Scale doesn’t mean anything if your ad doesn’t work

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“Equity analyst Dan Salmon may have never gotten as much feedback on a research note as the one he wrote six weeks ago about native ads — the trendy, bespoke executions mimicking the form of the content around them. “It was agency people saying ‘This doesn’t work, it doesn’t scale,'” Mr. Salmon recalled at a panel on native advertising convened by Ad Age and IPG at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They require too much work to be efficient, the agencies complained.” – Ad Age, 1/11/2013.

There’s beyond a cogent argument against using “scale” as the measurement of success in advertising models. Buzzfeed’s Jonathan Perelman says it really well in the video below, as does the head of sales for Tumblr, but I’ll summarize and simplify here.

Scale doesn’t mean anything if you’re not effective. Engagement and life of relevance are direct drivers of effectiveness. “Native” ads, content marketing, and other continuing change-ups on the same old-same old “online” ad are what will create engagement in the future, and what will live on past the fractional moment in which the eye tracks a banner.

My apologies for Ad Age’s Flash videos!

The mobile chasm

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Having been intensely steeped over the past year in advertising-based digital brand businesses, I have been walking two companies through this.

The mobile chasm is simply this:

Any native digital media brand (read: a company that began as a website or group of websites, and that sells advertising as its primary revenue stream) is now obviously faced with an audience move to the mobile platform. Audiences are rushing to consume content on mobile much more swiftly than advertisers are moving to BUY ads on mobile. (This isn’t “the Facebook mobile problem”, which is that Facebook’s mobile product is not ideally set-up as an ad vehicle; this is a problem for anyone with a well-trafficked web property whose users are moving to mobile.)

No matter how amazing your mobile offering (site or app) and your ability to offer mobile ad choices of many kinds – your audience is moving to this platform faster than your revenue.
How do you focus on mobile as a necessary priority while nurturing the old-school Interwebs place where people are still spending most of their digital media money?

And even more sleepless-night-creating: how do you handle the period soon to come when your users are hugely mobile and media buyers have still not quite caught on? A huge chunk of the media buying community is still busy moving dollars to online from other media. Mobile is barely a twinkle in their eye.

With luck, it’ll be a brief period, because advertisers do follow audiences, but there is going to be catch-up time.

Are you ready for the chasm?

 

Photo by Doug Brown. Creative Commons.

Restless agents of change

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Google’s Krishna Bharat: Hire people who are restless agents of change. YES.

Marketers are Bad, Bad People (loooong post)

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From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).

One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.

Over/under on that happening? Thought so.

* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.

art by Myaku-nya