Category Archives: Consulting

November 2, 2015 · 12:15 pm

Preservationists

I live in a town with a lot of old houses. By the town’s definition, that’s 50 years or more, although there are a lot of homes that are well over 100 years old. I should know: I live in one. Oh sure, a lot has been changed, both in my house and in many others, but the original structure and feeling of the building has been preserved. It’s part of what I liked about this town until recently. While there is plenty of new construction, much of the work was about adding on and/or renovating.  

I used the past tense because the trend over the last few years has been to knock down the older homes and build overly large new homes – they’re known as McMansions here. In fact, a local website features a Teardown Of The Day photo of some old home that is destined to be destroyed. Fortunately, we also have a Historic District Commission, and plans to rip down any home that’s over 50 years old are reviewed to be sure that no historic buildings or ones with historical value to the town are destroyed.

What does this have to do with business? I was reminded by it when I came across a quote from the critic Ada Louise Huxtable. She noted almost 50 years ago, “What preservation is really all about, is the retention and active relationship of buildings of the past to the community’s functioning present.” The same is true of sound business principles, which all too often are discarded like an old house as new technologies change the nature of the businesses.

Some of what I do with clients when I begin working with them is to clarify the “old” business thinking that needs to be preserved as we add on the new stuff. It’s akin to upgrading the electrical system and insulation which leaving the sound structure intact.  Sure, some of the old stuff needs to be tossed – you aren’t dependent on others for content distribution, for example, or your marketing can’t be a bullhorn, constantly blasting “buy me” messages.  Still, the underlying principles behind distribution and marketing haven’t changed since I’ve been in business (and I’m very much one of those historic houses at this point).  Confusing tools with the business just does not work.

I guess that makes me a preservationist.  I believe in retaining the sound old stuff and placing it into a present context.  What about you?

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October 29, 2015 · 11:22 am

Intruders

You can’t read anything having to do with marketing these days without running into some mention of ad blocking. It seems as if the entire industry is wringing its collective hands about the revenues lost due to the blockers. It doesn’t seem, however, that there has been a great deal of discussion about how the problem came to be. I’m not going to regurgitate a blow-by-blow of the last couple of years in ad tech, but there are a few important points that are worth pointing out.  

The first, and foremost, is that actions have consequences. You probably tell your kids that all the time but as an industry we seem to have forgotten. Publishers are cramming more and more advertising onto a page. But that action may be the result of the downward push of pricing that’s a function of the rush to programmatic buying. Rather than paying for quality, marketers seem more concerned with a lower CPM. That’s a nasty set of actions.

The consequence of popups, cluttered pages, and slow load times, married to incessant retargeting (which means we’re being tracked!) is ad blocking. According to one survey, 51% of US internet users agree that companies are too often intrusive on social media. Another survey says they feel all of the push notifications we send out are not relevant or are intrusive. There is that word again: intrusive.

The single biggest change in marketing and media over the last decade has been that consumers have all of the control. They don’t watch the prepackaged lineups that networks have been feeding for almost a century (if you take the dawn of commercial radio as the beginning). The world is now user-controlled and curated. Why would an intruder be welcomed?  Why are marketers and consumers in conflict, when one’s entire mission is to help the other to make informed buying decisions?

No answers today, just guidance.  We need to stop intruding.  Even the best creative messaging is intrusive when you see it for the 23rd time in a week.  We need to help publishers provide an environment in which the consumer feels welcome, and the only way to do that is to reduce clutter by paying for the value the publishers provide.  Not every empty space is screaming for an ad.  Some folks are getting it – Turner says they’re reducing ad time on some networks.  Let’s see who is wise enough to follow.

I’ve admitted to using ad blocking myself.  It’s not a great experience – pages break or won’t load fairly often – but it’s better than the minute and a half load times I’d face otherwise.  It’s doing a decent job of keeping the intruders at bay, and the odds are the walls are going to get higher if we don’t change as an industry.  Our actions have consequences and those consequences are becoming more clear every day.

Thoughts?

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October 26, 2015 · 12:29 pm

Clickbait

I am sick of the clickbait mentality. You know what I’m talking about. Many of the articles you see in your Facebook news feed are one example: “The Dog Ate My Homework And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!!”. I’ll admit that Facebook is getting better about having their algorithm eliminate a lot of the most egregious offenders, but there are plenty of other sites out there whose entire business model is predicated on getting some sap to click through and then to page through a slide show or a multipage article.

What really bothers me is that the mentality is spreading. The teases for upcoming stories in news programming seem to be more clickbaity (did I just make up a word?) in nature. They’re called “teases” for a reason – to get you to stay tuned through the commercial by teasing you with upcoming content. They’ve changed, though. When a news anchor ends a tease with the Upworthy phrase “and you won’t believe what happened next”, I cringe. There’s a business lesson in the reason why, even if you’re not in the content business.

Poynter interviewed Nilay Patel of Vox about the subject:

“Most clickbait is disappointing because it’s a promise of value that isn’t met — the payoff isn’t nearly as good as what the reader imagines,” Patel said.

None of us in business should be making promises to our customers what we can’t keep.  Doing so repeatedly is a recipe for disaster.  Maybe that’s what you’re after, but I don’t think so.  Our desire for traffic, clicks, engagement, whatever can’t supersede the value we deliver to our customers.  I get that in some businesses, the user isn’t the customer, but they are the basis for what you’re ultimately selling, so alienating them makes no sense at all.

We develop and keep customers n the basis of promises made and value delivered.  I think clickbait is, most of the time, the very opposite of that.  You?

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