Tag: advertising

What marketing is not

FabrizioLeave a comment

The inability to listen. The idea that by interrupting and telling your story people will be amazed. The practice of segmenting into hundreds of small niches to feed them whatever they want today. The ideas of optimization, hacking, ranking, fans and followers. The belief that data is better than interactions. The effort to second-guess needs and wants to stay clear of the risk of asking. The easy shortcut of personalised and automated user journey. The unrelentless focus on growth.

Marketing is not ruining the world. The things above are. And at the same time they set expectations, both for marketers and customers, that cannot be met, leading to inevitable dissatisfaction.

Key insights and themes from the research include:

  • Data is a dilemma. But “big data” isn’t marketing’s biggest challenge. It is actually the “small data” – the data used to describe the small, specific attributes delivered directly from the customer through, as an example, the Internet of Things. 36 percent of respondents believe that small data will be the greatest challenge for the organization.
  • We’ve lost the ability to be human, and we can’t blame the machines. Some 41 percent admit that they are overly focused on driving campaigns, forgetting that they are building relationships. Nearly 30 percent admit they think of their customers in terms of targets, records and opportunities – interestingly an equal amount admit that they are also struggling to define and deliver returns from customer experience strategies.
  • Going small could bring our humanity back. Marketers believe small data will help extract better signal from the noise (45 percent), reveal the “why” behind customer actions and behaviors (41 percent), help focus on the people behind the data to deliver more human interactions (35 percent) and aid in filling key gaps across the customer journey (35 percent.)

CMO Council Research

 

Renewing trust

FabrizioLeave a comment

The automatic renewal feature, enabled by default in plans that seal an agreement between a service company and the final consumer, is not designed to improved the user experience.

Despite the bullshit about “continuity of service”, that particular feature is designed (and enabled by default) to leverage our tendency to forget, and therefore fictitiously increase the recurring revenue metric.

It feels like yet another instance in which companies that invest loads of money in second-guessing personalisation of marketing messages (ads, newsletters, offers, etc.), fail to design their services and operations in a personal way when it would actually be easy.

Hi there, we have noticed that your plan is expiring in 30 days.

We do not do automatic renewal, as we believe in how good our service is. And on this note, this is what we have done for you this past 11 months (*list of features that the user has used, articles the user has read, videos the user has watched, …).

We’d like to continue delivering this and more, and to renew we ask you to answer two questions on this online form (the questions being: Do you want to renew? Is your credit card still valid?).

On the other hand, if you decide not to continue with us, we respect your decision and hope to have you back soon. We would still like to know if it’s something we’ve done (link to online feedback for churn).

Thanks for being a valuable member of our community. For any question on renewals, just reply to this message or call us at xxx.xxxxxxx.

Have a wonderful day!

Marketing and social media

FabrizioLeave a comment

Gary Vaynerchuck often repeats that as a marketer, the only thing he cares about is where the attention of the people is.

This is something I very much respect. Marketers should not be in a personal relationship with any platform, tool, channel. They should care about finding ways to establish a connection with their audience. What Gary Vee says is particularly important in a World in which many marketers still think that they _NEED_ a Facebook page, an Instagram account or a Pinterest strategy.

But I am struggling more and more to distinguish my identity as a marketer and my identity as a (decent) human being.

So, what happens if the attention of the people is on a channel that is increasingly damaging shares of the population and of society?

It is not my intention to be paternalistic nor bigot in approaching such dilemma. I just want us to consider when we should start caring about the fact that our marketing money is feeding unhealthy behaviour, toxic and dangerous ecosystems or openly wrong actions.

I have no answers, unfortunately. Yet these are questions of growing importance for me.

Should we care? Probably yes.

Should our business targets make us blind towards this (or this)? Probably not.

Is there a way to be relevant marketing-wise if we remove the most popular tools a marketer has in this age and time? That deserves a lot more consideration, and I hope this blog will help me elaborate in that direction.

Ads wars

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you create something that has a controversial reception, you have two choices.

You can try to explain what your aim was, that you were coming from a good place, that actually what you meant is not what the public understood, that it’s not your fault and that your original idea was actually to support the feelings of the very same people that are now involved in the controversy.

Or you can apologise.

Take this Dove ad from last year.

It does not matter that Dove wanted to represent female beauty in all its shades, nor that the bit under scrutiny was only a short part of a longer ad in which (among other things) a westerner-looking woman was turning asian. It does not matter what the female Nigerian actress thought she was achieving while recording the ad, and honestly after the controversy sparked, the ad itself and its aesthetic stopped mattering as well.

Dove did not fall into the trap, it understood that all that matters in these circumstances is the public and its sensitivities. As marketers (and as creators), we need to be aware that what we do today can reach a much bigger audience than in the past, but at the same time it gets subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

There are two things that can help stay clear from this kind of publicity.

First, make sure what you do is in line with a consistent brand that you are continuosly building. This gives credibility in the eyes of the audience, and it raises the odds that what you mean is what will be understood (take the recent Gillette ad as an example).

Then, surround yourself with people that are the most diverse possible, in every achievable way. And carefully weigh in every one of the concern they might raise on your job.

 

Why is AI assuming to know us?

Fabrizio2 Comments

The problem with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, at the moment, is a problem of use, not of technology.

Companies mainly implement AI in their products and services to maximise economic results, and they fail (mostly) to actually deliver value to their users.

Take the advertising industry, for example. AI and ML are used by platforms to predict interests and needs based on data collected from your online behaviour. It is currently a widely inaccurate utilisation of the technology, that’s why you get exposed for months to ads from that site you visited once while you were researching your competitors for the next management meeting.

It is so because what currently matters is not that you get an ad that is relevant to you or that the advertisers message gets exposed to the correct audience. What matters, at this particular moment in history, is for the platforms to sell as many ads as they can. And since their competition is even less accurate or completely unmeasurable, they thrive with very little conversion rates while they make the rules they feel are more appropriate to achieve what they want.

Now, imagine a slightly different application of the same technology.

We have noticed that in past weeks, you have visited sites of car dealers. Would you like us to push some car offers from local dealers to your timeline?

You have visited this restaurant three times in the last month, would you like me to add it to your favourite restaurants in town? I could push some of their lunch offer to your inbox, if you want me to. Just tell me how frequently you’d like to receive them.

I see you’ve been at events about business and management in the past six months. Here are a bunch of groups you might be interested in. Also, there is a special deal on the Business and Management magazine if you subscribe by the end of the year. Do you want to take it?

Asking questions instead of assuming, is a great rule of thumb for interpersonal relationships. The same should be valid for interactions with a machine.