The decision to work yourself to death can’t be unmade. The ones you make the decision for won’t be at your funeral. They will be busy replacing you with somebody else.
So tell me again why you’re so indispensible that you can’t take some time with your family this summer and really be on vacation?
As we look forward to the weekend, let’s look back. As a leader did you:
If not, can you do that next week?
The OODA Loop
Sounds like a barbershop quartet and a fad from the 1950’s, doesn’t it? As I promised on Tuesday and finally got around to today, here’s the concept of using a whiffletree to manage your multichannel marketing.
You might think that with more marketing investment moving to digital, with an attendant increase in our ability to read results in real time, that we could automate the allocation of marketing spend across channels. In other words, have machines do digitally much faster what we humans can’t do.
I disagree. We must instead use the technology, but operate in an analog fashion.
Continue reading
Kudos to Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed for starting to banish the word “consumer” from the marketing vocabulary. Molds, fungi, and bacteria are consumers. People buy your products and services.
In a talk at Cannes today, he discussed Unilever’s marketing transition from targeting to serving customers. He described it as moving from “marketing to consumers” to “marketing with people” to “marketing for people.”
That’s a terrific move because it recognizes the importance of social media on our marketing efforts. Further, that phrase tells the marketers and agencies working with Unilever what’s important: the centrality of the customer.
This concept also works in B2B marketing. Just because the check comes from a large corporation doesn’t mean the decision makers aren’t people. It certainly beats the alternative, treating the customer as a “kill” which I discussed last month.
Takeaway: Don’t dehumanize your customers by equating them with bacteria. Build your marketing with people at the core to win.
Whiffletrees, also known as Whippletrees.
Some of the digital natives out there might think of us old direct mail guys as being in the buggy whip business. Fair enough. It may be hard to see what mail has to do with retargeting, programmatic media buying and so forth. But there’s at least one thing a multichannel marketer needs.
The whiffletree.
And if you don’t have one, your multichannel marketing isn’t going to operate optimally.
What’s a whiffletree and why do I need one? More tomorrow. But first, watch this video which shows how you can use a whiffletree to create a digital to analog converter.
Fender EC Vibro-Champ Amp
What do tube amplifiers have to do with digital marketing?
It turns out the analog world of tube circuits is more like the real world of marketing and advertising than the clean, digital, “Big Data” world we’d like to believe we operate in.
Give me just a minute to explain.
Omaha Beach gallery of the First Division Museum at Cantigny. Wheaton, IL. Photograph by Michael Linden, Flickr.
It’s pitch black, 00:16 hours and you’ve just crash-landed near Caen. You’re in hostile territory, lost, and some of your comrades are already dead and wounded. You’re just 20 years old and have never been in combat.
So began D-Day 70 years ago today.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like.
Over 180,000 young men jumped, landed, or waded into Europe to remove the evil and tyranny that gripped much of the continent for so many years.
Those young men didn’t consider themselves heroes. They were there to do a job that needed to be done. They hoped that when the job was done, they would go home to begin their lives.
Some never made it.
You may see some increased media coverage of D-Day because of the anniversary. But there’s not many left who remember how important today still is.
We should never forget this day, nor those who did their job. I won’t.
Today is D-Day.
The quest for the bottom line leads to brutality, says Seth Godin in today’s blog post.
The race to the bottom, driven by price, causes people within companies to treat others with disregard of the Golden Rule. Outsourcing, treating customers with contempt and treating suppliers with contempt results in those organizations extending that behavior in their own companies.
It’s a really interesting theory and it reminded me of something I saw first hand.
One evening I walked into the inside sales bullpen of a medium-sized company. I saw the following on the whiteboard where the daily sales goals were tracked:
How many kills did you make today?
When you refer to your own customers with that kind predatory language, what type of behavior does that engender?
It turns out that it was the culture of price that drove the “kills” comment. The salespeople were working in a very competitive environment and the number one complaint they had was about the price. The products they were selling were priced at a higher price than the competition. But rather than sell on quality, the salespeople wanted to sell on price. Their management (not leadership!) hadn’t prepared them to do anything else.
The brutal “kills” comment was just a manifestation of wanting to compete on price. By the way, the salespeople were treated as prey by their management and treated their colleagues in a similar fashion. The customers? Well they were just so much carrion to be picked over–and the customer complaints told a story of unbelievable contempt toward them.
Maybe the race to the bottom does lead to brutality. Even the unchecked desire to participate in a price war may lead to bad behavior. What do you think?
US Ad Spending vs. Consumer Time Spent, 2012 vs 2013
This graphic from BI Intelligence showed up in my email yesterday and I took the time to scribble all over it. (I tend to think with a pen in hand.) I found it relevant to my recent post about the New York Times Innovation internal report.
The problem for the New York Times lies in the two leftmost sets of bars. Notice how time spent with print is down to 5% of our media consumption time in the United States, yet 19% of advertising spending is still directed to print?
The bars will never always align completely, as people are always shifting media habits to new channels and new forms of entertainment. But what I’m certain will happen is that the advertising dollars will shift to mobile. Per Mary Meeker’s recent Internet Trends deck (a must-read), that means about $30 billion in advertising spend should start flowing to mobile.
The chart demonstrates that most channels are reasonably aligned in time spent vs advertising dollars. So it’s clear that the dollars will flow largely from print to mobile. That’s what’s out of whack. Yes, you can argue that the time spent with print is of higher quality than looking at cat videos on your mobile device. But even if print time is double in value, then 10 percentage points of advertising still has to flow somewhere.
And, this graph only shows 2012 and 2013. The time spent in print certainly isn’t going up and to the right.
What should the Times do about this? Well my thoughts are here. Importantly, there should be a rabid focus on mobile. Because that’s where all the money in print advertising is going.
Cover, New York Times Innovation Report
I love the New York Times. I learned how to read newspapers in school, with the Times as the teaching vehicle. What I recall learning:
In my eyes the Times was, and still is, the paper of record in the United States. No other paper comes close.
But the Old Grey Lady is at a perilous point in her history, with journalism rapidly moving to digital. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger asked for a report to develop ways to improve the Times through journalism. The internal report Innovation was issued on March 24, 2014. It’s a good start. Like all who have an interest in journalism, I have my own take on the report.
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