Category Archives: Reality checks

July 27, 2016 · 9:36 am

Restoring The Balance And Destroying The Blocking

If you are in business and you market that business at all, chances are that you’re using digital media of one form or another to do so. I suspect that much of your budget for that has shifted a bit based on how widespread the ad-blocking phenomenon has become. I’ve written about it a few times and the practice of installing ad blocking software on computers and mobile devices continues to grow.

While several ad agencies and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) continue to denounce the software as violating the value exchange compact (attention to ads in exchange for free content), they’re finally getting around to studying ways to get consumers to turn off the blocking software. Both the IAB and Omnicom published some results of their studies and they’re enlightening.

Advertisements, Salem, Massachusetts

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First Omnicom. Their study found that many ad-blocking users don’t dislike all advertising. They hate popups (who doesn’t!). 44% of those polled associate ad blocking mostly with blocking pop-up advertising. Popups are a type of ad that interrupts the content consuming experience, and that’s what’s pissing consumers off. As an aside, TV commercials do the same interrupting – is a remote control an ad blocker? Then there was this, as reported by MediaPost:

If consumers perceive a positive value exchange with websites, most are willing to go back to an ad-centric experience. In fact, consumers can be motivated to not only turn off their ad blockers, but will also disable them. Among those factors that would entice them to disable ad blockers, 28% would do so if the blockers slowed down their browsing speed, 24% if the ad blocker allows advertisements via payment, and 23% if they trusted websites to not serve annoying ads.  Consumers would disable their ad blockers if the website promised non-intrusive ads (35%).

In other words, people get that publishers need to monetize their content and don’t mind ads per se. They do mind being overwhelmed by ads or having to close several popups to get to the content they want. The IAB data echoed this:

A total of 330 people who said they used ad blockers blamed ads for making websites slower, either because the ads were too data-heavy or because there were too many of them…Not surprisingly, animated, moving and autoplay ads irritated consumers who used ad blockers the most, as did ads that covered up content and long video promos.

All of this sounds like common sense to me. Consumers don’t want their content consumption interrupted, delayed, or slowed-down. They don’t want to expend excess data loading ads. They understand the basic economics of the attention/value exchange but feel that publishers have tilted the balance too far in their own direction and are retaliating by blocking the ads that do so. If we’ll restore the balance the chances are good that they’ll go back to looking at the ads. Make sense?

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July 25, 2016 · 11:21 am

Why Free Data Is A Bad Thing For You

Everyone likes “free.” Heck, there are plenty of marketing tomes that say “free” might just be the most powerful word in marketing. Well, as usual, I’m here to burst your bubble about one particular aspect of something free which I find detrimental to us all. It’s something aggressively marketed by T-Mobile and Verizon but others do it as well. It’s called Zero-rating of data. Their “Binge On” and “FreeBee Data 360” offerings provide subscribers with free streaming media that doesn’t count against their data plans.

The basic concept is that ISP‘s – in this case the two aforementioned wireless carriers – don’t charge consumers for data used when the consumers use specific sites or services. That’s pretty appealing. In fact, T-Mobile reports that mobile subscribers who sign up for their “zero-rated video” offering immediately double their consumption of video. So why is this a bad thing?

Verizon bought Yahoo this morning. They previously bought AOL. One might expect that those two companies and their services will become zero-rated for Verizon customers. While T-Mobile has yet to buy a competitor, one can easily imagine them assembling their own lineup of content and service providers. Cable providers have been doing the same thing for a long time with fledgling cable networks. They take equity in these companies and, in return, provide carriage on a better tier (meaning it’s more widely available). These cable providers are also ISP’s.

The reason our digital ecosystem is flourishing is that until recently there was no one picking losers and winners. Zero-rating does exactly that. Think about the food court at a mall. There are two restaurants side by side, but one serves free food which is paid for by the mall landlords. Which one do you think will have the longer line, regardless of the quality of the food served? If a new streaming service enters the market but there is no data charge to visit their entrenched competitors, what chances do they have to succeed?

So yes, everyone likes free but in this case free is a bad thing. It will restrict the development of new companies. It will give more power to the gatekeepers. It enables internet providers to gain a significant advantage in the promotion of in-house services over competing independent companies, especially in data-heavy markets like video-streaming. Does that make sense?

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July 12, 2016 · 10:02 am

Selling To The Sold

I read a piece this morning about how political campaigns are doing a bad job of using the data available to them. The main thrust of the article is this:

It doesn’t make the most sense to continue advertising to a voter after they’ve already made a decision about which candidate they’ll choose on Election Day. While inefficient government spending seems as inevitable as death and taxes, it is still shocking how much budget is wasted marketing to voters who have already demonstrated an affinity one way or another.

You might be sitting there smugly saying to yourself that it’s typical of how politics is out of touch with the real world. After all, many campaigns are marketing organizations that come together for a relatively brief period of time with a basic short-term goal: convince 50.1% of voters to buy your product by a date certain. Our businesses, on the other hand, are in it for the long term and need to garner on-going and repeat business so we’re forced to be better at marketing. But are we?

I’d suggest that we’re really not. Many of us spend a good chunk of our money trying to convince another brand’s partisans to switch to our brand while spending inefficiently against the “undecideds” that are more open to choosing us. That thinking is why a lot of money targets the young. In theory, they are less locked-in to any brand. But why stop there?

We need to spend less time selling what’s already been sold and focus on growing our consumer base. Yes, reinforcing and thanking your current user base is important but it should take far fewer resources than finding and convincing those who are both open to a brand message and ready to buy. You probably aren’t going to turn off your “base” and you’re never going to convince the other brand’s base no matter what you do. You with me?

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