pull over for that destination.

2) The Internet of Things is such a slam dunk for theme parks.

This year, we revisited Universal Orlando, because the youngest is very much into the Potter... and truth be told, the whole family is pretty much down with those books and movies. You can now buy your budding witch or wizard a wand that is IoT connected, which means it will activate various actions in the themed areas, which is pretty cool, even in beta. Soon enough, of course, the tech will allow a much more definitive experience than just the same thing that other kids are doing, and the day when you can use it to skip a ride line or six, well then... maybe you won't wince so much at the cost for a stick of your kid's own. (Oh, and the memories, of course. Those essential memories.)

3) Seven days, one hour.

My little family are not culture snobs; we enjoy all kinds of mass market stuff, really. But in the week we were all sharing the same hotel room, the television was on for all of one hour -- the crossover episode of "Supergirl" with a guest appearance from the star of the CW's "The Flash" -- and then went right back off. Mostly this is because I wasn't watching sports, and knew that on demand would have everything I missed back home waiting for me, but still. If you are looking for evidence that the next generation isn't much into tech that isn't personal, here it was, in microcosm. And it's not exactly a new development.

4) Mapping tech makes all of this so much easier.

GPS saved us hours with alternatives to main highways in both directions, and also made getting around town, sometimes in torrential thunderstorms, much less stressful. I remember vacations without mapping apps, and I'm so glad that we never have to have one of those again.

5) Old school fun still works.

As good as the IoT and craft of Universal is -- and honestly, we had a fine time, though not, of course, a fine value -- there's something to be said for more traditional approaches. Two of the other three days for us were spent at Fun Spot, a park where you can enter and park for free and ride attractions that don't take very long at all, and Wet and Wild, the first waterpark in America. (It's closing at the end of the year for a Universal rebrand.) No screens, promotional tie-ins, must-have souvenirs or cachet to saying we went there... but the good times were as valid or better, and the overall day, probably superior. And so was the board game we played in the hotel room as a family, the time we spent in the car -- necessary to afford the other stuff -- and the overall bonding. It's good to get away, and it's better to be back. Onward!

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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Negative Possibility and Self-Driving Cars

Probably Not Like This

As a father of an about to start driving teenager (and yes, I'm mostly mentioning this to freak out the colleagues who remember her from take your very small daughter to work days), I've been watching the advent of self-driving cars with strong interest. The eldest has a troublesome commute to her high school, so we've been eagerly awaiting her milestone day, and the subsequent test. While it will be a while before she turns that into solo trips, it's all in an easy to understand process, the same as driver less driving. But while I eagerly dream of a day when I can set and forget my commute and get in an extra half hour of sleep or work, and feel good about the blind and elderly adding to their quality of life, not to mention never paying for parking again...

Well, not so much with those about to drive. Skepticism towards the technology abounds, along with when it might actually be ready and operational, or having trust that it could ever be better than your own eyes and feet.

This makes no sense, right? The generation that can't ever put down their phones is unwilling to give up the wheel. Maybe it's just a matter of them not having enough experience with soul-deadening commutes, or that they are too tied up in the idea of how easily their tech freezes or fails. But honestly, we put our lives in the hands of technology on such a routine basis, from air traffic controllers to traffic lights, from medical records to food safety, from electrical grids to combustible fuels. But since we don't think about those things, and we do think about robot cars, well, fear.

Intellectually, we know this is a whiff. In our lifetimes, we're likely to regard driving cars in the same way that we look at doctors prescribing cigarettes, or never leaving the home without a hat. But in the short run, driving still represents freedom, independence, and lots of other things best sold in a car commercial.

There's also this: as a species, we are all-in for negative possibility, especially when the tech is new. Take a look at your Internet of Things feed, and I bet it's rife with security concerns. (Along with hackers shutting down your self-driving car.) If a loved one tells you about their new romantic interest, you stare them down hard for flaws. You'll never be more on your guard than the first time you try a new restaurant, or more focused then when you eat something you've never eaten before. Especially if it doesn't look a lot like something else you've eaten.

And with that, folks, I'm also hitting the road. It's time for some true time off, complete with significant road miles to coincide with the kids' spring break. Probably the last one where the eldest won't take the wheel for some part of the journey, too. Feel free to read up on the backlog of M&AD posts -- we're up to nearly 150 pieces in the archives! -- and drive safe. We'll be back in April.

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Monday, March 21, 2016

A Brief Moment In Cranky: People Who Threaten To Emigrate

Hitting the Road

In Q1 2005, I put my family of 3.5 (my wife was pregnant with what became our youngest) on a plane for a vacation to New Zealand. We spent weeks driving up and down the North and South Islands in a rented car, avoiding organized tour groups, walking on glaciers, eating like locals, visiting sheep and wool festivals (my wife knits), and learning as much about the Maori heritage and history as possible. Vacations for me are usually just another form of work, because that's just how I'm wired, and I really felt like we learned a ton about the place. I wound up writing a small book about it, punctuated with photographs, and had a dangerous epiphany behind a waterfall, alone and significantly off any hiking path, near sunset in an area near where there's an active volcano. It was the best vacation of my life, and Wellington may be the nicest city that I've ever visited.

I also took several job interviews while there, because I was thinking very hard about leaving the United States. Which, at the time, no one but my wife knew, though I suspect many of our friends and family would not have been very surprised by.

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, I had spent my nights and weekends, for nearly six months, talking to strangers in Nevada. (California, where I lived at the time, was never in play, and Reno is just four hours from the Bay Area, so it was a feasible drive and dial.) By the time I was done, we had donated thousands to the Kerry campaign, and I had talked to thousands of people. I wasn't blind to the idea that my candidate could lose. Disinterring an incumbent during wartime is very low in historical precedent, and most of the nation hadn't soured on the Bush Administration (yet, as the approval ratings showed in the second term).

Bush wound up carrying Nevada by 2 percentage points, or about 20,000 votes, winning five delegates. The state did not matter, in the grand scale of things, because Bush's win in the electoral college was by 35 votes. I was profoundly depressed by the turn in events, not the least of which was the decision of the Kerry campaign to hold back a significant amount of funds for post-election legal challenges that never came. I felt, at the time, like neither of the parties had served my interests, and questioned the wisdom of raising my family under their control. We were still young enough to be attractive emigres, and didn't own a house. I do Internet advertising for a living, which you can theoretically do from anywhere, and I even did a little work for my start up at the time while I was there.

So why didn't we become Kiwis? Well, you go back in time on the Internet when you go to different countries, and that's not always fun or lucrative. New Zealand is lovely, but most of the nation rolls up the sidewalks at 8pm, and I tend to night work and life. Not seeing our parents and siblings outside of a computer screen, and not having our kids interact in real life with their cousins, was too much. We wound up moving back to the East Coast for a fresh job a couple of years later, bought a home and set down our roots, and made our peace that while our country was far from perfect, it was still the best place for us.

The reason why I bring this all up is in answer to everyone in my social feed who feels compelled to discuss emigration every time the election cycle turns. To these folks, I'd like to ask the following questions.

1) Have you donated time or money or both to the campaign that would prevent you from wanting to move, or does your threat end at, well, actual effort?

2) Do you really know anything about the country that you'd like to go to?

For most of the Bush Administration, Canada was led by a party of similar conservative bent. Most other nations limit immigration from older individuals, or those without attractive and employable skills. For those of the other bent, most other nations are far more controlling on matters like healthcare and gun ownership. And finally...

3) Are you ready to wash your hands of everyone that you are leaving behind?

I don't regret the time I spent walking, calling and talking to Nevada. It gave me profound insights into the human spirit, made me more charitable towards those who do not agree with me, and was a transformative and educational experience. Had the job interviews and Web climate in New Zealand been better, maybe we would have stayed, and had similar growth.

But what I wouldn't do then, and won't do now, is treat my word as worthless, and make idle threats. As a marketing and advertising consultant, and as someone who chooses to make decisions for the benefit of my long-term brand, my word is bond. I will do what I say. And I won't say something unless I'm very prepared to do it.

If you oppose a candidate, work to defeat that candidate. If you can't stay in a country in the event of their ascension to power, make plans to leave.

Preferably with a measure of class and decorum. Especially to everyone in your social circle who chooses to stay.

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Friday, March 18, 2016

Working Hard, or Hardly Realistic

Part of the job description, when you do consulting for a living, is a willingness to confront some uncomfortable truths. They usually lead you to opportunities, but unless you can live with an awkward minute or meeting, you are in the wrong business. So I'm going to peel back the shade for a moment or two here, and point out something that very few people ever admit, at least out loud.

While I pride myself on my worth ethic and rate, I will never feel that I'm working hard enough, or even that I work all that hard. At most of my positions, for most of my life. Let me go a step further on this, dear theoretical reader... I doubt that you work very hard, either.

Now, let's walk this back and give it its proper context. We do marketing and advertising for a living. Rather than, well, brute labor. We're not on our feet unless we want to be, and finagle a standing desk. We're not dealing with unsafe work environments, likely workplace injuries, wearing special shoes for support, and so on, and so on. If we're worn out at the end of the day, it's because that, on some level, we've chosen to be worn out. Either through a stress story that we tell ourselves as a trigger to self-motivate, or because we've taken on aspects of the job that aren't all that necessary, but seem that way, because a stressful job is an important job. Or we've taken the wrong job, and are trying to make it right. (That never works, by the way. Spoiler alert.)

Perhaps you feel that the entirety of the work you do, when you roll in housework, child or elder care, or uncredited work that's outside of your role, gets you to that magical realm of working hard enough to cast aside all doubt. But even then, I submit to the jury of public opinion that technology, in the form of household appliances, smartphones, improved automobiles and so much more, have all added up to take a lot of the work out of our lives.

To substitute, we work hard on a lot of things... that, well, maybe no one has asked us to work hard on. Social media presences. Hobbies. Workouts. Side projects. Keeping abreast of the spiraling number of entertainment options, training pets, getting granular about food intake, and so on, and so on.

Oh, and another thing: when we are working at our highest level, it's not work at all. We're joyously in the weeds of the details, sweating to make a deadline with exhilaration, working a trade show booth while knee-deep in prospects, seeing the culmination of a lot of prior half-speed work race to a conclusion. I've had days where I've seen the sun come up, and it was a surprise.

Which is why a lot of the people who've shared a company with me are convinced I'm a hard worker. But I know better.

The hardest working person I know, or will ever know, is my mom. She raised three kids as a single parent, while keeping a spotless house, while working nights as a bartender. (OK, maybe I worked at her level when I was in college. But not since. The woman's a machine.)

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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

The Changing Nature Of Sex In Ads

Not Seen On TV

We live in fast and changing times.

Usually this manifests itself, in our world of marketing and advertising, in the realm of adtech and martech... but that's not what I'd like to discuss here. Instead, consider the recent Lane Bryant ad campaign. If you can't access the link, it's a commercial that uses plus-sized models, fresh off their inclusion in the Sports Illustrated cover mix, in various strong stages of undress, speaking to body pride issues. It's borderline not safe for work, and has been rejected by broadcast networks as too risque for television.

Now, independent of your personal or political feelings about this direction, as a creative pro, there's just all kinds of win here. I don't know about you, but being locked into the same kind of models has never been a fun moment. Even if you are committed to keeping the status quo and not changing your model mix, maybe they stand out a little more, because fewer of your competitors are digging in the same mine. I can tell you, from painful experience, that finding a good royalty-free model that a client would accept in a relatively tight demographic usually meant that the model would be showing up in similar ads soon.

Now, here's the very fun part... what if it works?

Consider just how different your world could be, and soon. Think about the testing possibilities, the artistic routes not taken, the instant reboot it gives to your design team, photographers, and maybe even copywriters. It probably even invigorates your social media pros, and gives your analytic team something very new to think about.

Because at the end of the day, diversity doesn't just make sense on a demographic level, or from a sense of personal politics. It also frequently makes sense on the spreadsheet.

Interesting era, no?

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Sunday, March 13, 2016

Marketing and Advertising In Interesting Times

Let's... Go... Fast...

Here's a fun fact: the wildly common belief that "may you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse? Apocryphal. No equivalent expression exists in China. But that's all beside the point. Everyone knows the sentiment, and more importantly, few would disagree with the idea that we are, well, living in those times right now.

Lesser known, but still generally well-accepted, is the belief that works of art, literature, music and more also improve in times of turmoil. The sense of immediacy created by political events that inspire, for good and ill, is good for the creative process. It generates a focus, a primal need to create, that just can't be replicated in times where people are comfortable and content.

Which leads me to how my family and I spent our Sunday night, at the movies, to see the well-regarded animated movie "Zootopia." I won't get too far into the plot of this, because it really is a movie that shouldn't be spoiled, but I'm not ruining anything by saying that it definitely seems to be a creation that mirrors our times. That it does so with a deft stroke, some genuine cleverness, and real craft in the artwork and voice acting is all a bonus. (I'd also consider it surprising, from such a mainstream movie studio as Disney.) But I don't think it's overstating the case that the era in which we live in makes the movie even more effective than it might otherwise be. (Oh, and special kudos to the filmmakers for naming two of their characters Walter and Jesse. That made my inner Vince Gilligan fan wildly happy.)

This is, of course, a common experience. Television shows got dramatically better once we left an era of limited distribution and competition, and into a realm of more diversity in popular awareness. American pop music had rebirths in the latter half of the '60s and early '70s, matching some of the most turbulent times in the nation's history. British punk music is born during extremely difficult times in the late '70s, and might have had its fullest flower in America 25 years later, during the backlash to the G.W. Bush presidency. And so on.

Where this leaves us, as professionals, is a time where middle ground work isn't going to do as well, and where incremental steps are going to seem, well, pedestrian. It's a time where adtech is giving us opportunities to do things that seem particularly aggressive, both from a distribution and a creative standpoint. Hard "R" content and tough talk seems to speak to more leeway in pitches, and in final execution. And the fact that everything happens at a greater speed is, on some level, it's own push towards redder meat.

No one really knows, of course, how our world is going to change in the next 6 to 12 months, and every presidential cycle comes with its own prediction of "most important in our lifetime." But we do know that with distributed communications technology, social media, and a profit-driven 24/7/365 news engine that is chasing ratings from the sensational, having our messages cut through the clutter, while still protecting brand, has never been more challenging. Just doing what you've done before, or taking very small steps toward optimization, might not be enough.

And on the plus side?

That means you've never had more freedom to experiment.

Interesting times, indeed.

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Friday, March 11, 2016

The Invisible Ad Campaign

Stalkery

I've been in digital advertising for a long time, and one of the more amusing repeated patterns has been the deep and abiding faith in self-regulation. Just let us take care of things, and don't strangle the baby in the crib with the rope of government interference, and everything will be skittles and beer. Perhaps even beer-flavored skittles. It's hard to see how that would be a good thing, but hey, deregulation is almost always seen as necessary, especially in the concept stage. Maybe you could drunk on those skittles. Probably would sell well in college towns.

What happens next is, of course, the other word you call a deregulated market: lawless. Consumer privacy gets trampled, the first mover advantage tends to go to those that cut corners to get there, and soon enough, you get cries for regulation, usually from wronged consumers, or people who weren't quick enough to make their fortune from the gold rush. T'was ever thus, and why lawyers love, love, love new business models.

The latest manifestation of this is the AdChoices logo, that little i arrow that very few people, really, know is the indication of a behaviorally targeted banner advertisement. That icon appears over a trillion times a month on banners across the Web, and I'm only mildly overstating the case when I tell you, that, well, no one has ever clicked on it. (Well, OK, almost no one. Especially consumers. Adtech people click on that thing all the time while doing QA.)

What happens when you do click on that? Well, assuming you are exact enough with your clickery -- which is to say, you aren't on a mobile device -- you go to a landing page where you are told who served you the ad in question. You also get the option to opt-out of getting those ads any more. This allows you to get rid of those pesky retargeting ads that stalk you around the Web, and sounds like world's most useful secret of Web usability... but keep in mind that retargeters tend to overlap, especially for very aggressive retailers. So you might find yourself with a brand new hobby, because folks just have lots of free time to click on parts of a banner that they might not have even seen.

The industry will tell you that AdChoices landing pages are viewed so many times, and have been in place for the better part of a decade now. Or that the next campaign will build on the success of the last one, or how much traffic the landing pages are starting to see from mobile.

I don't normally cast aspersions on the motives of strangers, because, well, no one really knows what lies in the hearts of others. But I do know that the idea that the industry really wants to educate consumers, or have a vast and active audience opting out of ads that are targeted, and hence far more lucrative than non-targeted...

Well, I'm pretty sure you could grow a fine crop from that grade of manure.

What advertisers want from their banners is revenue. What publishers want from their banners is, also, revenue. If consumers complain about those ads less, or feel better about how they are seeing more relevant ads, that only really matters if it, well, backs out to revenue.

That logo is there as cover only, a kind story to tell legislators to prevent them from making their lives more onerous... but if the only thing that's keeping the industry afloat is this low bar of privacy protection?

Well, that really doesn't say much for the business model of something that's been around for a while, does it?

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Wednesday, March 9, 2016

The Emotional Contract

Hard To Repair

Like many people, I've been struck by the controversy involving Apple and the FBI, and increasingly skeptical about how an incredibly common product could resist all of the world's criminals and cyber-security hackers. Also, how a company could not just be willing to take privacy to the point of providing aid and comfort to the individual over their government, even if that individual was a terrorist, criminal or murderer. I'm not sure how that jibes with supporting your local police or military, but that line just doesn't translate to the FBI. Anyway.

But no matter where you are on this issue, one aspect is absolutely clear. That's how Apple's brand has, to this point, taken no damage at all, really. To its users, the company has stood tall against public and law enforcement pressures to protect their individual interests and privacy. The emotional contract between the users and the brand remains perfect. Even with some prominent public figures calling for a boycott of the company.

And that, now that I've thought longer (and different?), is the best reason why Apple is going to fight this to, well, legality and beyond. The security issue is something that will eventually go away, because no platform ever stays completely secure, especially with this much scrutiny. But Apple's brand will endure, even if a side hack happens. So long as the company stays on message of their users coming first, and isn't revealed to capitulate in an underhanded manner, they'll suffer no real damage from this.

Now, let's consider Volkswagen. (Interestingly, not Audi or Porsche, who are part of the same corporate family, but haven't been painted with the same brush.) That company pitched itself as eco-conscious without a subsequent lapse of performance, through the use of diesel technology that passed all emissions standards. Until it was revealed that this was all a lie, thanks to the use of fraudulent software that only kicked in during testing. The cover up was elaborate, the benefit obvious, and the hubris involved in believing that the misdeed would never be found out was, frankly, well, stunning.

Overnight, VW owners lost value in their investments, because their cars were no longer attractive to, well, the kind of drivers that bought VW in the first place. Since the disclosure, VW has apologized, changed a great deal of personnel, swapped out marketing messages, and worked to fix the emissions issues before class-action and government watchdogs forced their hand. But whether or not this ever fixes the damage to the emotional contract, and helps the brand get back to their prior valuation, is a whole other matter entirely.

Thinking back on my own career and clients, I've had any number of wins and losses, with strong educational moments along the way in both directions... but I've never gotten a client back once an emotional contract had been broken.

No matter who broke it, really.

So it's not a phone, or even a great number of phones, or an operating system that Apple's trying to protect.

Rather, it's their idea of why their brand is valued the way that it is.

And how that's probably only got one direction to go.

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Monday, March 7, 2016

The Nerds Have Won, And Will Continue Winning

Cut It Fine

This month in my free time -- well, the time stolen from sleeping -- I'll prepare for my fantasy baseball draft. It's something that I've done for much of my adult life, and the way it has changed over the years has been fairly interesting. The game itself has changed dramatically over time, from the steroid and easy hitter parks of previous decades to today's pitcher-centric era. There used to be 40-home run per year hitters; now, you're lucky to get to 30. Starting pitchers used to get to complete games more than rarely; now, almost never. The best relief pitchers used to be the guys that closed the games, and now, not always. And so on, and so on. But that's not the point I'm looking to make here, nor the reason why this has anything to do with marketing and advertising.

What you are trying to do in a fantasy sports league isn't to get the most hitters that break a certain home run threshold, or starting pitchers with the most complete games, or even the "best" team. Rather, you are trying to achieve results above the median, and to have those results culminate in a best in class performance. (Sounds like fun, doesn't it?)

That's never really changed for fantasy players, but what's new is how that mindset has worked its way into the game itself. "Moneyball" wasn't just an influential book and rather well-regarded movie; it really was a clarion call to how a market that was less than perfect in its efficiency was, well, going to become a lot more competitive.

Now, the growth metric and talent evaluation in baseball isn't on base level counting statistics. Instead, it's in percentages above the median, increasingly esoteric evaluations of fielding and defense (especially in how catchers "frame" pitches), base running benefits that go beyond just stealing bases, and so on, and so on.

Back to our world.

It's rare, in today's digital marketing environment, that you'll just run a single channel or medium, and absolutely know the impact of the campaign. Emails inspire search results, which feed banner response, which rolls into your social media campaigns, and so on, and so on. So simple metrics like open and click rates, or even more powerful ones like revenue tracked by channel, may not give you the full story of what's working, and what isn't... or, more importantly, what's working, but only 20 to 30% as well as it should be, and might be easily actionable.

Which means that, just like in baseball, the role of the people who can recognize talent, or do game-changing things, is not all that different from what it was before. It's just being supplemented by increasingly complex analytical exercises, for the plain and simple reason that this is where the wins will come from.

That, and a fairly strong amount of luck, in regards to who gets hurt and when. (OK, maybe baseball and marketing aren't quite the same after all.)

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Friday, March 4, 2016

U.B.I.llin'

Staff Us Up

Here's a pretty fascinating story from the NY Times, and it plays off a longstanding concern of mine, as well as lots of people who work in marketing and advertising.

To wit... to date, technology hasn't *really* destroyed (many) of our jobs. Sure, designers and copywriters now get to "compete" with people from all over the world, which means that it's becoming more and more difficult to make a living, or justify doing this rather than flipping burgers... but the job still actually exists.

Unlike, say, the people who used to make or develop film for cameras, flashlights instead of cell phone apps, cassette tapes or CDs or DVDs, and so on. You might have a career that has felt increasingly more insecure, or one that has been less and less lucrative, or involve more and more free-lancing and hustling, but it's still a gig.

But just because the job exists now, doesn't mean it will continue. And when the gigs go away, what happens next?

Well, this is where we need to think beyond how the world is now, and try to get past our natural human reaction to always assume the worst of progress or people... and to think about, say, what the world might look like when it is very, very different.

Say, with ubiquitous renewable energy, and maybe it's so efficient and paid for, over such a long period of time, that no one *has* to pay for it any more. Kind of like how long distance telephone bills used to be a big deal, and now, well, aren't.

Where genetic research, and maybe even therapy, allows us to simply correct chronic conditions, rather than continually pay to manage them.

Where every child is planned, and populations managed, with humanity maybe not even confined to the surface of the Earth. Which means all kinds of disruption to real estate and housing.

Where technology eliminates the need for massive military expenditures, or stops putting humanity at direct risk.

Where travel becomes easier, either through self-driving (and maybe also flying?) technology, once again powered by the limitless energy. Or, more fancifully, with teleportation.

Which means that it's not just your job that's at risk.

It's everyone's.

That's a world where it's possible that the pursuit of money just might not be, well, how the world works. Remember, we're talking about limitless energy assets, massive developments in computing power, spectacular advancements in communications and so on. But the transition from the current world of 1% / 99% to a money-free "Star Trek"-esque utopia won't be easy or smooth, so what's being increasingly considered is a kind of dividend payment. Some economists call this Universal Basic Income, or UBI.

Rather than as a welfare payment, it's better to think of such things as if you were, say, a resident of Saudi Arabia or Alaska, where oil companies pay the residents a portion of their revenue as part of a prior arrangement. Or members of a Native American tribe with casinos. It's basically similar. (Also, perhaps not great for overall happiness. Hard to say, really.)

If all of this seems very naive or promoting a particular agenda, keep in mind that the concept isn't beholden to a political party or philosophic leaning. Rather, it simply reflects the reality that any job that can be taken away by technology probably, well, will.

And, finally, this...

If you didn't have to work for a living, because technology gave you everything you ever wanted and needed, and money didn't exist as a scoreboard or necessity to provide for yourself and your family...

What would you do with your time instead?

(Me? Probably the same job as now, because the writing is who I am. But don't tell my clients or employers, because it really doesn't do much for my leverage in contract negotiations...)

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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Today In I Don't Get It: Awards

Stop Stalking Us

After reading about the Oscars this week, I'm left with my usual reaction... and that is that, just, well, I just don't get why people care about such things. And before you get the wrong impression, this isn't about who got nominated, or the recurring demographic breakdown of that group. Rather, it's why the awards exist in the first place, and why anyone cares about them.

I suppose it's fun to complain about things that don't ever change... wait, that's actually not fun at all. Plus, there's all of these columns about what needs to be done to make the show better -- as if the show ever really changes. Or who got snubbed, as if the snubbing weren't probably better for your economic prospects than to be nominated, but not win it. But beyond all of that, I just don't remember ever making a decision about watching a movie based on whether it won a statue or six. I watch movies based on reviews that probably never mention the awards, or because of the personnel involved.

At this point, you might start to wonder how we'll tie this into marketing and advertising... and, well, it's simple. Have you ever made the decision to hire a marketing and advertising professional based on the awards they have?

That's not a rhetorical, by the way. Feel free to testify to it in the comments. But when you get into my world of analytics fueling creative, lather rinse repeat, awards just aren't part of the flywheel. I'm not saying that we'd turn them down.

Just that we've honestly never even remembered to apply for them, mostly because we've been too busy doing the, you know, work...

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Sunday, February 28, 2016

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.

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Friday, February 26, 2016

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.

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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

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...

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