Category Archives: Marketing

Your Holiday Season Mission: Customer Acquisition

Posted on Wednesday, 29 November 2017 10:17 am by markpilip

We’re in peak marketing season, with under 30 days to go. Digital CPMs are rising, clearing spots at acceptable CPA is getting harder, email in-boxes are more cluttered than ever, and sales promotion is off the hook. Nothing we haven’t … Continue reading →

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When somebody claims they’re a data-driven marketer, generally that means their actions are driven by cursory analysis of biased data sets, and that they lack a coherent strategy.

Posted on Tuesday, 28 November 2017 7:54 am by markpilip | Comments Off on Data-driven?

Black Friday Narrative: The Retail Apocalypse (The Data Says…)

Posted on Tuesday, 21 November 2017 9:41 am by markpilip

I was searching Linkedin last evening and read a comment from somebody about how “Black Friday sales have been down the last few years.” The comment came with no facts to back the assertion, and it fit neatly into the … Continue reading →

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GroupM Shines Light on Middlemen

Posted on Wednesday, 15 November 2017 8:05 am by markpilip

Bravo to Group M for starting to shine the light on the adtech middlemen who reduce our working media to, at times, a pittance. Advertisers need to demand more of this behavior from our agencies. Here’s the report I want … Continue reading →

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Paywalled, but interesting article at New York Times today on Renee DiResta’s work on peer-to-peer disinformation and how social media can be gamed to lead one into an echo chamber where vaccines can cause autism, planes distribute chemicals via chemtrails, … Continue reading →

Posted on Monday, 13 November 2017 1:30 pm by markpilip | Comments Off on Peer-to-Peer Disinformation

ABD (Always Be De-Averaging), ads.txt Edition

Posted on Wednesday, 1 November 2017 9:04 am by markpilip

Now that ads.txt is getting traction, with about 44% (and growing) of the top 10,000 domains using it, you’ve got some homework in your future. Here’s the assignment: Pull together your campaign data at the source (e.g. somedomain.com) and “source/source” … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Data, digital marketing, Marketing, Media, Tactics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Continuity Marketing: Profit or Scale?

Posted on Tuesday, 24 October 2017 9:17 am by markpilip

I had an interesting discussion on continuity acquisition strategy yesterday, which boiled down to two questions: Do we spend profitability, at break-even, or to penetrate (i.e. at a loss) at the margin? By profit, do we mean gross margin, marketing … Continue reading →

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2 LLCs and an SFDU: A Merge/Purge Fail

Posted on Tuesday, 17 October 2017 8:23 am by markpilip

A couple of days ago, I was reminiscing about a great piece of direct mail I received last year. Yesterday, I received the opposite. This falls under the category of a merge/purge fail. As you can see here, there are … Continue reading →

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Re-Seal the Deal: Category Repurchase

Posted on Tuesday, 10 October 2017 8:17 am by markpilip

Three years ago today, I wrote about a great piece of direct mail I received from a local driveway sealer company. The piece had everything needed to make a purchase decision: a great offer, strong call to action, and perfect … Continue reading →

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Marketing Navigators: Do You Have a Sextant?

Posted on Wednesday, 27 September 2017 7:40 am by markpilip

How can you be sure that your marketing navigation system is picking up the true signal, which can be very weak in these days of bots, fake traffic and across billions of rows of impression data? Continue reading →

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