Branding & Dating - Both Important

Imagine this metaphorical scenario. A man walks into a jewelry store and the following conversation ensues:

Jeweler: Hi, how can I help you?
Man: My friend told me this amazing statistic. He tells me that when men buy engagement rings and propose, women agree to marry those men more than 50% of the time. Is this true?
Jeweler: I believe you're correct. Using an engagement ring in the proposal process significantly enhances your chance of receiving a "yes" from the proposed.
Man: This is exactly what I need. I think I'm ready to buy a ring, then.
Jeweler: Wonderful, we have a wonderful selection that will surely please your bride-to-be. So, tell me, what is your girlfriend's name?
Man: Oh, I don't have a girlfriend. Actually I don't even have anyone in mind. But I do want to get married. My friend told me about the high success rate of proposing to a woman with an engagement ring!
Jeweler: So, you're going to approach someone you've never met and you think they'll agree to marry you just because you're presenting an engagement ring?
Man: Well, if women say "yes" more than 50% of the time, I've got a pretty good shot!

Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common with advertisers when approaching their ad plans. Ask most all but the highest level marketers what their marketing goals are and they'll reply with "Sales. Gotta sell product."

Ok, that's a great end goal, but that's where the man in the story was misguided. He believed that simply by buying the ring he would enjoy the same chances of becoming engaged as other men who've spent significant periods of time dating and building up to the proposal. All too often, advertisers want to skip the dating process and go straight for the sale. It's just not that easy.

With online and other emerging media being more measurable than any traditional medium ever has been, advertisers are tempted to take metrics and ROI goals to the extreme. If it doesn't end up in a sale, it didn't work. To be clear, I fully agree that advertising's only purpose is to sell a product. It's just that there is more than one level of "dating" that must occur between the product and the prospect. As a result, the goal of various phases of a marketing campaign is, at its core, to move each consumer one level further down the purchase funnel until a purchase finally occurs.

Taking the basic Awareness/Consideration/Intent/Purchase funnel, there are four nudges each consumer requires before the sale is made. So, 75% of the time that the marketing is its most effective, no sale occurs. But without metrics for ALL levels of the funnel, your ROI can appear to be much less than it really is.

The moral of the man and the jeweler story? The next time someone tempts you with a CPA model over CPM, or you are about to outline the goals for your next campaign, remember to date!

Free Research: Part Deux

One of my first posts discussed Google Trends and the terrific data it provides - for free! More and more products are popping up online that provide truly outstanding research at no charge (for now) that can help you make better marketing decisions in your business. Check out:

• Alexa. While the methodology driving their data collection procedures might not hold up to perfect scrutiny, it is a fantastic starting point for viewing a site's rough statistics and how it is trending.
• Compete. Again, perfect? No, but more in-depth than Alexa. And, with stats like "average stay", what a great way to get some initial guidance and help compare one site to another.
• Quantcast. Wow, Paul Sutter and the folks at Quantcast have the tiger by the tail. By engineering this information in reverse, a whole suite of products, like Dart For Advertisers, comScore, and Nielsen, will be in catch-up mode for years.

Web 2.0 is a fun time. While I certainly would love for the sites above to remain free, my hope is that they'll be able to monetize themselves and charge appropriately for various audience sizes so this information continues to be available to dedicated marketers.

Deliberate Confusion

Have you heard of this Dr. Oz guy? Supposedly he's the newest diet guru and can help you live longer, healthier, and so on. One of his tips is that there are five key ingredients to avoid in your diet. Let me paint a rather silly but scary picture for you. Imagine for a second that he introduces his own line of foods but doesn't list any of the ingredients on the label. Actually, let's take all the nutritional information off the label too. Now, let's also throw in there that literally 50% of the items stocked in the grocery store are those created by Dr. Oz and have absolutely no information to help consumers make informed decisions. One would think a consumer revolt would be brewing.

Of course the real life example of this is Google's AdWords, the PPC product which allows advertisers to list their web site in a sponsored listing area with the hopes of being noticed more frequently than if their site was solely listed in the organic search listing area. Google has approximately 50% of the search market share and gives little to no information about how to get the best results for your business as an AdWords customer. Have a question for Google? They don't want you calling 866-2-GOOGLE since they don't publish it on their site. Want to know who you're speaking with once you do call the number? You'll get a first name and last initial. At least they don't use symbols like the artist formerly known as Prince.

Ever since my first day at my first job out of college I've been in some sort of customer service role, whether it be serving internal or external clients. I've learned that the best way to create repeat customers is to make it easy for your customers to spend money with you. It's not only hard to spend as much money as possible with Google, spending that money supports a company who appears as if they don't want your money in the first place.

Compounding the problem is that this model is spreading, not shrinking. Right Media has built a phenomenal product that allows for 100% self-managed online advertising campaigns to run on thousands of sites at wonderfully reasonable prices. The problem is that "it" is incredibly intelligent, but "it" never passes any of "its" knowledge onto you. "It" is Yield Manager, the Right Media serving platform that has supposedly great capabilities but you'd never know since you have no idea what those great capabilities actually are. "It's proprietary" is their response. So is Coke's recipe, but they still list the ingredients and it's never hurt them a bit.

This doesn't mean that you should avoid these businesses or their platforms. This commentary simply offers a perspective from a buying customer's point of view. My clients expect transparency and that expectation is passed on from my customers to my vendors. However, whether or not we agree with a vendor's business model, all of our decisions are indeed purely business and are made to ensure the greatest success for our clients. For now, time will be the only judge. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.