Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

A 12-Step Guide to Solving Every Ad Industry Crisis

originally published in Advertising Age

The crises hitting the ad industry keep multiplying. Ad-blocking stories have topped the trades and mainstream press for weeks. Talent shortages abound, though the great work produced by top talent is rarely properly rewarded. Twenty years after the first banner ad debuted, we still can't agree on what an impression is. There are crises of confidence matched by crises of competence.

Every crisis breeds opportunity. Here is a simple guide to solving every major predicament in our industry.

1. Agree on impressions. This is easy. An ad must be fully viewable on the screen for it to count. Publishers can charge a premium when consumers take actions on those ads, provided there are rigorous measures in place to prevent bots from taking such actions.

2. Fix video views. No, a split-second impression doesn't count as a view. P&G defined the "first moment of truth" -- the time it takes a shopper to make up his or her mind about a product when encountering it on a store shelf -- at three to seven seconds. Granted, other research cited by Malcolm Gladwell and others say opinions are made in a split second. Let's split the difference and call three seconds the minimum for what counts as a video view. A bonus: The shortest popular form of video today is Vine, running six seconds, so even Vine would only have to charge for half a view for a promoted post.

3. Fix video placements. Stop putting video ads in the dumbest possible places, like 30-second spots in front of 60-second movie trailers (which, by the way, are ads), or overloading ads on kiddie music videos (the whole point of letting kids watch those videos is to let parents do something else, so 99% of those clicks are from toddlers trying to get to Elmo).

4. Reject short-term opportunism for long-term gains. Can you cram another ad on a page or between pages or every 12 seconds during a video? Sure. What will that do to the user experience? And even if today you can get away with it because you're the only game in town with a certain kind of content, you're making people hate us all more. See also: the Tragedy of the Commons.

5. Vow full disclosure -- about everything. Want to know where your impressions are being run? You got it. If any kind of influencer hawks a product for a fee, or because they received it for free, the disclosure should be as clear as the promotion. Making a change to a privacy policy? Instead of burying it in the fine print and waiting for someone to discover it, declare in advance what the changes will be and gauge feedback from customers. Getting kickbacks? Great. Just tell the buyer about the incentives for what you're selling so the buyer can decide if it's a conflict of interest.

6. Don't <adage_no_lookbook_links>steal. That means ideas. That means work. Don't ask for something for free when you would have had to pay for it by other means, and then use it as if you have the rights to it. Anything of value has a cost. Pay a fair rate.

7. Reward great work. Instead of constantly nickeling and diming partners and vendors, offer a premium on truly great work, whether it hits a specific goal or achieves some kind of breakthrough success.

8. Be open about what work costs. "Work" is defined broadly here -- whatever it is you're selling. Don't shy away from making your case. If it really can be done as well by someone in the Philippines or a college kid on Fiverr, you're fighting a losing battle anyway.

9. Accept where the race to the bottom leads. If your only goal is to shed costs, you will get the worst of all the industry has to offer. If you're the seller though, your focus should be charging what your offering is worth -- not what you can get away with charging for the time being.

10. Uphold security at all costs. The Ashley Madison hack won't stop people from doing stupid things online, especially when it comes to their personally identifiable information. We have to accept that we are all Ashley Madison: We are all trusted with customers' information, and we have a duty to protect it. Even if the stakes are lower, given that most of our businesses don't have Ashley Madison's moral issues, we all must make the head of security the best-known person at our organizations. Without security, nothing we do matters.

11. Eat our own dog food. It seems people in the ad industry were early adopters of DVRs and Netflix (TV's ad blockers) but late adopters of ad blockers used online. Perhaps rationalization is the cause; on TV, ad skipping or avoidance is an ancillary benefit, rather than the entire purpose as it is with ad-blocking software. We can no longer afford to be blind to the tools used to get around us.

12. Put trust first. That's where all of this leads. Our industry ranks somewhere down there with ambulance-chasers and Congress in terms of least trusted institutions. At our constant galas, we're so busy patting ourselves on the back that we don't consider how despised we are. What would it take to become one of the most trusted industries? Much of the time, we're helping people find out about stuff they probably want, while subsidizing media that would cost far more without our efforts. All that we're missing is a consistent effort to earn the trust of our customers -- and each other. A reputation for trustworthiness, more than anything we can ever offer in terms of salaries, would do wonders for our talent crisis as well.

There you, crises solved. Now we can get back to our day jobs.

Not Every Ad Has to be Social

Got it?

I had a few comments along those lines in this great story in Mashable, 4 Best Practices for Social Advertising, by Todd Wasserman: 

Take a look at most advertising you see. Is it something you would want to pass on to a friend? No. That's because most ads are not entertaining in themselves, but are either formulated to propose a call to action or as a branding exercise. "If you think of the typical ad with the shot of the car driving on the mountain against the sunset, there's nothing particularly social about it," says David Berkowitz, CMO of the marketing agency MRY. "You have to consider if there's anything social about it."

Read on to find out about the rest of the best practices, plus insights from Peter Goodman at Salesforce, and Jim Squires at Facebook.

 

The Backlash to Real-Time Marketing is ON!

Image via Jon Thomas at Post Advertising

Is 2013 the year of real-time marketing (RTM)? Befitting such a buzzword, it had a few good months, but the backlash to it has been picking up steam.

Here's what MRY CEO Matt Britton had to say about it in Digiday:

“It’s herd mentality, and for a lot of brands, it’s really just embarrassing,” said Britton. “It’s actually hurting the field of social media marketing. You have brand marketers who have spent 50 years crafting their brand and now all of a sudden they are dumbing it down with clipart trying to replicate magic that happened once.”

In Ad Age, Mike Proulx of Hill Holliday compares RTM to a predatory weed:

Driven by the myopic goal of increasing engagement, many brands are unscrupulously on the hunt for likes, shares, followers and retweets without an overarching strategy based on core business objectives. This blind yearning for social currency is leading to incredibly irrelevant and unavailing branded content (a.k.a. advertising) that's preying on social media. Just because #Sharknado is trending, a royal baby is born, the "Breaking Bad" finale is on, or it's "Talk Like a Pirate Day," doesn't mean your brand has to flippantly post about it.

Even 360i exec Jared Belsky has been heard dismissing claims of Oreo's 'super' tweet being something that just magically appeared in seconds (via Ad Age):

Seem we can't talk about real-time without mentioning Oreo's Super Bowl tweet. But that was actually 3 yrs in the making- J Belsky 360i #awx

— Jade Mangahis (@jade_mangahis) September 24, 2013

And then at my OMMA Social panel about Vine and Instagram during Advertising Week, moderator Carree Syrek of Kinetic Social put a glass on the stage and said anyone who mentioned real-time marketing or Oreo had to put in a dollar fine. We somehow avoided the penalty.

Real-time marketing is not a bad word. Or a bad thing. Like any other kind of marketing, it needs to be used strategically. There's often value in it, and it's much, much bigger than community management. Real-time marketing is happening in search, display, online video, digital out of home, mobile marketing (in various guises), and even at times in traditional channels such as TV and radio. Harness it, not because it's a buzzword, but because it often is the best way to reach your target audience.

 

Chevy Chase as You've Probably Never Seen Him: Pitching Turkish Cola

And now for something slightly different...

Ahead of a trip to Istanbul this week, I was catching up on some reading, which included Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know by Andrew Finkel.

Finkel mentions that Chevy Chase starred in commercials for Cola Turka last decade, showing what happens when Americans start drinking Turkish soda. It's so ridiculous that Chevy Chase is about as perfect a star as could be cast in this, and in the second spot, there's even a nod to the Wagon Queen Family Truckster station wagon from the Vacation movies.

Enjoy these two. And yes, I am REALLY curious to try this soda while I'm out there. See, advertising works.

 

 

Catch My New Presentation from Crowdsourcing Week - All the Way from Singapore

Hi from Singapore, or as they say in Singapore, Hi from Singapore (the joys of visiting former British colonies...).

Today, I'm presenting at Crowdsourcing Week here, a conference with impressive speakers from all over the world talking about different opportunities for and ramifications of crowdsourcing. I'm honored to be among them, giving a talk on how crowdsourcing impacts advertising and marketing.

The presentation is available via the shortened URL bit.ly/crowdads, and I've also embedded it below. Note this presentation below is not only annotated, but it includes a number of examples that I couldn't share in the 20-minute talk, so this is the director's cut.

Also, as usual with my Slideshare presentations, if you want to know the source material for anything, including images used, just refer to the notes on each slide. You can download the presentation as well.

Let me know what you think, and what other examples should be included here.

 

 

Crowd Advertising Success Stories and Challenges - Crowdsourcing Week from David Berkowitz

 

 

 

Pop-Up Shop Pops up Yet Again (Thanks, Rushkoff and TechCrunch)

I've had this odd feeling of déjà vu this month, especially as I discover that my first job out of college was at a tech startup that proved to be well ahead of its time.

In 2000, I worked as technical writer, and then a marketing writer, for a startup whose main product was Popupshop.com, which promised 'end-to-end e-commerce in a pop-up window!' In plain English, it meant that you could shop directly within ads online.

Imagine my surprise reading Present Shock, the latest work (and a phenomenal read) by media analyst and critic Douglas Rushkoff and discovering he wound up describing the business model of this startup that died twelve years ago:

On the Web, with the emergence of HTML 5, we are finally witnessing the disappearance of the split between ad and store. In the upcoming rather holistic model of online marketing, the banner ad is no longer a click-through to some other website, but it is the store itself. The ad unfolds and the customer can make a purchase right there and then.* You will be able to buy my next book wherever it is online that you’re finding out about it, without going to Amazon. By embedding stores directly into ads, we reduce the digiphrenia and increase the sales.

Rushkoff, Douglas (2013-03-21). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Kindle Locations 1849-1853). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

I then got another surprise seeing this story in TechCrunch:

Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile banner ads to increase click-to-buy conversions.

With in-ad payments, mobile users will be able checkout by tapping once on a visible banner ad within a mobile app, which then launches ZooZ’s checkout flow. As with ZooZ’s previously launched in-app payments product, the fully native checkout experience here doesn’t require the end user to re-enter their credit card or payment details after their initial sign-up.

This is a tough model to pull off. Which kinds of products would people buy from an ad? How easy will the payment process be especially if you're not first logging into the merchant? How much cross-selling and merchandising can one do within an ad? There are countless other questions and challenges.

Still, it's a reminder not to count out any seemingly hare-brained idea out there. In 2000, I was hardly a true believer in the company; it was an entry-level job that, for the 40-hour work week, amounted to under $13 an hour and yet allowed me to somehow move to New York City, where I've lived ever since. More importantly, it got me into this industry, and I never looked back. Yet it's amazing to think that I was working with some visionaries, and that this model was more than a decade ahead of its time.

The Biggest Red Flag from a Vendor

I receive a lot of pitches from companies and people collectively known as vendors.

Some are publishers, platforms, technology companies, apps, developers, websites, and other self-described genres. They're all vendors though because they're all selling something. They are also known as sellers.

I've seen two major red flags lately, one from a vendor on the rise (I think) and one from one on the decline. Both are hard to take seriously for a similar reason.

The company on the rise talks a lot about its various engagement numbers and the performance of its ads. I believe it. I'm impressed.

But the riser won't report on unique user numbers. Even internally, it's on a need-to-know basis. And those who know aren't allowed to tell.

To me, that sounds like it's hiding something. Why else would the company not share that information with advertisers?

The company on the decline recently sent me a presentation. It had some great case studies on its ad formats, and how well it has been received in the press. Yay!

There's one thing missing from the presentation: unique users. 

There aren't pageviews either. Or many numbers at all. 

Wait, I'm wrong. There are numbers. Page numbers.

So I did what any not-entirely-lazy buyer would do. I went on Quantcast. I saw a chart that looked like a rapid downward slope into oblivion.

I couldn't believe I was receiving a pitch from a company with a rapid downward slope into oblivion. So I went on Compete.

Same thing: rapid downward slope into oblivion. 

I wonder why the decliner isn't including numbers in the presentation. 

Wouldn't the decliner do so much better engendering trust if it said, "Look, you know and we know our numbers are pretty weak right now. But... " (Insert excuse here: "We've stopped the bleeding and now's a chance to join us as we make our comeback" or "All our traffic comes from our mobile app which doesn't show up on Quantcast or Compete" or "We're desperate and we'll give you a kegerator if you just get a brand to do something with us for free.")

Yes, that would do better.

They say you should show, not tell.

How about show, not hide.

Buyers aren't always that bright. Buyers make mistakes and irrational decisions. Buyers often choose going with their relationships rather than going with the best deals.

That's because buyers are human.

You know what else makes buyers human?

Buyers don't like it when others insult their intelligence.

Buyers will always have something else to buy.

Sellers won't always have something else to sell.

Six Steps For An Epic Promoted Tweet Fail

Today's Social Media Insider column, originally published in MediaPost

  

Marketers, if you're looking for tips on how to make the most of Twitter's new ad platform, skip this and harass your favorite Twitter guru. Heck, my cohort Cathy Taylor already gave a good taste of what's new about the ad model. There's enough sound advice out there.

Instead, here are six simple steps you can take to fail miserably with Promoted Tweets:

1) Treat it like any other media buy. If Twitter's calling it an ad platform, then just hand it over to your media buyers and they'll take care of everything. So what if Twitter's own executives glossed over all of the basic elements of what goes into a media buy? They barely discussed what Promoted Tweets costs, how you'll determine the reach of the keywords, and what targeting options will be available beyond the keyword itself. It's still an ad platform, so how hard can it be? Your media buyer will find a way to spend your money.

2) Write ad copy to run as promoted tweets. If you want to make sure to alienate as many Twitter users as possible in a short amount of time, make sure every tweet is talking at consumers, even yelling at them, ordering them to do your bidding. You have only 140 characters, so why beat around the bush with this fluffy relationship building and conversation stuff? Why respond to your customers when you know more than they do, anyway? This is your chance to promote, so don't blow it.

3) Invest as little time and energy as possible in the actual tweeting. One of the problems with Twitter is that it's a lot of work coming up with something interesting every single day, or even multiple times a day. Real marketers come up with one tagline and say it over and over again -- it's so easy, even a caveman can do it. Stop worrying about manning your Twitter account and turn all of your attention to promoting tweets. That's how you'll get rich off of Twitter.

4) Join Twitter just to use Promoted Tweets. You need to run your ads everywhere that'll accept them, and you can't possibly miss a social marketing opportunity. By running Promoted Tweets, you'll be able to cross another site off your checklist and show your boss how forward-thinking you are. It doesn't matter if you know anything about Twitter. If you've forgotten to do the Twitter thing already, now's the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.

5) Stay laser-focused on the one account you manage. Sure, there may be other people tweeting across your organization, and even across your office. Ignore every single one of them. You've got a job to do, and it's not about following them when you have the chance to promote your tweets above everyone else's. That may mean you'll be bidding against others within your company. It may also mean you'll miss opportunities to cross-promote each other and gain visibility for multiple accounts at once. Your own blissful ignorance is worth it.

6) Plan the owned media and paid media elements separately. Hypothetically, say you acknowledge that multiple disciplines are at work with Promoted Tweets, where someone (or a whole team) manages the Twitter account or accounts, and then someone with media buying expertise manages the promotion. Don't let those groups talk to each other. They might start figuring out how to best include the kind of content that would work well as a promotion. Or they might learn from the resonance scores of the ads to make the day-to-day content more engaging. You'll be much better off keeping everyone totally separate to ensure no learning and optimization take place.

Be sure to let me know if you follow all of my advice, as you could earn a feature in a future column so thousands of marketers can learn from you. You'll undoubtedly be an #epic sensation.

The Social Agency of the Future

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

If you look ahead at the agency business several years out, where will social media fit in, especially once some of the hype dies down?

The question occurred to me after hearing a speech by someone I've worked with for over four years now: 360i CEO Bryan Wiener. When I saw how Bryan touched on social media in his "Agency of the Future" talk at the IAB Annual Leadership Summit last month, I was itching to go deeper, and I happened to know how to reach him. For full disclosure, the idea to interview him was mine alone. I rarely mention 360i at all in these columns, but this was a story I was excited to run.

You can read a few of Bryan's broader thoughts about the coming evolution of agencies on 360i's blog. In this exclusive interview, the focus is entirely on social media.

Social Media Insider: How does social marketing fit in with the agency of the future?

Bryan Wiener: The unfettered rise of digital, and of social media in particular, has brought about staggering shifts in consumer behavior -- and this requires equally dramatic changes to the way agencies operate in order to help brands connect with consumers in this new dimension. The agency of the future must have digital expertise in its DNA, with search, social and mobility -- three things that have completely transformed consumer behavior -- as the three key legs of the stool.

Not surprisingly, social marketing serves as an indispensable leg to this stool for the simple reason that it provides a channel for developing a direct, unadulterated relationship between a consumer and a brand. And building relationships is becoming a more critical component of brand marketing as the media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented and cluttered.

SMI: Which skills in particular will be needed for agencies to 'own' that leg of the stool?

BW: Brands of the digital age need to keep pace with consumers -- and when it comes to the social space, this is no small feat. How can marketers navigate the changing terrain of the social Web in order to capitalize on those opportunities most relevant for their brands? Which emerging arenas hold tremendous promise, and which are flash-in-the-pan media darlings with little or no value to marketers?

As an agency, we are committed to staying innovative and ahead of media and technology trends, and to being change agents for the brands we represent - to throw out everything that's comfortable when necessary and innovate at the speed of consumer behavior. For agencies that want to be indispensible marketing partners to their clients, they need to commit to developing expertise within social and, even beyond that, commit to keeping pace with consumer behavior and bolstering their skills at fostering consumer relationships across all channels.

SMI: Agencies undoubtedly have their own hurdles in really getting social media to the point where they can be strategic advisors for their clients, yet marketers have their own issues managing social media. To what extent do client-side marketers need to change, and what in particular needs to change there?

BW: Digital engages consumers throughout the marketing funnel, simultaneously in real-time, which requires both agencies and their clients to adapt. The old, siloed model of advertising, promotion, sales, customer service and IT just doesn't cut it anymore. Put simply, if marketers really want to rapidly and radically impact change in the agency ecosystem, it starts with how they allocate their dollars. And while many are paying lip service to relationships and conversation, not enough marketers, media properties or agencies have made the structural and budgetary changes necessary to adapt to this new model of marketing.

What's more, marketers need to understand the dire importance of value exchange in their social programs. Consumers aren't going to follow you on Twitter or fan your Facebook Page in the absence of something in return -- entertainment, information, utility of some kind or some form of social currency. Understanding that there now NEEDS to be a value exchange between consumers and brands in their advertising and marketing is probably the single biggest change to the marketing industry since the advent of TV advertising.  The strategy of intruding and interrupting is replaced by informing and engaging.

Offerpal Befriends Direct And Brand Marketers

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 
One emerging business model that has caught on in social media is not particularly social at all. The model, especially prominent in supporting the booming social gaming business, allows marketers to target consumers with cost-per-acquisition deals that earn consumers points or virtual currency in the games.

Among the best known players in this field is Offerpal, which says it reaches more than 150 million consumers. After missing the company's CEO George Garrick last month both when he was in New York and I was in San Francisco, we finally caught up on the phone for an exclusive interview. While Offerpal has typically targeted direct response marketers for lead generation programs, new and upcoming programs will cater to brand marketers too.

Note that his answers below are paraphrased, except where in direct quotes, and some of the questions were added later for clarity.

Offerpal Overview

Offerpal reaches consumers who don't want to spend money for points or virtual currency. Offerpal's consumers are typically teenagers - younger people who may not have credit cards.

The first rewards were offers, but there are other ways Offerpal is providing value for consumers subsidized by marketers. Shopping Offers was introduced a few months ago. A video product is coming out where consumers will get rewarded for watching ads.

How do the leads from these offers compare with customers acquired through other channels?

We'll see if the quality of the response from these offers will turn out to be lower than purely voluntary responses (consumers who are not incentivized to respond). If someone sees an ad for Netflix and signs up for a new account, they're probably more interested than someone who suddenly needs some game points. The lifetime value is probably not going to be as great. The economics are probably going to settle out over the remainder of the year, and that's  OK. "If you look at customers acquired through different channels, they're always going to have different values."

The quality of leads may not be lower at all though. "I don't know that it's going to turn out that way. There's an argument that can be made in the other direction." You can say the type of person playing a social game is a heavier user of DVDs and watches more movies, which offsets the fact that you're incentivizing them to sign up.

It takes a long time to calculate lifetime value. "Ideally you need a lifetime... I don't think there's enough data yet." Offerpal has been around a couple years but social games only really took off at the beginning of last year. Part of the challenge is that "up until recently, a lot of the offers were coming through exchanges and networks... If you're coming through a network like Commission Junction or ValueClick, the marketer can't really tell where the lead is coming from." Better data is just starting to become available.

How will the new data affect pricing?

"Most marketers expect to be paying the same regardless of the channel... I think over time, the advertisers look at additional visibility into the source of the leads and their acquisitions and they will adjust the pricing by source... At the end of the day it probably doesn't make that much difference because unless a new channel comes along that suddenly is a significant source of customers and is significantly different in terms of lifetime value, it really wouldn't make that much of a difference."

What else is Offerpal doing to attract brand marketers?

"We have a number of things coming along that are targeted to brand marketers and more of the Ad Age type reader than the Direct Marketing News reader." [Editor's Note: MediaPost welcomes all such readers.] "The brand marketing world is spending a lot of money, and we think that social environments in games are a great way to reach people, especially certain demographics that are harder to reach through traditional media." Consumers playing these social games are arguably more engaged than TV watchers because they want to get the reward.

You're discussing the offers' role in social gaming. Do you see the offers themselves becoming more social?

"I don't know. It depends on what the marketers and what the agencies come up with." As more research and understanding come out of this, that's a reasonable thing to expect to happen, but that's really up to the marketers and agencies. "We don't design the offers... Typically, marketers do want to take advantage of the environment and the state of mind the audience is in."

Consider  Groupon - they come up with an offer that's only available if a certain number of people sign up for it. TownHog does that too. "We will always be looking for things like that to embed in our offering. I wouldn't rule out actually developing some of our own offers at some point."

What impact did the ‘scamville' brouhaha have? [For background on this, read Garrick's comments in TechCrunch.]

"I think there's a lot of opportunity that's still being left on the table because of the controversy that happened a couple of months ago. There's still an excessive amount of hesitancy to engage in non-cash alternatives. While I can understand that, there are a lot of users who would engage at a deeper level in these games and applications if there were non-cash alternatives available."