Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

February 28, 2018 · 12:21 pm

Measure What You Can Measure

The NFL is getting ready for the annual combine. This is where players get tested both physically and mentally to see if they’re NFL material. There is psychological testing to test intelligence. They run the 40-yard dash. It’s a 4-day job interview, much of which plays out on TV.

Teams use the data to make decisions about which players to select in the annual draft. They can stack the reams of information from the combine with the data generated over the course of a player’s college career and choose someone who will, hopefully, fit into a team’s depth chart as well as its philosophy.

Anyone who follows the NFL will tell you that all of this data has its place but it’s far from infallible. Kurt Warner, a 2-time NFL MVP went undrafted. So did Warren Moon, a Hall Of Fame quarterback too. Put Tony Romo on that list as well. No team looked at the data and thought any of these men were worthy of a draft pick. Oops.

You just might be guilty of the same thing in your business. The data isn’t infallible and the data only measures what it’s designed to measure. Tom Brady (selected 199th in his draft year) recently told NFL prospects that they can’t measure heart. He’s right, and it’s because there isn’t a solid way to capture that data.

How are you making this mistake? You might be using one data point to draw a conclusion that isn’t right. Correlation isn’t causation, as we hear so often. Grateful Dead fans don’t all smoke pot and have long hair. Identifying a target as those fans doesn’t mean you should be promoting to the stereotype.

Another faulty conclusion might be due to an error in the data itself. I had an advertiser on a site I ran complain that they weren’t getting great results. They had neglected to respond to a question from their salesperson about turning on frequency capping to extend their reach and limit the number of times a day someone saw their ad. They were reading the data correctly but the data itself was faulty due to an underlying issue.

One of my favorite data error is the foundation of the entire TV business, the Nielsen Ratings. The TV and ad industries have attached an accuracy level to Nielsen ratings that even Nielsen says is unreasonable. A study of a few years back found in analyzing 11 years of data that the margin of error for reported results was often more than 10%. That might not sound like much but it can represent hundreds of thousands or even millions of impressions. The issue here is that buyers are too focused on the (inaccurate) numbers rather than on precise metrics such as sales.

Measure what you can measure. Don’t extend that measurement to other things that aren’t measured as well. I bet your results will improve. Let me know?

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February 23, 2018 · 1:38 pm

It’s Your Lucky Day!

It’s Foodie Friday and if you’ve been paying attention to the calendar, you’ve already had a month full of pizza, wine, heavenly hash, tater tots, frozen yogurt, plum pudding, and tortellini. Oh – that list only gets us part way through the month. Today, for example, is National Banana Bread Day as well as National Toast Day. Over the weekend, we can celebrate Tortilla Chip Day, Clam Chowder Day, and Chocolate Covered Nut Day. Finally, we can end the month celebrating pistachios, Kahlua (I assume the drink and not the pork), strawberries, pancakes, and chocolate souffle, each of which has a day.

Got indigestion yet? Maybe it should be National Bicarbonate Of Soda Day? Oh – that already exists (December 30). You can check this handy calendar to find out what days you can celebrate if you’re ever looking for a reason to party. Some of the things on the calendar are just silly and some, like the upcoming Pancake Day or the recently passed Pizza Day, get way more attention than others. That probably has to do with some important businesses getting behind the days (lots of free pizza deals on Pizza Day!), particularly those businesses that really have to stretch to tie into the “normal” days during the month: President’s Day, Groundhog Day, and, in some places, Mardi Gras. Despite some of the silliness, there is a legitimate reminder in all of this.

Think about Festivus. This, as you probably know, is the entirely fictional creation of the Seinfeld writers based on the actual family practices of one of the writers. It’s a way to celebrate the season without participating in the commercialism of the season. In my mind, it is the most prominent made-up day of them all. As Allen Salkin, the author of a book on Festivus wrote, “Festivus is completely flexible. There’s no ruling force telling you what to do. Nobody owns it.”

You need to think about that as you create your own day. Besides being great promotional platforms, these days can inspire lots of social interaction so that the onus is not just on your business to promote your day. While it may take some time to become known and anticipated by your customer base and the public at large, I believe the investment is worth the effort. Find what might be some doldrums in your calendar and make your day a tentpole event. The key thing is to make it fun, make it authentic (even if authentically tongue in cheek), and make it YOURS.

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February 12, 2018 · 11:18 am

Cranky About Commas

Maybe I’ve always had tendencies to be a cranky old man but as I’m turning into one I find great schadenfreude when the universe punishes those who are lax about grammar and spelling. It could just be my history as an English teacher but I find my already elevated blood pressure spiking when I see people misusing punctuation or not particularly caring if they’ve mistaken “your” for “you’re” or “to” for “too.”

It cheered me up, therefore, when I read that a lawsuit over an Oxford comma was settled. An Oxford comma, as I’m sure you recall, is an optional piece of punctuation used just before the coordinating conjunction (such as “and,” “but,” or “or”) in a list of three or more things. I think its use provides clarity and I suspect that parties to this suit – a dairy company in Maine and their delivery drivers – now realize the importance of clarity. The comma was omitted from a list of circumstances which would not qualify for overtime payments. Because of that omission, the drivers argued that they were entitled to overtime since the words “distribution of” were connected, without a comma, to “packing for shipment,” making that a single activity that wasn’t eligible for overtime. The drivers said they were only engaged in distributing the product which is NOT on the list.

I think there is an important point for any of us who provide written communication in any event. It bothers me, probably more than it should, when I read something from one of my connections that misuses language. I’m not talking about the vagueries of punctuating parenthetical statements or comma use for multiple adjectives. I mean simple things such as the examples above or “it’s” as a possessive. It’s worse when a company does it since you know multiple people looked at whatever was being produced as a piece of marketing or a social media post.

The settlement of the suit cost the dairy $5,000,000. That’s a lot of cheese. Sloppy proofreading can cost you just as much in how your customers and others feel about your brand. It’s not just the lawyers who get concerned with vague meanings and incorrect language. There are a lot of cranky old men and women out there who know the difference, and many of us are actually not so old (ask my kids who are bigger sticklers on this point than I am!). Is all that clear?

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