Five Good Minutes

 The folks at Daily Ad Brief reached out to discuss the future of online advertising and such. Take a view (and see if you can find the Easter egg mistake).

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...