April 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Thought And Preparation

This is the time of year when many families host some sort of holiday gathering.

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It might be a Passover seder or it could be an Easter Sunday gathering.  Our Foodie Friday Fun this week was spurred by that sort of activity.  I’m sure you’ve been to gatherings of this sort where the host had it all together.  The food came to the table all at the same time and at the appropriate serving temperature.  There were no shrieks of “we forgot the rolls” midway through the meal (you rarely hear that at a seder, by the way).  The snacks and drinks are out when guests arrive and the entire experience is executed with efficiency.

I’ve been to meals of a very different sort.  The food comes out one dish at a time and sits on the table until everything is ready, getting cold in the process.  The menu is not quite complete, usually because it wasn’t thought through carefully.  That’s really the point this week – the need for thought and preparation in the kitchen.  Turns out it’s critical in business too.

The two things need to go together for the cook – or businessperson – to be successful.  The hosts who don’t have it all together did think about what to serve.  There was thought.  The problem is that they didn’t translate that thought into preparation.  They didn’t have a real plan.  The opposite is also true.  You can prepare all you want – make various dishes – but without careful thought beforehand, the odds are that you’ll have a meal that just doesn’t work since no one wants all proteins or to have to make a last minute run to the store for the ingredients you didn’t write on your shopping list.

It’s the same in business.  Not taking the time to think a project or situation through before organizing those thoughts into the various types of preparation the enterprise needs to do is futile.  That preparation will have to be redone when something that wasn’t thought through comes to light.  It’s nice when someone volunteers to “dive in” to a project but it’s even better when they make that dive after thinking through the depth of the pool.

I hope if you end up at a gathering of family or friends this weekend you’ll take a step back and appreciate the thought and preparation that went into the day.  If it’s been done well you probably wouldn’t notice it otherwise.  It’s when there isn’t thought and preparation – done together – that you do notice because things go horribly wrong.  Make sense?

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April 17, 2014 · 10:12 am

In The Zone

We all do complicated things effortlessly.

If you can think back to when you were learning to drive a car, for example, it seemed incredibly difficult.  You thought about how hard to push the pedals.  You had to remember to turn on your blinker and to look in the mirrors.  Coordinating your brain to hold the wheel steady while looking away from the view in front of you was a challenge.   Yep, driving a car is pretty complicated and yet most of us who have been doing so for any period of time do it effortlessly.

Athletes get to a similar place.  You’ve probably read some post-game interview in which an athlete described being “in the zone.”  That’s a state of mind where they feel as if everything has slowed down.  Their focus became incredible and all external noise seemed to vanish.  They feel invincible.  Psychologists call this “flow” and as Wikipedia states:

Flow theory postulates three conditions that have to be met to achieve a flow state:

  1. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.[11]
  2. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state.[11]
  3. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one’s ability to complete the task at hand.[11]

This, of course, isn’t limited to athletics.  In fact, it’s a pretty good roadmap for business success too.  Clear goals, losing track of time due to your total focus on the moment, intense focus on the task you’re doing, and constant, real-time feedback that allows you to adjust your game plan all are places where good businesspeople live.

I’ll add one caveat.  While getting to, and living in, “the zone” is a wonderful thing, we all need to venture out of that zone every so often.  Maybe it’s more about distinguishing a comfort zone from a flow zone.  I’m way less fond of the former than I am the latter.  Have you ever been in that zone?  Does this make sense?

 

 

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April 16, 2014 · 8:39 am

Digital’s Dirty Little Secret

A few days ago, the media trades (especially the digital media trades) were filled with self-congratulatory fervor over  the

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achievement of a milestone.  This story from Cynopsis is typical:

For the first time, digital ad revenue is surpassing traditional TV revenue. According to new research from Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising revenue climbed 17 percent to $42.8 billion in the U.S. last year, compared to the $40.1 billion generated from TV advertising. Although mobile ad spending increased by 17 percent to $7.1 billion, it was still just about 10% of the $74.5 billion cable and broadcast spending reached last year. Variety reports that digital video alone produced $3 billion in ad rev, while search reeled in 43 percent of the total online rev at $18.4 billion.

Woo hoo!  Way to go digital ad sellers – even you robotic ones.  The folks at Venture Beat did a really good overview of what has occurred and I’d encourage you to spend a minute and check it out.  Of course, there was one thing at the end that intrigued me:

Interestingly, performance-based pricing models are down slightly from the previous year. CPM, or cost per thousand views, was up slightly to 33 percent, while performance-based models like CPA (cost per acquisition) dipped slightly to 65 percent. CPM pricing is at its highest point since 2010, the IAB said.

Why is that of interest?  CPM pricing is impression based.  Now let’s look at digital advertising’s dirty little secret.  This is from the Wall Street Journal:

About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group. So-called bot traffic cheats advertisers because marketers typically pay for ads whenever they are loaded in response to users visiting Web pages—regardless of whether the users are actual people.  The fraudsters erect sites with phony traffic and collect payments from advertisers through the middlemen who aggregate space across many sites and resell the space for most Web publishers.

In other words, between $6 billion and $18 billion is stolen every year in the US  because of ad fraud.  So while there is no question about the impact digital has had in the advertising landscape, it probably has a ways to go to catch broadcast TV.  The bad news is that a lot of that catching up involves breaking up criminal enterprises. The good news is that imagine how much better off the legitimate business will become with those ill-gotten gains redistributed to the legitimate players.

It’s always good news, bad news, isn’t it?

 

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