Last night I was standing on our patio, admiring the sunset with my daughter. She looked at me and asked:

“Do you like the sunset?”

“Yes, I like the sunset.”

“I like it, too.”

According to some brands, agencies and consultants, that simple interaction turned both of us into ‘fans’ of the May 16, 2012 sunset. The company that created the May 16 sunset just acquired 2 valuable ‘brand ambassadors’ that have an influence on the bottom line of ‘May 16, 2012 Inc.’.

Welcome to the silly world of Facebook likes

The way some ‘experts’ cherish likes, you’d think they were lengthy love letters written in blood. Well, given that toilet paper has 10,496 likes, the premise that people click on things that mean a lot to them becomes absurd quickly.

Still, many brands and agencies use ‘likes’ as a metric to measure brand popularity.

The reason? It’s the easy way out and has no downside – besides that more and more brands go down the evil path of buying fans, putting ‘like’ traps in front of valuable content and eliminate any favorable feelings through forced love tactics.

Facebook is the Unicorn world. What would happen if the platform would introduce a “Don’t like”, “Don’t care”, “Hate it” and “Love it” button? The majority of brands would say goodbye quickly because expressions of apathy and dislike would outnumber any favorable interaction. Well, we know this is not going to happen. Revenue on Facebook would decline dramatically and, let’s face it, that’s what Facebook is all about, isn’t it?

There’s value in Facebook likes

There’s no value in considering like as an expression of brand favorability, love or passion. Most people push that thumbs up button as easy and mindless as they flush their toilet.

There’s a lot of opportunity in the social space. Brands will never unlock it if they continue to look at the Unicorn world through pink colored glasses.

What happens when a new service replaces a service we’re all familiar with? A service that you used infrequently or daily, at times of high stress and no time on your side? The brand claims the service is better, speeds up the process and is available in the palm of your hand. Will the brand make the transition easy or will I be stuck with a new service that has all the benefits for the brand and I feel cheated?

Many airlines are introducing the concept of mobile check-in to their services. I love the idea because I tend to crumple my boarding pass in my back pocket, even lost it a few times. It’s a fantastic idea, a win-win situation (less paper for the airline, more efficient and less stress and more convenient for customers). And then you get this:

The problem: I don’t feel confident with this solution.

I assume this is all I need: QR code for the agents, flight and my personal information. Still, when I first encountered electronic boarding passes, I was left with the question: “Is this all I need?”

What do I do when I need to check a bag? What does the security agent do, since they can’t sign my phone? Do I need to keep that screen on the app open or can I close it down and open when needed? What happens when my phone runs out of battery?

It’s not that hard, Delta just needed to add:

• A sentence explaining that this eCopy is all I need to check in
• Send a copy of this boarding pass to my email as a back-up
• Remind me that customer service agents will be happy to assist me

That’s all I need to be 100% confident. And switch from paper boarding passes to ePasses for good.

Brands need to design with empathy for their customers to introduce a new service. It has to be so easy, a 3-year old and a 91-year old feel safe and secure.

P.S.: Now, if somebody could start fixing the wide array of horrendous and idiotic interfaces of public transportation systems, that would be lovely. I’m looking at BART. LA Metro. Amsterdam. Paris. London, Tokyo. The one person/company accomplishing this herculean task will raise the global GDP and efficiency by 5%. Within a second.

I was meeting with an advertising agency and one of the team members talked constantly about new insights. After we explored his insight, it seemed to me he was talking about an observation not an insight.

I’ve seen the word on job descriptions, data aggregators claim to produce insights, clients request them and agencies claim to produce them.

The word ‘insight’ is a case of over-promising and under-delivering

One explanation for the insight inflation is organizational: The executives responsible for producing insights are often located in the research and data aggregation department, trying to find small gems that may affect marketing. This can be on the client side or done through planners in the agency.  The other reason is that people believe everybody can observe but not many can be insightful

So, what’s the difference between an observation versus an insight?

Determining that new homeowners are more likely to buy a new car is an observation.

Understanding that putting snacks at the checkout register will increase sales dramatically because parents want to calm down/reward their kids is an observation.

According to Dictionary.com, an insight is an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, especially through intuitive understanding. I’ve been working in advertising for more than 15 years and I haven’t encountered many insights. I don’t mind it because I’d rather reserve light bulb moments for science.

I worked with a global airline the last two years and they wanted to understand why they had problems attracting business class customers. We looked through all the data, did focus groups, interview prospects one-on-one. We had many observations and no insights. The breakthrough came when we observed passengers in the business class lounge. They were more concerned getting to the lounge than getting to the final destination. Once you’re in the lounge, you’re in the luxury bubble that protects you until you pick up your luggage. This observation led to an insight: If you can extend the luxury bubble from the usual airport to airport to home to hotel, business class passengers will be more willing to buy your product.

Observations are rooted in data. Insights are rooted in outside sources.

Insight is rare ,“apprehending the true nature of a thing”, since we often have to find a different way of expressing similar ideas to the competition. What’s the difference between Chase and Wells Fargo? Toyota and Honda? Goodyear and Pirelli? There’s no insight that can make a difference, the solution lies in how you say things, the advertising idea. Trust me, a lot of brilliant people try to find insights for these brands and markets, they are just as rare as hitting the $800 million jackpot.

There are some extremely rare planners and creative’s out there, hitting the jackpot once in a blue moon. Millions wait for jackpots, just to end up a few bucks poorer. Maybe it’s time to elevate the importance of observations. A great novelist makes a living with observations, stand-up comedians do. Just like observations bring a brand to life.

How many times did we hear outcry about tenure of CMOs? It’s somewhere between 12 and 24 months. In short: pathetically short. There are groups on various social networks where CMOs talk with each other and share information. I joined a few of them and was saddened by the content: a lot of echo chamber jargon, opinions and little substance. Anyone existing outside the marketing community wouldn’t understand a word.

There’s a lot of junk and cheap talk, nothing relating brand status to financial consequences. Anybody involved in the marketing and advertising world is responsible to nail down some factual benchmarks that smart business people understand. Many of the reports marketers produce are just fluff and hot air (Unaided brand awareness, anyone? Facebook likes. Do I have to continue? Thanks.) At my first agency job, we commissioned a client satisfaction survey each quarter. It gave us information agency staff couldn’t get internally. We used it as a way of giving the agency goals and every six months executives presented the results. It removed all opinion by giving us measures we needed to address. We tried to manage the agency brand through the eyes of our clients. The outcomes were fabulous when it came to retention, organic growth and new business.

The curse of marketing is jargon combined with unquantified opinion

That’s the real cause so many people in marketing and advertising believe to be visionaries and almost nobody is. When they lead the way, they might lead us to nowhere. Or Second Life. Let’s face it: most of us are challenged in the vision department. However, we all talk like Steve Jobs and Seth Godin. They communicated substance, most of us hot air.

Now, there are some real visionaries in this business. People that know the past, understand the present and learned from both to look at the future. The problem for agencies and clients is to work out who is the person with the jargon and glossary, and who is the one that is thinking and talking intelligently.

Any new client needs to agree on a form of measurement to track performance. Most brands still  don’t want to invest in the most elementary tracking. They rather focus on listening and defensive tactics, rather than understanding the real perception of their business and brand. Some brands spend millions of dollars on media but they don’t bother to spend 0.5% of their marketing budget on tracking important KPIs. “Let’s do that next year.”

CEOs should be brand managers

CEOs should ask for this data on a monthly basis. In terms of brand management at the top of any organization, the CEO cannot rely upon the input internally as it has a vested interest in all things  being pink unicorns. CEOs need some form of external intelligence communicating honestly how his brand is doing in the real world. Good intelligence gives the CEO the time to adjust the business. When he has to fire the CMO to correct strategy, it’s too late. The horse has already left the barn.

I was getting everything ready for Mother’s Day, when I read this powerful column by Nicholas D. Kristof “Saving the lives of moms”.

It tells the story of a young Ethiopian woman suffering from fistula after giving birth. More than two million women and girls have fistulas worldwide, the lepers of the 21st century, among the most voiceless and shunned people on earth.

And Kristof talks about Steven Arrowsmith, an American urologist from Grand Rapids, Mich., trying to combat this devastating disease:

“People in America can’t believe I left urology to do this, but this is about changing lives,” which is better than “listening to men tell me about the quality of their erections,” he said. “I’ve had my family held at gunpoint, I’ve had malaria, I’ve had serious exposure to H.I.V., I’ve been separated from family, and I’ve spend about a million hours crammed into coach class on airlines, but it’s worth it. I’d much rather live a meaningful life than a comfortable one.”

Left untreated, women and girls with fistulas become pariahs. Their husbands divorce them, and they are moved to a hut at the edge of the village. They lie there in pools of their waste, feeling deeply ashamed, trying to avoid food and water because of the shame of incontinence, and eventually they die of an infection or simple starvation.”

Today, all of us spend $18 billion on flowers, gifts, things to show appreciation to the mothers in our lives – an occasion worth celebrating. Today is also the day were you could safe the life of a mother by donating $450 (or $37,50 monthly) to cover one woman’s free, safe fistula surgery.

Is there a reason not to?

Read the column.

Save a life and give the gift of dignity.

Los Angeles can be ugly, just drive through the city when it rains. But when you look at the city from Griffith Observatory, you can feel the magic.

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.

]]> http://www.bateshook.com/digital-metrics-dig-deeper/feed/ 0 http://www.bateshook.com/have-neophiles-taken-over-advertising/ http://www.bateshook.com/have-neophiles-taken-over-advertising/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 13:14:51 +0000 Uwe Hook http://www.bateshook.com/?p=3917

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.