What you gain from copywriter reps

At many a previous adtech, I was in charge of teams that made banner ads. Our stuff was aided by targeting software and segmentation, but in terms of sizing, they were identical to everything else you'd see online, because that's how dynamic ad placements work. 

You generally designed for three main sizes -- a 300 x 250 pixel rectangle, a 728 x 90 leaderboard, and a 160 x 600 skyscraper. It's not an overstatement to say that every designer I ever worked with *hated* the 160 x 600 size. Most logos weren't optimal for the shape, text was inevitably challenged for legibility on any word of more than 7 characters due to the need for a readable font size, and it was always just a pain in the ass size to make. By the time of early design automation, where resizing banners could be done with a click of a button, the skill set died an unmourned death.

I don't miss copywriting and design direction of skyscraper display ads. These banners were always the least important in terms of generating response, while simultaneously taking the most time to design and revise, and dancing in closets isn't exactly my idea of fun. 

But the sheer act of working in these tight spaces for the better part of a decade on a routine basis has had an immense, long-lasting and profound benefit to my copywriting. You may not want to spend years lifting weights, but years lifting weights will make you stronger. So it was with banner ad production, subject lines for emails, preheader copy, etc., etc. Copywriting takes talent and creativity, but it also takes reps, and when they have unusual rules, it creates a certain sharpness.

Which are, of course, under direct and obvious attack from AI-generated text.

You want to be strong? You have to do the work. Which I guess could also be said about generating prompts, but... not so much.

Enhancing shareholder value

I live to work and find value in every gig, but gun to my head... I like working at the start-up phase the most. It's when you have the best chance to make a lasting impact, when immersion seems most worth it, and where learning happens at the fastest speed. It's a rush, and it's sometimes hard to throttle down to non-start-up speed when the client is in a highly cautious consumer segment. Not saying I can't do those gigs; just not my favorite.

Which isn't to say that start up life is always optimal, especially if you wind up regretting your choice of equity backer. (Pro tip: when they seem more concerned about the exit strategy than the propagation of the business... that's a bad sign.) Short-term decisions are often defended by the justification that they are "enhancing shareholder value", which is to say, taking profit.

And, well, balance in all things, and anyone who takes private equity while being anti-profit is doing a lot wrong. But before you roll over and do today the thing that the equity will end the business for tomorrow, this:

Are the people with the most stock options really the only shareholders?

Because I'm naive enough to think that, well, NO. 

Employees matter, even if their share of the stock is non-actionable. So do their dependents and families, given that the conditions of work, let alone the sudden cessation of income and benefits,  has more than a little impact to their lives. Also the customers, given that they've parted with their money and are (famously) always right. 

Start-ups don't start in a vacuum. They start in places with existing infrastructure, talent, resources, laws and so on. All of which has been paid for by others with a share in the business, if for no other reason than the value of their property might take a big hit from, say, finding themselves next to a data center. I'd even extend this to fellow citizens, at the local, federal, and even global level. If your start up only "works" through exploitation, it's even money that it doesn't really "work" at all.

So, the next time you feel pressured to compromise your integrity in the name of shareholder value... expand the concept of who the shareholders are. 

Because those unwitting state, federal and global co-signers of your business? 

Have a nasty habit of becoming much more important than the more direct shareholders later.

Even if they are wielding torches and pitchforks, instead of briefcases and lawyers.

Your Eroding Network (Effects)

Current Mood (Click, Play Loud)

 "I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing." - "Faster", Manic Street Preachers

If you are unfamiliar with a network effect, it's when the value of a product, service or platform increases just because the number of users has also increased. Examples include influencers getting new traffic because they already were already showing traffic spikes, e-commerce sites gaining market share from word of mouth by past customers, or delivery and transportation services becoming more effective for providers and customers when there are more providers and customers. 

Network effects aren't new to the digital age. When the majority of people have a weekend or holiday off, that's a network effect for travel, hospitality, and so on. When brands achieve mass awareness, the chance of a franchisee having success in a new market is higher; so are the fees. Religious faiths are much more likely to gain tolerance from governments when they are mass, not niche. Any network effect that you have become used to, like any other privilege, seems like second nature or the rules of the road.

But the roads are changing, sometimes faster than you might guess.

As a marketer, you are always looking for clients that can scale without sacrifice, because they allow you to fully realize wins without customer service issues. There are few things in this career worse than having to pull back from a winning practice due to forces beyond your control, so the past 20+ years of marketing life has been mostly in the service of digital enterprises. 

But the pursuit of these goals has caused the end of other network effects, and that's only speeding up with the advent of worldwide economies and artificial intelligence. Marketing campaigns that used to be able to rely and benefit from offline channel brand awareness increasingly, well, can't. Live events are cut and shared on the preferred schedule of the individual. Songs are not as well known, movies not as well seen, stories don't resonate, and so on.

What this means to the society is incredibly wide ranging, and the challenges it leads to are equally varied. If everyone's cultural intake is tailored to the individual, it's a small step to only seeing the "news" and opinions that one already has reflected back to them, because anything that isn't that won't work on the math. Since new things are harder to like than old, nostalgia plays dominate, or at the very least, inspire highly derivative ones. Intellectual humility and doubt -- I might be wrong and it might be good news because that's where learning and growth occurs -- are seen as untenable. Pushback to a time with stronger networks existed can lead to rises in nativism, because nativism and nostalgia are often closely linked.

Backing this up to real world implications for marketing and business people... I used to work in retargeting for an adtech company. What most vendors wanted to do was to simply show the customer the individual SKU(s) that they had previously viewed for as long as the cookie data would allow, which was typically 30 days. We'd do tests in which we'd run these repetitive stalking ads against other plays, and the other plays would do better on engagement... but not direct and proven sales. So instead of doing the complicated and human thing, clients would often just stay simple and mechanical. Similar efforts to optimize spends to short-term payoffs led to rises in search and email programs, and cuts to branding and sponsorships.

What this misses is plain to anyone who has had to try to restock a funnel after a rush season; no mid to long-term leads in the funnel. That may be fine for products with a short buying cycle or fast exit plan, but that's not the majority of human endeavors. 

I used to think that this was a market opportunity, and position mid-funnel metrics and awareness as a fertile ground for insights. Perhaps it still will be in a time of mature, rather than nascent, AI. But while we wait and hope and continue to strive to add value beyond all or nothing outcomes, the engines of this change seem focused on, well, all or nothing outcomes. Often tied to consumer categories that don't seem to drive any benefit to anyone but the owner of the category.

Keeping this on the positive, what it means is that your strong practices -- dayparting, frequency, execution -- need back testing more than ever. Seasonality assumptions may no longer be correct, if they are known at all. 

And intellectual humility, which is often missing from junior marketers and the technology they are overly reliant on?

The strongest practice of all.

Provenance and AI

Recently, we had a client in the fine arts space, so the assignment required a kind of copywriting that ties to journalism in an interesting way. This is because when you have a collectible, you have a single piece of physical media, and when it has a backstory, that backstory may impact the value. The shorthand term for this is provenance, which is quickly defined as the history of ownership.

From an economic standpoint, provenance is hokum, fluff, spin, or worse. You bought a painting; the idea that your experience of it may be worth more or less based on who handled it before you seems like, at best, nonsense. And yet, provenance may color a surprising number of purchases in your life, because branding is like that.

The wine is local? Provenance. The band records live to tape with no editing? Provenance. The house was owned by a history of happy families? Provenance, or feng shui, or not on disputed lands or close to environmental concerns? That song you like is suddenly loved by people you don't? Whoops.

Now, it's clear that commodity purchases have little impact from provenance, but how many pure commodities does the average consumer actually buy now? Gasoline has detergents and octane and corn supplements, electricity comes from fossil fuels or sustainable ones, and so on. Making a commodity into a service is a time-honored way of making a profit, and provenance is all margin, after all.

Until, well, it isn't. 

If the provenance of the painting involved murder and theft (and yeah, the Nazis stole a lot of art), you'd have to be a pretty special kind of outlier audience to think that made it more valuable, rather than something that should just be donated in an act of reparation.

We don't really know why we attach values to objects, and maybe not even when we do. Provenance threatens to supersede that judgment, lay it bare and open for all to see, and change the way we value items in our world. If you are in the proper head space for provenance (i.e., not distracted by something more urgent, trusting of the source of information, looking to assign or impose a resale value), this is all welcome information. If you are not, it's chaff. 

So getting the tone of this requires effective storytelling, a connection to a shared humanity, and the ability to tell the user not just what they want to hear, but things they don't. 

Or, shorter... why would you value the output of any LLM or AI, when you know the provenance is so relentlessly mundane, for anything other than, well, commodity work?

10 things we've learned since the last full-time gig

Making the nut as an independent agency is never easy, but in a time of (shh!) clear and emerging economic recession, it's particularly challenging. Here's what M&AD has learned in the past year.

1) Tariffs and the threat of tariffs create misery. A promising DTC client went completely dark after its supply chain was cut, because when you are in the start-up phase, any seismic shock will spook your investors. Uncertainty around things that used to be certain is not advisable.

2) SEO keyword seeding continues in copywriting, more by habit than need. You already knew that AI was eating search, but that doesn't mean that the disciplines and tactics used in the last few decades are just going to cease and desist. 

In the long term, we believe this will lead to more interesting and spontaneous content, but in the short, seeding your copy is still going to happen. If only to show clients due diligence.

3) AI "works" because it tells people what they want to hear. You don't have to be a particularly diligent student of history to know this doesn't end well, or that humans are very bad at resisting this. Just because the propoganda is coming from inside the house doesn't make it any less dangerous. In point of order, more so. (For the record, yes, we use AI. Sparingly, with great care, only at version zero, and from multiple sources. We're not anti-tech. Just pro-human.)

4) Working from home also means ghosting is easier. Every agency endures summer lulls and contact issues from vacationing personnel, but the frequency of such events is definitely on the uptick. Some of the things we've seen in the last year are real howlers, and unprecedented in the decades that we've been doing this.

5) Loyalty is increasingly seen as insecurity, or a failure to negotiate. If your client is talking about exit strategies and make-or-break KPIs, that's a red flag. And if a manager is very enthused about AI, you may want to start wondering why they aren't as enthused about developing their personnel. We don't recommend a direct ask on this, unless you've already got your next full-time gig lined up.

6) We're in a global sea change due to political forces. Regardless of your opinion of any of the governments in play, long-standing alliances, manufacturing centers, and supply chains are increasingly in flux. "Plus-one" diversification strategies fly in the face of efficiency, but add critical risk mitigation, which is non-negotiable. 

Whether or not declining populations with work forces that have been trained to value white over blue collar work can be made to pivot is an open question. So is the appetite of younger people for buying in to past dogmas about work meritocracies, money equalling speech, and embracing any form of nuance. Add management that's enthused about technology replacing employment, and you can understand their cynicism.

7) Bad actors are gaining by being early adopters. T'was ever thus, but criminals are taking advantage of job seekers, crypto, deepfakes and AI to step up their operations, and the field is also taking on more of an industrialized military approach. All of which leads to grist for conspiracy mills, and the next point, which is...

8) People want real conversations, but are afraid to have them. We've had clients beg for candor, then punish when it's been given. We've had others dictate the output to the point where pranking seemed to be on the table, all while professing very different ideals. It's your call whether this is reticence or self-censorship, but what is beyond debate is that it is sand in the gears of productivity.

9) The old ways of marketing give you greater share of voice, and still work. When you take in a podcast, TED talk or effective presentation, there's really nothing going on here that wasn't at work centuries ago, just without the modern-day trappings. We've seen strong wins from long copy, direct mail (ye gads), and even honest-to-God telephone calls in the past two quarters, if only because the channel is increasingly free of traffic. Marketing and advertising teams that only do what's comfortable, or what management or the bots approve, are doing their organizations a disservice. But they are, alas, retaining their clients.

10) Your morale is your personal choice. Reading all of these at once may lead you to believe that the past year at M&AD has been a struggle, and since we deal in truth here, that's accurate. Challenging management that needs its own opinions fed back to itself has always been a hard way to make a living. We've never been good at keeping quiet when a client was about to do harm to their operation, which isn't always conducive to retention.

But we remain steadfast in the belief that if/then, rather than a/b testing, is critical to driving not just temporary gains, but sustainable ones. We also believe that when data drives, you should pay attention, that single KPI thinking is for bad actors, and that those who do not love the journey and work of marketing are not the people you will see later on down the road.

We also love what we do, and are getting back to it. Forward!

Video tutorials update

Folks -- We've been making some video content on common wins and concerns in the email channel.

We'll likely port it over here at some point, but in the meantime, head over.

Email accessibility - LinkedIn

Email accessibility - YouTube

Innovation at the glimpse level - LinkedIn

Innovation at the glimpse level - YouTube

Limiting email attrition - LinkedIn

Limiting email attrition - YouTube

Favorite email marketing hacks - LinkedIn

Favorite email marketing hacks - YouTube

Under the hood email metrics - LinkedIn

Under the hood email metrics - YouTube

Email testing - LinkedIn

(Same content, but on YouTube)

The ins and outs of email dayparting - LinkedIn

(Same content, but on YouTube)

Writing better email subject lines - LinkedIn

(Same content, but on YouTube)

Making email metrics work for you - LinkedIn

(Same content, but on YouTube)

Why did my email go to the spam folder? - LinkedIn

(Save content, but on YouTube)

Share and enjoy!

A hill worth dying on

Once upon a time, there was a client who had a severe problem in converting prospects to paid. The mid-funnel conversion materials appeared to be the culprit. Looking at this as an opportunity, we proposed a very different line of copy and creative for their marketing funnel efforts than what they had been doing.

The new approach was candid. Direct. Shorter and more decisive. On brand, but different. Risky but not really, because the previous effort left them with very little to lose. 

We wrote the copy, massaged it through an inordinate number of intermediaries and shareholders, who conttributed, added, edited and approved. Essentially, they left the premise the same, and expressed their enthusiasm for the approach. Level with the mid-funnel, tell them things that came off as candid and strikingly different than what they had heard before, and give them a clear message. 

It got all the way to the C-suite, at which point it was stopped by an executive... who decided that the messaging wasn't right. This was also a person who was responsible for the previous round of creative, so, well. 

The status quo was defended. The intermediaries and shareholders didn't push back. They are no longer a client.

Something to stress here. It's not an absolute certainty that our approach was right. If you are absolutely sure you are right, you have no need of marketing. Test, don't guess.

There's an old saying in business: is this hill worth dying on?

Usually, the answer is no.

But if it's never yes?

You're going to lose the client.

One way or another...

The price of perfection

A few years ago, I was working a free-lance contract at a behemoth tech company, getting their email campaigns up to snuff. Word came down from on high that accessibility for any subscriber with challenges was now a must have, so we spent several months with coders and QA to make sure that our work was as friendly as possible to anyone who wanted to interact with it.

What did this entail? Changing templates to accomodate for color blindness. Adjusting copy for homonyms that might throw a screen reader. Consideration of British or American spellings to see if there was anything to be gained from a switch. Widow and orphan line formatting. Modifying default fonts to make sure that challenged eyes weren't at risk. Eliminating multi-column graphic approaches because of the possibility of a mishap. Making sure everything worked on every possible device and platform, including those that had been out of market for years, because if it didn't work for every user, it would ruin the brand for that person. (Somehow, just the behemoth's.)

Mind you, this is just the stuff that I'm remembering right now, years later, because they got out of initial planning sessions. It took months, it cost an undisclosed and probably prohibitive amount, and when the project was done, our stuff was as airtight as anyone's emails, ever.

I then waited to see if anyone would ever notice, comment to us, or if the behemoth would try to capitalize on the investment in some way, possibly with PR. Never happened. Once the templates were adjusted and the new normals were in place, that was that. Project over, call it a day, work on the next thing and make sure everyone's in compliance. 

Perfection mattered more -- much more -- to the behemoth than the public.

What actually mattered from the changeover wasn't anything we actually did in the glow up. What actually mattered was making sure to add alt tags to images, which any good email system has been letting you do for decades, and just shows anyone using a screen reader that you cared about their experience. The price of perfection was steep, unjustifiable from an ROI standpoint, limiting to design and UI for the vast majority of users, and sidetracked the project for months.

I'm also sure the behemoth considered it a success, since it scratched a long-term itch, and played to their internal brand police. No one at the behemoth ever questioned the wisdom of the program, had to show its worth on a spreadsheet, or defend headcount reductions for the dev costs.

At least, not right away.

I'm all for accessibility, and glad the behemoth did it. If nothing else, I learned a lot, accessibility issues aren't going away, and the number of people with challenges is a lot higher than most people expect. 

But if an ordinary client were to ask me to head up a project?

I'd probably just tell them to code the alt-tags and call it a day.

Because when perfect is the enemy of good, or sensible? 

You wind up losing a lot more than you gain.

Big Tech decides to "fix" email. God help us all.

As part of my role for a recent client, I have been adding to my email bona fides, which also means going to webinars involving personnel from Gmail and Yahoo. For those of you who do not make a living out of this channel, let me catch you up. I promise it will be more interesting than you might imagine. Also, really infuriating!

For the past few business cycles, Yahoogle has joined the previous party started by Apple to "improve" the email channel... but all of those improvements have more than a hint of sulfur to them, especially if you attempt to do, gasp, business in the channel. And since no one wants to stand up for professional emailers and even if they did, Yahoogle owns their channel and can and will do whatever they please... well, we're just all going to dance to their tune. 

Here's what the Big Tech Big Daddys have planned for us.

1) 1-click unsubscribe in the header. Hey, do you know how you've been able to find unsubscribe links for the vast majority of emails you've ever received in your entire life in the footer? And how, yeah, it might involve a little bit of scrolling, but it means that when you do break off contact with someone, you kind of had to mean to?

Well, that's not good enough anymore. Instead, we're going to have big fat UNSUBSCRIBE links (1 click, too! Heaven forbid you have to confirm anything) in the header area, so you can dramatically increase your chance of doing that by accident, especially on mobile devices. Don't you feel better now that Yahoogle is making your lives easier?

2) They are also going to look at "engagement data" (what data? Why, if we told you that, The Spammers Would Win!) to help determine what should go to the inbox. But since we've already systemically destroyed open as a metric with someone's idea of privacy (thanks, Apple! It's not as if we've been using that metric as a key performance indicator for the success of our emails for the last 30 years or anything), then we should go to click data. Not read rates, not multi-open, not multi-click, not long tail opens or long tail clicks... or maybe yes, who knows. Just clicks. 

Except those can be gamed by bots and bad actors, so probably not clicks either. Next year.

3) These moves have, of course, inspired other smaller email service providers to do the same. Because the not so dirty secret of email service providers is that they'd really love to not actually deliver any email, since that's an expense and all of the Kool Kidz went to social and SMS marketing years and years and years ago, because Email Is Dead and Old and never you mind that the metrics have never, ever actually followed that particular Naturalistic Fallacy.

So what does this make? A world in which unsubscribe rates and spam complaint is wildly more prone to misclick, creating a cycle in which less and less email gets to the inbox, which is, of course, what everyone says they want. And anyone with a rising rate (hint: people who use good dayparting, compelling subject lines, etc.) will run into more of this, and get dinged by these numbers, giving Yahoogle and its ilk all they need to... cut down on the number of emails that get to the inbox.

All without the end user ever likely knowing, because you like it when Big Tech solves "problems" for you, right? You can trust those people, and you'll never be able to get to Inbox Zero by yourself. (Um, I've been at Inbox Zero for my entire life. It's actually not that hard. Don't tell Yahoogle, they don't believe their users can actually do things for themselves.)

Or, TL/DR... literacy? Commerce? A channel where people have to read and write and think? Won't that get in the way of the other enshittification moves that Big Tech is giving you, especially now that the low interest rates dumb VC money has gone so far away, and they need to make more off you while providing less?

Now, look, I get it. AI means more spam. So does a campaign year. People are busy, they get too much mail, they are looking to claw back their off hours. But giving up your personal agency to Big Tech Daddys isn't the way to do that. They are just going to make it harder for legitimate pros, while actual spammers will just find a way, as they always have. 

Perhaps maybe ask pros, rather than just commit your usual hubris? Nah... what do emailers know? They work in email! Unlike... um...

Actually heard on a recent seminar: "We want to help inspire you to be better emailers." Oh, Thank You, Big Tech Big Daddy! We never thought of being better! (Side note: do you work with email pros that aren't constantly trying to get better? Usually by, I don't know, MATH, rather than hubris?)

Personally, it's all a win for M&AD; when the going gets tough, the tough go pro, and our bag of tricks has never been more full. But just because the world is better for this particular email marketing outfit does not mean it's better, or that Big Tech does not, in point of order, Suck. 

So very, very much.

Reach out if you need us! And enjoy those Big Tech layoffs! Maybe they'll inspire the laid off personell to be better!

Top 10 things we've learned this year

Sorry it's been a while, but the reality of agency work is that the less you hear from us on this blog, the busier we are. Anyway, let's get to the good stuff, and if most of this seems email-centric, well, that's what we've been doing. You are what you eat.

1) Dayparting continues to adjust. 

One of the easiest ways to goose your positive metrics is to send your emails (a) when people will see them, and (b) when everyone else isn't. So if you've never tested your times, don't think that they vary from summer to winter seasonality, and aren't taking advantage of evening and weekend work for highly motivated readers, you are just leaving money on the table. Anymore from 5 to 20% of it, actually.

2) Your body copy probably never mattered, and it really doesn't now.

After a year of extensive testing for a steady client, I've learned that email service providers are not analyzing body copy and content. They are analyzing subject lines, list hygiene, frequency, complaint rates and so on -- but the stuff that your marketing team really sweats over and edits as if it matters? Not so much. Inboxing, open rates, spam filtering -- that's all on the subject line. Plan accordingly. 

3) Your total list isn't helping you.

That's because for most clients, attrition and obsolescence is going to make the unresponsive parts of your list an active detriment. Send to them, and your rates will go down, your sender reputation will tank, and you won't be able to reach the people who actually want to hear from you. Reactivating lapsed users is small beer, by the way -- worth doing, but it's not a game changer. Send only to active members and write the back end off.

4) Go organic, if your brand allows it.

Emojis used to seem like hack work or gimmickry, but since the world has gone away from them, ESPs see them as evidence of human activity again. Odd punctuation, a not quite polished quote copy, something that seems just a little bit off in a way that's more human and less AI? It's all going to work, because it's all going to seem like it's from a human, not a machine. The more tech we have, the more we want humanity.

5) File sizes will not be enforced.

Once upon a time in email, you had to optimize your images to the point of pain, limit animation cycles, worry about deployment times and worry a lot about ESPs gating heavy messages, to the point of always sending plain text test segments to make sure you weren't harming the campaign. Now? Yes, an animated image might take a second or two to pop in, and you shouldn't make your messages huge for the fun of it, but otherwise, don't sweat this. It does not matter.

6) Single KPI sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck. 

No marketing department will stand up in public and say that they only care about say, acquisition without conversion... but they will also inevitably prioritize one measurement over all others, because humanity wants to operate on works/does not work binaries, when reality is a continuum. Measure the top of the funnel, the middle, and the close -- or risk your business to myopic moves that will optimize one factor, often at the cost of your entire business.

7) A secret sauce metric: read/glance/skim.

A top client uses Pardot for email, which leaves a lot to be desired, but does have one winning feature: a pixel that loads and tells the marketer if the reader has viewed the email in question for less than 2 seconds (glance), two to eight (skim), and over eight (read). Like all metrics in email, take it with a shaker of salt, but when you compare emails against each other and one has a dramatically better read rate? That's a clue on the efficacy of your body content, formatting, and so on. Don't ignore clues.

8) Check the tail.

Many email analysts will look at metrics after a small period of time and never look again -- but that's another clue that is being ignored. Some emails, dayparts, offers, content and so on is going to inspire interaction for much longer after delivery. That could lead to content changes, different tactics, and so on. It will also impress your client.

9) Email continues to underuse some tech, and overuse others.

Want AI to write subject lines for you? Sure, that's easy (and dear God, just hire a good human already; tech that ends honest work should not be celebrated). How about dynamic content that matches the user's interests, or fits into larger marketing efforts with CTV, AR, QR codes, banners, direct mail and so on? Not so much. (Alas the poor QR code: it's just never really going to be a thing. Especially when a bad actor inevitably uses it to promote malware and it becomes a media firestorm. Inevitable, that.)

10) Painting outside the lines still works.

The single biggest win for one of my clients this year was with an unusual format (a 2 minute broadcast spot), featuring very different creative (a comedy skit) in an unexpected setting (a nation-wide college football broadcast). A steady diet of this would not work, and there was a lot of unique aspects to this that made it happen; the game was a blowout and social media decided the ad was a lot more fun to talk about than the game. Having this be a replicatable success seems unlikely, but it did a lot of good for the client, reinforced the brand, and energized the internal team. It also wasn't an all-in gamble. Consider the wisdom of all of this.

There's more, of course, but we need to save a few things for your next engagement with us. We look forward to working with you.

On losing and loser clients

Ocean's Gate, Like Heaven's Gate

Many times in my decades of consulting, I've been directed to do a dumb thing by a client that's paying me to, well, steer them away from doing dumb things. (And yes, this post was inspired by a small group of obscenely wealthy people dying in the ocean, causing untold expense to find out what happened to them, all of which is money that could have been spent on so many, many better ideas.)

It's the single worst part of consulting, and the hardest judgment call you'll ever make. If your client hears your counsel and chooses to keep in their bad course, you are honor-bound to execute it to the best of your ability. All while knowing that, like a failed military coup in politics, this refusal to bow to expertise, math, etc., is just setting the stage for a deterioration of the relationship later. 

Most agencies lose 1 out of 4 clients every year, and most marketers don't stay at one gig for life, especially in aggressive categories. You acquire a past as being either too ineffective or too inflexible, the client acquires a past as being obstinate or resentful that you are telling them that they are wrong, and the seeds for a future separation are shown.

I'm not really sure how to solve for this, honestly. I've tried at most of my gigs to make it about the math, under the theory that math can solve a disagreement without emotion, and gives everyone a great way to walk it back from a bad decision. Test don't guess, and the only real way to fail is to not test, or at least, not test effectively.

But the trouble with this approach, and the reason why M&AD hasn't been able to elude the gravity that every other agency is subject to, is this: "the math" isn't binary. Which is an odd thing to say about math, but hear me out. It's never about a single key performance indicator. If it were, you could do your job forever and the only real issue is ducking AI or boredom, because your job is simple AF. 

But for most clients, if I drive leads to your business cheaply, you can say I've done my job -- or you can point to lifetime value and ROI and say I'm done nothing useful. I can say it's your site or your offer or your competition, and now we're back to the world of emotions, not math.

For clients like this, you win so long as you do the thing that makes them happy. You try to make yourself bulletproof by getting them to change the way they look at the world... but reality is that most people do not change the way they look at the world. And if they do change, it's not always for the better.

And that's when the job starts to lose its fun, its vitality, its candor and its color... and you start to think about the client that's going to replace this one. Which is also why agencies are never not looking for new business. Ping us accordingly.

What We've Been Up To

 Because, well, it's been a while.

Falling out of love with the NBA. (Whoops, wrong blog.)

Working for a non-profit with the damned near holy mission of protecting free speech in America. (You may have seen some of our TV spots in the Philadelphia area. Check it out.)

Finishing up assisgnments for consulting clients in insurance, programmatic marketing, online education, SAT prep and others.

Which is all a long way of saying that if you want to get on our dance card, we've learned some things and have less bandwidth than before, but still some. Reach out; we know more than ever, and have value to add.

Seeya!

Deactivating Twitter

So that happened today, for both the sports and business blogs. It was surprisingly easy, honestly, but I never really loved the site in the first place.

A few things:

> I have no idea how much this business was worth before Musk decided to have a nervous breakdown in public and light more money on fire than anyone has ever lit before, but you have to assume it was more than nothing. Which is what it's worth now.

> There's really no reason to think that social media as a business model, which wasn't exactly swimming in profit before this insanity, should survive this dumpster fire. Sure, some of the smarter people from Twitter are going to land on their feet, but you just had a brand that was known worldwide cease to exist. There's reasons for that beyond the bad ideas of a delusional maniac. 

> Anyone who is still working at Twitter should be presumed a grifter. There's no way that the 25% that are left are there for any reason other than to take the money Musk has got left. One presumes that there is some.

> I'm not certain that if I drove a Tesla, I'd feel good about it now. I get that they are great cars, but you are driving something that used to be known as a premium brand and forward thinking, and is now a source of ridicule. Can't be good for the resale value. And they were always expensive to fix.

> If this gets us to a better world of less snark and international influence on the decisions of nations from outside actors, I'm OK with losing out on the joke room pitch fest that was my feed. If it just means a world with less bad ideas of fun, also a thing.

> If you want to draw a similarity here between Musk and Alex Jones, or Musk and the content apocalypse going on with HBO Max / TNT Et Al... well, I'll see your supposition and raise with the following. There's been too much content for anything approaching economic sustainability, and we're probably going to a place where everyone is going to be presumably entertained a little less. Or just differently. Emphasis dark.

> If you'd like to imagine a dystopia where everyone stares at a TikTok feed of AI-driven quick twitch junk food for the intellect, yeah, that too. I'll be listening to podcasts instead, but I'm also not delusional; most folks are going to do the easy thing. You don't have to be like them, and if you've read this far, you probably aren't. Feel good about that.

What You Learn From Bad Clients

Folks, the life of a consultant may be lucrative. 

But it isn't easy.

Something that happens when you open your shingle to the world is that, well, the world isn't all great people. You run into folks who traffic in bad faith, deal in all or nothing thinking, behave emotionally, and your reward for all of this is, well, the paycheck. And nothing but the paycheck, because the value you add will feel like a bad exchange later. 

During the engagement, you make yourself believe in the client, because not believing in the client is, at least for me, impossible. Once we commit to a job, we're doing the job, but this is all at-will work where the role was available. It's often available for a reason the client won't admit. That's the fun of dealing with people who deal in bad faith.

In the past couple of years, we've had clients who:

> Ranted and raved about colleagues as if they were, well, children (in need of medication)

> Scheduled entire days of meetings, then never showed up on time for any of them, fostering an environment where time waste was endemic

> Forced goals on junior personnel that were ridiculously higher than the historical production rate of past teams as a bad faith exercise in office politics

> Engaged in "I got mine" leadership of more or less washing their hands on controlling the excesses of executives

> Preached values for public consumption that they utterly failed to uphold on a personal level

> Committed the naturalistic fallacy (what is true for me is true for all) as if self-doubt or self-reflection was a virus

> Treated Covid precautions as a sign of weakness and/or mockery

> Assumed the worst of everyone for everything (well, game recognizes game)

> All while claiming that said excesses were made up for by some other virtue (loose hiring, flexible hours, lavish lunches, etc.)

It's sobering. 

Discouraging. 

And in the long run, always, always, always a plus to get away from.

So what have we learned?

> Bank and save, so you can take on fewer red flag clients

> Practice gratitude, so that you don't turn into the bad client

> Trust your gut. Especially on things like using your own credit card for reimbursed expenses.

> Know that even if the bad client seems to thrive from their bad behavior in the short term, they won't be able to escape who they are. Character is destiny, and time wounds all heels.

> Live well. It's the best revenge.

Forward!

What We've Learned (So Far) This Year

Also, that Simpsons Memes = You Are Old

M&AD's business is, as I write this, up over 20% at this time from 2021. (Go us!) We've also got a pivot movement happening right now, as an old major client offboards for business reasons, and a new significant player hops on. So I thought I'd take a moment, as we've got time enough to write and share, to explain what we've been working on, and more of what we've learned.

> Sustainability is the new hotness.

Our pivot involves consulting and SEO work for folks in this space, which just makes all the sense in the world, really. It's a perfect marriage of channel and purpose, and what's encouraging here is that the prospect base aren't just skim and click folks. You have to write for brains as well as thumbs. Just a better place to be when it comes to the work.

This sector was always highly interesting to us from our historic position as a resource for first movers (prior: augmented reality, cannabis, remote learning), but it has special urgency with +$5 gasoline, not to mention the fresh incentive to not buy fossil fuels from terrible people. More of this, please -- and not just for M&AD.

> B2C tactics continue to work on niche audiences.

Some clients in special and highly regulated markets seem surprised when tactics from outside of their industry bear fruit, but the plain and simple of it is that marketing is about offer, list and creative... and the same eyes that looked at that e-commerce play five minutes ago are looking at this B2B one now. We don't magically ratchet up our attention spans, lose our preference for headlines that snap, or put our brain's desire to look at pictures over text away just because it's Business Time. Execute accordingly, while protecting brand.

> Small universal big levers still work and hold their value.

Consider the humble Sender Name in a commercial email. It rarely gets testing focus, and it's a hard thing to test very often for branding reasons -- but when you can if/then test to a winning one? You dine at the +10-15% table for a really long time after that. (Similar bonus point: waterfalling ads by placement to increase fill rates.) Some in this industry scoff at incremental improvements, but at M&AD, it's against our religious business faith to leave money on the table. Especially money from weak execution.

> People see through bells and whistles, even in a recovery.

A recent client was enamored of animation in their decks, all while missing the blocking and tackling required to make a major account feel secure in a commitment. This has been proven over and over again in our 20+ years in the business, but sizzle is a powerful spice. Use rarely and with great care, or risk arousing (justified!) suspicion from your prospect. If every slide is animated, no slide is.

> New holiday, who dis?

Twice in the past 14 months, Wal-Mart got resoundingly slapped down on social media for trying to monetize Juneteenth in a remarkably tone-deaf fashion. We are reasonably certain that at some point in our lifetime, the newest federal holiday will safely and positively celebrate Black Excellence (and, well, capitalism) in a way that won't induce cringing and social media disdain. This is America, after all.

We're also very certain that the movement will not be led via a special ice cream flavor or cookout section at a big box store. (And yes, I'm leaving some things unsaid in this note, and yes, you can ask me about it offline...) 

The Subroutine Problem

Or moles instead of subroutines

So here's a way that I think I can discuss the current political situation in re the Supreme Court that, with luck, will allow me to say something useful... without removing M&AD from professional consideration from a significant portion of the business community.

One of the ways in which I am blessed and useful, in a business context, is that I have a helpful amount of disassociation and distance from my physical self. It's something that I think may come easier to those of us who don't have to deal with, say, the issue of menses, and if I'm speaking to full privilege, the fact that I'm also currently abled, the majority skin tone, not living near heavy industry or under challenging policing conditions, hetero-normative, etc. I am a dream patient for doctors; I deliver the meat bag and I give them no trouble. These are tactical advantages under our current conditions, and will likely remain that way. If you want to end the pay gap, you actually have to pay women more than men, and in some places and industries, you do. Not enough, but it is better than it used to be, and independent of the activities of the week, that trend will hopefully continue.

Steering out of the tangent.

Let's imagine that the human brain is akin to your computer, or if you prefer, your phone. Too many programs (or aps) running all at once will cause heat, slowness, inefficiency, irritation and if done for too long, a system crash. Maybe even viruses and the early obsolescence of the hardware. Too few programs will improve on all of these things, but it will also be, well, boring as hell and not particularly useful. 

Finding the right mix and/or increasing your processing power and speed is the goal, but it's a balance. As soon as you add RAM, as it were, you also tend to add stuff. If you'd like to keep this offline, swap in age and commitments. You can kid yourself into thinking that your machine is special and can handle the abuse, and that may be true (especially if you were born lucky and aren't running all of those other aps I mentioned earlier)... 

But eventually a limit will be reached. Maybe you stop running the Kindness to Fellow Drivers or Service Workers ap, or the Charity ap, and maybe you even pat yourself on the back for being so smart as to do that. Life hack! One that I hope the majority of us will not adopt, because, y'know, it leads to devolution and horror. But I digress, and callous billionaires are heroes to many.

The past (five? who can tell?) years has forced a plethora of subroutines on *everyone*. No matter where you stand politically, you have ran the Covid subroutine. You are probably running the Ukraine subroutine. Maybe you are running Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Climate Change, Culture Wars, Immigration, Crime, Inflation and Media subroutines, too.

Whole lotta subroutines. On top of any of the personal ones.

And now, the Court.

You can, of course, shut down *any* of these. All you have to do is disable them, along with the Conscience and Empathy Aps.

But it won't make the world any better, won't protect those who really need protection, and won't give you any comfort at all when the next turn in the road arrives, and you are just along for the ride.

From a personal standpoint, I can not fathom how some of the folks who I oppose on this matter sleep at night, where they get the absolute self-confidence to know that their flawed position is somehow correct, and why they would want to live in the world that their actions would create. 

I am also sure that they probably think, if they care to, the very same things about me.

So I'll try to remember that these are human beings, and that if I engage my full ire about it... well, I'm just running the subroutine, probably so much that I can't do anything else.

And well, people need me to do more than run that subroutine. 

If only, so that others can.

Good luck getting past your own subroutine issues, folks...

Taking It Personal

A few months ago for a side project, I listened to "The Godfather" on audiobook. This quote in particular stuck with me.

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

A lifetime ago (aka, the lifetime of my eldest child), I took an intensive self-improvement and leadership class. It was many days of very difficult work, and it has served me well ever since, because it gave me the tools I needed to diagnose and act when my performance, either in business or my personal life, was lacking. In this course, I learned that what really makes me move is creativity, leadership and integrity. Whenever I've held back on any of these, it hasn't gone well.

A little while ago, I worked for a client where leadership knew exactly what it wanted -- even when other members of the team did not concur. I pushed back a little but over time, leadership took less and less input, to the point of rudeness. They also negotiated the price of the contract down, then ended the relationship in favor of a "fresh faced" hire. They have also had a lot of turnover and not a lot of real growth over the course of the business. Their output since our relationship ended, either at a business or creative level, has also slowed.

You can, and should, read that kind of behavior as a client that just wants cheap and deferential. You can, and should, also take that as a relationship that will never re-start, or one that, if they came back to us again, we'd just reject. 

But you'd be wrong, because I never say never, and I've seen enough reversals in my career to know that I don't know how everything works out. 

I also know that in deferring to leadership (as we had no leverage at the time), I wasn't acting with integrity -- and in the event of a re-start, we'd have said leverage, and would.

So yes, at M&AD, we take our work personally. We're also currently working for clients that are letting us fire on all cylinders... and man alive, are they getting a lot of value out of the relationship

So much so that this is the first post in a month, happening on a Sunday afternoon, before we get back to it. 

Because that's the thing about when you get what you need from management. You get a lot more back. T'was ever thus.

When Viral Is Off Brand

The Only 2022 Oscars Moment

I wanted to weigh in on the Oscars fracas, because I think it's an important lesson for marketing and advertising.

On a fast and obvious level, the moment seems like a win for everyone involved. An awards show with minimal buzz owned social media for a full cycle, with a ratings boost over last year's show, even during a time of war, plague and coming soon, famine. There's been a massive amount of speculation as to whether the confrontation was a "work", with slow-motion frame by frame analysis. 

This isn't a fast churn news cycle piece, or limited to just its lane. Today, I heard sports talk radio covering it, and my own children. That's two very different Venn diagrams right there.

If you are a believer of the axiom that any publicity is good publicity, this was a bonanza in earned media. So much that some have predicted this as a definitive playbook for future awards shows to have more unpredictable moments. Especially for ones with less conservative branding than the Oscars.

But from a long-term standpoint, it's hard to see how anyone involved benefits from the spectacle -- and the proof is coming from the number of apologies. Will Smith's brand, cultivated over decades, has been forever changed, with more than a little suspicion that he's not stable or what he projected. Chris Rock suffers less, but still has questions as to why he didn't step back to prevent the hit, or do more to respond to it. Jada Pinkett-Smith will likely catch some blowback, since Smith seemed to react well to the joke that triggered things before realizing his wife was not amused. Everyone in the room who stood to applaud Smith during his interminable awards acceptance speech later seems complicit as well. The fact that everyone involved seemed to go to an after-party later undermines any apology or damage control. Every other award winner was instantly forgotten in the aftermath.

If you want to tell the story that all of these people are hypocrites, phonies and devoid of any morals or decency, or you wanted to see a real-life "BoJack Horseman" episode, I guess you "won". But even then, what exactly did you win?

And that's just the short term damage.

In the long term, the movie industry, already in severe change and crisis from the pandemic and the switch to streaming, shows itself to be grasping, desperate and short-term. The home audience has to equate an art form that is capable of greatness to, well, reality television. 

The fact that everyone involved is a person of color gives comfort to people who should not be comfortable, and discomfort to minorities. It's just sadness and meanness for no payoff. Smith, Rock and Pinkett-Smith will not get a bigger payday from their next gig (well, OK, Rock might, because time and curiosity will create grist for future stand up bits).

So yes, short-term KPIs were achieved.

At the low, low cost of long-term branding, sales and revenue.

All publicity is good publicity?

Only if your product has worthless branding.

Fraction, Friction, Fiction

How it feels right now

 So for the past few weeks, I've been in multiple conversations with multiple prospective clients that are starting to make me question their good faith. (And given the timing, whether it's something I'm encouraging.)

That's one of the drawbacks to consulting. You just don't have full visibility into what's going on. So when a client goes dark for a few days, the list of reasons why can get uncharitable with a quickness. Especially when you are pre-contract, the client is taking on junior staff, or the initiative is part of a bigger and oft-delayed rollout.

Some employers will speak to the idea that the new modern workplace is increasingly fractional, with people taking on projects that truly interest them, or where they have something unique to contribute. This is especially true with remote work, with report of people doing more than one job (badly, of course) without either employer being aware of the double dipping.

All of which would be fine if, well, these limited bursts of work carried the day for all of the time when you were on the bench, ready to go in. The reality is that with very limited exceptions, the work that you do in marketing and advertising isn't something that only you could do. Unless you have a lot of folks bidding for your fractions, the whole isn't going to add up.

Which leads you to take on junior work or side hustles... and, well, taking on RFPs and dealing with the kinds of clients that lead you to question their good faith. 

Being an erratically paid consultant is one thing. Being an entirely unpaid one is quite another.

And being grateful for the clients that trade integrity for integrity, show loyalty by giving you more than just 100% fit work, or expand their time with you in troublesome times?

Is the most important thing of all.

(At least, until all of the dominos fall at once and we have very different problems...)

Driving Your Business

10 and 2 FTW

Recently, a prospective client asked how other companies (i.e., some of the ones that we have worked for) executed in a particular marketing channel. They were basically looking for direct and concrete yes/no answers on tactics to help solve an immediate problem. So, pretty much bread and butter consulting work.

I did not give them a yes/no answer. 

Here’s why.

a) We were being put on the spot to answer the question without data. 

b) Nuance and Tradeoffs isn’t just a terrible name for a band, it’s how marketers make decisions that are more likely to work out in the long run. If you ask us to make decisions in the dark in a pitch meeting, you are asking us to be omniscient. And, well, no.

Unfortunately for me, my prospect is new to the channel they were asking about. So just telling them no, sorry, data or go pound sand did not seem to be a good way to close a deal. Or look anything like a friendly and non-evasive provider that they would want to work with.

So, I did what many of the folks who have worked with me in the past will recognize as a common move. 

I asked a question rather than answer one. 

Here’s the question: Assuming you drive, how do you do it?

There are plenty of ways to drive a car, after all. You can clean it up nice and make sure all of your glass and mirrors are perfect, obey every speed limit, drive defensively and more. You can choose the safest possible vehicle, regardless of mileage or comfort, to give you the best chance of getting to your destination without mishap. You can drive an electric-powered car powered by your own solar array, because you want to model good behavior around mitigating climate change. You can rev the engine, gun it at the traffic light, and maybe even run yellow to red lights when you think no one is looking because you need to go fast and just enjoy driving that way

But what you really should be doing is taking the context into consideration and making the best decision for your self and brand. Maybe drive a little differently depending on who is in the car, the time of day, whether there are speed traps or traffic cameras, whether the road is smooth or filled with potholes. Run that red light when the road is empty, and you are getting someone to an emergency room. Take the bigger car when you have more people and cargo. And so on. Drive the way that makes the most sense for your business.

Now, for the vast majority of people and businesses? They are going to drive in a consistent manner while devoting their conscious thought to other matters. Execution can easily become rote, and maybe an extra mile or two of fuel economy isn’t worth having to remember to hit the Fuel Economy Mode button. (My hybrid’s got one of these. Helpful.)

But if you find that your tactics are not reflective of your brand? Or that you keep getting traffic tickets, flat tires, or no one wanting you to drive them anywhere? Change your tactics.

And drive happy.

(Side note: I don’t know if the pitch worked, but I would be surprised if it did not – if only because the prospect used the same analogy back to me later in the conversation. We’ll see.)