Tag Archives: life lessons

May 13, 2015 · 9:52 am

Your Own Deflategate

I’ll say right at the top I’m not a New England Patriots fan.  Being a loyal fan of the Michigan Wolverines, however, puts me into a state of cognitive dissonance over the Tom Brady “deflategate” issue.  I’m writing his bad behavior off to being immersed in a bad environment – he didn’t learn this stuff in Ann Arbor.  By the way – I’m amazed how some folks think he was suspended for conspiring to deflate the footballs.  As I understand it the issue is his lack of cooperation with the investigation and not his guilt or innocence with respect to the rules violations.

New England Patriots at Washington Redskins 08...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might wonder why I’m bringing this up on a business blog.  I suspect there are many folks in the digital marketing business who are shaking their heads at what went on with the footballs.  Maybe there is a sense that cheating your way to a win diminishes both the win and the game itself.  Most of these folks would say they’d never do something like that and yet I’m willing to bet many do on a regular basis.

All of us in the digital media business are aware of fraud.  There are publishers who buy traffic which they know is not human traffic and which they turn around and sell on the ad exchanges in a form of arbitrage.  They might make a couple of hundredths of a cent on an impression but do it a million times a day and suddenly real money is involved.  It’s easy to spot anywhere in the media chain – the publisher sees it, the exchanges see it, I suspect the ad agencies see it and perhaps even the clients see it.  How?  Analytics.  When lots of your users are running a 10-year-old version of flash and a 5-year-old version of a browser (doesn’t happen in the real world, kids), someone is cheating.  If you’re buying really cheap traffic from someplace, you can assume it’s not human.  Yet no one is putting their hand in the air saying “I’m not going to take the money because I know it’s wrong.”  Like the Patriots, they just want to win.

The rage now is “viewability.” The problem is that the folks who are making money off of ad fraud – and the marketers who knowingly support it – will come up with a way to defeat the tactics to measure real ad views.  You don’t think any real marketer would do that?  Who is putting their ads on the ad injectors – the thieves who steal traffic from websites and layer their own ads on top?

There is an old expression in sports: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.”  When the most penalized team in the NFL wins the Super Bowl (the Seahawks a year ago), what does that say about pushing the limits, which is what the Patriots were doing?  More importantly to your business, you need to think about how far you’re willing to go and to what degree you are willing to push the limits to win.  Personally I like to be able to look at myself in the mirror without shame.  You?

 

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May 11, 2015 · 9:39 am

What Did You Learn Today?

On those rare occasions when the entire family would gather at the dinner table when I was a kid, one of the inevitable questions posed by one parent or the other was “what did you learn today?”. My brother or sister or I would launch into a minimalist explanation of whatever was shoveled our way in school, trying desperately to give a quick answer and let the other kid get grilled. The question, however, has stuck with me and it’s a good one for each of us to ask ourselves.

Business is constantly changing. Obviously so are the tools with which we attack our business issues. I routinely use a number of them – social media, web analytics, SEM, and CRM – which didn’t exist several years ago and the digital world in which I work most of the time didn’t exist at all (save for in science fiction novels) when I left my formal schooling several decades ago.

I use that question when I interview people –  “tell me something you’ve learned recently.” I’m not really looking for a specific skill. I want to be sure that the candidate feels an imperative to keep learning and to continually grow their skill set to keep up with a constantly changing business world. It’s even better if they don’t tell me about a program their employer sent them to – who knows if they went willingly. If they’re willing to invest in themselves the odds are that I can safely make an investment too.

So let’s start the week by asking ourselves that question – “what did I learn today?”  If you don’t really have a good answer, maybe it’s time to think about the blind spots in your skill set and to put together a plan to fix them.  You might not like analytics but I can pretty much guarantee they’re having an impact on your business.  I’m not particularly fond of accounting but I’ve learned how to read financial statements as well as how they’re put together and why.  One of the best things about our connected world is that much of the world’s learning is accessible to anyone, or at least to anyone with a motivation to absorb something new.  You?

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April 29, 2015 · 11:58 am

Rivers

I have rivers on my mind today.  Maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time over the last couple of days talking about streams of information and of video.  The nature of media these days is that we’re on a mostly self-directed rafting trip immersed in these streams.  Except that they’re really rivers since “streams” speaks to something much smaller than the torrents of content with which we deal every day.

Coincidentally, I came across something in the Phi Beta Kappa blog that resonated on both the nature of our content world and our business world:

It was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said that you can’t step into the same river twice, giving us a memorable illustration of the principle that things change. The very nature of things is change.

Amen.  I’m not the only one to have written about FOMO – the fear of missing out on something changing in your social or other streams because it happened while you weren’t paying attention.  There are lots of tools available to assure that doesn’t happen by sending you alerts when a significant person posts or an important bit of data comes to pass.  Nevertheless, I’m sure many of us feel a need to dip our toe in the river constantly, both to stay in touch as well as to take the temperature.

It’s more the change that occurs in business which is my focus.  I laugh when people talk about five-year plans.  Where were your video marketing plans back in 2010?  How about mobile?  Is what you’re doing today what you contemplated then?  I doubt it.  That’s not a complaint; it’s a recognition that the river keeps flowing and the water you photographed when you did your strategic plan is long gone by the time you’re ready to implement it.

Keep the notion of a river in mind as you approach business.  While it runs within the same banks it’s never exactly the same.  You need to embrace that flow and learn how to swim with a changing current.  There is a reason that so many songs and literary works deal with rivers as central to a community and to life.  How you deal with it is the difference between a wonderfully exciting ride or drowning.  Your call!

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