MediaMath and Improve Digital collaborated on an animated short film that tells the story of the evolution of automated media trading in the digital advertising industry.

Media

This is what happens when you fly today:

• You have to leave the house 3 hours before the flight
• You get annoyed just thinking about the security theater
• Everybody looks and feels miserable
• People are not trained well enough to discover harmful items
• Everybody knows it and still plays along
• TSA changes the rules constantly to keep us even more anxious

A big charade and the results: Security is still not good and nobody feels safe.

The real result: We pay a lot of money and time and effort to get nothing in return. It’s a silly play that we all participate in and nobody has the nerve to say: “What the hell are we doing?”

Another example: parenting. A lot of parents push their kids into gazillion of programs: violin, soccer, theater, ballet, baseball, chess – you name it. The weekends are filled with driving kids around and not spending quality time together. Parents push their kids into these programs to seek reassurance that they tried to give their kids the best possible childhood. Providing opportunities. I haven’t seen any data to indicate that filling up a kid’s schedule with activities makes them more successful in life.

I call it the “cover your butt” fee. We pay it every time we spend money or time seeking reassurance. We pay double when that act makes us more anxious: “I should do more.”

We pay that fee every time we cover our butt instead of just doing what’s right. I wish we could call out that fee as a line item on the government budget: How much money are we spending to create fear and then spending to address the fear? Each annual report of a corporation should quantify the “cover your butt” fee, products/services that were purchased just in case. Once we can quantify the fee, we can make a judgement if it’s worth the investment.

We overstaff, overplan, overanalyze, overmeet to quiet down our anxiety. How much better governments and corporations would function if they didn’t have to pay the fee to deal with fears?

The Internet is great. If you like data, the Internet is perfect for you. You can easily get overwhelmed by stats, not understanding the metrics that really matter. All this data is worthless unless you count the numbers that really make a difference.

The Internet is enormous – you can achieve scale rather quickly and fairly easy. As easy as you might make the mistake to chase volume over meaning. If you want to attract a quality audience should you try to use every SEO trick in the book or facilitate an engaged community? If you want to make money with your site, should you deploy many slide shows and photo galleries with low value or engage through high value content?

People love to do stuff on the Internet. The best metrics are often those that relate to people doing what the Internet is best at – interacting. Unfortunately, humans are extremely complex, so the way in which we measure it can be over-simplified. Just look at click-through rates. The average is now 0.1% or lower. You could say that out of 1,000 impressions served, at least 1 person was clicking. Buy gazillions of impressions and you can get thousands of people to click. Or, you could say that 0.1% means, 99.9% of people didn’t care about ad and your work is an utter failure.

Some say banner ads don’t work at all. Or they are not working hard enough. Putting them in the right context makes sense, making them bigger and more intrusive definitely not. They should be more useful and relevant. When I see an ad that tells me the Hollywood Bowl will start individual ticket sales tomorrow at 10am, that would be useful. Good targeting works fairly well. Still, we are in danger of attributing everything to the last click, and very little to any other form of effect, or to any brand-influence or other communications the customer may have been exposed to. We tried solve that attribution challenge, the pace is too slow for my taste. Too many digital campaigns are measured on soft and unimportant metrics. It is not all about the click, and the last click is certainly not everything.

So, next time you report on campaign numbers, don’t go for the shiny number. Data tells a complex story. My guess is, you’re stopping at page three. Dig deeper.

Neophile: A neophile can be defined as a personality type characterized by a strong affinity for novelty.

Neophiles have the following characteristics:

• The ability to adapt rapidly to extreme change
• A distaste or downright loathing of tradition, repetition, and routine
• A tendency to become bored quickly with old things
• A desire, bordering on obsession in some cases, to experience novelty

Psychologists have tracked neophiles over time. This is what Psychology Today had to say about them:

“Looking under the hood of the person high in novelty-seeking, it seems that dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter, seems to be involved.  According to research conducted by Zalid et al (2009), high dopamine activity in a specific part of the midbrain is higher in individuals high in novelty-seeking, even after controlling for age and gender. An orientation toward reward could help account for the relationship between the desire to seek out new experiences and a tendency to develop addictive behaviors.

Some forms of novelty-seeking may, on the plus side, may be related to creativity. According to Marvin Zuckerman, people who seek pleasure from new experiences are also likely to be more creative. The ability to have big ideas seems to require a certain degree of enjoyment of expanding your mental horizons into new territory.

Novelty-seeking, then, is a mixed bag in terms of its ability to get you through life. To get the most benefit from novelty-seeking, it’s important to keep the balance in mind between sameness and change. New may be better than old, but not at the cost to your mental health.”

Advertising was always a meeting point for neophiles. We had to find new ideas, new insights, new ways of connecting with people.

The emergence of new platforms, new channels and new bright shiny objects has moved the industry to pathological extremes of neophilia. I’ve met with a client recently that planned on delivering their messages through 28 channels. They had enough budget to disseminate their message to the point where it is spread so thin, they are ensured to make no impact.

Brands should not create confusion. Their communication planning should deliver a cogent vision and definition of their values. Only then customers will contribute to the brand, rather than spreading confusion. When Social Media gives the customer the possibility to mass-publish any thought or personal opinion, a comprehensive and well-defined definition of a brand is more important than ever.

Agencies should be in the business of building brands.

The agency neophiles are diluting  brands.