Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

December 21, 2016 · 1:07 pm

Social, Smoke, And MIrrors

I’m frustrated. Some of the frustration is with myself because I can’t seem to explain why hiring certain people to work on your business is a bad idea when compared to hiring other kinds of experts. Some of the frustration is with businesspeople who don’t seem to grasp that the tools aren’t the business. In an effort to ease my aforementioned frustrations, let me vent a bit and, hopefully, in the process of doing so help clarify the issues.

With very few exceptions, a recent college grad is not an expert on how to use social media as a marketing tactic. I think the supposition is that since most of these kids have been on social media for a decade and are generally quick to adopt the next new thing that they’re qualified to lead your social media efforts. That is as ridiculous as assuming that I am qualified to repair my car just because I’ve been driving for 40 years. Rattling off buzzwords isn’t the same as understanding business goals. Doing things because they’re “cool” or because they appeal to the social media person isn’t a great strategy. Things are done because they serve the customer and in so doing, move the company toward one of more business goals.

The tools aren’t the business. We use the right tool at the right time for the right purpose in everything we do. We don’t decide “I’m going to use a hammer” when the goal is to cut meat. I’ve had discussions with potential clients who have no clue why they’re on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve had others who blast out a dozen pieces of content a day with no examination of their analytics to help refine the type of content they’re pushing, the frequency with which they do so, and the channel(s) they employ.

I’m open to suggestions for cutting through the smoke and mirrors. It’s not so much that my proposals to help aren’t chosen (and I know I’m speaking for several other senior consultant types here) but that the ones that get chosen are doomed to failure because they’re style over substance. This hurts everyone – platforms, clients, consultants, and ultimately customers. We can’t expect clients to invest in developing channels – particularly social – if we can’t produce results. We can’t produce results if we don’t understand the underlying business and its customer base.

Thanks for indulging me today. What’s on your mind?

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December 12, 2016 · 11:40 am

Bursting The Bubble

Would you buy from you? Knowing what you know about your product/service and the team behind it, would you invest your hard earned capital in your company? Hopefully, the answer is yes, and it’s just as important that your response is based on real-world experience and not some vision you conjured up of your business as seen through a Vaseline-coated lens.

I raise this today because I read the chart you can see over there which summarizes the results of a study as reported by Marketing Charts. 200 Chief Marketing Officers were asked, by the CMO Council and Deloitte, how they prefer to spend their time:

When respondents were asked where they would prefer to spend their time as marketing leaders, a leading two-thirds said they’d rather team with leadership on global business strategy (66%), while a majority would also want to innovate and implement new approaches, products, and strategies (58%). Just 1 in 6 would prefer to spend their time in meetings and only 1 in 10 would want to review budgets and campaigns.

How this relates to the question I asked initially is simple. My questions put you in the position of the consumer. They imply that you’ve actually used your product or service and have done so as a consumer would (sort of like a secret shopper). The survey responses feel to me as if the CMO’s would prefer to live in a bubble, dreaming up new strategies and products while not particularly wanting to get their hands dirty in the real world activity of listening to customers.

You might wonder how any CMO can strategize without keeping the customer front and center. What’s interesting is that only 6% report that they are tasked with driving routes to revenue across all facets of the business globally. That reads like life in a bubble to me.

Each of us needs to burst whatever bubbles keep us away from our markets and our customers. Planning new products is fine but they can’t be solutions to problems that don’t exist or for which there won’t be demand once consumers realize they have a need (and hopefully they already do). You with me?

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December 7, 2016 · 12:06 pm

Fighting About Data

I think everyone knows that a lot of data is collected as we conduct our daily digital activities. Google and the other search engines know what we’re looking for, Amazon and other commerce sites know what we’re shopping for, Facebook knows what we like, LinkedIn knows who we know, etc., etc., etc. These data footprints are collected and in many cases sold to marketers and their agents to allow them to serve ads to you. If any of that comes as a shock to you, I’m not sure where you’ve been for the last decade or more.

What you might not have thought about, however, is that the ads themselves collect data. How many times has someone seen it? What kind of person (that pesky data that the aforementioned guys have) has responded to an ad, and how well do the ads translate to sales (lovingly called the conversion rate as if someone is changing religions…). As it turns out, there is a bit of a controversy about who actually owns that data: the advertiser or the agency. The marketers believe that they are the rightful owners while the agency folks believe just as strongly that they are. Neither side feels that the publishers who serve the ads and, therefore make data collection possible, have much of a claim to it. Of course, even publishers came out ahead of one other group as the rightful owners in the survey: consumers.

As you can see in the chart, only 10% of advertisers and 15% of agency respondents believed that consumers had a claim to their own information. That’s tragic. Why? Because it represents a mindset that is ultimately self-defeating. It can lead to legal problems at worst and consumers opting out (if they can figure out how) at best. What have the advertiser or the agency done to give the consumer value for the data? Nothing, in my mind. One could argue that the ads they serve make possible the content the consumer enjoys, but those very ads make that enjoyment nearly impossible given the state of ad-serving today, particular in mobile.

Unless and until we on the marketing side see the consumer as at least an equal partner in our business and not as a bunch of rubes or just as “data”, the problems with ad blocking, anti-spam rules, and other protective measures aren’t going to go away. What will go away are the people represented by the very data over which the agencies and marketers are fighting. You agree?

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