Archive for January, 2011

How CAPTCHA Ads Stall the Evolution of Marketing

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

In my role as strategy group leader at Bridge Worldwide, I am often asked by my team or clients to weigh in on what’s next. And in my 15 years of working in the digital marketing space, I’ve seen a lot of bad ideas. Usually the bad ideas can be picked apart strategically as an internal exercise and we move on with life. But some bad ideas not only threaten to waste clients’ dollars—they threaten the very evolutionary survival and success of the digital marketing industry. Some ideas are evil in that they wish to bring marketing back to a time when we treated people like captive cattle at the impression trough. The people working on them are not necessarily evil, but such companies need to be called out. Today I would like to share why I am firmly against “CAPTCHA Advertising”—in hopes that you help save everything we’ve worked for in the next evolution of marketing.

For background, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test. This is a tool that websites often use to ensure that an action is completed by an actual human being, rather than a spamming bot. Here’s an example from a company called reCAPTCHA.

If you have left comments on blogs or registered for just about anything online you have likely completed a CAPTCHA. They can sometimes be difficult to read, and are made more difficult to read as spammers get better and better. But for now they are a necessary evil on the Web.

The Advertising Innovators Strike

For decades now there are many innovators and inventors in the world who dream of grabbing a piece of the multibillion-dollar advertising market by creating a new, owned “network” for marketers to hock their wares. The result is everything from advertising on airport runways to gas pumps to sheep grazing in a field. Back in 2005, Ilya Vedrashko, a marketing thinker I admire, wondered on his blog why no one had tried to turn these CAPTCHAs into an advertising medium.

A few years later Carnegie Mellon University created a system called reCAPTCHA which asked users to enter words from scanned books. This allowed the school to both block spammers and digitize many out-of-print books. It was a novel way to do something positive with a chore done by millions of people each day. In 2009, Google acquired the tool and continued to use it to digitize its book collection as well as the historic printings of The New York Times.  Another novel improvement on the CAPTCHA is something Facebook recently introduced: A test for people who lost their passwords in which you must correctly pick out a picture of a friend.

Alas, other not-so-noble ideas took hold after five years when a handful of companies began creating ad unit CAPTCHAs. Instead of deciphering a meaningless word or helping digitize a textbook, companies such as Solve Media ask consumers to write out a brand’s tag line or selling point, as in the example for Dr Pepper at the top of this page. The companies claimed that this was good for consumers, who no longer had to type in something that is often illegible; it offers advertisers a new, “captive” audience who was forced to interact with brand messaging; and it promised website owners the opportunity to further monetize content through ad revenue sharing. And in the past few months the hype around Solve Media and other CAPTCHA ad competitors is getting deafening.

I’ve been quietly ignoring these ads and pushing people away from it for some time. Until now my one public comment on the medium was in the comments of an iMedia article that claimed Solve Media as something that creates “real engagement.” But recently a client and friend of mine directly asked me for my point of view, and I put together an analysis that I would like to share with you here: The 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use CAPTCHA Advertising:

1. It’s Not Strategic

Such ad units are clearly a tactic, not a strategy, and therefore not worth much time at all for marketers to assess their value. At most, a brand manager who is running an awareness campaign online would expect that her media-buying agency is keeping an eye on the CAPTCHA ad space for really cheap CPMs. Already most marketers don’t spend enough time looking at bigger, strategic opportunities in digital through social, mobile, and CRM.

2. It’s Not Scalable

Solve Media and its competitors are targeting the big marketers who spend millions of dollars a year on mass marketing campaigns. What they fail to recognize, however, is that these companies want big numbers for their impression bucks. And the numbers on CAPTCHAs just don’t add up. Solve Media claims that there are about 300 million CAPTCHAs solved per day around the world. That’s not many impressions in a planet of 7 billion people who see about 3,000 ad impressions per day. Let’s say a full third of that comes from the U.S., so that’s 100 million CAPTCHAs per day for 100 million households in the U.S. That means most of us probably “solve” one CAPTCHA per day.

That’s right, even if 100% of these were by these ad networks, you would have one impression per household per day. Imagine if people saw one TV commercial per day, or one print/outdoor/banner ad per day. If there are a hundred total companies advertising on this medium, then your brand might only serve one ad per person per quarter. Why waste the time and energy for so little of an impact?

Ah, but Solve Media might just increase the number of CAPTCHAs that people have to solve per day! Imagine if people had to solve five or 10 of these per day?! (Step back and think of doing that! You’ve got to type in 10 brand slogans per day just to read a few articles!) But it’s still too little, and starts to anger the people who use your websites. (See below for more on that.)

3. Results Are Unproven

Marketers want to see the data and results before testing their budgets, so it was smart for Solve Media to invest in a study to gauge consumer interest and effectiveness of its new tactic. However, it is still far too early to trust in what little information has been shared so far. The company frequently quotes its “Wharton Study” that was done in summer 2010. Unfortunately this is the only data I can critique, and there are a few big issues with it.

In the study, 234 college students were asked to read an article. One leg had to sit through an interstitial ad between two pages of the article, which you might recognize as the kind of ad that you are forced to sit through before getting to content that you want to read or view. It’s so annoying that most websites won’t put it into use for fear of losing visitors. The second leg had no interstitial, but readers were asked to type in an advertising phrase in order to vote in a poll at the end of the article. By choosing interstitials as the comparison leg—one of the most annoying ad formats that exist—Solve Media stacked the deck in its favor in terms of measuring annoyance in a User Enjoyment score that came out flat between the two.

The big data quoted in the experiment is that Brand and Message Recall were much higher for those who had to type in the brand message with a CAPTCHA unit versus an interstitial. This makes sense, as people who have to write something down naturally will remember it better. But, again, there are issues: First, every new form of digital interruption I have seen has similar stronger numbers than “older” ad units, simply because people have not learned to ignore the new format. Second, the survey was given only 5 minutes after the ads, so the large Recall number does not necessarily translate to memory in the days later when someone is making a purchase at the store. Meanwhile Recall tests with TV advertising typically call people 48 hours after the survey to see if they still really remember what brand was advertised.

These are major flaws in the research, and marketers deserve more proof before handing over their shrinking budget dollars.

4. Too Little Benefit for Publishers

Solve Media and its competitors claim that this new ad format is a boon for content publishers and webmasters. They claim that their revenue sharing model is a way for people to keep getting valuable, free content. But the websites that have used these tools are seeing little benefit so far. Solve Media pays a whole 10 to 20 cents per CAPTCHA solved. Adverlab points to some interesting comments from websites that have tried the service, including:

“So, basically, if you annoy the crap out of 1000 of your visitors with these things, they’ll give you, the webmaster, 15 cents on average.”

“The payout threshold is a whopping $200…will take me 3 years to reach.”

Although the payout numbers are small for publishers, it seems that the spam rate gets a lot higher when you put Solve Media’s system into place. As one commenter in this article points out the fundamental issue: “Advertisers love clear (easy to read), consistent messaging (same answer every time). Spammers love easy to read images that always decode to the same CAPTCHA answer.”

5. The Risk of Angering Customers Is Too High

Let’s face it; our consumers have become tough and demanding, especially after surviving years of pop-ups, scam/spam email, spyware, privacy violations, and hacked laptops. They have a very low trust for advertising overall and digital “innovation” like this in particular. In fact, a recent survey by AdAge and IPSOS Observer found that digital formats take up the top four spots in consumers’ most-disliked ad platforms (in order: mobile, email, social, and websites). A very large and growing percentage of people feel that they have a right to skip pre-roll video ads and install banner ad and cookie blockers on their browsers. So a new “unbeatable” forced ad will leave a lot of people angered.

This particular ad unit feels like a punishment, and while a few marketing bloggers might say this is a clever idea, go check out some real consumers’ comments on Reddit or this take from Gizmodo. And it only takes a small amount of angry consumers to make this look like a bad idea quickly. If, say, only 10% of people decide not to buy your brand because of this kind of advertising, it might take 10 or 100 people to be slightly positively impacted enough by the CAPTCHA ad to make up for this loss.

And while these new ad companies say that they started the business in part because the old, hard-to-read CAPTCHAs were frustrating for consumers, now they are creating new, video ad units. So where you used to have to just decipher a phrase (branded or not) to comment on that article, you will increasingly have to sit through a video.

Conclusion

Along with these logical, strategic arguments against CAPTCHA Advertising, I feel compelled to add a personal point of view: This type of marketing represents everything I have worked against in my career, and it violates the Marketing with Meaning concept that I have been driving in this space for years. It treats our precious, loyal consumers as bad children who must be forced to memorize our brand assets. It seems aimed at tricking people into remembering or liking a brand rather than earning the business with great products and meaningful marketing.

We need to stand up against these kinds of advertising ideas because they lure marketers into believing that the old, interruptive, tell-and-sell ways can still work in the post-digital age.

UPDATE: Since posting this, two entrepreneurs have approached me with “better” ways of turning CAPTHCAs into advertising models and asked me for advice.  If you, too, think you have such an answer, please don’t contact me with it.  In case it was not clear above, I do not believe there is a “good” way to to advertising in this format.  Please put your great brainpower and entrepreneurial spirit into truly meaningful marketing.  Thank you!

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

5 Digital Predictions from a Brand Marketer’s Mentality

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

It seems like just yesterday that we entered the second decade of the 21st century and were beset by a bevy of predictions from gurus about what will come in 2011. As a digital strategist myself, I am often called on by our clients to interpret the tea leaves of change in our space—after all, many decisions will be made and money will be moved among the new-new things. Ironically, I have found that the more time I spend thinking about new digital media and start-ups, the more I am drawn to old lessons that I learned in working on new products as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble.

Way back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, I worked in marketing on brands such as Tide and Mr. Clean, and led a dozen product initiatives—including a few major successes (Mr. Clean Magic Eraser) and some spectacular failures (Fit Fruit & Vegetable Wash). I saw patterns in these launches and learned recurring marketing lessons. Interestingly, these lessons seem to hold true in the world of digital start-ups—as entrepreneurs and their investors travel through the same world of 4Ps, 3Cs, and WHO/WHAT/HOW.

I believe that we can make smarter investment decisions about how to use digital tools in our marketing by applying our brand-building frameworks to these start-ups. Here are five trends that my brand marketer intuition suggests will play out in 2011 and beyond:

1. Sales of Smartphones Will Beat Nearly Every Analyst Prediction

Nielsen predicts U.S. smartphone penetration at more than 50% in 2011. Pricewaterhouse Coopers forecasts global smartphone penetration will be 17% by 2014 (55% in developed nations). Verizon began this year by taking its earnings up due to rising smartphone revenues, and just predicted that its percentage of customers with smartphones will rise to 50% in 2011, up from 26% in 2010 and 15% in 2009. Predictions of new technology adoption traditionally get ahead of reality, but I believe several basic consumer and market forces will drive Web- and app-enabled smartphones to beat what most analysts and industry players dare imagine.

First, people already have a habit of upgrading their mobile phones relatively frequently. Unlike the laptop market where people prefer to delay upgrades due to high costs and the complexity of moving software and files, we find it easy to upgrade our phones annually. Contracts are always churning, and smartphones are the only devices that the large pool of manufacturers and service providers are advertising—because they are more profitable than other, older product lines. Just yesterday I saw an advertisement for a $9.99 Android-equipped smartphone.

Another driver of the habit is the social nature of mobile devices. Smartphone owners barely hesitate to show off vacation photos or update their Facebook status. They have become visible markers of the status of access—and no one wants to have the oldest phone in the club.

The product benefits are also very clear. Smartphones unlock access to thousands of value-added apps, ranging from time-killing games to productivity-building tools. It is rare to have a product category that provides access to so much more value—perhaps the only comparison is broadband Internet access, which also beat many expectations in its rollout.

Marketers must focus their attention on smartphones, mobile Web access, and app development in the year ahead. With the rapid rise of these devices we will see a corresponding explosion in tools such as promotion-seeking and price-checking apps in-store.

(Final note: In case you think it’s impossible to find a technology that beats predictions, no one predicted the huge numbers that Apple’s iPad hit this week, either.)

2. Build and Bet on Apps with a Clear, Focused User Benefit

In large part due to the growth of smartphones, an increasing number of brands have become interested in developing apps or partnering with mobile app makers. In either case it is important to think of apps as new products, and evaluate them based on the classic core concept questions: What is it? How does it work? And when should I use it?

Through this classic concept lens, start-ups such as Foursquare begin to look questionable. The service allows people to “check into” locations, yet offers no single, focused benefit aside from the novelty factor. No wonder that only 4% of those in the U.S. have ever used a location-based service, and Foursquare is now promising to add some real, tangible benefits in the months ahead.

On the other hand, some apps and brands will struggle because they offer too many benefits. Google, for example, keeps adding so many services to its broad audience that its users cannot keep track of what’s next. Google has a mobile app that just added a photo-based search capability. But its early visual searches are too broad—so that specific images are hard to find and results are generic. Instead, look for a rise of more focused search apps, such as Snooth, a wine review guide that also uses image search for the specific purpose of scanning wine bottle labels and pulling up focused information.

In the year ahead I would bet on apps that similarly focus on a single benefit to a focused target audience. For example, AisleBuyer brings grocery store self-scanning to your mobile device. This is a clear, focused benefit for both shoppers and retail stores—and by hooking users with this benefit, it can gradually add access to reviews, coupons, and loyalty programs.

3. Groupon Will Lose Its Luster Unless It Becomes a Consumer Habit

Groupon raised eyebrows in our industry at the end of 2010 when it reportedly turned down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google, and then made plans to raise $1 billion in VC funding. There is some justification for the excitement—Groupon has more than 35 million members worldwide, and its revenue is on a $500 million annual pace. The company has tapped into a clear consumer benefit—saving money—and it has unlocked marketing budgets of local businesses.

These dynamics have helped Groupon win with awareness and trial, but I worry that habit formation is a risk in its business model. Those like me who have experimented with Groupon as a user might agree that while the initial excitement of a great deal is there, the honeymoon soon wears off. The company’s daily email becomes an annoyance over time, and its offers vary wildly—recently ranging from a nursery painting service to an anti-LeBron James T-shirt. And because it depends on a group of people to act, there is often disappointment when not enough savers sign up. I believe this will mirror some of the initial hype and gradual decline of interest around online auctions. (For another smart user+marketer take on Groupon that is consistent with mine see the Experience Matters blog).

I believe Groupon-like features will pop up in existing online and physical stores in the year ahead as retailers experiment and build off the publicity around Groupon. Walmart, for example, launched a program called CrowdSaver, which first offered an 18% discount on plasma TVs when 5,000 people “Liked” the offer on Facebook. And focused interest businesses such as Restaurant.com are offering $100 dining credits for $40.

4. 3D TV Does Not Provide Enough Consumer Value to Take Off

All too often, the breathless desire and combined forces of consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers attempt to ignite a new wave of home entertainment technology but fail to win in the marketplace. Many have pegged their hopes on 3D television and filled their shelves with related equipment in hopes of a happy holiday buying season. Alas it didn’t take off this year and I believe prospects are low in 2011 and beyond. A Nielsen survey shows that only 3% of people in North America said they Definitely Would Buy a 3-D TV in the next year.

The first problem for 3D peripherals and programming is the significant purchase barriers that exist. Consumers loathe wearing special glasses and replacing the lovely flat-screen LCDs that they just brought home one or two years ago. More importantly, the value of a 3D home experience seems small. There will be few home movies and cable channels in 3D for some time, and a 3D picture is not significantly better than a high-quality HDTV at a fraction of the price. Analysts even say that 3D movie production will scale back as consumer interest wanes.

This follows the path of Blu-ray players and movies, which have also failed to connect with consumers on a large-scale basis. Blu-ray offers an improved picture quality, but most consumers have not seen enough of a difference to make it worth replacing their old DVD players and movie collections. Meanwhile, consumers are aggressively buying up services such as Netflix and Amazon, which allow movie downloading to their laptops, iPads, Xbox, and TiVo. Ironically, the quality of on-demand movies is usually significantly worse than even basic DVD quality—proving that the innovation consumers value today lies in access, not pixels.

5. Augmented Reality Fails the User Experience Test

I have to end my list by pouring a bucket of cold, harsh reality over the head of Augmented Reality, or “AR.” You may have encountered this buzz-builder in 2010—AR essentially is the use of a digital device to overlay physical objects with information or entertainment. This most often consists of a mobile app that uses image recognition and GPS. Examples are starting to pop up in app stores—such as an ATM locator that recognizes nearby buildings, a tool that guides you back to where you parked your car, and the Pocket Universe Virtual Astronomy app that really is a blast with kids in the backyard on a starry night.

The concept of such AR apps is exciting, but the use test is where it all falls apart. Put simply, it is far too difficult to hold your mobile device in front of you to enjoy the core benefits of AR. If you thought driving while texting was bad, imagine driving while holding an iPhone and peering through the tiny screen to look for a virtual ATM sign or coffee discount. It’s just not happening.

AR technology and its range of imaginative apps will not hit the mainstream until we have a better way to overlay digital information before our physical lives. For example, within a few years I believe we will be able to buy smart sunglasses that act as video screens, or even beam information directly onto our retinas. I predict that such devices will be commonplace by the year 2020, and of course come first from Apple (iFrame, anyone?).

Conclusion

Of course, I cannot guarantee that my predictions are accurate—if I could, my stock returns last year would have looked a lot better. But I can guarantee that you will make better decisions about which digital innovations are worthy of your investment in time and money by analyzing them through the lens of the great consumer marketer that you are. Digital may seem confusing and overhyped at times, but you cannot go wrong by centering yourself in consumer and concept understanding.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Why Companies Still Don’t Use Data Mining

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

There is one prediction that seems to come and go in every end-of-year business magazine or blog. This common prediction is more frequent than even calls for “The Year of Mobile.” The claim we “gurus” make and miss time and time again is that companies in the year ahead will mine deep data pools to develop brilliant, personalized recommendations on the products and services that you and I will want next. But decades since people started filling up storage facilities with data, we still see few marketers putting data to use. Amazon continues to be common case study, cited for its “You Might Like” feature that makes recommendations based on past purchases. But we all know how even Amazon’s algorithm fails to learn how to remove something you had wrapped as a gift, Banana Republic continues to send me offers for women’s apparel, and Jet Blue can’t even nail a basic user experience on its ticket-selling website. This is the kind of question that keeps me up at night in my quest to shift the world to Marketing with Meaning; but I think I have an answer.

Over the holidays I read an interesting article in the MIT Technology Review about how a handful of companies are actually putting their consumer knowledge to work to do some pretty interesting and successful micro-marketing. The concept, called predictive analytics, actually uses a combination of an individual’s specific personal information and purchase history, as well as traits from the entire customer database, to predict which types of products and services people might be interested in next. For example, the Cabela’s brand, which sells outdoor equipment through catalogs, online, and physical stores:

built a model that ranks customers from those with the best buying history to those with the worst. Next, it adds more than 15 predictive variables, including a customer’s preferred product categories and zip code. Each customer is then assigned a score from 1 to 100—the higher the ’star rating,’ the greater the revenue projection. The score determines whether and when Cabela’s mails that customer each of its catalogues.  The goal is ‘to determine how much each customer is going to spend with us over the next 12 months,’ says Corey Bergstrom, director of market research and analysis for the $2.6 billion company. Some high-value customers get special perks, such as more sophisticated telephone support. ‘If you deserve the white-glove type treatment,’ Bergstrom adds, “we need to know who you are so that we can go the extra mile for you.’”

Cabela’s has quadrupled the rate of response to its catalogs since implementing the system. That’s an almost unbelievable improvement on an age-old business model. The article notes that “predictive analytics software is a fairly small part of a $1.4 billion global market for business intelligence software”—and goes on to suggest that companies need more of a top-down commitment from the CEO to customer service support.

But let’s consider this question: Why can’t more companies make this commitment to smarter, personalized marketing through tools such as predictive analytics? Why are we getting the same catalogs, the same email specials, and the same credit card mail offers when so much of our data lies there for the interpreting—and sales are there for the taking? I believe there are four organizational behavior hurdles that stop this no-brainer from happening at the companies we work with and buy from every day:

Known Costs, Unknown Upside

We humans are often pretty bad at examining and judging risk and reward. For example, we have a bias against taking risks when we know the costs but are unsure of the rewards. I’ve been in too many meetings where companies are unable to achieve the revenue upside of a marketing investment because there simply isn’t available budget. No matter how high sales could go with a predictive analytics tool, for example, the $750,000 price tag for implementation is hard to swallow.

There is one piece of business where advanced data mining and personalized predictive analytics is hot, though: credit card fraud prevention. According to a recent article in Wired, in the U.S. alone, retailers and the big credit card issuers lose more than $3.4 billion a year due to lost and stolen cards. That is a very real number sitting on the income statements of these companies, thus providing them with a guaranteed bang for their buck by investing in analytics platforms. No wonder they are using tools to, say, predict that a card used to buy gasoline and then a piece of jewelry is likely a theft and flagged.

Too bad such technology isn’t being used nearly as often by these companies to make smart sales recommendations. The problem is that these lost sales opportunities never hit the books.

No “Burning Platform”

We humans and organizations also shy away from risks when things seem to be going well in our current situations. And such is the scenario of most businesses that could or should be using tools such as predictive analytics. Big, successful companies—and even not-so-successful companies that are still hanging on—are safe from the ravages of radical change, so they tend to keep on keepin’ on. It’s easier to do a study on something new and kill it in a committee, and then return to our everyday habits and do what we’ve always done. Sure, sales might even be flat or down a bit, but most jobs seem secure and we can always blame it on the economy, which we hope will pick up soon.

Individuals and companies take more risks when their jobs lives and livelihoods are actually on the line. Whether it’s Sears jumping into personalization and community tools that outstrip anything Walmart and Target are doing, or a start-up such as Zappos embracing killer customer service in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace and create a company from nothing, organizations that are standing on “a burning platform” recognize the need for something new much faster and more often than the leaders. They know their jobs are at risk so they take big risks that lead to big rewards. This is the heart of the concept of The Innovator’s Dilemma, and it is incredibly hard to overcome.

The Law of Big Numbers

Another classic marketing trap happens when a business is so large that improvement goes unnoticed and unappreciated. The big, national brands that most of us use every day rely on millions of purchase decisions and scale, scale, scale. The incentive is to spend your time and money on sweeping activities that impact many people at once. Personalized offers and actions fly in the face of mass marketers’ business models.

Take, for example, a major retail grocery chain that has a sophisticated data analytics tool that brands can use to gain insights about how people buy their products and shift marketing efforts accordingly. If I am the brand manager at a soup company, I can do basket analysis of what people buy, and how often and at what price points they buy my brand versus others, and then do some personalized offers through direct mail and checkout systems that the retailer makes available. Let’s say I spend several hours of my time testing various offers and hit a remarkable result—say, doubling sales at this one chain. The problem is that this retailer represents only about 1% of my annual sales. So after adjusting for time lost on other efforts and share that was simply stolen from another retailer, that doubling of sales in one chain has negligible impact on my business. It’s simply a waste of time to even think about. That’s why you see the same grocery store ads in the newspaper rather than a personalized list of specials in your email inbox.

Many Marketers Prefer Art to Science

A few years ago I was in a new business pitch with a major, global financial services company and brought forward an idea for a killer predictive analytics tool that would still be remarkable. I reasoned that because the company had access to individual credit card purchases, we could make smart recommendations about what people might be interested in now—and next. For example, we could see when someone was starting to pick up a new hobby or interest such as skiing or wine, and offer products, services, and experiences that could help him take that growing interest to the next level. Or when someone landed in a new city we could make proactive recommendations on restaurants. As I excitedly presented the idea to a CMO and his team I saw their eyes glaze over. They simply didn’t get it. And I think the main reason was that this company and all of its marketing staff was used to creating ad campaigns, not smart buying-recommendation tools. It simply didn’t compute.

I believe many people in marketing and advertising got into the jobs in large part because they lean toward art over science. We want to create cultural icons and memorable ads. We are attracted to creativity and imagination. And most of the big-company CMOs in charge today got to where they are because they learned how to judge whether or not a 30-second advertisement will break through the clutter during prime-time television. Many marketers find the concept of writing algorithms, analyzing personal buying habits, and testing hypotheses to be completely foreign.

…But Hope Springs Eternal

To paraphrase my favorite sci-fi author, William Gibson, the future of marketing is here; it just needs a user manual. The purpose of this blog, my book, and a big part of my everyday work at digital ad agency Bridge Worldwide, is to help guide marketers into the new world around us and give them new habits and tools. The first step for anyone in marketing is to recognize the need for change, and the reality that what made us successful in the past will not necessarily be the skills and methods needed going forward.

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Posted in Organizational Behavior | 2 Comments »

(Glowing) Book Review: The Personal MBA (Buy it today!)

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

Around eight years ago when I was working in marketing at Procter & Gamble, we welcomed a new member to our Mr. Clean brand team. Josh Kaufman began working for me as an Assistant Brand Manager after graduating from the University of Cincinnati. Early on, I recall talking with him about his side hobby: a website called ThePersonalMBA.com, where he maintained a list of business books for people who wanted a self-education without the $100k or more price tag. I loved the idea at the time, and I’ve been following Josh’s progress since he left P&G to follow this opportunity full time. Today I am thrilled to talk about his first book and offer a glowing, well-earned positive review. Please buy this book this week and let’s send it to the top of the best-seller charts.

Overall, The Personal MBA is a rare combination of “engaging airplane read” and “must-have desktop reference.” Josh has spent years pulling together a best-of business education, and putting it into easily digestible chunks. His book is both a needed refresher for what you know, and the missing key to what you never learned but need now.

My Take on the Value of an MBA

Before I give too much more information about the book, let me quickly address my take on the value of an MBA. I do have an MBA from the Stern School of Business at NYU. For me, attending NYU for graduate business school worked out very well. I was able to hit the career reset button, escape a job in banking that I did not love, and get on the radar of a great company such as P&G. My wife and I got to experience life in New York City for a few years and I met many fun and smart classmates and professors. I also “sucked the marrow” out of my MBA experience by pushing myself to earn high grades and lead a handful of student organizations.

That said, there are many drawbacks, such as the cost and the time away from drawing a salary, and, frankly, I did not retain a lot of the information from the classroom—I find that binging on lectures and case studies for two years is not the best way to learn. I would not change my choice, but I certainly have warned many people that an MBA should not be pursued without careful, realistic consideration. If you can get the job you want by simply showing results in your current and previous jobs, skip the MBA and keep self-learning from books such as The Personal MBA.

The Personal MBA website and book have caused some controversy over the years as people debate the ever-growing cost of the degree, with Josh providing a much-needed challenge to established thinking. In fact, Josh discusses Controversy as a marketing model on page 102 of his book. But this book really has little to do with the MBA question—it’s just smart writing on a topic we all could stand to learn more about.

The Book Review

Josh has spent several years crafting this book and it shows. The concepts are well-organized into linked chapters and one- to two-page sub-chapters, each with references to other books and helpful links for sharing. He shares stories of his own life and others to keep the material engaging and relevant. His writing is clear and understandable—making the knowledge of business accessible for people with little or no education in the field.

For me, The Personal MBA was a great book to read to refresh myself on concepts that I had learned and forgotten long ago. It also helped me identify some new tools that I can put to work in my role in analyzing clients’ businesses and markets. In the handful of days since finishing it, I have already gone back to Josh’s book a few times to look up something he covered.

What I like most about The Personal MBA is that it does not simply cover the class structure of today’s master’s of business program—instead, Josh provides new, more relevant material that MBA programs still don’t teach. For example, he includes a chapter on how the mind works, which is incredibly useful for understanding our customers no matter what our business is. And he sprinkles the book with concepts from the self-improvement world. Josh understands that those of us who work in business also live in business. Our minds, bodies, emotions, relationships, and personalities come into play on the job every moment we are there, and we need to look inside to be more effective in the outside business world.

I noticed that The Personal MBA is already around #300 on the Amazon charts, which suggests that this book is quickly resonating with a wide audience. I can think of nothing more rewarding than seeing a good friend find success in writing a book that has a chance to positively impact so many people. My kudos to Josh for his hard work in creating something important for our field. I hope you buy Josh’s book today and begin benefiting from his knowledge!

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