Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

July 7, 2015 · 9:18 am

Not Actionable Or Not Able?

Marketing Executives Network Group

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We discuss the need to measure the results of what you’re doing here on the screed fairly often.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m a big believer in applying data to decision-making, especially after decisions are taken and tactics are deployed.  As it turns out, my views about that part are fairly typical within the marketing community.

In a survey of marketing executives, The Conference Board and the Marketing Executives Networking Group found 75% of the respondents in agreement with the statement that “A primary responsibility of marketing professionals is to generate data-driven insights about prospects and customers, and then create a brand or sales story based on those insights.”   I especially like that language because it is inherently customer focused.

Two other findings, however, disturbed me quite a bit.  Only 39% agreed with the statement that “Most information available from monitoring social media is not actionable” 56% agreed that “Most of the members of my marketing team are not as skilled in the use of digital marketing as they need to be.”   Those two statements are probably related and let’s think about why.

First, if you’re having trouble taking action on your social analytics, maybe you’re measuring the wrong thing.  I totally agree that “likes” is a useless number, but using conversion pixels to measure assisted conversions from social media can provide a wealth of information about how your customers come to buy.  Maybe you’re not doing sentiment analysis (that’s not baked into the standard analytics packages but readily available). You should be. Putting aside sentiment, we can focus on trending topics among your user base as well as feedback on your brands and those of your competitor.  Those are all highly actionable data points.

With respect to the second point.  If your team is lacking in some critical skill, whether it’s digital marketing, writing, or sandbox, your job as a leader is to help them improve that skill until it meets the organization’s needs.  If not getting them training is a “resource issue”, think about what it’s costing you in missed opportunities.  Flip that to the positive:  if you’re getting good results now, how much better would they be if you could agree with the statement on your team’s abilities?  Maybe that’s why the data doesn’t seem to be actionable.  Is it “not actionable” or are you just not able?

If the results of the survey resonate with you, get some help to improve your results.  I’d love to be that help but there are lots of qualified people who understand how to help your company live up to the promise that digital holds. I don’t think that dismissing it as “not actionable” is the answer.  Do you?

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July 3, 2015 · 9:09 am

Fake

Small tomatoes in Korea

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Foodie Friday Fourth of July, let’s get real about fakes.  I was shopping for tomatoes the other day.  They had some beautiful looking specimens at the market and I knew from a lot of sad experience that they would be tasteless.  They probably came out of a hothouse hundreds of miles from where they were being sold. Unfortunately, they were typical of a lot of modern foods but they make a broader business point.

Our industrialized food production system has managed to remove a lot of the natural flavors of things.  Why?  Because we want things like tomatoes year-round, we have to transport them further, and in many cases, we have completely “fake” foods to which flavors n=must be added for them to taste like anything remotely worth eating.  This is from a talk by a UPenn doctoral candidate:

Berenstein began by narrating synthetic flavors’ earliest and biggest coup: turning vanilla from a coveted luxury good into a synonym for the bland and everyday. For two hundred years after its introduction to the West, vanilla was a precious commodity. Artificial pollination helped increase the global supply by allowing the plant to grow outside its native Mexico, but the real turning came in the 1870s, when scientists cracked the molecular structure of vanillin—and opened the floodgates for the manufacturing of synthetic vanilla flavor.

I think fake foods and flavors have peaked because consumers want the real thing and it’s not just in their food choices.  The desire for authenticity is now a constant in most businesses. Customers quickly recognize when we brands are faking it.  I like this explanation from someone writing in Ad Age:

Authenticity involves an emotional connection with an audience, and that connection is forged over years through consistency. Consistency builds trust and integrity. Ignoring the reality of your audience’s world, trying to be something you’re not, or telling customers what you think they want to hear quickly deteriorates trust and erodes integrity.

When we make our businesses more efficient for us, we might just be removing the flavor the customers crave.  It’s no longer real. Something that sort of tastes like what you took out what do.  Like that hothouse tomato, I’m not buying.  Would you?

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June 29, 2015 · 11:54 am

The Rise Of The Machines

One of the things I do to amuse myself when the weekend weather isn’t cooperative is to play video games.  I’m almost done playing the Mass Effect trilogy, which I highly recommend.  The games’ story revolves around a galactic war between biotics (humans and other species) and synthetics – machines, basically.

I flashed back to the game as a dozen articles about programmatic media buying came through my news feeds.  I don’t think it’s a shock to any of you to read that media buying has been transitioning from the personal, relationship-based business in which I grew up to programmatic.  People don’t talk to one another in today’s media buying and selling business: machines do. The days (and nights) of long lunches, emailed proposals, phone calls on Friday afternoons to sell out the weekend, and the entire one-to-one negotiating process have become mostly a memory.

I get it.  Programmatic is far less labor-intensive and a lot more efficient than the way I learned to sell media.  Efficiency, however, isn’t the total story and as the machines take over quite a few other things get lost.  The biggest one in my mind is transparency.  In many cases, the current media buying platforms primarily provide breakdowns of networks, and total schedule dayparts, and only after the campaign is complete do you see what has transpired and individual spot affidavits are shared.  Clients (the people who pay the bills, after all) are spending big chunks of their budgets on a plethora of middlemen, each of whom extracts their little pound of flesh for touching the buy.  It’s common for a third or more of the buy’s budget going to pay for services rather than media.

The biggest issue I have, frankly, is the loss of context.  Buying has shifted to buying audience delivery from buying based on content.  The machines buy and sell cookies, basically.  Those cookies might enable the buyers and sellers to learn quite a bit of information who is on the other end but they don’t add context.  Does that matter?  Indeed it does.

“While it certainly offers the opportunity to reach audiences more efficiently, our research shows that advertisers can’t ignore the strength of the publisher’s brand as a fundamental part of the ad experience and overall effectiveness of the campaign.”  That’s a quote from chief marketing officer and chief client officer at Millward Brown Digital as he reported on a study they had done.

According to Millward, as the “Brand Score” went up, so did the fit of advertisements, the consumers’ enjoyment of the ads, the trust consumers placed in the ads and the usefulness of the ads. Millward based its ratings on behavioral and attitudinal data collected about the consumers that visited the 44 sites during February 2014.

It’s not just about getting the right message to the right people at the right time.  It also involves the right place (read site/program).  I think that takes a human touch.  While beer ads make sense to a young male, those ads on a page containing “beer” and “drinking” keywords might also be a report of a car wreck due to drunk driving.

The human touch in media buying alerted us to when an episode might have subject matter that’s wrong for our ad. Buying audiences without regard for the show they’re watching or site they’re reading is allowing the machines to win at the expense of our marketing.  As the guys who spent the weekend battling them, I say no.  You?

 

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