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The typical recipient of your digital impression.

I was reading “Mythbusting Digital Ad Fraud” by Dr. Augustine Fou this morning and this quote struck me:

“Do you think humans really spend 30 mins a day ON AVERAGE watching videos on mobile? They may, but there is an alternative explanation for that.”

You can torture yourself to understand a world with statistics like the above, that publishers, platforms, and ad tech providers are happy to provide. You can, and should, ask “why” often and as much as possible. Maybe the statistics are right. Or maybe Occam was right, and the answer is “bots.”

Posted on Tuesday, 6 June 2017 7:18 am by markpilip | Comments Off on Occam’s Bots

Screen Shot 2017-05-31 at 10.54.34 AMImagine this: A set of large screens in your corporate lobby running, in real time and randomly, the actual digital ads you are running on the pages the ads are being displayed on. A viewer would also be able to stop the ads and scroll back to see any ad at will.

As a marketer, are you OK with your executives, visitors, and the general public seeing your ads and scrolling through them?

Or would you think this is too risky?

If you wouldn’t be comfortable doing this, you need to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong in your digital advertising. And change it.

Posted on Wednesday, 31 May 2017 11:59 am by markpilip | Comments Off on A Thought Experiment: Lobby Ads

A Loyalty Program Retort: British Airways

Posted on Wednesday, 31 May 2017 9:20 am by markpilip

“When you pass the football, three things can happen. Two of them are bad.”

This quote has been attributed to Woody Hayes–probably incorrectly–Darrell Royal, Chuck Mills, and several other famous football coaches. It’s stuck with me over the years, particularly with regard to retention marketing and customer communication. So much so, that I’ve referred to myself as a “Woody Hayes marketer.”

When you communicate with an existing customer, only a few things can happen, and most of them are bad:

  • “Oh, I’m still paying for that? I need to cancel.”
  • “Who bought that thing? We have to return it.”
  • “This is aggravating. Next time I’ll go with brand X.”

I’m not telling you to never communicate with your customers. What I’m saying is that you need to think carefully why you want to communicate with them, segment your customers strategically, then make sure the message is perfect and perfectly clear.

In a post today, the great Drayton Bird shows us what can go wrong. British Airways wrote a careless letter to a formerly valuable customer. Instead of throwing it away, he wrote back. In his response, you see the thought process that a poorly-written loyalty program letter can trigger.

Although the gentleman’s reply to British Airways is probably one of few well-written responses, you can be assured that many others were thinking the same thing.

Now, in this case British Airways got some candid and free feedback, so maybe it wasn’t a total loss. But I’ll bet their CRM spewed out a whole series of similarly poorly thought out letters. I wonder what damage those letters are doing.

Takeaway: Before communicating with your customers, make sure you need to do it. Figure out one thing you want them to do.  Segment your audience carefully. And for heaven’s sake, hire a good copywriter. And win.

Posted in Communications, Customer Care | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on A Loyalty Program Retort: British Airways

Screen Shot 2017-05-22 at 12.06.20 PMWhy are digital marketing vendors so obsessed with automating the processes involved in advertising? Everything from deciding on what media to buy, to bidding, tagging, tracking, analysis and creative development has been automated to varying degrees.

Everything seems to be moving along at a faster rate every day. You need to ask yourself one question. Who benefits? 

Hint: It’s probably not you, the advertiser with the money that feeds the system.

Posted on Monday, 22 May 2017 12:25 pm by markpilip | Comments Off on Automation and Digital Marketing

Why Are We Eliminating The Human?

Posted on Tuesday, 16 May 2017 9:57 am by markpilip

Screen Shot 2017-05-16 at 9.55.24 AMDavid Byrne wrote an eloquent piece yesterday, in which he said:

“Our random accidents and odd behaviors are fun—they make life enjoyable. I’m wondering what we’re left with when there are fewer and fewer human interactions. Remove humans from the equation and we are less complete as people or as a society. “We” do not exist as isolated individuals—we as individuals are inhabitants of networks, we are relationships. That is how we prosper and thrive.”

That reminded me of a discussion with some co-workers about the supposed rudeness of New Yorkers. In my past experience that stereotype has never been true. I’ve never been let down when asking for help. Sure, the interaction might have been short, because New York is a fast-moving place. But the stereotype? Not true.

I believe that stereotypes are more likely to survive in today’s high information era. One can walk the streets of Manhattan, staring at device while looking at Google maps, Yelp and summoning transport via Uber or Lyft. All the while, never having meaningful conversations with New Yorkers. Certainly not the serendipitous types that Byrne mentions in his post.

So, for all we know, the residents of NYC, Paris, or Berlin, are what the stereotype says they are. This isn’t an improvement. It’s a step back.

That makes me a little sad. It’s personal interactions that make life worth living, not shaving the last tenth of mile off a random walk to a restaurant suggested to you by a total stranger. Or finding the optimal hotel for a couple of days of sight-seeing in a strange town.

It’s not the money, the time, the rational decisions that make life worth living. It’s the people. And when we remove people and replace them with glowing screens and algorithms, we’re the worse for it.

I’m not sure our masters at Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple understand that.

Takeaway: Drop the phone. Have coffee with a human. Pay too much. Take too long to get there. Wander around a little*. Be human. And win.

 

* From the Tolkien poem in The Lord of the Rings, “Not all those who wander are lost.” You’ll often find me wandering in thought, place, and priorities. I like it that way.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Are We Eliminating The Human?

Working with ad exchanges? Do these things:

  • Require MRC accreditation
  • Implement a whitelist-only policy
  • Never pay for any impressions listed as “unknown”
  • Require a full site transparency report every week

If the exchange will not agree to the above, drop it instantly and move on.

In addition, you should test your own ads with real humans every day. And have your marketing managers do it, not your interns. Not your ad agency. If you see one questionable website, audit the whole exchange immediately. If you see two questionable websites, pause the spend while the audit takes place.

A good article on what can go wrong is here at Digiday.

 

 

Posted on Thursday, 11 May 2017 9:00 am by markpilip | Comments Off on Ad Exchange Rules of Thumb

Fake News Root Cause: Digital Advertisers

Posted on Wednesday, 10 May 2017 9:32 am by markpilip

Screen Shot 2017-05-10 at 9.06.42 AMLike you, I’m sick of  the slanted stories being pushed to me through social media. I’m tired of having to hunt down the source material of everything I read, just to make sure I’m not being fooled. I’m disgusted with the low level of fact-checking and slipshod attention to detail in today’s 24 second “news” cycle. And I realized who’s to blame.

Me. And you. And the companies we work for.

Somewhere in our rush to use digital media, we got obsessed with reach and the size of audiences (the magic word again) and impressions. We got taken for a ride by the ad tech industry hucksters, who built an almost-perfect money-making machine on top of fake inventory created on phony websites.

Jim Rutenberg, of the New York Times, reminded us in an article last week that “Real news costs real money; fake news comes cheap.” If advertisers and our agencies are obsessed with getting more advertising inventory and cheap reach, there’s nothing like fake websites to satiate that desire. Why spend money on quality journalism, when you can invest that money in software engineering and arbitraging dodgy traffic to careless marketers? The margin is far better. Who cares if a little truth gets lost along the way?

Google and Facebook aren’t our friends either. You’re giving them 90%+ of your incremental spend this year. Have they ever fallen short of providing the impressions you “need” either? If volume is the name of the game, they’ll provide it and we’ll fall for it because, as Richard Feynman would say, we marketers “don’t look too hard.”

Shame on us.

Enough is enough. As Shareen Pathak in today’s Digiday asks, yes, media buyers do have a moral obligation to save media. We live in a society that needs a free flow of ideas and a strong, independent press to hold corporations and our government accountable. Quality journalism costs money. The good news is that quality attracts quality, in both viewers and advertiser dollars. It is a virtuous cycle. Somebody’s got to re-prime the pump. That’s the advertiser.

Stop looking at the CPM. Look at quality. Damn what your multitouch attribution model says (which is either owned by a publisher or an ad tech provider) and use common sense. Forget reach. Forget “audiences.” Demand quality. Buy quality. Do your own analysis. Be skeptical of everything you see or hear in the digital marketing ecosystem.

Win for your companies. Win for society.

Posted in fraud, Leadership, Marketing, Philosophy, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fake News Root Cause: Digital Advertisers

Funny how things change. In 2011, I wrote that nobody will write about a lousy product, despite the best efforts of your Marcom team. By 2017, because of all the useless viral and social sites, you can get “press” on anything.

It’s just that nobody (aside from bots) will read it.

Takeaway: You still have to build something worth talking about for people to talk about it.

Posted on Wednesday, 3 May 2017 7:41 am by markpilip | Comments Off on Now, Nobody Will Read About It

When you’re looking to reduce your ad fraud rates, always:

  • Pick the vendor that detects the most fraud
  • Check every impression (not a sample) for fraud
  • Look for brokered traffic (it’s garbage)
  • Assume fraud is worse than you think
  • Don’t be obsessed by scale

Most importantly, stop advertising to audiences. Advertise to people. And win.

Posted on Tuesday, 2 May 2017 7:36 am by markpilip | Comments Off on Assume Fraud Is Worse

Autonomy: Kitchen Cabinet Installers vs. Office Workers

Posted on Monday, 1 May 2017 11:03 am by markpilip
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Not my kitchen

I’m listening to the kitchen cabinet installers upstairs working on my new kitchen and it dawned on me that they have more autonomy than a typical cube- or open-plan dweller in an office.

As Dan Pink points out, it’s mastery, autonomy, and purpose that really motivates us. One word comes to mind when I think of the guys re-doing my kitchen: autonomy. No bosses leaning over their shoulders, no Monday morning review of last week’s metrics. They’re just left alone to get stuff done.

Sure, the boss shows up every couple of days, but that’s pretty much it.

Leaders: How much autonomy are you delivering to your team this morning? Contributors: How’d your Monday start out?

Posted in Behavioral economics, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Autonomy: Kitchen Cabinet Installers vs. Office Workers