If It Ain’t Broken, Why Innovate?

 

This article, entitled “TV isn't broken, so why fix it?” (link) appeared on CNN this past week. I have to say, I fundamentally disagree with almost everything about it.

The primary idea that I have an issue with is that because TV (and are we talking about the device or the delivery format?) isn’t completely without utility or appeal, no one should be trying to improve it. What if Kennedy had looked at the moon and said, “Hey, no one has ever been up there, so why should we go?”

Seriously though, I find it hard to believe that a guy writing a ‘Business Insider’ piece for CNN’s Technology segment could be so opposed to progress and innovation. The companies he takes shots at for trying to improve the consumer experience with their televisions? Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Those are some pretty good track records when it comes to developing new and popular ways to interact with technology, and I would imagine that one of them could very well strike upon the key to the next stage in TV evolution.

In criticizing their past attempts to innovate in the space is his second majorly flawed position (after “maintain the status quo”), which is basically, “if these companies have failed to achieve this breakthrough in the past, they should just quit trying.” Really? Once again, this doesn’t feel like someone who should be writing about business or technology.

Then the piece meanders for a bit while the author goes back and forth between talking about TVs as a piece of technology and TV as a service provided by cable companies without recognizing the distinction, followed by some unsubstantiated assumptions about TV consumers and some weak anecdotal or hunch-based evidence.

“But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most TV viewers simply won't care enough about any of this stuff to shell out $1,500 for a new Apple TV, or spend a few hundred bucks and countless hours fiddling around adding a new box to their TV set and figuring out how it works.”

Oh yeah? Those being the same people who waited in long lines to pay $400 for a slightly newer version of a cell phone they already had? Why am I picturing the guy who wrote this as an 80-year old man whose grandkids have to constantly set his VCR clock?

“But normal people don't think about TV that way. TV is passive. The last thing we want to do is work at it.”

What defines “normal people?” How do you know what they think about TV? More importantly, what have you seen in the last few years that doesn’t suggest that people are looking for more control, more personalization, and more interactivity?

Perhaps the biggest fallacy at all is that TV hasn’t already been revolutionized several times in recent memory. To him the massive old box upon which he enjoyed black and white westerns as a child is somehow closely related to the HD plasma flat-screen which is currently streaming Netflix via an HDMI connection from my laptop. A year or two ago I was setting recordings weeks in advance so that I could watch my favorite shows after I returned from vacation, and skip the commercials while I was at it. I no longer adjust the rabbit ears when my picture is blurry, and the channel options went from 14 to 1,400 in my lifetime.

“That's why we love TV just the way it is. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

If people had said that 20 years ago, I would consider TV extremely broken. Speaking as a marketer, I do actually find a lot of problems with television, but even as a viewer I would be happy to see change. As it is, there is much room for improvement, and while lack of imagination may be something that the author suffers from, I’m glad that there are people in the industry who don’t share that narrow-mindedness.

As soon as I calm down enough to climb off this soapbox, I will submit my resume to CNN. It seems like they are in desperate need of some technology writers.

Google Is Not Shaking Things Up as Much as We Thought

::NEWS FLASH::

I just received this emergency telegram from my high-level sources at Google:

"Matthew

AdWords blog was unclear -(stop)-
Rumors abound in POVs and the blogosphere about reduced ad inventory -(stop)- 
We plan to show the same number of 1st page ads as before -(stop)-
If 6 ads would appear in the right-side rail, they will not move to the bottom -(stop)-
CPCs should therefore not increase -(stop)-

Please stop calling us every ten minutes -(stop)-
Seriously stop -(stop)-

-Deep Throat"

So my previous take on this, and a number of POVs that agencies have already made public and sent to clients, appear to have been a little hasty.

The Google employee I spoke to seemed unaware of the industry's first take on this change, but seemed to understand how this could be misconstrued given the brevity of the announcement on the AdWords blog, as well as their general lack of transparency on exactly how and why ads would be shifting around.

Scooped!

Crowd-source This Contest! Update 2

So far, we have 3 comments/entries.  Here are some highlights:

1.) Geotargeting (but to where?)
2.) 3 pieces of creative per ad group
3.) Small kw list divided into ad groups of no more than 3-10 kws
4.) Exact match only
5.) Lower max bids as history creates CTR/quality score
6.) Bid to position 4
7.) Social integration
8.) Viral "real world" marketing
9.) Writing on $100 bill with a sharpie (this might be illegal)
10.) Gravy trains.

This is all good stuff, but we are still 7 entries away from anyone winning anything.  Do you disagree with these people?  Wouldn't you do it differently because you are smarter than them? 

Prove it.  Leave a comment with how you would advertise this blog with just $100 worth of AdWords and a ton of moxie, and you could win the Amazon gift certificate or whatever you people vote for.

Oh yeah, vote in the poll for what the prize should be.  As mentioned in the original contest post, value will increase with the number of entries.

Google is Shaking Things Up (Again)

What's missing in this picture? (Hint: paid ads on the right side)

The big news for advertisers to come from Google lately (and yes, I am ignoring the organic algorithm change for right now) is that they are changing where paid ads are going to appear on the search results page.  For all of the claims that Google is a power-hungry, money grubbing monster, I have to say that as an advertiser, I don’t generally see that being the case.  In fact, I am normally frustrated by things they do in order to improve the user experience because they run contrary to what I would like as a marketer.  This latest decision, to move paid ads from the right-hand rail to the bottom of the page is no different.

The first issue that we have to consider is user behavior.  Thanks to eye-mapping technology (they plop users down in a chair, tell them to navigate the search page, and have a camera mounted on top of the monitor to track their eye movement as they look around the page; not clear if they hold the lids open Clockwork Orange-style), studies have been done telling us how people actually view the SERP (search engine results page).  Combined with click data on the various links, we have a pretty good idea of how users see and interact with the search engine results, and as Google has changed the layout and result types that show up, user behavior has changed as well:

SEOmoz studied the effect of Local & Expanded Sitelinks

Basically, what we have seen in the past is that most people tend to view the page top-to-bottom, and only occasionally do their eyes wander over to the margin, unless it is a relevant part of the answer to their query (like a map or a video).  Thus, Google feels that putting those paid ads that don’t make it into the prime top-of-page slots will actually be better served at the end of the organic results, due to the natural progression of users through the listings.

I know that for organic results there is some basis for this, as listings in positions 9-10 often actually have a better click through rate than those in positions 7-8.  The idea is that we tend to gloss over the middle results, paying the most attention at the beginning, and then at the end when we are forced to decide to either click on something on the first page, or make the (increasingly rare) decision to see if page 2 of the results will have something more to our liking.

Google thinks that CTR will increase at the bottom of the page compared to the right rail, but we will see.

The other issue is a purely mathematical one for advertisers.  Where you once had 6-8 paid search results on a page, it will not be uncommon to only have 4 results, which is what I tend to see now when I get these search result layouts.  Two on top, two on bottom.  Now, if there are fewer first-page ads available, then simple supply & demand tells us that competition, and thus cost per click, is going to go up. 

Google is not saying that 2^nd page ads are going to see improved performance, so this is strictly a cut in inventory.  Everyone wants to be on the first page, so get ready to see your CPCs go up (and presumably CPA as well, all other things being equal). 

Now, I have already heard the argument that this is Google’s way to make more money from ad revenue.  Higher CPC = more fees for Google, right?  Probably not.  Think about it how much CPCs would have to increase in order for them to make up for the revenue lost by having their total first page ad inventory drop by as much as 50%.  If anything, Google is most likely costing themselves money, because people who find that their bids have moved their ads to the second page are just as likely to pause the keywords as they are to increase the amount they will pay for them.

I don’t love this change as an advertiser, but it is once again going to be hard to argue that it isn’t better for the user.

Crowd-source This Contest!

UPDATE:  The prize is an Amazon gift certificate.  Minimum of 10 people have to enter in order to trigger a prize.  Seriously, that's a low threshold, if you enter you basically have a 10% chance, since I doubt more than 10 people will.  However, that is an incentive for those of you in marketing to spread this on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, so that your marketing peers will contribute and trigger the prize!

Further, 10 entries makes it a $25 prize, but the value will increase with the number of entries, so spread the word!

Ok, so let's pretend that I only have $100 with which to advertise on Google.  What would be your approach to maximizing this tiny budget in paid search?  Day parting?  Only run on one highly relevant keyword?  Conversely, run on a bunch of really cheap, long-tail keywords?  You have all dealt with budget issues, so take your solutions to their logical extreme!

Remember, this is Google only, so if your advice is to blow it all on Facebook ads, it will not be actionable.

Get creative.  Leave a comment.

Here's the kicker (I just came up with it): Contest!  Best response wins a real-life prize.*

*when I figure out the prize, I will update this post.  Also "best" is going to be ill-defined, but like pornography, I will know it when I see it.

Yahoo! & Their Social Media Integration

Yahoo has recognized that their value offering to the marketplace isn’t search, and it that this has essentially been true for a while now.  Since last fall, Microsoft has been serving Yahoo users Bing results, and Bing has been eating into their share of the search space as well.  Therefore, the decision makers have wisely chosen to focus on their core competency, which is being one of the most visited content hubs on the web.

They recognize that they can’t remain static though, and that social and sharing is the future of the digital space, especially for marketers.  Plain old banner ads will always have their place, but they just aren’t targeted or engaging enough on their own, and they lack the sexiness of more recent ad units to hit the market.  Thus, Yahoo decided that they would team up with Facebook, and create what is actually a pretty interesting experience platform that attempts to blend paid and earned media more seamlessly than any other.

Essentially, by linking your Yahoo login to your Facebook page, what you get is a carousel/toolbar that consists of your friends faces when you are anywhere in Yahoo’s properties.  If you hover over any of those pictures, it will show you what that friend has been reading/sharing (within Yahoo).  It also has a feature that will show you any comments that your friends have made regarding a piece of content, which allows you to essentially combine your content consumption with social dialogue, and will push your comments out to appear on your Facebook page as well.

The advertising part of this comes in the form of new ad units that they are creating.  Essentially these “road block” or “pause sign” ads will be branded banners set at the bottom of an article, which contain a question, or quiz, or other interactive feature based not directly on the products/services of the advertising company, but on the content that the user is looking at, in the form of a “sentiment slider” that the user can move along a continuum to express their level of agreement with a particular statement.  The example shown to us was in a travel article, and the unit asked the reader to choose which option was his/her dream vacation: skiing in Tahoe, laying on a beach in Hawaii, or hiking in [some good hiking place].

The ad featured a small JetBlue logo, but upon clicking a choice the user was given the option of sharing their choice in Facebook, which would link to the poll unit and tell all their friends that they like skiing, or hiking, or what have you.  This would then lead other users back to the content, which is theoretically relevant to them, and another small JetBlue sponsored item in the sidebar, as well as a traditional JetBlue ad at the bottom.  All very cleverly integrated so that the user can interact with the content and their social network without ever feeling like they are having a product pushed at them.

The product seems decent, and the integration itself feels like a well-built technology, in terms of user experience.  The automatic nature of the passive sharing part of this collaboration, the part that automatically tells your friends what you are reading on Yahoo, will probably be very popular, though I will be curious to see how many conversations occur in this space.  As an advertiser though, I have a few issues with the new unit.

First of all, and this is probably just my bias as a search marketer, I don’t really think that it should be a CPM (cost per million impressions) buy.  It is contextually targeted, though only at the vertical level, rather than keyword (this also feels like a missed opportunity for relevance), and Yahoo simply chooses a bundle of articles for the ad to run in.  Given that the entire pitch and idea is built around interaction however, between the brand and the user, the user and the content, the user and their social network, etc., it really feels like this media should be bought on a pricing system that is also based around interaction.  When I brought this up to Patrick Albano, who is Yahoo’s VP of social, mobile, and innovation, he said that that was something they might consider in the future.  I am not holding my breath.

The other thing is that the whole point of not having a regular ad unit that contains product/brand messaging to drive the user to the company’s online assets (either website or social platform), is that this unit is not really supposed to feel like advertising, it is supposed to feel like part of the content.  If that’s the case, and since they themselves used the “pause sign” terminology, I think that interaction rates would be much higher if they moved it to the fold, and plopped it right in the middle of the article, to actually make it feel like part of the content.  If you put something all the way at the bottom of the page, a lot of people aren’t going to take it in or associate it with their consumption.  When I made this suggestion, they were much more receptive and indicated that it could actually be something they change after it has been in the market for a bit, maybe Q2 next year.

The last issue, and this is often a problem with advertising in the social space right now, is measurement.  They seem a little unclear on success metrics, or even anything beyond clicks, but their idea is to build a brand favorability/purchase intent study into the cost of a buy.  Given that it will have to be survey-based, that seems like a rather ham-handed way of tacking “value” onto the offering in order to help justify selling in the cost to clients.  It’s a very non-scientific, ethereal thing to try and measure when onsite interaction seems like the obvious way to go. 

Overall, it’s an interesting new experience for users and advertisers, but it is a product that I will be happy to wait for, and just sit on the sidelines for the initial phase, instead of rushing to get in line for this. 

Believe in Yourself Bing, Because No One Else Will

Much has been made of some comments made at this year's Web2.0 conference by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.  Especially an odd sort of back-handed pitch for his own search engine:

“Take any search you want and try it out on Bing, and try it out on Google... 70 percent of the time, you probably won’t care, 15 percent of the time you’ll probably like us better, and 15 percent of the time you’ll like the other guy better.”

So let me get this right:  Your argument is that people should switch from Google to Bing, because your product isn't specifically worse?  Steve, are you unfamiliar with the concept of 'damning with faint praise?'

This would be like my grandmother saying that I am not a bad looking kid.  Does that happen?  No, every grandmother thinks her grandkids are the most beautiful in the world, no matter how homely, and they should.  If the CEO of a company can't say that his product is the best, how is anyone who isn't biased supposed to think so?

Hell, if you are just going to make up numbers, which is clearly where the 70/15/15 came from, at least say that it is 70/20/10 in favor of Bing.  What, you can't even give your own people a 5% edge?  Hell, call it a margin of error, they are fake numbers anyhow!

This has to be one of the least inspirational plugs, and frankly, I wouldn't be thrilled if I actually worked at Bing.  You expect your boss, the public face of the work you do every day, to go out there and at least say that you are the best, even if behind closed doors he pushes you to be better.  There is nothing wrong with saying "we have work to do, we can always get better," but this feels like a defeatist attitude.

It's bad salesmanship, and it's bad leadership.  For shame, Steve Ballmer

Behavior of a Blog Reader

Ok guys, this is a straight-up request for feedback.  If you have a moment, either comment here, or respond on twitter @SEMiotic5, or shoot me an e-mail (since most of you know me).

I have been finding that if I post a new update in the afternoon and tweet a link, I get very little traffic compared to when I do the exact same thing around 10 am.  My rationalization for this is that people are most likely to be active on Twitter/blogs between 10-11, once they have had some coffee and checked their e-mail, but before the pressure of the end-of-day deadlines start getting to them.

Is this accurate?  I have a very small sample for this, so I can't be sure if you just don't happen to like the content that I have been posting in the afternoons, compared to the pieces that have gone up in the morning.  This could easily be random based on the amount of data that I have, but the beauty of having direct connections with your audience is that I don't have to wait for the sample to grow.

Also, if I am way off base feel free to let me know.  If the content is bad (or too long), I can't promise that it will improve, but it can't hurt for me to know about the problem.

Here is my grumpy kitten:

Google+ : What's Their Angle?

With Google+ finally rolled out to the general public and membership reaching 40 million users, the question becomes not whether it will be successful, but has it already peaked?  We know that brand profiles will be available soon, but beyond that what offerings are on the horizon to make this social network a daily destination, rather than a set-and-forget option in your Gmail account settings?  What is Google really after here?

Their search engine, the bread and butter of the Google empire, still holds around 60% of the market share, with the rest carved up between Yahoo and Bing, and to a lesser degree Ask.com and AOL.  You have to figure that if Google could get their social service to take a similar 30% bite out of Facebook, they would be absolutely thrilled.  Are they likely to do that though?  How many people do you know who have signed up for Google+ and stopped using Facebook?  Right now it seems more like a curiosity than a platform that people are going to move over to full time.

Normally to make a new market entrance like this really successful you want to have some integration in order to take the burden off of the user.  As of now, one of the main complaints that you will hear about Google+ isn’t that the features aren’t attractive, but simply that the initial set-up is work, and more importantly, work that the users have already done on Facebook.  Inertia is a powerful force, and people don’t like having to do the same thing twice.  If you could import your friend list, copy all of your “likes” as ”+1s,” and port your privacy settings over, it might be more attractive, but there is no way that this unholy marriage will ever be consummated.

Which brings us back to the question of, “what is Google’s” long-term strategy here?”  Are they simply looking to get users to spend time on another of their properties so that they will have space for a few display ads? 

In marketing, Facebook ads are certainly something that people are paying for, though the results have been mixed and there is still relatively little information provided in terms of on-site metrics.  Measuring the success of a FB buy is difficult, and the question of whether to direct users to a brand site versus a profile page remains unanswered, depending on the goal of the campaign and whether one platform or the other holds some sort of unique user experience like a contest or a promotional giveaway.  The advantage to Facebook ads is almost entirely in the demographic targeting that is available, which makes sense given how much personal information people include in their profiles.

Still, to make that attractive as a marketing feature, you need a certain critical mass both in terms of the number of users (since for any given company/product you are only targeting a narrow slice of the consumers), as well as the time that they spend on the network per day (since they won’t see many ads if they just log in and log out).  Google+ has nowhere near that volume yet, and won’t soon, as they are still below 10% of the membership that Facebook has.

The “hangout” real-time meeting function offers a bit more interest and utility, and is certainly an offer that is distinct from anything that Facebook does, but it is a very limited engagement option, and it isn’t a hub that people will spend hours logged into every day.  As a multimedia tool it is appealing, but not necessarily a draw to the casual social networking user.

Really, you have to figure that for Google the goal here is just to be able to collect more user data, and be able to connect it to the vast archive of data that they have already.  Imagine if you could marry the personal information that users put in their Facebook profile, to the detailed search logs that are created when those users look things up in Google.  The dossier that Google will be able to produce on 50-100 million users will be so detailed and in-depth that the retargeting (and regular targeting) options will be incredible.  Having not only demographic information to target your consumers with, but also an explicit search history will allow an even greater level of ad relevance than Facebook can offer now (which is why people wonder why they haven’t gotten into the search game yet).

Taking this one step further though, I wonder if what we are seeing won’t lead back to Google TV.  Remember that idea?  When your television was going to become your main point of contact with the internet as well?  I wonder if they are not setting themselves up for an incredible targeted TV buy application in the future. 

Think about it:  The real problem with television advertising has always been a lack of targeting capability.  You can show during certain times or on certain networks when you think your targeting audience will be watching, but other than that you are just blasting your message out into the world and hoping you hit something.  It is the shotgun approach to marketing, and not very efficient.

But imagine if your consumers have Google TV.  They are logged into their profile to see if they have any messages from friends (or maybe they just finished a “hangout” using the built in webcam, or a partnership with Microsoft and their Kinect hardware), then that runs in the background while they watch television. 

Suddenly, Mountain Dew wants to buy an ad, and Google can say to them, “we will show your TV spot only to males, aged 14-32, who have listed an interest in mountain biking, extreme sports, computer games, programming, soda, rock music, Doritos, or whatever else, based on their Google+ profiles.  You pay based on the available impressions that we can give you at whatever time, so if it is 8 pm. on a Thursday and there are 2.4 million people who fit the criteria that you set up, we will deliver you TV spot to all of them, and only them, for $XXXX.”

Think of the revolution in advertising that could take place if Google can just get people to be logged into the device that they watch TV on.  Suddenly, most of the inefficiency of TV buys disappears, and Google has a massive back-door entrance to a marketplace that they have only recently established a toe-hold in.  How this would need to be structured with the networks is another thing, but as more and more media is consumed on YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu even that problem becomes more manageable.

Google doesn’t have to fight Facebook, they just have to play in the space long enough to gather the user data that they need.  How does this not make sense?  If it isn’t Google’s plan, it should be.  More specific targeting is the trend in the advertising world, and this is a way to bring search-level relevance to the massive budget world of TV, with Google in prime position to lead the charge, if they can only put all of the pieces together.

This may only be a wild theory today, but check back in a few years.  I will take wagers.

History's Greatest Moments #1

For years I have been systematically scouring primary sources, collecting and writing notes/commentary on all of the most amazing historical moments and people, and how they represent the best traits that a man can hope to possess.  The best thing that I can do with them is share them out, because there are so many great stories that no one ever hears.  This feature of the blog will save you literally thousands of hours of reading to get at the finest gems history has to offer.

Luckily, there is even a business case here.  The qualities that make a great man also make a great business man.  Today’s lesson is about leading by example, not letting your title/position get in the way of work that needs to be done, and accepting responsibility once it is taken on.

The inaugural episode of this regular feature comes from the memoirs of Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcellin, Baron de Marbot.  A French soldier during the Napoleonic wars, he was one of the most astounding people that I have ever come across from any time period, and will certainly make a number of appearances here.  This story however, takes place when he was an officer on the staff of Marshal Lannes, at the Battle of Ratisbon in 1809.

With the Austrian forces inside the walled city, French attempts to storm the main gates had failed twice before artillery opened a breach in the wall.  However, the breach was high up, on the far side of a moat-like ditch, and was heavily defended.  Seizing the breach and gaining a foothold in the city fell to Lannes and his corps, but the first group of 50 volunteers was virtually annihilated in a hail of gunfire as soon as they left cover.  Another 50 volunteers came forward and took up the ladders to scale the wall, but met with the same fate.  Here I will turn you over to Marbot:

“Cooled by these two repulses, the troops made no response to the marshal’s third call for volunteers.  If he had ordered one or more companies to march, they would, no doubt, have obeyed; but he knew well what a difference there is in point of effect between obedience on the soldiers’ part and dash; and for the present danger volunteers were much better than troops obeying orders.

Vainly, however, did the marshal renew his appeal to the bravest of a brave division; vainly did he call upon them to observe that the eyes of the Emperor and all the Grand Army were on them.  A gloomy silence was the only reply, the men being convinced that to pass beyond the walls of the building into the enemy’s fire was certain death.  At length, Lannes exclaiming, ‘Well, I will let you see that I was a grenadier before I was a marshal, and still am one,’ seized a ladder, lifted it, and would have carried it towards the breach.  His aides-de-camp tried to stop him; he resisted, and got angry with us.  I ventured to say, ‘Monsieur le Marechal, you would not wish us to be disgraced, and that we should be if you were to receive the slightest wound in carrying that ladder to the ramparts as long as one of your aides-de-camp was left alive.’  Then, in spite of his efforts, I dragged the end of the ladder from him, and put it on my shoulder, while de Viry took the other end, and our comrades by pairs took up other ladders.

At the sight of a marshal disputing with his aides-de-camp for the lead of the assault, a shout of enthusiasm went up from the whole division.  Officers and soldiers wished to lead the column, and in their eagerness for this honour they pushed my comrades and me about, trying to get hold of the ladders.  If however we had given them up, we should seem to have been playing a comedy to stimulate the troops.  The wine had been drawn, and we had to drink it, bitter as it might be.  Understanding this, the marshal let us have our way, though fully expecting to see the greater part of his staff exterminated as they marched at the head of this perilous attack.”

Party System Has Outlived Its Usefulness

In sports, we are often taught that true fans root for (or against) the laundry, not the players.  A roster turns over, players get traded, retire, or leave through free agency.  It doesn’t matter who plays for the Red Sox, I am always going to want them to beat the Yankees.  I would be downright gleeful if they didn’t lose a game to New York for the next five years.  I have trouble understanding how Yankees fans date Red Sox fans, but I have seen it happen.

The problem is that this mentality has spilled over into politics.  You root for Democrats, or you root for Republicans, and the politicians themselves act as if the two parties were adversarial, rather than collaborative.  Imagine if your company’s divisions acted like this.  What if the Display team and the Search team couldn’t agree on how to divide the Digital budget for 2011, so they simply froze it so that neither side could get anything done.  Meanwhile, the client is stuck on the sidelines watching their products not being advertised.  That would last for about 10 seconds, until your agency were fired.

In theory, both parties belong to the same company, with the same goal: to ensure peace and prosperity for the citizens of the country.  The idea of a party isn’t strictly terrible, either.  A group of individual representatives coming together to achieve common goals and push forward a collective agenda makes sense, as long as it works.  Any organizational structure is the right one if it contributes to a functioning body, be it a government or a corporation.

The issue is that it isn’t working, and it has been slowly descending into paralysis for years as allegiance to parties became more important than individual contribution.  This is ultimately the crux of the biscuit, and what brings me to the most obvious solution:

Get rid of the useless categorization.

How about instead of choosing a team, voters actually elect individuals.  Vote for an official because you think he/she has integrity, or has good ideas, or is an able administrator.  Make every candidate run on their own merits, with their own funding.  Then, you will have a collection of bright, capable people whose views are actually somewhat representative of their constituents, and can work together unrestrained by party lines.

As it stands now, politicians have no choice but to adhere to party stricture, if they want to have a chance of winning/keeping their post.  You aren’t likely to replace an incumbent without the financial and PR backing of a party.  If you won’t toe a line, they will nominate someone who will.  The laundry is what matters in the election process, not the player.  If you put the party war chest and PR machine behind basically anyone, they become a viable candidate.

Ultimately though, this is a matter of practicality.  Would I love to live in a country where we just elected the best 100 individuals to be Senators, locked them in a room and said “solve some problems?”  Hell yes.  Do I think it will happen?  Of course not.  But what they are doing right now, isn’t working.

We live in a results-driven world.  When your job is to legislate, and set budget allocations so that the government can do its job, that’s what the people expect you to do.  If the current system isn’t working, it is completely unacceptable to stubbornly keep on doing the same old thing.  When things don’t work, you have to identify the problem, and then come up with a solution that involves doing something different.  In my industry, and I suspect most industries, “test & learn” is a phrase you hear a lot of.  If your results are satisfactory, develop a theory, and run with it.  If it doesn’t work you stop, but at least you a.) gained some valuable information about what doesn’t work, and b.) YOU DID SOMETHING. 

Doing nothing isn’t a solution, and neither party can sell the current service that they are providing to the “consumer” (in this case Americans) with any degree of honesty.  I would rather see our politicians try something to fix the economy and see if fail, than see them refuse to do anything because it’s either a potential liability for them if it fails, or a potential win for the other party if it succeeds.

You (I am shifting to speaking directly to the politicians, because it adds narrative force) aren’t doing your jobs right now, period, and a lot of people depend on you.  We as a people are sick of excuses, and finger-pointing, and empty rhetoric.  Just show us that you are even trying to help.  Pretend for a moment that you aren’t athletes playing in the big Republicans-Democrats rivalry game, and that you actually care about the people you supposedly govern for.  Make sacrifices, think outside of the box, don’t factor the 2012 elections into your decision making.

Can’t figure out how to compromise on budgets?  Here’s an idea:  Every Senator takes the 2011 budget and has to make a 1% change somewhere, in any program.  He writes it on a slip of paper anonymously, and hands it in.  That’s it.  If you personally hate Medicare, you can choose to take 1% away there.  If you feel that the Pentagon budget is too high, take 1% away there.  If you think that infrastructure is a pressing need, add your 1% to the Highway Department.  By making it anonymous, everyone will feel free to actually do what they think is best for the country, not their party.  By making it an aggregate, naturally, less popular programs will lose money and more popular ones will gain.  Chances are the final result won’t make everyone happy, but no one will be able to say they didn’t have a hand in it.  As Calvin & Hobbes taught us, “A good compromise leaves everyone unhappy.”

Is that idea unreasonable?  How about this:  TAKE TURNS.  We can learn from children on this one.  You don’t think the Democratic plan is a good one?  Fine, that’s an opinion you can have.  But let it pass, give it 6-12 months, and see what happens.  If it doesn’t work, do a post-mortem and try to figure out why, take some lessons from it, and then give the Republicans a shot.  Keep taking turns trying solutions until you hit on a fix, if you aren’t able to work together on one.

We recognize that this is a tough situation, and that you guys have an uphill battle in front of you, but give us a little credit.  We can forgive mistakes, and we can forgive failures, but inaction is unforgivable.

Steve Jobs: The Man and the Myth (1955-2011)

Steve Jobs died yesterday.   May he rest in Peace.

(Note: if you don’t have time to read this whole post, skip to the last 2-3 paragraphs)

Basically everyone on earth already knows about it.  I had the same shock as everyone else, and as someone who works (roughly) in the technology space, it has been a big deal in the circles that I run in.  However, I very quickly found myself surprised and a little dismayed at the direction public discourse went in mourning the man.

I got into a brief back-and-forth with the most prolific Twitter user in my industry, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, when he said “This is when you wish the US had knighthoods.  Perhaps a presidential or congressional recognition of Steve Jobs,” with a link to the list of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients.

Let me say now what I said then:  I have no desire to diminish the man’s abilities or accomplishments.  I was a fan of both his products (though I never owned a Mac or iPod), and even more his presentations and style as a CEO.  He was an innovative business leader, and committed to building a good product and marketing it effectively.

That said, I question the deification that is taking place here.  Great business man?  Yes.  Great individual?  Check.  Great contributor to humanity?  Not clear.  Bill Gates said “The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.”  He could have been talking about Winston Churchill, or Nelson Mandela, and I guess that’s what’s bothering me about all of this.  People who have actually given more to the world die with a fraction of the fanfare. 

I should mention, he obviously deserves no blame for this.  He didn’t write any of this, and he deserves to be mourned and respected just the same as anyone else who dies.  It’s the hero worship that I don’t get.  He wasn’t just an industrialist, he made high-end consumer electronics.   They are luxury items, no matter how much we love them.  I am thrilled that I can now watch YouTube videos on the subway, but I would argue that Google has contributed far the value to the world in making information more accessible.  However, since Larry Page (or Sergey Brin) isn’t the huge personality that Jobs was, the response to his eventual passing will be muted in comparison.

I need to keep interrupting myself here to make sure that people realize, I have no problem with saying nice things about a man who died.  It is appropriate, and I would hope that people will speak kindly of me when I am gone (though I don’t count on it). 

For all his strengths as a business man, he was conspicuously less involved with philanthropy than fellow billionaires like Branson, Buffett, and Gates.  He paid himself a salary of only $1 as head of Apple, but made about $8-9 billion in stock options and investments, which he paid very little in taxes on, and was not a supporter of the Buffett school of taxing wealth generation as regular income.  In fact, he was the subject of both a criminal investigation and a lawsuit from his own board members for securities fraud and costing the company money in a shady valuation of his stock compensation. 

Now, again, let me be clear.  He should not be condemned for any of this.  They are his opinions, and it was his money to do what he liked with.  However, generosity of spirit, belief in the civic value of giving back to the community and government fairly, and compassion for the many are exactly the traits that make Gates and Buffett figures that transcend their business personalities.  As far as screwing his own company, the criminal investigation went away, but the lawsuit didn’t.  I imagine that it will now, unless his estate is held liable for the $7 billion in damages that the board of directors was seeking.

I feel like this is still coming across as critical, and that isn’t my goal.  I am more than happy to raise a glass to the memory of a guy who by all accounts was a good man, a great CEO, a thought leader in his industry, and a beloved husband and father who died too young.  I mean that.  I am genuinely saddened by his passing, and in the loss of his spirit, zeal, and drive to be the best we have certainly lost something that will be difficult to replace in such a compelling package.

I’m just saying, let’s celebrate the man for what he was, rather than trip over ourselves in a competition to see who can best praise him for being something that he wasn’t.

Best Practices for Blogs

Ok, I am new at this, so it figures that I am going to stumble my way to competence.  All the great content in the world isn't going to make this blog visually stimulating.  People like pictures, and they are more likely to remember a point that is made with an image than just text.  Several kind people have tried desperately to teach me this lesson in my PowerPoint decks, and it is only now starting to sink in.

Images help recall, apparently.  If you hear some information, after 3 days you will remember 10% of it.  If you see it in conjunction with a picture, that number goes up to 65%

(source: Najjar, LJ (1998) Principles of educational multimedia user interface design (via Brain Rules by John Medina, 2008), via Scott Sorokin)

You know what else people like?  Cute kitten pictures.  I just so happen to have a very pretty cat:

This little darling is my research assistant, and she performs such valuable functions as chewing on books and papers, walking across the keyboard, and drinking from/knocking over my water glass.

What you have here is a straight-up cheap trick, but it is also a test.  I have a feeling that posts including pictures of a kitten will get more traffic than a carefully thought out argument, but I would really like to be proven wrong.  Either way, this should fulfill a promise I made to my sister in Boston to get a picture of my cat online.

Plus, it should help people recall this blog.  Remember, our slogan is SEMiotic5 = kittens!

Is Data a Big Deal in Advertising?

How does this still qualify as a question when it has been answered?  Enough to warrant a "big prediction" and a panel discussion?  Apparently, Omnicom thinks so.

The idea that it is going out on a limb to say that "everyone in the advertising industry will be 'partly a data scientist.'" is frustrating because it should be that way already, and should have been for years.

Obviously, I did most of my ranting on this a few posts back, but seeing it in print just gets my hackles up all over again.  When I got into this business, it was basically because I spent a lot of free time on sabermetrics and baseball, and I wanted to work in a field where data analytics was the job.  I honestly assumed that every SEM account team would have a dedicated stats person, rather than 2-3 analytics people for an entire office, if you are lucky. 

On one hand, I should be glad, because every single advertising person who hasn't completely embraced the statistical analysis side of the industry is making me look better in comparison.  As a search person, you would think that it would be a huge advantage over traditional media and thus cause money and favor to flow to my part of the business. 

The reality is though, while it seems like a no-brainer to some, the very fact that there is an article like this means that the boat is being missed as we speak.  If you saw a newspaper article in 1943 headlined "FDR Concerned that Hitler Might Cause Some Trouble," wouldn't you worry about what the heck FDR had been up to since 1936?

Is it worse to be stating the obvious, or stating the obvious years after it should have been obvious?

On the other hand, apparently we have a bright future to look forward to, with numbers and stuff.

Beware Broad Match + Dynamic Keyword Insertion

We all know by now that dynamic keyword insertion can be a great tool.  Users are often more likely to click on an ad if it contains the wording that they used in their query, because it suggests a high level of relevance (of course, that relevance only goes as deep as the ad headline, not to the landing page). Recently however, I got a reminder that the technology on its own can lead to some unintended consequences if not carefully monitored.

Shortly after a client released a new promotional offer which we supported in paid search, an ad from a competitor appeared offering the same product.  Of course, this led to all kids of fears about corporate sabotage and bid wars, especially once we discovered that the competitor has no such product on the site anywhere.

To make a long story short, the query was for "category term + offer item" and the competitor was bidding on "cetegory term" on broad match with dynamic keyword insertion, leading to an ad headline that made it look like an ad for a specific promotional product(this is hard when I can't give any actual information out). 

The result is that right now that competitor is providing a terrible user experience, driving users to their site who will be frustrated by what essentially amounts to false advertising/bait and switch tactics.  Even worse, they are paying money to create a bunch of irritated consumers.  Worst of all, they apparently haven't realised that they are doing it, and it has been two weeks.

Example:  You have a company that makes gun racks.  You come up with a boss new gun rack for mounting in that little back window of a pick up truck, so you run on the keyword "pick-up gun rack" with an ad that talks about your product, and leads to your website.  Perfect.

Meanwhile, Chevrolet is bidding on the keyword "pick-up" on broad match, and using dynamic keyword insertion without any negatives.  So when someone types "pick-up gun rack" into Google, they see an ad like:

Pick-Up Gun Rack
Find Out About Big Savings on the 2012 Chevy Silverado Today!
www.Chevrolet.com/Silverado

Users will see this, go to the website, and then realize that they have been duped!  Chevy didn't start making gun racks, they just forgot to have negative keywords around their broad category terms.  They aren't tricking users on purpose, they just didn't consider the risk of dynamic keyword insertion.

As paid search marketers, we need to consider all possible outcomes when using any automated technology like dynamic keyword insertion.  It's easy to become complacent on matters like this, but it highlights how often we need to pull search query reports to scan for trending keywords that we need to add negatives around.  I can say for sure that at least one company hasn't done it in a couple of weeks for a brand, and that it is costing them money and goodwill.

I will be more careful in the future

Content: Curation Versus Creation

Looking back to an earlier post, I touched briefly (sort of) on the shift from a monolithic system of branded content creation to a more diffuse system in which the end user can also generate media that ties back to or directly represents a brand.

As this diffusion of publication capability through social media has made every consumer a potential creative force, media has become as much of a horizontal process as it was vertical in the past.  Media is no longer simply created by a handful of agencies and pushed out through narrow channels to an end point.  It is created at downstream points as well as upstream, and can be passed easily from one person to another.

The dream has been realized; everyone can find any information and themselves contribute to the global discussion.  Some will get to write for the Huffington Post, or get mentioned in a Penny Arcade comic.  Maybe you will meet Mitch Krpata sometime at a convention, and hear some pretty smart things (you could read them at Insult Swordfighting also).  You can debate writers from The Economist now on their site, and brands like Ford are actually launching new product promotions entirely using social media,with the new Fiesta.

This change has led to the rise of the importance of the concept of "curation" alongside "creation."  Marketers and social media companies have to become aggregators and collections management specialists as much as creative agencies.  With all of this content being created and spread on the web, organizing it, packaging it, and making it accessible is a big deal, and a big business.

The issue for me is that after spending all of this time getting to a point where the end of the content production chain is no longer a dead-end at the consumer, the channels by which we access all of this media are quickly consolidating.  New boss might be the same as the Old Boss.

All we see these days are stats and articles about how big and how fast services like Facebook and Twitter are growing.  Facebook is unapologetic about wanting to be the connective tissue for the entire internet.  Think about it this: how often do you read articles now that you didn't come across via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Digg?  I admit, aside from the NY Times and the Economist, I get most of the rest of my news from links that come from those sources.

Granted, the obvious argument is that these content aggregators simply provide the vehicle, and that the sources of information that I get are actually myraid, since there are people behind those tweets.  Still, most articles that trend online are those that get passed around and around, tweeted and liked and re-tweeted, in something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am afraid that as we become more passive media consumers again, allowing information to be given to us rather than seeking it out, more and more editorial power will come to those services that are the conduit, even if they don't exercise it.

I get nervous when a handful of private enterprises, now matter how benevolent they claim to be, or even are, have so much control over the content that we see.  Hopefully, I am worried about nothing, but even if it isn't a matter of some vast conspiracy or information monopoly, I just worry that fewer sources channeling information will inherently lead to a narrowing of worldview on the part of the people who depend on them. 

When everyone reads the exact same articles that circle the social sphere, the conversation gets boring fast. 

Don't Fight the Data, Marketing People

Why do people find it so hard to change their behavior, despite evidence that they have been operating under assumptions that turned out to be false?  Maybe I have simply been lucky enough to spend much of my life in a world where data flows in a nearly unlimited stream, to be recorded and calculated by computers.  Answers to questions, and more numbers and information than we will ever have time to analyze are never more than a few clicks away at this point.  Yet still, once an idea has become entrenched, it is surprisingly hard to pry it loose.

An example which immediately shows my bias is the difficulty in getting companies to recognize the value, or even the necessity of devoting a portion of their marketing dollars to paid search, or even general digital advertising.  Plenty of studies have been done demonstrating the beneficial effects of having both online and offline media, or how search captures the interest generated by television, etc..  Nielsen itself, the king of measuring TV advertising reach and effectiveness, has produced these studies, even specifically calling for TV dollars to be re-allocated to online media for a more efficient marketing mix.  Yet still, in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, marketing professionals who are used to traditional media don’t acknowledge what’s right in front of them.

The best parallel that I can draw comes from baseball, which in many ways reminds me of search marketing.  In both cases, compared to either other sports or other media channels, baseball/search is much more easily measured and quantifiable.  Between engine data and onsite tracking, the consumer journey through search can be quantified as a series of discrete actions, just like a game of baseball.  Looking at football or TV commercials, there are just too many variables to accurately attribute the effect of any one moving part.  With baseball however, like search, every play is recorded, and has been for a hundred years.

Where am I going with this?  Bunting.  I have made this speech a million times, but I will make it again for the one person who reads this who hasn’t heard it before.  If you watch enough baseball, especially in the NL, chances are you have seen a fair few sacrifice bunts in your time.  It has been a respected tool in the managers toolbox for a long time, and is celebrated by baseball purists everywhere.  The problem is that it is a bad decision, and it turns out that it always has been.

With so much available data, it turns out that you can really learn a lot about a subject.  By using linear weights based on every single play over a given period of time, you can create a very accurate run expectancy matrix (it turns out that you want a sample size of at least 3 years to get a model that follows the real results closely).  What this matrix does is tell you what the expected number of runs a team will score on average in any given game state (i.e. ‘a man on second base with two outs’).

Brass tacks: With a man on second and no one out (the most common, and conventionally ‘best,’ time for a sacrifice bunt) the run expectancy is around 1.166, which means that a team in that situation will on average score 1.166 runs in the inning.  With a runner on third and one out, which would be the result of a successful sacrifice bunt, the run expectancy is 0.976.  So if the sac bunt is executed perfectly and all goes according to the manager’s plan, he has created a situation in which his team’s run expectancy has dropped by 16.3%.  Keep in mind, that’s about the most defensible situation in which to bunt.  When starting with one out, or a man on first, the decline becomes much sharper.

Now, I am not saying that no one should ever under any circumstances order a bunt.  There are a variety of factors that come into play and they all need to be considered.   My point is simply that most of the time when you see a sacrifice bunt it is the product of a mindset that simply refuses to acknowledge the value of the data.  When no one had done the math it was an interesting argument, and now it just seems quaint and a little backwards, like chewing tobacco or fights where no one gets punched.

This is what I think of when companies believe that they are doing fine because they run some TV commercials and newspaper inserts.  A study found that about 90% of the CPG (consumer packaged goods) target audience watches TV, and about 81% go online.  Yet about 80% of CPG companies’ marketing dollars go to TV ads, compared to about 3% spent on OLA (online advertising).  

Why do people and industries insist on being behind the curve?  Not wanting to fall for a fad is one thing, but this here internet isn’t exactly new, or a flash in the pan.  In 1915, you could make a case for building horse carriages, in case those darn automobiles didn’t catch on.  In 1940, not so much.  What about the guys who swore that the talking pictures would never replace radio dramas?  Or dinosaurs that figured mammals were never going to be a big deal?

Not knowing something because the information wasn’t available to you is one thing, but willfully ignoring the data that is right in front of you is another.  Consumers are doing everything online, so be there when they are. 

And quit bunting so much.

Is Over-Efficiency a Problem Within the Solution?

Ask most paid search marketers the fastest way to the most efficient campaign possible, and the answer will be some form of “Pause everything but your top few brand terms with the highest conversion rate.”  Sometimes it will be even more stark, something along the lines of “get one click on your brand name and then pause the campaign.”  The response is, of course, a joke.  You can always get one conversion for a very good price, and then if you stop spending, your campaign averages will be fantastic.  It is a matter of volume, and to get that you have to live with some inefficiencies.

Chances are, the keyword “2011 Chevy Malibu Dealership Locations” has a lower cost per conversion for Chevrolet than “cars for sale,” but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be running on both.  We recognize that the most efficient thing isn’t the best in the majority of cases, as long as you have the resources available.  When it comes to money, we recognize that the optimal is related to, but not synonymous with, the most efficient  distribution.

But what about time?  This is the other resource that we have to manage.  There is practically speaking an infinite amount of work to do on any search marketing campaign, because in addition to running it, you have to study it, understand it, and optimize it continuously.  There is always more that can be done, so in some ways time is more of a limiting factor than budget, as there is no 100% Share of Knowledge.  As the services we offer always outstrip increases in man-power, we turn to time saving efficiencies to do the same work on more campaigns with fewer relative man hours.

Bulk sheets, Excel formulae, macros, campaign management software, APIs: we always want to find ways to do the same work faster, and with great success.  The problem is, we seem to be losing sight of the greatest tool in any workforce’s toolbox: elbow grease.  Now, right before I go tell some kids to get off my lawn and walk to the store through two feet of snow, let me go on record as loving technology and what it does for us.  However, most great things were accomplished not through efficiency, but huge amounts of hard work. 

The point of diminishing returns is big part of what we do, and what everyone does.  We know that efficiency and spend intersect, and that there we find our optimal point.  When the unit of volume is time rather than dollars however, I would argue that we have been looking at the graph wrong.  We still use the point of diminishing returns to evaluate how we spend our time, in a world where tasks are frequently triaged in order of urgency and necessity.  Something that could help us increase efficiency in our cost per conversion by 3% isn’t done if it is a slow, laborious process that increases the number of man hours needed by 10 hours.  We look at it from a “PoDR” standpoint and determine that it isn’t worth it.

What if the idea is flawed?  Dollars are an external limitation placed on us by the people who pay us.  Time is a resource that we control, and last I checked, we don’t get paid by the hour, so the two don’t intersect.  The company gets paid a set fee to provide a minimum number of man hours and services.  Salaried workers get paid to provide the best product or service they can, and while there is a limit to how much a company can make its people work, there isn’t a limit to how much we as individuals can work.   Target can make a piece of furniture far more efficiently than my great-grandfather could, but that set of hand-joined wood drawers has lasted, and will continue to last, far longer than any massed-produced piece of particle board flotsam on the market today. 

Obsession with efficiency can lead to an inferior product, even if the first degree return on investment is higher.  Adding man hours to an account by increasing personnel costs money, but adding man hours by working harder, and working longer, is free.  In that situation, there is no point of diminishing returns because the lines don’t cross.

You can’t be compelled to go above and beyond, but why wouldn't you?

Reader Feedback Day!

I started to respond to a comment in the comments section, but somewhere around paragraph five, I realized that that section wasn't big enough for me and my soap box.  Still, I can see both sides of this argument, so please feel free to weigh in, and tell me how wrong I am.

The initial comment was:

"I would also buy the tomatoes. That being said, I'm a little disappointed that you consider the WSJ a trusted source. Regardless of politics, have you not heard anything about the massive scandal currently unfolding?
"But what initially began with allegations that Murdoch's British News of the World had illegally hacked scores of Brits' phone messages has widened from a sordid tabloid tale involving a murdered British teen to a burgeoning scandal with broad political, criminal, ethical and business ramifications for Murdoch's far-flung News Corp."http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-07-11-Rupert-Murdoch-News-Corp-phone-hacking_n.htm "

The user name is suspiciously spam-like, but as this is first person to comment here, I am going to give him/her the benefit of the doubt.

First, I want to point out the humor in citing USA Today in an effort to undermine the credibility of the Wall Street Journal.  I'm not making an argument there, it's just funny.

Moreover, I have indeed heard about this scandal, and read a lot about it.  However, I have yet to see, in the article that is linked to or any other, a single connection to the WSJ, aside from the fact that Rupert Murdoch owns it.

The very brand respect that they have earned over the years, and the standards of journalistic integrity that (I believe) they have maintained, prevent me from assuming guilt by association.  Is the commenter suggesting that the WSJ editorial staff was involved in the scandal?  Or the writers?

I am not prepared to tear down a long-standing edifice based on rumor and innuendo.  If new evidence comes to light of wrongdoing taking place at the Journal, my opinion can change, but for right now, I don't see how the scandal mentioned affects this brand in particular.  News Corp perhaps, but not every single one of its components, not yet.

Additionally, let's not lose sight of the fact that this scandal is about the means they used to gather information for stories.  Means which I do not defend and solidly condemn as abhorrent, in light of the subject matter and the newsworthiness of the data in the first place.  Nonetheless, the accusation is that they published information that was illegally/immorally acquired, not that they fabricated it.  Decency is in question, but they aren't making things up to print at least.

I'm not even going to get into the part that we the public play in this, and how our hunger for lurid details encourages papers to go to great lengths to invade the privacy of anyone who we will pay to read about.  Still, on the face of it this is a simple question:

Does the Murdoch scandal inherently taint the contributions of every part of his empire?  Does the value tied to a brand give it the benefit of the doubt?  Let me know.

Brands and the Language of Symbols

Branding is nothing more than symbolism.  A logo, a name, a set of letters; these inert forms can be imbued with a life and meaning, made to represent far more than the product that they are printed on.  Mercedes and Chevy both make cars, mechanically they are extremely similar, and they serve the same basic purpose, but those brands have very different connotations.  Chevy invokes muddy construction sites, men in hard hats and denim throwing bricks into pick-up trucks.  Mercedes conjures images of business suits and sunglasses that appear from behind darkly tinted windows.  This isn’t an accident; it is the result of years’ worth of deliberate branding to appear as either blue-collar or refined, familiar or exotic. 

The associations that we have with brands are important to us, as they allow us to communicate in subtle ways about products and companies.  When someone talks about Apple or uses them as a reference point, your brain automatically assumes pleasant aesthetics and an intuitive interface.  There is a language implicit in branding that most people can understand, and for many brands the icon, whether it is an image or a name, is the cumulative reputation of the company expressed visually.

The reason that I am talking about all of this is that this symbolic language is something that we take for granted, and can change the way we view things.  I was reading something a week ago and it referenced a study that was done recently (I don’t recall what the study was), and the citation for the information said “WSJ” along with a date.  I remember being a little surprised at the claim being made, which was why I checked the source in the first place.  However, seeing what I thought was an attribution to the Wall Street Journal, I decided there might be some merit to the statement.  For better or worse, the Wall Street Journal is a trusted source, and they have earned that brand credit by maintaining consistently high journalistic standards, whether you agree with their politics or not.  So, I went to their website and spent twenty minutes searching in vain for this mysterious article.

To make a long story short, it turns out that the citation was in fact referencing the Winston-Salem Journal, not the Wall Street Journal.  Now, I have no opinion on that publication, and I am sure that it is a fine one.  However, to most people in the world, “WSJ’ is shorthand for the Wall Street Journal.  If I saw a sign advertising the NYT for $0.25, only to go into the store and discover that they meant “native young tomatoes,” I would feel that I had been misled (though I would buy the tomatoes).

Obviously, there are plenty of interpretations for a lot of abbreviations and initials, but there is usually one dominant interpretation based on context.  If you are talking about a business-related study and cite WSJ as the source, 99% of people are going to assume that you mean the Wall Street Journal, and I have a hard time believing that someone making such a reference wouldn’t know that.

Using Twitter for Branding Isn't Hard

Like most Twitter users (89.4%, according to a new study by eMarketer and Lab42), I follow a number of corporate brands.  The only brand to immediately follow me back?  Huggies.  That’s how you build brand loyalty.  Opening up a two-way communication with your consumers is crucial, and Huggies is the only brand I follow that did so.

They produce more content, and solicit more responses from their followers, than all of the other brands, and they recognize the value in engagement.  People like feeling as though they matter, they (we) collect Twitter followers like baseball cards, and each new one is a tip of a cap.  Humans are social animals, and the desire to feel liked is strong.  I am not particularly social at all, but seeing that Huggies went out of their way to follow me gave me the same endorphin kick as anyone else.

The result is a blog post like this, and it is the perfect example of earned media.  Suddenly, by doing something as simple as following a twitter account that was already following them, they get free advertising.  This isn’t much of an authority site, but maybe 5 or 10 people will see this.  I will mention it on twitter and the other people who follow me will see it, and I will throw a link up back to the brand website (diapers, and a full baby resource!)

Studies have shown that one of the strongest incentives for consumers to purchase is the opinion of online friends.  All the commercials and banner ads in the world won’t trump the words of people you know and trust.  Brands need to recognize this, and leverage every piece of media at their disposal to not only reach their audience, but turn that audience into a legion of goodwill ambassadors.

Content is King (of Kings)

As a man who was trained not in marketing, but in history and sociology, I often end up viewing paid search and online media through a somewhat different lens than my peers.  I can’t help but look for the patterns and symbols embedded in user behavior, and like a good structuralist I believe that those currents reflect the same basic needs and feelings that all societies have had.  After all, don’t the members of the internet using world make a society at this point?  The very emergence of the “social space,” “social media,” and other such terms tell me that they do.  Like-minded people band together online just as they do in the physical world, communicating and trading with one another, and linguistics and resource economics are two of the main pillars of any cultural study.  Therefore, I don’t find it far-fetched to think that anthropological lessons can be applied to digital advertising, in the same way that art history majors were brought into print marketing in the last century to ensure that the correct symbols would be used to appeal to a consumer’s unconscious.

So it was that while I watched Scott Sorokin deliver a presentation on the rise of user generated content and what the engaged consumer meant to brands that I began to think about the relationship of the masses to content and information in the digital age.  He made point that until very recently a company controlled the flow of information to the consumer, and that it was a one-way stream and extremely limited in scope.  As the internet grows and we move more into a world where content and information are both limitless and accessible however, the connection between a brand and consumers has become reciprocal.  What was once a monopoly on the part of the brand company is now an open platform, where user reviews, Facebook likes, YouTube videos and more not only respond to brand-created media, but augment (and in some cases stand in for) content that a company generates.

The importance of this shift in the fundamental relationship between consumer and brand cannot be overstated.  The move from a monopolistic to a reciprocal distribution of power is extremely rare and nearly impossible to reverse.  Generally you would expect the examples to be political, harkening back to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century, or the toppling of hereditary monarchies in the 18^th century, but these sorts examples fall well short.  Changes in political or technological control over information in a society do represent the movement of power, but the authority in such cases is always fleeting and illusory, because the society in question is not part of the loop.  Submitting to authority is not the same as granting authority.  A citizen of the Soviet Union who drove a Zaporozhet was not brand loyal, they simply weren’t allowed to buy a Ford.

The relationship that consumers have had with brands for the last 50 years has been voluntary though, if one-sided.  The information that you knew about a product, and the associations you made with the product, were (for the most part) based solely on what the company spread through media.  Now however, most savvy consumers can find all the information they need on a product without ever visiting the brand site.  What’s more, they can produce media of their own, be it a tweet or a 20-minute video, which provides a personal, positive or negative impression of a brand.  And with the accessibility of this content online, the difference is that now the brands need that content.  In the old days you could write a letter about a poor experience with a product to the company, or mention to your neighbor that you liked a commercial, but companies didn’t need that feedback, and it didn’t change what flowed the other way to the consumer.

What all of this triggered in my brain was the shift from polytheism to monotheism in the western world two thousand years ago.  When you study any society, one of the most important relationships that you will learn about is that between a people and their deity.  In most early, polytheistic cultures there is a very direct and personal relationship with the gods.  You generally don’t find a large hierarchical church structure serving as an intermediary, outside of a few priests or shamans.  This is where you have a sacrificial system (not necessarily the type of sacrifice that the word conjures up), which is simply the mechanism by which a society expresses their end of a reciprocal relationship with the deities.  In order to keep the god of fertility happy so that the crops will grow, you in turn provide the first and best results of the harvest, as a trade.  In these belief systems the gods are very close to humanity, and they are a reflection of the society and its needs.  These gods were petty, greedy, and humorous, and above all they wanted the same things that the people did, which provided the believers with something to contribute to the relationship.  This is the sort of relationship we are coming to now between the consumers and brands.  It is a close, two-way system in which both sides need something from the other, and where the connections between them are interwoven, the boundaries thin.  It is no surprise that words like “organic” and “holistic” are used to describe the new direction of marketing strategy, the same words applied to naturalistic polytheisms.

We are moving in the opposite direction as religious beliefs, and that transition was based on the requirements of a more structured and hierarchical society.  In a monotheistic culture God is remote, obscured behind layers of ritual and clergymen.  One of the issues that early missionaries faced was getting non-Christians to understand that the sacrificial system didn’t work because God didn’t want anything they had to offer.  The relationship was no longer reciprocal, because an all-powerful Lord can provide himself with anything he wants, and cannot be contacted directly.  God passed his messages down through a chain, whether in book form or the words of his earthly representatives, in the same way that a brand would disseminate its media through its channels.  Here is our product, here is what we want you to know about it, and how we want you to think about it.  What you thought about a product as an individual wasn’t really important, because there were plenty of other people who were happy to buy it.  In contrast with the druidic, diffuse nature of the polytheistic power exchange, monotheism was institutional and monolithic, a relationship that could be mirrored by centralized political authority, consolidating authority with the rise of “the state” as opposed to tribalism.

As consumers we have finally made the journey in the other direction.  Apple users now form a tribe that is distinct from pc users, where once there were just people who did or did not own computers.  There was once a segment of the market that was simply made up of car owners, but now the Ford Focus has a Facebook page and thousands of friends.  As the pendulum swings, the importance of embracing this new paradigm should not be lost on those brands who wish to become successful.  Users seek to engage with a brand because they have something to offer that is valuable, and in return they become an asset, a supporter, a (twitter) follower.  In a tribal system, you really want to have the biggest tribe.

Edit:  There is no intent here at blaspheme, nor am I attempting to elevate any belief system over any other.  I find this topic to be an interesting one, and I plan to go a little further into the matter and flesh it out, so that it is more than just idle ramblings.