Monthly Archives: July 2015

July 22, 2015 · 11:41 am

Plans Etched In Sand

So, marketing compatriots. Let me ask you: what are you plans for MySpace this year? Or Orkut? What role does Friendster play in your brand strategy? While you may be giggling about the ridiculousness of those questions, you might have taken them quite seriously a few years ago. As an aside, I remember that when I met with the MySpace folks at the height of their popularity I was surprised both by the outrageous demands they were making and by their refusal to acknowledge that nothing seems to last forever in the digital world.  Oops.

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The business planning cycle tends to begin at budget time and if you’re a media or marketing person you’re often asked for a fairly detailed plan of attack.  I always prefaced my presentation with a broad disclaimer.  “What I am presenting is accurate and true for right now but I can’t promise you that it will be the best plan of attack in a month and certainly not in six months.  I can live with the budget requests I am making but please allow me flexibility with respect to the channels and media we use.”  Most of my bosses were great about that.

There is no way a social media plan you’ve developed a year prior is accurate. As with the examples above, circumstances change.  While I don’t believe most companies can support a major presence on EVERY platform which emerges, I do believe that it’s important to be aware of all of them and to test.  It’s really OK to cross-post great content every so often! Those tests need to be done with your key performance indicators in mind, and if an emerging platform doesn’t give you the ability to measure them, it’s probably not worth your time.  What’s very important is not to dismiss anything as “a fad” or “for kids.”  Remember that Facebook began as something for college kids and once it opened up the brands that were early adopters had an advantage (well, at least they did until Facebook destroyed a brand’s ability to engage their fans easily without paying).

The message today: don’t follow the plan; let the plan follow your customers.  Those plans should be etched in sand and not in stone.  Are yours?

 

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July 20, 2015 · 10:58 am

The Broken Business Model

I’ve written before about ad blocking and all of the business questions it raises.  Those questions are most directly asked about the business model in media, but they might also involve your business as well.  After all, when the basis of your revenue model involves getting consumers to do something which they really don’t want to do, maybe it’s time for some more thinking.

The media business has been built on a business model that involves a trade: the consumer gets content in return for giving up their attention.  In the digital world, they provide data along with that attention.  The flaw right out of the box with this is that publishers tell users that their content is free, or at least they do nothing to discourage that belief.  When a consumer adds ad blocking software to their browser, they do so to create a better browsing experience.  They probably don’t realize that they’re breaking the business model; they just want pages to load faster or not to be interrupted by pop-ups, screen takeovers, or any of the other ad formats that scream at them instead of talking with them.  Some publishers have tried either a subscription or “freemium” model which eliminates the ads, but consumers haven’t responded.  Instead, many sites are seeing up to 60% of the ads they serve being blocked.  This, clearly, is broken.

What to do?  I’d be lying if I said I knew.  I’d start by using something on my site that sniffs for ad blocking and maybe redirect anyone who uses it to a page where we explain why the ads are necessary.  At least it makes the value exchange explicit.  Will consumers care?  Will they make a small donation?  Will they buy a subscription?  Some will, and that’s a step in the right direction.  I don’t think the nuclear option of refusing to serve content to anyone using an ad blocker is smart.

Maybe hard code the ads (build them into the page instead of serving them via an external call).  They can’t block something that’s part of the page and appears to be content to a blocker.  Way more work on the administrative end, but effective.  I don’t know what to do about page load times, another key annoyance caused by ads.  When an ad-free page loads in under a second and the external ad and tracking calls add up to 10 seconds to the load time, there is a problem.

Any business model has to provide something of value to the customer.  In this case, the site’s customers are advertisers and the products are consumers.  Unfortunately, the consumers are not cooperating and the product is in trouble.  Any thoughts on how we fix this?

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July 17, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Responsibly Irresponsible

This Foodie Friday, I want to rant a bit on responsibility.  What’s prompting this is a report from the Center For Science in the Public Interest on their annual awards for the 9 most unhealthy chain restaurant meals.  I’ll admit that almost everything on the list sounded pretty good to me.  After all, who doesn’t enjoy 7 cheeseburgers piled high on a bun?  But my rant isn’t about chain restaurants offering dishes that are really unhealthy.  We allow people to sell cigarettes and lots of other products that can potentially kill the consumer (cars, for example).  Is it inherently irresponsible for businesses to create products that end up causing societal problems?  You tell me.  Diabetes is an epidemic but nearly every supermarket product has some form of added sugar and we’re just getting around to banning trans fats which bring about heart disease.  I’d rather than any business person think about minimizing the damage before they offer something to the public but that’s probably wishful thinking.

Here is the thing: you’d have to be pretty stupid not to understand that you’re consuming a lot of calories and fat when you chow down with that 7 cheeseburger menu item.  You probably don’t understand, however, that the 1,330 calories in the burger are accompanied with 47 grams of saturated fat and 4,570 mg of sodium.  Let me quote the report on another dish which comes from The Cheesecake Factory:

The Louisiana Chicken Pasta, which weighs an impressive 1½ pounds, comes topped with four slices of heavily breaded chicken (in case you didn’t get enough white flour in the mound of pasta). Add the New Orleans sauce (butter and heavy cream), and your plate is up to 2,370 calories (more than a day’s worth), plus 80 grams of saturated fat (a four-day supply) and 2,370 milligrams of sodium (1½ days’ worth). For those numbers, you could have had two Fettuccine Alfredos plus two breadsticks at Olive Garden.

When you jump out of an airplane, you know it’s risky.  When you get on a roller coaster, there are always signs explaining the risks.  When you order many of the extremely unhealthy products available in restaurants, you’re generally flying blind. Even when the nutritional information is posted, it’s often inconspicuously posted on a wall someplace and it’s rarely on the menu near the copy that is pushing the product.

So back to responsibility.  We all need to pay more attention to what we’re eating and we need to learn to ask questions about just how bad a dish is.  At least that way we can attempt to minimize the damage by eating a bit better over the next couple of days.  Marketers need to provide enough information to allow us to make intelligent choices.  Killing your customers is almost always a bad idea, and encouraging them to kill themselves (slowly) without speaking up about the risks is, I think, irresponsible.  At least someplace like the Heart Attack Grill is pretty upfront about the risks.  You might not like it, but it’s responsible.

Thoughts?

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