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...

And... we're back!

(Nope, not a political post. Thanks for asking!)

It's never good when a content blog goes quiet for a long time, but since we've last put words to electrons, M&AD has...

> Worked on several start ups with NDAs (but I can say that we now know *way* more about medicinal cannabis and personal protection equipment than we used to)

> Completed a long-term contract with Creative Circle working for Google (and yes, that was also Highly Educational), and

> Executed exploratory calls on several new exciting initiatives in new consumer categories for us (and honestly, after 20+ years in the game, when something is new to us it's Downright Exciting)

All of which would be very, very cool if it made for more short-term billing, which it has (at least so far) not.

So... ping us! Bandwidth available, at least for a limited time. 

With fewer exclamation points in person.

Talk to you soon...

In The Succulent Belly Of The Beast

Not My Office, But A Reasonable Comp

First, the good news. For the past three weeks, and hopefully for a long time to come, I've been working a pretty fascinating contract job for a pretty Fascinating Employer.

They've brought me in for specific expertise that others do not have, and so far, it's been going really well. I'm a lot happier in this role than most of the gigs I've held in my life, my manager is incredibly nice and supportive, and the corporate culture is *astonishingly* better than some of the experiences that I've had.

Now, the bad. I can't say very much about it, really. I don't work for the Fascinating Employer; I work for a contracting company that sends people to the Fascinating Employer. Which means that while you get many of the bells, whistles and trappings involved, you don't *really* have the same status, and if you are wired like me, it also makes you *very* aware of how much you want to keep that status or better moving forward.

I also can't really get into any of the details of the Fascinating Employer's ample and over the top perks. So the moments that make my 9 to 5 feel more like Wonkaland, rather than just another office... well, the details are going to be lacking, because they have to be.

But I can, of course, hint.

I didn't think that the perks were this going to be that much of a deal, folks. I'm a grown up. I've worked at any number of start ups with any number of Costco-infused snack rooms, with the inevitable HR-driven cupcake and donut fetish, with the Oooh So Naughty cheap thrill of beer in the fridge for Friday Wackiness. If you've been in offices with ping pong and foosball tables and after-hour Work Drinks and off-sites at nice restaurants, it starts to feel like every other place.

All of that stuff becomes table stakes with a disturbing quickness, and the relative lack of variety and Hey, I Can Go To Costco And Get My Own Grub means that you still see people stomping off to Starbucks or into town because, well, food.

And then there's what the Fascinating Employer does, and... yeah.

I used to think I had personal discipline, folks. Thankfully, the Fascinating Employer is staffed head to toe with young and in shape people (many of them who avail themselves of the in-office workout equipment), all of whom subtly remind you that you are not the weight or age or height or skin quality that you want to be, so maybe mix in some (impeccable and astonishing) salad with your truffle-infused triple chocolate salted caramel and garnished with real unicorn shavings brownie. (Not a real thing, but you get the point.)

So just have some fruit, right? That's good for you and they can't do that better than everyone else and... oh dear God, the fresh pears. How do they get bananas that are just always perfectly ripe and massive? Fine, fine, I'll just have some coffee... that's freshly ground from beans that are just better than the beans the rest of the world uses, and I'm not even a coffee snob. But this place is going to turn me into one.

Oh, and there are web sites that list all of your menu options, because why wouldn't there be? If there's duck today at one of the ridiculous number of dining options, you're going to want to know about the duck, right? (It was so good. And I'm not a duck guy, either.)

And if you don't want to bring your laptop, there are loaners, and if you don't want to work at your desk, hey presto, just go wander and take any number of comfy chairs with fabulous views or secluded little corners if that's what helps you concentrate better.

And all of this means that you never, ever leave the building, because why would you want to? (Which is, of course, the point.)

It's the first time I've ever worked for anything this massive, or anything this pampered.

And it's making me wonder why I didn't do everything in my power to get into a place like this decades ago, honestly...

Start Up Goldilocks

Unicorns: A Cautionary Tale

Recently, I was brought in to consult a venture capital fund as they interviewed an acquisition target. (Fun project! Help total strangers decide to avoid or create a massive wealth event for other total strangers, all while never leaving your home. I've had worse times, honestly.)

This mostly consisted of spending time in remote meetings, asking questions about the offering when pertinent, and taking a lot of notes to share with the VC later.

It was an interesting project, and the agency that hired me was pleased with my work... but that's not the point of the story. (Also, I'm not going to disclose the outcome of the decision, because confidentiality and the such.)

 Without getting into the details of what was discussed and decided, what the most striking point to me about the entire experience was how similar the prognosis for the target company was to other companies that I've known.

To wit: you can try to change the world and create amazing value for your clients with something new and exciting and game-changing...

But if what you are doing is really all that and a bag of chips, and the market shows it with explosive growth and revenue...

Well, why wouldn't a whale (i.e., Google, Amazon, Adobe, or maybe their Chinese competitors) just swim on in, buy your company or similar tech, and just be done with the category?

And if that has not happened... well, is your category or technology really all that, and if the answer is no, then why should the VC be around to put more cash into something that isn't going to change the world and cash out?

It all puts you in a Goldilocks moment -- markets that are neither too big nor too small, but *just* right -- and, well, having your start up win is hard enough without adding extra hoops to jump through.

I know, I know -- I'm missing the point of Start Up, which is when your stock option lottery tickets cash out and you get enough moolah to afford real estate in any market, all while setting yourself up to either continue working with the whale (unlikely) or buy yourself a lot of runway to take off with another plane.

But on some level, well, having a steady gig is its own reward, and companies that keep their people tend to do things like keep communities together. Kind of useful things, those.

So, maybe I'm just old fashioned here... but how about we just have companies that turn a profit as soon as humanly possible, and reduce their need for outside capital in the first place?

Pitch Drunk

In my free-lance and consulting life, I get to hear and deliver more sales and marketing pitches in a year than most people see in a lifetime. I'm also enough of an "In The Weeds" nerd to never, ever consider the following game. Nope, not ever. 

You Are What You Is

It's a way to learn French

(H/t to Frank Zappa, and a song  that you really can't quote in its entirety any more...)

In the past few months, I have taken on some bigger clients in consulting agreements, as part of a larger consortium. This has been very productive and even reasonably lucrative, and while I do not think that I am going to avoid full-time work for the rest of my career, the work has been interesting and I have learned a lot. I also definitely have added some things to my skill set.

What is even more intriguing about these experiences is how they inform past professional stops. Especially when you get a fresh perspective.

This is because when you are at a start up, it can be completely immersing in ways that warp your view. If your management communicates change every quarter - not unusual in a hot sector - you can definitely feel that things are different now than what they were before, and that the rest of your industry is either responding to your change, or soon will. You eat your own dog food, become a fan of the product as well as the people, and move with the times.

However, if your sales pitch is ineffective and you have whale clients that dictate the terms of your road map, you run the risk of being left out to dry on an initiative that is not really supported by reality.

The reason why is that just because the product changes or you are hearing new things in meetings and hallways, that does not mean the management, or the perspective that they bring to the problem, has truly become very different. Start-up culture in particular has a very high count of people who need to be the smartest people in the room, and if that translates to also feeling like you are smarter than your clients and know what they really should be doing...

Well, that mindset may be more meaningful than what is said in the pitch. That perspective can be very helpful for the people you talk to at your next engagement.

So if you are doing your due diligence on a start up, see if you can find an old deck. Talk to anyone in your network who they ran into a while ago. Go on the specialty sites and see the turnover rates, and how much their advertising copy has changed over the years. Find out if the benefits and offers are wildly different, and if their clients seem to have taken over the wheel and driven their development.

If all of this is true, you do not have to avoid working with that company. Especially if they are upfront about it. It may not even be a red flag that pitch and execution are going to be wildly different.

But if you are doing a deal with someone, you owe it your client and company to do the due diligence. Because when people show you what they are, you should believe them... but you may need to dig a little to find a true look.