Category Archives: Reality checks

September 30, 2016 · 8:54 am

Squashed

It’s Foodie Friday, and this week, boys and girls, I’m not having any fun. I’m experiencing feelings I haven’t had since I found out about the Santa thing many years ago. I’m sorry to end your week on a down note, but I found something out that I need to share. It is, of course, helpful to those of us in business, but it’s really a bummer.

English: A slice of homemade Thanksgiving pump...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know those cans of pumpkin you use to make pumpkin pie this time of year? That orange goo that turns into warm spice wonderfulness? It turns out that it’s not pumpkin. Nope. It’s squash. In fact, it’s multiple kinds of squash (Butternut, Hubbard, and others) blended together and labeled “pumpkin. The Libby’s people actually have their own variety to replace actual pumpkin, which apparently is too watery and stringy when canned.

I’m sorry if I just ruined Thanksgiving for you. But it points to a broader issue, which is that of transparency. The can says “pumpkin.” I suppose not many folks are lining up to make squash pie, but a lot of folks do think they’re paying top dollar for one species of fish and they’re getting another. They also think they’re buying organic when they’re not.

Trust is among the most important things we try to develop wth our customer base. Once we violate that trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back, and consumers have enough choices that they can move on to someone more trustworthy pretty easily. When you’re pushing pumpkin pie that turns out to be squash, Boston Cream isn’t that far behind. Oh wait – that’s not a pie at all – it’s a cake, technically. OK, apple then.

Don’t serve squash and call it pumpkin, no matter what it is you’re selling. Please?

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September 19, 2016 · 12:26 pm

Who Is Smarter Than You?

One thing that I’ve found over the years is that it’s impossible to stay on top of my game if I’m not continuously learning. I make a concerted effort to do so. I have an RSS reader that’s loaded up with the feeds of dozens of sites. Many are tech sites so I can stay on top of the latest technical developments for my clients. Others are media sites so I’m aware of changes in the marketing world. Still others are more personal – golf sites, food sites, sites that report on social media changes, sites about the analytics world and the sports business. The reader fills up with over a thousand new articles every day and each one is an opportunity to learn something new.

Despite that volume of information, one thing that helps me more than anything else is when I can find a person who is better informed about a topic than I am. I also seek out people whose minds I respect. Many of us don’t like it when we realize they’re not the smartest person in the room. I welcome it with open arms.

That philosophy needs to carry over to hiring. Obviously, the earlier in a candidate’s career we encounter them the less knowledge of the technical aspects of a business they’re going to have. The won’t have a ton of real world experience either. What they can show you, however, is basic intelligence and the other things that we can’t teach. They should demonstrate a capacity to synthesize information and if they’re really smart, they’ll end up making you smarter too.

So who is smarter than you? Ideally, you know many people who are, since interacting with them will make you smarter. I’m sure you’ve run into people who need to believe that they are the smartest person in the room. I certainly have, but it’s a lot more interesting when you encounter someone who clearly smarter than anyone else but never makes anyone feel that way. Better informed is a stepping stone to smarter, but well-informed with an ability to develop new ideas and express them clearly is what’s smart in my book. Yours?

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September 8, 2016 · 11:55 am

Why Apple Improving Privacy Has Marketers Upset

Apple announced a bunch of new stuff yesterday including the release date of the newest version of their mobile operating system, iOS10. You can read about all of the enhancements here (or just about any other place on the interweb) but one thing you probably won’t hear about piqued my interest because it gets to the question with respect to ad blocking that we’ve pondered before here on the screed.

First, a little tech talk. Apple has something called IDFA – Identifier For Advertising – that they use instead of a simple UDID (your device ID) or a cookie (which don’t work well in the mobile space). It’s used to track you, serve you ads, and also for privacy controls. What they’re doing in iOS10 will change how the IDFA behaves. When you opt in to limit ad tracking, the IDFA will return a string of zeros, effectively opting the user out of advertising. It will also prevent the previously permitted “frequency capping, attribution, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, advertising fraud detection, and debugging” uses of this ID.

Needless to say, many in the ad world are very unhappy. “Ad blocking is stealing” according to the IAB. Pretty harsh, but I get that it’s a reflection of the disruption in the attention/value equation that underpins much of digital commerce. Here is the thing, though. Other media, many of which were built on the same equation, suffer from ad blocking and yet have figured out other business models. One blocks ads on TV either by watching on a delayed basis and skipping through the ads or by changing the channel until the program returns. Way back in the ’70’s, my fellow TV execs cringed at the thought of VCR‘s and felt they would irreparably harm the business. That thinking was repeated when DVR‘s (now at over 70% penetration) came out. Both lines of thinking were wrong.

The same is true of radio. No one is thinking about removing the buttons from your car that make it easy to change channels, nor is anyone thinking taking away your TV remotes would be a good thing. Ad blocking in print is as easy as turning the page. There is research that found people only fast-forward through about half of all ads during playback, and other research has found that even fast-forwarded ads make an impression on viewers. Even so, the business model for TV has changed a lot, and “ad blocking” was part of the impetus for that.

Maybe instead of worrying about Apple (or consumers, for that matter) doing what they can both to improve the web and mobile experience and to protect privacy, those of us involved in the digital marketing ecosystem need to keep refining our business models and whine a lot less? What do you think?

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