October 16, 2015 · 9:30 am

Food For The Ages

Celebrating my dad’s 90th birthday got me thinking about age and why some people live so long. As a happy coincidence, I read some things the other day that represent this week’s Foodie Friday Fun. They had to do with some of the oldest living humans and to what they attribute their long lives. As it turns out, foods of various sorts are involved, as is an excellent business/life lesson.

The NY Post reported on a Brooklyn woman who is 116 and eats bacon, eggs, and grits every day. In fact, she has been known to eat bacon throughout the day and claims that the secret to living a long and happy life involves surrounding yourself with positive energy and bacon helps to do that. Not to be outdone in attributing long life to consumption of pork products, there is a woman in China that is 117. She has eaten twice-cooked pork three times a day and says pork is the secret to her longevity.

Then there is the woman in New Jersey who is 110 and attributes her long life, in part, to the three beers she drinks each day along with a shot of whiskey. Since researchers say centenarians typically show such characteristics as a steady routine and avoidance of stress, a few beers and a shot to keep one happy can’t hurt alleviate the stress.

Pork not your thing?  Well, there is a woman who is 116 years young in Japan who says the secret food is sushi, particularly mackerel on vinegar-steamed rice, and she has it at least once every month.  “Eat and sleep and you will live a long time,” she said in a message to The Telegraph. “You have to learn to relax.”

While these women can’t agree on which food is the secret, they do agree on being happy and relaxing.  I suspect that those things are not high on many folks’ lists as they deal with the daily stresses of business.  Wouldn’t the odds of generating long-term profits increase if we were around to help make that happen?  So get some rest this weekend, eat some bacon, have a beer, and relax.  It will all be there on Monday!

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October 15, 2015 · 10:29 am

The Digital Ad Industry Wakes Up

Well, what do you know. Someone woke up the folks at the Internet Advertising Bureau, who seem to have been in a bit of a slumber lately with respect to ad blocking. Just a month or so ago they were holding meetings trying to work out the possibility of suing the ad-blocking companies. Now, it seems as if a light has gone on.

In a release entitled Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX, the head of the IAB Tech Lab begins this way:

We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.

Exactly! Instead of treating the symptoms, they’ve finally decided to attack the disease. The piece goes on to explain how the commercial internet evolved and how the focus was squarely on technology. The key paragraph comes later, and is instructive for anyone in business:  

Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.

In other words, we took our eyes off the consumer and looked only to our own bottom lines.  This precipitated a consumer-focused solution – ad blocking – that is undermining the entire ecosystem of ad-supported media on the internet.  It’s consumer-friendly and a business killer.  The IAB now wants ads to be L.E.A.N. – Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, and Non-invasive.  It’s a great start, but I wonder if it’s too late.  With substantial percentages of users already using ad blocking, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to reverse the trend.  At least, however, the heads are out of the sand, no longer focused on the daily financials, and more focused on the consumer.  I think it’s a good start.  You?

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October 13, 2015 · 12:27 pm

I’ll Take Bad Ads

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of going into a store where the staff is charming and can’t do enough for you, but you left without buying anything.  You’ve also probably seen a wonderful product description in some online store, only to get to the customer reviews and find out that the product wasn’t nearly as good as the advertising.  That is a truism in marketing:  good ads can’t sell a bad product.  Conversely, even the worst marketing can’t keep a great product out of consumers’ hands.   Give me the bad ads every time and a great product.

I put customer experience right in there as part of product.  That experience isn’t just customer service.  It’s any engagement your product and brand has with a customer – social media, email, etc.   Since the product is more important than advertising, improving those engagements can yield a significant competitive advantage.  Having an ongoing, transparent, truthful series of interactions with your customers as well as consumers at large will probably have a larger effect on your business than doubling the ad budget.  You want to improve your product without retooling, repackaging, or developing a better formula?  Improve the customer experience and you’ve done so.

So why aren’t brands spending more to improve those engagements and the products they support?  Beats me.  Maybe it’s because they didn’t have it in last year’s plan.  Maybe it’s because you can’t run that on TV.  Maybe because we tend to emphasize creativity over basic blocking and tackling. Whatever the root, it’s something to think about.

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