Tag Archives: Digital marketing

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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October 5, 2015 · 11:17 am

It’s The Solution, Stupid

One of the great meme/clichés since 1992 has been the form based on James Carville‘s famous slogan for the Clinton presidential run:  The Economy, Stupid.  The popular version always adds “It’s” upfront, as I have done above.  The point of his slogan was to keep Clinton campaign workers focused on the main points the campaign was trying to make (it was one of three).  My point is to keep you focused on the marketing you should be doing. That introduction out of the way, let us address my point – it’s the solution.

The first point on all three lines L 1–3...

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with clients and listened to their spiels to potential investors or customers and come away not understanding why either of those groups would give the client any money.  I used to wonder the same thing from the other side of the desk when I was listening to people pitch me new partnerships or technologies when I was at the NHL.  In both cases the person speaking would explain the features of their product or company but they’d miss the most important point: how what they had solved a problem.  Actually, how it solved MY problem.

If you’re a marketer, you can’t assume your audience has any clue what your product does or what problem it solves.  I’m amused by the brands that go straight to paid search marketing or other immediate calls to action, never having done any brand building.  The classic framework for marketing (AIDA) begins with “attention.”  Branding campaigns get that attention and build awareness.  That’s the time to educate the audience on one thing: how the product solves a problem and why that solution is the best one for the audience.

So it’s the solution, stupid.  Identify the problem you’re solving, make sure it’s a big enough problem (one that a large number of people have, even if they don’t know it yet) and then market the solution. Advertising the product, not the solution, is a recipe for disaster.  Make sense?

 

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September 29, 2015 · 8:57 am

No Clue

You are probably aware the there is a war being fought in the world of digital advertising.  Unfortunately, the combatants are publishers and their readers who use ad blockers.  With the release of iOS9, which supports ad blockers within Safari, the fighting escalated to another level.  I’ve written a number of posts on this topic, why users are using blockers, and how screwed up the advertising-supported world of digital media has become. This is not going to be another one.  Instead, just as every war has “collateral damage”, I want to focus on a side effect this war is having, one that is causing harm even to sites (like mine) that are ad-free.  

Simply put, ad blockers have the effect of throwing the baby out with the bath water.  They often will “break” sites, leaving them unreadable or unusable.  More importantly, even if the sites render correctly, ad blockers will often block the analytics – Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture – that most sites use to measure traffic and other things.  That means that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to get an accurate measure of which content users like, what’s useful, how the site is performing technically, how to optimize the viewing experience based on browsers, etc.  Publishers have no clue.

I’ve admitted before that I use both Ghostery and Privacy Badger.  That said, I do whitelist Google Analytics and Omniture so that sites I visit know that I’ve been there. I’m not proud that I block most of the ads, but I’m also not a fan of what many sites have done with respect to commercial loads, pop-ups, rendering speed, and  constant remarketing.  If, as is being talked about in some places, many publishers band together to collectively block their sites to people who don’t want to give some value in return (check out The Washington Post’s actions), I’ll either make a site by site judgement with respect to whitelisting them (as I do some ad-supported sites now that carry reasonable ad loads and aren’t a mess) or I will find the content elsewhere.  I understand their position; hopefully, they care about mine.

Where I do draw the line, however, is with the analytics, and if you use an ad blocker I’d ask you to think about letting sites measure traffic.  Your privacy is still maintained (yes, I’m aware it’s possible to track individuals across sites but that’s the exception) and you’re providing some value in return for the content you’re receiving. It’s a small step towards avoiding collateral damage while this war rages on.  You with me?

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