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Why Do So Many Super Bowl Ads Fail?
While they are still fresh in my mind, I wanted to work through my dismay at the quality and effectiveness of many of the ads run during the recent Super Bowl telecast. There’s a lot of chatter critiquing individual ads the day or two after they run, but I don’t see a lot of analysis about the craft in general and what it means for broadspectrum media marketing in general. I won’t speak directly to any single effort, or run down the list and comment, that’s been done to death. Here’s my take:
- Pressure – with :30 spots topping $1.5 million at the bottom end for TV time during the telecast, there is tremendous pressure to use that expensive time to best advantage, and to be memorable so people will talk about it the next day and beyond. However, being “memorable” for memory’s sake is a flawed tactic if the brand doesn’t already resonate, or the ad attempts to shift brand perception too far outside the limits of credibility.
- Dilution – the audience touted by the Super Bowl telecast is not only huge but is much more diverse than it used to be – that male 25-34 demo has been diluted significantly as parties, gatherings, and the halftime shows have broadened the audience to take in women, older men who remember the good old days, and twenty-somethings watching for the halftime shows. Whenever you have to play to that broad an audience, the tendency to pitch to the lowest common denominator is terribly great. By appealing to everyone, they don’t really appeal to anyone.
- Shock Value – in the past, the most unusual, the most shocking ads have been the ones that garnered the most attention, got the most buzz in days after their airing. Now, it’s a contest to see who is going to be the most shocking, the most outrageous, regardless of whether it actually moves the needle for recognition, or god forbid, sales. Shock for shock’s sake is great for slasher movies, not so great for advertising.
- Lack of Taste – as societies’ level of etiquette and civility toward its own members has declined, so has it’s need and desire to be tasteful. Who needs to be tasteful if it’s not going to be appreciated, right? So some of the more crass, tasteless ads often resonate with the younger, newer audience who are the next generation of both creatives and pundits, who have a different set of taste values than the older generation before them.
- Lack of Fundamentals – some of the ads are just bad because they don’t do the job we expect them to do. They may not have been intended to do the job traditional ads are crafted to do – sell product, or reinforce brand. Some of them are just there to make an impression for a short time – see number three – rather than reinforcing the brands behind them, the ads have become a product within themselves. Some are so bad at the traditional function, they functionally fail, as day-after polling repeatedly shows – you remember the ad but not the product or the company for whom they were made – kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Those are just a few of the reasons that for most of the core Super Bowl audience, many of the ads run during the game seem strange, bizarre, poor or just plain awful. The goal has become, “Hey, we need a Super Bowl ad” instead of “Hey, we need a new campaign, and by the way, the Super Bowl has a great audience that matches the demo we need to hit,” which has lead to the current crop of high-visibility, low-memorability, poorly identified spots that miss the mark on any other day, but on Super Sunday, they become darlings – for about 48 hours. Pretty expensive two days, if you ask me . . .
February 9, 2016
Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

There is a lot of buzz among marketers about fostering customer engagement, building engagement with apps and websites, creating communities with blogs and social selling. It all sounds great on paper, we should all work together, share your purchases socially, everybody knows everything you do, everyone’s on your side, we’re all a village, cumbaya . . . But when you’re standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart deciding what frozen dinner brand or dog food to buy, I don’t feel that my level of engagement with Purina’s website is the deciding factor. Marketing is about raising awareness in a positive way to influence and drive SALES. I can be as engaged as can be with a brand, but if a similar product is in front of me, and they are largely the same, engagement doesn’t trump quality, availability and price, and the sale will go to the one who fits those three criteria the closest. Even with B2B sales, I’ve been “engaged” with a number of websites and businesses prospecting my business via e-mail and other devices, but haven’t actually bought anything from any of them – I’d score really high on their “engagement scale” algorithm, but they haven’t made a dime off of me, and may never do so.

Brand engagement is a long-term play. It needs to be tied to other awareness vehicles, timed promotions, backup media, and ongoing evolution of product benefit awareness in order to really be effective at driving sales. This is not a new idea, but it’s one which has risen to prominence recently along with the ubiquity of social media platforms, which provide the ability for person-to-person communication in a way heretofore not possible on the current scale. I can now tell thousands of people what I’m doing, what I’m interested in, what I’m buying, what I’m eating, cooking, enjoying, drinking, and more on a moment’s notice in real time. That means that if I’m sharing it with others, it’s boosting their awareness as well as my own for a particular product, service or item. That kind of organic, exponential awareness spread at that speed was unheard of just 15 years ago. Epidemiologists are familiar with the concept, but marketers only recently began to apply it to their efforts – indeed the term “going viral” is borrowed from the disease spread specialists, as information, or awareness, can spread a lightning speed unseen from the outside, like a virus.

Just because I’m aware of a product or service that I’ve engaged with it on the Internet, does not mean that when the time comes I’m actually going to make a purchase. It may increase the odds some, but as we learned with the recent Powerball drawing, odds need to be changed significantly with a supreme effort in order to really affect the outcome. Social media engagement or website engagement is like buying 100 lottery tickets instead of one. It seems like you’ve boosted your chances of winning by 100 fold, but in reality, those other 99 tickets didn’t even move the needle.

By all means, do A/B testing, make adjustments, formulate campaigns that include a mechanism for increasing engagement, but depending upon it to drive significant revenue could be a mistake. The basics of building ongoing awareness through media your audience utilizes, timing your efforts to coincide with that target’s needs or life-stage position, matching your demographics and psychographics and messaging to that of the prospective customer, are still the linchpins of successful marketing efforts, and enhancements and refinements to these, along with some boosts in awareness through effective promotion of specialty offers, benefit driven messaging, and creative imagery, will drive revenue upward on a consistent basis as the brand evolves and the audience grows. If you’ve got all those bases covered effectively, engagement is a nice to have, the icing on the cake, and a good set up for the upsell and cross sell to that customer base, due to the added time allowed for an opportunity to develop.

Unless I miss my guess, the folks dwelling on engagement (which is notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy) don’t have all the basics in place and need a buzz word and a crutch to help them explain why things on the sales side aren’t moving as far or as fast as expected.

Dwell on the basics of marketing, make sure all the right pieces are in place and working together efficiently, and keeping the pipeline full, then worry about engagement.

February 4, 2016
Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

The world of marketing is fraught with data, we’re drowning in it, awash in a sea of numbers, statistics, charts, graphs, analytic dashboards keeping track of minutia that has little bearing on the bigger picture of framing and positioning the thing we’re marketing in it’s best possible light to the best possible audience. What was once about words, pictures, images, headlines, ideas, insights and engagement has been reduced to a series of tactical, digital zig zags, trying to maximize return on a micro level, and hope it scales up and moves the corporate revenue needle.

Why?

Do It Yourself

One of the reasons that data has become so powerful (it always was, we just didn’t think it was cool to talk about it) is that not only is there a lot of it, but it’s easier to obtain and derive, and the costs are much lower, thanks to the Internet. In the bad old days, if you wanted to measure engagement or response, you had sales numbers (conversion), inbound phone call numbers (inquiry, “likes”), or account rep activity (lead gen inbound). Other than those in-house numbers, if you wanted to know more, you needed to dig much deeper, create a research study, engage a firm and have them do what they do and report back.

Today, all the activity data, engagement activity, views, likes, dwell time, clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement signal are logged, categorized, organized and reported to you digitally on a minute-by-minute basis in real time, using inexpensive or free software. And it can all be accessed by anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

Prove It . . .

One other reason all this craziness over data is occurring is more corporate and has to do with economics. The marketing department has long been viewed as an expense, occasionally by the more enlightened as an investment, but only recently as having the potential to be a profit center. Marketers have always had the need to justify their existence pressed upon them, and we spend hours writing reports, dissecting response numbers and finding ways to make it look like the things we’re doing contribute directly to the company’s revenue and well-being. On some level, the more data we can present, the more attractive a case we can make for being provided, and spending, more money to do the things we know we need to do, but have to prove it to everyone else.

In the real world, using data to gauge performance, learning and improving returns, and making decisions based on data is really the main idea – but we’ve been doing that for years. The real trick is to properly select and vet the data you’re looking at and using to make those decisions. Just because a number represents a count of a certain behavior or response doesn’t make it a viable or useful piece of data – it may not scale, it may not apply across platforms or audiences, it may not be sustainable, it may be badly skewed by events you have no control over. But it is data, and therefore useful, right?

The other pitfall to all this data is that even if it is accurate, correct, vetted and sustainable, you need to find a way to convert that data to insight, and that insight into an action plan. You have to use the data to further the cause. Most data will tell you something on it’s own, but its not enough to go the distance. You need to step back, see the larger picture, put the data in context with other inputs you have proven already, and see if it flies.

Lies, Lies, All Lies!

Now we come to the lies part. Numbers and statistics can be manipulated to indicate almost any point of view, the insight comes in the interpretation. Averages tend to dilute or blunt insight, rather than amplify it. Statisticians have all sorts of tricks and formulas to manipulate data so that it can tell virtually any story you want – it’s all in the spin, how it’s presented. Even something as simple as college rankings, a long standing measure of the potential for success in leveraging education and brand to elevate one’s position in life in the long term, can be easily manipulated by marketers to tell a story that promotes the cause. If a college has slipped in the rankings from number three to number seven, is that slide an anomaly, is it due to something short term or environment that will reverse it self when conditions change? Even though that could be seen to represent a significant slide, it’s a virtual certainty that recruiters will be touting it as a “Top 10” college for years to come following the slide, hoping that nobody looks too closely at where within that top ten it falls.

Use It Right

The best use of all this data is to gain a clear understanding of the current position and level of success of your marketing efforts, establish a base line, relate it to growth, profitability, revenue growth, reach, market share or other commonly regarded metric, in order to use that baseline as a starting point for improvement going forward. If that happens, justification of added spending will be easily achieved, as activity can now be tied directly to results that impact everyone. Clicks and likes don’t pay the light bill or match the retirement funds, but if you can use data to show how you’re moving the needle, use it to improve performance by looking at the “right” metric, and make good decisions based on a few key data points, then that’s all the data you really need . . .

January 29, 2016
Could Your Business Survive Ten Days With No Internet?

As fears go, loss of Internet access is climbing the ladder, and will soon join spiders, tornadoes, public speaking and cancer at the top of the national list. With all the threats presented by the modern world both international and domestic, the loss of the currently ubiquitous Internet is a very real possibility. Cyber Security has gone in just 15 years from a futurist topic on the seminar schedule at small, obscure IT conferences, to a huge industry and a Federal government priority,in an effort to preserve the integrity and functionality of this newly precious resource. Could your business survive the Internet-less apocalypse?

So many businesses depend so heavily on the Internet for their marketing, either through organic search and SEO of their site, e-mail marketing and customer service, banner advertising, Adwords programs, re-marketing programs, to order-taking and fulfillment operations, that they could not function with no internet capability – web-only based businesses are out of luck from day one! Brick-and-mortar businesses have an advantage here, in that they may still have foot traffic, use traditional media like TV and radio ads, billboards, building signs, direct mail and print ads, to drive shoppers to the store – they would have to use cash to purchase anything if the Internet were “down” or didn’t exist, but they could function moderately well in the local geographic area. What would be most missed is the additional global outlet and customer base that the ‘net allows for.

Professional services businesses would also function in a remedial way – law firms, accounting firms, consultants, and engineering firms still do much of their marketing and lead generation through traditional means – but would be hampered in providing some of those services in as quick or timely fashion as we’ve become used to – “e-mail me that spreadsheet,” and “give me everything Lexus-Nexus has on . . .” would be things of the past, but those laws are still “on the books” and in the books at most firms, and the search, while laborious and time consuming, could still be performed manually, and those ledgers still record debits and credits just fine, no batteries required.

The US Postal Service would likely see a huge uptick in business, as e-mail ceases and businesses have to return to writing memos and mailing them, either internally or externally to clients, customers and far flung colleagues. It might make some of those long-winded and knee-jerk missives that show up in your inbox on a daily basis a bit more scarce as well, as business people are forced to craft more thoughtful communication to commit to paper and mail. It would certainly allow for more time to proofread and edit, something most e-mail desperately needs, so not all of this non-Internet fantasy is bad . . .

Certainly the lack of social media communications platforms would free up more time to be productive, although those businesses that exist or thrive using social media marketing as a reason to live would disappear, they would likely be supplanted by higher attendance at conferences, tradeshows, meetings, seminars, more client contact, which would help out the hotels, airlines, conference venues, as face to face returns to fill the vacuum. Talented writers would have to work for a publication, magazine, newspaper, ad agency, or radio or TV outlet, as blogs would be impossible. Maybe they’d remember how to grow and hold a following, build an audience, and even get paid to write . . .! Editors would suddenly be back in fashion, curating the news and crafting public perception of current events, rather then the gang input, do it yourself, Wikipedia approach to learning about the world around us.

Take five minutes, and mentally catalog all the things in your business, either marketing or operations, that depend upon the Internet to exist or function. Were a global calamity to occur, could you continue to function as a business without it? Is there a written (and printed out) plan for this eventuality? Keep in mind that we’re not talking about the stone age, electricity still works, computers still function as free standing machines, connect to printers and other computers over local network wires, the phones still work (unless you have VOIP service only), its the global connected-ness, the openness, the instantaneous access to global information that’s gone. If nefarious evil-doers were to knock out large sections of the global ‘net, would your business survive? If your fleet of trucks uses credit cards at the gas pump, your transactions are credit card only (the return of the chick-chuck slider machines would be rapid and expensive), your equipment needs GPS reports to function, your outreach is web-only, your pipeline driven solely by Google Adwords, you might be out of luck quicker than you think . . .

Should we continue to base our businesses heavily around the Internet’s availability and ubiquity? Probably. Should it be our only way to continue to further drive commerce? Likely not, as you just never know . . .

January 21, 2016
Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

Think about it: Every meeting you attend outside your company, every business function you attend, every group you join, even casual encounters at sporting events, concerts, classes and athletic competitions like races and charity bike-a-thons, the one thing you can use to conveniently provide your contact info and your business “story” to a new acquaintance is your business card. It carries your company brand, it carries your professional reputation, your phone number, e-mail address, website URL, physical address, even a level of achievement and professional status – that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of card stock 2″ x 3.5″!

For small businesses, the many choices made in creating a business card are each vitally important to be sure it can carry all that weight effectively. Nice layout but thin, flimsy stock says I’m just starting but don’t have the resources to spring for the good stuff (sending a subliminal message that maybe I’m not concerned with other details of my company’s image, either). Standard white with black type might send the message that basic is good enough, I don’t care enough about appearances to even pay attention to subtle design cues and engagement that some color can create. Way colorful and “cartoony” might make it difficult for the recipient to grant your firm the importance and weight of consideration it deserves. Lots of type and images of you might come off as narcissistic if over done. Too “designy” might reduce the impression of seriousness and business acumen that goes behind your creative decisions. Type too small to read, too much information packed in illogical order, funny, multiple or odd type faces that make it difficult to read or absorb quickly, are all poor choices, and we’ve seen them all at one time or another. All these choices are critical to convey the message in just the right way that really makes you memorable, carries your brand effectively, and connects that person who receives it with the way you can somehow help them achieve their goals, no matter what they are. Like I said, a lot of pressure for a small scrap of paper . . .

With all that going on, it’s usually best to leave the design, layout, and production choices to a design professional who has a reasonable portfolio of business identity work. That doesn’t mean your new sister-in-law who just graduated from art school can’t take a crack at it, depending on what type of business you’re starting or promoting, but her input should be able to stand on it’s merits, not on her attendance at Thanksgiving dinner. There are basic design tenets that should be adhered to when crafting an effective business card (and other identity materials), but those tenets leave a huge margin open for creativity and ingenuity! Don’t feel boxed in by convention, just give due weight to the experience of those who are successful at creating these little buggers.

For the money, business cards can be your most effective weapon in the battle for recognition, growth, brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and professional networking success. Its certainly the oldest, and most valuable dollar for dollar. Sure, digital elements are global, changeable, adaptable, mobile and modern, but the lowly business card travels further, gets kept longer, is more portable and shareable, carries more information and meta-information, more memorable tactility, and more engagement than a web banner ad URL could hope for on its best day!

Next time someone hands you their business card (hopefully you asked for it first), take a moment and study it, feel it, read both sides, absorb it for a moment, then look up and connect all that information with the person in front of you. Does it all hang together, is it “as expected”, or is it in jarring contrast to the person, company or position you’ve encountered in the person you’ve been speaking with? That jarring disconnect is to be avoided at all cost, as it reduces that attachment, that engagement, that connection and memorability that are the card’s main job. If the card looks and feels just like you’d expect after speaking with the person for a few minutes, observing and listening to them, then its a winner, and carries that person’s brand, their status, their stature, their ethos and of course, the way to continue the conversation later, perfectly packaged in one small fragment of wood pulp. Not bad for a few bucks and some thought . . .

January 13, 2016
Thinking IS Doing . . . Build More Contemplative Time Into Your Marketing for Increased Effectiveness

Lists – tick lists, To-Do lists, task lists, chores, check lists – successful people of all types and stripes are driven by lists, either as a way of measuring success, or of keeping your day, week, month, company, on track and focused on moving forward without forgetting anything. But what if we could spend less time focusing on knocking tasks off of a list and more time contemplating the more broad strokes of what marketing is about and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Would spending more time thinking and less time doing actually improve our results?

In a word – yes!

Studies coming out of Stanford, MIT, and University of Wisconsin indicate that deep meditation can actually change the physical structure and chemical behavior of the brain long term. Studies of gamma synchrony, the fast-firing of neurons in the brain that lead to a feeling of enlightenment or well-being, have shown that those who meditate or contemplate deeply and regularly can trigger this synchrony, which has also been associated with increased mental ability in in higher mathematics, enhanced creativity, at will through meditative techniques.

That’s great, but what does that have to do with Marketing?

Everything, if you think about it. A large portion of what the majority of people feel is marketing activity involves doing. Doing campaigns, researching and data gathering, hunting for lists, selecting images, writing and editing headlines, press releases and collateral, producing ads, commercials and websites – all doing. But those in the know have figured out that the big bucks really come in when you get paid for what you think, not what you do. Doing is the logical extension and the expression of thinking. They don’t call it doing leadership, it’s called thought-leadership, and for good reason. Taking time to think deeply about a subject or about a concept, idea, product, or technique leads to ways to express those ideas and thoughts in a way that influences others to see things your way – it’s the essence of marketing!

How much more successful might you be if you took an hour, or even thirty minutes, to do nothing else but think through your next campaign strategy, or to contemplate possible uses for your product, or think deeply about the customer experience you’re creating for buyers? Most of us are so busy doing, we don’t take time to think deeply about the actual purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish, of the consequences and ramifications of our actions, or how they affect others, or how they can be improved.

Deep thought, contemplation, and the training to focus those energies on a single element of our work, to trigger those fast-firing neurons and reach an altered consciousness state that can deliver new insights could be the most powerful tool in the arsenal, but most don’t know it exists, let alone take the time to stop doing, and learn how to use it to their advantage. I know, it all sounds a little geeky and a little off base from the central tenets of marketing, which typically are all about the “do” – but if a half hour spent thinking can improve your insights, and therefore your success rate, by even 20%, I’d say that the most valuable 30 minutes you’ll spend all week!

For a list of topics that should be contemplated at greater length, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

January 8, 2016
5 Things To Watch For In 2016
I don’t normally do predictions and prognostications about the future, because even the most informed and engaged “futurists” are at least half wrong on a terrific day. If you go back and review their predictions with 10 years of hindsight, usually they were either dead wrong – not good for career development as a futurist – or the predictions now, in hindsight, seem rather vague or are broad enough to be interpreted in a number of ways, one of which might be construed as having some to fruition. Either way, such prognostication is best left to carny acts at the State Fair rather than being used as a business decision-making tool. However, as the new year looms, I feel compelled to at least point out some observances that seem to be gaining positive momentum and seem fairly sensible in the broader context of marketing. So, here’s five things to keep an eye on:
1. Data Gathering V.S. Privacy – Eventually privacy will win, but not next year. There is so much data out there available now on everyone, from a huge variety of sources, all self-proclaimed, that marketers can access it without having to invade anything more sophisticated than a social media page. That level of data availability will continue to increase, and the volume and type of data available will ramp up next year, as more software is launched, more apps are developed, and the digital sharing movement continues to grow in the new connected environment. Marketers will have to continue to run to try and reach the top of the curve and not get too far behind in the actual viable use of that data to produce results.
2. The Clouds Gather – Storage on site at corporate buildings will continue to drop weight like Jenny Craig moved in next door, as storage needs are more easily accommodated in the Cloud. Data centers and other aggregating technologies will continue to supplant hard on-site storage for firms under a billion in annual sales. Now cyber security exercises will have to beef up accordingly to provide the security and trust the could requires to continue acceptance and growth.

3. Old Will Become New Again – In a sense, marketing is like fashion, if something sticks around long enough it will circle back around and become popular again. Like hemlines or trouser cuffs, marketing tactics can be reborn as if it was discovered anew by the next generation of marketers. The speed of growth of content marketing will accelerate – at least until the end of this decade – but content marketing has been used since before the turn of the century – the last century! Ask John Deere, Betty Crocker, Jell-O and P&G, who used content marketing to sell products and stay top of mind, establish market dominance and cement their brands in the minds of buyers in a certain context, with great success. The biggest change is the speed of the distribution of that content. Modern digital marketers can get a “read” on the popularity and engagement level of their content before it converts to a sale, which allows for some adjustment and fine tuning that the old-school folks didn’t have available to them.

4. The Message Becomes The Medium – FREE! Big agencies will put in a greater level of effort on earned media and on visibility message marketing, as opposed to just paid advertising. The success of Donald Trumps nascent presidential campaign, driving him from neutral name recognition to leading the GOP field by a significant margin in under a year, after spending a paltry $1.8 million, shows how effective this approach can be. While agencies’ bread and butter will continue to be paid media, both traditional and digital, the earned and PR practices will take a larger role in the messaging scheme, will gain power and recognition for top brands that “get it” about how information travels in today’s connected world.

5. Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ – Going Mobile Becomes “Normal” – As the number of mobile searches continues to climb, and broadband becomes even more ubiquitous, and the number of smart devices proliferates, having a strong mobile component to your corporate web presence will become not just essential but standard. If your site doesn’t perform on a 5″ touch screen, you’ll be relegated to the digital dustbin quicker than your girlfriend’s MySpace account.

2016 will be dubbed the year Content peaked, as the field gets crowded, the hackers learn to generate more targeted content in a mass contact way without human intervention. Computer as author is everyone’s fear, there’s enough published by humans already to circle the globe multiple times a day. We don’t need more, we need better – better engagement, better targeting, better relevance, better quality.
January 2, 2016
Content, Shmontent – Providing Valuable Insights To Prospects Will Convert Them To Customers, No Matter What Form It Takes . . .

The top marketing buzzword for 2015 has got to be “Content,” surpassing “Big Data” from 2014. Everywhere you look online, in magazines or journals, webinars, conferences, you’ll run across tips, tricks, advice, approaches, models, templates, secrets and techniques on how to generate, improve, disseminate and offer content that will effectively convert inquiry to customer. It’s nearly ubiquitous, and clearly some content is better than others, and some is more appropriate than others, and some should never have been produced or disseminated at all.

My feeling is that content marketing is not new, it’s one of those tools in the bag that solid progressive marketers have latched onto because the pathways to delivery have gotten broader and easier. Content is essentially in the same genre as sampling programs, advertorials, forced free trials, and other marketing tools where the creator can put their knowledge of their industry on display, demonstrate quality or level of service, demonstrate their understanding of issues that affect their industry, and provide possible solutions at a lower engagement risk to the recipient than actually purchasing a product or service. It allows the creator or the distributor to shape their brand perception, elevate themselves to expert status, show thought leadership, and hold themselves out there as someone who offers solutions, not just gripes about the challenges facing their industry or line of business. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s a terrific way to accomplish the goal of building credibility and showing forward thought, but it’s not as shiny and new as the most recent generation of marketers would like to believe – the delivery system is new, but the model is not.

Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere corporation, who created a magazine featuring uses for it’s farm equipment in 1898, The Michelin Guide promoting travel and offering insights to travelers in 1900, and Jell-O salesmen offering housewives a recipe book featuring Jell-O as a key ingredient in 1904, and Betty Crocker cookbooks touting uses for their cake mixes in 1912 or so, and so on to the point where recent statistics show that 96% of corporations are using some sort of content marketing in their mix in 2014. The telling statistic in that same report is that, among respondents, only 21% of those using content marketing felt they could accurately track its ROI. I thought marketing was about testing, measuring, data-driven action that creates more efficient and cost-effective drivers of awareness and sales conversion . . .

Hopefully, content won’t be shown to be just the next big, shiny object marketers latch onto, use inappropriately until it loses it’s effectiveness or relevance, or until the next shiny object comes along.

To see how to do Content “right,” pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

December 10, 2015
It’s Not Too Late . . . Five Things You Can Do To Accelerate Your Holiday Promotions
As marketers, we’ve been trained to think ahead . . . way ahead. We’re used to thinking about New Year’s Eve marketing in June, Halloween promotions in March, Summer beach product releases in December, and so on. With retailers edging the calendar ever earlier for holiday promotions, the pressure is even stronger to start early and get those tinsel-oriented top lines working even earlier. If you haven’t planned your December holiday promotions by now, you’re so far behind the 8-ball, you may feel it’s impossible to recover. Here are five things you can do quickly enough to get you back in the game and make the holiday contribute to your Q4 results:
1. Crash the boards and pull together a real zinger of a holiday offer for one product – something so outrageous, no one can believe it. Make sure it’s tied to another product or service that’s been a little lagging this year, and use the popular part as a loss leader to drive additional sales. “Get a FREE 10lb bag of coffee ($35 value) when you buy our new jet-powered coffee maker for just $19.95.” Or, flip it – “Get our new jet-powered coffee maker FREE when you buy 10 lbs of our signature coffee” – this last falls under the rubric, “Give Away the Razors and Sell The Blades”. Either way, craft an enticing full image e-mail and shoot it to all your top buyers, with a intro line that says something along the lines of “Your Invited To Receive the Next ‘It’ Gift . . .” to boost your open rate.
2. Craft a full-page ad for the largest newspaper in each of your major markets, saying that in an effort to revive the non-commercial spirit of the holiday, you will not be running any ads during the holidays, and dare your competitors to do the same . . . with the right tone and imagery, this will be a winner this year in light of the Black Friday backlash we’re seeing among customers of major retailers and service providers.
3. Craft a survey for your best customers with a participation incentive that’s irresistible – enter a drawing for a chance to win a new Corvette, or something on that order of magnitude that relates to the products or services you offer – or winner can use the chance to donate the equivalent value to the charity of the winner’s choice. Keep the survey relatively short but make the questions reveal those really crucial details about your customers that you need to move forward next year. Launch the survey on social media, and have your PR team pitch the story – leading with the charity angle – to all the major editors and bloggers in your sphere of influence. Not only will it get lots of attention, the charity angle will undoubtedly boost participation and you’ll get a full sample set of responses on a critical piece of data you need next year. Win for everyone.
4. Donate a startlingly large number of your product or coupons for a free service you offer to our remaining troops still deployed in Afghanistan and surrounding countries who aren’t coming home for the holidays. 25,000 pairs of sneakers or $20 super strong waterproof phone covers sent to our troops with pics of them saying thanks for the holiday gift. Or if that’s not feasible, send a coupon for the product or service to their families here at home – they can use the support as well, and will appreciate the help.
5. Hold a contest to see which philanthropist can give away the largest amount of your product or service in 30 days. Pick the largest corporation or foundation in each of your markets and challenge them to see who can buy and donate the largest cash value of your products or services in those in need in the next thirty days, with the deadline being Christmas eve. Big PR push on this one to get the word out in time, and social media can help this one a great deal – put together a short video daring the wealthy to help those around them using your products or services.
These are all designed to move your product or service at a furious rate for a short period of time – they’re not necessarily designed to do that profitably, but most lead to additional sales of other items as a byproduct of the enhanced awareness of your brand, and that will likely keep you in the black in spite of the losing proposition of the initial marketing initiative. You’ve gotta spend to make, and these idea may spawn a few of your own that can be implemented quickly and effectively in your particular situation.

Write me and let me know if any of these appeal to you and if they were effective for your company. I’d love to hear from you . . .
November 30, 2015
In a World . . . Where There Is No Post Office . . . Direct Mail Professionals Aren’t Doomed

Based on experience, on articles in a huge number of media outlets, on TV and radio, much has been said about the challenges facing the US Post Office. Fiscal reform efforts don’t seem to have stemmed the bleeding, a rate case is in the making that will likely make most mailers sit back and reconsider their mail schedule and creative costs with respect to mailability, machinability and postage costs, and even with offices consolidating and more rural locations closing, deliverability and schedules will have to be accounted for under the current scenario. But picture a world where the Federal Government, Congress, and the American People all agree for a change, and come to an agreement on closing the post office altogether. What might that world look like?

From a business standpoint, a huge bulk of business correspondence has already shifted to e-mail from printed postal mail, as have bill and invoice presentment, financial reporting statements, even annual reports are delivered digitally as PDF files. The remainder of the mail stream includes direct marketing pieces, catalogs, parcels, fulfillments of various types that cannot be delivered digitally, legal documents that must be delivered on paper or signed for by the recipient, and some other odds and ends. In aggregate that still represents a huge swath of companies, and jobs, that will have to shift their thinking, and their marketing efforts and communications strategy, to account for the loss of postal delivery.

Strategically, one of the other common carriers, or possibly both UPS and FedEx, will likely have to ramp up to fill the void, but that would certainly suggest that some changes would have to made in how they operate logistically. Air hubs would have to be expanded, fleet maintenance established and expanded from the current to service fuel and maintain the huge fleet of trucks, cars, planes and other specialty apparatus the USPS currently fields. The care and upkeep of the buildings, street boxes, already a rarity, would likely be curtailed, shifted and more centralized. Delivery would likely be curtailed, made only on select days, much like in EU nations, and only to select stations – residential delivery, especially in rural areas where efficiency is low, would likely cease. Individuals would be forced to visit a substation several days a week to pick up their mail after showing ID. Businesses would receive delivery to their internal mail handling sections, but maybe not daily.

Businesses directly related exclusively to supporting the USPS would certainly be challenged, but what about those who use the mail extensively to market their goods and services, and the businesses who serve them (printers, designers, processing houses, list brokers and aggregators, equipment manufacturers who make printing, folding, inkjet and addressing equipment, inserters, sorters, cutters, stampers, high speed duplication and personalization printing machinery), and a wide swath of other businesses world-wide.

Fortunately, most of those businesses will have the time to adjust to the new circumstances, and if they are nimble and diversified in their customer base and product offering, they will survive in the new post-post office world. Direct marketing professionals need not necessarily fear for their jobs, as nearly all of their skills can be ported over to the digital realm. Copy that sells still works digitally, with some minor adjustments; good design still enhances results, online or off; a good list is still the key to response success, and if my inbox is any indication, there are a good-sized chunk of list purveyors specializing in selects from business e-mail addresses to help companies and non-profits reach out to their target audience.

The toughest cut will be the army of postal employees nationwide, for some of their skills will be made obsolete, marginalized, or undervalued. With no residential delivery, carriers, sorters, and other related jobs will be sidelined out of existence. Hopefully a retraining program of immense proportions will be built into the wind-down plan, and those hardworking individuals will be placed elsewhere as they desire.

As an exercise, close your eyes and imagine that post-post office world and how it will affect you. Let me know if you like the new world . . .

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November 20, 2015