When you say “That’s all I can do”, do you really mean “That’s all I’m required to do”? Don’t aspire to the minimum necessary.
Not aspiring to the minimum necessary is how great businesses like Zappos build unbeatable reputations for customer service. But it’s pretty applicable in everyday life as well.
It’s not about what you “can” do, or what you “must” do – the answer is going to be in what you actually do.
Photo by Sudiono Muji.
“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!
Your data is (are, depending on your grammatical preference) your personal information – the biggest currency there is today; control it, own it, and even find a way to profit by it. Everybody else does.
Remember “the audience is listening”? No longer applicable.
If you define an audience as a group of people who are only, or even primarily, watching and/or listening, then there’s no such thing as an audience anymore.
Photo by Pieter Musterd. Creative Commons.