A Sniff Test for the Internet of Things

originally published in Ad Age

A Sniff Test for the Internet of Things

My air freshener is connected to the internet. Now I know what the internet of things smells like: floral notes covering up overpriced hardware and overcomplicated software that provide a marginal benefit.

When the Febreze Home internet-connected plug-in air freshener arrived in the mail this month, I opened the box and beheld yet another questionable impulse buy. I ordered it during this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in January just after Procter & Gamble announced it. If this was a typical Kickstarter project, it would have arrived in time for the 2017 holiday season after several competitive products already hit the market. P&G actually stuck to its promised ship date, which is the most remarkable aspect of this product’s debut.

This harbinger of the connected home offers a whiff of what’s ahead for marketers, manufacturers, and consumers. Here is how Febreze Home holds up on some key attributes.

Pay for the privilege: The hardware, with one pack of scented oil, sells for $49. Comparable dispensers that aren’t internet enabled sell for $5-$10. That’s a minimum of a 500-percent markup for adding internet connectivity. These kinds of markups are common with other household products such as light bulbs, though the discrepancy should diminish somewhat over time.

So much for a plug-in: Remember how Glade (a rival brand from SC Johnson) used to have the jingle that went, “Plug it in, plug it in”? That is not the case with connected devices. The new theme song should go something like, “Plug it in, plug it in. And then go through a 50-step process that we will now explain to you in painstaking detail, and you will still have to call that 15-year-old kid who hooks up your TV and shows you how to add people on Snapchat.”

The entire setup process felt absurd. First, I needed to find and download the Febreze Connect app on my iPhone – for my air freshener. Next, I had to connect to a custom WiFi network, requiring me to look up my home network’s password – for my air freshener. Then, I had to wait for a firmware update (really) – for my air freshener. Finally, to differentiate multiple devices should I ever buy a case of them, I had to come up with a name – for my air freshener (mine goes by the name Feberky). The user experience will need to improve, especially for lower-cost devices, so that they are truly plug-and-play.

Questioning convenience: There are supposedly some benefits to having an air freshener that is connected to the internet. Febreze Home’s website says you can “customize settings for each room with more devices.” I live in a cramped Manhattan apartment, and it would cost $300 to place these air fresheners all over my home. The device detects the temperature and humidity in the room, and also includes light sensors to double as a night light. For those with a Nest thermostat, the dispenser can learn when rooms need more freshness. Scent levels can be controlled from the mobile app.

How many people are so obsessed with their air fresheners that any of this will matter? In time, as more products connect to the internet, people will expect passive utility rather than a need for active management. If devices can run in the background, communicate with each other, and only require attention at critical moments, then they won’t be as much of a hassle. Expecting consumers to download a new app and continue to use it isn’t realistic when moving beyond the earliest adopters.

Partner or perish: My bank, Capital One, flagged that I had been charged twice for the order. I didn’t know which order they were referencing until I called the company, Gamechanger Products, and they told me they manufactured the Febreze device. They’re so closely involved that they even registered the febrezehome.com domain in December 2015. While it’s unclear how much of Febreze Home was outsourced to Gamechanger or developed together with them, P&G isn’t handling all of this in-house. Given that the domain was registered a month before the product’s launch, I suspect that this all came together very quickly, with minimal risk. That’s one way to get faster buy-in for an experiment.

I had a client once who described a pilot program we did together as a failure, and he said the f-word with the biggest cheek-stretching grin I’ve ever seen. We both understood everything that could possibly go wrong, and everything did in fact go wrong. But he was excited to get something in the market, learn from it, and try again. P&G seems ready to fail fast here and, in the words of shampoo bottles, “lather, rise, and repeat.”

What’s next? Someone, somewhere at P&G is probably trying to figure out which other brands’ products will connect to the internet. Dawn? Gillette? Charmin? Pampers? It all sounds crazy now, but give it time. How long before a $0.25 diaper automatically tracks a baby’s output and flags caretakers when something seems amiss?

There are limits, of course. Few companies will have the resolve to launch and iterate these products until they become viable for the mass market. Kudos to P&G for getting this in market, adhering to their schedule, and offering a whiff of the future. The current odor doesn’t smell right, but it will be replaced soon enough.

A Few Thoughts on Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

In CMO.com, Matthew Schwartz just published a story on paid, owned, and earned media. I shared a few thoughts:

“One of the big reasons for the confusion with PEO is you often have one component in ascendance and another decreasing,” said David Berkowitz, who was most recently CMO of MRY, part of Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). “Right now ‘PEO’ is more like uppercase ‘P,’ lowercase ‘e,’ and lowercase ‘o.” [PEO is] increasingly driven by the media model, whereas when PEO started it was driven by the creative. Earned and owned media are still important, but right now paid is in the driver’s seat.”

Marketers should keep their eyes peeled on Facebook’s other digital properties to gauge how long it takes for the social media giant to shift to a paid-media model altogether, Berkowitz told CMO.com.

“You can almost use Facebook as a ‘PEO Index,’” he added. “Facebook News Feed skews almost entirely toward paid, with some earned and little owned. Instagram is moving in that direction. WhatsApp is still open-ended as it has the least brand integration. Facebook Messenger now is all about owned and earned with no paid media, and Oculus is all owned as well, with little earned and no paid.”

I do think an index would be interesting here, perhaps as a kind of barometer. It's like the Big Mac index showing economic trends by reporting the price of a Big Mac in different countries. Facebook is McDonald's in that scenario, and whatever they do is consistently mirrored by others (though occasionally others lead, as in Kik leading the messaging bot market but Facebook scaling it and shaping much of the future of it).

 

How to Make a Bad Impression

This post originally ran in Ad Age. The image above is the rate card from QQTube.

How to Make a Bad Impression

When it comes to digital marketing, you always get a second chance to make an impression. Impressions are cheap, and way too many buyers and sellers still rely on them as currency.

While this has been an issue for decades, marketers can’t stop their impression addiction. This is partly because impressions (and equivalent metrics, such as video views) are a unifying metric across disparate tactics such as display advertising, video advertising, content marketing, influencer marketing, and public relations. Meanwhile, branded content tends to get little distribution without paid media amplification. The easiest way to promote content is to buy impressions, so reach becomes a goal in and of itself.

This racket needs to stop. Impressions mean absolutely nothing. Here are a few of the more salient reasons why:

• There’s a reason why reach and frequency are the chocolate and peanut butter of traditional media: frequency provides at least a hint of context as to whether an audience is overexposed or underexposed to a message. And yet it’s all too common to see pitches and reports stating something like, “Kevin has a million Twitter followers,” “Josie got 10,000 views on her Instagram post,” or “This native ad was viewed 10 million times.” Often, there is no further context beyond some version of the impression count. Frequency isn’t perfect, but it’s a start, and online, there is no standard as to what that context should be.
• Fraud is rampant. Imperva Incapsula reported that 29% of all online traffic in 2015 came from malicious bots, while Distil Networks puts the figure at 19%.
• Bad bots are getting smarter. Wired’s May 2015 issue describes how Trump supporters (if not the campaign itself) are using bots to influence the election. Wired writes, “We’ve caught bots disseminating lies, attacking people, and poisoning conversations.” Impersonating real-looking voters is harder than impersonating anonymous web visitors.
• Fraud can take subtle forms. For instance, consider a Twitter user who is a real person and wants to come off as a more popular influencer, perhaps to attract sponsorships. Such a user can run bots that constantly follow others, and then unfollow anyone who doesn’t reciprocate. All this user cares about is boosting impressions. Here, the action may be banal, but the intent isn’t, and marketers who aren’t careful can wind up paying a lot of money to reach people who only influence Twitter bots but not human beings.
• All kinds of impressions can be bought. For evidence, below is a case study on how cheap and easy it is to inflate an impression report.

Consider the YouTube video “[Zombie Highway 2] A pretty good ride.” It was published in November 2014, and as of May 13, it had tallied all of four views. All four were probably from the content creator checking out his own YouTube account (I can assume this because it’s my account). Several days later, it had more than 10,000 views, and within a couple weeks, the view count will likely top 100,000. The total cost of all this activity was $60, purchased from QQTube which calls itself “the largest supplier of YouTube views in the industry.” They add, “We make it easy to simply go viral.”

It’s easy to “simply go viral” when all you care about are impressions. Anything can be made to look like it went viral. What’s telling is that having tested QQTube on other pointless videos from personal accounts (I’ve never used this for any client work), these views never deliver any meaningful results. They don’t even generate likes or shares, so those need to be bought separately. Want to cover your tracks? Buy some dislikes, which cost the same as likes at $9.60 per 1,000.

On average, each viewer watched less than five percent of my video. Russia, Argentina, Vietnam, and Indonesia are top viewer sources. I can’t imagine many marketers are targeting Russians, Argentinians, and Indonesians at the same exact time with the same piece of content, so most marketers would be displeased with such a result. Some others may prefer blissful ignorance and enjoy their inflated report.

There is one simple way to pop this impression bubble: demand better. Demand context. Demand accountability. Demand to know how some impression number could possibly address any of your goals. Demand that greater efforts are made at delivering successful results than the efforts fraudulent bot operators wage at undermining your efforts. Demand more by asking “who” and “how” and “why.” Demand another option. Impressions alone aren’t worth anything,