The Price Of Recession Discounting

Last week I asked for some feedback about the recession topic we discussed on the BeanCast. To remind you, the recession apparently ended in June of 2009. (Yeah, right.) So I was looking for some perspective on the topic.

What I got, though, was some insightful commentary from Karen Tabaka (here's a link) to an expanded version of these comments in the forum) that took me in a whole different direction and made me realize that the reason the recovery continues to lag is probably a result of our own marketing foolishness. And I also realized that I had called this very thing out a year or so ago on the show and in several blog posts, including this one.

I won't repeat everything she said. You can read that for yourself. But one particular points stood out for me: There are two groups of people — the lesser portion of the population that have been affected by layoffs and economic hardship and the greater part of the population that remain employed and have no comprehension of the hardship, but have now become accustomed to discounts.

And that's the rub. We talked about it on the show. The experts wrote about it in Ad Age and other trade journals. Folks discussed it on Twitter. For the last year we've been saying that discounting at the expense of brand investment will always hurt a brand in the long run. Now we're seeing the proof.

Just think about it. The recession hit and everybody, whether they had a job or not, pulled back spending in fear. If folks didn't loose their jobs, they were afraid of losing their jobs and everyone got gun shy about big purchases. So most retailers and manufacturers, acting in desperation, started discounting in order to woo people back to the stores. For the most part it worked. Folks operated at a reduced profit, but the healthy operations managed to keep product rolling off shelves. Trouble is, now that the recession is over, all this marketing to the lowest common denominator — the lesser part of the population that was really out of work and really on hard times — dragged the rest of the population down with it. It may take years (if ever) for brands to increase profit margins back to pre-recession levels. 

Now let's turn to my favorite example, Apple, and we see a different story. They didn't discount. They didn't pull back brand spending. One could say that they may have even ramped up branding efforts and product introductions. And while it's true to say that not every brand is as cool as Apple, my retort is, "Why not? Why can't every brand be as cool as Apple?" Let's face it, Apple makes computers. Computers are a commodity item now. Yet Apple makes them special. They make them cool. So why can't other commodity operations do the same?

The drive for immediacy in terms of profit, rather than long term investment in brand position has left far too many companies exposed to economic risk. So when the recession hit, these lackluster branding efforts revealed themselves as less than useless and all that was left for survival were discount tactics. Which, of course, just served to exacerbate the situation in the end.

Karen's point about the two groups hammers home that knee-jerk responses to advertising are foolish. In this case, everyone was affected by recession news, but the greater portion of people still had money to spend, as Apple proves time and again. So brands pulling back on ad spends in favor of discounting ended up creating a short-term fix that ignored the huge potential that was out there. It was like the investor who pulls his mutual fund at the first sign of downturn, only to watch the market come back without him. He saved some short-term losses, but he missed out on the long-term gains. Some investments are meant to be slow, steady and long-term and branding is one of those investments.

The Press Release As Junk Mail

In the direct marketing world we often joke about being called "junk mailers" and say instead that we deliver, "targeted, personalized solicitations." But we all know why people think of direct mail as junk mail. It's because no matter how well crafted and targeted the best of direct mail can be, it's drowned out by the deluge of untargeted, poorly produced, creatively devoid mail pieces that flood our households. It doesn't make direct mail bad as a tactic, but it lowers the effectiveness and perceptions of the entire industry.

The exact same thing is happening today to the PR world because of the press release.

The History Of The Release

The press release was created as news about a product or service. Notice the operative word, "news." It wasn't created for promotion or selling people on an idea, but to inform journalists about interesting facts regarding what was happening at a company.

What's more, the release was not something everyone got. It was a document that was distributed one-on-one to journalists or influencers that either the PR expert had cultivated a relationship with or who requested this information. It was rarely, if ever, sent blind. 

Further, it was never intended to be the first line of the pitch. Indeed, it was often little more than a follow-up to the true work of picking up the phone to talk to a journalist about why the story mattered. After all, it's called public "relations" for a reason — it's about relationships, not promotions.

How Email Created Laziness

Admittedly, people have always bent the rules and there was always "that" PR rep who just mailed the release out to a hundred journalists. I'm not suggesting that PR is an exact science here. But generally people played fairly and there was a true symbiosis between the PR rep and the journalist. Then email happened and all bets were off.

Email made it possible for the PR practitioner to blast out a message to every known journalist in a database with a click of a button. And if 1% or 2% of them ran the story, the PR rep had a win. It was easy, it was fast and it was cheap.

It's also direct marketing at it's absolute worst.

Think about it: Would you just send a direct mail solicitation out for Viagra to everyone in a 5 ZIP code area of the US? No! It would be a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of effort and may even offend a bunch of people along the way.

Direct marketers understand that if we don't target, we truly are "junk mail." And the best PR practitioners know the exact same thing is true in public relations.

Promotion Instead Of News

At the same time that email blasts of releases were become the norm, came a change in the content. This was no longer a relationship, after all. This was pure email promotion. So the tone of releases changed. Certain words started to slip in. "Outstanding." "Best-of-Breed." "Super-Amazing-Awesome!!!"

Suddenly the press release really was a direct piece. Even box mailers were created and freebies were sent out. It was if many PR agencies suddenly became B-to-B direct mailers and were trying to sell their story, rather than pitch a story. 

Now mind you, I don't think this is a bad thing. I love direct marketing. But when it totally replaces public relations, then you and I have a problem here. Because I love public relations too. And a box mailer sent out to every journalist on a mailing list is not PR.

The Debate Over The Release

Simon Dumenco's piece over at Ad Age has sparked a pretty vigorous debate on this subject and it's high time it happened. I'm a huge advocate of PR. I think it's a vastly undervalued component of the marketing pie. But laziness is killing both the perception of the discipline and the effectiveness of the programs.

I've been lucky enough to learn PR from some of the best and brightest in the industry — both big names and rank and file. And from these relationships I've learned that PR is much more than events and promos and getting your product on the Today Show. It's the hard work of getting to know the people who can influence your story and being as much a help to them as they are a help to you. 

Do you regularly feed information to your contacts that have nothing to do with your clients? You should be. Why should they help you if you aren't helping them? And do you try to craft angles on your stories that can actually help them get attention and maybe a promotion? Why not? They have a life too.

The debate shouldn't be over whether the press release is dead. It's not. The debate is over how the press release should be used. And I, for one, think there are plenty of direct marketers out here already.

Influencers Are Hiding In Forums

Long-time listeners will know that I believe forums are the most under-appreciated venue in social media. One might say that the forums — as well as Usenet and the bulletin board systems before them — are the true grandfathers of social media. And the fact that they are still around and thriving in force after 20 (sometimes 30) years, shows they have a viability that is simply unmatched in the digital realm. MySpace didn't invent online conversation. Nor did Facebook or Twitter. Open, online conversation was born in forum spaces, where people intensely interested in common conversations would gather to discuss. And while other systems and platforms have come and gone, all trying to reinvent the wheel, forums have continued to march on and even proliferate in thousands of different guises. Even today it is not the Linked In Questions space or the Facebook "Like" page or even the blog comments that are getting meaningful two-way conversation. That honor predominantly belongs to forums.

Why Forums Are Valuable To Marketers

We talk about the value of Facebook and how friends will recommend to friends, and that leveraging a person's social graph will increase the likelihood of extending sales among like-minded people. But here's the problem: Even my wife and I don't agree on everything, let alone my college roommate or the guy I met at a conference. So how "like-minded" are these social graphs? Probably not very much.

Yet a person who commits to a forum is intensely interested in the subject(s) being discussed. They wouldn't have joined if they didn't want to specifically discuss the topics at hand. It's not like a Facebook or a Twitter where you join to either connect with people you know or enjoy an ever-widening circle of friends with a range of interests. This is not a group formed by and for relationship, but one created to facilitate commonality.

Let me put it bluntly: This is where the most intensely interested, loud-mouthed advocates on any subject known to man hang out. Whether it's video games or parenting, you'll find a wealth of key influencers. No Facebook drama to deal with. No overwhelming slew of tweets to navigate. A forum takes you right to the heart of any given online conversation. And the opinions formed here make their way out to all the rest of those venues.

And tell me again why you're ignoring forums?

Putting The Transparency-Gospel To The Test

Now to be fair, I know the challenges here. While forums are the havens of intense conversation, they are also vigilant against the threat of marketing. We all know the horrors stories of forums rising up with a mighty ban hammer against the unwary marketer. And so we shy away from them.

What most marketers don't realize, though, is that in every case this happens it's not in response to the marketing itself, but to irrelevancy.

The absolute, rule-number-one no-no of forums is irrelevancy. Topics and threads are set up for a reason — to stay on topic. Moderators police threads and regularly shift posts from one thread to another, all in an effort to combat the dreaded monster of irrelevance. So when you look at a forum as your cheap way to post about a deal on video games, you shatter relevance in the conversation.

But forums don't hate marketers. They just hate marketing copy. And if you find a forum or thread discussing something of specific interest to you or your product, most forums would totally welcome you into the conversation. In fact, you'd be a hero as the knowledgeable expert (or willing scapegoat, depending on the conversation).

You see, we talk a good game in the social space about being transparent, but it's real easy to pretend transparency when all you have to do is write a blog post, write a Facebook status update or answer a few comments. But forums demand true transparency and a much more intense level of interaction. Which is probably the real reason behind why most organizations only offer passing attention to them.

Yet there's no denying that forums continue to offer us the best source of finding key-influencers on a range of subjects. And we're not talking bloggers here, who will take our message back to their 100,000 monthly uniques. We're talking everydaypeople who will take our message back offline, where 90% of all social interactions still happen. (Thank you Keller Fay Group for the research on that statistic.)

So take some time to revisit how you are approaching the social space and take a look at your forum outreach. It's hard work, but just like building any key-influencer relationship it will always pay off in spades in the end.

The Duke Hartman Center

Click Here To Listen.

I had the most amazing experience earlier today. Helen Klein Ross (more famously known at @adbroad or @bettydraper) was at Duke University to deliver a lecture on social media and advertising. So I, not one to pass up the opportunity to meet past guests of The BeanCast, drove over to the campus early this morning to meet her. Helen is an amazing person. If you've not had an opportunity to meet her, make the time. She is witty, engaging, smart and truly delightful. 

Well, to make a long story longer, we had a wonderful breakfast and then she asked if I wanted to see the Hartman Center with her.

Jacqueline Reid, Director at the center, had arranged private access to what may be the world's biggest collection of advertising history. The archive at Duke contains nearly the entire archive of J. Walter Thompson's storied history, as well as briefs, research and work from other agencies. And they continue to grow, soon adding another one of the big and storied agency players as a contributor to the archive. 

The collection is rich and amazing. I saw ads for dozens of brands throughout the 20th century and that only scratched the surface of what they have. I saw brands at their best and brands at their absolute racist and sexist worst. But unlike many Internet scans, these were actual proof, many times attached to original documentation and strategy discussions.

To say the center blew my mind is an understatement. Just a few minutes there and you realize how much advertising has been a reflection of culture around the world. 

I write so much here, because the ad industry needs to know about what's going on at Duke. If you are an agency, you need to be seriously considering donating your archive to the center for preservation. They charge no more than your internal archival costs and provide a chance to preserve the history that our work represents. And if you are a researcher, movie producer or just an agency looking for historical perspective, the Hartman Center represents the first place you should look for information.

As Jacqueline points out in the interview, a little study can show that woman have historically played more of a role in shaping advertising than many have realized. And in terms of historical data, only they knew what colors were used for the light of the Great White Way's many advertising signs when the producers of King Kong came looking for answers. 

So make an appointment the next time you're in Durham, NC. You'll love every minute of the experience.

What Makes A Good Agency Website

I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with a very interesting lady. She's been part of a team that built several iterations of an agency. She's bought in, sold out, restarted and built the current agency into a multi-city operation, so she knows a few things about the agency world. But one thing she wasn't sure about was her agency's website.

I could see why. It wasn't that it wasn't well produced. (It was.) Nor was it that it didn't impress. (It did.) The reason it failed was as simple as my jaw hitting the ground when I walked into her shop. Nothing and I mean nothing on her website had prepared me for the scale of her operation. From office to scope of work, I had no idea. It was truly impressive. Her website had conveyed none of this effectively.

In hindsight, their online effort clearly stated what they did. Trouble is I'm jaded. I've seen one too many lies or fluffery on an agency website to believe anything I read on them anymore. So I was shocked by how grand it all was. 

So she asked me to tell her who is doing it right. She wanted to see examples. Who was clearly presenting their capabilities and work in a manner that made it genuine and believable. And for my part, I added in the need to find sites that were proving through their thinking that the portfolio was truly a testimonial to their capabilities and not a memorial to folks who have long since departed. 

Some interesting side note before I go to my list. Nearly every agency I visited started with "About Us." For a business that preaches it's about the customer, this struck me as odd. Also, while I reluctantly agree that a portfolio is important, I found portfolio examples much more interesting if they were married with content pieces like blog posts or research papers. (Case studies counted, but were not nearly as impressive as tying the work to thought leadership pieces as examples.) The work attracted me, but the thinking made me stop and consider what the work meant. And finally, only one site (R/GA's) had a mobile optimized page and it really wasn't that good. That speaks volumes about the mobile expertise we all crow about.

That aside, here's a list of 3 agency websites that I personally like, along with a couple honorable mentions. This is not a "top 3" or definitive list in any way. These are just some examples I have found so far and I'm still willing to accept more for the list. Thanks to to Rupal Parekh, Chris Houchens, David Horne, Shawn Hartley and Scott Crawford for their help on this.

Best of The Best

Mullen.com - Clearly they get it. They have the usual portfolio and capabilities, but the most prominent emphasis on the site is an ongoing stream of thinking. You see clearly that the work being show is not just memorial, but testimonial. Examples of work flash up at the top and then below are recent news, blog posts, thought leadership pieces and more to back it up. It's not flashy. It's just clean, informational, interesting and engaging. It looks easy to update and the content always appears fresh every time I go.

BigSpaceship.com -- Big Spaceship's site is very similar to Mullen's in function and yet you can't say they are the same. People read, engage and are comfortable with these WordPress style layouts that automatically update and sort news. I like how they took this knowledge and made it their own. Clearly this homepage is being fed stories actively and sorting them based on if they are news or a blog post. This clear demarcation allows the site to function both as a destination for agency information and as an interesting content source to repeatedly visit. The rest of the site then clearly communicates what they are about without fluff. Very effective and engaging.

RGA.com -- There was some debate about this site. I personally like it. In one page they offer everything you need to make a decision. There's no need to navigate through the site. You get all your questions answered here. I also like the wall of video presentations about capabilities. It's an interesting and fun approach to meet people expressing ideas rather than just reading about those ideas. But some felt it hyped the agency too much without impressing. Debatable.

Honorable Mentions

CPBgroup.com - This is a great idea that is being poorly executed. They presented a site that is constantly changing content and revealing the conversation going on around the agency. Rather than them telling clients what they are about, they allowed the online chatter (good and bad) to be displayed on their site. It's bold and risky, but effective. Trouble is the content is not pushing thinking as much as fluff PR. But I like the concept very much.

Hookusa.com This one is very cool and interesting without losing sight of the information. I have trouble recommending such a Flash-intensive approach since it dies on most mobile devices, but I have to admit that it delivers on the eye candy in terms of navigation. I would want to see more abilities to refresh the homepage every time you see it so that it isn't such a one-and-done experience. I also don't want to have to dig so hard to get to what is essentially some good content.

An Open Letter To Apple: Why Selling Podcast Stats Makes Sense

Dear Apple/iTunes Executives:

I know that podcasts make you no money. I know it was an act of good will to even give us podcasters access to your iTunes store in the first place. However, I have a business case to make about why you should consider offering podcasters access to the statistics you gather about their listings in your store.

The premise is simple: You already collect the data. (You have to be collecting the data.) So why not sell us access to this data on a subscription basis? Consider these facts:

• Unlike data from other portions of the store where it is to your advantage to, shall we say, "control" access, there is no such reason with our data. You make no money from us now, so there is no benefit to obscuring our stats.

• There have to be 250,000 shows listed by now, if not more. But even by some old stats of 125,000 shows, there is definitely an active community of participants which can be pursued.
  

• If even a fraction of this audience wants stats (let's say 10,000 shows), at $5 a month that's $600,000 a year — just for putting an accessible front end on the data you're already collecting!

• With minimal marketing (say including an offer of stats with the listing of a show or via email blasts to existing listers) it is easily conceivable that you could quickly capture five or ten times that number — which I feel compelled to remind you is $3 million to $6 million dollars for just opening a front end web page tied to the data you already have.

I seriously hope you will consider this proposal. The direct access to your subscribe/unsubscribe stats as well as page view data would be enormously beneficial to those of us making a business of podcasting. It would help us tailor content to the desires of our audiences, it would help us justify media buys to advertisers and it would solidify your position as a singular destination for podcasting. 

Thank you for your time. Please feel free to contact me at bob[at]coolbeansgroup[dot]com if you would like to comment in any way.

Bob Knorpp, Host of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

Frequency By Relationship

Frequency is a question that plagues all levels of marketing. How often do we send a message to a prospect before effectiveness begins to diminish? How often does a customer have to buy before they become loyal? How often do we reach out to an existing customer before customer service becomes good old fashioned stalking?

Frequency is supposed to be determined by the math. Through controlled testing we're supposed to arrive at an optimal number of connections that deliver a peak in the bell curve of desired response. Albeit, most of the time marketers just sit around in a room and guess using the "focus-group-of-one" principal of, "What would I like?" But still, there are formulas out there and they work.

Trouble is, does determining frequency based purely on the math leave a lot of opportunity on the table?

The Intangible of Relationship

Once again marketers would do well to pay attention to something that sale executives have always known instinctively: Relationship lengthens the bell curve.

A sales person knows that the frequency you can communicate with someone goes up the deeper the relationship you have with them. If you know their kids names and they are sharing what their summer vacation plans are, you might be able to drop a line every couple days. You're friends. The relationship is genuine. So there's no reason not to have higher frequency of contact.

However, if the prospect or customer is stony or saying, "I'll think about it," you have to carefully space out communications. In this case, more frequent communications can get quickly annoying and you'll lose the ability to build that deeper relationship.

Now there are certainly mathematical indicators that could help us understand frequency in these situations, but in the end math can't tell the full story. There is an intangible at play here. There is unquantifiable intuition at work when it comes to relationships and relationship building.

So my question is, are we short-changing our potential ROI and marketing to too small of an audience when we don't invest in relationship-building first?

More Than Social Marketing

This is the part where most people trot out their social marketing evangelism. I'm not going to do that. Because if you read my blog recently you know I'm beginning to believe there isn't any such thing. Social is a media, not a tactic. So saying "social marketing" is like saying "TV marketing" without specifying whether we're launching a brand campaign, an infomercial or going for a product placement on The Today Show. What I'm saying instead is that by any means necessary, including through the use of social media, we need to be cultivating better lead strategies.

Let's take the example of Kmart. Long before the Rain Man uttered the iconic words "Kmart sucks," I despised this store. It represented a childhood of being forced to go there with my parents to endure flickering fluorescent lighting and endless racks of junk. Even today when I know that they hold some of the best deals on video games, I still won't shop there. 

Then along comes their KmartGamer Twitter account. It's not there to convince me Kmart doesn't suck. (Well, it probably is, but they don't say that.) Nor is it just there to spew an RSS feed of sale information. It's there to engage gamers in conversation about games. They are running chat sessions, they are talking about PAX (don't worry, it's a gamer thing) and they generally show interest and commonality with gamers. 

No amount of marketing before this would have ever convinced me to step foot in a Kmart. That's how damaged their reputation was with me. Now, however, I might consider it. Maybe. I'm not committing to anything here. But you get my point. Purely by the numbers I was out of the demo. In a blanket, untargeted mailing I would have thrown out every piece of mail. But now, Kmart's audience just widened a tiny bit. That mailer wouldn't be thrown out. I might actually look at what they have to offer.

Now imagine further, if Kmart invested in a mailing that didn't try to sell me anything right away. Imagine if they reached out for a local gaming tournament. Or maybe they just sent me an email inviting me to write a post about my favorite game on a gamer blog. What if they made me a founding member of a Gamer Klub? What they would really be doing is making me even more ready to read their solicitations.

My point is that relationship building, built into every aspect of a marketer's strategy, opens up the audience for greater possibilities. It may cost more and deliver less results upfront, but over time it creates greater ROI than simply going by modeling and targeting existing buyer or simply competing on price. 

Building Both Sales And Potential Sales

I openly admit that you can succeed just from going by the numbers. If you know that "x" audience will see an ad and "y" will be impressed and "z" will respond to an offer you send, then you know how much to spend and what results you will get from your marketing campaign. And while most marketers would love to raise that "x" number (Who wouldn't love a bigger budget?) and spend most of their time worrying about that "z" number, the "y" number is where real magic can happen. That's because "y" indicates what people think about you and how willing they are to even listen to your offer in the first place.

We covered an interesting story on this week's BeanCast about how PR shops are winning against digital shops for digital work. The article we were referring to for our discussion credited social expertise as the reason for this shift. After all, clients are looking for digital plans that embrace the social spectrum. But the panel saw it slightly different. 

Ultimately the focus of digital is moving from campaigns to ongoing communication strategies. It's my belief the reason for this comes down to everything I've said here in this post. A campaign gets you a sale. A communication plan buys you a sale and a relationship. And a relationship can buy you even more future sales by creating a customer who is more receptive to messaging. Just like the salesperson who knows her customer's kids by name, you have their trust and their ear.

This long term view of marketing makes a lot of sense to me. How about you?

The Story Of McDonalds.com

Want to know how far we've come in Internet branding? Consider this story from Wired Magazine, circa 1994.

I may be dating myself, but this article is what convinced me of the importance of online branding. It defined everything I thought about marketing for the next decade and half. I wish it had also convinced me to snap up some domain names, but it certainly got me in hot water with superiors for pushing ideas that they later stole and used for their own gain 3 years down the line.

But I digress.

This article by Josh Quittner chronicles his attempts to contact someone — anyone — at McDonald's corporate who may have heard of the Internet. He tells them point blank that their domain is in jeopardy and that even a competitor could register it. From the beginning of the article:

I'm waiting for a call back from McDonald's, the hamburger people. They're trying to find me someone - anyone - within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.

It's true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com either.

Yet. 

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago.

Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.

I explained a little bit about what the Big Thing is, and how it works, and about the Net Name Gold Rush that's going on. I told her how important domain names are on the Internet ("Kind of like a phone number. It's where you get your e-mail. It's part of your address."), and I explained that savvy business folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of: their own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and
silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like roadkill.com.

"Some companies," I told Jane Hulbert, "are even registering the names of their competitors."

"You're kidding," she said. 

I am not, I told her...

Yet instead of registering it, they let it go. So he registered it. I believe the expletive I remember from the piece have been edited out since the original publication, but I distinctly remember the line of jubilation: "I'm am now Ronald @ F***ing McDonalds.com!"

He even ends the pieces with a call for comments about what he should do with his new prize: 

Got a suggestion? Send it to ronald@mcdonalds.com.

A classic Wired piece, to be sure. But it's also a great warning. The next big thing is always with us. You just can't see it yet. So if you get a crazy call from an oddball journalist, please pay attention.

Preroll Gone Horribly Wrong

I've been watching a lot of streaming online video over the last week. I've probably watched more in the past week than I have in the past year. So this is the first time I've had to deal extensively with the automated ad serving that is part and parcel of the online video model.

Here's my problem: I understand that ads are necessary to support these video sites, but why have we thrown out all sensibility in regard to ad placement?

I was watching a rather gruesome anime series about a serial killer and the doctor who is trying to stop him. There's blood. There's child abuse. There's alcoholism. There's racist clashes. And the first day I was watching it I saw the same Kraft Macaroni and Cheese ad every 3 minutes like clockwork. 10 episodes. That 60 times. The same interminably long 30-second ad.

I know ever line of that commercial. I know every cut. I know what's happening in the background. And I know that when she raises her right eyebrow we go to the camera card. And invariably I would go from cute, sassy kid back to a murder victim lying in a pool of blood.

My choice of entertainment aside, if this was traditional TV I doubt that Kraft or it's media buying agency would ever willingly buy time in such a series. I also know that they certainly wouldn't have thrown out all the rules about frequency and run the same ad over and over again until I would sooner gouge my eyes out than buy their new Baked Macaroni and Cheese. Yet, there I was watching the same 30 second ad, over and over and over again.

To be fair, on subsequent days the ad mix was a little better. I might actually get three different commercials within a given half hour. But I started to see a pattern and it became clear to me who was getting it and who was not. Online video is not a cable buy. You can't just buy an ad-serving network, specify a few sites and expect good results. You have to anticipate certain things. So I compiled a few rules of thumb from my own observations:

• Know Where The Ad Is Running - On the surface a buy for Jell-o or Kraft that will include an anime site may sound good. But the juxtaposition of kids and kids dying was extremely disturbing and it did not reflect well on the brand. Be hyper aware of how your content will run.
  

• 15 Seconds - These are not broadcast commercials. I was incredibly engaged with each and every ad, but my patience was thinner. I had a much higher opinion of the ads that got me back to the content quickly and I can still name every ad and their brand proposition.

• Creativity Matters More Than Ever - Engagement is being forced with this model. So understand that if the spot is not intensely interesting it's worse than bad. The worst of the ads always came with a sigh from me and a gritting of my teeth as I had to endure them. 
  

• Mix It Up - You have to assume that your ad may run repeatedly if the ad volume is low on the service. This means that your ad may be shown up to 12 times an hour. So alternate ads. Snickers did an excellent job of alternating two 15s during their buy.
  

• Be Smart About Response - Ultimately I would never have clicked on any of these ads. There was always the choice to click (and Pensacola tourism even asked me to click), but no one was making me an offer that deserved me losing my place in the video. So if you're not making an offer, don't measure success by clicks. You won't get any. But don't be afraid to experiment with targeted offers. I might just have clicked if you enticed me just right.

• I Blamed The Ads - My final point is really just a hazard of the territory. The ads would not auto-serve on the site I was viewing. I had to click play for every ad to begin. And then when the show would freeze, I just KNEW that the ad serving was to blame as I had to reload and find my place in the video again. Technically there's not much we can do until the sites and the ad servers get their act together. But be aware that you may be causing your audience stress. This is where I found a surprise. Despite the data showing preroll as best, in this context the preroll ads were most annoying. Having to reload the page and see that 30 second HP ad, obviously bought as the preroll placement, made me irritated at HP, not the site.

All in all I'm still a fan of the model. The potential good of running ad during online videos far outweighs the bad. But clearly we have to rethink both the creation and the delivery of these ads if we want to get the full benefit of the platforms.

What are your thoughts?

They Want To Get Married In Your Store

T.J. Maxx had an interesting proposal recently. (See what I did there?) 

A loyal T.J. Maxx customer, Lisa Satayut, decided that she wanted to have her wedding in the shoe aisle of one of their Michigan stores. So she wrote to the corporate office asking permission. I image there was a bit of head-scratching at first, but obviously the PR possibilities were immediately evident. After all, 

Bass Pro Shops

 is always in the news for their redneck weddings. Why the hell not?

So ultimately permission was granted. Wedding on. PR cranked up. Interviews galore.

Here's the problem. Miss Satayut came off as bat-sh*t crazy. I mean either she was a badly cast plant by T.J. Maxx, thought she needed to help promote the hell out of the store or really was the demon of all consumerism she came off as, but any way you look at it this woman was not playing with a full deck. In every interview she was practically salivating with giddy glee as she looked at the shoes surrounding her. Frankly, if she is a representative sample of the average T.J. Maxx customer, I can think of no reason why I would ever want to set foot in one of their stores again.

Further, in all the national press I saw about the event they never mentioned that the wedding was between two reporters. The newlyweds were Michigan Morning Sun sport reporter Drew Ellis and former reporter Lisa Satayut. I don't know about you, but their stature as media representatives seems relevant to me, mainly because it calls into question whether any of this was genuine. Was this a stunt the local paper cobbled together with the local T.J. Maxx to secure more ad dollars? I'd like to know.

But that aside, I do want to say if the event was indeed genuine I can't blame T.J. Maxx for jumping on the opportunity. But I think the way this whole thing went down is a warning to brands who get involved with things like this. Essentially you are handing the keys to your brand to a person who we know from the beginning has to be a little off-kilter (she wants her wedding day in a shoe department, folks) or may have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with you. Giving them too much voice could be disastrous.

So if you are tempted to allow a similar event in one of your stores, all I'm saying is ask lots of questions and keep control of the message. I now pronounce you brand and brand manager. You may kiss the slingbacks.