Archive for July, 2009

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MasterCard App Begins to Deliver on ‘Priceless’

Friday, July 31st, 2009

For as long as I can remember, credit-card marketing has been stuck an endless cycle of equity advertising. It’s a story we see in categories as diverse as automobiles, beer, and life insurance: When there is little innovation and lack of differentiation among major brands in a category, their advertising agencies are called on to gin up something remarkable.

In credit cards, the pattern has held firm for years, and the result is an endless loop of ads that celebrate how much life can be enjoyed because of the convenience and buying power of credit. Visa recently moved from its “Life Takes Visa” campaign to the current “Go” work, which includes millions of dollars in celebrity endorsements (Michael Phelps), celebrity voice-overs (Morgan Freeman), and licensed music (Moody Blues). American Express has had “My Life, My Card.” And MasterCard has stuck with its own version, “Priceless,” for more than 12 years. But a few weeks ago MasterCard took one small step out of the pack with an iPhone app that finally does something “real” through meaningful marketing to deliver on its promises.

The MasterCard Priceless Picks app, a free download from iTunes, is a clever tool that recognizes your location and presents a 3-D map of various “Priceless Picks” in your area. Its use of the touch screen interface is excellent, and within seconds I was able to explore the city around me. Unknown people or bots have populated the maps with restaurants, bars, museums, and popular items on sale. A little clicking offers more information, and the chance to send to a friend, flag as improper, or get more details. I actually discovered two interesting places across the river from my office, a coffee shop called the Bean Haus (“best place for a snug cup of coffee”) and an ice cream shop called Sweet Tooth, which apparently has great homemade chocolate chip. The video below from MasterCard shows a few user examples:

As a MasterCard customer, I really appreciate that the brand is trying to actually deliver on its “Priceless” brand promise, and the choice of an iPhone app works because it is a tool that is truly integrated with our daily lives. In fact, this is the second iPhone app from MasterCard. A few months ago it launched an ATM Hunter that allows users to find ATMs near their location, and sort by preferences such as drive-thru and no service charge.

As a Meaningful Marketer, I love that MasterCard is carving off at least a small piece of its mammoth budget and adding value to its customers’ lives through marketing itself. While Visa dumps hundreds of millions of dollars into beautiful TV “film” that is aimed at brainwashing viewers into pulling its card out more often, MasterCard has given us something worth talking about and playing with, and it just might help us discover something new and “priceless” in our hometowns or travel destinations. This kind of marketing (rather than a pretty new ad campaign) actually has a chance of helping the brand differentiate in the credit-card category.

I do admit there are some bugs and bumps in this app. I would expect a lot more than a handful of flagged locations in downtown Cincinnati, for example. And some of the picks are pretty lame, such as “$13.99 Huggies or CVS/pharmacy infant formula.” In an Ad Age article about the app, marketing consultant Tom Anderson suggests that, “You only have one chance with an app like this. If users come to it and it smells like an ad, then it is an ad, and with no value added it will die quickly.”

I actually disagree that the MasterCard app has to be perfect out of the gate, as long as the company goes into the app with a plan to continually learn and improve. There is much to be learned from seeing thousands of actual users engaging with it and adding their own picks. Some features such as its partnership with ShopLocal (which likely supplied the questionable Huggies ad above) might just be temporary tools that help get a critical mass of content while people are just discovering the app. At worst, people who have a subpar experience will revisit the app sometime in the future when they are bored and give it another chance.

I’m rooting for MasterCard’s value-added app approach and plan to upload a few of my own Priceless Picks, while pulling out my own MasterCard more often.

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Posted in Applications | 1 Comment »

Book Review: ‘It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For’

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Last week I trekked down to Austin, Texas, to spend some time with a fellow leader in the campaign to elevate the role of advertising, Roy Spence. I first wrote about Roy in a blog post a few months back. Our initial phone conversation then led to this trip to continue the dialogue about how we might partner up. We were able to spend some great time with Roy, his Chief Purposologist and co-author Haley Rushing, and a few other quality folks from their agency, GSD&M Idea City. We met the day after it was announced that Roy was handing his CEO role over to Duff Stewart, and he seemed extremely charged up to focus on the new Purpose Institute.

The purpose of this post is to convince you to purchase Roy and Haley’s book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. Overall, it’s a must-read if you are a fan of this Marketing with Meaning concept and wish to drive your organization and yourself to higher-level work.

I believe the act of proclaiming a Brand Purpose is really the best way to start down the path of creating meaningful marketing. When a brand makes the decision of “Why We Exist,” it becomes much simpler to begin thinking about how you can create marketing that people choose to engage with, and marketing that itself improves people’s lives.

What is particularly insightful about It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For is that it provides an inside view of some of the most successful businesses in terms of profit and purpose. The advertising agency Roy founded out of college, GSD&M, has been fortunate enough to attract and help shape great companies such as Walmart, Southwest, Whole Foods, and BMW, all of which have stayed close to a higher-level purpose. For example, the purpose of Southwest is to “democratize air travel,” and BWM exists to “enable people to experience the joy of driving.” I agree that being on the inside of an advertising agency offers the chance to see “lifetimes” worth of the good and bad of many organizations. It’s very easy to understand which companies “get it” and which are hopelessly lost, no matter what print ad or website we create for them.

Roy and Haley weave decades of personal history together with these brands’ most recent activity, and provide a nice step-by-step guide for brands to uncover their own purpose. There are a few specific sections of the book that I underlined heavily:

Life Is Too Short to Work Without Purpose

This is something I first began thinking more about after reading The 4-Hour Workweek. In this book, author Tim Ferriss encourages cubicle dwellers to escape the office, become Internet entrepreneurs, and focus on personal hobbies for the rest of their lives. He almost looks down on for-profit, 40-hour-a-week work. I enjoyed his book in many ways, but believe that a full workweek itself can and should be rewarding and exciting. Roy and Haley remind us that:

Bookstore shelves are now fully stocked with books about finding your personal purpose. But the reality is the vast majority of your time is consumed by your work life… Whether you’re a CEO or a secretary, the majority of your time, energy and talent will be spent in the service of your work. So why not make it worthwhile?”

They go on to suggest that you find the work you love best by paying attention to “the meeting on the calendar that you’re actually excited about going to” and to “notice when your heart speeds up just thinking about an issue.” In other words, finding personal purpose is the first step in moving your company or your career toward brand purpose.

Great Takeaways from Whole Foods

While I enjoyed the deep case studies on Walmart and Southwest Airlines, I especially enjoyed two lessons from Whole Foods. First, there’s the fact that the company continues to commit to donating 5% of its sales on five days a year to nonprofits chosen by each local store. Stock analysts and some investors complain about so much of Whole Foods profits going to charities, but who can argue with a 3,000% increase in stock value over 14 years?

A second interesting observation is that Whole Foods admits that it is never going to be perfect in delivering on its Vision Statement, as seen in its “Declaration of Independence“:

We do not believe [the Vision Statement] always accurately portrays the way things currently are at Whole Foods Market so much as the way we would like things to be. It is our dissatisfaction with the current reality, when compared with what is possible, that spurs us toward excellence and toward creating a better person, company, and world. When Whole Foods Market fails to measure up to its stated Vision, as it inevitably will at times, we should not despair. Rather let us take up the challenge together to bring our reality closer to our vision. The future we will experience tomorrow is created one step at a time today.”

(On a side note, after meeting with the folks at Idea City we headed across the street to the Whole Foods headquarters store. We spent about two hours exploring the amazing selection and had a wonderful lunch in the seafood cafe.)

Conclusion

One of my favorite passages in the book is the challenge for people to be willing and able to communicate their personal+brand purpose into the dinner-party conversation. Imagine the usual first exchange when you meet someone new and he or she asks, “What do you do?” You know you’re onto something when you can proudly proclaim the higher-level drive of your work. For me, the answer is: “I create marketing that improves people’s lives.”

What’s yours?

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Posted in Agency Marketing, book, purpose | 1 Comment »

Starbucks Supplies Free Music and Drinks

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Last week I stopped into the Starbucks that I drive by nearly every day on my 20-minute commute to work. It was the first time I had been to this store in several months, and my first Starbucks visit of any kind in at least eight weeks. During that time I’ve been away, Starbucks seems to have been working hard to win back regular customers in a tough economy, and a few small signs of life suggest that this customer at least might be visiting more often.

There were two pleasantly unexpected examples of meaningful marketing that I encountered on this visit. First, when I was handed a receipt for my Vente Coffee with hazelnut, the server said that if I returned to any Starbucks today I could show the receipt and get a free Grande cold drink. This is a smart promotion in that it rewards purchase, plus helps drive in a second visit and perhaps an afternoon-visit habit.

I found the second bonus when I went over to load my cream and sugar choices at the toppings bar. (Is there a better name for that?) There was a small display of cards (see above) offering a Starbucks and iTunes “Pick of the Week” song. In this case it was a new Dave Matthews Band tune called “Write a Song” from their new album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King. All I had to do was redeem a code on iTunes and I was enjoying free music from a band I love. This is actually an ongoing weekly promotion, with a new free song every Tuesday. The idea of free music at Starbucks is particularly new because the stores are infamous for pushing CDs on its visitors at every corner.

These are two small examples of meaningful marketing, but they suggest that the company is working hard to win our business back. It makes me want to stop into Starbucks on my daily drive more often to check out what new surprises the store has brewed up. And that’s exactly what the company is hoping for. Maybe there’s life in Starbucks yet.

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Posted in Connection, Sampling | 3 Comments »

Bayer Creates Nintendo Game for Diabetes

Friday, July 24th, 2009

A few weeks ago I was alerted through buzz-tracking site Boing Boing of a new Nintendo plug-in from Bayer called Didget, which helps encourage children with diabetes to build good blood glucose testing habits. It is an incredible example of meaningful marketing and I hope the first of many such examples in the healthcare industry.

While I’m not a child with diabetes, I know a little something about the disease through work with one of our clients, the Glucerna brand at Abbott Nutrition. Several years ago we helped launch a program called Diabetes Control for Life, which helps people manage their disease through better eating, exercise, and regular glucose monitoring. And I have learned how important regular blood glucose testing is for people with diabetes, as it helps people learn about how their body reacts to food and activity. I have actually pricked my finger a few times to test my blood—and I can tell you that it’s not fun for an adult, much less a child. So anything that makes it easier—and even fun—for children to manage their diabetes is a huge opportunity to improve lives through marketing.

Bayer created this program with the help of a parent, Paul Wessel, who noticed that while his son was constantly losing his glucose meter, he always had his Nintendo Game Boy close by. In its final product, Bayer has done a lot of things well. First, it has developed an add-on to an already very popular and widespread Nintendo DS game system. Nintendo was likely very helpful in the development, both because of the revenue upside and chance to do good work. Second, the company created new games that tie into the monitor and reward kids with virtual credits that can be redeemed at a personalized website online. I know my own kids have improved their math and language skills through the educational games we have bought them with similar benefits.

Bayer’s Didget tool lies somewhere between the definitions of “product” and “marketing.” It is a new device that sells for around $50 in the U.K. and comes from Bayer’s family of glucose testing devices (including the Contour brand). I consider the online site and digital prizes part of a meaningful marketing program, much like the Webkinz online experience that is unlocked by purchasing a stuffed animal.

It will be interesting to see if Bayer will quickly expand this program to the U.S. and other countries around the world. I would be interested to see the company commission and share research showing that this device is helping kids learn to test regularly. This could help drive other healthcare companies into a new way of encouraging education, testing, and treatment by making it more fun for children of all ages.

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Posted in Games, Uncategorized, healthcare | 4 Comments »

A Permanent Decline in Advertising Spend

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

From time to time I get phone calls from financial analysts who cover the broad advertising and marketing industry. Their questions tend to focus on uncovering “what’s hot” and whether and where companies are putting money into new growth areas such as digital, mobile, and social media. Last week I read a Forrester report that reminded me of something I said to an analyst more than two years ago—that the rise of digital and better advertising ROI might actually decrease total advertising spending in the economy. He didn’t care to pursue this opinion much further, choosing instead to focus on go-go growth. But now that Forrester is similarly predicting a fall in total spending, I feel vindicated and actually excited about what this means for the future of our advertising industry.

Forrester’s new five-year spending forecast by Shar VanBoskirk is based on extensive interviews with marketers. Its focus is on digital, and shows that various forms of digital advertising will rise from 12% of overall advertising spending in 2009 to 21% in five years. One main reason for this shift is that digital is increasingly the go-to medium for consumers, and brands that don’t follow their consumers are doomed to fail. But another key reason for the move is that digital marketing is much more efficient. Instead of spraying billions of eyeballs with a standard message, digital allows both better targeting of the right people as well personalized marketing services that forge a much stronger bond. In other words, digital marketing is much more meaningful to consumers. In his blog post about this forecast, Josh Bernoff at Forrester proclaimed that “we are all digital marketers now”:

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I’ve learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you’re in advertising, you’d better learn to speak digital, because that’s the way the world is going.”

When I spoke to that financial analyst two years ago, my argument that total advertising spending could decline was twofold: First, I mentioned the fact that there was a rising “bubble” in the pricing of advertising on mass media such as television. The television networks, among other old media, have been increasing ad prices on 30-second spots despite the drop in actual viewership. “Media inflation” has been far ahead of actual inflation, which has created a house of cards destined to collapse.

Second, in a world where marketing choices and measurement tools are more targeted, we increasingly see which “half of the marketing budget is wasted.” When you eliminate the part of your marketing budget that’s wasted, you don’t necessarily spend the savings on ads somewhere else. Increasingly in this economy, you take it to the bottom line or invest it in product development.

Some in the industry choose to fight the shifting forces with words. Jeff Zucker, President of NBC-Universal, famously complained that Apple and others in the industry were “trading analog dollars for digital dimes.” And I’ll never forget being at a closed summit of CMOs where one top-30 advertiser berated us all for using DVRs to skip ads in our homes, thus destroying the marketing model we hold dear.

Sorry, guys, but the push of global competition, fundamental change in consumer media habits, and the catalyst of the current recession will terminate advertising inefficiency with extreme prejudice. If your advertising agency, media company, or brand marketing doesn’t add value to consumers’ lives and the business bottom line, now is the time to move on.

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Posted in Cost Reduction | 1 Comment »

ExactTarget Visualizes Personalization Payoff

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Last week a group of us at Bridge Worldwide got to spend some time with a team from ExactTarget. ExactTarget is a leading provider of one-to-one communication services, with particular leadership in email delivery. A former colleague of mine at P&G, Tim Kopp, is now the CMO of ExactTarget. Great things are happening with their business: The company’s revenue growth is accelerating, and it recently raised $70 million in funding during one of the worst periods in market history. I love the services the company offers and we’ll be exploring ways to work with them in the future. But for this post I wanted to share something special that stood out in their presentation last week: a chart (above) that shows the evolution and payoff of meaningful marketing.

I apologize if this is a little difficult to read, but the visual above is an incredible way to diagnose where your brand lies in the evolution of one-to-one communication. Many brands begin at the far left segment, blasting out the same email to everyone in their databases. But over time, some discover the need for and benefit of adapting their communication by using customer profiles—information such as age, income, and purchase history. Some then do research into the goals of their customers and progress to Persona-Driven models. A small number of brands are using historic and real-time behavior to adapt messaging, and a rare few leaders have modeled their entire database of customer activity in order to predict the rhythms of customer engagement and give them the content they want before they even know they want it.

As this graph shows, case study after case study proves that the more sophisticated companies become at serving meaningful communication to their customers, the higher the return on investment. And this is a payout with increasing marginal returns. For example, a blast email that creates a 1X return on investment might move to a 2X return through Persona-Driven modeling, and to a 10X return with Predictive Messages.

As one might expect, the companies that are doing the most in this space are those with heavy e-commerce businesses, such as Retail and Travel. The reason is that the impact on sales from these adjustments can be measured through actual purchases in real time. To date, industries such as CPG, Healthcare, and Automotive have been slow to adopt sophisticated personalization of messages because they are a step or two away from the final purchase, and the purchase might not ring up for weeks or months after the email arrives.

It takes a leap of faith to make the financial and time investment to turn your one-to-one marketing efforts into something more personalized and more meaningful. But the accelerating benefits make this very difficult to ignore for much longer. Fortunately, companies such as ExactTarget exist to help do the dirty work of making sophisticated marketing happen, and I look forward to working with them in the future.

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Posted in Personalization, Uncategorized, content | 5 Comments »

How the Starwood iPhone App Pressures Delta

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Over the weekend I somehow discovered that the Starwood Preferred Guest program was now offering a free iPhone app. In less than five minutes I had Googled it for a review, downloaded the app, input my membership number, and was checking out this cool new marketing service from one of my favorite hotel chains. My next thought: Why does my regular airline, Delta, not have an iPhone app yet? A great service by Starwood also made me feel worse about my airline, a company not even in the same business category! This reaction is an example of how great customer service and meaningful marketing in one category puts pressure on every business to improve.

My friend and colleague, Jonathan Richman, recently referenced this idea on his blog, Dose of Digital. It’s an idea that I share often with clients as we try to help them navigate the sea of digital choices and choose which services to offer and competitors to benchmark. This idea that customer-service expectations are rising across categories first sprung up in my mind when I read an Accenture survey from November 2008 of the customer-service attitudes of 4,000 respondents. It found that 31% said their customer-service expectations are higher than a year ago, and 52% said their expectations are up from five years ago. That’s an incredible increase in a short period of time, and it shows the path of the economy of today and tomorrow: As competition increases, service and value will increase, and people will expect these improvements to continue across every industry. The more we give them, the more they expect.

I believe this idea manifests itself in several divergent categories. My favorite example comes from Domino’s Pizza. In January 2008 it launched an online Pizza Tracker that shows an estimate of the step-by-step process of making the pizza you order online. Some laughed at the idea, but Domino’s felt it was necessary because a significant number of people call back to ask how their orders are progressing (before the 30 minutes, mind you). While others laughed, Domino’s racked up its millionth user of the tool before six months. Why? Well, I believe that people have become used to viewing the progress of their online orders from services such as UPS and FedEx. These two companies have great package tracking systems that millions of people have used. So the consumer’s expectation is that if these orders can be tracked, why can’t my pizza?

Other examples abound. A few years ago Facebook and Twitter started allowing mobile updates on information as trivial as when a friend updated his status or uploaded a photo, but banks and airlines were much slower to provide mobile updates for important information such as low balances and canceled flights. Another example is the increase in self-checkout lanes at retail stores. I firmly believe that they have rapidly expanded because customers are used to self-checkout online at e-commerce stores, and expect similar freedom in the offline world.

Our agency has seen this recently with our work on the Vicks brand. Just weeks before we launched our first online cold-and-flu tracking tool, Google came out with its own flu-trends tool, which grabbed the media spotlight before we did. So now CPG brands are competing with Google? That’s a pretty huge challenge!

But that’s reality. And on my other personal blog, The Challenge Dividend, you can read many, many stories of how Challenge Drives Improvement. (Warning: It’s not been updated in a few months as I’m focused on this blog and book.)

I believe that the many increasing examples of Marketing with Meaning will start setting a very high bar for businesses across every industry. Consumers will gravitate quickly toward those brands that provide value through marketing, and increasingly punish the brands that continue to interrupt and annoy them.

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Posted in Applications, customer service | 3 Comments »

Unique Coke Cannes Delivery

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009


This week I’m spending some time catching up on sharing some of the best, most meaningful marketing to be awarded in the annual Cannes Advertising Competition. Our President, Jay, and Chief Creative Officer, Peter, both came back raving about an incredibly powerful vending machine for Coca-Cola that was put up in the bottom floor of the Cannes conference. It ended up winning a Gold Lion in the Design category. Check out the video above for a glimpse of the experience.

The biggest lesson for me here is a reminder that everything your brand does with the consumer is a kind of marketing, whether it’s customer service, packaging, delivery trucks, or vending machines. And every consumer touchpoint in this broad view of marketing can be made much more meaningful. In this case, Coke has taken the boring, predictable, exchange-focused vending machine and turned it into something remarkable, entertaining, and fun. I also love how this delivers on what the Coke brand and drinking experience is really about: a few minutes of fun and enjoyment. Instead of just advertising to people on TV with equity spots that are meant to help trigger a feeling of enjoyment hours or days later when the drink is consumed, this makes entertainment and happy feelings happen at the moment of truth of refreshment.

I think there are some other really interesting things about these vending experiences. First, they are completely measurable (obviously, because they sell product). Second, they could allow Coke to charge more and achieve wider margins (say, charging $2 or more for the machine experience and fancy bottle). Third, they draw attention in public places, which attracts more users, buyers, and observers.

I am most interested to see what happens from here with the vending machines, and whether they will truly roll out broadly. Sure, it’s easy to create a concept such as this, install it in a few malls, and win an award at Cannes. The challenge is selling this in broadly and getting distributors around the world to embrace the concept. This is where the marketing department often bumps heads with the old-school crowd, finance guys and general bureaucratic commitment to not making waves.

“Marketing” sits in a skyscraper in Atlanta, Georgia, making ads, while “Sales” is out on the streets making sure machines and store shelves are full. Placing ads and maintaining fancy machines is not their job, nor in their budget. Coke distributors are used to paying $X for a basic vending machine that needs almost no service. But what happens when “headquarters” forces them to pay $5X for this special machine? Who’s going to fix them when they break? Anyone who has worked in a large company can play out this tragic scene from hours in boardrooms and conference calls. A quote that I developed in my days as a big marketer was, “Doing anything new is hard.”

My congrats to Coke on a killer idea, and our hopes are with you as you try to take this meaningful idea outside the ad-award world.

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Posted in Awards, Entertainment, Experience, Outdoor | 1 Comment »

Bleeding Billboard Slows Traffic Deaths

Monday, July 13th, 2009


It’s a few weeks after the annual Cannes Advertising Festival. I was able to post early on our agency’s Gold Lions win for Pringles, but I’m a bit slow in sharing other examples of great, meaningful advertising from the show. This week I’ll share a few examples of my favorite work.

First up is this incredibly powerful and simple idea from BBDO in New Zealand that won a Bronze Lion in the Design competition. The video above tells the story much better than I can, but in summary, its goal is to reduce car accidents on the roads of Papakura, New Zealand, which tend to spike when rains come and roads become slippery. This campaign reduced road deaths on this particular piece of roadway to zero.

It is great to see a piece of brilliant, meaningful marketing for a nonprofit issue here. One might argue that all cause-related and nonprofit marketing is meaningful, but I don’t believe that is the case. Issue-related nonprofits are in sales just like regular businesses; their goal is to “sell in” their point of view on a topic. But unless they draw true engagement and value for the targeted audience, they fail.

In this case, local government is trying to “sell” its drivers on the need to slow down during rain. To measure success, instead of tracking sales of a product, it is tracking the number of road accidents and fatalities. And clearly some marketing is more effective than others. Imagine TV commercials or print ads with a policeman or government official lecturing a viewer about the need to drive cautiously during rains. Failure is almost assured for such an approach because it does not come at a relevant time in an engaging way. Here, the bleeding billboards not only come at the right place and time (roadside during rain), but they communicate the message in a way that embodies the tragedy of drivers’ failure to adjust—the photo of a young child. This beats a flashing yellow warning sign any day. Not only is this effective in its roadside ad placement, but the ad has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube in less than a month.

My hope is that the concept and framework of Marketing with Meaning is also used by nonprofit organizations to better their strategy and results. Coming up in my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, I share the story of how another nonprofit issue organization, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, dramatically shifted its marketing approach from interruptive ads to meaningful messages and advice. I may also try to do something in the marketing of the book to specifically reach out to nonprofits, perhaps in a nonprofit way. Stay tuned and, as always, your ideas in the comments are welcome and appreciated!

(Special thanks to Chris Zieverink from our Creative team, who not only sent me this link but just created a killer logo for Marketing with Meaning that I’ll be sharing here soon.)

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Posted in Cause Related, Outdoor, non-profit | 1 Comment »

What Not to Do for a Blogger Book Review

Friday, July 10th, 2009

As most readers know I’ve been gearing up for the launch of my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, which will be published in October by McGraw-Hill. For more than a year now I’ve not only been writing furiously but also going to school on best practices in book marketing. One of the obvious and growing keys to book marketing is reaching out to influential bloggers in hopes of positive reviews and word of mouth. Interestingly, as a blogger with a good amount of traffic, I have now been approached a handful of times by authors and publishers who would like me to review their books. This has given me a hands-on, customer-based view of what works and what doesn’t. Yesterday I received an offer that misses the mark, and I thought it would be interesting to share here.

(NOTE: I have chosen not to mention the book or publisher that reached out to me in this case, because I have no desire to negatively impact their sales or business, plus naming names is really not necessary to make my points.)

The Approach

A representative for the publisher in question emailed me with a note saying that he is “reaching out to bloggers to ask if you would help us spread the word about a new book…” This followed with a short paragraph summarizing the book and its target market. The publisher representative also attached the “pre-press page proofs” of the book—essentially a PDF of the almost-final book itself. He ended with the line, “Anything you can do from a Tweet to a full book review on your blog would be appreciated.”

My Analysis

As a target blogger in this case, I felt very little motivation to give attention to this offer. There are several issues and negatives that come through here. First, it is a general message that is likely copied and pasted to hundreds or thousands of other marketing-related bloggers. The only thing personalized is my name in the opening. It is clear that this person has not read my blog. Second, there’s nothing here to make it easy for me to act on the request. If the publisher representative had spent 5 minutes getting a feel for my blog topic and then added a sentence that suggested how this book was relevant for my topic and audience then I would have been much more compelled to pay attention, and it would have given me an idea of where to go with it. But the biggest issue to me is that I’m only getting a 380-page PDF of the book, rather than a real copy. There’s no way I’m going to read through this type of document on my laptop. Frankly, by making your target audience do more work, I believe you actually bias them against your product—or at minimum fail to take advantage of human nature to reward a free gift.

A Better Way

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post in praise of the book Content Rich, the result of another example of blogger outreach that worked much better—obviously because it motivated me to spend hours reading the book and writing a (positive) review. In this case the author, Jon Wuebben, sent me a personalized email that specifically mentioned how his book was a fit with my concept and audience. He offered to send me a free copy of the book if I would be interested in reading and writing about it. This helped him ensure that books only went out to interested people. I agreed and the book arrived a few days later in the mail. It took me longer than I hoped to actually read the book and write the post, but it kept sitting on my desk as a constant reminder that I promised to review it. I didn’t want to let down the author, who had invested time and money on me and my commitment.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea to make a free version of a new book available broadly, as the publisher in this example did. Another example of this happening right now is Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book Free, which he is releasing widely in digital file format at no cost. However this approach is unlikely to get many influential bloggers to quickly put out a positive review.

I’m still working on my own strategy for blogger outreach in the coming months. I want to make sure to personally touch bloggers with large audiences with a free copy, but I also plan to offer some incentive and/or reward for “the long tail” of bloggers with smaller audiences who write book reviews. I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning | 5 Comments »

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