Tag Archives: marketing

November 12, 2018 · 11:59 am

Thank You For Your Service

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day. I don’t typically post on Sundays but I did want to honor all of those who served by putting out something, even if a day late. This is my post from 2009 (yes, I’ve been at this for quite a while) and I like it as much now as I did then. Thank you for your service if you served and please remember to thank a vet, even if it’s a day late.

Today is Veteran’s Day, a holiday which was created to commemorate the end of “The War To End All Wars.” While that part didn’t work out so well, it’s a worthy celebration of our men and women who have served and are serving in the Armed Forces. My Dad is one of those vets. He fought – as Archie Bunker used to say – in The Big One – WW2. And while he’s taught me a lot over the years, he and his fellow vets teach us another really valuable business lesson to go along with all the others.

Veterans Day 2007 poster from the United State...
My father got out of high school and went into the service like most of the young men (and many young women) of his generation.  They put their country ahead of themselves realizing that the answer to “what’s in it for me” lay in the preservation of the principles on which this country was founded and which made everything else in their lives possible.

The really inelegant analogy I want to make has to do with how we approach business.  While the stakes in business aren’t nearly what they were and are for the vets, there are still people making that same decision today both in and out of business.  That decision is to put something else – your customers in the case of business, your country in the case of vets – ahead of yourself.  I’ve written a lot about everything from lousy customer service to marketing messages that shout “me me me” and not “you you you.”  That’s so 1999, isn’t it?

Converse, don’t spew.  Listen, don’t talk.  If I can’t get you to engage in a conversation and put others first because it’s smart, how about to salute the vets?

Any takers?

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May 21, 2018 · 12:16 pm

We Are At An Advertising Turning Point

Unless you never use the internet, you’re aware that something is happening in the next few days because every service and site you use is updating their terms of use. You may be wondering why you’re getting lots of emails to that effect or why sites are putting large banners to that effect on their homepage. It’s due to the start date of the GDPR. In case any of you don’t run digital businesses (which I suspect is most of you), the GDPR is a regulation that pertains to privacy and data protection for all citizens of the E.U. Because the internet is a global thing, many digital publishers and stores are extending the protections of the GDPR to their non-European consumers as well. I, for one, am very glad even though there is a good chance that it will force the ad tech business to change dramatically. It’s a big effing deal and we are at a turning point.

Let me preface this by saying that I got fed up with the ridiculous amount of tracking going on quite a while ago. Like many people, I think that tracking someone without their permission or a court order is wrong. I think it slows down the user experience and unbalances the trade of content for attention toward the publisher since tracking me beyond your content is infringing on some other entity’s territory. Besides that, it’s creepy. I don’t want to see a few weeks’ worth of ads for an item I looked up for a friend in which I have zero interest. I don’t care about ad personalization, frankly, although I know for many people it’s a much better user experience. I think only showing me ads for products and services that you think I might care about excludes product discovery and I have proof in that I’ve made many purchases based on content-based marketing but very few based on served ads.

I installed a browser extension called Cookie Auto Delete which wipes out cookies as you surf. That’s on top of Ghostery which blocks ads and other trackers. Because of that, I don’t see ads other than those targeted to things such as geography that don’t require cookies (actually, I don’t see a lot of ads period). Am I hurting my friends in digital publishing? I don’t think so since most of the cookies placed these days are not by publishers but by ad tech services that I think undermine the value of great content. They value eyeballs, not what lures the eyeballs.  Ads served directly by publishers and embedded in their content value the content. They’re not based on your ability to track me.

Am I overly sensitive? Not when I’m joined by billions of people who have installed ad blockers. If ad tech was doing a great job, that wouldn’t be happening. Would GDPR be necessary if ad tech companies respected consumers’ privacy? Of course not and I think it’s going to cripple any business that doesn’t respect its customers enough to work in the customer’s best interest. Tracking them like Big Brother doesn’t do that, does it?

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April 25, 2018 · 10:25 am

Selling Sneaky Vs. Selling Right

I got called an idiot this morning. OK, not in those exact words, but I was reading an article on social media marketing and a pop-up asked me to download a whitepaper. The choices I was given via the two buttons were “YES, sign me up” or “No, I don’t want the latest research.” It’s a classic example of what is called “confirmshaming”. This is the act of guilting the user into opting into something. If you choose not to, the option to pass is worded in such a way as to shame you into compliance. You can see numerous examples of it here.

That’s just one of the sneaky things marketers do. The worst, of course, is tracking you without your permission. Did you ever hear of a company called InMarket? Me neither, but if you installed one of 800 apps, they’re tracking your every move without your permission. You can read a very well done piece about it in Adweek. Is it legal? No one seems to be sure. Is it ethical? Oh hell no, not in my book. 

Marketing has never really been held up as a paragon of ethical behavior but I’m not sure why many of the folks in the field decided to head for new lows. Maybe it’s because digital tools have made it all much easier, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough grown-ups in the room when these decisions are made, maybe it’s because the drive for money has overtaken common sense. Witness the ongoing effort to force “influencers” to disclose when they’ve been paid to say nice things about a product or service. Besides that requirement being the law, it’s also the right thing to do.

Some more examples? Designing a website or email to focus your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from something else such as an opt-out button. Asking you to upload your contacts to give you some sort of social or informational benefit but using your address book to spam your friends. Not posting all of the charges and fees until the very last step in checkout or, even worse, hiding them in such as way that they’re hard to find. I think I’ve seen examples of those things just in the last few days. They’re not rare.

Why is there an aversion to the truth? Why can’t we call advertising by its name rather than some misleading name such as “sponsored content” or “special section”? Why can’t we treat consumers as we would a family member rather than a mark?

I’m not naive and I realize that this is about selling stuff. Given the high cost of getting caught, both in dollars (millions of dollars in fines!) and in reputation (check out the latest 20 Most-hated companies and why), those sales derived from the methods described above and others probably aren’t worth it in the long run. That’s my take – what’s yours?

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