Five Half Year Takeaways

Folks -- Thanks to terrible Web hosting service and three high volume clients, we haven't had much of a chance or ability to add to the blog recently. So consider this to be a six-month catchup of what we've learned by doing.

5) It's a 2 (Point Five?) -for-1 year.

From my spouse's harp work to email copywriting and event planning, the pent-up demand from 2020 is just causing a lot of asks in a short period of time. 

It's not that everything is fine and dandy now -- supply chains are still a mess, shortages and price spikes are giving pause, and the specter of a Covid backlash from the Delta variant and over a year of big fear is keeping some still on the sidelines -- but the thirst for doing is strong.

4) Email is going to have seismic shifts.

Open rates have been under siege for a while now, but with third-party cookie verification being put on a slow track to extinction, that metric is going to become pointless. Judging emails just by click rates is going to take some air out of channel, and creative personnel are not sitting on AR/VR assets and best practices to juice the CTR. Combine this with ever-shrinking use of the channel by younger and time-stressed users, and you've got bad times for an old reliable channel. (Short term, at least.)

3) For many, the pandemic is firmly in the rear-view mirror.

I was at a corporate event in late spring that was scheduled for an outdoor space to be Covid safe. During the event, persistent rain kept everyone inside... and they all packed together, talked loudly to each other (you had to), and more or less went back to 2019 in minutes.

Sure, maybe the event was already pre-populating with people who were vaccinated and confident, or just starved for IRL companionship. But this wasn't a small crowd, or a timid one. 

2) Antitrust is having a very large moment.

There are a number of bills in Congress right now that actually have bipartisan traction as both political parties have an axe to grind against (Very) Big Tech... and almost as if they were hoping to pull off one more big heist before retiring, Apple and Google and Facebook have all moved to control ad targeting (while shutting it down for others).

It's always safe to bet on inertia when Congress is involved. Until, well, it isn't.

1) Retargeting was math-smart and world-foolish, with pain to follow.

If you judge creatives strictly on last-click attribution (hint: do not do this), then you probably wound up approving art that looked a lot like Criteo for most of the last decade -- which is to say basic and utilitarian dynamic boxes with a creepy 30-day stalker window of a product that you almost bought but didn't.

By the math, you were smart to do this, because hey presto, more clicks for this, less for everything else. Good for you with your math skills.

But you also find yourself in 2021 with the public *hating* your ads and that targeting method, so much so that there is popular support for giving even more negotiating power to the richest companies in the world?

Well, um, maybe there's more than math to this. Maybe you should have looked at capping frequencies, or running second-best executions more often to limit burnout. Maybe you could have cut into that 30-day magic window and looked at tighter times (yes, 7 and 15-day for most consumer categories). 

I'm not sure what's the next move to make for this industry. Criteo's not going to go away without a fight, and people aren't going to lose their most effective creative by math without complaint. But if your way to do this goes away, or people expect it to go away and complain to their platforms... 

Well, once again, things that can't continue eventually don't.

* * * * *

If you'd like to talk to us more about any of the above, feel free to reach out. We've got bandwidth and even more tricks up our sleeves than before.

Best -- DMt

Hello Again, And Yes, We've Had The Worst Site Hosting Service Imaginable

Sharp-eyed readers of the blog will note two significant points in the publication of this here blog-like product. (Actually, not even sharp-eyed.)

Point one: The URL has changed. (My name plus blogspot.com, not M&AD. It was too long anyway, I guess.)

Point two: It was several months since the last update... because I've spent that long just trying to get the site back online at the old URL.

These are related.

Here's the story... as a person with decades in the space, I have a long history of buying URLs. I've never really thought too much about it. So I used Register.com back in the day, and have kept using them because inertia.

That web site isn't around anymore. They've sold it to web.com.

How good is web.com? Well, here's the link to the Yelp review. Just to prove it's not just me.

17 reviews, all of them a single star, most of them wishing for legal action.

It takes work, honestly, for not a single reviewer to give you more than the minimum. It also shows that you so don't give a damn about your reputation that you don't even file a fake review on your behalf.

I'd say more about this customer service experience, but honestly, I've wasted enough of my life on these people, and so have you from reading these words.

Anyway.

Blog's back up, thoughts later. Sorry we were away. Back in a bit. Lots of work being done and lessons being learned...

6/29 Update: And now we're back at the old URL. Moving on, folks...

Here We Go

 I want to tell you about one of my favorite things in the world.

I could do this very badly with numbers. Here, I'll show you.

2 - minutes

45 - miles per hour

73 - years old

78 - feet high

$1.5M - cost

Now, the better way.

The Phoenix is a wooden roller coaster at Knoebels, a century-old amusement park in the middle of Pennsylvania. It goes up and back, causes you to float out of the seats, seems impossibly faster at the end and once you ride it from the very front or the very back in your dozens of times in riding it, you'll never take the middle again.

OK, some more words of explanation. 

Knoebels is a family run place that's free to enter, free to park, and the lines are never really very long because for heaven's sake, you are in the middle of Pennsylvania. I think I've probably ridden this thing a few dozen times, in the day and night, in hot and cold, in drizzle (the best; it's even faster) and dry. 

It's a smile machine. Everyone is smiling on the ramp as they leave it. It's magic.

And no matter how many times you get dragged up that hill -- you know the drag, the chunka-chunka-chunka of the chain sounding like oh dear Lord this is the time that it's going to break, isn't it, and the nerves and the adrenalin kick in and you become the person that you were the first time you rode it, rather than the person you are now, if only for those two minutes...

You are present. You are aware. 

You are not thinking about lunch or dinner or the mortgage or your in box or your calendar or the healthcare check or the pets or the water heater or the government or anything, really, beyond the chunka-chunka-chunka.

There are very few things in the world better than the Phoenix. (Short list? The laughter of my wife and daughters. My dog when he's asleep or catching a frisbee. Joel Embiid. This list subject to change.) 

But in business, there is very much one thing that's better than the Phoenix.

And that's the feeling you get when the chunka-chunka-chunka stops, and the glide starts, and you look down the hill of knowing that everything is about to get very, very much faster.

We've had days of over 4 million vaccinations. The unemployment rate is dropping. Cash is rippling through the country from stimulus checks and pent-up demand. Airports are filling up, perhaps too soon for pandemic safety, but filling up just the same.

Enough people are getting vaccines, or more darkly have had the damn bug already and lived to produce their own antibodies, that the fear of a new wave is likely greater than the reality.

Personally, M&AD has had clients with urgent needs, all of them reading the tea leaves the same way we do. The sports laundry I root for both had home games today, both won, both in front of vocal but responsible crowds that made everything seem just a little bit more like the Before Times.

We're getting dragged up that hill, folks.

After 13 months of too long and too dumb and needless tragedy and I'm skipping the recap, we're in glide, in the last few seconds before Fun.

And no matter how many times you've ridden the ride, this moment is the best.

Hold on tight!