25June2009
Posted by robgraham under: Targeting; behavioral targeting.
As a marketer, a big part of my job is finding new and interesting ways to communicate with consumers. However, as a consumer I am often discouraged by many of the poorly planned and targeted advertising campaigns there are out there.
I’m a huge fan of relevant message targeting. While I also believe that more traditional reach and frequency metrics have their place in certain branding campaigns, the idea of trying to reach “everybody” with a single campaign seems antiquated and very wasteful.
Because we have computers and because we have an online marketing infrastructure to help lead us, were no longer beholden to hoping that our campaigns are working but can instead measure results to see if it is true or not. During the last few years, advances in behavioral targeting have given advertisers new tools to allow them to better refine the audiences they want to reach instead of having to default to getting the same message to everybody.
I bring this up because well meaning members of the U.S. House of Representatives have decided that behavioral targeting is an invasive science that needs additional regulation. The proposed legislation focuses on giving consumers the right and ability to opt out of being targeted using behavioral technologies. While on the surface it sounds a fair option, the reality is that the bill like this can severely stifle the ability for behavioral targeting to do its job. As a result, advertisers would still be the default to reaching everybody if they can’t target specific audiences.
As a huge proponent of consumer privacy I have no argument with most of the thoughts behind the pending legislation. However, in my experience with behavioral targeting (and having written a book on the topic I have some unique insights) the vast majority of behavioral targeting solutions are fully anonymous and cannot personally identify the consumers they are reaching. By comparison, direct marketers not only have your name, but in most cases, your home address. Try opting out of those lists.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks and months. I am hopeful that the lawmakers won’t decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater and will instead focus on guidelines to prevent the transfer of personally identifiable data between marketers. By the way, an IP address does not count as personally identifiable data.
22June2009
Posted by robgraham under: Uncategorized.
When a colleague of mine died early this spring he left behind many friends, a young family and his Facebook page. Recently, I saw his picture come up in rotation as one of my Facebook friends. Figuring that his account had gone quiet, I was surprised and rather touched to find that during the months since his passing, several friends and his children had posted messages to him expressing their missing of him and keeping him up-to-date on events that were taking place in their lives.
I found the action very poignant and started to wonder if this wasn’t a natural way to grieve the passing of people that we love. To me, it seems to be the modern equivalent of standing in the cemetery and talking to a grave marker but also allows those thoughts to be shared with other friends and family.
As a social media tool, communicating with dead loved ones will probably never be a killer app but it’s nice to see that these tools still allow us to express our humanness and to help us feel less alone during those times when we most need to be together.
12June2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing; Media Musings.
I think it was Roseanne Arnold who once said “it’s true; you do see the same people on the way down that you saw the way up”.
It seems that one of the national pastimes of this country is watching celebrities, large companies and anybody else who seems to pull ahead of the pack, to fall from grace. During the past few months Twitter has emerged as a ‘cutting edge social media’ tool. During this time, Twitter has been hyped, been part of major news stories, and has entered the consciousness of millions of people. The main challenge for Twitter has been to live up to all that hype.
Recently, news has been emerging that Twitter has a huge churn rate. While the rate of sign-ups may be impressively high (over 2000% in the past year) it’s starting to appear that the majority of those who sign up for Twitter poke around for a few days and then disappear. This news is also often followed by gloom and doom prognosticators who claim that this is indicative of Twitter’s inability to be an effective marketing tool.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that much of what establishes any growth in any industry is based upon two factors: 1) a perceived need for that product or service in the market, and 2) curiosity on the part of consumers to learn more about those products and services. In the case of Twitter, with so much hype surrounding its use (largely brought on by people like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher) many people just wanted to check it out to see what it was. This is all perfectly acceptable.
However, just because you check something out doesn’t mean that it’s something you want or need. We’ve all watched the random infomercial for a product that we never bought. It may have engaged us and even held our attention for a full half-hour and made us think of ourselves “wow, if I bought that product I can have washboard abs!” But there’s a difference between those things that pique our interest, and those that motivate us to take action. In the case of Twitter, just because you logged in and looked around doesn’t mean it’s something you need.
For years I have been a fan of master carpenter Norm Abrams and his show “The New Yankee Workshop“. I sometimes watch with fascination at the ease in which he creates these complex pieces of furniture. But I also realize that if I were to try to create the same project, odds are good that it will look like it was put together by vandals. The bottom line is that even if I went out and bought all of these great tools, that doesn’t make me a master carpenter. That moniker comes with a good understanding of how to use those tools to accomplish my goals.
I feel the same holds true for Twitter. To claim that Twitter can’t live up to its promise to be good marketing tool has nothing to do with Twitter itself, but with how it is used. Anybody who believes that the path to marketing success when using Twitter is simply throwing up a random tweet once in a while is using pretty much the same logic as a person who believes that buying a hammer and saw will magically turn them into a craftsman.
It’s not a question of whether Twitter can be used effectively as a marketing tool. There are way too many cases of people who’ve used it as an effective way of communicating with other people who really want to hear what they have to say. But like any mode of communication, it is not a magic bullet that will suddenly grab the attention of everybody and bring them to your doorstep. Instead, it is only a tool that can allow marketers and other people to create a targeted list of other people who might be interested in what they have to share. And that itself is pretty damn impressive.
6June2009
Posted by robgraham under: Media Musings; Targeting.
I make mistakes.
It’s a human thing. I’m not thrilled about it but there’s not a lot I can do to change this.
You see, as hard as I try to do everything perfectly the first time it rarely happens. That’s not to say I can’t get close or be effective in my efforts, but I’ve learned that the reality of almost any development process is that it can be rejiggered and refined to be even better and more effective.
I bring this up because in marketing and advertising there’s a certain assumption that by the time the campaign has been created and distributed, it is 100% spot in reaching its target audience and campaign goals. As much as I’d like to believe that the campaigns are created in the past hit all set marketing goals square on the head, I’m dubious that, as brilliant as I am, I’ve been able to bat .1000 consistently.
Like anything else, marketing is about achieving success by small degrees. Certainly, there are best practices that will get you well within range of your marketing goals. But marketing online (and off-line for that matter) is not a ‘set it and forget it’ proposition. It is a dynamic process that should be designed (and be allowed to) to evolve slowly over time. This also holds true for just about any type of marketing or advertising content designed for consumption including webpages, printed brochures, display ads, point of purchase displays, and just about anything that you can think of.
The reality of all of these forms of communication is that you won’t be able to know how effective they are in reaching the right consumers with the right message until you do two things:
1. Clearly identifying how success for the campaign or project is being determined
2. Identifying the areas of contact between net media and consumers that directly impact
reaching those goals
The bottom line is that you can’t measure success until you know what it is. Furthermore, you need to define what to measure in order to determine if those success points are being reached.
For example, if we were training to be archers, we could both easily agree that the goal for this activity would be to consistently fire the arrow and hit the bull’s-eye. As we take our shots, it’s going to be clear to both of us whether or not we are successful. However, every shot taken provides us with feedback which helps to determine what was wrong with the previous shot and how we might use that understanding to improve the success of the next shot. In this way, over time we should be able to refine our approaches until we are able to hit the bull’s-eye just about every time.
This optimization phase is a natural part of any development process. In online advertising the opportunity to access instant feedback and use that information to determine future success is a powerful, powerful tool. However, in order to take advantage of this secret weapon, you first need to be willing to admit that you’re probably not doing it 100% right the first time and build in the feedback loop to tell you what you’re doing wrong and how you can improve those results.
Bottom line is that it’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes can also provide us with feedback which we can use to minimize future mistakes. Marketers who don’t have an optimization phase built in their advertising cycle are ignoring this reality.
And that is a mistake.
Rob Graham
28May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Media Musings; Targeting.
A few weeks ago I was visiting an office building in while waiting for a meeting, I picked up a brochure that was sitting in a small Lucite stands in the corner of the waiting area. It was one of those tri-fold brochures popular during the 90s in which a marketer could run preprinted and pre-scored paper through the laser printer and voilà suddenly you had marketing collateral.
Now, I’m not going to pick on the media (since I too used it at one point in my career as a way to create very affordable marketing materials) but I did notice in reading this brochure that they totally missed the point of what they were trying to accomplish in the first place.
The brochure was for a company that provided professional services. The content talked about the services, about the history of the company, about the people running the company, and about where they did their business. However, in carefully scanning the contents, I noted that not once did they explain to me (the reader of their marketing materials) how any of this information applied to me.
Effective marketing is about creating a relationship with the consumer. In order to do this, marketers need to provide consumers with something that personally resonates with them by meeting their current needs and desires. While in this case all of the information in the brochure was factual and accurate, it was also highly irrelevant in telling me why I should care. In truth, it appears that the brochure was written for the benefit of the marketer. I can just imagine them looking over the copy and commenting to each other about how professional this makes them appear and that the shot of the outside of their office really pulls it all together. Unfortunately, by the time that I, the consumer, look at it, it appears to be a self-serving printout which was designed to impress but not necessarily to inform.
For marketing to be effective consumers need to be able to “try on” the content being provided. If I were walking by a store window and saw a new suit sitting on a mannequin, I would automatically picture myself wearing that suit and judge in my mind’s eye whether I thought it would look good on me or not. Likewise, with just about anything that we can purchase, consumers need to try on the idea first before they can make a decision to buy. Anybody who’s gone house hunting knows that there are occasions when you walk into a house and you say, “this is nice but it just isn’t me”. It doesn’t matter what criteria you used to arrive at that conclusion. The truth is the decision that you make is based on personal revelations and how well something meets your comfort levels.
The other thing that is important for marketers to remember is that consumers have limited bandwidth. We are bombarded daily with marketing messages and as a result we are in scan mode. This scan allows us to quickly eliminate anything in our environment which is a relevant to our immediate needs while also keeping an eye for those things that match our set of current needs and desires. For marketing to work in this environment it needs to provide hooks that will allow us as consumers to include it and its content in our current list of needs. It’s quite possible that there are marketing messages that are very relevant to us as individuals they get passed over because that information is not obvious to us when we come in contact with the message.
‘What’s in it for me? ‘Is the rallying cry of the consumer. To be an effective marketer you need to focus on the answer to that question at every turn. If you can’t effectively explain to consumers why they should care about your offer than the deal is done — in most cases the consumer won’t even notice that you exist and they will happily move on scanning for content that matters to them personally.
Rob Graham
22May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Marketing Methodologies; Media Musings.
In case you hadn’t noticed it the world is changed. In this column I often focus on how these changes affect our efforts as marketers and advertisers. However, I think it’s important that we knowledge the elephant in the room and discuss what the future of our part of the world will look like in just a few years.
Online media is here to stay. For those of us who work in this area this is a blessed event. For those who work in more traditional media these are often very frightening times.
You need only look at the rapidly failing newspaper industry to gain a sense that something that once was the dominant way of distributing news and information is no longer can of that domain. In the case of the decline of newspapers, advertisers found it easier, cheaper, more effective, and overall faster to reach customers using different new and emerging online technologies. From free classified ads to news as it happens, most newspapers can no longer compete against those technologies and methodologies which have become dominant instead.
The result is that for a newspaper to survive it needs to first gain a better understanding of what its new identity is. For many newspapers, the concept of printing presses and home delivery are still at the core of their fundamental business models. After all, they are in the newspaper business. But in the future, will this be the dominant form of news distribution? I think we can safely say that the answer is “probably not”. However, all is not lost. Newspapers also have a great social infrastructure which allows them to serve as the voice of the community. Yes, the market for yesterday’s news being delivered today is quickly dying. However for newspapers to remain a central pillar of the community and to allow readers to exchange ideas with one another has a strong future possibility. Newspapers as media companies, are also well positioned to allow advertisers to reach target consumers and to provide connectivity between people.
I’m not saying that this revelation alone is going to save the newspaper industry. But positive change starts with accepting that you are no longer in control of what is happening in the world around you and finding new ways to reestablish your worth to the economy.
Several years ago I was in a meeting with a publishing client of mine. We were discussing ways in which they could take aspects of their educational materials and place them into digital media format for easier access and use by students. During this meeting, one of the senior executives slammed her hand down on the desk and stated “We are a textbook manufacturing company. We have always been a textbook manufacturing company. And we will always be a textbook manufacturing company!”
My initial thought at the time was “it really doesn’t matter what you want reality to be, the market is going to change based upon the needs and desires of your clients. To think otherwise puts you in a very precarious position.”
It has been said that the only people who like change are wet babies. Change is uncertain, change can be difficult and often painful. But avoiding change and pretending that it isn’t happening can end up destroying even the most ardent believer. Effective marketing, and so many other things, starts with setting affective goals. If those goals take into account a changing world and offers new solutions to old problems then you’re in pretty good shape. However, on the other hand, if the goal is to always maintain the status quo and keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them for years, then those years may be numbered.
19May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Marketing Methodologies; Targeting; Uncategorized.
When we talk about finding solutions to problems, part of the natural progression is to look for what works and stick with it. Unfortunately, this often means that we stay with the first solution we find and neglect looking for additional solutions.
I bring this up because I’m often surprised by the lack of efficiencies that many of the current manufacturing and economic systems offer. As an example, I was shocked to learn several years ago (horrified actually) that the standard combustion engine used in almost all auto manufacturing today uses only about 1% of the energy being generated by the burning of gas to move the vehicle forward.
While I won’t belittle the usefulness of cars and other vehicles it does seem to me that an acceptance of the pure waste of 99% of the potential energy is a shame. However, if you peek back at what life was like during Henry Ford’s rise to automotive dominance, the plain truth is that gasoline was cheap and plentiful. As a result, the need to push the envelope and to create more efficient car engines was offset by a real lack of need to do so. Today, things have changed and technologists around the world are working hard to increase efficiencies of the standard combustion engine.
As we continue to fumble our way through new and often very different advertising and marketing paradigms for the 21st century, it occurs to me that the way we’ve been doing “our thing” for the last 100+ years means that we too never stopped to figure out ways to make the process more efficient but instead settled for the results we got because they were so far better than anything we’ve had before.
For these reasons, traditional direct marketers were content (overjoyed, actually) if they received a 2% response on their direct mail campaigns. Using a business model that builds a 98% waste factor into it strikes me as a prime example of not setting realistic goals.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of challenges in reaching consumers because we all know that’s not the case. However, as we begin to develop new models for targeting and reaching consumers what can we do to increase the efficiencies of the programs that we create so we can allow the greatest potential to move our messages with the least amount of waste?
I would propose that we can start this process by first moving away from the mindset that reach and frequency is the end all. True, in some campaigns, such as branding, getting your message in for the greatest number of eyeballs accomplishes this set task. However, even with branding there are ways to increase efficiencies so that the brands are seen by those consumers to which the brand is significant and may fill a future need. Offering a brand of surfboard to the entire population of an economy may meet branding goals of “getting the message out there” but, as I’m sure you will agree, still falls very short of getting the message to those consumers would be most interested in purchasing a surfboard now or in the future.
I would also propose that in the future accurate consumer targeting is paramount to the success of any campaign. As pointed out above, reaching everybody with the same message is not only incredibly wasteful but often meaningless to huge percentages of consumers. By first identifying who the target consumers for product or brand are and then breaking that group into smaller sub targets will allow advertisers to create multiple marketing problems that are specifically designed to reach specific segments of the target audience. As a result, more consumers receive a message that meets their personal wants and needs and also speaks to them directly.
Finally, I would propose that start to accurately measure online and offline campaign results. There are too many horror stories of companies that have spent millions upon millions of dollars on advertising without ever stopping to measure what the results of the campaigns were. True, not every campaign yields a clean number that determines whether or not ROI was met or not. However, to have no understanding of what the money you’re spending is actually doing for future profits is almost criminally negligible. To be an effective marketer in the 21st century means finding meaningful and accurate ways of collecting data and then analyzing that data to come up with clear and meaningful answers that help identify if marketing goals are being reached.
The bottom line, as I see it, is not one of waiting for the right tools and technologies to find their way into the marketplace. We have arrived already. The challenge now is to learn how to use these tools effectively and to move away from older and less efficient methodologies and exchange them for proactive and meaningful ways of measuring campaign success. This will not only allow us to be more efficient with every dollar spent by two also do a far better job at communicating the benefits our brands and services provide consumers.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Rob Graham
18May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing; Media Musings.
I received a call a few days ago from a sales rep telling me that he was in charge of global sales for a company that provided training services. Being that I too provide training services I wasn’t quite sure what kind of synchronicity we might have and would’ve mentioned this except that right after introducing himself he went into his patter to tell me about all of the different services-based company offered. It was quite an impressive list. The only problem was is that I didn’t know how any of these services could be applied to my business models because he never bothered to clarify any of my business goals.
Eventually I was able to shake him free with a polite “sorry, but we’re not interested at this time”. I hung up the phone and started thinking about his approach and pondering how ineffective it was at reaching me and my needs.
We’ve all been subject to ineffective and just plain bad sales pitches. In this case the information he was providing me was all legit, and in his mind, no doubt, very topical. The problem was that he had no idea what my needs were and never even bothered to find out. The result was a mishmash of options presented to me at such a rapid pace that I couldn’t try any of them on to see if they fit.
Selling is hard. Selling to people who don’t know what you offer is very hard. Selling to people who have no interest in learning what you offer is harder still. However, there are ways of starting a dialogue with prospects that allow salespeople to move away from their carefully crafted scripts and to start a real conversation with a real people. In this example, all the sales rep really needed to do to start things off was to ask me about my business. What is it that I do day-to-day? What is it that I was hoping to accomplish in the future? By gaining an understanding of what my needs were and what my future goals are, he would have been well-positioned to respond to me I saying something like: “Well, based on what you’ve told me, I have a great solution for you!” Instead, I received a laundry list of generic information that was fairly meaningless and more indicative of someone merely fishing.
As marketers, we all need to move away from any type of communications model that sounds more like a monologue than a dialogue. Consumers can very easily tune out and ignore these one-size-fits-all pitches. After all, they don’t know what’s in it for them unless they can establish where the connection is. By approaching the sales pitch as a dialogue, the goal is to share information back-and-forth. I ask you a question and your answer gives me insight into our potential relationship. With this insight, I can establish points of commonality, assess your needs, and use any information you provide me to customize a response that best fits your personal needs. Without this input, I can only guess what you want or need and in most cases I’m going to get it wrong.
Simply asking a few questions during the sales process not only humanizes the conversation but provides solid insight into how the relationship between the sales rep in the consumer can move forward.
13May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing; Media Musings.
The headlines are buzzing this morning because U.S. retail sales for the month of April fell unexpectedly for the second month in a row. In short, people aren’t returning to their former pre-bust buying habits as the economy is proposing to improve.
I can’t speak for most Americans, but I know that I am much more cautious today with how I spend my money because of concerns I have that in the future I may need whatever cash I have on hand to cover my basic living expenses and would rather not have it tied up in a new sofa or flat-screen TV. But is it my thriftiness, and that of most Americans, that is causing this decrease in retail sales?
I think the problem goes deeper than that. As a guy in his middle fortysomethings, my need to go out and acquire new “stuff” is diminishing rapidly. During the last four decades I’ve acquired pretty much everything that I want to acquire. Certainly from time to time the need for a new pair of jeans, a best-selling novel, and perhaps a new car will appear on my ‘needs radar’. But we’re talking maintenance here and not consumption. I don’t personally need a new device that will allow me to play music. I don’t need a computer. I don’t need new bedroom furniture, an outdoor grill or a white picket fence in front of my home. I already have all these things and the need to acquire new ones is very limited.
As the population continues to age, there are more people over the age of 50 with discretionary income than there are under 50. If, like me, most of these people are in a post-consumer mode of behavior, then that leaves a fairly limited portion of the population to cover the entire range of product consumption in order to keep all of these retail channels up and running. The bottom line is that there are too many stores that want to sell their stuff to too few customers who want to buy it.
It doesn’t make any sense to believe that any economy can sustain perpetual growth when it comes to the sale of things. What does make sense is that as consumers our habits are changing to better meet our desires. In the past decade consumers have gotten away from the desire for things and have had moved closer to products and services that offer us opportunities for experience and engagement. This opens a new door to companies who can provide interesting and meaningful experiences for consumers and it also means that these companies aren’t beholden to manufacturing products for sale.
I don’t have all the answers here. I only know that if I were to plan for the future as a business, I would focus on providing information products that would allow people to live a more fulfilling and interesting life and focus on those things that don’t necessarily need to be carried home in a shopping bag.
12May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Bad Marketing Practices.
The bartering of information is perhaps at the core of anything that marketers do online. In a nutshell, marketers create opportunities for trade with prospects by offering them something of value in exchange for personal information. In most cases this works quite well. If a marketer can offer something of value to consumers are generally willing to exchange personal information for that value.
Unfortunately, not everybody gets this concept.
Yesterday, while doing some research, I decided to check out a new service being offered by Omniture called Omniture Genesis. Just for the record, Omniture is a great company with plenty of great products and services. However, in this instance they totally missed the ball.
In my attempt to learn more about Omniture Genesis I clicked on a link to see a product demo and was immediately taken to a registration page. I didn’t want to register — I wanted to see a demo. However, until I gave them my personal information (including my phone number) I wasn’t going to have an opportunity to learn more about the product and what it could do for me. In the end, I followed the registration process so I can watch the short demo.
The problem with this approach is that it forced me to make a commitment way too early in the process. It also is creating a marketing firewall of sorts. Furthermore, I’m not interested in buying Omniture Genesis. I was simply doing research so that I would have a better understanding of the service should it ever come up in conversations with my clients. But now I exist in their database as being someone who is interested in perhaps purchasing Omniture Genesis in the future. Not the case.
This information gathering approach is kind of like forcing somebody to sign a lease agreement before they test drive a car. It doesn’t make any sense in that context and it doesn’t make any sense in this. If you want to get information from a site visitor make sure the trade is a fair one and that you are offering something of value (a white paper, a widget, a screensaver, etc.) in exchange for that consumer’s personal information.
On the other hand, if the only thing you have to trade is it your marketing materials then it’s a pretty bad deal and will probably drive away at least half of your prospects before they’ve even had a chance to be engaged by what you offer. Try giving the marketing materials away for free and then create ways to channel interested consumers toward providing personal information for future follow-up.
