Do people really care about what you know?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. When I started this blog, I didn’t have any expectations that anyone would read it, or give a flaming tomato what I had to say.

This blog actually began as a staging ground for content on the agency internal blog. At the time, the blog software on our enterprise solution (it rhymes with Spare Joint) didn’t cooperate very well with a mac — links and pictures had to be hand coded.

So I began writing blog posts here.

As they began piling up, I began to hit post on some of the posts. Eventually, some people began reading.

But I don’t for a second think anyone cares what I have to say. There are many, many blogs out there written by people who grand ideas about the future of marketing. Mine is one little corner of that. And in almost 3 years, a few people enjoy hanging out with me in the corner.

I tell you this because I’ve worked in the NO ONE CARES industry all my life.

People don’t care about, or want Advertising.

Outside of today’s Super Bowl, no one cares about the ads. No one buys a magazine to read the ads except for Art Directors, and they don’t actually read the ads. No one listens to the radio for the ads. If people could, they’d live in an ad-free world.

People think this even though they understand that the advertising message underwrites the content.Those 30 second spots on Today’s Super Bowl help to pay for the broadcast. And yet, no one cares.

(Caveat: This doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for advertising. “Apples 25 cents” is information that buyers want to know. Plus, one can still prefer to live in an ad free world, and be moved by a great ad.)

Which brings me to corporate blogging and social media.

There are people who will tell brands to start a blog. They will tell them that corporate blogging is the bees knees, and that progressive companies are blogging their keyboards off. They’ll point to examples from places having a lot of success, and they’ll tell you that said success is waiting for all brands.

They might be right. But one should never start with a tactic and work backwards. If those same people walked around saying you should all have Radio Spots, no one would take them seriously. But since tactics like “blog” seem new, we don’t laugh. We listen.

Knowledge is content

A blog is a tactical way to share knowledge. But so is a wiki. So is a Twitter feed. So is a video podcast.

My point is simple. Think about your target. Think about what they care about. Then carefully consider how best to communicate your knowledge.

Finally. If someone ever comes to you and says “Start a blog”, ask them why your customers would like to consume your knowledge in words.

Please understand, this blog post isn’t meant to talk anyone out of blogging. It’s meant to make everyone think hard about the tactics out there. Don’t start a blog because other people said to. Start one because your target market will appreciate the knowledge you have.

Facebook adds insights to comments

Facebook has launched insights built into a Facebook Page post. This is what they look like.

I took out the logo for this brand, and other parts of the message that might give a hint as to who they are. Who they are isn’t important, what is important is the 40,956 impressions – 0.27% feedback line.

And other posts have a message that says “Post Insights not yet available, please check back later.”, meaning they are going to back in insights on all posts.

Post Quality

Facebook still offers a Post Quality score, a “Score measuring how engaging your content is to Facebook users. A higher Post Quality indicates material that better engages users.”

But until now, we only really knew what posts engaged with people. With this new added feature, we can get a feel for impressions versus engagement. IE, response based on a real universe. Because the old universe was fans, but some fans don’t log into Facebook, or don’t log in at the right time and miss the message. So fans was never a true measure. In the case of the image above, the 41K fans who say the message are a percentage of the total fans of the page.

This will help content providers hone in the content that fans want. This is excellent. Thanks Facebook.

The iPad needs content

I think my boss is one of the smartest people I know, which I suppose makes me lucky. The other day, over a rare beer, my boss told me that he thinks the iPad will be a game changer.

I tend to agree.

On this blog, I write a lot about TV. I do think TV has a problem, and this problem comes at a time that is arguably a golden age for creativity.

Let’s start with the last point. If you ask people to name their top five favorite TV shows, you will get 5 different answers from 5 different people. From Lost, Heroes, Weeds, Dexter, Rescue Me, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia….

And now we hear that 3D TV has a greater wow factor in live sports than HD did.

It truly is a golden age for TV. There just simply isn’t enough time to watch it all, so we time shift. DVR’s and online watching are just some examples. We time shift in our house by watching entire shows on DVD.

It’s this last point that brings up the issue with TV. You see, we’re a Neilson Family, and have been for almost three years. I work in advertising, so we’re not supposed to be a Neilson Family. I’m also not supposed to tell you we’re a Neilson Family (if they have a google alert, this should be the end of our 3-year relationship). We have the computer on the back of our TV that logs all the TV we watch.

We’ve watched the first four seasons of Dexter, but we’ve never watched it on the TV in a way that gives it ratings. We don’t have Showtime. We’ve also enjoyed most of Weeds, all of the Wire, a lot of Rescue Me, all of Lost, and sadly, all of Life, a show we tried to watch on TV, but mostly watched online.

You can see the problem TV has. While it’s true there is wonderful content, it’s not true that marketers can ‘monetize this content’. Now admittedly, it’s not dire. As the Super Bowl will show, the 30 second TV spot isn’t dead. And it can still make an impact like no other marketing medium can (with the exception perhaps of digital, though digital rarely has the mass appeal of TV.)

But there is an issue. There’s a bunch of great shows, but there isn’t an easy way to get to all the masses. With so many people watching so many shows, it’s hard to reach people. With most of the media buying being done by monster media buying agencies, it’s almost impossible to compete.

So what does this have to do with the iPad? In theory, it can be the way to consume media in a way that is more friendly to marketers.

The iPad can be the thing that people use to consume media, like TV. And since the iPad knows a little bit about you, it can relate that information to marketers to create smarter ads. Smarter simply means more relevant in this case.

This is the Expedia ad delivered on a daily basis. The reason is that the iPad is only for consuming media. Even the kinds of shows that one watches tells marketers a bit more about the person watching. More so than out of touch Neilson ratings that have no idea that I’ve watched a single episode of Lost, Rescue Me or Dexter — to name just a few.

So I think it could be a game changer because it can help marketers offer more relevant content.

The key will be for content creators to embrace the technology. Then for marketers to figure out how to monetize the information they get.

The irrationality of our decisions

Dan Ariely, and MIT Professor, ran a webinar for B2B Magazine. The good news is, if you didn’t see the webinar, most of the content in it was covered here, in this TED Talk.  In both the webinar and the talk, he talked about the illusions of our decision making process. First though, he showed us some famous visual illusions. Here is one of them.

In this image, you’re asked what color the two blocks are. When we look at this image, we’re sure that one is brown and one is yellow. Turns out though, if you take away the background of the blocks, they are the same color.

Even more, once we learn the illusion, we still can tell it’s there. Seriously, go back and look at the first picture. Even though we ‘know’ the colors are both brown, our brains won’t let us see it. Indeed, some of you might even be thinking this is a trick (it’s not). Even though we know they are both the same color, we still can’t see that they aren’t.

So Dan wonders; if our eyes are incredible evolutionary system that can do a lot, and they can be easily tricked, then what about the decisions we make when it comes to economics  — a thing we’re not evolutionary designed to understand.

He talked about how our choice is influenced by the options that are presented and used an example on Jams.

There are two in-store displays in a grocery store. One shows six jams, the other shows twenty jams. The first display managed to stop 40% of the people. The second display managed to stop 60%. Everyone who stopped got a coupon for $1 off any Jam in the store.

And the results? 30% of people who say six jams redeemed the coupon and bought Jam. Only 3% of the people who saw 20 Jams redeemed the coupon.

The Paradox of Choice.

There is a great book called the Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less that explains this last phenomena pretty well.  We’re not hardwired to make a choice when faced with more than 7 options.

In a classic experiment described in a phenomenal episode of Radio Lab called “Choice”, they describe an experiment called “The Magic Number Seven” that purported that most people can naturally hold seven (+/- 2) numbers in their heads. When people are asked to remember more than seven numbers, strange things happen. People are asked to remember a number on a piece of paper. They can take as much time as they want, and then walk out of the room and into another room to recite the number.

Some are asked to remember a two digit number and some are asked to remember a seven digit number. As they walk down the hall, they are interrupted by a woman who offers them a “Thank you for participating snack”. The choices are a healthy bowl of fruit, or a huge piece of non-healthy chocolate cake.

The results. The people with two numbers almost always picked the fruit. The people with seven numbers almost always picked the cake. The reason is that the rational part of the brain is in competition with the emotional side. Emotional side wants cake. The rational side knows that fruit is better for them. However, when the rational side is given seven numbers to remember, it can’t compete with the emotional side of the brain, meaning people don’t make a rational decision, they make an emotional one.

Listen here.

So what are the implications of all this? Design matters. When we design anything, and place a communication in front of them, we are giving them a choice. If the choice isn’t clear, they will simply walk away. If the choice has too many options, they will walk away.

The agency client relationship

There’s a wonderful little yarn about Avis and DBB back in the Mad Men days, when agencies ruled and TV and Print could muster the kinds of sales that made people believe in Advertising. The post is here, but the actual Google Doc excerpt of the book Up the Organization – where the story came from is here.

Image via Wikipedia

The story is about how DBB agreed to work on the Avis account on the condition that Avis could not change any of the ads. They could approve them, or not approve them, but they couldn’t change them.

They couldn’t even add a logo. And if you look at the first link above, you’ll note that the Avis ad that adorns the top of the post has NO LOGO.

According to the book, one should let professionals do their job:

“Moral: Don’t hire a master to paint you a master-piece and then assign a roomful of schoolboy-artists to look over his shoulder and suggest improvements.”

And this got me thinking. Advertising people like this kind of story. Deep down, we’re all sure that if the client would just get out-of-the-way, the communications would be better. That might often be the case, but for the most part, the client agency relationship is an us versus them. Indeed, the above moral is a perfect illustration of the us versus them mentality (if only they got out-of-the-way and let the artists work…)

I’ve worked in multinational places like DDB, and I can tell you that I’ve experienced the us versus them. It even permeates to the Creative versus the Suits, where the ‘them’ are the account people (Suits) who seem hell-bent on changing creative to make it crap.

So clients should get out-of-the-way and let agencies do their job. But clearly this isn’t the case. And I think it’s because of the first point. The client does know the business better than marketers, and the client has Marketing in their title. We could trade stories about times when the client made changes to ads that the agency felt weren’t in the ads best interest. But that’s not the point of this post.

This is. Social media is turning the client agency relationship on its head. Think about it: social media is conversation, and it’s not the kind of thing that lends itself to the approval process. It takes an understanding of the brand, but also a Bernbachian trust between the client and the agency. If an agency runs the Facebook page or the Twitter feed for a client, the client can’t “approve” the script. They have to trust the people to do the job.

Expedia delivers a really smart banner ad

Update: this smart banner ad targeting has been going on for a while. Check out the comments on this Adverlab post to see some possible explanations. Interesting that the flights were to Chisinau and Kalamazoo, two places that jump out. (Would I notice if the ad said New York?)

For the most part, I ignore banner ads. I think the major reason is that I’ve trained my eyes to not give a damn about them. In fact, I’ve often thought that banners are the most needy of the advertising messages. Click me, touch me, scroll over me, they basically plead — and they do it with flashy lights to interrupt.

So, I’ve adopted banner blindness. But this banner ad jumped out at me.

I stared at it. For a long time. Then I e-mail it to my boss.

Here’s why.

Last week, I went to Expedia.com. I often start travel plans with Expedia and Kayak because they let me know the airlines in play from the little airport from which I embark.

I wasn’t logged into Expedia or Kayak.

But at Expedia, I searched for flights to Kalamazoo.

A week later, there’s Expedia, delivering me relevant content on hotels in the place I was planning to visit. Now, at first, one might wonder “How in sweet Mary did it know?”

Or, one might scream Big Brother.

The only thing I thought was cool.

Cool.

In my opinion, there are far too many irrelevant, dumb ads out there. This is a smart one. This one at least makes an attempt at being relevant. The ad in my shopping cart, in the urinal, on the truck, in the tweet, those things are noise. And there’s a lot of noise.

This was a message from a company I use telling me that they are paying attention. And they’re here to help me find a hotel in a city I’m clearly interested in visiting. As a marketer, I respect that. As a consumer, I love it.

What do you think?

Adding tabs to Facebook pages

Chances are, you might have noticed some of the things happening on Facebook pages in the last half of 2009. The reality is, the Facebook page can be a sort of microsite for a promotion, a product launch, or whatever.

Here are some examples of the Facebook tabs from Best Buy and Gap:

I’m not a programmer, but I’ve added tabs to Facebook pages. Check out the tabs on this page.

Facebook can do many things for businesses, both big and small. But it can’t do everything. As a marketing tactic, it can connecting people who use a product or service to people who don’t.

More importantly, it should work with, not against other marketing initiatives.

On it’s own, Facebook isn’t that good. Unless you’re the Gap or Best Buy (or a large well-known brand). If you’re not those things, Facebook can’t magically get people to a page.

But you know that, because chances are, your website isn’t attracting people. Well guess what: A website needs marketing to tell people about it. So does a Facebook page. If you build it, they won’t  come. So in 2010, don’t just tell people about your page with a silly “Fan us on Facebook”. Tell them what you want them to do.

“Tell us what you would do if you were CEO for a day at Facebook.com/brand”

Facebook is not a loner.

Facebook (and other social networks) can’t work alone. It needs help from the website (in the form of badges), e-mail blasts, ads…whatever. It’s not a silo, sitting in the wilderness collecting the 150 or so people who know someone who works on the marketing of the brand. If a brand decides to do a Facebook Page, it needs to work with other things. It might mean an ad drives people to a Facebook page instead of a website. It might mean something different, altogether. Figure that out as part of the goal.

If you do all that, Facebook can be a nice new tactic in your marketing plan for 2010. It can do some wonderful things, especially since it can now work with websites and promotions so well. Set your expectations by setting a goal. Be realistic, and Facebook can be a realistic tactic in your arsenal.

What is a social network?

Social networking is the hot thing in advertising. And it will be even when mobile becomes the next hot thing in advertising sometime around the summer when someone like Facebook or Twitter launch a mobile phone. (Google just did, and Facebook and Twitter long ago stopped being websites and started being media companies).

So what is a social network?

Seems to me that if people throw money at “social media“, then they should understand it. So lets start with the last word first.

Network.The word has a lot of meanings. It’s a noun (our network is behind a firewall) and a verb (I’m going to that event to network).

Today, a network implies the connecting of computers. The World Wide Web is a network of computers and servers that connect people to websites. Internally, our agency network is a connection of servers and desktops that use enterprise software to connect colleagues on internal blogs, Wiki’s, and client rooms.

But that’s a new use of the word network. Because a network is also a group of people tied together by something. A network might be a Chamber of Commerce, a thing people join in order to ‘network’. It might also be Facebook, arguably the most well-known of the social networks.

The point is, a network now implies the connecting of people. And when you really think about it, they were always social. They just didn’t have fancy logos.

That said, a social network is defined by Wikipedia as:

“A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes,” which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.”

I like to think of a social network as this:

“A social network is comprised of people tied together by a common outcome.”

In other words, people join social networks for the same reason they join a Chamber of Commerce. Or at least they will. Because now, the newness of is all means people are joining for the sake of joining.

“Should I just get on Facebook” a client once asked me in a meeting.

Just think about that for a minute. No one would say: “Should I just join my local chamber of commerce?” No, they would weigh the costs and benefits of their time versus what they want to get out of spending that time.

Not so with “Social Networks”. People are in the process of just joining because they are there, and thus the number of people on Facebook grows in a balloon like way. And as the growth balloons, clients decide they want to get in on it for the same reason people do — because other people and products are getting in on it.

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The future of the ad agency

Over at Forrester, there’s an interesting look at the future of the ad agency. Since I happen to work at one, I’m intrigued by the future of agencies. There are some good comments under the article. So go take a look.

I think 2010 will be the year where we really look into the future of agencies. We’re all sort of aware that the model doesn’t work as well as it did, but we’re not sure what model will work. Indeed, Steve Wax wrote:

“Great question, but I think we’re at such an early stage in the media revolution that we need to ask what the questions are, not what are the answers…”

I tend to agree. We’re not sure how this will all shake out, or even why we think agencies won’t be necessary. As we enter the Tens, I’m psyched to be working where I work. I think we’re on the right track at Eric Mower and Associates. Here’s why:

It used to be that different agencies were responsible for different tactics on the consumers path to purchase. The big ones took care of “Brand”. The digital ones took care of the website. The direct ones took care of the direct, etc.

This worked because “The Brand” basically ran the executions throughout the tactics. The Brand was the AOR, known as the Agency of Record. They dictated the look, feel and voice of the brand. Indeed, they would even publish Branding Guideline Books that talked about where the logo was appropriate, and where it wasn’t. It talked about the voice. It talked about colors. It was the brand bible, and all the other agencies that worked on the business got one.

This worked because the consumer’s path to purchase was a more linear path. It was awareness –> scouting –> purchase. Tactics like TV, print and radio solved awareness. Direct and promotions solved scouting, while coupons and in-store solved the point of purchase. And PR was always kind of separate.

The model was simple. Dictate the voice at the from (awareness), and ensure it all matches up in the middle and the end. The end was the purchase. Outside of airline Loyalty Programs, no one really cared about the post-purchase consumer.

Then came broadband internet access.

And the model feels broken because the path to purchase is less clear. Awareness can be generated through a PPC campaign (and who does that, the interactive agency of the brand?). Webinars, social media, PR and the blogosphere can impact the path to the purchase. The website is no longer just a brochure, it can be a tool to nurture people who aren’t yet buyers. Social media can turn post-purchase fans into product evangelicals.

So what does this have to do with the future of agencies?

I think that the agency that can handle everything on the path to purchase is an asset to a client. Where once we were siloed, handing web work to this agency, direct to that one, and calling the one that handles the brand the AOR, I think now the smart client takes it all into one place. A full-service, nimble shop that fights for a strategy, not the tactic that fits in their silo.

(Note: the accusation here is that an interactive agency would love nothing more than to have the client spend all their marketing dollars online, and not on TV. There is a risk when a client breaks up business that agencies fight for dollars in the marketing budget not on strategy, but because they simply want more of those dollars.)

True, clients can still outsource the tactics across the board — but then it will be on them to look at the overall consumer journey and see that the touch points reiterate what was said by all silos. Clients will require a Director of Message type role that works with the agencies (or freelancers) to ensure everything works together.

Because when everything is connected via the internet, then if it doesn’t work together, it’s a waste of money.

So it’s in that strategy that agencies still have value. Especially ones that offer strategic direction across all disciplines.

Full-service agencies are the unofficial “Director of Message” for the their clients. In the Tens, that will be critical.

Social media in 2010

If 2009 was the year of social media, then 2010 won’t be.

In 2009, there seemed to be a million different social media conferences all based on the idea of teaching social media.

But there was a need. In marketing, we don’t have to teach someone how a billboard works before we pitch it. People inherently understand the value of a billboard, a print ad, a piece of direct mail, etc.

Not so with Social Media. Especially when people post the opinion that Twitter (or Facebook, or podcasts) are changing the face of marketing, and that everyone needs to be on Twitter or be left behind.

It was this dire warning that created the demand for knowledge that was met by the millions of conferences/lunches/presentations on Social Media. I did my fair share.

These courses (how to’s) were, and are still necessary. Even if they simply calm the direness of the “you have to get into social media or be dead” warnings that come from many angles.

Which brings us to 2010.

One could argue that social media is mainstream. There is no longer a need to explain Facebook or Twitter (though there still might be a need to explain why people use it). We’re somewhat comfortable with it as a tactic, though not entirely sure who to use it. It’s on the radar.

Meaning, this should be the year that Strategy wins of over Tactic.

Instead of just starting a Facebook page or a Twitter feed or sticking a video on YouTube, we’ll craft a strategy whereby these tools fit into the marketing plan (or don’t when it doesn’t fit the objectives).

That’s the plan anyway. But one needs to simply look at the Internet to see that it might not happen. Think back to the first web bubble. It peaked when the NASDAQ did in the early part of the this decade, March 10, 2000. On that day, the euphoria of the web was at its highest. One could see it on the NASDAQ, but also in the halls of marketing departments.

We want a website, markers said. If agencies didn’t have a website solution in the marketing strategy, clients didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t a serious plan if it didn’t have a website.

As the decade ends, one would think that the web 1.0 way of building a website for the sake of building a website was antiquated thinking.

But it isn’t. In a generalized way, websites are still tactics, and not part of an overall marketing strategy. So what makes anyone think social media will be different?

So here’s what I think will happen. There will be lots of talk about strategies on social media. Seeing as how I’m a social media strategist, I hope to have many of them. But they will be drowned out by the next thing in 2010.

2010 will be the official Mobile Coming Out Party. If strategies don’t have “Mobile” solutions, they won’t be allowed at the table. So a mobile tactic will be inserted, whether right or wrong.

The website will be ignored. The social media ‘tactics’ written off as yesterday’s fad or executed because they are free, not because the tactic fits the strategy.

Just an opinion. I hope I’m wrong.