Archive for the ‘Marketing Without Meaning’ Category

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Pepsi Cuts All Ad Spending: Consider the Possibilities

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Onion Pepsi

A few weeks ago, one of the most re-tweeted links among us marketing geeks was The Onion’s article claiming “Pepsi to Cease Advertising.” The article is a classic, hilarious piece from the online newspaper equivalent of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, and many of us had a short chuckle and went back to work. But on second thought, maybe this article isn’t so crazy after all….

This week I got to spend some time with Frederic Colas, Chief Strategic Officer for giant European digital agency, FullSIX. We both are former P&G guys who left to take similar roles in digital agencies. We were talking about our concept of Marketing with Meaning, and Frederic brought up this Onion article as something that was suggesting what meaningful marketing is all about: dumping the traditional, interruptive model  and moving all funds to something that consumers actually care about. As Frederic wisely said, “Any good satire has a kernel of truth and believability.”

So what if Pepsi started from scratch on its marketing budget and adopted an entirely new approach? What if it decided that the purpose of its marketing was not to simply remind people that the brand exists, is refreshing, and is something that celebrities love to (get paid to) drink?

What if, instead, the brand chose to put its marketing dollars into something that its consumers choose to engage with, and marketing that itself adds value to people’s lives? Imagine what the company could do to inject joy into people’s lives through marketing, rather than mentally brainwashing them into thinking that a sip of Pepsi will produce said joy. By creating real joy, Pepsi has a much better chance of earning loyalty beyond reason for life. As for where to put these dollars, I envision everything from social gaming to enormous global cause projects.

Pepsi certainly could use something different. Revenue for PepsiCo fell by 1.5% in the most recent quarter, which was worse than analysts expected. Brands such as Gatorade have struggled as the old model of catchy ad campaigns have failed in this new economy with this new consumer. On the other hand, the beverage unit could learn and embed lessons that are coming from its Frito-Lay division, where brands such as Doritos and SunChips are experiencing sales growth and tighter consumer bonds through meaningful marketing.

I wonder what the conversations were in the halls of PepsiCo when this article made the rounds through email. If even a handful of its marketers paused to consider this article as a possibility, then the seeds of revolution might have been sown.

Pepsi-To-Jump-R

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Organizational Behavior | No Comments »

Consumers Rejecting Targeted Ads

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

targeted ads unwanted

One of the promises of digital marketing that has kept our industry excited and optimistic for the past 10-plus years has been the opportunity to learn about individual consumers and serve them relevant advertisements. The hypothesis is that more relevant interruptions will be more engaging, incite positive action, and reduce waste. Aside from behavioral targeting, which uses cookies to help websites personalize banner ads for individual site visitors, social-media services such as Facebook have promised to open up further opportunities by reading into what people are posting about themselves. Even cable companies are experimenting with personally addressable TV commercials.

But despite all of the hope and hype, targeted ads have not become the revolution that we digital marketers have longed for. Not only are people ignoring highly targeted ads just as much as they do all other banners, but new research suggests that many consumers are outright rejecting the idea of personalized marketing.

I’m a few weeks late in catching the results of a new survey by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley in which represents one of the first pieces of research not done by digital marketers (who have an understandable bias). In their telephone survey of 1,000 adults nationwide, they asked: Do you want websites you visit to show you ads, discounts, or news tailored to your interests? Before getting to the results, let me first say that this is an excellent way to word the question. It does not introduce the idea of cookies or other privacy third-rails. If anything, this question format seems to emphasize the positive aspects of advertising and content targeting.

Even as a hardened digital marketer I was surprised at the results: 67% of Americans do not want advertisements that are tailored to their interests. A further 51% reject personalized discounts and 58% don’t even want tailored news. Again, this is without seeding survey respondents with doubt and questions about how their personal information is captured and turned into tailored ads. This is a very, very bad sign for the digital advertising industry and website content creators.

What’s worse, when the researchers started describing how their information was tracked, even more people rejected the idea of personalization. From The New York Times:

“The respondents’ aversion to tailored ads increased once they learned about targeting methods. In addition to the original 66 percent that said tailored ads were ‘not O.K.,’ an additional 7 percent said such ads were not O.K. when they were tracked on the site. An additional 18 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked via other Web sites, and an additional 20 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked offline.”

Some believe that this data has little impact on the industry; sure, people will always say that they hate advertising, they say. Others add that people will protest ads until they learn that it’s the only way they will get free content. The problem is that the government is getting very close to stepping in and regulating targeted advertising. David Vladeck, the new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, has promised to look closely at such online ad targeting, and has already publicly called some tactics “Orwellian.”

Here’s the problem for marketers: No one is going to stand up and tell the FTC to back off us. We advertisers as an industry have punished consumers for years with meaningless messages pressed against their eyeballs by the thousands each day. Because we can, we have hit them with ads everywhere from their email inboxes to elevators and gas pumps. Our level of society respect lies with used-car salesmen. Who is going to protest in favor of more advertising, even when we threaten that we’ll take away our free content?

With data like this study, Vladeck and the FTC essentially have a mandate to act against personalized targeting. It gives them impartial proof that the people don’t value personalized offers, and their job is to, well, do what the people want. Lawmakers and the FTC can also recall how the National Do Not Call Registry unanimously sailed through Congress and home phone numbers have been registered by more than 70% of Americans. The Direct Marketing PACs could do nothing to stop that legislation and there is little hope that we can stop this, either.

Look, I’m an executive at a digital marketing agency and I will feel the pain like anyone else in this business if this legislation goes through. But I also realize that you can’t force people to view or accept your advertising. This is why I am so passionate about the concept of Marketing with Meaning. I fundamentally believe that the only thing we can do to survive in this business is to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that adds value to people’s lives.

So, people don’t like and genuinely fear personalized advertising. I take that as a sign that we’ve got move on to something that they do value. That is why I believe in creating content that people choose to view, read, or listen to. That is why I believe the future of digital, and marketing overall, lies much more in creating services and positive social movements. So while my company and I still make a lot of banner ads, we are also driving ourselves and our clients to create more meaningful marketing.

Isn’t it time we as an industry stop trying to fight against public opinion and do everything we can to make the public embrace our brands?

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Posted in Banners, Government, Marketing Without Meaning, Media, Movement, Personalization, culture | 2 Comments »

Milk-Carton Ads Don’t Build Strong Brands

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

oreo milk 1oreo milk 2

Last week was back to school for my two daughters, which means I was right back into the habit of making them breakfast in the morning. When I pulled the jug of milk out for their cereal on Tuesday, I noticed something new and unexpected: an ad for Oreo cookies where I would usually expect to see the usual milk-brand package logo. I grabbed my iPhone and snapped the photos above. It seems many other people were waking up to this new media channel, as The New York Times featured it in an article on August 27. It is an interesting test case in “new media” and makes for a blog post that I hope you dear readers will weigh in on.

The rationale for milk-jug advertising makes a lot of sense from a traditional marketing perspective, of course. There are millions of gallons of milk that appear in grocery-store aisles and home refrigerators each day. That’s many billions of impressions that have gone uncapitalized on, until now! With people increasingly ignoring or avoiding traditional advertising media such as newspapers and TV, this is a viable alternative for eyeball harvesting. Because people drink an average of 20 gallons of milk each year and often leave it out on the counter or at the table during breakfast, this makes for a very long-term exposure.

It can also be very relevant to advertise on milk cartons. One of my coworkers pointed out that his grocery store has placed a display of Oreos right across from these milk ads. The New York Times reports that milk ads can be customized by type of milk—say, higher-end product ads for low-fat milk, which people with higher incomes tend to choose. And because kids drink a lot of milk it’s an easier way to connect with a generation that grew up with one finger on the DVR skip button. Ads are starting to show up on single-serve milk cartons at schools, and Disney and Build-A-Bear have already gotten on the bandwagon. No wonder there’s already at least one advertising company with a specific focus on selling milk-carton media. The firm, BoxTop Media, ran a study that showed a large brand got a 4% to 6% increase in sales.

Despite the new hype around this old/new media idea, I don’t think it has much of a future. New places to put your interruptive ad represent a fight against the grain and offer only temporary sales gains at best. Last year I wrote about how Zappos was advertising on airport security bins, for example. These ads are temporarily cute and stand out the first few times you see it, but over time people just learn to tune out the new ad space. And the ad networks that quickly form around them do not limit their space to clever and relevant marketers; rather they will “monetize” these impressions to whomever is willing to pay, which further deteriorates any hope for the new medium.

I also wonder about potentially negative consequences. A key problem with mass interruptive advertising is that people increasingly feel offended when it comes at them unwanted. In this case, imagine the parent who puts milk into the grocery basket and hears a child say, “Oh, Mom, can we get some Oreos?” That moves from mere interruption to a negative externality, and it could lead to a very poor brand impression for life, if not an all-out boycott campaign. Today’s social-media tools make this much, much easier for consumers to take actions like this.

Switching around among new interruptive media might be a viable strategy for some brands, but I doubt it would work for many. Instead, why not choose to create marketing that is more meaningful to customers’ lives? Imagine what a great brand such as Oreo could to do make its product more fun, engaging, and buzz-worthy. Perhaps taking a chapter from My M&Ms and allowing customers to buy personalized cookies. Let us choose the colors of cookies and cream, inject different flavors or designs, and miniaturize, double-, or triple-stuff ‘em. That’s just one minute of thinking and one possible avenue. But I’m sure that the Oreo team could come up with a lot more meaningful ideas based on their years of experience and customer understanding. And if they are looking for more ideas we’re always here to help.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Personalization | No Comments »

NFL Commits Marketing Fumble by Blacking Out Fans

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

sad NFL fan

In the past few months there have been many examples of businesses that realize the economy is tough and react by doing the right thing for sales and human decency. Hyundai created its Assurance Guarantee to protect car buyers who feared losing their jobs. JetBlue, Walgreens, and Virgin Mobile have provided similar coverage. Even sports teams are offering more protection and value for their fans. Last summer the minor-league baseball Birmingham Barons sold tickets for the price of a gallon of gas, the NHL’s St. Louis Blues offered a promotion that would pay your mortgage for a month, and the NBA’s New Jersey Nets offered free tickets for unemployed fans. But one sports business is able to ignore the pleas of financially ravaged fans: The NFL is moving forward on its plans to black out TV coverage of games in cities that fail to sell out their stadiums. It’s a brazen move for these times, which I strongly believe will put the country’s most popular spectator sport on a slippery slope downhill.

Yesterday the sports talk shows were abuzz about the news that as many as 12 NFL teams might not be able to sell out their home games within 72 hours, meaning that the league will choose to black out the games’ local television coverage. It goes without saying that the economy is the main reason for the lack of sellouts. The Jacksonville Jaguars and San Diego Chargers have been particularly hard hit, and both are suffering greatly from the housing bubble. My own Cincinnati Bengals say it is “too early to tell” if games will be blacked out after 44 straight sellouts.  Only 3 teams suffered any blackouts in all of last season.

While unsold tickets are an economic reality, the decision to prevent local fans from cheering their team on TV is entirely the NFL’s fault, and it is just plain poor marketing. Look, there is a clear difference between the audience for game attendance and TV viewership. Let’s start with the price. It costs more than $100 per person to attend an NFL game, including tickets, parking, and snacks, which compares to $0 for sitting at home in front of the television. Fans who can’t see the game at home are not going to rush off in their cars to the game Sunday afternoon. Some will spend $100-plus for NFL Sunday Ticket, the pay-per-view TV option, but those are actually the people with higher incomes who are more likely to go to a game in person.

Offering “free” viewership at minimum should be considered the most meaningful marketing investment by the league, as it feeds fan frenzy and loyalty. You could even consider it a free sample that helps excite people enough to eventually buy a ticket, and maybe even season tickets when their incomes rise over time. This “free sample” also leads to huge advertising revenues and sales of sports merchandise at huge margins. Why cut off the fans who feed you?  Why cut off the most powerful form of marketing you have when you need it the most?

It’s not only bad for business, but it is a dishonorable way to treat its customers. People grow up in these cities and entire families rally around the home team. Fathers and sons sit on the couch and cheer for the local hero in a rite of passage, maybe hoping to attend one game per year. This freezes out the poor and middle-class households, who, quite frankly, could use a little entertainment. What’s worse, many of these cities have put up hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars for brand-new stadiums that sit idle for all but eight days of the year (only $500 million for the stadium across from our office in downtown Cincinnati). Now the tax bill can’t even get you a free picture on the local TV network.

For years now the NFL has been called the “No Fun League” for its many rules that seem to make the game less interesting for fans and players alike. It has banned hard hits and end-zone celebrations. Most recently it banned players from Twittering during games. The league even banned cheerleaders from stretching near opposing benches. And tailgating has been banned at the Super Bowl. This time it might be facing a “perfect storm”: Consumers are angrier at businesses than ever, and they dislike seeing high ticket prices and highly paid athletes behaving badly. They also have many more media options to keep them busy, and college football is just as exciting with the added plus of being a little more pure and innocent. And before the beginning of the 2011 season, the NFL and Players Association will have to come up with a new collective bargaining agreement. Many say a lockout or strike is a strong possibility. Together these negatives could add up to strip away decades of fan passion, and revenues and more blackouts will surely follow. Just ask Major League Baseball how it feels.

The lesson here is that businesses must recognize that they exist for more than short-term revenue maximization, especially when they are extremely successful and powerful like the NFL is today. Because the customers whom you take advantage of when you are strong won’t be around when times inevitably get tougher. I’ll be switching to the NCAA on Saturdays. What about you?

UPDATE: the NFL has caved a wee bit by putting up delayed broadcasts of its games up on NFL.com.  Still, it’s far from the experience that their customers want, and it frankly doesn’t make sense to the masses.  If anything, it looks like the NFL is using this build up an online audience at the expensive of TV networks and their local affiliates (and advertisers).

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Posted in Entertainment, Marketing Without Meaning, Sports | 6 Comments »

End the GRP; Embrace Engagement

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I was extremely disheartened last week to read an article by Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, who announced that he was finally coming around to the belief that digital marketing must submit to be measured and compared according to Gross Ratings Points (GRPs), which is a way of counting the number of people who are exposed to an advertisement. Although he stopped short of calling GRPs the only way to measure, his comment signals a step back in both digital in particular and marketing overall. It’s a sign that more and more new media leaders are giving up on the medium’s potential to change the marketing rules, and have succumbed to the traditional, interruptive model in hopes of speeding the move of dollars to digital. But I’m not about to cave in, and instead would like to promote the cause of a new marketing measure: engagement.

In his article, Ramsey claims that his mind was changed after interviews with numerous smart people in the media buying and measurement field. Examples include:

  • “At the end of the day, we ultimately need a standard…. We need a metric that will allow marketers to mix and match and to allocate dollars across whatever the platform is….” —Pam Horan, CEO of the Online Publishers Association
  • “…If you don’t have [GRPs], I don’t see how you can really understand the intricacies of your media plan or compare it across media.” —Gian Fulgoni, Chairman of comScore

Ramsey claims that marketers want two questions answered: First, “How successfully and efficiently did I reach my target audience?” He calls the GRP, a measure of reach and frequency, something that can answer this. The second question is tougher: Did my advertising influence the intended target’s attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors associated with the brand?” The GRP doesn’t address this.

I agree with the overall points of these experts: Marketers do need a standard measurement across media, and we do need to know how successfully and efficiently they reached their target audience. But measuring eyeball impressions is no longer good enough for any form of marketing. In a world of 3,000 ad messages a day and technology that allows unprecedented ad skipping, the “impression” is less and less able to sway purchase habits. It is failing to answer Question #1, above, and has decreasing impact on Question #2.

Ironically, while the digerati are giving in to the call for GRP measures, at least one big traditional media buyer is heading in the opposite direction. In a recent Ad Age article that suggests the recession is leading marketers to “hit the reset button” on where they put their dollars, Phil Cowdell, head of WPP media agency Mindshare, says:

I feel we could be facing an inflection point in our industry. The often contradictory forces of procurement-driven cost reductions and the marketing departments’ calls for more, smarter and better [approaches] will create an increasingly uncomfortable and potentially less effective operating zone for agencies. The only viable way forward is to shift from the procurement-oriented benchmarks of input measures such as CPMs [or cost per 1,000 viewers] to more output-oriented measures such as cost per hand-raiser and cost per lead. We need to move away from pure cost to a more-considered value equation.”

Meanwhile, data continues to show that the only way to successfully sell product is to get people to willingly engage with marketing. Instead of capitulating to the old-world measure of impressions, we must measure digital—and all marketing choices—according to the higher standard of engagement. Reach and impressions represent the wallpaper of a consumer’s day. But engagement is your welcome foot in the door of the consumer’s mind.

While there is no firm consensus among new media gurus on the definition of “engagement,” most sources point to a common theme: When people willingly direct their attention to your marketing, you have achieved engagement. There are many types of engagement and some can be more meaningful than others, for example:

  • Reading text (consciously)
  • Watching video (consciously)
  • Playing games
  • Forwarding/sharing
  • Voting
  • Commenting
  • Creating text/graphics/audio/video

Every item on this list requires the consumer to choose to pay attention to your marketing.

While admittedly imperfect, engagement is the closest thing we have to the next holy grail of marketing measurement. It fits with a common-sense belief that when people get more personally involved in your marketing, they are likely to develop a more favorable impression of your brand and learn something important about your product or service. Engagement is extremely measurable thanks to digital tools that can gauge everything from time on site to number of video views. And engagement is versatile enough to work across all forms of media. For example, Facebook apps can read how many people are using the code, and TiVo and Nielsen are now reporting which TV commercials are skipped and which are replayed.

Finally, changes in consumer media habits suggest that engagement will become even more important going forward. We are spending more of our media time in “lean-forward” mode. According to a Forrester report that called engagement “marketing’s new key metric”:

…Passive consumption of media is waning. Individuals dismiss or ignore marketing messages in lieu of information available from an ever-increasing number of resources, such as product review sites, message boards, and online video.”

The biggest downside to engagement is that it requires thought and processing, rather than just counting eyeballs. Engagement is multidimensional, and marketers and their media agencies must work together to define the right measures for each program up-front. And while it is important, engagement is merely the beginning of a robust measurement program. From this starting point, brands must build metrics to ensure that this foot-in-the-door leads to closing a sale.

It’s not easy for Ramsey and other digital-marketing leaders to change the media measuring and buying habits of thousands of marketers, but it is the right thing to do for our clients, our businesses, and the people who buy our products and services. Who’s with me?

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Posted in Engagement, Marketing Without Meaning, Media, Organizational Behavior | 5 Comments »

Blyk Free Mobile Service Finds Few Takers

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

One of the last great hopes of believers in the interruptive marketing model is that consumers will willingly opt into advertising if there is enough of an incentive to do so. This idea is inspiring a few new business models; perhaps the most-watched has been Blyk, a mobile service in the UK that since 2007 has been offering free calls and texts to 16- to 24-year-olds in return for mandatory advertising. Alas, Blyk failed to hit its growth numbers and was recently absorbed into telecom giant Orange with little fanfare or investor payday. I believe it proves my point that when the price of interruption is too high, the only way forward is Marketing with Meaning.

The business model of Blyk was fairly simple: Offer free mobile service to teens and young adults who are heavy users but have small bank accounts, and use mandatory advertising to lure big marketers eager to engage with an audience that is notoriously difficult to reach. According to Advertising Age, the company expected to reach 4.5 million members and roll out across Europe in its first year. There was even talk of an eventual U.S. entry. Alas, the service hit only 200,000 members in its first year and was unable to attract more users.

There were some good signs from the Blyk experiment. The company launched more than 2,000 campaigns, which included top brands such as Coca-Cola, Colgate, L’Oreal, and the BBC. Clearly the company was reaching an audience that these marketers desire. And the response rates to the forced ads were actually very good. The average response was “at least 25%” and one quiz for L’Oreal got a 70% response rate.

So, WTF? Simple: Most people, even teenagers with more time than money, find the true cost of advertising interruption so high that they will not accept it. In 2005 there were 6.9 million people aged 16 to 24 in the UK, so 200,000 Blyk users represent only 2.9% penetration (assuming 100% of Blyk subscribers fell into this narrow range and the company didn’t kick out users at age 25). Consider the fact that this is a very social crowd, and likely each of the 200,000 users told dozens of friends about the service. The lack of growth shows that the proposition of free mobile service could not overcome the advertising overload.

I think this experiment also shows how personally important the mobile device is in our lives. While we might be OK with zoning out in front of ad-supported passive media such as television (even on Hulu.com), our mobile devices are our active, lean-forward links to the world. As we’ve seen with the tens of millions of people who have signed up for the Federal Do-Not-Call List, we want our phones to be immune to marketing interruption.

Some might wonder why the response rates to ads were so high. I believe it is just a logical function of the type of people who were attracted to Blyk in the first place; in other words, the (small) audience that bought into Blyk doesn’t find advertising to be that much of a negative. Some of them even enjoyed the advertising. It reminds me of a study AOL did a few years ago on the .2% of people who click on banner ads more than once per month. These rare few are “the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”

So another ad-supported business model bites the dust. My hope is that marketers and the investment community see this specifically as an example of how interruption and annoyance will fail in new media. As I wrote about earlier this week in my review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free, the price of consumer attention continues to increase. Forcing people to accept a drain on their time and attention (forced ads) in exchange for something of value (free cell service) is likely the wrong way to go. But if the marketing itself can be enjoyable and add immediate value in return for people’s attention, we might just be able to win them over.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, mobile | 5 Comments »

Does This Banner Scare You to Death?

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Here’s some Friday “fun” for you…

My lovely wife opened her Yahoo! Mail account this week to be surprised with the banner ad above for AccuQuote. A corpse with a toe tag? Really, AccuQuote? When I first saw it I thought it was some kind of joke from The Onion, but it’s real. AccuQuote is a company that provides multiple insurance pricing quotes from its website. It might provide a good service, but this ad does a disservice to the company and to the marketing profession.

And it’s not the first or only banner that attempts to scare the hell out of people. I found a post from 2007 by copyranter that shares the banner below:

I’ve met a few of the people from AccuQuote at digital marketing conferences and I found them to be good folks. I believe that they feel their service is important and beneficial to many consumers. They might rationalize this by saying that some percentage of clickers are happy to be reminded of this issue. However the other 99.99% of us who are interrupted while checking our email are unwillingly disgusted. It also sets a new low for other banner advertisers; after the “toe-tag corpse” visual no longer gets attention, what do you show next? A good service and desire to help people prepare for life’s realities is no excuse to delve into this kind of tasteless tactic, even if the click rate is .02% instead of .01%.

Further, I also hold Yahoo! to blame for allowing this kind of nonsense on its ad network. These and many other questionable ads by Yahoo! deteriorate any equity and trust that it has earned with consumers. People form their closest bonds with content providers that exhibit some restraint on the ads they run, such as NBC (which demands claim support on commercials submitted) and The New York Times. The people who run these brands realize that the advertising inside is also a reflection on them. Here, Yahoo! looks like just another Web property desperate for ad dollars. And Gmail is just a click away.

Using (or, in Yahoo’s case, benefitting from) cheap tricks to capture an audience’s eyeballs is one of the many reasons that our advertising profession is looked down upon. I hope that shining some light on the worst offenders—and offering a positive solution in the concept of Marketing with Meaning—will help turn that around over time.

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Posted in Banners, Marketing Without Meaning | 4 Comments »

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 »

A Dastardly Direct Mail Piece

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

I got a piece of junk mail the other day that I just had to share in this space for the pure fun factor. Here’s the play-by-play from a user perspective:

1. The Envelope—This is the equivalent of the subject line in email spam terms. It’s got all of the latest bells and whistles that are aimed to keep you from dropping it directly into the wastebasket. You know, there’s the WARNING and “Penalty for Tampering” and an IRS-looking “FORM 2009 096-5B.” There’s the classic three-stage tear-strip opening procedure that only official documents bother to use, of course. On a side note, it is interesting that making it harder to open a piece of mail actually can result in higher open rates—but I digress…

2. The Invitation—Evidently I have been selected to receive two round-trip airfares to most major international airports of my choice! It appears that this is for a ride on a new company called US Airlines. You know, the guys from those commercials who say, “Fly the US Skies.” Note how the offer comes with a unique offer number and bonus grocery voucher for the first 100 callers.

3. BONUS—A boarding pass! Hey, I guess I can just take this to the airport right now and get on seat 07-C (which had better be First Class). But what about the boarding pass for my companion? I’m sure they’ll just take care of that at the Delta counter when I go to get on the flight to USA DESTINATIONS. Thankfully this is valid through 2009. But wait, at the bottom in small print this says, “Not valid for travel.” I’d better call for details…

4. The Phone Call—I had to do this post justice and call the number to see if I could get some more intelligence for you, dear readers. At the risk of getting on some super-duper short list of people who actually respond to these things, I did call in. An automated voice picked up right away and let me know that “because of the overwhelming response to this offer there is a 30- to 45-second wait time for my call to be answered.” In less time than that a friendly operator from “Reservations Services” got on the line and asked for my code to pull up my account. She said that not only would I receive the free air tickets but also two days and three nights of hotel accommodations. She then attempted to ask me some “qualifying questions.” (Hey, I thought this boarding pass meant I was prequalified?) Instead of continuing the charade I asked her to jump to the chase and tell me what the catch was. She said I’d have to attend a 90-minute presentation for a “travel agency” but was adamant that “this is NOT a time-share!” Unfortunately I don’t think I have an extra 90 minutes for this blog post, so I bailed at that point.

The Lesson: It’s wrong to fool your customers.

I don’t believe anyone reading this is foolish enough to fall for this nor jerk enough to think that this is an acceptable form of marketing. That said, these jerks are out there making it harder for the rest of us. Because of spam both in the mailbox and email inbox, our customers are more leery and have a more negative view of advertisers than ever before. There’s not much we can do except recognize the error of tricking people and ensure that we do the exact opposite of everything here.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning | 7 Comments »

Time Warner Cable Dictates Bill Pay

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

My friend Pete Blackshaw has been saying for years that “customer service is the new marketing,” meaning that more and more companies are discovering that the people on the front lines of direct customer contact are having a growing potential to turn customers into brand fans or outraged detractors. Unfortunately, many big, slow, monopolistic companies refuse to see this shift. And it’s time for this customer of Time Warner Cable to put up some meaningful marketing against its poor practices.

Over the weekend, my wife shared the story of her recent frustration with Time Warner Cable. On Friday, May 29, she received an email that stated the company would no longer be accepting payments from our bank’s online bill payment provider. As you might be able to see in the actual email above, this change came with no explanation, no customer service contact to reply to, and only the general website URL for further information. Her reaction: WTF?

And so my lovely wife started to track down what was going on with our cable service. After more than an hour of digging through the website and the back and forth with an IM bot that spit back the same formulaic answers to her questions over and over, she discovered that Time Warner Cable was migrating customers to its own preferred bill-payment system. We had the “opportunity” to sign up for this, of course handing over more personal information and changing our entire bill-paying habits.

This is a horrible example of customer service from start to finish. First, the decision to disallow our preferred method of bill payment, which we use for every other service, is blatantly bad for its customers. Nearly every other company on the planet is embracing NEW options to allow bill payments, from PayPal to mobile phone, in order to provide better service and close the sale. Second, the fact that this significant change in habit came with no explanation and nothing more than a terse email is unfathomable. Only a company with a complete disregard for the customer would do such a thing. A simple email written by an actual human being with some explanation and remorse would have done wonders.

Of course, cable companies are not new to completely screwing over customers in very visible ways. My favorite example is Bob Garfield’s “Comcast Must Die” campaign. A search of any cable company and the words “sucks” or “protest” land on thousands of horror stories from people who have been treated horribly by companies that cling to one of the last market pockets of low competitiveness.

Fortunately some alternatives are starting to break into the market and break up cable companies’ hold on our lives. New competitors are entering the TV market, such as Verizon with its all-fiber FiOS system, and AT&T’s U-verse system. They are bringing down rates in the market and bringing up service levels wherever they go. Meanwhile, some local governments are getting in on the act; in Wilson, N.C., residents organized to create a city-owned broadband network with lower rates and higher speeds than Time Warner. And now a growing number of households are cutting their cable cords altogether and using broadband to download video directly. More than 900,000 people now rely on Web video alone, dealing a significant revenue blow each time it happens.

My family and I are getting ready to move to a new home in a few months. The current owners have been using DirecTV. I think it’s time to give Time Warner the boot and let a new company vie for my business. And while I’m not a heavy commercial watcher, this ad for DirecTV certainly attracts my attention…

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Uncategorized, customer service | 6 Comments »

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