Tag Archives: Digital marketing

March 2, 2015 · 1:55 pm

Misplaced Problem Solving

A new week and another bit of news that has me shaking my head.  Today it comes from the folks at thePlatform which is a widely used video streaming service.  thePlatform announced that it has been working on a feature to defeat ad blockers and they have something that protects against ad blockers, making it easier to get ads onto new devices with minimal client work.

Diagram of Unicast Streaming

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like thePlatform and have worked with them so please don’t misconstrue what follows as anything but me trying to a little wider perspective.  I’ve written before about the challenge of ad blockers for the ad-supported digital community.  To quote one article on the subject:

There are stats out there that say nearly 28% of users have some sort of ad blocker installed, a percentage that has spiraled by nearly 70% in a year. Ads that are blocked, combined with all the other ads that aren’t seen because of viewability issues, makes for pretty bad business.

Indeed.   In this case, thePlatform is looking out for the businesses that support their services.  I applaud them for that even though it’s a misplaced solution that doesn’t cure the underlying problem.  It’s fine to defeat some of the ad blockers for a short time and to help your clients with generating advertising revenue.  However, when you have 70% annual growth in something that runs counter to your business model, maybe the answer is to examine why people are using ad blockers in the first place.

Ad blocking is most popular with younger users – 41% of American internet users aged between 18 and 29 used ad blocking software, rising to 54% when only young men are counted.  Those are the prime years for developing habitual customers.  Yet rather than figuring out how to get product messages across without being annoying and intrusive the industry is figuring out how to thwart customers’ technology.  “We’ve been extremely diligent about making sure that ad blockers can’t find patterns in our URLs they can block on” says thePlatform’s CTO.  Hmmm…

I believe in the ad-supported business model.  I also believe that you can’t force-feed consumers.  Defeating ad blockers is a band-aid and a misplaced one at that.  We need to focus on how to make ads that don’t tax computer resources and crash web browsers.  We need to respect privacy, which is another reason people install blockers.  We need to stop producing band-aids and focus on real solutions.

That’s my opinion.  Yours?

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February 5, 2015 · 11:52 am

Kidding Yourself With Content

When I was a kid we watched 7 channels of TV. There were 3 networks (no Fox yet), 3 independent stations (more than in most markets), and PBS. By the time I had my kids we had many more channels available – Nielsen would tell you that by 1995 the average home had 45. Today the number is closer to 189 in the typical home and with all the movie and sports channels the number in my house is well over 300. That’s a lot of content and I consume only a fraction of what is available.

I bring this up today because I read an excellent study called The Content Marketing Paradox. You can read through the deck here. It was written by the folks at Track Maven and it was eye-opening. As the Research Brief folks summarized it:

The study found the output of content per brand increased 78% from the start of 2013 to the end of 2014, but content engagement decreased 60%. Brands are generating a higher volume of content per channel, but individual pieces of content are receiving fewer interactions

On social networks, brand-generated content is seeing the lowest engagement rates now than anytime in 2013 and 2014, and 43% of professionally marketed blog posts receive fewer than 10 interactions. Marketers are distributing more content on more channels, while simultaneously complaining about how hard it is to cut through the noise.

This was the most meaningful statement in the piece for me:

As channels have proliferated, technologies have emerged to help marketers more efficiently produce and broadcast content, which has in turn increased the total volume being generated. But as the data above show, marketers’ “more is better” approach is not an effective response to channel explosion. Stated differently, marketers are getting better at distributing content, but are not getting better at creating content worth distributing.

So ask yourself this:  why are producing the content we are?  Who is reading and interacting?  What results have we measured?  Most importantly, how is our relationship with our customers and with consumers as a whole being enhanced by our efforts?  The silence may be deafening if the above data are to be believed.  Maybe we’re just kidding ourselves?

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December 15, 2014 · 1:53 pm

It Ain’t Me Babe

You might think from the title of today’s screed that I’m going to get into another Dylan rant. Nope. I’m just borrowing a song title from him because it was the first thing that popped into my head when I read something.

twitter fail image

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I realize that research can be boring but here is the factoid that blew my mind: 40% of Facebook accounts and 20% of Twitter accounts claiming to represent a Fortune 100 brand are unauthorized. That comes out of a research report from the good folks at Nexgate. They analyzed the 32,000 social media accounts associated with the Fortune 100 between July 2013 and June 2014 to compile their State of Social Media Infrastructure, Part 2 report. The findings are disturbing, at least to me, and should be a warning to anyone in business who manages a social media account.

It found that the average firm had 320 accounts on various platforms, but that many were false. How exactly any company, even these very big ones, can keep up with 320 accounts is beyond me although I suppose you could convince me of the need for very granular Twitter accounts, for example, with which to do customer service. 2.29 accounts per firm indicated that they had probably been hijacked, while social spam on accounts grew a staggering 658% since mid-2013.  Links to porn, malicious software, and worse are rampant.  I suspect that using the excuse that “it wasn’t us; it was an evil person using our good name” isn’t going to cut it.

Obviously the first thing any smart business should do is to  create an inventory of legitimate accounts.  From that you find the other accounts and ask that they be taken down.  It’s also important not to just “set and forget” what’s going on within the real accounts.  People do manage to hack their way in and spammers have figured out ways to hijack threads.  In other words part of “listening” is hearing yourself as part of the conversation and taking action when your own voice seems inauthentic.

Make sense?

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