Tag Archives: Digital marketing

November 10, 2015 · 11:44 am

Are You Marketing To Goldfish?

If you are like many people I know, you spend a fair amount of time curating your feeds. What I mean by that is separating out all the stuff that really isn’t important to you so that what you’re reading is meaningful. On Twitter, for example, you might do as I do and use lists. I rarely look at the firehose of my main feed, relying on those carefully constructed lists and the odd specific search to help me stay informed via the service. I do the same thing on Facebook – build specific lists of people – to use the service efficiently.

Why do I bring this up? Because that is the same thinking that should be going into your brand’s marketing these days. Consumers’ attention is a scarce resource. If you think I’m kidding, check out the results of a study from the folks at Microsoft:

Humans have become so obsessed with portable devices and overwhelmed by content that we now have attention spans shorter than that of the previously jokingly juxtaposed goldfish.

Microsoft surveyed 2,000 people and used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor the brain activity of another 112 in the study, which sought to determine the impact that pocket-sized devices and the increased availability of digital media and information have had on our daily lives.

Among the good news in the 54-page report is that our ability to multi-task has drastically improved in the information age, but unfortunately attention spans have fallen.

In 2000 the average attention span was 12 seconds, but this has now fallen to just eight. The goldfish is believed to be able to maintain a solid nine.

You have very little chance of having your 8 seconds of attention continue unless you’re curating the feed (read that as your marketing messaging) with a customer focus in mind.  How are you helping solve their problem today?  What added value are you bringing into their lives?  If you can’t answer those questions, you might as well be marketing to goldfish.  At least you get a little more of their attention.

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November 3, 2015 · 9:29 am

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A riddle to start us off today. What do the NYC Police Department, Jeb Bush, McDonald’s, Walgreens, and Qantas all have in common? They’ve all had their hashtags hijacked. The Bush campaign is just the latest organization or company to have a hashtag used for a purpose far different from what was intended by the originator. I think the folks at Wired git it exactly right in their write up:  

This slogan-jacking shows just how difficult it has become for political campaigns to control their own message in the digital age. It’s no longer just up to the campaigns to steer the conversation and their opponents to counter it. Now we can all play a role in spinning the new narrative, which dramatically changes the power structure in campaigns.

Except that you’d be a fool if you are reading that solely in the context of politics, since it’s true for any form of marketing.  The consumer is in control, and they are very much paying attention, but maybe not for the reasons we’d prefer as marketers.  It’s imperative, therefore, that brands think long and hard about how messaging – and social media messaging in particular – can be twisted and hijacked.  If you’re trying to stir virality using a “tell me how much you love me” message, you’re probably going to go viral for the wrong reasons.

It’s not just consumers who are trying to take over the meaning of the message. Some brands have been just as guilty, and inevitably their stupidity has caught up with them.  DiGiorno’s Pizza tying a pizza sales message to a hashtag about domestic violence is just one example.  A 2013 post on the phenomenon summed it up:

The bigger the business or the more well-known the person or organization, the bigger the target on its back. And what typically happens is the hijacked hashtag becomes viral and far more visible, as a result of the sarcasm and negative uses of it.  Not only does hijacking have a negative effect, but the negative aspects are magnified.  It becomes a train wreck, where public relations are concerned.

The tags here might be #playingwithfire and #campaignfail if you’re not careful.  I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.  You?

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October 29, 2015 · 11:22 am

Intruders

You can’t read anything having to do with marketing these days without running into some mention of ad blocking. It seems as if the entire industry is wringing its collective hands about the revenues lost due to the blockers. It doesn’t seem, however, that there has been a great deal of discussion about how the problem came to be. I’m not going to regurgitate a blow-by-blow of the last couple of years in ad tech, but there are a few important points that are worth pointing out.  

The first, and foremost, is that actions have consequences. You probably tell your kids that all the time but as an industry we seem to have forgotten. Publishers are cramming more and more advertising onto a page. But that action may be the result of the downward push of pricing that’s a function of the rush to programmatic buying. Rather than paying for quality, marketers seem more concerned with a lower CPM. That’s a nasty set of actions.

The consequence of popups, cluttered pages, and slow load times, married to incessant retargeting (which means we’re being tracked!) is ad blocking. According to one survey, 51% of US internet users agree that companies are too often intrusive on social media. Another survey says they feel all of the push notifications we send out are not relevant or are intrusive. There is that word again: intrusive.

The single biggest change in marketing and media over the last decade has been that consumers have all of the control. They don’t watch the prepackaged lineups that networks have been feeding for almost a century (if you take the dawn of commercial radio as the beginning). The world is now user-controlled and curated. Why would an intruder be welcomed?  Why are marketers and consumers in conflict, when one’s entire mission is to help the other to make informed buying decisions?

No answers today, just guidance.  We need to stop intruding.  Even the best creative messaging is intrusive when you see it for the 23rd time in a week.  We need to help publishers provide an environment in which the consumer feels welcome, and the only way to do that is to reduce clutter by paying for the value the publishers provide.  Not every empty space is screaming for an ad.  Some folks are getting it – Turner says they’re reducing ad time on some networks.  Let’s see who is wise enough to follow.

I’ve admitted to using ad blocking myself.  It’s not a great experience – pages break or won’t load fairly often – but it’s better than the minute and a half load times I’d face otherwise.  It’s doing a decent job of keeping the intruders at bay, and the odds are the walls are going to get higher if we don’t change as an industry.  Our actions have consequences and those consequences are becoming more clear every day.

Thoughts?

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