First Mile Problems

Posted on Thursday, 18 April 2019 7:30 am by markpilip

I was recently interviewed by Tim Furey, CEO of MarketBridge, on The Last Mile Podcast. Among our discussion of SAC, CAC, LTV, ROI, other three-letter acronyms, we also spent time on “first mile” marketing problems.

As a practicing performance/direct response marketer, I’ve always first asked myself or my clients a few strategic, or “first mile” questions. Questions like:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What is your allowable?
  • What is your objective with this campaign, product launch, etc?
  • What does success look like?

I’ve had senior product managers, or product marketing leads respond with blank stares when I ask these questions. As a classically-­trained direct mail (OK–I’m a “junk mail” guy), I learned to start with the allowable. Knowing unit economics and fixed or overhead costs, won’t guarantee a winning campaign or new channel test. But at least you won’t be in the situation of losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume.

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At the End

Posted on Wednesday, 6 March 2019 11:07 am by markpilip

For years my policy when I was sick was that if I could get vertical, I went to the office. One time, about twenty years ago, I got into the office just fine. I then spent the next two hours mustering the strength to get into the car to go back home to bed. It was obviously a flawed personal policy, that came out of duty to my job.

I’ve spent the last couple of days fighting the flu–wisely, from my bed–and handling enormous grief in our family at the loss of my brother-in-law on Sunday. To not be able to console my wife for fear of getting her sick troubles me terribly. The possibility of being unable to attend my brother-in-law’s service to pay proper respect to a great man left me sleepless last night.

On Saturday my sister-in-law advised us that he wouldn’t have long to live. When we arrived at the hospital, we found family and friends, in various stages of grief and numbness. There wasn’t anything any of us could do, only offer support.

No CEO or executive from one of the companies he worked for was there. No demanding client that he gave up holiday time with family. No former bosses who expected him to drag himself into work sick. Only family.

Now how important is that meeting or Powerpoint again?

When my brother-in-law passed away early Sunday, his wife was by his side. I hope to be as lucky. Godspeed, John.

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Buy direct

Posted on Sunday, 10 February 2019 1:14 pm by markpilip

There’s only one correct way to buy ads, and that’s direct from the publisher. If you buy any other way you’ll pay too much in adtech tax or get scammed buying something that’s not what you think it is. Probably both.

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Ads on blogs

Posted on Monday, 26 November 2018 9:24 am by markpilip

I just had a chance to check my blog. Here’s the type of quality ad that gets served on blogs like mine.

Do you know if the creative is automatically generated by some brilliant AI? Or have you ever really looked at your site transparency report? If not, why not?

Fun idea: Do the above at an impromptu meeting with your CEO and CFO. At least you’ll get to spend more time with your family over the holidays!

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Ads back on temporarily

Posted on Friday, 9 November 2018 9:57 am by markpilip

I just turned the WordPress WordAds monetization tool back on. Doing a little test.

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2.8 billion years of evolution, down the drain

Posted on Tuesday, 23 October 2018 8:40 am by markpilip

Someday, as expressed in this article by Shelly Palmer, AI and technology will be so good it will be impossible to tell truth from fakes. In other words, we won’t be able to trust our eyes and ears any more.

That evolved skill of being able to tell reality from fantasy will be made redundant by silicon and some algorithms. “I’ll believe it when I see it” will become literally true.

We don’t use our ears and eyes when we buy digital advertising. Instead, we think we’re clever by using adtech algorithms to try to optimize (fancy jargon for outsmart) the opaque business that is ad buying.

Except your adtech team is team B, at best. It’s safer and smarter to assume that Team A–team ad fraud–is already using AI and machine learning to outsmart you. After all, they don’t even need to fool your eyes and ears. Only your second-rate ad tech.

Think I’m being overly critical? If you buy anything on any ad network, look at your site transparency report today. I mean really look at it.

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The silence of the fake influencers and lack-of-thought leaders is deafening…

Posted on Saturday, 22 September 2018 3:15 pm by markpilip

The Malcolm Auld Blog

Those who have read my missives or attended my seminars, are aware I’ve been calling out the online zealots and their snake-oil since the invention of the information superhighway. So here’s today’s polite rant.

The internet and all it brings, is one of the most positive developments in the marketing industry. Yet the industry has been infested with dodgy, dishonest and downright diabolical deceivers, the likes of which have never been seen before.

Though it’s been quite comforting to have a number of industry heavyweights step into the fray these last couple of years and join the cause for honesty and integrity in digital marketing.

But something struck me recently. Given the public revelation about the major players in the digital media landscape, and their lack of ethics around privacy, data usage and the real number of users, something was missing. To recap:

  • Facecrook – data dishonesty, deletion of almost…

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Your Facebook Rebate

Posted on Monday, 16 July 2018 10:27 am by markpilip

Q2 2018 Screen Shot 2018-07-16 at 7.17.50 AMis in the books. Plenty of time for advertisers and their agencies to true up Q1 and really start work on the second half of the year.

As a reminder, in Q1 Facebook removed:

  • 583MM fake accounts.
  • 21MM pieces of content featuring sex or nudity
  • 2.5MM pieces of hate speech (I don’t think they were looking hard enough here)

and added 10,000 low paid and poorly-trained contractors moderators to help remove bad content.

So how big was the rebate that you received from Facebook for showing ads to all those bots and in front of that hate speech?

Thought so.

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Talent > Systems

Posted on Wednesday, 13 June 2018 8:47 am by markpilip

“Any industry that values systems and processes over talent is an industry in decay.”

Wrote Bob Hoffman today, reminding us that the adtech, martech, …aaS, and whatever other stuff we’ve cobbled into a tech stack isn’t our secret sauce.

Like the Warriors, it is the talent and experience that makes the difference.

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Default Power

Posted on Thursday, 5 April 2018 10:37 am by markpilip

switch_offFacebook recently said that most of the 2 billion people on their platform had their personal data scraped. The reason, aside from Facebook’s appallingly sloppy controls over access to data, is defaults.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that most people kept their privacy settings in the default configuration, allowing almost anybody to scrape their data. Facebook set up the defaults that way to allow them to sell more advertising. They just set things up in an incredibly stupid and careless fashion.

Dan Ariely and other behavioral economists have done much research on the power of defaults. Pre-checking boxes works, sometimes in ways that are unintended, as Facebook has learned. As marketers, we use defaults for things like ship-till-forbid and negative option sales systems. Those tools will have to be rethought in the EU when GDPR goes into effect in May.

I hope that Facebook’s irresponsible data protection policies will result in something like GDPR in the U.S. although that probably won’t happen in today’s regulatory regime. I believe that EU has done the right thing with consent under GDPR.

An interesting talk on defaults from Dan Ariely:

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