Still No Standard Unit Of Online Advertising

Among the many problems that plague online advertising, there is one that seems to have gone unnoticed. After 20 years, there is still no standard unit.

TV has the :30 second spot.
Radio has the :60 second spot.
Print has the page
Outdoor has the board.

This doesn't mean there are no variations on these units, but at least we have a standard workable unit.

What is the standard unit of digital advertising?

God help us if it's the banner.
Is it the social something?
Or the content something?
Or the native something?

If so, what is the something -- what is the unit?

If you have a realistic strategy and produce decent creative work you can plug it into one of the standard units of TV, radio, print or outdoor and have a reasonable chance of effectiveness.

But what is the online equivalent?

I guess you could argue that this absence of a standard unit is the strength of the medium -- that it is more malleable and flexible. But the facts contradict this assertion.

There are so few major non-web-native brands that have been built by online advertising, that it's hard to see how this argument could hold water.

Display advertising is riddled with fraud, corruption, and phony metrics.

Social media marketing has seen a handful of big successes and an ocean of flops.

Content success is impossible to define because content is impossible to define.

And in the fullness of time I think we will find that native advertising turns out to be just as spectral as all the other online methodologies.

It seems to me more and more likely that the standard unit of online advertising is going to turn out to be some variation of the TV spot.

What a disappointment that would be.

Toddlers With Money

When my daughter was a toddler she put every question through what we called “Twelve Degrees of Why.”

“Dad, why do flowers have different colors?”

“Um, to attract insects”

“Why do they want to attract insects?”

“Well, they don’t actually want to, it’s just that those that do tend to have more success reproducing”

“Why?…”

Because insects pick up some of the material from flowers and then go to other flowers and transfer this material which helps them reproduce...

Why?...

It was not just valuable for her learning. It was valuable for me, too. After the twelfth “why” I found out whether I really understood something or not.

A smart client doesn't stop after the first "why?"  A smart client keeps asking why until he finds out if the agency really knows what they're talking about, or if they're bluffing.

Why are we using this medium? Why is this a good idea? Why do you believe that statistic?

A smart client is a toddler with money.

On Being A Prick

Recently, once again, Barry Bonds was not voted into the Hall of Fame.

Bonds was an astoundingly great baseball player. He may very well have been the most fearsome hitter since Babe Ruth. His stats are amazing. He has the all-time Major League home run hitting record.

He was such a scary hitter that in one game Buck Showalter, manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, ordered him intentionally walked with the bases loaded. 

But Barry Bonds was a prick. No one who had a choice wanted anything to do with him.

Bonds admitted using PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) but claimed they were secretly given to him by his trainer. Yeah, right.

Whether or not players who used PEDs should be considered for the Hall of Fame is a big issue in baseball circles.

But one thing I am certain of -- there are many baseball writers (who do the voting) who are absolutely thrilled that they have a reason not to vote for him.

Being a prick is an occupational hazard for a certain type of person. For a good part of my career I was prick. Sadly, I chose to be a prick.

If you're not careful (and I wasn't) being a creative director can turn you into a prick. Mostly all a good creative director does is say no to people. It can become a very bad habit.

I once took over the creative department of an agency that was doing terrible creative work. I promised to give everyone in the department a few months to demonstrate their abilities before I made any moves. But I hated it.

I wound up re-doing everyone's work and driving them crazy. I couldn't help myself. I felt that the only way I could demonstrate my seriousness of purpose was to behave like a jackass. Not being talented enough to actually help them be better, I just became hypercritical and censorious. It was silly, immature, and counter-productive.

Many years later, I heard the following story.

One night the creative department (without my knowledge) got together for a "bonding" (drinking) session. After a few cocktails, the conversation quickly turned to me, and what an asshole I was.

Each person got a chance to air his or her rendition/illustration of why I was a prick. Then it got around to one person who said, perhaps, the most charitable thing anyone ever said about me.

"He's not really a prick. He's actually a nice guy who wants you to think he's a prick."

What Replaces Television?

The ad industry and the trade press can’t seem to understand that TV industry internals are not the same as consumer behavior.

They keep pointing to changes in the industry as evidence of the “death of television” or the “free fall in TV viewership.”

Yes, network share of viewership has declined. Yes, individual program ratings are going down.

But no, TV is not dying and viewership is not in free fall. Here's a chart from the website FiveThirtyEight:

Consumers are watching about as much TV as ever. And they don't care how it’s delivered to them.

As far as they’re concerned, whether they are watching video delivered over the air, through a cable, via an app, from a satellite, or on the web is about as interesting as whether their underwear gets to Walmart by train, truck or boat. As long as it’s there when they need it they couldn’t give a flying shit how it gets there.

Delivery systems are of no interest to consumers. All it is to them is confusion. They don’t care what pipe it comes through. They’ll get the pipe that gives them the best choice at the lowest price.

Every time I post a piece about TV, I get comments saying, "Yeah, people are watching TV, but they're not watching live TV, they're watching Netflix or YouTube or Amazon Prime, or...."

Wrong.

Popularity of "non-linear" TV is certainly growing, but it doesn't come close to live TV. I'm in a chart-making mood today, so here's a chart that shows what people are watching on their TVs. 

The data comes from Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group, one of the most respected analysts of the media business.

In 2008 I went unhinged on this blog and made a bizarre statement. I wrote, “television is the web’s killer app.” Turns out I was right. 70% of all web traffic is now streaming video.

Dave Pell put it best, “We’ve replaced television with television.”

What does 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data mean?

1st, 2nd and 3rd Party Data Demystified

I have referred to 1st party and 3rd party data in a lot of blog posts. Based on the queries I get, both via email and in the classes I teach, it is time to clarify what various data sources mean.

1st Party Data

1st party data is the data that you (brand/publisher/retailer) have collected about your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. You own the data outright and all the rights to it. You can use it for any purpose you want based on the agreements with your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. as specified in your data collection and use policies. Some examples of 1st party data are:

• Site registration data – name, email, address, gender etc.
• Visitors behavior data on your site – time of visits, minutes spent, products looked at, source of visits etc.
• Shoppers/customers purchase data – products purchased, transaction amounts, coupons used etc.
• Email data – emails sent, opened, clicked etc.
• It is most widely used data for the marketing purposes. Generally, you use the 1st party data for customer retention using email marketing, retargeting and onsite personalization.

2nd Party Data

2nd party data is the data that is collected by some other company and shared with you(brand/publisher/retailer), in other words it is their first party data. A strategic data sharing partnership between two brands/publishers can help both of them grow their customer base and monetize that customer base.
You can generally use 2nd party data to:

1. Augment the data you already have about your customers (or visitors) – for example, if you do not collect “Household Income” during customer registration/signup data but have a need for that data you can partner with another brand that collects that data to get that data to enhance user profile. Another example is Google Adwords sending the keyword/campaign data to enhance behavioral data collected on the site.
2. Add a list of new customers – for example, if you are hotel booking site, you can have a partnership with airline to share information about customers who recently booked. If a customer books a flight, then you can use the data from partner to reach those customers and offer them hotels. Similarly, the airline partner can reach the customers who have booked hotel on your site.

3rd Party Data

3rd party data is the data collected and aggregated by someone other than the 1st party (data collector). In other words, the data aggregator doesn’t directly collect the data from customers/shoppers/visitors but have relationships with several companies/sources that collect the 1st party data. Some examples of the 3rd party data provider are BlueKai, Acxiom and i-behavior. These data providers aggregate the data from different sources to build a comprehensive profile of a customer/person. These enhanced profile let you understand a visitor/shopper more than what a 1st party or 2nd party data sets can provide.

For example, if you are a Financial institution, it will be very helpful for you to know which of your customers travel frequently, this will help you offer them a credit card that provides added travel rewards and benefits. This is where 3rd party data becomes useful that can provide such information based on data collected from various data sources such as hotel booking sites, airlines, location based data on several other places, other credit card providers etc

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The 14 Things Every LinkedIn Article Will Be About In 2016

As you probably know, LinkedIn is the dreariest, most humorless repository of business commentary mankind has ever produced.

It is a venue for people without the slightest talent for business writing to shoot their mouths off and be taken seriously by other dimwits who are either looking for work or looking for something to do when they ought to be looking for work.

To start the year off right, and as a service to my readers, I'm going to summarize for you everything that will appear in LinkedIn in 2016.

This way you can use the time you might otherwise waste on LinkedIn to do something useful, like polish your guns or make rice pudding.

Here are the 14 things that every article in LinkedIn will be about this year:

1. What Is Your Brand Story?

2. Why Marketing To Millennials Is Different.

3. Why Marketing To Millennials Is Not Different.

4. 2016: The Year Of Mobile.

5. 2016: The Year Of Content.

6. 2016: The Year Of Native.

7. Unlocking The Authentic Purpose In Your Brand.

8. Don't Be Afraid Of Change. Embrace it!

9. Greatness Requires Passion.

10. You Need Leadership. Leadership Needs You!

11. Managing Is About Listening.

12. Social Media Is About Listening.

13. Marketing Is About Listening.

14. Every Fucking Thing In The Whole Fucking World Is About Listening.

 Okay, now let's see those guns sparkle.

Advertising And Espionage

Apparently espionage and advertising have a lot in common.

During the holidays I re-read Smiley's People (for the third time). George Smiley, the British spymaster, is one of my fictional heroes.

Here is an excerpt that is so apropos to our industry, it almost made me choke on my vodka martini.

"All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine...

He had watched Whitehall skirts go up and come down, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He has been the witness, or victim -- or even reluctant prophet -- of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now...integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: 'Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!' Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar...muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator."

Substitute Madison Avenue for Whitehall, and  conversations, engagement, co-creation, and interactivity for lateralism, parallelism, separatism, and integration. And what have you got?

The dreary self-deception of the advertising industry.