Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

November 20, 2014 · 11:48 am

The Lady Does Protest Too Much

You might have read Hamlet. Perhaps unwillingly in high school English, perhaps for pleasure since it’s one of the greatest dramatic works in the English language. At one point Gertrude says “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Tiger Woods Photo by Paddy Briggs

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That line has been used as a figure of speech ever since (and since 1602 means for a long time) to mean that a person’s overly frequent or vehement attempts to convince others of something have ironically helped to convince others that the opposite is true, by making the person look insincere and defensive. Thank you, Wikipedia!

I thought about that quote the other day as Tiger Woods responded to a satirical piece written by the great Dan Jenkins. Jenkins wrote an “interview” with Tiger which was clearly labeled as made up in which Tiger was made to look cheap, dumb, and nasty. What happened next is instructive for all of us and for any business.

The “interview” ran in the print-only edition of a golf magazine.  Had Tiger left it alone, it would have been read by hard-core golfers and died.  Instead, Tiger took it upon himself to issue a 600 word rebuttal on ThePlayersTribune.com which was picked up immediately by the media.  The interest in the controversy grew quickly, and the golf magazine then posted the original article on its website where anyone could read it.  The mostly ignored problem became a front and center issue.  Which is the point.

Maybe you’ve heard it called “The Streisand Effect.”  This is when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.  It’s instructive.  By protesting too much we fan the flames of the problem.  Should every negative comment be ignored?  Of course not.  But had Tiger responded publicly (and I’m not sure he should have in this case) with an appreciative chuckle and a wink of the eye (“I’ll have to work harder and adjust my thinking to live up to the bad guy image you made up”), this all would have gone away.  Better would have been a phone call to Jenkins and a quiet meeting someplace to straighten it all out.

There are dozens of examples of companies and individuals choosing the wrong course and triggering The Streisand Effect.  While our emotional response to something false or misleading might be to take that course, the smarter response is to choose another.  What’s yours?

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November 19, 2014 · 10:53 am

Brand Purpose

I was reading a report on lifestyle segmentation and women when I came across a term that I really like: Brand Purpose. I know – if this is what you read for fun, what the heck does your work reading entail?  In any event, the term comes from the folks at Harbinger Communications and it’s so of their USP – Unique Selling Proposition. They define it thusly:

Brand purpose is the ownable, actionable impact the brand will make on the lives of the target consumers, rooted at the intersection of what the brand offers the world and the consumer’s deepest cares and desires.

There are a couple of things to consider here and I think it isn’t a bad exercise for anyone is business (and, therefore, anyone with a brand) to think about them.  First, what does your brand offer the world?  How is it different from anyone else doing what you do or offering the same type of product or service?  What problems are you solving for your customers?  I’m amazed when I speak to businesses about this how few of them have a very clear notion of the answer to those questions.

Second.  What do you know about your consumer?  You have rams of information at your fingertips about the “what” – what did they buy, what was the average sale, etc.  You might know their basic demography.  But what do you know about their motivations?  What primary research have you done?  What feedback do you get on a regular basis?  The world is no longer “we talk, you listen.”  Brands need to do way more listening than talking.

Finally, how can you “own” the answers to the above?  Can anyone else come in and take your place in the consumer’s mind?  Is your positioning and purpose actionable, or is it just a nice mission statement?  Are you adding genuine value to peoples’ lives or are you just making this month’s sales target?

Something to consider today!

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November 3, 2014 · 1:52 pm

The 40% Chance Of Fraud

If there was a 40% chance that when you bought something you weren’t going to get what you thought you were buying, would you take that risk? I wouldn’t, but apparently many advertisers and/or their agencies do so every day. Ghostery, which is a browser extension I use and would heartily endorse, says its research shows 40% of all URLs in automated ad auctions are masked. What is URL masking? As a recent Ad Age article defined it:

URL masking is often used to trick advertisers into running ads on sites with illicit or stolen content, which tend to generate lots of traffic but little ad revenue. URL masking is also used to fool buyers into thinking they’re buying premium inventory when they are instead getting low quality placements.

Ouch.  Then again, this is just one of the issues that have arisen as programmatic ad buying becomes more prevalent.  As a former TV sales guy, I just don’t get it.  Oh sure – the costs of machines that are supervised by a couple of people is far less than the cost of the number of people required to do the equivalent work.  But look what happens when it’s just machines.

Ask anyone connected with the programmatic ad business what the top three issues are and they should answer:

  1. Fraud
  2. Fraud
  3. Fraud

Traffic generated by bots, ads that are run underneath pages to generate impressions when no one is seeing them, fake sites which spoof domain names that clear buyers’ whitelists because they look like they belong to reputable publishers.   That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Another big issue is how little of what the buyers are paying actually reaches publishers – middleman upon middleman taking their cut drives revenues to the content creators down.

Putting aside the need for transparency, I’m not a Luddite.  I know programmatic ad buying is an advantageous, time and cost-effective process.  But the machines can’t do everything.  In fact, someone has to understand the business well enough (and all of those bad actors who would seek to steal from it) to program the algorithms.  Someone needs to bring the 40% chance down to 0%.  Someone else has to come up with the next brilliant, breakthrough idea.  It won’t be a machine.

You?

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