The Peril of Perfection

The Gong Is Necessary

Back in my pre-marketing and advertising past, I was a musician.

Well, to be completely honest about it, I was a singer/songwriter, who also bankrolled a band. Musicians, generally, have more skill in their instruments than I do, and I was never completely secure in the title. I worked hard at it, took voice lessons, thought about it all the time, and hustled up hundreds of gigs. We completed four recording projects and I don't regret the experience.

Anyway, back to the story. (I promise this will have something to do with marketing and advertising. Honest.)

We had a drummer that wanted to be John Bonham (that's the guy who played for Led Zeppelin, and is also pictured above). Which is a fine thing for a drummer to want to be, honestly. But his ambitions, at least at the point in time when we recorded, weren't quite up to his chops.

On a specific track in question, he was trying to execute a particular difficult part, and he didn't quite get it right. It was close, but it wasn't in the exact point. He could have just done something simpler, but that wasn't where his art demanded him to be.

Enter technology.

At the time, we were recording on analog tape, which is prized by many recording musicians and studio engineers for its warmth. The story goes is that since digital music is all just 1s and 0s, you don't get the full nuance. (It's a similar story with people who prefer vinyl.)

Which means that you can only edit, or "punch", the tape so much before the tape degrades. And if you are editing the music in question, you have to be extremely exact, and maybe even break out a razor and do splice work, to get a "correct" track.

Which is how we spent way too much time into the wee hours of a Saturday night / Sunday morning, at billable hours, to get a single drum hit in a complicated fill to move a fraction of a percentage of a second... all so the drummer was happy. (Well, more relieved than happy.)

To him, that fix meant everything. It meant that he could hear the song in the future without dwelling on his mistake, that he could take pride in ownership, and that his dreams of sounding like his hero weren't beyond his grasp.

Needless to say, no other person in the world noticed it.

Also, everyone else in the room wanted to murder him.

Which leads me back to digital advertising, and our nearly limitless ability to get things just, exactly, perfect. Often, to the pixel.

And which leaves me thinking, far too often, about my old drummer.

And how often people need to be just like him...

Stepping In The Same River

Deep

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

- Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher (544 B.C., so let's forgive the pronouns)

For roughly my entire career as a marketing and advertising professional, especially one who has been on the inside at places that have held the data, there has been one consistent inquiry.

"How do we get our (insert metric) up?"

Typically this is clicks, but it's also been opens (see email roles). Sometimes it's view based, other times its conversions, your best bet is probably a hybrid measurement that's mid funnel, and there's even been downloads or user time. You name the success metric or KPI, show me some creative, and I can probably tell you a half dozen things that could positively impact success.

In seconds, without research. It's something of a party trick that comes from decades in the space.

But the question also betrays a fundamental misread of the mission.

Short term wins over your control, especially if they are from something as transitory as a design only refresh, gives you a diet of popcorn -- and a very finite amount of popcorn at that. Especially in a typical marketing and advertising mix of multi-channel touch and communication, or with (and here comes the river) a fluctuating supply of impressions.

(You remember the river, right? It's important. Sorry it took me a while to get back to it.)

Especially in broad campaigns and programmatic plays, the quality of traffic can vary wildly, even among people who aren't scouring the Web for low CPMs. Online publishers are under constant pressure to keep the lights on, and that can lead to unfortunate decisions on frequency. There's also the very real spectre of outright fraud, which is slowly getting beaten down due to better tech, but, well, not all at once.

So what's needed is testing. Constant, disciplined, with an emphasis on reporting, preferably with your analysts having a strong dose in significant confidence levels. With a plan that attacks structural differences (i.e., offers) as well as surface changes, and KPIs that don't change with the weather.

Oh, and when you think you've determined, for once and for all, a stronger practice?

Well, that's when you have to run a back test... because the river has changed.

And if you need help navigating those waters, I'm happy to guide your boat.

There and Back Again

Yes, The Author Is A Short Fellow

Last Thursday (3/21/19), RevJet ended my role as part of a force reduction. It wasn't for cause, I don't bear them any ill will, and a wide range of senior personnel have reached out to express their condolences and willingness to help. There's even a chance that I'll work with them again, once they get past their current issues, and in some ways, I feel more valued now than I did when I worked there.

I believe in their application and value proposition, and the future of digital advertising is going to look a lot like what they do. As to whether it will be their name when the dust settles... honestly, I have no idea. There are a lot of good competitors in the space, and as last week shows, they don't have the deepest pockets.

Which brings me to, well, why the blog wasn't getting a lot of updates.

RevJet is many things: a boon to marketing and creative personnel, a way for ad ops people to get their lives back and do more interesting things with their time, a DAM and an ad server and a test machine and a dessert topping and a floor wax.

On a personal level, I learned a lot -- about strong practices in creative, about durable learnings in dayparting, about animation cycles and creative heat maps and reporting and a ton of far more technical ad ops stuff than I had ever been exposed to before.

It also wasn't, well, lucrative.

I took their first offer and drove to California as fast as I could to work for that company. I lived in a 200 square foot hut (that cost over 40% of my mortgage back in New Jersey). I spent the past two years away from friends and family, doing everything I could to ensure optimal service for clients. At the end of every day there, no matter how much stuff we had to do, I left with a clean in-box, set agendas for the next day, completed documentation and a sense of accomplishment.

And then I'd work 5-7 hours as a rideshare driver to cover the shortfall, and 12-14 on weekends, and served M&AD clients.

It was an interesting ride and a great learning experience, and more proof that when I believe in something, I go all-in. (See also past gigs, my time leading a rock band, putting mysef through college, and such.)

It's also made me dramatically more useful to, well, the next employer. (If that's you, please get in touch. Papa needs a new pair of health benefits.)

More about what I've learned later, and thanks for reading.