Category Archives: Digital Marketing

What Price Privacy?

As promised, I’m picking up the thread from last week’s column on why we seem okay with trading privacy for convenience. The simple – and most plausible – answer is that we’re really not being given a choice.

As Mediapost Senior Editor Joe Mandese pointed out in an very on-point comment, what is being creating is an transactional marketplace where offers of value are exchanged for information.:

“Like any marketplace, you have to have your information represented in it to participate. If you’re not “listed” you cannot receive bids (offers of value) based on who you are.”

Amazon is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Take Alexa and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Alexa promises to “make your life easier and more fun.” But this comes at a price. Because Alexa is voice activated, it’s always listening. That means that privacy of anything we say in our homes has been ceded to Amazon through their terms of service. The same is true for Google Assist and Apple Siri.

But Amazon is pushing the privacy envelope even further as they test their new in-home delivery service – Amazon Key. In exchange for the convenience of having your parcels delivered inside your home when you’re away, you literally give Amazon the keys to your home. Your front door will have a smart door lock that can be opened via the remote servers of AWS. Opt in to this and suddenly you’ve given Amazon the right to not only listen to everything you say in your home but also to enter your home whenever they wish.

How do you feel about that?

This becomes the key question. How do we feel about the convenience/privacy exchange. But it turns out that our response depends in large part on how that question is framed. In a study conducted in 2015 by the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers gathered responses from participants probing their sensitivity around the trading of privacy for convenience. Here is a sampling of the results:

  • 55% of respondents disagreed with the statement: “It’s OK if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”
  • 71% disagreed with: “It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.
  • 91% disagreed that: “If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing”

Here, along the spectrum of privacy pushback, we start to see what the real problem is. We’re willing to exchange private information, as long as we’re aware of all that is happening and feel in control of it. But that, of course, is unrealistic. We can’t control it. And even if we could, we’d soon learn that the overhead required to do so is unmanageable. It’s why Vint Cerf said we’re going to have to learn to live with transparency.

Again, as Mr. Mandese points out, we’re really not being given a choice. Participating in the modern economy required us anteing up personal information. If we choose to remain totally private, we cut ourselves off from a huge portion of what’s available. And we are already at the point where the vast majority of us really can’t opt out. We all get pissed off when we hear of a security breach a la the recent Equifax debacle. Our privacy sensitivities are heightened for a day or two and we give lip service to outrage. But unless we go full out Old Order Amish, what are our choices?

We may rationalize the trade off by saying the private information we’re exchanging for services is not really that sensitive. But that’s where the potential threat of Big Data comes in. Gather enough seemingly innocent data and soon you can start predicting with startling accuracy the aspects of our lives that we are sensitive about. We run headlong into the Target Pregnant Teen dilemma. And that particular dilemma becomes thornier as the walls break down between data siloes and your personal information becomes a commodity on an open market.

The potential risk of trading away our privacy becomes an escalating aspect here – it’s the frog in boiling water syndrome. It starts innocently but can soon develop into a scenario that will keep most anyone up at night with the paranoiac cold sweats. Let’s say the data is used for targeting – singling us out of the crowd for the purpose of selling stuff to us. Or – in the case of governments – seeing if we have a proclivity for terrorism. Perhaps that isn’t so scary if Big Brother is benevolent and looking out for our best interests. But what if Big Brother becomes a bully?

There is another important aspect to consider here, and one that may have dire unintended consequences. When our personal data is used to make our world more convenient for us, that requires a “filtering” of that world by some type of algorithm to remove anything that algo determines to be irrelevant or uninteresting to us. Essentially, the entire physical world is “targeted” to us. And this can go horribly wrong, as we saw in the last presidential election. Increasingly we live in a filtered “bubble” determined by things beyond our control. Our views get trapped in an echo chamber and our perspective narrows.

But perhaps the biggest red flag is the fact that in signing away our privacy by clicking accept, we often also sign away any potential protection when things do go wrong. In another study called “The Biggest Lie on the Internet,” researchers found that when students were presented with a fictitious terms of service and privacy policy, 74% skipped reading it. And those that took the time to read didn’t take very much time – just 73 seconds on average. What almost no one caught were “gotcha clauses” about data sharing with the NSA and giving up your first-born child. While these were fictitious, real terms of service and privacy notifications often include clauses that include total control over the information gathered about you and giving up your right to sue if anything went bad. Even if you could sue, there might not be anyone left to sue. One analyst calculated that even if all the people who had their financial information stolen from Equifax won a settlement, it would actually amount to about $81 dollars.

 

Will We Ever Let Robots Shop for Us?

Several years ago, my family and I visited Astoria, Oregon. You’ll find it at the mouth of the Columbia River, where it empties into the Pacific. We happened to take a tour of Astoria and our guide pointed out a warehouse. He told us it was filled with canned salmon, waiting to be labeled and shipped. I asked what brand they were. His answer was “All of them. They all come from the same warehouse. The only thing different is the label.”

Ahh… the power of branding…

Labels can make a huge difference. If you need proof, look no further than the experimental introduction of generic brands in grocery stores. Well, they were generic to begin with, anyway. But over time, the generic “yellow label” was replaced with a plethora of store brands. The quality of what’s inside the box hasn’t changed much, but the packaging has. We do love our brands.

But there’s often no rational reason to do so. Take the aforementioned canned salmon for example. Same fish, no matter what label you may stick on it. Brands are a trick our brain plays on us. We may swear our favorite brand tastes better than it’s competitors, but it’s usually just our brain short circuiting our senses and our sensibility. Neuroscientist Read Montague found this out when he redid the classic Pepsi taste test using a fMRI scanner. The result? When Coke drinkers didn’t know what they were drinking, the majority preferred Pepsi. But the minute the brand was revealed, they again sweared allegiance to Coke. The taste hadn’t changed, but their brains had. As soon as the brain was aware of the brand, some parts of it suddenly started lighting up like a pinball machine.

In previous research we did, we found that the brain instantly responded to favored brains the same way it did to a picture of a friend or a smiling face. Our brains have an instantaneous and subconscious response to brands. And because of that, our brains shouldn’t be trusted with buying decisions. We’d be better off letting a robot do it for us.

And I’m not saying that facetiously.

A recent post on Bloomberg.com looked forward 20 years and predicted how automation would gradually take over ever step of the consumer product supply chain, from manufacturing to shipping to delivery to our door. The post predicts that the factory floor, the warehouse, ocean liners, trucks and delivery drones will all be powered by Artificial intelligence and robotic labor. The first set of human hands that might touch a product would be those of the buyer. But maybe we’re automating the wrong side of the consumer transaction. The thing human hands shouldn’t be touching is the buy button. We suck at it.

We have taken some steps in the right direction. Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen predicted a death of branding in their book Absolute Value:

“In the past the marketing function “protected” the organization in some cases. When things like positioning, branding, or persuasion worked effectively, a mediocre company with a good marketing arm (and deep pockets for advertising) could get by. Now, as consumers are becoming less influenced by quality proxies, and as more consumers base their decisions on their likely experience with a product, this is changing.”

But our brand love dies hard. If our brain can literally rewire the evidence from our own senses – how can we possibly make rational buying decisions? True, as Simonson and Rosen point out, we do tend to favor objective information when it’s available, but at the end of the day, our buying decisions still rely on an instrument that has proven itself unreliable in making optimal decisions under the influence of brand messaging.

If we’re prepared to let robots steer ships, drive trucks and run factories, why won’t we let them shop for us? Existing shopping bots stop well short of actually making the purchase. We’ll put our lives in the hands of A.I. in a myriad of ways, but we won’t hand our credit card over. Why is that?

It seems ironic to me. If there were any area where machines can beat humans, it would be in making purchases. They’re much better at filtering based on objective criteria, they can stay on top of all prices everywhere and they can instantly aggregate data from all similar types of purchases. Most importantly, machines can’t be tricked by branding or marketing. They can complete the Absolute Value loop Simonson and Rosen talk about in their book.

Of course, there’s just one little problem with all that. It essentially ends the entire marketing and advertising industry.

Ooops.

Email Keeps Us Hanging On

Adobe just released their Consumer Email Survey Report. And one line from it immediately jumped out:

“We’ve seen a 28 percent decrease in consumers checking email messages from bed in the morning (though 26 percent still do it),”

Good for you, you 28 percent who have a life. I, unfortunately, fall into the pathetic 26 percent.

So, what is it about email that still makes it such a dominant part of our digital lives? It’s been 46 years since the first email was sent, from Ray Tomlinson to himself. Yet, it’s never gone out of vogue. In fact, according to this survey, the majority of us (about 85%) see our use of email staying the same or increasing over the next two years. Even the rebellious Generation Z – the post-Millenials who are rewriting the book on tech behaviors, color inside the lines when it comes to email. 41% of them predict their use of email will increase at work, and 30% of them foresee themselves using email more in their personal lives.

Email is the most commonly used communication channel for work – beating actually talking to other people by a full 11 points

What was interesting to me was when and where email was used:

adobe-consumer-email-survey-report-2017-27-1024

From Adobe’s Email Survey Report, used with permission

This suggests some interesting modality variations. I’ve talked about modality before, including a column a few weeks ago about devices. Personally, as a UX geek, I find the whole idea of modality fascinating. Here’s the best way I can think of to understand the importance of modality as it applies to behaviors. You have to stay late at work to fire an employee that has become a train wreck, becoming increasingly hostile to management and bullying her co-workers. It does not go well, but you get it done. Unfortunately it makes you late for your 10-year-old daughter’s birthday party. Consider the seismic shifting of mental frameworks required so you don’t permanently traumatize a roomful of giggling pre-teens. That’s modality in action. It becomes essential when we’re talking about technology because as we step into different roles to accomplish different objectives, it seems we have pre-determined technologies already assigned to the tasks required.

Email seems closely linked as a communication channel perfect for certain behavioral modes: If you want a quick update on a project, are delivering feedback or asking a brief question, email is the preferred communication channel. But for anything that requires more social finesse – asking for help, pitching a new idea, letting your boss know about an issue or even calling it quits – there’s no substitute for face to face.

Here we see why email has not faded in popularity – it’s Occam’s Razor of factual communication. It does just what it needs to do, without unnecessary complication. It allows both the sender and receiver to communication on their timelines, without disruption. It provides an archival record of communication. And it’s already integrated into all our task flows – no extra steps are required. Many start-ups have promised to abolish the in-box. So far, none have succeeded.

What Email doesn’t do very well is convey emotion. Emails have a habit of blowing up in our faces in delicate situations, for all the same reasons as stated above. But that’s okay. We know that. That’s why most of us don’t use it for that purpose. (Note – even for delicate situations, email is still usually the next most popular choice after face to face. 11% of survey respondents would still choose email to tell their bosses to take a flying leap).

As email approached it’s half-century birthday, logic tells us that someday it will become obsolete. But it’s outlasted VCRs, fax machines, 8 tracks and a veritable junk heap of other discarded technologies. In fact, it’s hard to think of one other thing that has changed so little over the decades and is still such an integral part of our lives. Say what you want about email – it does appear to have legs.

To Buy or Not to Buy: The Touchy Subject of Mobile ECommerce

A recent report from Akamai indicates that users have little patience when it comes to making purchases on a mobile device. Here are just a few of the stats:

  • While almost half of all consumers browse via their phones, only 1 in 5 complete transactions on mobile
  • Optimal load times for peak conversions ranged from 1.8 to 2.7 seconds across device types
  • Just a 100-millisecond delay in load time hurt conversion rates by up to 7%
  • Bounce rates were highest among mobile shoppers and lowest among those using tablets

But there may be more behind this than just slow load times. We also have to consider what modes we’re in when we’re interacting with our mobile device.

In 2010, Microsoft did a fascinating research project that looked at how user behaviors varied from desktop to tablet to smart phone. The research was headed by Jacquelyn Krones, who was a Search Product Manager at the time. Search was the primary activity examined, but there was a larger behavioral context that was explored. While the study is 7 years old, I think the core findings are still relevant. The researchers found that we tend to have three large buckets of behaviors: missions, explorations and excavations. Missions were focused tasks that were usually looking for a specific piece of information – i.e. looking for an address or phone number. Explorations where more open ended and less focused on a given destination – i.e. seeing if there was any thing you wanted to do this Friday night. Excavations typically involved multiple tasks within an overarching master task – i.e. researching an article. In an interview with me, Krones outlined their findings:

“There’s clearly a different profile of these activities on the different platforms. On desktops and laptops, people do all three of the activities – they conduct missions and excavations and explorations.

“On their phones we expected to see lots of missions – usually when you use your mobile phone and you’re conducting a search, whatever you’re doing in terms of searching is less important than what’s going on with you in the real world – you’re trying to get somewhere, you’re having a discussion with somebody and you want to look something up quick or you’re trying to make a decision about where to go for dinner.

“But we were surprised to find that people are using their mobile phones for exploration. But once we saw the context, it made sense – people have a low tolerance for boredom. Their phone is actually pretty entertaining, much more entertaining than just looking at the head in front of you while you’re waiting in line. You can go check a sports score, read a story, or look at some viral video and have a more engaged experience.

“On tablets, we found that people are pretty much only using them for exploration today. I had expected to see more missions on tablets, and I think that that will happen in the future, but today people perceive their mobile phone as always with them, very personal, always on, and incredibly efficient for getting information when they’re in mission mode.”

Another study, coming out The University of British Columbia Okanagan, also saw a significant difference in behavioral modality when it came to interacting with touch screens. Assistant Professor Ying Zhu was the principal author:

“The playful and fun nature of the touchscreen enhances consumers’ favour of hedonic products; while the logical and functional nature of a desktop endorses the consumers’ preference for utilitarian products,” explains Zhu.

“Zhu’s study also found that participants using touchscreen technology scored significantly higher on experiential thinking than those using desktop computers. However, those on desktops scored significantly higher on rational thinking.”

I think what we have here is an example of thinking: fast and slow. I suspect we’re compartmentalizing our activities, subconsciously setting some aside for completion on the desktop. I would suspect utilitarian type purchasing would fall into this category. I know that’s certainly true in my case. As Dr. Zhu noted, we have a very right brain relationship with touchscreens, while desktops tend to bring out our left-brain. I have always been amazed at how our brains subconsciously prime us based on anticipating an operating environment. Chances are, we don’t even realize how much our behaviors change when we move from a smart phone to a tablet to a desktop. But I’d be willing to place a significant wager that it’s this subconscious techno-priming that’s causing some of these behavioural divides between devices.

Slow load times are never a good thing, on any device, but while they certainly don’t help with conversions, they may not be the only culprit sitting between a user and a purchase. The device itself could also be to blame.

The Assisted Reality of the New Marketer

Last week, MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan warned us that the future of analytical number crunchers is not particularly rosy in the world of marketing. With cognitive technologies like IBM’s Watson coming on strong in more and more places, analytic skills are not that hot a commodity any more. Ironically, when it comes to marketing, the majority of companies have not planned to incorporate cognitive technologies in the near future. According to a report from IBM and Oxford Economics, only 24% of the organizations have a plan to incorporate CT in their own operations.

Another study, from Forrester, explored AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and eCommerce sectors. The state of readiness is a little better. In these typically forward thinking sectors, 72% are implementing AI marketing tech in the next year, but only 45% of those companies would consider themselves as excelling in at least 2 out of 3 dimensions of readiness.

If those numbers seem contradictory, we should understand what the difference between cognitive technology and artificial intelligence is. You’ll notice that IBM refers to Watson as “cognitive computing.” As Rob High, IBM’s CTO for Watson put it, “What it’s really about is involvement of a human in the loop,” and he described Watson as “augmented intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence.

That “human in the loop” is a critical difference between the two technologies. Whether we like it or not, machines are inevitable in the world of marketing, so we’d better start thinking about how to play nice with them.

 

I remember first seeing a video from the IBM Amplify summit at a MediaPost event last year. Although the presentation was a little stilted, the promise was intriguing. It showed a marketer musing about a potential campaign and throwing “what ifs” at Watson, who quickly responded with the almost instantly analyzed quantified answers. The premise of the video was to show how smart Watson was. But here’s a “what if” to consider. What if the real key to this was the hypotheticals that the human seemed to be pulling out of the blue? That doesn’t seem that impressive to us – certainly not as impressive as Watson’s corralling and crunching of relevant numbers in the blink of an eye. Musing is what we do. But this is just one example of something called Moravec’s Paradox.

Moravec’s Paradox, as stated by AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, is this: “In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best. We’re more aware of simple processes that don’t work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly.” In other words, what we find difficult are the tasks that machines are well suited for, and the things we’re not even aware of are the things machines find notoriously hard to do. Things like intuition. And empathy. If we’re looking at the future of the human marketer, we’re probably looking at those two things.

In his book, Humans are Underrated, Geoff Colvin writes,

“Rather than ask what computers can’t do, it’s much more useful to ask what people are compelled to do—those things that a million years of evolution cause us to value and seek from other humans, maybe for a good reason, maybe for no reason, but it’s the way we are.”

We should be ensuring that both humans and machines are doing what they do best, essentially erasing Moravec’s Paradox. Humans focus on intuition and empathy and machines do the heavy lifting on the analyzing and number crunching. The optimal balance – at this point anyway – is a little bit of both.

In Descarte’s Error – neurologist Antonio Damasio showed that without human intuition and emotion – together with the corresponding physical cues he called somatic markers – we could rationalize ourselves into a never-ending spiral without ever coming to a conclusion. We need to be human to function effectively.

Researchers at MIT have even tried to include this into an algorithm. In 1954, Herbert Simon introduced a concept called bounded rationality. It may seem like this puts limits on the cognitive power of humans, but as programmers like to say, bounded rationality is a feature, not a bug. The researchers at MIT found that in an optimization challenge, such as finding the optimal routing strategy for an airline, humans have the advantage of being able to impose some intuitive limits on the number of options considered. For example, a human can say, “Planes should visit each city at the most once,” and thereby dramatically limit the number crunching required. When these intuitive strategies were converted to machine language and introduced into automated algorithms, those algorithms got 10 to 15% smarter.

When it comes right down to it, the essence of marketing is simply a conversation between two people. All the rest: the targeting, the automation, the segmentation, the media strategy – this is all just to add “mass” to marketing. And that’s all the stuff that machines are great at. For us humans, our future seems to rely on our past – and on our ability to connect with other humans.

Is Google Slipping, Or Is It Just Our Imagination?

Recently, I’ve noticed a few articles speculating about whether Google might be slipping:

Last month, the American Customer Satisfaction Index notified us that our confidence in search is on the decline. Google’s score dropped 2% to 82. The culprit was the amount of advertising found on the search results page. To be fair, both Google and search in general have had lower scores. Back in 2015, Google scored a 77%, it’s lowest score ever.

This erosion of customer satisfaction may be leading to a drop in advertising ROI. According to a recent report from Analytic Partners, the return on investment from paid search dropped 27% from 2010 to 2016. Search wasn’t alone. All digital ROI seems to be in decline. Analytic’s VP of Marketing, Joe LaSala, predicts that ROI from digital will continue to decline until it converges with ROI from traditional media.

In April of this year, Forbes ran an article asking the question: “Is Google’s Search Quality Starting to Decline?” Contributors to this decline, according to the article, included the introduction of rich snippets and featured news, including popularity as a ranking factor and ongoing black hat SEO manipulation.

But the biggest factor in the drop of Google’s perceived quality was actually in the perception itself. As the Forbes article’s author, Jayson DeMers, stated;

It’s important to realize just how sophisticated Google is, and how far it’s come from its early stages, as well as the impossibility of having a “perfect” search platform. Humans are flawed creatures, and our actions are what are dictating the shape of search.

Google is almost 20 years old. The domain Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Given that 20 years is an eternity in internet years, it’s actually amazing that it’s stood up as well as it has for the past two decades. Whether Google’s naysayers care to admit it or not, that’s due to Google’s almost religious devotion to the quality of their search results. That devotion extends to advertising. The balance between user experience and monetization has always been one that Google has paid a lot of attention too.

But it’s not the presence of ads that has led to this perceived decline of quality. It’s a change in our expectations of what a search experience should be. I would argue that for any given search, using objective measures of result relevance, the results Google shows today are far more relevant than the results they showed in 2008, the year it got it’s highest customer satisfaction score (86%). Since then, Google has made great strides in deciphering user intent and providing a results page that’s a good match for that intent. Sometimes it will get it wrong, but when it gets it right, it puts together a page that’s a huge improvement over the vanilla, one size fits all results page of 2008.

The biggest thing that’s changed in the past 10 years is the context from which we’re launching those searches. In 2008, it was almost always the desktop. But today, chances are we’re searching from a mobile device – or our car – or our home through Amazon Echo. This has changed our expectations of search. We are task focused, rather than “browsing” for information. This creates an entirely different mental framework within which we receive the results. We apply a new yardstick of acceptable relevance. Here, we’re not looking for a list of 20 possible answers – we’re looking for one answer. And it had better be the right one. Context based search must be hyper-relevant.

Compounding this trend is the increasing number of circumstances where search is going “under the hood” – something I’ve been forecasting for a long time now. For example, if you use Siri to launch a search through your CarPlay connected device when you’re driving, the results are actually coming from Bing but they’re stripped of the context of the Bing search results page. Here, the presentation of search results is just one step in a multi-step task flow. It’s important that the result that is on top is the one you’re probably looking for.

Unfortunately for Google – and the other search providers – this expectation stays in place even when the context shifts. When we launch a search from our desktop, we are increasingly intolerant of results that are even a little off base from our intent. Ads become the most easily identified culprit. A results set that would have seemed almost frighteningly prescient even a few years ago now seems sub par. Google has come a long way in the past 20 years but it’s still losing ground to our expectations.

 

 

Live, From Inside the Gale of Creative Destruction

Talk about cognitive dissonance…

First, Mediapost’s Jack Loechner writes about a Forrester Report, The End of Advertising as We Know It, which was published earlier this year. Seeing as last week I starting ringing the death knell for advertising agencies, I though I should check the report out.

Problem One: The report was only available on Forrester if I was willing to plunk down $499. American. Which is – I don’t know – about 14 zillion Canadian. Much as I love and respect you, my readers, there’s no friggin’ way that’s going to happen. So, I go to Google to see if I can find a free source to get the highlights.

Problem Two: Everyone and Sergio Zyman’s dog has apparently decided to write a book or white paper entitled “The End of Advertising as We Know It.” Where to begin researching the end? Well, here’s one deliciously ironic option – one of those white papers was published by none other than WPP. You know I have to check that out! As it turns out – no surprise here – it’s a sales pitch for the leading edge cool stuff that one of WPP’s agencies, AKQA, can do for you. I tried to sift through the dense text but gave up after continually bumping into buzz-laden phrases like “365 ideas”, “Business Invention” and “People Stories.” I return to the search results page and follow a Forbes link that looks more promising.

Problem Three: Yep! This is it. It’s Forbes summation of the Forrester Report. I start reading and learning that the biggest problem with advertising is that we hate to be interrupted by advertising. Well, I could have told you that. Oh – wait – I did (for free, I might add). But here’s the cognitively dissonant part. As I’m trying to read the article, an autoplay video ad keeps playing on the Forbes page, interrupting me. And you know what? I hated it! The report was right. At least, I think it was, as I stopped reading the article.

I’m guessing you’re going through something similar right now. As you’re trying to glean my pearls of wisdom, you’re tiptoeing around advertising on the page. That’s not Mediapost’s fault. They have a business to run and right now, there’s no viable business model other than interruptive advertising to keep the lights on. So you have the uniquely dissonant experience of reading about the end of advertising while being subjected to advertising.

My experience – which is hardly unique – is a painful reminder about the inconvenient truth of innovative disruption: it’s messy in the middle of it. When Joseph Schumpeter called it a “gale of creative destruction” it made it sound revolutionary and noble in the way that the Ride of the Valkyries or the Starks retaking Winterfell is noble. But this stuff gets messy, especially if you’re trying to hang on to the things being destroyed when the gale hits in full force.

Here’s the problem, in a nutshell. The tension goes back to a comment made back in 1984 from Stewart Brand to Steve Wozniak:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

In publishing, we not only have the value of the information itself, but we have the cost of wrapping insight around that information. Forrester’s business is industry analysis. Someone has to do the analyzing and there are costs associated with that. So they charge $499 for a report on the end of advertising.

Which brings us to the second part of the tension. Because so much information is now free and Google gives me, the information consumer, the expectation that I can find it for free – or, at least, highlights of it for free – I expect all information to be free. I believe I have an alternative to paying Forrester. In today’s age, information tends to seep through the cracks in pay walls, as it did when Forbes and Mediapost published articles on the report. Forrester is okay with that, because it hopes it will make more people willing to pay $499 aware of the report.

For their part Forbes – or Mediapost – relies on advertising to keep the information available to you for free, matching our expectations. But they have their own expenses. Whether we like it or not, interruptive advertising is the only option currently available to them.

So there we have it, a very shaky house of cards built on a rapidly crumbling foundation. Welcome to the Edge of Chaos. A new model will be created from this destruction. That is inevitable. But in the meantime, there’s going to be a lot of pain and WTF moments. Just like the one I had this week.

How I Cleared a Room Full of Marketing Techies

Was it me?

Was it something I said?

I don’t think so. I think it was just that I was talking about B2B.

Let me explain.

Last week, I was in San Francisco talking at a marketing technology conference. My session, in which I was a co presenter, was going to be about psychographic profiling and A.I. – in B2B marketing. It was supposed to start immediately after another session on “cognitive marketing”. During this prior session, I decided to stand at the back at the room so I didn’t take up a seat.

That proved to be a mistake. During the session, which was in one of three tracks running at the time, the medium sized room filled to standing room only capacity. The presenter talked about how machine learning – delivered via IBM’s Watson, Google’s DeepMind or Amazon’s Cloud AI solution – is going to change marketing and, along with it, the job of a human marketer.

I found it interesting. The audience seemed to think so as well. The presenter wrapped up – the moderator got up to thank him and introduce me as the next presenter – and about 60% of the room stood as one and headed for the exit door, creating a solid human wall between myself and the stage. It took me – the fish – about 5 minutes of proverbially and physically swimming upstream before I could get to the stage. It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions.

I tend to take these things personally. But I honestly don’t think it was me. I think it was the fact that “B2B” was in the title of my presentation. I have found that as soon as you slap that label on anything, marketers tend to swarm in the opposite direction. If there is a B2B track at a general marketing show, you can bet your authentic Adam West Batman action figure (not that I would have any such thing) that it’s tucked away in some far-off corner of the conference center, down three flights of escalators, where you turn right and head towards the parking garage. My experience at this past show was analogous to the lot of B2B marketing in general. Whenever we start talking about it, people start heading for the door.

I don’t get it.

It’s not a question of budget. Even in terms of marketing dollars, a lot of budget gets allocated for B2B. An Outsell report for 2016 pegged the total US B2B marketing spend at about $151 billion. That compares respectfully with the total consumer Ad Spend of $192 billion, according to eMarketer.

And it’s definitely not a question of market size. It’s very difficult to size the entire B2B market, but there’s no doubt that it’s huge. A Forrester report estimates that $8 trillion was sold in the US B2B retail space in 2014. That’s almost half of the US gross domestic product that year. And a huge swath of the business is happening online. The worldwide B2B eCommerce market is projected to be $6.7 trillion by 2020. That’s twice as big as the projected online B2C market ($3.2 trillion).

So what gives? B2B is showing us the money. Why are we not showing it any love? Just digging up the background research for this column proved to be painful. Consumer spend and marketing dollar numbers come gushing off the page of even a half-assed Google search. But B2B stats? Cue the crickets.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s just lack of attention, which probably comes from a lack of sex appeal. B2B is like the debate club in high school. While everyone goes gaga during school assemblies over the cheerleading squad and the football team, the people who will one day rule the world quietly gather after class with Mr. Tilman in the biology lab to plot their debate strategy for next week’s match up against J.R. Matheson Senior High. It goes without saying that parents will be the only ones who actually show up. And even some of them will probably have to stay home to cut the grass.

Those debaters will probably all grow up to be B2B marketers.

It may also be that B2B marketing is hard. Like – juggling Rubik’s Cubes while simultaneously solving them – hard. At least, it’s hard if you dare to go past the “get a lead and hound them mercilessly until they either move to another country or give in and buy something to get you off their back” school of marketing. If you try to do something as silly as try to predict purchase behaviors you have the problem of compound complexity. We have been trying for some time, with limited success, to predict a single consumer’s behavior. In B2B, you have to predict what might happen when you assemble a team of potential buyers – each with their own agenda, emotions and varying degrees of input – and ask them to come to a consensus on an organizational buying decision.

That can make your brain hurt. It’s a wicked problem to the power of 5.4 (the average number of buyers involved in a B2B buying decision- according to CEB’s research). It’s the Inconvenient Truth of Marketing.

That, I keep telling myself, is why everyone was rushing for the door the minute I started walking to the stage. I shouldn’t take it personally.

Disruption in the Rear View Mirror

Oh..it’s so easy to be blasé. I always scan the Mediapost headlines each week to see if there’s anything to spin. I almost skipped right past a news post by Larissa Faw – Zenith: Google Remains Top-Ranked Media Company By Ad Revenue

“Of course Google is the top ranked media company,” I yawned as I was just about to click on the next email in my inbox. Then it hit me. To quote Michael Bublé, “Holy Shitballs, Mom!”

Maybe that headline doesn’t seem extraordinary in the context of today, but I’ve been doing this stuff for almost 20 years now, and in that context – well-it’s huge! I remembered a column I wrote ages ago about speculating that Google had barely scratched its potential. After a little digging, I found it. It was in October, 2006, so just over a decade ago. Google had just passed the 6 billion dollar mark in annual revenue. Ironically, that seemed a bigger deal then their current revenue of almost $80 billion seems today. In that column, I pushed to the extreme and speculated that Google could someday pass $200 billion in revenue. While we’re still only 1/3 of the way there, the claim doesn’t seem nearly as ludicrous as it did back then.

But here’s the line that really made me realize how far we’ve come in the ten and a half years since I wrote that column: “Google and Facebook together accounted for 20% of global advertising expenditure across all media in 2016, up from 11% in 2012. They were also responsible for 64% of all the growth in global ad spend between 2012 and 2016.”

Two companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago now account for 20% of all global advertising expenditure. And the speed with which they’re gobbling advertising budgets is accelerating. If you’re a dilettante student of disruption, as I am, those are pretty amazing numbers. In the day-to-day of Mediapost – and digital marketing in general – we tend to accept all this as normal. It’s like we’re surfing on top of a wave without realizing the wave is 300 freakin’ feet high. Sometimes, you need to zoom out a little to realizing how momentous the every day is. And if you look at this on a scale of decades rather than days, you start to get a sense that the speed of change is massive.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that both Google and Facebook have introduced a fundamentally new relationship between advertising and it’s audience. Google’s outré is – of course – intent based advertising. And Facebook’s is based on socially mediated network effects. Both of these things required the overlay of digital connection. That – as they say – has made all the difference. And there is where the real disruption can be found. Our world has become a fundamentally different place.

Much as we remain focused on the world of advertising and marketing here in our little corner of the digital world, it behooves us to remember that advertising is simply a somewhat distorted reflection of the behaviors of the world in general. It things are being disrupted here, it is because things are being disrupted everywhere. As it regards us beings of flesh, bone and blood, that disruption has three distinct beachheads: the complicated relationship between our brains and the digital tools we have at our disposal, the way we connect with each other, and a dismantling of the restrictions of the physical world at the same time we build the scaffolding of a human designed digital world. Any one of these has the potential to change our species forever. With all three bearing down on us, permanent change is a lead-pipe cinch.

Thirty years is a nano-second in terms of human history. Even on the scale of my lifetime, it seems like yesterday. Reagan was president. We were terrorized by the Unabomber. News outlets were covering the Iran-Contra affair. U2 released the Joshua Tree. Platoon won the best picture Oscar. And if you wanted to advertise to a lot of people, you did so on a major TV network with the help of a Madison Avenue agency. 30 years ago, nothing of which I’m talking about existed. Nothing. No Google. No Facebook. No Internet – at least, not in a form any of us could appreciate.

As much as advertising has changed in the past 30 years, it has only done so because we – and the world we inhabit – have changed even more. And if that thought is a little scary, just think what the next 30 years might bring.

The Status Quo Bias – Why Every B2B Vendor has to Understand It

It’s probably the biggest hurdle any B2B vendor has to get over. It’s called the Status Quo bias and it’s deadly in any high-risk purchase scenario. According to Wikipedia, the bias occurs when the current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. In other words, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. We believe that simply because something exists, it must have merit. The burden of proof then falls on the vendor to overcome this level of complacency

The Status Quo Bias is actually a bundle of other common biases, including the Endowment Effect, the Loss Aversion Bias, The Existence Bias, Mere Exposure effect and other psychological factors that tend to continually jam the cogs of B2B commerce. Why B2B? The Status Quo Bias is common in any scenario where risk is high and reward is low, but B2B in particular is subject to it because these are group-buying decisions. And, as I’ll soon explain, groups tend to default to Status Quo bias with irritating regularity. The new book from CEB (recently acquired by Gartner) – The Challenger Customer – is all about the status quo bias.

So why is the bias particularly common with groups? Think of the dynamics at play here. Generally speaking, most people have some level of the Status Quo Bias. Some will have it more than others, depending on their level of risk tolerance. But let’s look at what happens when we lump all those people together in a group and force them to come to a consensus. Generally, you’re going to have a one or two people in the group that are driving for change. Typically, these will be the ones that have the most to gain and have a risk tolerance threshold that allows the deal to go forward. On the other end of the spectrum you have some people who have low risk tolerance levels and nothing to gain. They may even stand to lose if the deal goes forward (think IT people who have to implement a new technology). In between you have the moderates. The gain factor and their risk tolerance levels net out to close to zero. Given that those that have something to gain will say yes and those who have nothing to gain will say no, it’s this middle group that will decide whether the deal will live or die.

Without the Status Quo bias, the deal might have a 50/50 chance. But the status quo bias stacks the deck towards negative outcomes for the vendor. Even if it tips the balance just a little bit towards “no” – that’s all that’s required to stop a deal dead in its tracks. The more disruptive the deal, the greater the Status Quo Bias. Let’s remember – this is B2B. There are no emotional rewards that can introduce a counter acting bias. It’s been shown in at least one study (Baker, Laury, Williams – 2008) that groups tend to be more risk averse than the individuals that make up that group. When the groups start discussing and – inevitably – disagreeing, it’s typically easier to do nothing.

So, how do we stick handle past this bias? The common approach is to divide and conquer – identifying the players and tailoring messages to speak directly to them. The counter intuitive finding of the CEB Challenger Customer research was that dividing and conquering is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It actually lessens the possibility of making a sale. While this sounds like it’s just plain wrong, it makes sense if we shift our perspective from the selling side to the buying side.

With our vendor goggles on, we believe that if we tailor messaging to appeal to every individual’s own value proposition, that would be a way to build consensus and drive the deal forward. And that would be true, if every member of our buying committee was acting rationally. But as we soon see when we put on the buying googles, they’re not. Their irrational biases are firmly stacked up on the “do nothing” side of the ledger. And by tailoring messaging in different directions, we’re actually just giving them more things to disagree about. We’re creating dysfunction rather than eliminating it. Disagreements almost always default back to the status quo, because it’s the least risky option. The group may not agree about much, but they can agree that the incumbent solution creates the least disruption.

So what do you do? Well, I won’t steal the CEB’s thunder here, because the Challenger Customer is absolutely worth a read if you’re a B2B vendor. The authors, Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman, lay out step by step strategy to get around the Status Quo bias. The trick is to create a common psychological frame where everyone can agree that doing nothing is the riskiest alternative. But biases are notoriously sticky things. Setting up a commonly understood frame requires a deep understanding of the group dynamics at play. The one thing I really appreciate about CEB’s approach is that it’s “psychologically sound.” They make no assumptions about buyer rationality. They know that emotions ultimately drive all human behavior and B2B purchases are no exception.