Monthly Archives: January 2016

January 14, 2016 · 9:53 am

Quite Content With Content

I think I may have misspoken.  Well, not misspoken, exactly, but perhaps I’ve conveyed the wrong idea about my feelings on content marketing.  The fact that you’re reading the screed today should tell you that I’m a fan of real content marketing: it’s native advertising disguised as “content” that pisses me off.  If I haven’t made the differences between the two clear, let’s use the next minute or so to rectify the issue. 

I’ve railed more than once about advertising masquerading as content.  Frankly, now that the FTC is watching this carefully, my displeasure is the least of anyone who is engaged in the activity’s worries.  It’s not hard to distinguish when you should or shouldn’t notify your readers if it’s “native” content: if some entity paid you to put the story up, or of they wrote it and bought the space where it’s running, it needs to be labelled as advertising.  Let’s leave it there for now.

True content marketing is what you’re reading.  I don’t think I’m letting you in on a secret when I tell you that part of the reason I write this blog is to show potential clients that I have a decent grasp of marketing, media, and digital.  Hopefully, as you read this every day (you DO read every day, don’t you?), you’re learning something or seeing something that makes you pause and think. I try to keep it informative and entertaining.  It’s one form of content marketing.

In addition to blogs, you might have given a company your email in return for a white paper on a topic of interest to you. Maybe you listen to a company’s podcast because it teaches you and informs.  Maybe you downloaded an e-book.  As the Content Marketing Institute defines it:

Content marketing is a strategic marketingapproach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

I am a huge fan of this sort of marketing.  It is something of value given away, generally for nothing more than an email address.  It works, too.  Research has shown content marketing to be 62% less expensive per lead than traditional outbound marketing. Unlike native, it’s transparent too. Don’t have the resources to generate this sort of material?  Call me – we’ll make it happen.  So what are you waiting for?

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January 13, 2016 · 10:33 am

Give It A Rest

Last week was CES, the big show that takes over Las Vegas.  140,000 or so folks descend to schmooze and to check out that latest technology.  I used to go every year but I can’t say as I’m disappointed not to have gone the last few.  It’s a mad house.  Mad as it may be, however, it generally gives us an indication about where technology might be heading over the next year or so.  This year, Virtual Reality was one of the biggest stories.  Cars were the other.

What’s that you ask?  I said it was a tech show, so why are cars the big thing?  Glad you asked.  You see, cars are becoming rather sophisticated computing platforms on wheels.  You might not be impressed by the 100,000+ lines of code in today’s car (Windows has tens of millions of line, for example), but that number will grow exponentially over the next couple of years as cars become more and more autonomous.  Most importantly, they will become totally connected devices.   After all, since you won’t be driving, you might want to catch up on Netflix, and not on your phone either.  Why not on the car’s screen?   In fact, since you really don’t even need to look out the windshield, why not make the window opaque and stream it there?

The notion of the car doing the driving doesn’t have me alarmed.  This does:

“Cars are essentially becoming the next must-have mobile device,” says Jason Harrison, global CEO of Gain Theory. Driverless cars open “an entirely new opportunity for advertisers. Assuming Wi-Fi-enabled cars would be targetable in the same way other devices are, they would offer high-quality targeted-audience opportunities, with an added contextual dimension such as parents and kids on the way to school, daily commutes and so on.”

I’m not sure what has me looking at this askance.  Maybe it’s the notion that everything has to be a receptacle for someone’s marketing message?  My car is not the subway.  While NYC Transit sells ads (in theory to help offset the costs of your ride), I’m not welcoming marketers into my vehicle.  Where is the attention/value exchange?  How does  the fact that marketers are paying the navigation system to come to the nearest Dunkin Donuts help me? How is yet another invasion of my privacy helpful? What other system preferences will be set based on an exchange of money that excluded me, the car buyer?

We need to learn when to give it a rest, folks.  No one wants to install an ad blocker in their car – isn’t that what the buttons on a radio are for?  Instead of rubbing our hands in anticipation of yet another trackable environment for marketing, maybe we ought to be thinking about what the benefit to the consumer will be for letting us into their daily drive?  Instead of thinking of cars as a “one-ton cookie” (as in the code dropped into your browser to track you), maybe we need to think if them as a place where we can reset our relationship to consumers and raise their expectations about the value of good marketing.  Thoughts?

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January 12, 2016 · 11:48 am

Why Your Marketing Job Is Safe

A lot of folks who thought they were in marketing are finding out that they’re really computer scientists. That’s a shame in my book. Surprised I’d say that after all of the rants in this space about the need to measure actionable data? Let me explain what I mean and how I think there will always be a place for real marketers.

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Computers and the data they can generate are really good at many things. I, for one, am very much looking forward to the day when they are driving all of our cars. One thing at which computers suck is creativity. They provide great creative tools like Photoshop, but the ability to create is intrinsically human, in my book. They aren’t great at improvising. They can’t “pretend.” I’ve not heard of them mashing up a couple of concepts into a third. Yet those tasks are the essence of great marketing.

We are complex creatures. There are things within the human mind and character that no computer can understand. They might get the “what” (actions you took) but most of us in marketing are interested in the “why” at least as much. It’s great that, as recent research found, 92.3% of respondents said they maintain databases to host information on customers or prospects, at least to some extent. I wonder if that data dependency is replacing the human side of marketing.

I like this quote from a recent article by someone at Adobe:

Buyers’ behavior isn’t always rational. People make strange decisions that defy neat algorithmic understanding. Often, customers are not simply looking for the highest-quality product for the lowest possible price. Indeed, the burgeoning field of behavioral economics is revealing on an almost daily basis how irrational consumers can be—and how seemingly irrelevant factors can influence purchasing decisions. Savvy marketing adapts to these nuances.

Exactly.  Computers don’t do irrational. We do need to use data as a tool, but we can’t assume that our jobs are done because we’ve got a system that aggregates and reports.  We can’t dive so deeply into data that we drown in it.  Computers can’t do marketing well because they lack the skills that make great marketing: intuition, creativity, innovation, compassion, and imagination.  You might think your marketing job has morphed into that of a computer scientist, and if it has, you have a problem.  Great marketers know how to use those tools within the context of the human to human interactions that make business flow. Do you?

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