Tag Archives: Digital marketing

September 9, 2015 · 9:00 am

Hearing Aids

One thing that I find when speaking with clients and others on the topic of social media is there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what social is all about. Most of them seem to approach social as yet another megaphone. The reality is that social media is a hearing aid. Most of them want to be speaking when they really ought to be listening, and that fundamental difference has resulted in some pretty disturbing trends.  

First, data shows that companies are speaking a lot more in social than they are listening. Brands send four times as many posts as replies, according to data from the latest Sprout Social survey. My guess is that this has to do with a couple of factors. First, the management team is still fixed on the old way of thinking about marketing: we talk, you listen. Second, this results in a content strategy, not a service strategy. Third, it’s easy to hire a single social manager who can schedule your posts in advance and work across many social platforms. All of this is pretty wrong in my book.

I won’t spend any time on the changed (notice past tense) nature of marketing. The customer is in control of the brand to a large extent –  deal with it. If you’re listening to what those customers are saying you must, be nature, be servicing what you’re hearing unless you don’t mind missing golden opportunities. Sprout Social’s data says brands are, in fact, doing just that. Most brands ignore 88% of messages on social media. That’s 7 in 8 social messages to brands go unanswered within 72 hours. Sad…

Finally, brands are not set up to support constant service. I know resources are a challenge, but as I’ve said to clients, if you can’t support a platform properly you need to wait to deploy there. Social media is still in its infancy, and like any infant it requires constant monitoring and support. Ignoring customers almost 9 times out of 10 is insane.

We need to be responsive and engaged.  We need to use the hearing aids and drop the megaphones.  You agree?

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September 3, 2015 · 10:37 am

Programming Surprises

I come from the world of advertising sales. Strike that: I come from a world that no longer exists even though there is one with the same name still out there. It’s called advertising or media sales except there isn’t a heck of a lot of selling going on – just a lot of buying.

I dislike programmatic buying for a number of reasons, but the one I’m going to discuss today has implications for your business, even if your business isn’t media. Your brand may be using programmatic to purchase ads. Certainly digital ads and, soon if not now, TV, print, and even outdoor. I completely understand the efficiencies of this system and from the buy side the system is great. From the publisher or content distributor side, it has had the effect generally of pushing pricing down. Zero-sum games do that. However, that’s not today’s beef.

In a word – transparency, or lack thereof, is my issue. Many brands have no clue where their ads are served nor do they know for certain which creative is being used vs. which targets. They don’t really know how fees are being taken along the way and they’re not really sure what their budget is getting them in terms of placement. In short, the last thing you want as a marketer – or any businessperson – is a surprise, and this system has the potential to deliver many of them, most of which are bad.

If you think you can mitigate the surprise issue with a Service Level Agreement, think again. Most of those contain a cure period. Even if there is an hour during which your ads run on an unapproved site, the damage is done. Surprise!

When the bills come in and you find out that your $250,000 budget bought you $175,000 of inventory due to fees, causing your effective CPM‘s to rise significantly, surprise!

Ad spending in the US for programmatic TV will rise to nearly $4 billion in 2016 according to some estimates.  That kind of honey attracts a lot of flies, and I suspect we’ll see an even more fractured technical landscape supporting this buying.  No matter what your business, you can’t work with partners who are hiding something, at least I can’t.  Can you?

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August 18, 2015 · 9:30 am

Lightening The Load

If there is one thing that seems to have happened over the last 15 years, it’s the growth of ADD.  That’s right – it seems as if most of us have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder which manifests itself via an inability to stay focused and patient as we use our devices.  After all, what’s more frustrating than clicking on a link and waiting and waiting and waiting for the page to load?  Sometimes it’s due to a lousy connection to the internet.  Most of the time, however, it’s probably due to how the publisher has built the page.  I can hear you muttering that “he’s gone all wonky today” but stay with me.  There is a broader business lesson here.

Web pages are a series of elements.  The page code processes them and does everything from display pictures to send analytics data to a server  to format text to pull ads out of a marketplace.  Each of these things takes a little time and the more of them there are, the longer it takes the page to load.  Graphics intensive content – slide shows, autoplay videos, etc. – take a VERY long time to get ready.  I think part of why people use ad blockers is because they very often cut load times substantially.

GQ, according to an article I read in Digiday, focused on decreasing page load times.   Maybe that was less convenient for their writers or editors, but they decluttered their article pages, moved to a unified content management system, and did some other things that resulted in an 80% decrease in page load times.  That focus on their reader has paid off:

For GQ, having a faster site, along with features like new article pages and article recommendation widgets, has paid off in helping audience growth. Traffic jumped to 11 million uniques in July, the first full month of the relaunch, from 6 million in June, per the site. (Those are the site’s internal Omniture figures; comScore’s July numbers weren’t available at press time). Median time spent on the site rose to 7.8 minutes in July, from 5.9 in June. The benefits have extended to advertisers. With people spending more time on the site, along with bigger and repositioned ad units, the interaction rate on ads rose 108 percent.

The lesson for any of us is that staying focused on the customer experience pays off, sometimes in ways we don’t anticipate (who would have thought ad interaction would rise!).  Maybe lightening the load made their wallets heavier. Not a bad tradeoff, right?

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