Impressions

Every day, with frustration mounting, I read another article by an online video wonk touting the value of buying impressions. Stuff like -

• Pre-roll Ads aren’t as pricey as you think they are
• Simultaneous Viewings are the cat’s meow
• Financial Services Company buys 85-million Impressions online

This is old school thinking so bad it could have come right out of those abandoned, decaying, one-room school houses that you can still stumble upon in rural America (circa 19th Century).

Offline (TV) is push, online should be pull; offline is intrusive advertising, online should be inclusive advertising; offline is about selling an impression; online should be about selling an interaction.

Mainstream folks will tell you that impressions indicate how many times someone saw your advertising. I prefer to modify that statement by saying impressions are how many times someone could have seen your advertising.

How many people in your target audience are in the bathroom, rummaging around in the fridge, or using their clicky-things to fast forward when your message is playing? How many people actually pay attention to your nifty pre- or mid-roll video online?

It’s the tree in the forest thing: if your video runs and nobody watches it, does it really make an impression?

Now, if I have a video on my website, and it’s user-initiated (think opt-in), then I know darn well that that visitor chose to interact further with my brand. Even better, I can measure my video’s effectiveness. Even, even better, if I use email to invite viewership, and I have properly segmented my list, I can glean all manner of accurate, detailed demographic info. Oh, and I can track conversions, or what we call Return on Interaction.

See, traditional TV and Agency pros want to sell you potential eyeballs, not actions.

Bottom line, stop trying to buy an impression, and start trying to make one.

How do you know if someone is interacting with your brand? Stay tuned.

Quality, Not Size, Matters

At my company, EverEffect, we believe that the success of email marketing hinges on execution in two critical areas:

1. The Quality of your List, the Quality of your Offer, and the Quality of your Call to Action
2. Getting the Right Message to the Right Audience at the Right Time

Let’s start with your list. In Email Marketing, the quantity of people on your list matters far less than the quality of people on your list.

Case in point – EverEffect has organized a full day conference focused on interactive marketing featuring speakers from eight other companies (www.geyourMBO.com). We sent out an invitation to our email list (205); we secured another list and sent the invitation to its subscribers as well (more than 3,900).

We urge our clients not to buy or rent lists themselves, but we did so ourselves for two reasons: 1) we wanted to expand our reach to a targeted audience of online marketing professionals; and, 2) we wanted to use the exercise as an experiment to prove our point. The results are a staggering endorsement for permission-based email.

EverEffect
205 Emails Sent
73.6% Opens
44.6% Click-Through Rate
60.6 CTR/Open Ratio

Brand X
3,939 Emails Sent
37.9% Opens
12.9% Click-Through Rate
34.0 CTR/Open Ratio

Now, the primary goal of this particular send was to have Subscribers view a video invitation to the conference. Here’s where the stats get extremely interesting. One in three EverEffect Subscribers viewed the video compared to 1 in 42 Subscribers for the much larger list!

Take another look at the numbers. The smaller list outperformed the larger one in every key performance metric: nearly 2-1 in Opens; almost 4-1 in CTR; and, 14-1 in Conversions!*

Okay, inquiring minds want to know why. It boils down to this: EverEffect’s subscriber list is permission-based; Brand X’s is pseudo-permission-based. The people on our list know who we are, and – hopefully- anticipate receiving email from us; people on the Brand X list do not have a relationship with us, and have little incentive to open an EverEffect message.

It’s pretty simple, we have less quantity (we work on that every day), and more quality than the “borrowed” list.

Yes, it takes longer, and requires more effort, to build a quality list, but the results are worth it.

You don’t need a Tsunami-sized list to make your splash!

*In fairness, even the rental list outperformed advertising/marketing industry averages for Opens (37.9% vs. 24.6%) and CTR (12.9% vs. 2.8%). Source: http://bronto.com/stats.

A Site for Sore I

“No, honey, the kids and I were thinking more about something with a salty breeze than the Bonneville Salt Flats.” My wife smiled, and sent me back to the computer in search of the perfect, affordable vacation getaway for our cabin-feverish, landlocked family.

“(We) offer luxurious, oceanfront vacation rentals; great rates online!” the ad copy virtually screamed at me.

The bait was meant to tempt, and I was hooked. I bit on the lure like an aggressive brook trout, and was reeled into a hospitality company’s website that ended up being, well … less than hospitable. Here are seven reasons why:

1. Landed on the Home Page, which scrolled on forever. The company absolutely had to feature all fifteen locations, 350 properties, and eight resorts that they manage, complete with text and photos. Didn’t they?
2. Prominently featured were locations in Arizona. I may be wrong, but there is no oceanfront property – luxurious or otherwise – in Phoenix or Tucson. Maybe these folks went to the Lex Luthor School of Real Estate. Otisburg … Otisburg?
3. The site was designed to appeal to a number of target audiences, including Travel Agents, Real Estate Agents, Owner Agents, Time Share Owners, Vacationers (Families and Singles), and Current Clients.
4. I was lured to the site to check out great deals on vacation rentals, not evaluate investment opportunities.
5. View Our Video. Okay. But instead of letting me view their promotional video from the site, the company insisted that I pay to own their advertisement on DVD. Only $15.95, including S&H. If I’m interested enough to learn more about their properties, don’t make me shell out real dollars American for the privilege! Let me see it for FREE. Maybe I’ll even Forward to a Friend or six …
6. Visitors are asked to Add to Cart before receiving any information on pricing. I’m thinking they have some real (cart) abandonment issues.
7. The company has a number of Catalogs. None are available for download. Why make visitors order a catalog and then send via snail mail? Most, like me, would want to see the information immediately rather than wait days or weeks to receive it.

To recap: I was enticed to the site under false pretenses; there was an overwhelming amount of content, and a huge amount of it was irrelevant to me personally; the content that I was interested in was hard to find, and the company wanted me to wait to receive it, or worse, pay them to get it.

This fish got away. How many other visitors does this site fail to catch (convert)?

Does your website keep the promises your online campaigns make? If not, you could overly frustrate someone by creating an experience that is a site for a sore I!

Mind Your P’s

By now, everyone on the planet is aware that a substantial price drop has rubbed some of the shine off of Apple’s iPhone. In my July 25 post, I wrote that if the iPhone failed, it would not be because it is a convergence device (as Al Ries contends), but because of flaws in 1-3 of the 4 Ps.

I’m going to revisit what I considered the iPhone’s potential drawbacks with updated commentary.

1. “The Product does not live up to its hype, or it is not substantially different than other Smart Phones.”

   A beautiful, breakthrough device, the iPhone has a major drawback: it cannot run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network, which means it is far slower than offerings from competitors Verizon and Sprint. Worse, initial models cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

   The speed issue is a huge competitive disadvantage, and a clear barrier to switching phones.

   Not insuring that the phone can operate at maximum capability is something like selling a Triple Crown winner for dog food – pennies on the pound – instead of raking in millions on stud fees.

2. “The Price is too steep (up to $599 is a little pricey for a unique fixer-upper).”

   Shortly after the $200 price cut, Steve Jobs wrote, “We can’t wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season.”

   The iPhone was priced too high from the start. Other cell phones usually come cheap or for free because carriers have long subsidized the cost when customers sign up for their services.

   Charging extra for things like Ring Tones created bad buzz as well.

3. “Placement becomes an issue due to the exclusivity deal with AT&T.”

   There is a double-whammy here. Unless you’re in an area where AT&T (nee Cingular) has excellent coverage, an iPhone purchase is somewhat moot. Further, many Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or other customers will not immediately switch because they are loathe to eat the remaining balances on long-term contracts with their existing providers. Thus, exclusivity becomes a self-inflicted wound to sales by limiting the potential customer base.

4. “No one can argue with how Promotion has been handled.”

   No one could argue with the pre-launch pub, but Apple has botched their post-price cut PR blitz. The high price, greed gamble, has backfired. Media reports no longer hype how cool the phone is. All the talk now is about “sluggish sales” or the phone’s other potential shortcomings. And, while Steve Jobs’ response to early adoption anger was fairly honest (we want to sell more iPhones), the manner in which he did it has left Apple vulnerable to stepped up assertions of corporate arrogance.

Any product or service – no matter how cool – will ultimately fail when the strategic or tactical approach to the Four Ps is flawed. In the case of the iPhone, gaps in geographical coverage and speed (customer solution), high initial price (customer cost), AT&T Exclusivity (lack of convenience), and poor post-launch PR (communication) bode ill unless immediately addressed. The iPhone can still become the monster success almost everyone envisioned prior to its introduction, but not until Apple realizes that it must do a better job of considering customer need before its own.

iCulpa is iBad

Monday’s announcement by Apple® that it has sold its one millionth iPhone ™ is good news and bad news. The good news is that they sold their one millionth iPhone. The bad news is they now have their one millionth angry early adopter!

Last week, in an open letter, Apple® CEO Steve Jobs responded to customers “upset” about the company dropping the phone’s price by $200 two months after it went on sale. After explaining the company’s rationale for such a move – and in an attempt to assuage angry buyers – Jobs offered up a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.

It reminds me of a moment in Caddyshack when Carl the Greenskeeper (Bill Murray) shares a story about his experience caddying for the Dalai Lama: “So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something for the effort?’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

Apple just stiffed their loyal, early adopters, oh, uh, there won’t be any money, and it’s beyond the company’s power to grant total consciousness. Instead, they’re offering their customers in-store or online credits. So they’ve got that goin’ for them, which is nice. Or is it?

Mr. Jobs wrote, iPhone is so far ahead of the competition, and now it will be affordable by even more customers. It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone ‘tent.’ We strongly believe the $399 price will help us do just that this holiday season.

In reality, what Apple has is a $200-million oops on their hands. I may be wrong, but I believe that people who paid the original $599 price tag could care less how many new customers will buy at the more affordable price or what a great deal others will be getting during the holidays!

Read between the Open Letter lines, and you might conclude (as I have) –

• Betting on the power of their brand, Apple gambled on a higher-than-otherwise-justified price, and lost.
• Apple and AT&T (their exclusive iPhone partner) must more than double average daily iPhone sales to hit their published goal of 4.5-million units sold by year-end. Their best chance to accomplish this is to slash prices and try to cash in on upcoming holiday gifting.
• Mr. Jobs wrote that there is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the operating system or the new whatever. The problem with this statement is that the iPhone is two months old and there is no new operating system or new whatever, just a new sense of urgency to sell more iPhones.
• Apple’s This is life in the technology lane, we’re slashing the price, so what, get over it attitude may provide a short-term shot-in-the-arm for iPhone sales, but create a long-term hangover by reinforcing the Apple is arrogant perception held by many or damaging its brand equity by eroding trust in the company and its motives.

This pricing issue, and the Steve Jobs response to it (borderline contempt), may – deservedly so – come to be regarded as a huge blunder. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

We Owe It to Each Other

Now – more than ever – it’s time that interactive marketing firms band together to promote the entire industry. Our biggest challenge is not each other, but growing competition from the ignorant seeking to take indecent advantage of companies seeking real solutions in the online space.

Albert Einstein once remarked, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” Individuals and companies alike could achieve much more by striving to embody this idea.

What keeps me up at night?

• A Digital Agency offering “E-Solutions” to prospects. This same agency – selling advice to others – has not revised its own site in nearly two years, and worse, it is not optimized for organic or paid Search. When this was mentioned to the owner, he responded, “I don’t care.”

• The CEO of a PR Agency writing about Social Media, including a laundry list of popular sites, and touting MySpace as the place to be even as Facebook is poised to surpass it in use and relevance.
• A group of web developers pushing Second (I call it After) Life on anyone who will listen, despite the fact that only one percent of marketers list such a tactic as desirable.
• A video production company insisting that the mere presence of videos on a website enhance visitor engagement, regardless of their content, because “they’re entertaining.”
• An article by another PR Pro touting blogs as a must do, but failing to explain the critical role they can play in driving website traffic.

The problem is that these people are selling stuff, they are not selling solutions.

The approach of such companies, to paraphrase Billy Crystal’s Fernando, seems to be, “It is much better to look good than be good, and darling, your site looks marvelous.”

This attitude makes it exponentially harder for all of us to help companies in real need.

Last week, one of my partners attended a half-day seminar on online strategies. In attendance, a couple hundred local business people eager for insight. The idea of the event sounded pretty good until the speakers started preaching about topics they had never practiced. Afterwards, my partner felt like searching for Ipecac to purge the poison he had just ingested. (Two hundred + people getting bad advice all at once should sicken us all!).

Making stuff to put on the web, especially if they’re neither aligned with corporate objectives nor tied to measurable goals, is not enough. Contrary to Woody Allen’s famous assertion, 80% of success is (not) just showing up (online). No company (client) benefits in the interactive world (wide web) without the full integration of strategy, content, and analytics.

My company recently passed on a significant opportunity. Could we have handled the project? Sure. But providing the solution would have required a significant investment in development time for us and at great expense for the other company. We knew of another firm that had a solution already in place, and at a much lower price point. We referred the prospect to that company … one of our competitors. Why? We would rather gain a prospect’s trust than lose a potential advocate for the industry as a whole.

Whenever someone manages to sell a half-baked scheme everyone bears the full brunt of its inevitable failure. When someone sells a service for the sake of their own — and not their client’s — success, they devalue our entire industry.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, seek help before you seek someone else’s business. If you do know your business, speak out. Be forceful. Be relentless. Help the uninitiated understand the power of interactive marketing. There’s enough business out there for all of us if we just work in concert. If we strive to elevate the industry as one, we shall all soar together.

Who Killed the Internet?

“It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago,” said Billionaire Mark Cuban, author of BlogMaverick.

Stopped Evolving???

Mark, four years ago when I started reading your blog, I had to check your website once a week to see if you had updated it. Today, I open up my RSS reader, and all the information I choose to receive is sitting there waiting for me. That alone is a pretty big change in my Internet experience. For a guy who made his money selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo – I’d have thought you’d put a little more brain power into your blogging.

The Internet is not dead, and by no means is it boring. The Internet as a platform is replacing the need for traditional mediums such as TV, Radio, Newspapers, and even Billboards. For a platform that has only been commercially available for 13 years, I’d say that is an astounding accomplishment. The Internet allows for the constant evolution of engagement and interactivity.

When is the last time you actually engaged with your TV? Research companies would love for you to believe that the average American spends roughly 26 hours per week in front of the tube. Get real! The TV is a passive medium. Like the radio of old, it is more than less background noise while you eat dinner, talk on the phone, play with your kids, etc.

The internet is changing the way we live. Artificial intelligence, in the realm of personal preferences allows us to see what we want, when we want it, and most importantly – HOW we want it. The Internet is beginning to understand and remember what we do. Some may think this is “Big Brother-esque,” but ultimately it is simplifying our lives.

As cities start becoming blanketed with free or public wi-fi, our “always on” culture will become more and more dependent upon the Internet and its ever expanding advancements.

Mark, you recently posted an entry about how you had forgotten how to write. Could it be that you have forgotten how to use the Internet?

It’s Fourth and Long for Big 10 Network

The Big Ten Network is set to kick-off soon, but few fans will be able to receive it. Why? Because no major cable company wants to carry the freshman network, at least not as part of its basic package.

“The cable companies are playing their favorites, and abusing their power,” scream conference officials.

“We are underwhelmed by the prospect of carrying an overpriced niche channel,” a clever cable industry spokesman would say if such a person existed.

As legendary announcer Keith Jackson often exclaimed, “Fum…ble! Whoa Boy!”

My response to all this, is why waste your time with cable, Big Ten Network? Leave cable on the sidelines.

The Big Ten Network coulda been something, Charley. They coulda been a contenda.

The game plan all along should have been to launch as the first major online sports network. All the necessary pieces are in place. The Big Ten Network’s partner is Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also happens to own a minor online player called MySpace. DirecTV, also owned by Murdoch, will carry the network. AT&T’s U-Verse, the internet video provider, is on board as well. Oh, and AT&T just happens to have a little partnership going with Apple and its iPhone.

Satellite, internet, mobile… hmmm.

It’s not too late (okay, maybe it is) to make halftime adjustments. Here then, are my Big 10 (+ Penn State) Reasons the Network should be online:

Number 10 Cable limits exposure to parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. Yawn. Online provides easy access to millions more Big Ten alumni who now live and work all over the world.

Number 09 Most people won’t want to see an increase in their cable bills just to have access to this network, but many fans would probably drop a buck or two a month for an online subscription.

Number 08 An online network creates a dual revenue stream for its partners (Subscriber-based and ad-driven) just as cable would.

Number 07 CBS proved the viability of such a model with its delivery of NCAA March Madness broadcasts via streaming video. Only insufficient server capacity kept this initiative from becoming a true blockbuster.

Number 06 More Bucky Badger and less Brent Musburger!

Number 05 This “niche” network provides advertisers and marketers with an unsurpassed, rich media-powered playground for true interactivity.

Number 04 Online merchandising @ virtual versions of the conference’s campus bookstores, Booster Clubs, Fan Forums, online video games featuring Big 10 sports and teams (Hey, Michigan doesn’t have to lose to Ohio State in football every year anymore if you’re handling the joystick), and other possibilities too numerous to name here.

Number 03 Ability to track viewer behavior gives new meaning to “time out for a measurement,” and accountability means something to more than just coaches with losing records.

Number 02 Every geek can now claim that he had a cheerleader in his room – On Demand!

And the Number One, Big 10 (+ Penn State) Reason that the Network should be online… Imagine the Social Media possibilities. They could launch as InYourFaceBook.com!

The Human Factor

I recently attended an Interactive Marketing Blowout; a day-long series of seminars featuring some of the industry’s best and brightest as presenters / speakers. Much of the focus was on technology and how it is transforming the marketing world. There was very little mention of the human factor.

Overheard during a break in the action, “One of my clients wanted a Pay-Per-Click campaign. If you’re using the right software, it’s no big deal. It only took me five minutes to set the whole thing up.”

One small step for the Adman, one giant loss for his client!

True, software programs facilitate building a keyword list, evaluating Advertiser competition, estimating search volume, and predicting Page Ranking while considering Cost-Per-Click. More data is available, but generally, that’s as far as it goes.

Here’s why The Human Factor matters.

In preparation for an upcoming PPC Campaign, my firm spent five days, not five minutes, performing due diligence. We spent the first 60 minutes with the software tools (Google; Yahoo! Search), and the rest conducting our own searches – word-by-word, site-by-site, link-by-link – on the web. We knew that there was keyword competition, but not who those competitors were. If we had stopped after an hour, we would not have discovered the following:

1) The names of our client’s competitors who were using PPC, what words or terms they were buying, and where. Valuable competitive intelligence.

2) An additional 60 high-performing, product-specific keywords being used on the web, which we used to build out our target list.

3) Bids on some of the most desirable, highly-contested Keywords had not been placed by our client’s competitors, but by vertical-specific associations, directories, and so forth. This insight was leveraged to beef up our Link Back Strategy.

4) Six (previously unknown) new competitors and one that had ceased operations.

5) Several online “Malls” offering competitors’ products and not our client’s. Obviously, this creates additional strategic / tactical opportunities.

6)One competitor is using our client’s brand as a Keyword. Very smart, and an actionable insight, which suggests tactical moves to remedy this.

7) Two Vertical Search opportunities – alternative engines with superior Keyword search volumes and no competition – promising in terms of driving traffic at a reduced CPC.

Two vertical-specific Forums, each with more than 15,000 active members, which allowed us to present our client with several more options: pursue Link Back; participate as a knowledge leader; advertise; or, all three?

I could go on and on (I usually do). Of course, we gathered a great deal more data, and we’ll use all of it going forward. Bottom line, we would not have such information if we had ignored The Human Factor in a technology-dominated equation.

The Lion and The Fox

Once upon a time, there lived a hungry Lion who found it tough to acquire new customers (to eat). Possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit, he decided to advertise. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on a direct mail campaign, sending coupons to his neighbors inviting them to take advantage of a Free Lunch.

A few animals responded to the offer (about one percent), and came to visit the Lion in his den. Upon their arrival, the King of Beasts promptly devoured them.

An observant Fox quickly discovered the Lion’s trick, but kept his distance.

“Come on in for a bite,” said Mr. Lion.

“No thank you,” replied Mr. Fox. “I see a few footprints entering your establishment, but I don’t see any coming out.”

The Fox liked the Lion’s idea, but thought it needed to be fleshed out a little. He hired an Interactive Marketing Agency, and the nice people there helped him develop a strategic approach for lead generation and presented him with some killer creative to make it work.

First, the Fox threw a Jungle Block Party, and used the event to warn other animals about the Lion’s ploy. Once he had the trust of his fellow animals, it was easy for Mr. Fox to amass a huge, permission-based list of Subscribers for his email Nutritional Guide.

Next, Mr. Fox segmented his new list and emailed relevant messages to his Subscribers: Rabbits received an offer for free carrots; Squirrels an offer for free acorns; and, the local Bullfrog population an offer for free flies.

The response was overwhelming, nearly four times the weighted animal industry average! Animals — including a number of cranes lured by an offer of free minnows — flocked to Mr. Fox’s den where they received their free goodies, and were then (post-fattening up) eaten by the sly marketing exec.

Mr. Fox soon had more food than he could handle.

Fortunately, Mr. Fox’s advisors had helped him develop a post-send strategy to monetize the results of his campaign, which included the creation of a Diner’s Club for other Foxes. Membership fees alone more than covered the expense of his email initiative.

And the Lion? Mr. Fox’s warning, and the cost of his Direct Mail campaign, soon left Mr. Lion with no cash and no carrion. Word on the savannahs is that Mr. Lion was forced to accept a gig with an American Zoo to make ends meet.

The moral of our story? It takes a solid strategy to outfox your competition.