Tag Archives: Reality checks

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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May 4, 2015 · 11:35 am

Misleading Marketing

Sometimes it’s just too easy to point out corporate stupidity and today I’m taking that easy road. You might be aware that the FTC is suing AT&T for allegedly misleading consumers by offering them “unlimited” data plans, and cutting back their data speed when they exceeded a maximum monthly allotment of data usage. AT&T doesn’t deny doing it, which is smart since there is ample evidence to support the accusation. Nope. Instead, they’ve told the FTC that their hands are clean since customers should have known they were going to be throttled if they used too much data.

I’m not all that knowledgable about network congestion management.  I do know that all ISPs (and a wireless carrier is one of those although you might not think of them that way) use “traffic shaping” to manage the load on their system.  Generally that’s something that’s imposed on a short-term basis to manage load.  So while there may be a heavy demand for bandwidth during primetime evening hours, traffic is much lighter in the middle of the night, for example.  Wireless carriers (except for Sprint) all impose limits on the bandwidth a user can have.  In my mind it’s a false scarcity since most people don’t come close to using all the bandwidth in their plans.  Even with the explosion of mobile video usage, no one is claiming that our wireless infrastructure is near its limit.  But let’s put aside the alleged technical issue and focus on the real point.

You can’t sell something as “unlimited” and then place limits on it.  Selling someone an unlimited high-speed data plan which becomes very low-speed after a certain, unstated point is misleading at best and fraudulent at worst.  The  fact that customers continue to renew their contracts isn’t an indicator that they don’t mind being deceived; it’s more of an indication about how little choice we all have.

This quote, taken from a MediaPost article on the subject is what I find particularly galling:

AT&T adds that consumers with unlimited data plans signed up for those contracts even though they “had reason to anticipate the possibility” that they would be throttled.

I don’t know how someone at AT&T wrote that with a straight face.  Really?  When you said “unlimited” a customer with zero technical training about network management should have anticipated that once they crossed some boundary known only to you they would suffer a service degradation?

Any of us in business need to run our businesses in accordance with the business model we develop to maintain profitability. If AT&T’s engineers tell them that throttling is necessary, so be it.  The point is that we need to let our customers know what they’re buying – honestly, transparently, and actively.  Lying isn’t a marketing plan – it’s just stupid.  Right?

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April 28, 2015 · 11:52 am

The Delusion Gap

Some mornings as I’m writing this I feel like I’m Chevy Chase reading the news that Generalissmo Francisco Franco is still dead because so much of what crosses my digital desk as news is just so “duh.”  When I read about the latest report out of the folks at IBM and Econsultancy called The Consumer Conversation Report I really did say “and Franco is still dead” out loud.  Here is why.

There is a huge gap between marketers’ intentions and their customers‘ satisfaction.  As the report says:

A common theme throughout this research is that brands’ belief in the strength of their customer experience doesn’t line up with their customers’ reality.

For example:

  • Only one in three consumers believe that their favorite companies understand them.
  • Of those consumers who switched consumer services in the last year, most did so for reasons companies should be able to predict and prevent.
  • Of the nearly 50% of consumers with a significant service issue in the last 12 months, only 28% say that the company dealt with it very effectively.

That’s a pretty important point.  We can’t pat ourselves on the back in business.  Our partners and customers are only ones who can do that for us and in this case they’re telling us something very different.  When 90% of the responding companies felt they were able to resolve customer conflicts in a satisfactory manner and not even 60% of customers felt the same way, there is a problem.  Let’s call it the delusion gap – the space in between our beliefs and those of our customers.  We all know that anger and frustration lie in the gap between expectations and experiences.  I’d suggest that the delusion gap is a direct corollary to that difference.

We need to use all of the data we gather to develop honest answers.  They might not be the ones we want to hear but they’re the beacons that point us to serving our constituencies better.  If two-thirds of those groups believe we don’t understand them and we believe otherwise, someone is delusional.  You?

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