Category Archives: Consulting

November 19, 2018 · 2:28 pm

Why Does Anyone Buy Digital Ads?

Billions of dollars are spent marketing via programmatic advertising. Many billions more are spent paying for app installs – money that changes hands when an ad convinces a consumer to install an app on their smartphone. Ask yourself this: in what other business do you as a customer have a pretty decent chance of being defrauded? Off the top of my head, I can think of used cars and the investment world as places where customers should tread exceptionally carefully. Each of them has a certain subculture of ripping people off and there is a small percentage of bad actors who cause the bulk of the problems.

Try to wrap your head around these numbers. Somewhere between 3% and 37% of ad impressions were found to be from robots and not actually delivered to human eyes. That doesn’t seem bad until you do the math and see that over $6 Billion is spent on fraudulent ad impressions.

Do I have your attention yet? How about this from eMarketer:

eMarketer estimates that $7.1 billion will be spent on mobile app install ads in 2018, up from $6.5 billion last year…Several companies have conducted research that indicates how expensive install fraud is for marketers. Mobile marketing analytics firm Adjust estimated that between July and September 2018, 13.7% of app installs were rejected as fraudulent. According to Tune, app-install fraud cost marketers nearly $2 billion in 2017. DataVisor stated that for some ad networks, half of their app installs are fraudulent.

Is the industry trying to solve this? Of course it is, but it’s almost a Sisyphean task. One problem is solved and another method to defraud marketers and publishers pops up, and it’s been going on this way for as long as I can remember. Even among the legitimate ad service providers, there is an industry-wide reluctance to share the “black box” of how these systems actually do what they do. Do you think it’s only the little guys? It’s not. Facebook has been sued for overreporting how much time users spent watching videos. The suit says that Facebook knows that the majority of video ads on its platform are viewed for very short periods of time—users scroll right past. They claim that if advertisers were more widely aware of this fact, and in particular, if they knew that their advertisements were among those that were not drawing viewers’ attention, they would be less likely to continue buying video advertising from Facebook.

I tell clients that they need to be extremely careful if they go beyond search engine ads into other forms of programmatic. While I am well aware of how effective digital marketing can be, I constantly wonder if the bad actors are making that effectiveness almost impossible to achieve. I don’t know why anyone would enter the sewer that the digital ad world has become, at least not without full protective gear. Am I being too critical here?

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November 14, 2018 · 11:24 am

Girls And Boys Just Want To Have Fun

One thing I learned after I began managing people many decades ago is that even though it’s called “work,” it doesn’t have to seem that way all the time. Since I was still pretty young (24) when I got my first managerial responsibility, I still placed a good deal of emphasis on having fun as well as getting the work done. In fact, most of the time when problems arose it was because I had failed to act in a way that would be how I would want my boss to act or that I’d forgotten that for most people, work is what they do and not who they are. Let me explain why remembering to have fun is just as important as remembering to get things done.

I felt I was running a benevolent dictatorship. What I mean is that most decisions were mine because I bore the responsibility for them to the powers that be whether I had made them or not. However, I rarely took those decisions in a vacuum. I got input from my team and always encouraged them to voice their opinions. They knew that I might not decide to do things the way that they wanted but that I’d listened and considered their thinking on the matter.

That’s part of having fun. It’s letting every member of the team feel valued. It’s taking what we were doing together seriously but not taking ourselves so seriously. I read somewhere that great leaders are ambassadors of happy. I like that, especially since I’ve worked for a few bosses to whom “happy” and “staff” were never words that intersected.

People have fun when they know what to expect from their leader. When leaders make a conscious effort to have fun, whether via silly signs or self-deprecating humor or through the constant appreciation of the good work of each person on the team. That’s when “work” becomes a place that’s a lot more than a job or a paycheck. Ask yourself, “are we having fun yet?” Ask your team too. Are you? Are they?

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October 31, 2018 · 3:43 pm

Going Negative

It’s a bit less than a week before Election Day and I, for one, can’t wait for the elections to be over. That will mean that the political ads will end too, and that can’t happen soon enough.

Putting aside politics, the vast bulk of these ads are horrible marketing. One thing that marketers learned long ago doesn’t work is badmouthing your competition; yet damn near every ad I see across the multitude of channels I watch and stream is 30 seconds of negativity. These folks spend their allotted time distorting positions, taking things out of context, and flat-out lying in many cases. The candidate-produced ads are bad and the PAC-produced ads are even worse. You’d think they’d stop. In 2007, the Journal Of Politics did a study of negative ads. They found:

…that negative ads tended to be more memorable than positive ones but that they did not affect voter choice. People were no less likely to turn out to the polls or to decide against voting for a candidate who was attacked in an ad.

While campaign consultants seem to think that these ads work, science proves otherwise. Of course, there are many folks out there who don’t believe in science but that’s another screed…

It’s bad marketing. Going negative makes you look petty and unprofessional. Playing up your strengths always works better than bashing a competitor’s weaknesses. Good marketers explain how they are going to solve your problems. I think good politicians should do that too. I don’t want “small” people representing me. If you can’t run on your positions and your solutions, then how am I to trust that you can outperform the one running against you?

This applies to your business as well, obviously. Do you see a lot of non-political negative ads? No, you don’t. There are many good reasons for that. Do you see a lot of false claims in non-political ads? You sure don’t – there are laws against it. The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium. That is, advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers. A claim can be misleading if relevant information is left out or if the claim implies something that’s not true. It seems to me that many political ads do just that, unfortunately.

Politicians may be brands, but they sure don’t advertise as if they were. Going negative isn’t particularly helpful in non-political marketing and it’s just as bad in politics. That’s one man’s opinion. What’s yours?

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