Eight Ways Marketing and Advertising Will Improve... Soon

Also an underrated Prince song (Everybody Batdance!)

Recently, we've been fortunate enough to have conversations with some media and podcasting types. This seems to be on the rise, because we have a bit of the grizzle to us, and have been at places where we get insights on The Future, which is already in progress. 

Which led to the following listicle. Enjoy, argue, like, share, subscribe, tithe, carve this into cryptic rubrics or into hard to follow bad poetry. You know, the usual.

8) Last click is last century.

The idea that one marketing channel (usually SEO, but sometimes email) is your favorite child and none of the other kids ever pull their weight isn't just bad for the brand, it's not even true once you start to look at synergies and the funnel. 

7) Single KPI marketers RIP.

Similar to last click, but a little different. If you think the only problem that, say, your display ads need to solve is More Click, just go show them to some robots. Hint: robots tend not be such great shoppers. Any marketer that only cares about one metric, no matter what that metric is, has a fool for a client. And foolish clients eventually stop being foolish, or clients. Or in business.

6) Your devices talk to each other, and you do not notice, because it's not creepy.

Let's say you are the kind of person who is never going to buy a truck, go to a movie theater to watch a cape film, purchase or discuss pharmaceutical products for others, or donate to a political organization that is diametrically opposed to your views.

Now, let's imagine that you never see an ad for any of these products ever again.

Would you find that creepy, or would you just go through your day with less distraction, annoyance, ire, etc.?

This is where the technology can go with cross-device technology and information sharing. It really, really does not need 30 days of e-commerce stalking to ruin things for every legitimate use.

5) Creative testing will stop sucking.

I get why creative testing is, 99 times out of 100, a pointless chore. It can go sideways in a hurry when the highest paid person in the room weighs in with their Almighty Gut (the one that has all of the feeling answers), or when everyone has the good faith / scared subordinate desire to not be seen as the champion of the ad that failed.

But, um, folks? That's not how science works, or progress, or math. 

We learn when things deviate from the mean. We learn from explosive failure or success. Then we iterate, shine, enhance. 

If you are walking on eggshells, rolling over for everything from Gut Exec, and not committing enough to a campaign to test, you are doing it wrong. If your tech or media plan does the same thing, well, same thing. 

You are also working in a bad situation. Eventually, you'll stop. We have faith. (Also, well, math and tech that is dragging us there.)

4) Social media will improve or die.

Do you spend as much time as you used to on Facebook? No, of course not, the numbers and stock evaluations are proving that, and if you claim to be excited about the Metaverse, well... welcome to the blog, Meta Employee. The rest of us are watching Second Life Part Duh, but with headsets. Yay, headsets! Way better than phones, except, well, not.

The reasons why you are spending less time on social aren't hard to fathom. Personally, I find curating memories of dead pets more sad that I want to deal with routinely, along with ducking the obvious trolling clickbait pieces or oversharing. (Yes, I get it. You play Wordle. Now please tell me something more interesting about yourself. Toenail length, at this point.)

What needs to happen to get these increasingly run-down stores to provide something more than a dutiful check in for mentions and work? Hell if I know, but Stein's Law, people. You may or may not like TikTok, but at least it's different.

3) Bad faith actors are purged.

See item 3, then apply it to publishers that make their sites unworkable due to over-advertising, exchanges that provide traffic that never gets to the mid-funnel, marketers that make short-term single KPI moves, and so on. New technology always favors the grifter (side note to the folks that want us to work on their NFT or crypto concerns; um, nope), but that edge does not last. Providing actual value is still necessary, and the only thing that endures.

2) Direct mail will survive and thrive.

Ready for our most radical suggestion for 2022? Engage in direct mail. Especially if you have work from home targets, especially if your lists are good, especially if you have novel ideas for creative execution in this channel. Now that the USPS is getting back on its feet (speaking of bad faith actors being purged...), there's never been a better time to make your mark with a physical piece in an increasingly digital world. So send!

1) Your inbox has always been a competitive separation. It's going to become more of one.

How do you personally feel about people who ghost you, who don't read or reply to emails, who require multi-channel follow up, and who react as if you need to be on call for them, but not vice versa?

Yup. Us too. Perhaps understandable, but also not printable and no one that would be on the top of your list to recommend working with.

As more and more employers move to remote and fractional work while trying to execute clawbacks on benefits and job security, personal loyalties will move more towards colleagues and less toward firms. Which means you are going to gravitate towards the people in your life that inspire better work, and less for those you would rather avoid.

(Well, most people. Full disclosure: we're OCD about zero inbox. Besides, we *love* all of our clients...)

A Message I Never Expected

 At one of my full-time gigs, I had issues with a co-worker. They presented as terse at best and unpleasant at worst (their words, not mine -- more on that later), and we butted heads often. 

I also had to collaborate with them on a routine basis in a small team, so there was no getting around it. I made the best of what I could, added value where possible, and kept telling myself the only thing you can tell yourself -- that it is not your fault or problem, and that problems like this are not eternal.

What I also told myself was that management at the gig was not capable or willing to fix the issue, and that it was not something I could solve myself. So just live with it. They were paying me, after all.

My co-worker and I had some ups and downs. Mostly downs. When the gig ended with a loss of funding and waves of people taking their stuff to their cars in boxes (start ups are like that sometimes), I took the troublesome co-worker off my first party LinkedIn list and thought, well, that’s a small benefit from an unfortunate ending.

I did not have to associate with them anymore. If I thought about them, I could and should stop. And when I did think of them, it was not with an abundance of kindness. They share a name with a local road, so I have thought of them more often than I wanted to.

A week ago, I was running an errand for a colleague and waiting for them to come back to the car. LinkedIn pops up with a message – and it’s from the old co-worker. They had moved on to a healthier work environment, and the change in settings had led them to do some soul-searching and reach out to me over the past difficulties. It was not an over-the-top apology, but it really did not have to be.

They did not have to do this. All of that water was under the bridge many years ago. We are not likely to meet again, nor work at the same company. I do not intend to use them as a reference, nor they with me. It was just something that was eating at them, so they had the courage to reach out and own the behavior. When they did, I realized it was eating at me, too.

I can not tell you how much better this email has made the last week.

When you work in a place with poor management, it really can seep in and do real damage to your confidence and performance -- and to your colleagues. Demeaning, undermining, quibbling and belittling is contagious. It can also often create work that is in the “turtle” position, and that is not work you are going to be proud of later. Overcoming the feelings of dread at work, or proactively pulling your punches because you are just walking on eggshells, is no way to work or live.

Neither is having omniscience as to why someone is not getting along with you, or that the situation will never go to a better place later.

You have to have hope. 

Thanks to my new friend’s courage and conscience, I can now look at any coworker, past, present or future, and think it might be just like this situation later.

What a gift, really!

The New Epidemic Opportunity: TL/DR

Recently, a client asked why a colleague's email newsletter went to a junk folder.

I don’t want to get into the e-mail nerdery on this, but unanswered questions are torture, at least for me. So, here’s why in the next paragraph. Feel free to skip, even though we’re getting pretty meta (note: Not Meta) to do that. More later.

There are many possible reasons why an email will junk, from inbox levels to subscriber use to throttling and bounce rates. The bigger problem is that diagnostics at individual levels are far from exact, because ISPs want to keep this kind of thing secret from would-be spammers. If it’s 100% clear why something junks, that junk filtration method is nearly immediately worthless. So, there is almost no way to definitively know the reason an email junks, and it may even be more than one reason. Moving on.

The bigger point for me was that we had been here before. We had also taken steps to help everyone avoid this, by putting the sender on a “whitelist” and changing their settings at the inbox level. Individual users can prevent junking, and the directions weren’t even particularly hard.

They had also been publicized. For about three months, every email we had sent out went out with a PS, and there was even a dedicated email for just this subject on its own. The person who reported the junking has been at the client’s employ during all of this.

So, the most likely scenario is that user never took the steps to prevent the junking. It’s possible, of course, that there was a breakthrough case, and there is nothing gained from impugning the motive of a client. But the overall performance of the email in question was in line with recent flights, so the chance of some seismic act to cause junking seems minimal.

What seems most likely is that the user simply did not read that email, or the other emails. Because TL/DR. Which may be even more endemic than Covid right now, and hopefully, not just when I write something to someone.

I totally get why. Jobs are always on, emails and meetings are never ending, and many employers are cutting corners while having a tough time filling positions (there may be a clue here). Sweating the details has never been harder. I’ve started sprinkling text messages with non sequiturs on personal channels, just as a periodic check to see if people are reading. It’s good intel because it tells you who you will need to follow up with offline. (Also, fish ride bicycles because meta not Meta references are impossible to resist.)

As with every crisis, there is good news to this. Sweating the details has always been a competitive advantage. It is also now becoming increasingly lucrative.

Another client (a more lucrative one, by the way – there may be a clue here) has brought us on for a variety of tasks. Among them is combing through their data to find insights, not just from tests, but usage.

This is not work that is usually in our wheelhouse, or something we have as much experience in doing. Career analytic professionals in our past might scoff at our jerry-rigged confidence level calculations, or raise valid objections that, well, often activate our own urge to TL/DR. We are copy writers and creative professionals who are not scared of math, not mathematicians with a creative edge.

But that is not what this client is paying for.

So, if you can lean into it, embrace the details and read all the way through, without getting distracted in our pandemic of distraction?

You might just add value. A lot of it. For you, and your client.

From something that it seems like anyone could do, but won’t.