Category Archives: Huh?

September 1, 2015 · 11:00 am

CMO – uh oh…

I find research interesting. Maybe it’s my basic, curious nature or maybe I’m just nosy, but I enjoy reading studies of how businesses and consumers behave. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. More often than not, I’m a little shocked. Today is one of those times. The folks at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have been conducting a survey of top U.S. marketers since 2008. You can read the latest CMO Study here. They released this year’s data and I found one section – the one on marketing analytics – particularly interesting. Let’s see what you think.

There are the headlines, as summed up in this analysis:

Just 31% of projects use available or requested marketing analytics, well within the 29-37% range seen over the past 3-and-a-half years, according to US CMOs responding to the latest edition of The CMO Survey. B2C product companies appear to be leading the pack in usage of marketing analytics, however, at twice the rate of their B2B product counterparts (45.6% vs. 22.8%). B2B product companies also give the highest rating to marketing analytics’ contributions to their firms’ performance. Overall, marketing analytics are most apt to be used for customer acquisition, customer retention, social media and segmentation, per the report.

Frankly, I’m not surprised but I am a little disappointed.  Two-thirds of the marketing work is still seat of the pants, basically, and it’s even worse when you’re marketing to other businesses.  I can sort of understand this last point – it’s hard to tell when a website or social visitor is a business target or just a random consumer that’s wandered on to your digital presence.  You B2C marketers, however, have no excuse.

What it really means is that companies lack quantitative metrics to demonstrate the impact of marketing spending.  That is a recipe for budget suicide.  It’s not just that they’re generally not using analytics.  The survey also asked about what data is being used.  Only 15% of firms able to prove the impact of social media quantitatively and four metrics dominate how companies show social media impact:  likes, general traffic, click-through rates, and hits/visits/page views.  In other words, the really broad, pretty useless measures.  I spend quite a bit of time with clients trying to get beyond those measures into data than can translate into actionable business decisions.  These generally can’t.

Any of us engaged in marketing need to become comfortable with analytics of all sorts.  They’re what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Fail to eat them and you’ll starve.  Are you coming to the table?

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August 26, 2015 · 10:01 am

Idiotic Injecting

No one that I know enjoys going to the doctor and getting an injection. Whether it’s as simple as a flu shot or something more complex such as a regimen of allergy shots, it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. 

Today’s topic is an injection of another sort, but the experience isn’t enjoyable either. It turns out that AT&T has jumped on the “no free lunch” bandwagon with respect to offering wireless hotspots to its customers. A Stanford computer scientist and lawyer was travelling and discovered that the AT&T hotspot to which he had connected was serving ads over web pages he was accessing. When he went to Stanford’s home page, for instance (a page that has zero ads on it), he saw a pop-up ad for jewelry and AT&T itself, and the ads persisted for several seconds until he could close them.

He discovered that the ISP was tampering with HTTP traffic – that’s what serves web pages. It is using a service from a third party to inject the ads and to monetize the traffic. AT&T is far from the first “free” service to do this – Comcast and Marriott are just two others. But as the professor wrote:

AT&T has an (understandable) incentive to seek consumer-side income from its free wifi service, but this model of advertising injection is particularly unsavory. Among other drawbacks: It exposes much of the user’s browsing activity to an undisclosed and untrusted business. It clutters the user’s web browsing experience. It tarnishes carefully crafted online brands and content, especially because the ads are not clearly marked as part of the hotspot service. And it introduces security and breakage risks, since website developers generally don’t plan for extra scripts and layout elements.

In other words, while you might have accepted that as your ISP the folks at AT&T will see and record everything that you’re doing, you might be concerned about an outside company doing so.  Moreover, as a publisher, your beautiful content environment is now sullied by ads from which you derive zero revenue.

If you’re on an AT&T hotspot, you’re already an AT&T customer.  I don’t believe you can log on if you’re not and you’re probably paying them handsomely each month (I know I am).  This sort of nickel and diming might help revenues (I wonder how much in the scheme of things) but it doesn’t help with customer satisfaction. That’s a point from which any business can learn.  Idiotic injection from my perspective.  Yours?

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August 11, 2015 · 10:20 am

The Real DNT Question

The good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation released their own definition of “do not track” the other day.  You might wonder why there needs to be more than one definition of such an easy to understand concept.  After all, what could be more clear than “do not track?”  As it turns out, marketers and others seem to misunderstand the term, at least then they are wearing their business hats.  They’re also hiding behind those hats in order not to address the real issue.

Here is where the EFF is coming from:

We think using the Web—including viewing online advertisements—shouldn’t come at the cost of privacy.  Whether their business is analytics, advertising, or social networking, companies dealing with data must be persuaded to respect a universal opt-out from tracking and collecting personal data without consent.

Pretty clear, I think.  You can read the policy they’re promoting here.  DNT Means Do Not Collect…And Do Not Retain…Except Where Required…Necessary to Complete a Transaction… Or With the Clear Consent of the User.  That seems very clear and yet even though this discussion has been going on for years, there is still no effective implementation.  As MediaPost said:

One reason why do-not-track never gained broad support is that the ad industry and privacy advocates couldn’t agree on how the signals should be interpreted. Some privacy advocates argued that people who say they don’t want to be “tracked” don’t want any information about their Web-surfing history compiled. But ad industry representatives said they were willing to stop serving targeted ads to people who turned on do-not-track, but wanted to continue to be able to collect data for purposes like market research and product development.

In other words, we’ll tell you what you mean.  Opting-out is never as good in my mind as opting in.  While advertisers and publishers aren’t exactly holding people against their will in their ad universe, they are forcing users to ask to leave as opposed to inviting them in.  Opting out has been made hard on purpose.  But we’re avoiding the real issue.  We are very focused on finding a good and technologically persistent way to respect users’ privacy and to opt them out.  What we really ought to be focused on is how can we  keep users engaged and opted in while maintaining their trust in how we’re using their information.

How do you see it?

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