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The unreachables

It’s a rare meeting, pitch, or roadmap that doesn’t involve “reaching millennials”.

The term, coined in 1987, was meant to refer to people coming of age in the new millennium – originally those of us born circa 1982. Most sources still define millennials as born within a twenty-year period beginning in the early 80’s.

This may be a generation, but it’s completely useless as a media/marketing target.

The pace of change in media, content, entertainment, and the way marketing messages are delivered is far too fast to measure in generations. It’s not just that today’s sixteen-year-old and today’s thirty-six-year old grew up in completely different worlds. The way we experience, consume, and understand our world changes dramatically year over year.

So, in reality, “millennials” is totally meaningless. 

“Reaching millennials” is almost always code for one of two things: capturing youth culture (whole different deal) or reaching the unreachables. It’s the unreachables that have really changed the way we need to approach business.

Unreachables. We don’t watch TV. We don’t have cable or any push-only subscriptions. We don’t make appointments for media. We don’t have landlines. We’re often totally unwired. We don’t see print. We use adblockers. We “miss” other ads because we’ve already moved on from the target.

We know when we are being “branded at” and can, often do, choose to ignore it.

We make decisions by reaching out to a trusted group of sources that we personally curate, and we can reach these sources from anywhere at any time. 

We’re really hard to map as an attribution model or “customer journey” because there are so many places you can’t see us.

Unreachables don’t consume media in the way we are expected to; don’t sit through ads; absorb messaging in a different way, if at all; aren’t where you expect your audience to be after decades of traditional TV, print, radio, and traditional digital marketing.

Unreachables are the huge and growing audience whose lives don’t align with the plan you made last year, let alone the canonical wisdom you’ve built up over a decade or more.

This has nothing to do with millennials. You want the unreachables.

Tomorrow, November 9, at 2:30 PM CET, I’ll be leading a roundtable at Web Summit’s Marketing X on “How Do You Reach the Unreachable Audience?”. Come say hi if you’ll be in Lisbon. If you’re not, I’ll be sharing some of the group’s insight and comments post-conference. 

Marketing is a product

I’ve worked as both a head of marketing and a product lead, but sometimes the two are absolutely separated and viewed as completely different domains and disciplines.

This is a fallacy.

Marketing is a product.

Your marketing strategy/rollout is a cohesive creation, including brand, messaging, content, etc., but also built on top of multiple platforms: CRM, email engines, analytics, optimization tools, content platforms, and so on.

Products are a mix of feel, form, and function. Like any product, your marketing is designed to reach and please a customer, to bring them into your world, and to be useful. Every human who’s reached by your brand anywhere is using a product from you already. When you find a feature that doesn’t work, you adjust that feature.

Marketing is a product.

The Dawn Wall

You’ve almost certainly seen the amazing free-climbing ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall completed this week by Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson. (If not, here’s a nice write-up.)  To put it into perspective, “sending” a 5.12 and above pitch means you’re a GREAT rock climber. The Dawn Wall is an unbroken stretch of 32 pitches from 5.12 to 5.16 (which is basically unmeasurable).

Caldwell and Jorgeson lived on the wall for 19 days. The ascent could be a business book in itself, but here are some things I personally took away from this in terms of tackling massive challenges:

Prepare like crazy. Jorgeson and Caldwell spent five years working on various pitches and trying the wall in all seasons.

– Don’t be tripped up by what you perceive as handicaps (I’m too young, too old, too shy, don’t have the degree – whatever). Tommy Caldwell has nine fingers.

– There will always be a really, really, insanely tough part and you will need to push through it. It took Jorgeson a week to complete pitch 15.

– Share your struggle. The climbers tweeted, Facebooked, and Instagrammed their way up the wall, were visible to everyone, and were honest about the tough parts. The world loved them for this and cheered them on. 

– The impossible is only impossible until it’s done.

 

Photo by Mitchell Cipriano. Creative Commons 2.0.

 

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

“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 biggest currency there is today

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.