Category Archives: digital media

May 13, 2015 · 9:52 am

Your Own Deflategate

I’ll say right at the top I’m not a New England Patriots fan.  Being a loyal fan of the Michigan Wolverines, however, puts me into a state of cognitive dissonance over the Tom Brady “deflategate” issue.  I’m writing his bad behavior off to being immersed in a bad environment – he didn’t learn this stuff in Ann Arbor.  By the way – I’m amazed how some folks think he was suspended for conspiring to deflate the footballs.  As I understand it the issue is his lack of cooperation with the investigation and not his guilt or innocence with respect to the rules violations.

New England Patriots at Washington Redskins 08...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might wonder why I’m bringing this up on a business blog.  I suspect there are many folks in the digital marketing business who are shaking their heads at what went on with the footballs.  Maybe there is a sense that cheating your way to a win diminishes both the win and the game itself.  Most of these folks would say they’d never do something like that and yet I’m willing to bet many do on a regular basis.

All of us in the digital media business are aware of fraud.  There are publishers who buy traffic which they know is not human traffic and which they turn around and sell on the ad exchanges in a form of arbitrage.  They might make a couple of hundredths of a cent on an impression but do it a million times a day and suddenly real money is involved.  It’s easy to spot anywhere in the media chain – the publisher sees it, the exchanges see it, I suspect the ad agencies see it and perhaps even the clients see it.  How?  Analytics.  When lots of your users are running a 10-year-old version of flash and a 5-year-old version of a browser (doesn’t happen in the real world, kids), someone is cheating.  If you’re buying really cheap traffic from someplace, you can assume it’s not human.  Yet no one is putting their hand in the air saying “I’m not going to take the money because I know it’s wrong.”  Like the Patriots, they just want to win.

The rage now is “viewability.” The problem is that the folks who are making money off of ad fraud – and the marketers who knowingly support it – will come up with a way to defeat the tactics to measure real ad views.  You don’t think any real marketer would do that?  Who is putting their ads on the ad injectors – the thieves who steal traffic from websites and layer their own ads on top?

There is an old expression in sports: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.”  When the most penalized team in the NFL wins the Super Bowl (the Seahawks a year ago), what does that say about pushing the limits, which is what the Patriots were doing?  More importantly to your business, you need to think about how far you’re willing to go and to what degree you are willing to push the limits to win.  Personally I like to be able to look at myself in the mirror without shame.  You?

 

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May 6, 2015 · 10:39 am

Reading The Words, Missing The Meaning

Let’s start today thinking about a language you don’t speak. It’s very possible, assuming that it’s written using the Latin alphabet, that you could pick up a book and begin to read out loud in that strange tongue. Of course, you’d have absolutely no idea what you’re reading. You can say the words on the page but you can’t explain what they mean.

Keep that image in mind as we change the topic to data. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with clients and gone through their analytics reports with them and the aforementioned image has popped into my head. I don’t mean that to be derogatory to the people who pay me, nor does it mean that I’m fluent in analytics and they’re not. It raises a business point that is something we all need to keep in the back of our minds as data becomes more integral with everything we do.

Here is a small example. Most of us see “direct” traffic in our analytics reports. In theory, those visitors typed in the site URL or clicked on a bookmark they set on a previous visit. That’s a partial truth. The reality is whenever a referrer is not passed, the traffic is treated as direct traffic by Google. Think that’s an unimportant bit of information? How about in the context of mobile traffic not passing referrers at all (and I bet mobile is a big and growing part of your site traffic)? The point is that it requires both the knowledge that the “direct” bucket isn’t an absolute as well as some further analysis to figure out the truth.

I’ve seen the same sort of issues crop up in attribution modeling (what source was responsible for the sale).  The groundwork for proper attribution hasn’t been laid and so the reports aren’t accurate.  Sure, any analyst can puke out the data in front of them but the good ones – the ones who can interpret the words and not just say them – will tell you why there is a problem and fix all the links you’re putting out there to accurately reflect what’s going on.

“Keith,” you say, “I’m not a data scientist.”  Neither am I.  What I can do – and you probably can too – is to ask questions, especially when someone tells you they are dead certain about what the data is saying.  Be sure they’re not just reading aloud in a language they don’t understand.  Get beyond reporting and into meaning.  It changes everything.  Agreed?

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April 23, 2015 · 10:47 am

What Vs. How

One of my mantras is that we can’t confuse the business with the tools. I remind clients of this all the time when they’re confused about the imperative to be on a specific platform or address a particular market segment. While they might think their need is to build a better app, I’d rather we explore the underlying business processes and make sure they’re optimal from a customer perspective. The app we’ll then build will reflect a great customer experience and not magnify the flaws in our offering.

Here is another mantra. People hate middlemen but love people who add value. Think about the great sharing economy that’s emerged over the last few years. Uber doesn’t own a single car but facilitates millions of rides. They’re a middleman but they add value by provide generally inexpensive, fast service to consumers while providing income for people with a car and no particular place to go. AirBnB has done the same thing for lodging. I have a spare room or a vacant apartment, you are visiting where I am and don’t want to pay ridiculous rates (and “resort fees“) to stay in a so-so hotel. They add value by putting us together.

In both of those cases, as in others like Etsy, the business has not changed. Someone needs a room or a ride or a scarf. They want them to be fairly priced. They want them to be of great quality and dependable and delivered on the customer’s own terms (timing, etc). These companies have not changed the business. They’ve changed how they made the business happen. The “how” is new, not the “what.”

We need to stop thinking of transforming into “digital” companies.  There are too many of us trying to serve the technology rather than making the technology serve us. Maybe it’s the old guy talking but I don’t see much difference now in the business world I entered in the late 1970’s.  Find people with problems and help them to solve them.  It may be a need to get somewhere or to be better informed or to be in two meetings in two different cites an hour apart.  We’ve solved those business problems with technology.  My business – media – has been among those most affected by this and there is no doubt that the next two or three years will see even more change as people migrate to more over-the-top viewing.  But the business hasn’t changed, really.  People want to be educated and entertained and are willing to pay – either through attention or through their wallets – to see content that does that.  Boy, how the “how” has changed, but at it’s core the “what” is that same as it was when Uncle Miltie made America laugh.

Make sense?

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