Category Archives: Rants

Every so often I have to blow off steam. These are the results

Talking Back to Technology

The tech world seems to be leaning heavily towards voice activated devices. Siri – Amazon Echo – Facebook M – “OK Google” – as well as pretty much every vehicle in existence. It should make sense that we would want to speak to our digital assistants. After all, that’s how we communicate with each other. So why – then – do I feel like such a dork when I say “Siri, find me an Indian restaurant”?

I almost never use Sir as my interface to my iPhone. On the very rare occasions when I do, it’s when I’m driving. By myself. With no one to judge me. And even then, I feel unusually self-conscious.

I don’t think I’m alone. No one I know uses Siri, except on the same occasions and in the same way I do. This should be the most natural thing in the world. We’ve been talking to each other for several millennia. It’s so much more elegant than hammering away on a keyboard. But I keep seeing the same scenario play out over and over again. We give voice navigation a try. It sometimes works. When it does, it seems very cool. We try it again. And then, we don’t do it any more. I base this on admittedly anecdotal evidence. I’m sure there are those that continually chat merrily away to the nearest device. But not me. And not anyone I know either. So, given that voice activation seems to be the way devices are going, I have to ask why we’re dragging our heels to adopt?

In trying to judge the adoption of voice-activated interfaces, we have to account for mismatches in our expected utility. Every time we ask for some thing – like, for instance, “Play Bruno Mars” and we get the response, “I’m sorry, I can’t find Brutal Cars,” some frustration would be natural. This is certainly part of it. But that’s an adoption threshold that will eventually yield to sheer processing brute strength. I suspect our reluctance to talk to an object is found in the fact that we’re talking to an object. It doesn’t feel right. It makes us look addle-minded. We make fun of people who speak when there’s no one else in the room.

Our relationship with language is an intimately nuanced one. It’s a relatively newly acquired skill, in evolutionary terms, so it takes up a fair amount of cognitive processing. Granted, no matter what the interface, we currently have to translate desire into language, and speaking is certainly more efficient than typing, so it should be a natural step forward in our relationship with machines. But we also have to remember that verbal communication is the most social of things. In our minds, we have created a well-worn slot for speaking, and it’s something to be done when sitting across from another human.

Mental associations are critical for how we make sense of things. We are natural categorizers. And, if we haven’t found an appropriate category when we encounter something new, we adapt an existing one. I think vocal activation may be creating cognitive dissonance in our mental categorization schema. Interaction with devices is a generally solitary endeavor. Talking is a group activity. Something here just doesn’t seem to fit. We’re finding it hard to reconcile our usage of language and our interaction with machines.

I have no idea if I’m right about this. Perhaps I’m just being a Luddite. But given that my entire family, and most of my friends, have had voice activation capable phones for several years now and none of them use that feature except on very rare occasions, I thought it was worth mentioning.

By the way, let’s just keep this between you and I. Don’t tell Siri.

Donald Trump, The Clickbait Candidate

Intellectually, I hate clickbait. But do I click on it? You bet. Usually before I stop to think. It hits me in the quick and dirty (in every sense of the word) part of my brain. Much as I know I should be better than this, I find myself clicking through more viscerally tantalizing slideshows than I would care to admit. Humans, of which I number myself one, are suckers for sensationalism.

So, I admit to human foibles. But in doing so, I stress that they’re something we should strive to overcome. Ration should rule the day. We should not embrace a future that’s built on the pushing of our collective hot buttons.

That’s why the current ascendency of one Mr. Trump is scaring the hell out of me.

Donald Trump is not stupid. He’s built his campaign to be one massive, ongoing A/B clickbait test. He floats Outrageous Remark A against Outrageous Remark B to see which generates the biggest response. He’s probing the collective psyche of America to see what goes viral. And he knows that virality cannot live in the middle of the road. It has to live in the extreme margins. In order to be sensational, you have to provoke senses. You have to push buttons. To get people to love you, you also have to get people to hate you. It was an inevitable evolution of politicking in the Age of the Internet.

To this point, Trumps tactics appear to be working. He’s distancing his Republican opponents by increasing margins (the latest has him doubling Jeb Bush’s support, at 32% vs 16%). He’s even closing in on Hilary Clinton, trailing by just 6% in a recent poll. Trump’s sledgehammer-subtle attack on the quick and dirty shortcuts of our brains seems to be triumphing over any rational appeal to the slow and reasoned loops of logic.

But is this really how we want our leaders to be chosen?

In 1856, America was edging closer to the ideological precipice of the Civil War. It was a time when it was easy to ignite hair-triggered passions. And the country was captivated by one senatorial race in particular – in the state of Illinois. There, incumbent Stephen A. Douglas was running against a little known lawyer who had served one largely unremarkable term in Congress. His name was Abraham Lincoln. As part of the campaign, Douglas agreed to debate Lincoln on what was the only real issue of the election – the future of slavery. Prior to the debates, popular opinion had it that Douglas would eviscerate Lincoln.

lincolndouglasThe series of seven debates were spread around the state over a period of 56 days. The stakes were profound. Over 14% of the US population was black. Of them, almost 90% were slaves. The future of the union revolved on the thorny question of the legality of slavery. No matter what side of the issue you were on, whatever came out of your mouth was guaranteed to be provocative.

Each debate was 3 hours in length. The first speaker spoke for 60 minutes, the other candidate had 90 minutes to respond, and the first speaker had an additional 30 minutes as a rejoinder. In total, that was 21 hours of usually eloquent political debate. The full text of all speeches were published almost verbatim in the nation’s newspapers (papers usually fixed the grammatical errors of whichever candidate they were supporting, while leaving the opponent’s remarks in rough form.) Lincoln got off to a rough start, but hit his stride midway through the debates. By the final two debates, in Quincy and Alton, most everyone who was at objective felt that Lincoln was the clear winner. He ended up losing the senatorial race to Douglas, but emerged as the national champion of abolitionists. The momentum from those debates eventually carried him into the presidency 4 years later.

In these debates, Lincoln managed to do something extraordinary. He reframed the slavery debate – moving it from a question of social equality to one of legal liberty. This sidestepped some of the fiercely held beliefs and allowed for a more rational examination of the question. Beliefs are the bedrock of the quick and dirty mechanisms of our mind. It’s relatively easy to connect with someone’s beliefs. You just have to know the right buttons to push. It’s much more difficult to encourage people to think, as Lincoln did, and push them to question their beliefs. Beliefs act as bulwarks against open and rational consideration.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the term, a bulwark is a great wall built to keep things out. Like, for example, a great wall on the US/Mexican border.

Why Disruptive Change is Disruptive

There were a lot of responses to my last column, looking at why agencies and clients have hit the point of irreconcilable differences. Many of those responses were in agreement. In fact, none were in outright disagreement. This surprised me. A lot of Online Spin readers are people who work for very big agencies. I can only conclude that you elected to show your dissention through your silence.

But there were many that fell in the “Yeah-but” category:

Tiffany Lyman Otten wrote,

“This, like anything, is a sign simply that agencies must evolve – again.

Jill Montaigne adds,

“Yet, our own ongoing advertiser conversations confirm that rather than walking away from their traditional agency relationships, clients desperately need and want their agencies to evolve.”

David Vawter chimes in,

“As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.”

Agreed. But…

All of the above comments pointed to a new trend in the marketing ecosystem – that of a network of specialists, often in the form of micro-agencies, that appear to be finding niches to hang on to in the tidal wave of change that is sweeping over our industry.

I used to head one of these agencies. Our area of specialty was in user behavior with search interfaces. We did well in this niche. So well, in fact, that we were eventually acquired by a bigger agency. Bigger agencies are always vertically integrated. As such, they offer clients the one-stop shop model. They move to that model because that is the model they know. It is the model they are programmed to create. It is an organizational form that is dictated by their P&L targets. There is no operational wiggle-room here. They simply can’t become anything else.

Tiffany, Jill and several others all used the word evolve, like it is a magical formula for survival. But evolution is like a tree. Once your branch has been determined, you have to evolve outward from that branch. You can’t suddenly leap to another branch. If you’re a chimpanzee, you can’t suddenly decide one day to evolve into a budgie. You can evolve into a new type of chimpanzee, but you’re still a chimpanzee.

What does happen in evolution, however, is that the environment changes so drastically that the tree is dramatically pruned. Some branches are lopped off, so that new branches can sprout. This is called punctuated equilibrium, and, as I’ve said before, this is what I believe we’re going through right now in marketing. Yes, as David rightly notes, “As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.” It’s just that the form that takes may be dramatically different that what we currently know. It could be – correction – will be a marketing ecosystem that will be dominated by new species of marketers.

We tend to equate evolution with change – but evolution is a very specific kind of change. It’s change in response to environmental pressures. And while individual species can evolve, so can entire ecosystems. In that bigger picture, some species will emerge and thrive and others will disappear. What is happening to agencies now is just a ripple effect from a much bigger environmental change – analogous to a planet size asteroid slamming into the business and marketing ecosystem that evolved over the past two centuries.

Big agencies are the result of corporate evolution in the previous ecosystem. We are quick to take them to task for being slow, or dumb, or oblivious to client needs. And perhaps, in the new ecosystem, those things are true. But those are the characteristics of the species. No agency intends to be dumb or unresponsive. It’s just an evolutionary mismatch caused by massive disruption in the environment.

These things happen. It’s actually a good thing. Joseph Schumpeter called it Creative Destruction. But, as the name implies, it’s a zero sum game. For something to be created, something has to be destroyed.

Feed Up with Feedback Requests

Sorry Google. I realize this is my last chance to tell you about my experience. But you see, you’re in a long line of companies that are also desperate for the juicy details of my various consumer escapades. Best Western, Ford, Kia, Home Depot, Apple, Samsung – my in box is completely clogged with pleas for the “dets” of my transactional interactions with them. I’ve never been more popular – or frustrated.

I appreciate the idea of customer follow up. I really do. But as company after company jumps on the customer feedback bandwagon, poor ordinary mortals like myself don’t have a hope in hell of keeping up. It could be a full time job just filling out surveys and rating every aspect of my life on a scale that runs from “abysmal” to “awesome” The irony is, these customer feedback requests are actually having the opposite effect. Even if my interactions with the brand are satisfactory, the incessant nagging to find out if I “like them, I really like them” are beginning to piss me off. In the quest to quantify brand affinity, these companies are actually eroding it. Ooops! Talk about unintended consequences.

So, if we accept the fact that knowing what our customers think about us is a good thing, and we also accept the fact that our customers have better things to do with their lives than fill out post-purchase surveys, we have to find a more elegant way to get the job done.

First of all, customer feedback should be part of a full customer relationship continuum. It should be just one customer touch point, not the customer touch point. You have to earn the credibility that gives you the right to ask for my feedback. Too many companies don’t worry about gauging satisfaction “in the moment.” If you don’t care enough to ask if I’m happy when I’m right in front of you, why should I believe that you’ll pay any attention to my survey. But too many companies jam this request for feedback on their customers without doing the spadework required to build a relationship first.

Worse, because compensation is increasingly being tied to feedback results, you get the “please say you’ll love me” pleading on the sales floor. See if this sounds familiar: “You’ll be receiving a survey from head office asking me how I’ve done. I don’t get a bonus unless you give me top marks in each category. So if there’s anything I can do better, please tell me now.” There are so many things that are just plain wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. It’s smarmy and disingenuous. It also puts the customer in a very awkward position. When it’s happened to me, I just murmur something like, “No, you’ve been great,” and run with all speed to the nearest exit.

The next thing we have to realize is that not all purchases are created equal. Remember the Risk/Reward matrix I talked about in last week’s column about how our brains process pricing information? While this applies to our motivational balance going into a purchase, it also provides some clues to the emotion landscape that exists post-purchase. If the purchase was in the low risk/low reward quadrant, like the home improvement supplies I picked up at Home Depot this weekend, it’s a task that has been crossed off my to-do list. It’s done. It’s over. The last thing I want to do is prolong that task by filling out a survey about said task. But, if it’s something that falls into the high risk/high reward quadrant, such as a major vacation, then I am probably more apt to invest some time to give you some feedback. The Rule of Thumb is: the higher the degree of risk or reward, the more likely I am to fill out a survey.

The final thing to remember about customer surveys is that you’re capturing extremes. The people who fill out surveys are usually the ones that either hate you or love you. So you get a very skewed perspective on how you’re doing. What you’re missing is the vast middle of your market that may not be sufficiently motivated to toss you either a brick or a bouquet.

I’m all for getting to know your customers better. But it has to be part of a total approach. It begins with simple things, like actually listening to them when you’re engaging with them.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

Are We Guilty of “Numbed” Marketing?

BombsightA few years ago, I was moderating a panel on mobile advertising. The room was full of marketers. After much discussion about targeting and the ability to track consumers both geographically and behaviorally, one audience member lamented, “Why don’t the carriers just share the subscriber information? They know who they are. They know addresses, family status, credit history, demographics – they have all that information. Then we could really pinpoint our market.”

I had to jump in. I asked this room full of marketers to indicate who would like to have access to that information by raising their hand. The entire room answered in the affirmative. Then I added a twist…

“Okay. Everyone in this room has a mobile phone. Who, as subscribers, would want your carrier sharing that information with anyone who wanted to target you? Keep your hands up.”

Hands wavered. You could almost hear the switch clicking in their brains. Every hand slowly went down.

That story came to mind last week when I read the following passage in a book by Arthur J. Dyck called “Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities: The Moral Bonds of Community,”

“In his study, (Robert Jay) Lifton takes note of a phenomenon he calls “numbed warfare,” a mode of combat in which participants have psychological contacts only with their military cohorts and their own equipment…. Lifton describes research that found a striking correlation between altitude and potential for guilt:

‘B-52 pilots and crews bombing at high altitudes saw nothing of their victims and spoke exclusively of professional skill and performance…’

Lifton calls these B-52 pilots “numbed warriors.” What have been numbed are their empathic emotions: ‘lacking emotional relations with his victims, the numbed warrior receives from them very little of the kind of feedback that could permit at least one layer of his mind to perceive them as human.’”

That may seem like a horrific parallel to draw with marketing, but the similarities are striking. One of the ways warriors have always desensitized themselves is by thinking of the enemy in non-human terms, either as a faceless, monolithic group, or by assigning a dehumanizing (and usually derogatory) label to them. We marketers have been doing this for years. What is more dehumanizing than taking a thinking, feeling person and calling them a “consumer?” Someone once described consumers as “mindless wallets eating shit and crapping cash.”

Warriors have to clearly delineate the concepts of “us” and “them” in order to do what they have to do. But as my room full of marketers realized, when it comes to marketing – “them” is “us.” In a recent PEW study, 80% of social network users were worried that their data would be accessed by advertisers. That means 4 out of 5 people don’t trust you, Ms. or Mr. Marker. They’d rather you didn’t know who they were. If you knocked on their door, they wouldn’t answer. Maybe it’s because you keep calling them a consumer or a target market. I’m also betting that if you were asked that question, you’d answer the same way. Because even though you’re a marketer, you don’t trust other marketers.

In a recent interview, I was asked what one piece of advice I would pass on to other marketers. I said, “Be an empathic marketer.” Or, in plainer terms, don’t numb yourself to your market. I’m not alone in saying we can be better. Fellow Spinner Cory Treffileti talked about the importance of emotion in ad messages. And Katie Meier recently asked the question, “What if data wasn’t about numbers, but instead we made it about the people the numbers represent?”

Technology has put us at a crossroads. We could use it to further distance and dehumanize our market, turning real people into digital data points. We could become “high-altitude” marketers, never coming face to face with the humans we’re trying to connect with.

Or, we could use it to create, as my friend Scott Brinker likes to say, “markets of one.” But before we do that, we have to make them want to listen to us. They have to answer their door if we knock. And that will take some work. We have to start treating them the way we want to be treated, when we’re not wearing our “marketing” hats.

The Trouble with Trying to Stand on The Shoulders of Giants

Standing-on-GiantsIt has long been thought that academia provided a refuge from the sordid world of business. But when a Nobel prize-winning academic says that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t publish, you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Laureate Peter Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) told the Guardian:

“Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

The whole point of publishing is to share knowledge. But academic publishers don’t seem to have received that memo. For the past two decades, publishers like Reed Elsevier, John Wiley and Springer, who got in on a good gig early, have propped up ridiculous profit margins by slowly squeezing non-profit publishers out of the picture. In the process, they’ve turned academic publishing into a hamster wheel that stresses quantity over quality. Most academic research is rushed out to a limited audience that has been designated as the ones who “count” and the rest of us have to pony up ridiculous sums to access an article that lies on the far side of a barricaded pay wall. Academic publishing is one of the few bastions that has managed to resist the digital tide of declining transaction costs.

I love academic research. I am a big believer in scientific inquiry. I am an avid reader of blogs like Science Daily and Big Think. But 9 times out of 10 (or 99 times out of a hundred), when you actually read an academic paper (if you can get your hands on one), it’s hopelessly mired in academic jargon and the actual findings fall disappointingly short of remarkable. What should be a reflection of the best of who we are has turned into a sordid little business run by shortsighted people who are only in it for a quick buck. If one of the pre-eminent physicists of our generation would rather become a used car salesman or worse yet, a marketer, than follow his passion, we know something is seriously wrong.

Google tried to remain true to the spirit of academic publishing when they introduced Google Scholar. I use Scholar a lot, and have found it very useful for accessing landmark papers from a few decades back that have managed to seep into the public domain. But if you use it to try to access more recent papers, you typically run headlong into one of the afore-mentioned pay walls. I tried to see how academics feel about Google Scholar and was amazed to find this quote from the McKinney Engineering Library blog at the University of Texas:

“Google Scholar has an ambiguous status in the library and research world. Obviously, it is powered by the Google, which is kind of a dirty word in academic research. Also, the fact that it is free throws further suspicion on its quality, particularly when libraries pay lots of money for database access.”

WTF? Forget for a moment that Google is referred to as “the Google” – which I hope is a joke aimed at fellow Texan George W. Bush. Since when should knowledge be judged by the size of its price tag? Stewart Brand identified the disconnect 30 years ago when he said,

“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.”

The rest of the world seems to have moved in the right direction. What the hell is the problem with academia?

If you’re not mad about this, you should be. The vast majority of academic research is funded directly by your tax dollars. Academic publishers don’t pay anyone for content. They have done nothing but agree to publish, which, in today’s world, costs virtually nothing. But somehow they still feel entitled to charge $50 to access an electronic version of an article. Reasonable profits are the right of an honest businessperson, but academic publishing doesn’t even come close to passing the “smell-test.”

One of the big Academic publishers, MacMillan, is at least considering loosening the drawstrings a touch. They’re lowering the drawbridge of their pay wall just a smidge by offering the ability to read and annotate articles on line. But academic publishing still has a long way to go before it approaches the accessibility that marks almost every other form of publishing in the digital world. So far for most researchers, the draw of being published in a prestigious journal has outweighed the idealism of openly publishing their work for all to see on a digital platform.

I suspect this is an area just waiting for disruption. I hope that the academics that are creating the content agree. It seems that academic publishing has been hiding in a previously overlooked nook that has escaped the relentless liberation of information driven by technology. But if MacMillan is feeling threatened enough to lower their defenses, however slightly, I suspect that the tide is beginning to turn. I, for one, thinks that day can’t come soon enough.

The Sorry State of Online Publishing

ss-publishingDynamic tension can be a good thing. There are plenty of examples of when this is so. Online publishing isn’t one of them. The plunging transaction costs of publishing and the increasingly desperate attempts to shore up some sort of sustainable revenue model is creating a tug-of-war that’s threatening to tear apart the one person that this whole sorry mess is revolving around – the reader. Somebody better get their act together soon, because I’m one reader that’s getting sick of it.

Trying to read an article on most online is like trying to tiptoe through a cognitive minefield. The publishers have squeezed every possible advertising opportunity onto the page and in doing so, has sacrificed credibility, cohesiveness and clarity. The job of publishing is communication, but these publishers seem to think its actually sacrificing communication for revenue. Methinks if you have to attack your own business model to make a profit, you should be taking a long hard look at said model.

Either Fish or Cut Click Bait

The problem has grown so pervasive that academia is even piling on. In the past few months, a number of studies have looked at the dismal state of online publishing.

clickbaitIn the quest for page views, publishers have mastered the trick of pushing our subconscious BSO (Bright Shiny Object) buttons with clickbait. Clickbait is essentially brain porn – headlines, often misleading – that you can’t resist clicking on. The theory is more page views – more advertising opportunities. The problem is that clickbait essential derails the mind from its predetermined focus. And worse, clickbait often distracts the brain with a misleading headline the subsequent article fails to deliver on. As Jon Stewart recently told New York Magazine, “It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, “Come on in here and see a three-legged man!” So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”

A recent study from The Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that misleading headlines and something called “false balance” – where publishers give equal airtime to sources with very different levels of credibility – can negatively impact the reader’s ability to remember the story, create a cohesive understanding of the story and cognitively process the information. In other words, the publisher’s desperate desire to grab eyeballs gets in the way of their ability to communicate effectively.

Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith has publicly gone on the record about why he doesn’t use click-bait headlines: “Here is a trade secret I’d decided a few years ago we’d be better off not revealing — clickbait stopped working around 2009.” He references Facebook engineer Khalid El-Arini in the post, saying “readers don’t want to be tricked by headlines; instead, they want to be informed by them.”

Now You Read Me, Now You Don’t

If you ever wanted to test your resolve, try getting to the end of an online article. What content there is is shoehorned into a format littered with ads and clickbait of every description. Many publishers even try to squeeze revenue from the content itself by using Text Enhance, an ad serving platform that hyperlinks keywords in the copy and shows ads if your cursor strays anywhere near these links. Users like me often use their cursor both as a place marker and a quick way to vet sources of embedded links. Text Enhance makes reading in this way an incredibly frustrating experience as it continually pops up poorly targeted ads while you try to tiptoe through the advertising landmines to piece together what the writer was originally trying to say. It turns reading content into a virtual game of “Whac-a-Mole.”

Of course, this is assuming you’ve made it past the page take-over and auto-play video ads that litter the “mind-field” between you and the content you want to access on a site like Forbes or The Atlantic. These interruptions in our intent create a negative mental framework that is compounded by having to weave through increasingly garish ad formats in order to piece together the content we’re trying to access.

A new study from Microsoft and Northwestern University shows that aggressive and annoying advertising may prop up short-term revenues, but at a long-term price that publishers should be thinking twice about paying, ““The practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns, as people are more likely to abandon sites on which they are present. In addition, in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate in remembering what they had read. None of these effects on users is desirable from the publisher’s perspective.”

Again, we have this recurring theme about revenue getting in the way of user experience. This is a conflict from which there can be no long-term benefit. When you frustrate users, you slowly kill your revenue source. You engage in a vicious cycle from which there is no escape.

I understand that online publishers are desperate. I get that. They should be. I suspect the ad-supported business platform they’re trying to prop up is hopelessly damaged. Another will emerge to take its place. But the more they frustrate us, the faster that will happen.

 

 

A Prospect Ignored isn’t Really a Prospect

asleep at work / schoolI’ve ranted about this before and – oh yes – I shall rant again!

But first – the back-story.

I needed some work done at a property I own. I found three contractors online and reached out to each of them to get a quote.

Cue crickets.

No response. Nothing! So a few days later I politely followed up with each to prod the process along. Again, nothing. Finally, after 4 weeks of repeated e-nagging, one finally coughed up a quote. Most of the details were wrong, but at least someone at the other end was responding with minimal signs of consciousness.

Fast-forward 2 months. The work is still not done. At this point, I’m still trying to convey the specifics of the job and to get an estimated timeline. If I had an option, I’d take it. But the sad fact is, as spotty as the communication is with my contractor of choice, it’s still better than his competitors. One never did respond, even after a number of emails and voicemails. One finally sent a quote, but it was obvious he didn’t want the work. Fair enough. If the laws of supply and demand are imbalanced this much in their favor, who am I to fight it?

But here’s the thing. Market balances can change on a dime. Someday I’ll be in the driver’s seat and they’ll be scrambling to line up work to stay in business. And when they reach out to their contact list, a lot of those contacts will respond with an incredulous WTF. If you didn’t want my business when I needed you, why would you think I would give you it when you need me? A prospect spurned has a long memory for the specifics of said spurning. So, Mr. (or Ms.) Contractor, you can go take a flying leap.

If you’re going to use online channels to build your business, don’t treat it like a tap you can turn on and off at your discretion. Your online prospects have to be nurtured. If you can’t take any new business on, that’s fine. But at least have enough respect for them to send a polite response explaining the reason you can’t do the work. As long as we prospects are treated with respect, you’d be amazed at how reasonable we can be. Perhaps we can schedule the job for when you do have time. At the very least, we won’t walk away from the interaction with a bitter taste that will linger for years to come.

In 2005, Benchmark Portal did a study to compare response rates for email requests. The results were discouraging. Over 50% of SMB’s never responded at all. Only a small fraction actually managed to respond within 24 hours of the request.

I would encourage you to do a little surreptitious checking on your own response rates. Prospects contacting you need your help, and none of us like to hear our pleas for help go unanswered. 24 hours may seem like a reasonable time frame to you, but if you’re on the other end, it’s more than enough time to see your enthusiasm cool dramatically. Make it someone’s job to field online requests and set a 4-hour response time limit. I’m not talking about an auto-generated generic email here. I’m talking about a personalized response that makes it clear that someone has taken the time to read your request and is working on it. Also give a clear indication of how long it will take to follow up with the required information.

Why are these initial responses so critical? It’s not just to keep your field of potential prospects green and growing. It’s also because we prospects are using something called “signaling” to judge future interactions with a business. When we reach out to a new business we find online, we have no idea what it will be like to be their customer. We don’t have access to that information. So, we use things we do know as a proxy for that information. These things provide “signals” to help us fill in the blanks in our available information. An example would be hiring new employees. We don’t know how the person we’re interviewing will perform as an employee, so we look for certain things in a resume or an interview to act as signals that would indicate that the candidate will perform well on the job if hired.

If I’m a prospect looking for a business – especially one providing a service that will require an extended relationship between the business and myself – I need signals to show me how reliable the business will be if I chose them. Will they get the work done in a timely manner? Will the quality of the work be acceptable? Will they be responsive and accommodating to my requirements? If problems arise, will they be willing to work through those problems? Those are all questions I don’t have the answer to. All I have are indications based on my current interactions with the business. And if those interactions have required my constant nagging and clarification to avoid incorrect responses, guess what my level of confidence might be with said business?

Rethinking the Channelization of Advertising

Anybody who has been a regular reader of my column knows I very seldom write a column exclusively about search, even though it runs every Thursday under the masthead of “Search Insider.” I’ve been fortunate in that Ken Fadner and the editorial staff of Mediapost has never restricted my choice of subject matter. But the eclecticism of my column isn’t simply because I’m attention deficit. It’s because the subject that interests me most is the intersection between human behavior and technology. Although that often involves search, it also includes mobile, social, email and a number of other channels. I simply couldn’t write about what interests me if I was restricted to a single channel.

So why is Mediapost divided into the subject areas it is? Why, when you go to navigate the site, do you choose from email marketing, search marketing, mobile marketing, real time marketing, video marketing or social media marketing? Mediapost is structured this way because it’s a reflection of the industry it serves. Online marketing is divvied up in exactly the same way. We are an industry of channels.

the_rhine_color_coverThe problem here is one of perspective – the industry perspective vs. the customer perspective. Let me use another example to make my point. One of the best things about cruising the Rhine is that there is a stunning medieval castle or fortress around every bend. From Rüdesheim to Koblenz (the Middle Rhine) there are over 40 of these fortifications sprinkled along 40 miles of the river. As picturesque as they are, they were not put there to enhance the views for generations of sightseers yet to come. They were put there because the river was one of the major thoroughfares of Europe and anyone who owned land along the river had the opportunity to make some money. They exacted tolls from travellers to guarantee safe passage.

While this build up along the Rhine probably made sense for the German land barons, it did nothing to make life easier for the poor souls who had to get up the Rhine to reach their eventual destination. Unfortunately, they had few alternatives. They were stuck with paying the tolls.

The advertising business is divided up into channels for exactly the same reason the Rhine has a castle every mile. Channels are there to show ownership of property. Advertising is a way to generate revenue from that ownership. It is a toll that customers have to pay. Mediapost is divided up the way it is because its readers are the modern day equivalent of medieval land barons and that’s they way they think. If it were published in 1224 its sections may have been labeled Pfalzgrafenstein, Sterrenberg and Reichenstein (3 of the Rhine castles).

But if you’re like me, you’re not as interested in the castles as in the journey itself. And, in this way, I think we have built our industry in exactly the wrong way. We should all be more interested in the journey than in ownership of individual destinations along that journey. If you asked a traveller from Rüdesheim to Koblenz in 1205 which they would prefer; paying 40 separate tolls or paying one guide to safely escort them to the destination, I’m pretty sure they would chose the later. That is what our industry should aspire to.

The reason our industry is channel obsessive is because we had no option previously. In a pre-digital world, all we could do is own or control a channel. But technology is rapidly allowing us an option. Today, it is possible for us to map a customer’s journey and act as a guide along the way. All that is required is a change of perspective.

I believe it’s time to consider it.