Are You Engaging In IST?

Sing It, Sir

No, not Indian Standard Time, or Information Systems Technology, or any of the other 400+ uses I've found for this acronym in a quick Web search.

My use of IST here is a little more idiosyncratic, and you'll have to let me walk you around for a little while. I promise it'll be worth it.

I'm a podcast fan, because they make me seem smarter than I actually am. Along with decades of working for start ups that had data insights that you could tie to learning optimal creative practices, which is why people bring me on board to help with their work. Sorry for the humblebrag.

This week, my habit led me to a replay of a Freakonomics Radio podcast that shows the popular belief that there is an average human body temperature (98.6, right? Not so much) is a misnomer. It turns out that the study that established this wasn't properly done, with a faulty thermometer at play, and other factors. Humans have their temperatures go up and down all the time, either through exercise, menstrual cycles, time of day, and so on. So this number that we all know isn't true, and the common practice of ascribing small changes in temperature to the body fighting off infectious diseases is, in the words of the analyst that dug into the matter, inappropriately simplistic thinking.

What a wonderful phrase. Who says that scientists have to be poor communicators? But as it is a whole lot of syllables, let's just call it IST, since that also makes a snide little comment about political exclusions.

I'm very anti-IST. You should be too.

One of the realities of existence as a marketing and advertising consultant is that you are usually there to fix a problem, and have to prove your bona fides right away. Usually with clients that have highly defined pain points. So if the reason why you are in the room is a poor metric, you need to fix that ASAP.

That's fine; it's fair and well understood. But what isn't so fair or understood is what happens next. That's because IST isn't just a poor way to live your life, it's also an extremely efficient way to tank your marketing.

So let's take this out of theoretical. The client has poor conversion on the landing page. What's the first step? Well, there are plenty of rules of thumb about how to improve the rate, which have been proven from a wide range of tests and consumer practices. You can try to limit scroll, cut down on leak points, make sure that all data entry is mission critical, confirm load times on various platforms, code responsively in the strong likelihood of high mobile usage, and so so. Apply these tactics to a client that was not previously aware about them, and your rate will likely rise.

Voila. Problem solved. Cut us a check. Sound the trumpets. All hail the wise and helpful consultant! Also the designer, and the coder, and the copywriter, and whoever else is on the team, and maybe even the client for the presumed flexibility in moving off the old page.

Except that, well...

Now it turns out that our SEO may be off a touch, because all of that copy that was causing the scroll was helping. Also, sales isn't as happy as you might think, because the "new" leads that are coming through the pipe are not converting as well as the old ones. The old ones, after all, were really proving their level of interest by fighting through the poor execution.

Oh, and pretty soon? The new rate bump may start to flatten out, especially if the business served by the landing page has seasonality issues, or the company's selling proposition is made less competitive by competitor actions, or the means that drive traffic to the landing page are failing.

IST would tell you that optimizing landing pages is a clear and simple, before and after practice. But the Web is not now, and never has been, a set and forget experience. And your landing page changes can and should lead to rethinking your display ads, or your emails, especially as those have a lot more meat on the bone in terms of testing ability from bigger sample sizes.

I don't mean to discourage you from trying to clear tasks and fix problems. Metrics can and should improve, especially when you work with people who know what they are doing. Fixing today's problem is how you keep it from becoming tomorrow's problem, and when today's problem becomes tomorrow's problem, that's intolerable.

But tomorrow?

There's going to be another problem.

Which also isn't going to solve quickly or easily if you are engaging in IST...

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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.

Reality On Reality's Terms

A Concerning Sign

There's a school of thought in many corporate situations right now, and it goes something like this.

People have short attention spans and very little time to get what you are trying to do.

So you need to get to the point as soon as possible.

(In fact, faster than that. Say ASAP instead.)

So if you are answering a question or trying to solve a problem, you have to keep it simple.

Which is fine for many situations, but others? Not so much.

Let's take email, a subject that has been the full-time occupation for me at several different start ups. It's also a marketing channel that has undergone more changes in the last two years than the last two decades. Which means many of the rules have changed. (Why? Smartphones. But I digress.)

If you are running an email campaign, there are three basic metrics that your client always wants you to raise. Those would be inboxing/deliverability, open and click.

There are plenty of ways to increase all of these metrics... in the short term. Many of which are, if not full on black hat coding, at least gray, and far from a good moment for your branding. These practices can include using images instead of live text to thwart filtering on words that would activate spam triggers, salacious or misleading subject lines or sender names, highly aggressive creative practices to inspire click responses, and so on.

You can, of course, do all of this stuff: it's a free Internet, none of it is going to send you to jail, and plenty of consumer categories recognize these practices as, if not completely legitimate, at least expected. In some campaigns where the entire enterprise is a little shaky, running without these aids would more or less identify you as painfully naive. (Which categories in particular? Well, let's just say that one of my past gigs included work for a for-profit online education enterprise that you've probably heard of, especially in relation to the fact that it settled out of court on a fraud charge in the midst of the election campaign last year. Let's just say it's a piece in my portfolio that I don't always show to new prospects.)

But if your brands are, well, built for the long haul, you know not to propose anything in this vein, because it would be wrong for the client. And if you are skilled in the way of the work, you also know that secondary email performance metrics (unsubscribe rate, spam complaints by readers, multiple use, attributable sales, forwards and so on), and deviations from normal rates, can tell you a lot more than just a brute and simple number.

By the way, if you are blessed enough to work for a client or employer that gets all of that, or allows you to explain the complexity...

Who also understands that the occasional poorly performing campaign, so long as they drive lessons that you can use to improve in the future, are more valuable than just universal high rates...

And this is actually the way the world works, and just saying More Open / More Click / More Inbox isn't the best way to get any of that?

Well, treasure them. Honestly. Thank your maker or your stars or your manager or your board of directors for being smart enough to deal with reality on reality's terms.

And if not?

Find your next gig before that one goes away. Because people who do not live in reality are capable of, well, anything...

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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.

Don't Hug Me I'm Genius

Green Is Not A Creative Color

This last week, I was told about a dark and brilliant piece of subversive UK film via a social media message from a respected friend in the business of creative work. It was about the web series "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" (aka, DHMIS). You can see (and should!) the six episodes on YouTube in less than half an hour. Here's the link to do that.

I also highly recommend the Film Theory recap and possible explanation of all of the hidden messages in the work, which are just legion, really. The makers of the show have axes to grind on some social issues, and a tireless skill in doing just that. with Easter eggs all over the place.

But as this is a marketing and advertising column, let's keep it to the subject at hand, rather than a free ad for something cool.

For reasons best understood by people who have watched the clips and/or the explanation, DHMIS can only really exist on the Internet, AKA a popularly distributed medium with no central owner... or room or role for a direct and controlling commercial sponsor. Not only is the subject matter and treatment just not something that would ever lend itself to, say, cereal ads in between the clips, it's also something that works best as a one to one recommendation for viewing, since it's not something where you can say, "If you like X, you'll like Y..." because, honestly, there's nothing like this, at least not in my experience or memory.

It's also something that needed the Internet in its current incarnation, where crowdfunding through Kickstarter isn't just known, but accepted and encouraged. With no real owner except the fans, DHMIS can keep this as weird and uncompromising as they like, without fear of notes, standards and practices or focus groups tamping down the vision. And for something like this, keeping the vision of the makers with no compromises is the entire game, really.

So in the final analysis we have a runaway viral hit, with tens of millions of views. It's also a financial slam dunk, and something that can't really be exploited for further monetization because, well, it's already achieved everything it needed to, from a creative and distribution standpoint. The famed "Butterfly Effect" of '90s cause theories was always accurate; it just needed an online boost to truly make the phenomenon real.

And with that, I encourage you all to go watch this and see if there's anything I'm missing, and to also try not to think too hard about great content operating outside of traditional media channels, which is to say, the meat and potatoes of what we do on a daily basis.

Because if great stuff is increasingly outside of advertiser influence, doesn't that say something terrible about the impact that marketing and advertising is having on the creative process?

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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.