So Good You Can't Say

Ironic Meme Not Included

This month, one of my clients released something really great. It took them years to make, fulfills a need in the marketplace that was underserved, and flat out dunks on everyone else in the category. Their core group of customers and fans are spreading the word about it on social media, because it's in a category and demographic where word of mouth and an urgent buying cycle are both strong realities. 

So why am I telling you about them while not really telling you about them?

Well, because...their experience is striking, educational and if you look at it the wrong way, a little dispiriting. 

Here's why.

The product and service has a strong Reddit channel. If you don't know Reddit, Wikipedia defines it as a social news aggregator and discussion web site, where registered members submit content that is up or down voted by other members. 

Also, if you didn't know about Reddit... well, there is no point in being mean about it. You probably knew about Reddit. You are reading a marketing blog, for heaven's sake. It's Yelp for everything that Yelp isn't for, basically.

Anyway... as previously stated, the new product is great. Not my opinion; pretty much everyone's. So is the service that supports it. The market, which skews young, is really enthused about it. And not shy about singing its praises to the skies. 

Which means the posts get cynical admins casting aspersions as to gaming the system or writing fraudulent content, because we didn't just fall off the turnip truck here... you folks are scammers, right? Let's just assume scammer first and ask verification later.

Or competitor trolls doing what trolls do, because hey, trolls gonna troll.

This is likely just a temporary problem, and a pretty good one to have, really. Eventually the persistence and true organic nature of the positive commenting community will outweigh the haters. Competitors in the space will step up their game or perish. Competition and capitalism and the such will have its way.

But in the meantime?

We get to patiently explain to the most tiresome people on the planet why nice things can still exist in the world. (Without sounding like scammers or religious zealots.)

All while being profoundly grateful that we don't have to live in their world for very long...

Play me out, Modest Mouse!

I Only Care About One (Wrong) Thing

Sometimes as a consultant, you get a client who is monumentally frustrated by a single metric. It's resisted previous efforts at optimization, it's deteriorated in a way that's threatening employment, and it's all anyone can talk about.

In a moment like this, you have to *very* careful and stick to your integrity... because to be honest, there are a *wealth* of black and gray hat tactics that will "solve" the problem for any single metric. And if your client keeps hammering away on a fix, you might even be tempted to use them. But they only create, well, much bigger problems.

Open rates in email an issue? Change your sender name to something salacious, or tweak the subject line to oversell a benefit or personalization. Sure, you may lose in-boxing, get booted by your provider, and unsubscribe and bounce rates will spike, which are all way much worse problem to have, but hey... you only wanted to fix the open rate, right?

Let's go further down the funnel, then -- clicks are tried, true, and never high enough to make everyone completely thrilled. OK, dumb everything down to a single entry point (for old-time fans of the blog, the Jolly Candy-Like Button), make the call to action pop to the point of obnoxiousness, and prevent anyone involved from analyzing site behavior or caring about click quality. Bonus: show the ad in a new geographic area for the consumer category, even if it's impossible for them to make a purchase. Voila, CTR is spiking! Not conversions, though. Definitely not conversions.

Well, fine, Mr. Black Hat Consultant... let's only measure for conversions, then. That'll fraud-proof it! Except that in making this move, you've likely made testing impossible due to the rare event issue, made everything dependent on a conversion funnel that is likely independent from lead generation, and given everyone involved a massive incentive to sell on an irresponsible price point and forget about return on investment or lifetime consumer value. If you are only measuring on conversion, well, converting on a loss leader isn't really that much of a trick. (I'd get into SEO here, but the black hat work there is so prevalent, it's honestly hard to sell honest services.)

The point is this: life (and marketing) is often *complicated* and a complex problem to solve. Trade offs are inevitable. There are very few things where you only want to know one metric, and are ready to toss all others out the window. If the only thing you care about is how fast you are going when you drive, you're going to run out of gas. Or fail to heed the check engine light. Or drive through a red light while you stare at that speedometer.

Marketing and advertising is the same way. A long-term marketing professional wants to see as much actionable data as possible -- because they give us clues for how to make things better. Find out what site behavior says about click quality. Work out what platform someone is viewing your offer on, and how they index demographically. Grind away on small but free levers like dayparting, frequency, segmentation and so on, and so on. And when you measure for impact, look at more than one point in the funnel, if only to check that your gain in one place isn't being wiped out by a loss somewhere else.

Any marketing and advertising consulting agency should be able to help you solve your most pressing problem. But if they do so without making sure they aren't creating others, that's not good or sustainable service. 

Strong, Not Optimal

Occasionally when you talk to a client, they give you clues as to how the relationship is going to go later. But only if you know what to listen for. 

One of the most telling, in my experience, is whether the terms they use show the right amount of intellectual curiosity and complexity... or whether they are hoping to keep things as simple as possible, even if this leads to a drop in performance due to a lack of rigor.

Words, in short, matter.

Which leads to the curious quest for Optimal Creative practices... 

That, well, do not exist. At least, not eternally.

Now, does this mean that there aren't strong and weak tactics? Of course not. You may be using many strong practices already, from calls to action to front loaded subject lines, from easily parsed body copy to entry points above the fold and a clear offer hierarchy and so on. 

I could go on, but there's a lot of channels, a lot of strong and weak practices, and that's not the point of this little exercise.

But no creative practice -- not even the ones that I would be truly shocked to see fail, mostly because I've seen them win in thousands of executions -- is optimal. 

That's because they can't be. 

Optimal implies perfection, unchanging, unquestioned. Can't be improved. And that's just not what occurs in creative testing. Everything can eventually fail, go stale, become overused by competitors or frequency, to the point where it's absence could be a better idea than it's presence. And everything can improve, see a boost from better execution or timing, or relative rarity in the market.

There are no optimal practices. There are simply strong ones and weaker ones, points you are more likely to see a benefit from testing and ones that are (probably much) lower priority to test.

There is no Magic Formula or Holy Grail or Perfect Ad. And if there were, it would cease to be with a quickness, because it would be duplicated and driven into the ground by everyone in a similar market.

And if your client doesn't get this, uses the terms optimal and strong interchangeably, or doesn't seem to want to get into the nuance, or live in a world where testing and data drives, instead of simplistic opinions that reinforce their own sense of being a Marketing Super Genius?

Then you don't have an optimal client.

Or a strong one.

And, if past precedent is any indication, a long term one...