Category Archives: digital media

December 2, 2015 · 11:43 am

The Checklist

Do you make lists?  I do, and as a manager I used to insist that there be protocols – checklists – for most of the departmental activities.  I always found them to be an excellent was to assure a repeatable, high-quality product.  They also make it relatively easy to work new hires into a routine with minimal disruption.  Checklists have a big problem, however, and that’s our topic today.

The problem is tunnel vision.  Think of a pilot landing a plane.  Every pilot, no matter how many hundreds of hours of flying they have, uses checklists as they go through landing.  It prevents little problems like forgetting to put the landing gear down.  The thing that they do as well, which is not on the checklist, is to look out the window as they near the ground.

Now think of the marketing team that is going through its protocol.  Part of it may be to work on the brand’s social media. In many cases, the brand continues to schedule a post every 3 hours on one platform, and every 2 hours on another.  They’ll drop posts into a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, feeling good that they’ve checked something off the list.  The problem is that they don’t look out the window.  They’re not paying attention to what is actually happening on their social presence.  Comments go unanswered.  Spam comments aren’t deleted.  There is no engagement.  Social media?  It doesn’t sound so social to me.

More importantly, I’m always surprised that the nature of many brands’ posts continues to be “Me! Me! Me!”.  That sort of antisocial, broadcast thinking has been dead for some time now and yet, zombie-like, it walks the social media earth.  What we need to be doing is measuring how often our social fans are engaging via likes, comments, and amplification (how often they share), and we need to ascertain the nature of those interactions (spam comments don’t count).

The checklist is a valuable thing.  A checklist that is enhanced by looking at the world beyond the things on the list is more valuable.  A staff trained to use the checklist as a guide of the minimum requirements, and that is encouraged (strongly) to enhance those minimums with their best work is invaluable.  Which do you have?

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,

December 1, 2015 · 12:22 pm

Unlimited Thinking

I’m not a fan of limited thinking. I much prefer the intellectual exercise of accepting the challenge of a difficult supposition and then figuring out a way to expand the set of answers. I often think of President Kennedy‘s challenge to put a man on the moon in 10 years when manned spaceflight had not really happened yet. Had everyone just said “no way” rather than “ok, so IF we were going to do that, how would we?”, we’d never have made it (nor had great films like Apollo 13!).

The Thinking Man sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought of that this morning when I read the quote below. It’s from a piece about the need for advertising to support content and a rant on how ad blockers are killing off content:

And so it really is a simple math problem. If there isn’t any money to pay the people who create content or buy and maintain the servers that host that content, there will not be any content. No one’s really coming at the story from that angle. And those who have lived almost their entire lives consuming content for free might need a good slap upside the head. In fact, everyone could use that slap. Because there are only two choices: ad-supported content or subscription-based content. And we all know most will take free if they can get it.

So there is our difficult challenge.  I disagree that there are only two choices, however.  I’ve also come to realize that it’s really only a problem for a select group of content providers.  First, the “two choice” thinking.  What about a freemium model?  Some very large publishers have successfully adopted it, and if the quality of what you produce is there, people will want more and pay.  What about a donation model?  PBS has used it successfully for years.  So does Wikipedia.  I know of several digital entities – podcasts and otherwise – that use Patreon to fund their content production.  It’s possible to use the appeal of great content to support an affiliate sales model too – buying products from links on a review site, for example.  Frankly, it’s not hard to argue that the ad-supported model is one of the worst options. Besides requiring a large audience to make it work, I think it encourages publishers to grab and abuse consumer data or to inflate page counts (and ad counts) with endless slide shows, etc.  Limited thinking means limited choices.

The realization is this.  Most “publishers” link to a limited set of high-quality content producers.  How many stories that you read, even on big sites, link back to the original work done in the NY Times or Wall St. Journal?  It might be a fun exercise to see how many of the people complaining about no money to support content creation are actually creating content or adding value to someone else’s content. Maybe another business model is a little pass-through of payments to the real content creators from those who are using that work to generate revenue?  There was such thinking back in the early days of the web.  What happened?

As I said upfront, I don’t like limited thinking.  Hopefully today you understand why that is.  Was I clear?

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , ,

November 30, 2015 · 11:32 am

A Better Ad Model

What does it say to you when people go out of their way to avoid your product?  Nothing good, probably.  That’s exactly what consumers are doing with digital advertising, and while it’s not good, it might actually be a blessing in disguise.  How so?  Source : comScore

I’ve been in digital media for 20 years, and during that time the question of “how do we pay for this” (monetization, in a word) has been asked constantly.  The obvious answer was to employ the ad-supported model of “old” media since adapting the subscription model to the digital age has proven incredibly difficult.  The problem is that with almost unlimited inventory, price pressures keep pushing down the revenue per ad and publishers just kept adding more “stuff” to keep revenues growing.  That’s not the case with traditional media, although TV has fallen victim to the same problem. Enter the ad blockers, which are a giant call to action to rethink the business model again. Well, maybe not the model but certainly the execution.

Some folks are already doing that with decent success.  Let me give you an example.  To unwind, I will often take short breaks to play a game on my phone.  While I don’t have an ad blocker installed on my phone, I have uninstalled a few games that popped up ads or placed the banners in places where it was likely that my fingers would accidentally click them.

One game I’ve been playing does something differently which I think is a very effective way to promote ad viewing.  Before I begin a level, a little box asks me if I want to watch a video and get rewarded with something I can use immediately in the game – a bonus life, a booster box, etc.  Saying “yes” brings up a full-screen ad of no more than 30 seconds – most are shorter.  The ads are almost always for another mobile game of some sort, and to get my reward I need to let the video finish.

This is a better way to market because it gives value to the user as well as to the marketer.  I almost look forward to the ad prompts since I gain something.  When was the last time you said that about an ad?  This sort of innovative thinking turned around the “avoid it at all costs” mentality, at least with this consumer.  It costs the publisher (the game I’m playing) nothing and brings value to all parties.

The business model hasn’t changed.  What has changed is that users are going to mobile, and within mobile they are hiding out inside apps. Rethinking how ads interface within those apps is how the business moves forward.  Showing ads that provide value to all parties – which includes the user – is the key.  You agree?

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , ,