Tag Archives: Business and Economy

October 22, 2015 · 10:32 am

The Tip Of The Iceberg

I”m not sure why, but a lyric from the Rush song “Distant Early Warning” popped into my head this morning:

I know it makes no difference
To what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg
And I worry about you…

I think that’s something we do in business – see the tips of those icebergs – but we also do a very human thing and ignore them. I’ve been part of organizations that were just as guilty. I can clearly recall a sports sales meeting in the 1990’s in which the sales staff laughed at competing with this little cable sports network called ESPN. Buyers were talking about it, even though their numbers weren’t much at the time. It was the tip of the iceberg, except we didn’t worry.

Those tips surface all the time. A decade ago, no one was “worried” about social media taking dollars from mass media (although what could be more “mass” than social media these days?). Having a highly profitable media business disrupted by consumers watching TV on demand and on a mobile device? A good way to get a room full of executives to laugh.

It’s not just the media business. How many businesses have a written disaster plan in case a server goes down, a system gets hacked, or a natural disaster occurs? Why written? Because there is a high likelihood that you won’t have the time to figure it out on the fly, and it’s possible that members of the team will lose communication. We see the tip of that iceberg in other businesses struggling with floods and hacker incursions, but what do we do about it?

You might also ask yourself about the distant early warnings of burnout. Many of us are stressed, and that constant strain can lead to burning out – a state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.  When was the last time you looked inward as well as outward for signs of those icebergs?  Ignore the distant early warnings at your own peril.

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October 20, 2015 · 11:00 am

Myth Busting

When my brother was born, I’m told that he was to be named Mickey. Upon being informed of this, my response was “don’t be silly – Mickey is on television.” The “Mickey” in question, of course, was Mickey Mouse, and I was an avid viewer of his afternoon club. TV Mickey was very real to me. Brother Mickey was renamed Michael. 

I’m sharing that story because it speaks to the power of myths that have become real. You might think that business is the last place we would find such things, but you’d be wrong. Most prominent in my mind, of course, is the shared myth that drives billions of dollars of media spending: Nielsen ratings. Putting aside the obvious issues with sample error and lack of reporting from out of home viewing, read any ratings book and Nielsen will tell you that what’s inside is only accurate within certain limits. They are a shared myth, one that allows both sides of the advertising transaction to negotiate against some standard, even if it’s dead wrong.

The ratings field is instructive because some folks finally decided to challenge the myth by providing another, more accurate look at audiences. It’s having a double effect – Nielsen is improving their service and there is a second “currency” that can be used in negotiating ad placements (sometimes you would rather buy in Swiss Francs than dollars). Someone challenged the myth and both they and business is better for them having done so.

Another example: a taxi medallion in NYC is worth lots of money. Uber challenged the myth by making every car owner a potential taxi service, and Google and others are challenging it even further by negating the need for drivers at all. Until recently, a car needing a driver was a shared myth, and when we can simply call for a driverless car, day or night (no drivers means no sleep needed!), the nature of car ownership changes as well. How will car dealers and resellers be impacted in 20 years? I suspect the myth of fossil fuels will be blown up in the next decade too.

The point is this. Nodding one’s head at myths that have the force of reality instead of seeing them for what they are can impede progress and obscure opportunity.  Sometimes the emperor really is naked and you need to be that kid saying so.  It won’t make you popular, but it just might make you very profitable.  Any myth busters out there?

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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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