Mad Structure

Perfection

As it's Selection Sunday as I write this, and I'm a very lapsed college basketball fan but a very strong professional one, I'm struck by the annual urge to dive into the tournament anyway.

Mostly because it's a teachable marketing moment.

Why? The absolutely perfect structure of the enterprise.

For all but the diehards, college basketball really isn't something you need to pay too much attention to before the actual tournament starts. Unlike the 82-game NBA regular season, the college game seems extremely skippable, since it's overlapped by other sports during its run time, and doesn't really matter beyond the highly transitory "who got snubbed" arguments. Sure, if you root for a school in a power conference and they win that title, it's nice, but it's forgotten as soon as the Madness begins.

A word about the timing. It's usually perfectly coinciding with spring celebrations like St Patrick's Day and some spring breaks. It's deep enough into the year that taking a couple days off for a 4-day orgy of bracket obsession is within reach of many workers. The highlight footage of dunks, last second shots, favorites asserting themselves, and so on translates to every platform in our digital age. There hasn't been a tournament yet that lacked for drama, because many of the games are coin flips, and a 40-minute basketball game falls into the small data sample that says anything can happen, and just might. The NBA more or less goes on mute during that initial blast, with networks switching over to the tournament. Football doesn't compete. Baseball is playing games that don't matter. It's a nearly extinct rarity in American media; a ceded time slot with a lack of competition.

The only actual problem is... the product.

Purists talk about how collegians care more and try harder on defense; this is not true, it's just that they are comparing playoff games in the tournament to not equal moments in the NBA. (Try to find lapsed defense in a Game 7, which is, in effect, what all NCAA tournament games are.) Others talk about how into it the crowds are, and sure, but again, Game 7s. The only real difference between the tournament and the NBA playoffs is the structure, which rewards luck far more than the meat grinder nature of the pro game.

Beyond the structure, there's no comparison. The NBA attracts talent from six continents at the height of their physical skills, puts them in the presence of the finest coaches in the world, then pits them against each other in a Darwinian endurance test to qualify for the post-season and acquire home court advantage. Next, it throws the same opponents together for a minimum of 192 minutes of court time to see who is best.

The coaches only coach; there is no recruiting. The players only play; there is no pretense at education, and if they choose to spend the whole of their lives at their craft, their teams will not suffer sanctions. The officiating is at a higher standard, and so is the sports medicine, scouting, practice time, strategies, and so on. It's just a better game.

And yet... that perfect structure. The bands, the crowds, the sense that if you aren't picking a bracket you are just denying yourself joy. Even though brackets almost never end in joy. The nostalgia, if you went to a school that's participating, for times gone by.

From a marketing and advertising perspective, we spend our lives seeking for similar business models and experiences. Structures that write themselves, creatives that play into such advantages, locked and loaded concepts that never fail.

We almost never find them, and even when we do, they don't endure like the NCAA tournament does.

Structure.

Find a perfect one, and everything else falls in its sway.

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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.

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.