A Brief Longing For The Busy Signal

Nope. Nope. Nope.

The other day, I heard one of my favorite rock songs by the British recording artist Richard Thompson. It's "Tear Stained Letter" ( here's the link to the live version), which dates back to 1983. It contains the following lyric:

I went for the phone, but the line was busy

Which got me to thinking about busy signals. They were a constant, universal and dreaded factor in everyday life that has more or less just gone away due to technology.

Busy signals used to be a very big deal. You'd dread getting them, worry about being on the phone too long and giving one to someone else, get very frustrated with whatever entity was causing it, and so on. As phone tech improved, we moved on to call waiting, and getting straight to voicemail, and at this point, voicemail is pretty much a lost art as well. If you want to reach anyone under the age of 25, text or their preferred social network is pretty much becoming your only channel, especially with the scourge of robo-calling.

But I want to get back to what the busy signal represented. There was a democracy to them. Rich and poor, urgent and trivial, the busy signal was a simple and complete hard stop to whatever the caller thought was important and had to happen right now now now. If you couldn't figure out some other way to solve your problem, your only option was to redial or wait.

Maybe really wealthy people had other options - private lines and such - but for the most part, it was a shared and universal inconvenience. At any point in the day, you had the means to immediately communicate with the person you wanted to talk to, but there was a really good chance it wasn't going to work. The busy signal encouraged back up plans, alternatives. Creativity.

Now, of course, the call goes through, but with less of a chance of success. Maybe it goes straight to voicemail. Or blocked. You can send email, but there's no guarantee it won't trigger a spam filter or get buried under other messages. What used to be an absolute and mechanical disconnect is now set to the preference of the recipient, who holds all of the power. They decide whether to answer the call or not from the information they receive on their screen.

I think this means that we talk to each other less than we used to, but there's really no way to know for certain. Perhaps we are all just busier now, less apt to do the small reach of making the first call, more prone to cultivating our feeds and inboxes and to do lists.

No one wants the busy signal back, of course, and it's never coming back. Good tech always displaces bad.

But that doesn't mean that when it went away, we didn't lose something as well.

AI, Paper Clips and Criteo Boxes

All Hail The Criteo Overlords

This is going to get pretty esoteric pretty quickly, but I think it will get to a place that's helpful to marketing and advertising folks. Let's dig in.

In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Bill McKibben spoke about his latest book, where he outlined threats to humanity. (Mostly, spoiler alert, climate change.) At the tail end of the talk, McKibben also noted the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), loosely defined as computers making decisions based on a virtuous learning loop built on data accumulation and analysis.

McKibben did so with a fairly famous thought exercise known as the Paperclip Problem, or to get more high faluting, instrumental convergence. In this, an AI robot with a seemingly good but unbounded mission (say, the most efficient manufacture of paperclips) would quickly move to terminate its human masters, since they would likely shut off the robot at some future point, and thereby prevent paperclips from being made.

Now, at this point, you might be wondering how we're getting to digital advertising challenges. And with that, I give you the Criteo Box, which is a term that some in our field use to describe template retargeting ads made (in)famous by the dominant player in the space, Criteo. (Example above.)

Criteo boxes are loathed by many design and brand marketing professionals, because they are machine and data driven utilitarian shopping bots that seem to eliminate the need for design. The challenge becomes all about the dynamic product recommendations shown in the ads, because by whatever analytic standard is being used to determine good ads from bad, the data has driven you to this, the final plateau of performance.

An inelegant bare bones box with as many recs as you can fit, Because Data.

Which might lead you to think that design doesn't matter, because it's been solved by AI. Like betting that you will win in chess against IBM's Watson, it's a losing proposition. Just accept the box and move on, with the small possible caveat that it's only solved for remarketing and not acquisition. (But will also likely be solved at some point for acqusition, again, Because Data.)

But here's where I'd like to hold out hope for humanity's continued presence in my life's work, while still being OK with analytics. My belief is that the Criteo Box is only dominant due to an over-reliance on short term goal events.

If you are judging only by clicks, an ad with multiple entry points and good dynamic SKUs might always win over something more brand related. (Side note: please don't use clicks as your goal event, as it's really a bad idea due to bad actors and fat fingering on mobile, and it's not 2001. Tangent over.)

But what if you were looking at, say, purchases? Or the lifetime value of the consumer? Or the margins driven from that value? Or...

Well, you get the point.

The reason why we don't judge ads by these longer funnel approaches is because no advertiser is going to run just display ads. They are also going to follow up with email, have a social and native presence, perform work in search engine optimization for paid and native, and upsell the user on site. All of which will have impact on the performance of the ads, and possibly not an equal one.

In addition, advertisers are going to rise or fall based on customer service, their offline presence, print and broadcast and podcast and heaven knows what else. (Oh, and a side note? Advertisers don't exist in a vacuum without competition, and if everyone in your space is making nothing but Criteo Boxes, your non-Criteo Box ad is likely going to stand out. And, perhaps, perform better.)

Because life is about a lot more than paperclips. Strong performance practices are rarely so cut and dried as to be about a single factor or a single metric. Things that you think you know probably need to be re-tested, and re-thought, rather than assumed to be settled law.

People who design ads without consulting the data are, I believe, acting in an irresponsible manner to their clients.

But so are the ones that act only from data, rather than be inspired by it.

(Also, beating Criteo Box controls? Not a new trick for me. Reach out and let's talk.)

Shovels Not Grails

Let's Get Digging

This week, a good friend and better business associate may complete a quest.

It's taken years of his life and tens of thousands of hours of work, but he's attracted great partners, and the business is nearly complete on a life changing round of funding. Soon after that, we may witness the spread of this tech for marketing and advertising professionals.

Exciting times! (And yes, I'm hoping to work with him on it, mostly because he inspires me to do good work, and you really want to spend your time with people like that.)

Why is his tech life changing? Because he's made something that other people will use to solve a problem and chase their dreams. More importantly, he's done it with a solution that is completely self serve, easy to use, and (this is critical) limited in scope. Instead of threatening the current way of doing things for people in the space, it's just a supremely cool thing that they will use to be more effective. Without a ramp-up period, a forced breaking of silos, or a lockout of current partners.

You can explain his solution in a sentence. Without leaving out stuff that some clients will value, while others ignore.

In other words, he's not selling the Holy Grail.

He's selling the shovel that you need to find it.

(Much better business than Grails, honestly. Also, he's not going to use the shovel for you.)

Part of this echoes what many of the start ups that I've worked for in the past two decades have looked to do. But while it's easy to state your vision, the details of what's involved (primarily account management and customer success) usually destroys those intentions. Clients want to know what you know, have you do things for them that they would rather not, or expand the use of your tool into areas that it might not support to the same level of expertise.

Your customers aren't wrong to want these things, of course. Their concern about your business model probably doesn't go beyond polite interest, and at the end of the day, everyone just wants to solve their own problems, not yours.

With your solution or someone else's, with the usual mix of great, cheap and fast (pick two!) impacting their business decision.

More about this soon, I hope. (And yeah, I'm under NDA, which explains all of the vagueness.)