Monthly Archives: March 2016

March 10, 2016 · 11:49 am

No There There

You’re probably familiar wth Gertrude Stein‘s quote about Oakland – “there’s no there there.” Putting aside the meaning of the statement (nostalgia and not a diss of Oakland), it came to mind when I read about Obsessee. This offering, as reported by WWD, will cover fashion, culture, music, beauty, food, shopping and relationships for the 14- to 22-year-old set. What’s unusual about it is that the brand will exist only on social media platforms. No website, no app of their own. In other words, no home base. No there there.

Accession Number: 1979:4010:0001 Maker: Alvin ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It will be interesting to see how this works. One thing many companies forget about social and other non-owned media platforms is that your brand is at the mercy of the landlord. When the landlord decides to change the terms of the lease or to raise the rent, you’re sort of screwed. Won’t happen? I’ll tell you what – go look in your Google Analytics for all the keywords used to come to your website via Google search. They’re all (not provided) Google decided to change their policy. It’s just as easy for any of the social platforms to do the same, and we have many instances of Facebook changing both their policies and their algorithm in ways that require any brand in the platform to rethink how and why they’re using it.

What happens when you become wildly popular and, as with some other analytics, Facebook decides to charge you if you want full data in your Insights reports?  Maybe I’m too much of a control freak, but it seems that without a home base that’s completely under a brand’s control, there is no alternative but to sign up for whatever terms and conditions the non-owned platforms decide will be how you operate.  Moreover, you never really own the customer. What are your thoughts?

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March 9, 2016 · 10:10 am

Blocking My Goodwill

One of the things I’ve done consistently throughout my life is to subscribe to the NY Times. I can remember a representative of the paper coming to my elementary school class to show us how to fold it for easy reading and to explain how newspapers are written and printed. 50 years later, I’m still a reader.

The New York Times uses an unusually large hea...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have read that the NY Times is following the lead of several other publications and shutting down access to those people who use ad blockers. Instead, readers who visit the Times site will see, as Digiday reported, the following:

“The best things in life aren’t free,” the pop-up reads.”You currently have an ad blocker installed. Advertising helps us fund our journalism,” then points readers to two options: purchasing a subscription option, which doesn’t strip the site of ads, or to whitelist the Times, which disables the ad blocker.

It’s the value exchange – we give you content, you give us attention. I’ve written about this paradigm before and I came to the conclusion that there really isn’t any one correct answer for publishers when it comes to ad blockers. Cutting off access does little for most publishers since not many publishers can claim to provide truly unique and valuable content and readers can go elsewhere. The Times, however, can make that claim. The issue is that with upwards of 40% of US readers using some sort of ad blocking, curtailing access also means fewer page views that can be sold, lower time one site, higher bounce rates, etc. Still, given their success in digital, I’ll give them a “wait and see” on this. Except for one thing: They’re cutting off access for subscribers as well.  As a spokesperson put it:

Ad blockers do not serve the long-term interest of consumers. The creation of quality news content is expensive and digital advertising is one way that The New York Times and other high-quality news providers fund news gathering operations.

Want to know what really doesn’t serve consumers’ long-term interests?  Greed. My bill for home delivery, which includes online access, is around $150 a month.  I daresay that the Times has gotten full value out of me, just as I’ve gotten great value out of their content. I access the Times site as a logged in user, so it really shouldn’t be too difficult to identify me as a subscriber and not to hassle me about ad blocking.  Hopefully, they will.

To the extent it can, any business needs to treat each customer as an individual.  There are very few rules that can apply to prospects and customers equally, and not every customer is the same (the pesky lifetime value computation we need to do!). Asking a customer to pay for access and then asking that same customer to endure a barrage of ads as a condition for continued access seems like nothing more than greed and insensitivity.  What do you think?

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March 7, 2016 · 2:14 pm

The Canal Street Of Media

If you get off the New York City subway on Canal Street, it isn’t long before you’re approached by someone selling fake goods.  Preeminent among them are the watch salespeople, but it’s not hard to find fake bags, jewelry, luggage, or just about anything else that has a supposed high value at a very low cost (which can be negotiated lower if you press the seller).  I racked my brain to come up with some other example of consumers knowingly buying fraudulent goods but I am unable to do so.  Oh – except for one: programmatic advertising space in media.

In December 2014, AdWeek reported that, according to an Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps study, digital advertising was projected to take in $43.8 billion in 2015, and $6.3 billion would be based on fraudulent activity. The average bot level for display ad campaigns throughout the study was 11%, but for programmatic ad buys that number rose to 17% (55% more). Bots account for 11% of display ad views and 23% of video ads and up to 50% of publisher traffic is bot activity, just fake clicks from automated computing programs.  They estimate that between 3% and 31% of programmatically bought ad impressions were found to be from bots, with an average of 17 percent.

Despite the fact that everyone buying digital ad campaigns knows that they might be buying fake goods, a study from the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester finds that 79% of marketers have made programmatic ad buys within the past year. (The growth is staggering: In 2014, the number was 35%.).

“While programmatic buying indeed offers benefits, it suffers from complexity and a lack of transparency,” said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA. “And that is wasteful. The industry — and marketers in particular — would greatly benefit from a rethink of the entire digital supply chain.”  Ya think?  What’s interesting isn’t that many advertisers are moving programmatic buying in-house where, in theory, they can have more control and better oversight or are taking other steps to deal with fraud: it’s that a significant number aren’t doing so.

Like the shoppers on Canal Street, any marketer who is buying programmatically without asking a LOT of questions and taking actions to increase transparency is knowingly buying fake goods.  Are you?

 

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