Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

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 12, 2015 · 10:47 am

Mowers And Marketing

I bought an electric lawn mower this morning.  It runs on a rechargeable battery and it is both incredibly light and much quieter than the old gas-powered thing we’ve had for decades.  That it’s more environmentally friendly goes without saying – no fumes means no pollutants.  Yes it was a higher investment cost initially but over time it will just as cost-effective to cut the grass as with the old thing.

Obviously I didn’t just grab the first mower of this type I spied.  I went to the internet to do research and there was lots of information about battery-powered mowers generally and every model specifically.  That’s not news to you but it reminded me of a few points that might be applicable to your sales efforts so let’s review.

First, the single most important information upon which I relied was user reviews.  Putting together a list of the purchase candidates was relatively easy – I just searched for “battery-powered lawnmower reviews” and found a few professional sites that had side by side comparisons of features.  As an aside, most of these contained affiliate links to purchase the mowers which reminds us that having an active affiliate program is something every online seller needs.  Once I had sorted out my choices down to my three top candidates I went to Amazon to read reviews.  Any mower without at least a dozen recent reviews became a questionable choice in my mind.  Why rely on real people rather than the professionals?  Both because of much higher volume and due to the fact that I have no way of knowing who is being paid to say nice things (thanks, content marketing…).

That activity is typical.  A Bazzarvoice study looked at how reviews can impact sales and return on social media investment.  You can read it here.  The big takeaway is you must get users to write reviews.  They help with search results (SEO benefits) as well as with conversion:

As the number of reviews ticks higher, businesses start to see increases in the conversion rate. Just one review can increase the conversion rate by 10 percent. At 100 reviews the conversion rate can be boosted by up to 37 percent, and by the time there are 200 reviews, the rate can be boosted as much as 44 percent.

The fact that these reviews exist is just as important as what they say, as it turns out.  They add authenticity, and in addition to the types of ROI already discussed, authentic content also positively impacts overall consumer trust in a brand. Even negative reviews (which you MUST NOT edit or delete) can help.  I found many of the one or two star reviews were based on some nit or an unrealistic expectation (no, the battery doesn’t last for three hours before it needs recharging).

The only thing the folks at Home Depot won’t understand is how I came to choose their store and that model.  They have no clue how I did my research and the folks at Amazon won’t understand why I did all this research and never bought (their prices were hundreds of dollars too high).  That cross-channel measurement is a much longer topic but it’s a critical missing link in much of our marketing.

Think about your last major purchase.  Did it flow something like mine?  How are you serving all the folks who are doing their research right now?  How are you encouraging  reviews and getting them front and center?  Make sense?

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May 5, 2015 · 11:26 am

Asking For Trouble

You might have read yesterday’s screed about how AT&T was selling “unlimited” data plans that really had limits and shaken your head. I mean, doing something as deceptive as that would never cross your mind, right? Well, let’s put that deception into another, more prevalent context and find out.

The Association of National Advertisers did a survey about native advertising. You know what that is – content created by or for a sponsor which looks very much like the environment in which it runs. Maybe it’s completely straightforward or maybe it contains subtile messaging about the sponsor’s product or service. As the ANA puts it:

Native advertising is an advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing messaging in the context of the user’s experience. Native ad formats match both the form and function of the user experience in which they are placed. The advertiser’s intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and increase the likelihood users will engage with it.

Many marketers (58%) are already engaged in this and many more intend to do so in the next year. I’m not going to go off (again) on publishers who do their damnedest to blur the line between ad and editorial. Instead, let’s just look at what the ANA found:

  • Two-thirds of respondents agree that native advertising needs clear disclosure that it is indeed advertising. Only 13 percent feel that such disclosure is not needed.
  • Both the publisher and the advertiser have a responsibility to ensure disclosure.
  • Three-fourths of respondents feel that there is an ethical boundary for the advertising industry when it comes to native advertising.

That’s all well and good except that when it comes to how that disclosure is made, we might just have an issue (and what the hell are the 13% thinking?). A company called TripleLift surveyed 209 U.S. consumers for their thoughts on how native ads are presented. They were shown a native ad on a website and different respondents saw the ad with different labels.  Seventy-one percent said they noticed the content in the ad, but fully 62 percent didn’t realize they were looking at an ad.  When asked which labels were the most clear, “advertisement” and “sponsored by” were the best in terms of letting consumers know they were looking at an ad.  The problem is that readers do NOT like feeling as if they’ve been deceived, as a study by Contently found:

  • Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand.
  • 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content.
  • 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand.

So let’s go back to the AT&T question.  Would you knowingly try to deceive a consumer?  Before you answer, are you running native ads that just might be doing exactly that?  Are we – marketers and publishers – just asking for trouble in our quest for better engagement?  Let me know your thoughts.

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