Tag Archives: Reality checks

July 10, 2015 · 11:42 am

Gout, Seriously

It’s Foodie Friday, and this week’s topic is the very serious business of the very serious food magazines. I was reminded of this by something Eater.com does every so often, which is to publish the cover of a mock foodie rag called Gout. You can see the covers here and here. While it may look like a legit food magazine, with article titles such as “Summer! It literally comprises 1/4 of every year but we’re going to explain all the food as if you’ve never previously considered grilling burgers before!” it clearly isn’t.

One of the articles – “Vodka – it’s cool again!!! (unrelatedly, Grey Goose bought the back cover ad)” points to the problem we’ve talked about numerous times here on the screed.  It’s reinforced with the “An editor we’re trying really hard to turn into a celebrity writes about his trip to Uruguay as if it weren’t fully comped”.  When ad and edit become indistinguishable and readers begin to wonder if what they’re reading is a version of the truth someone is paying for you to see, we have a problem.  As an aside, this isn’t just an issue with food magazines – I’ve never much believed equipment reviews in golf magazines since I’ve never seen a bad review of anything.  Funny how that works when 90% of your revenue is from equipment companies…

But that rant isn’t my point today.  What Eater has done here is something we all need to do a lot more often: poke fun at ourselves.  After all, unless we really are brain surgeons, EMT’s, firefighters or a few other professions, it’s not as if what most of us do is life or death.  In fact, I’ve often said that the best part of my job is that if I screw up, nobody dies.

Business is hard.  It can be horrible sometimes.  It is very serious most of the time. Because of that, every so often we all need to do what Eater has done – recognize the silly stuff inherent in our industry, and laugh.  Honestly, while a great meal may leave you happy and satisfied, a good laugh is better for your health.

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July 1, 2015 · 10:01 am

The Power Of No

Almost everyone I know complains that there never seems to be enough time in the day. Time really is a zero-sum game and even if you go without sleep (really a BAD idea) you eventually run up against that 24-hour limit. The answer, then, isn’t to find a way to make more time but to do fewer things. That’s the power of no.

It’s hard in business not to chase every opportunity, particularly when you’re a small company that’s just learning about in which of those opportunities lies the best chance for sustained profitability. As a marketer, there is a never-ending stream of media that provide the ability to interact with your audience. Social media grows daily and the support needed to maintain a steady stream of conversation in them grows with the number of channels.

As individuals, we take on tasks with impossible deadlines. We lose sight of the cost/value equation with respect to the time required for some pieces of work vs. the benefit gained to the enterprise or even just personally. We might even dig ourselves a hole by accepting responsibility for a task that we don’t have the skills to do. All of those things are self-defeating and could be stopped with just one word.

When I began consulting I was overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted my help.  The problem, I soon found, was that they had neither the ability nor the intention to pay me for my time (there is that word again).  As I’ve said to many people over the years, the Stop & Shop doesn’t take stock certificates at the checkout.  I’ve learned to say no.

Sometimes “no” isn’t about stopping something altogether.  You don’t really need to post on Facebook every hour nor does everything you run through Twitter have to be unique to that platform – cross posting is OK, honest.  Even so, being more efficient can help but ultimately “no” is  every once in a while.  Agreed?

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June 29, 2015 · 11:54 am

The Rise Of The Machines

One of the things I do to amuse myself when the weekend weather isn’t cooperative is to play video games.  I’m almost done playing the Mass Effect trilogy, which I highly recommend.  The games’ story revolves around a galactic war between biotics (humans and other species) and synthetics – machines, basically.

I flashed back to the game as a dozen articles about programmatic media buying came through my news feeds.  I don’t think it’s a shock to any of you to read that media buying has been transitioning from the personal, relationship-based business in which I grew up to programmatic.  People don’t talk to one another in today’s media buying and selling business: machines do. The days (and nights) of long lunches, emailed proposals, phone calls on Friday afternoons to sell out the weekend, and the entire one-to-one negotiating process have become mostly a memory.

I get it.  Programmatic is far less labor-intensive and a lot more efficient than the way I learned to sell media.  Efficiency, however, isn’t the total story and as the machines take over quite a few other things get lost.  The biggest one in my mind is transparency.  In many cases, the current media buying platforms primarily provide breakdowns of networks, and total schedule dayparts, and only after the campaign is complete do you see what has transpired and individual spot affidavits are shared.  Clients (the people who pay the bills, after all) are spending big chunks of their budgets on a plethora of middlemen, each of whom extracts their little pound of flesh for touching the buy.  It’s common for a third or more of the buy’s budget going to pay for services rather than media.

The biggest issue I have, frankly, is the loss of context.  Buying has shifted to buying audience delivery from buying based on content.  The machines buy and sell cookies, basically.  Those cookies might enable the buyers and sellers to learn quite a bit of information who is on the other end but they don’t add context.  Does that matter?  Indeed it does.

“While it certainly offers the opportunity to reach audiences more efficiently, our research shows that advertisers can’t ignore the strength of the publisher’s brand as a fundamental part of the ad experience and overall effectiveness of the campaign.”  That’s a quote from chief marketing officer and chief client officer at Millward Brown Digital as he reported on a study they had done.

According to Millward, as the “Brand Score” went up, so did the fit of advertisements, the consumers’ enjoyment of the ads, the trust consumers placed in the ads and the usefulness of the ads. Millward based its ratings on behavioral and attitudinal data collected about the consumers that visited the 44 sites during February 2014.

It’s not just about getting the right message to the right people at the right time.  It also involves the right place (read site/program).  I think that takes a human touch.  While beer ads make sense to a young male, those ads on a page containing “beer” and “drinking” keywords might also be a report of a car wreck due to drunk driving.

The human touch in media buying alerted us to when an episode might have subject matter that’s wrong for our ad. Buying audiences without regard for the show they’re watching or site they’re reading is allowing the machines to win at the expense of our marketing.  As the guys who spent the weekend battling them, I say no.  You?

 

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