Making Invisible Content Visible

Is your content invisible?

This is a question that plagues me. Because while each episode of The BeanCast is filled with great information and fascinating debates, none of this is natively discoverable. You can certainly piece together the fact that a certain person was on the show and was involved in a specific discussion because of the show notes I post, but the things that were said and the tenor of the conversation is mostly lost to search.

This dilemma is only going to increase as video and image-based content further eclipses text as the de facto standard of communication on the Internet. Currently we rely on keywords in descriptions to generate awareness for our visual posts. But to truly optimize views we need to be much more aggressive. Here are just a few ideas:

Sharing

From the moment we plan and script our visual and audio content, we need to be thinking about what makes it shareable. Making visual content discoverable in a social world is dependent on viewers/listeners sharing insights in text that is associated with your link. Always be thinking about what will motivate your audience to share, then provide the easiest possible means for them to do so.

Transcripting

I’ve struggled with this need. It seems like a frivolous extra cost that will hardly ever be read or used. But associating your visual and audio content with complete transcripts provides you with a wealth of search value and opens up more of the content to discoverability. It’s also another content resource that can be shared and attributed to you, so it’s worth the effort. (Talking to myself here as well.)

Discussing

Creating conversation around your content, through comments on posts and discussion in social media, is a great way to introduce volumes of searchable keywords. Just make sure to balance these conversations to include places that map to all possible areas of discoverability. Facebook and Twitter are important for discussion, but Google is blind to this in-bound linking and keyword data. So make sure to include conversations in places that all the search paths can see.

Promoting

Old media still matters. One of my biggest traffic spikes in listenership came from a promotional link associated with an article I had published in the print edition of Ad Age. If something is said in your visual/audio content that is relevant to a news cycle, get the word out through your public relations channels, packaged in a resource that journalists and producers can use. 

So what other ideas do you have? This is an ongoing discussion in its own right. So how would you generate added search value to your own visual and audio content? The comment box is below, so have at it.

Scheduling Posts for Social Marketing

Everybody who's anybody in social media schedules posts. It's just a fact. And whether you love it, accept it or hate it, scheduling is here to stay out of the pure expediency of having to juggle social reputation against a job and a life.

So, what's the best way to handle scheduling posts? Here are a few helpful suggestions to keep it from getting annoying for the rest of us.

Stop Filling the Day

There is a notable difference between those who schedule posts to appear all day long and those that are simple spreading out a lot of content.

If your strategy is simply to have five, ten or fifteen posts during the day, you're probably combing through sites looking for links that you may or may not even be taking the time to read. You're just filling up space — and with half a billion tweets a day, let me assure you we don't need the space filled.

However, if you really do have things to say and interesting links to share, by all means spread it out. We don't need you to clump up your posts either, and frankly we appreciate having time to react to each separate statement. 

The difference comes down to whether you are piling it on or spreading it out. Scheduling needs to be a service to your readers, not a tool for making sure you are seen during each and every hour of the day to maintain your Klout score.

Schedule To Be Present

Spreading out your posts is all fine and good. But please also make sure you are scheduling these posts with a mind toward when you will be available to interact with the comments and conversations that may result.

This suggestion also applies to cross posting to multiple networks. If you aren’t around to interact with a post when it happens, you break the illusion of spontaneity and you reduce the value of being on social media in the first place. 

Set alarms. Plan for breaks. Do whatever is necessary to only schedule posts that coincide with you or a team member’s availability.

Meet Your Audience Halfway

A lot has been written about dayparting social posts. This is the practice of choosing a timeframe for content to appear that most closely matches the time of day that the content’s audience will be available. Buddy Media’s report from last year offers some good advice on this subject.

It is less important to schedule hourly or some other evenly spaced posting plan, than it is to think about when your audience is available to read. Are they consistent lunchtime audience? Are evenings after 9p usually best? 

Think logically about your posting timeframes. It’s a lot like media buying. If you do your research, you’ll always find the slots that make the most sense for your audience.

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Your Celebrity Sports Endorser is a Cheating Doper

Okay, folks. It's time for a reality check:

It's quite probably that nearly all professional athletes take illegal, performance-enhancing drugs.

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying "Bob! No! It can't be so!" But trust me on this one. If I can't take a run through the park at age 45 without needing ibuprofen in the morning, these men and women can't possibly be punishing their bodies for 12 hours every day without some serious medical trickery.

Let's get it through our heads once and for all: Hiring a sports celebrity as an endorser is like putting Bill Clinton in charge of your ethics committee — they look nice enough on television, but eventually they're in the news trying to explain how they never had relations with that cute, young steroid.

So why is it that every time we have one of these cats fall from grace, we in adland start to question ourselves? Should we have hired him? Is it worth the bad publicity? All I can say is, Who gives a shit?

If brands were really worried about this stuff, there would be no celebrity sports endorsers. Seriously. You think they don't know what they're getting into? Of course they know! They probably have a list as long as their arms of all the hookers and booze they've bought these guys over the years. And there's no doubt that they know everything about the medical condition of the athletes they hire. After all, you wouldn't even buy a puppy without getting it checked out by a vet first. You're definitely not going to pay some dude $2 million without at least knowing if his heart's about to explode from injecting some other dude's oxygenated blood. (And what's up with that crap, anyway? But I digress.)

So it's not a question of whether or not these guys are worth the trouble. They obviously sell a lot of bizarre, electronically enhanced footwear and lightly sweetened sugar water. It's simply a wager. We are betting that they will never get caught and we pay them enough money to make sure that they keep it that way, all while giving ourselves plausible deniability. End of story.  

So yeah, real sad that Lance Armstrong had his tour wins pulled. But enough of the funereal retrospectives on his role in advertising. At most it should be a paragraph under account moves: "Radio Shack loses bet with Armstrong. Seeking more reliable doper for future campaigns."

Social Media Is A Great Big Pyramid Scheme

I don't care how you slice it, the entire social media marketing infrastructure is so similar to the structure of a Ponzi scheme that it's maddening no one has pointed it out before. Instead, every time I bring it up to my brethren of self-appointed social marketing leaders, I am greeted with immediate and vehement rejection of the idea. Which really does nothing for their case, because I've seen enough Dateline episodes where they confront pyramid scheme guys to know this is exactly what pyramid scheme guys do — they deny everything vehemently.

Look, I'm not suggesting this is about stealing money. No one is sitting at the top of a pyramid in the social space asking people to send in their life savings and recruit their friends. No, social media experts just sit at the top of a pyramid asking people to send in $19.95 for their latest book and ask folks to tell their friends to buy the book. They are very different models, as you can obviously see. So I understand the resistance to the concept.

Certainly this can't possibly be a pyramid scheme when millions of dollars aren't being exchanged, right? In fact, we don't hardly trade in money at all except for the consulting fees we charge to people outside of the pyramid, so that no one inside the pyramid has to foot the bill.

So, how does our pyramid work? Well let me tell you, it's ingenious! We have invented our very own imaginery monetary system called, "social currency." So you see, everything is on the up and up. We aren't stealing money. We're just trading imaginery and relatively valueless currency in order to get Internet-famous. Awesome!

It's really simple. The top tier makes all the big bucks with speaking fees, book sales and consulting gigs because they have the biggest audience. Some of them even know what they are talking about, which is good because if they didn't, I would have to go shoot myself.

Then there's the next tier (that's me!) who speak for free and have a relatively big audience, but who mainly feed the top tier by interviewing them on our blogs and podcasts and Twitter chats and webinars. But we get all the books from the top tier for free so we can write blog posts about them. So there's that.

Finally there is the bottom tier. They usually have like 60 followers and buy all the books that the upper two tiers are hawking. Someone has to fund this crap!

And the best part is the pitch! This is great. We tell everyone that good social media is listening and interacting with your customer. The customer has the power and building relationships with your customer is the most important thing. And we tell people all about this by pushing out impersonal messages to our 200,000 followers whom we don't interact with unless a follower has a high enough Klout score to warrant our time. 

No, this isn't the structure of a pyramid scheme at all! What was I thinking?

Now you might imagine that my sarcasm (yes, literalnet, this post is dripping in it) might mean that I am bitter about the great social media marketing pyramid scheme. But really I'm not. I find it hysterically funny. I'm more bothered by the fact that other folks in the social media juggernaut are not willing to admit it with me. I mean really, what's the harm. So it's a pyramid scheme. So what? No one is getting hurt and the value we get out of being pseudo-famous in our own little ecosystem is kind of pathetic anyway. So why not be blunt?

Maybe I should write a book about this. Because that's what the social media world needs — another book.

I Just Want To Have Sex With Your Banner Ad

Digiday recently gathered a whole bunch of ad people — many of whom are friends, so I'll play nice here. (Well, mostly nice.) Then they asked them the question, "Are the days of the banner ad numbered." To which most of them replied, "No," in long-winded, caveated, asterisked and bank-disclosure-like answers about how we need to do banner ads better to save them.

God! This sounds just like the way ad people have always talked about their direct mail brethren. You know direct mail, right? The stuff that no one in their right mind would ever be caught dead doing, and why the hell would you be wasting your career on that crap? You know — the stuff that works.

For years I've listened to the talk-down-their-nose, snide remarks of ad people snorting and sneering about .4% response rate — like you can call that effective! Or they would say, "If we're going to do direct, we're going to do it the right way!" implying that the creatively inferior work was the real cause of these supposedly dismal results that were, nonetheless, generating provable profits.

So here is this article with everyone just assuming that the banner is dead because it's getting .5% response on average and that it needs creative genius or better targeting or any number of new front-end solutions to make it work, without a single person in the group ever mentioning that there's absolutely no legitimate reason for us not to be making millions with that kind of response rate!

The banners aren't the problem with the banners. The problem with banners is that, just like the article, everyone is ignoring the after-click experience.

Imagine you go on a date with a really hot person. Everything about them is perfect. Then you go back to their place, they undress and reveal a web form, and in order to have sex with them you have to fill out the registration dialog box, which once completed will take you back to the restaurant where you first met them, where you can then begin your search anew as they now hide among a large group of Amway sellers who just rolled in from the convention center.

THIS is the problem with banner ads!

You can crow all you want about how we need to employ these cool, new IAB standards to bring banners back from the dead, but if your banner is leading to your stupid homepage you won't be getting that sale. Or sex, for that matter.

Conversion is the issue. And the last time I checked, conversion typically has nothing to do with the ad itself. Clicks are usually just qualified leads. Conversion happens when people make a purchase...from a real person...or on your site....not from your banner ad. And surprise! Response channels are mostly Borked these days, so we're hovering around .001% conversion — which is another way of say we ain't making any damn money.

In the past we could funnel everything into a single call or mail center. Then all the 800 numbers and mail centers fed into a single, manageable and sustainable fulfillement channel. But today, most digital campaigns assume that because the Website is our online presence, we can just throw the traffic there through a redirect and we'll manage it all later. It completely ignores the fact that a web hit isn't a dang business reply card. The web site is a user experience. And it sucks. Like really sucks. I mean, seriously bad.

So please, no more crowing about how banners are dead. We've proven that a plain white envelope with a sticker pulls better than your ad-in-the-mail travesty, and we can also prove that the dancing lady animated-gif banner for debt relief is still pulling quite well compared to your page take-over. I like better creative and targeting as much as the next guy. But I'd also like just once to click on a banner and be taken to the item featured in the ad. 

I'd also like to have sex. So call me.

No One Wants To Read Your Agency Blog

This article in digiday last week has really gotten me thinking about the subject of agency blogs — so much so that I covered it on both The BeanCast for this week (5/14) and on The 2 Minute Rundown for today (5/15).

The basic premise of the article is that agencies are ditching their blogs in favor of other forms of social media presence, like Facebook and Twitter. And as usual with such an inflammatory subject, it ignited the usual round of blogging-purist commentary about the wonders, joys and business advantages of blogging.

Here's my problem: While I agree with all the specific points made about how blogging is good for business and how any company that disagrees has their head up their ass, why are we all shocked that most agencies are living, breathing examples of head-up-assery? I mean seriously, why are we even fighting this battle?

Agencies abandoning blogging is just a practical admission that the entire culture of advertising is working against everything that blogging represents. They absolutely should be killing their blogs, because they aren't willing to do the things necessary to fix them. 

First of all, blogs are written by people, not agencies. This scares the death out of most big agencies and the people who work at them. Letting a person from within the ranks build up their own reputation and express their invidiual opinions on a subject is just crazy talk! My god! Someone might see this crap and hire the person away. Or worse yet, the person may say something that, god forbid, we oppose! We already have enough trouble with creative egos after Cannes. The last thing we need are strategists talking about the hit counts on their blog post!

And as an individual blogger, the last thing I want to do is put my name on something that could get me fired. The first thing you get when you walk into an agency these days is a list of all the stuff you can't say in social media. So there's no way I'm sticking my neck out in any way, shape or form. Instead I'm going to write generic posts like, "I really like this commercial," or "Look what our agency did." And when we do go deep on the blog, it's going to be a heavily vetted thought-leadership article — and even then we're going to try to submit it to Ad Age first, with the blog being the consolation prize when the piece gets rejected.

But all this aside, anonymously written "Facebooking" is simply a more natural fit for big-agency culture. Blogging is about being personally compelling on a deep level with a small audience and most ad agencies don't have patience for that kind of stuff. Next you'll be asking them not to bill client dinners back to the client! My god! What is wrong with you people?!?

Agencies trade in mass awareness, and blogs are like the bland, healthy salad your doctor says you should eat, contrasted with the deliciously juicy, calorie and cholesterol rich burgery goodness of Facebook Likes. Mmmmm! You're salivating already. I can tell.

The last thing we need are more half-hearted blogs from agencies. So let them eat Facebook already. Sheesh!

The Podcast That Got Dissed By Internet Week

Internet Week decided not to give me press credentials. Now you would think that I would be all irritated and petty about this fact. And you would probably be right. I can be a very shallow person. But frankly the humor of it all outweighs any blow to my ego. Because let's face it, the event that celebrates the great equalizer of media is seemingly only interested in extending press credentials to bigger news organizations and blogs. Now that's pretty damned funny — in a bitter, I-just-got-jilted kind of way.

I really can't blame them, though. I do, of course, but I can't. Internet Week understands all too well what the rest of us are too afraid to admit: blog posts and podcasts are nice, but what really works is TV and major news outlet coverage. Which only serves to highlight one of the biggest problems I have with digital as a whole. We crow about the power of the Internet, but we all know in our hearts that traditional media is still more important.

Word of mouth is powerful stuff, because it carries the recommendation of a trusted expert or friend. But it's inefficient if what you need is quick pick-up for promotion. That video that your friend passed to you may indeed go viral just through pass-along, but it sure helps when the Today Show picks it up and suddenly you have a million new folks passing it along.

Now again, let me reiterate that I understand my 30,000 targeted uniques a year are meaningless to an organization that needs to reach 100,000 or 250,000 minimum to move the needle. I get that. In fact, as I was punching the wall this morning I was saying to myself, "I understand. They are good people with a tough decision to make." But it occurs to me that we are reaching a decision point in Internet-land. It's reaching the point where we need to either believe in the rehetoric that the Internet is the replacement of traditional medias or we need to stop spouting this BS and start accepting that it's a glorified public access channel, no matter how over-valued Facebook becomes.

I can go either way with you on this. But of course my opinion apparently doesn't matter much, so I'll leave it up to all the old media brands playing and dominating on the Internet to decide which is right.

Gee, I wonder what they're gonna choose.

Dragon's Lair Is Better Than Your Interactive Video Ad

For those of an age (meaning old people) we remember a video arcade game called Dragon's Lair. And let me tell you, despite the fondness of nostalgia that colors everyone's memory of this game, it was the suckiest piece of kluged-together technology ever.

The thing was a glorified choose-your-own-adventure game that ran on a modified laser disc player, another failed technology of the 80s. So basically you used a joystick and pretended you controlled a pre-rendered scene in the game, made a choice and then waited for 20 seconds as the disc searched for the next scene and began playing another segment of beautiful animation that you had no control over.

Yet, however bad this game was back then, it was still better than most interactive video ads today. Because at least it tried to expand the horizons of what was possible.

Dragon's Lair captured imagination because it skipped right by the fact that video game graphics were dots and dashes on a CRT and envisioned the day when fullly rendered animations would replace outlined stick figures. It had the audacity to say it didn't matter that the technology wasn't up to the graphical processing challenge yet, it was still going to find a way to hack together a whole new way of experiencing interactive entertainment. And it didn't matter that the solution was broken and imperfect. It was still something completely new.

Meanwhile, fast forward to 2012, we have the most amazing arsenal of interactive tools ever assembled at our disposal and most agencies are still running their television ad as a pre-roll on YouTube, with a pop-up inserted that says, "Click here to find out more!"

Because as we know, what consumers really want from an ad is to click for another ad. 

Do we not have the capacity to envision a total consumer experience? Does the ad itself have to be a static entertainment onto which all we can do is layer interactivity after the fact? In television ads we usually start with an idea and then worry about making it happen. It really shouldn't be that much different with interactive video. We should be pushing the limits of the vendors, not the other way around.

Interactivity is not just an after-thought, it's the culmination of the idea that started in the ad. So for godsakes, start thinking about what you're going to do online before you hand off the broadcast reel to the digital folks and expect magic. Otherwise the most innovative thing in interactive video will continue to be the little counter that tells you exactly how long you have to suffer through that preroll before you can click away.

I love that little counter.

Those Pesky Compromises

Advertising is a competitive business. I get it. We all think that somehow our work is better than the next shop's work. But the surprising thing about the viciousness is that we assume it's a failure on the part of the other agency, when we all know the compromises that are often made to appease the client.

Have you not been at the meeting where you are informed the client insists on using puppies in the ad to market their $20,000 server array? Put aside that animal fur around servers is like smoking a cigar in a nursery, we are often put in situations like this where the idea is severely compromised by the whims of the people with the money.

Even if your compromises aren't so Technicolor, there are almost always creative compromises being made. And let me assure you that someone, somewhere is sneering down their nose with disdain at your misguided effort.

Insecurity-fueled self-righteousness is the blanket that warms our small, cold little hearts in advertising. "We could have done it better," we tell ourselves, assured in our untested little bubble of superiority.

But the really funny thing is that when something actually manages to get to market creatively uncompromised, many of us still hate it. We call it ineffective or a waste of time and money, which pretty much says they should have compromised and listened to the client more.

No one ever said ad folks were fair — or even sane.

I'm not delusional enough to think that this little rant will change things. Frankly, I think we take ourselves too seriously anyway, so I couldn't care less if you want to sneer at someone else's dog food ad. In the scheme of things no one will remember us or the product in a thousand years anyway. But it's always helped me to get off the high horse and realize that if I absolutely have to work in-the-box, I'm gonna make that box the best damn box you've ever seen. Sneering at the compromises of others doesn't make your work any better. It just makes you ignorant.

Of course, if you sneer enough it can also make you a Chief Creative Officer. So there is that.

There Is No Process, So Get Over It

One of the most fascinating things about our business is that we get anything done at all. 

Think about how most operations are run. I mean you couldn't make a car if you didn't have huge investment in detailed processes. You can't "wing" a car. You could try, but I'm pretty sure that the public would sue you into the stone age as thousands of people went careening into embankments.

But in advertising agencies it's like someone decided that we were exempt from all reason. Sure, there are process manuals and well-meaning production people who maintain schedules that no one follows, but over all it's complete chaos.

The new AMC show, The Pitch looks like it will be a case study in this phenomenon. How many pitches is an agency in every year? 20? 50? 100? You'd think with that many times doing the same thing there would be some sort of process for how a pitch is run. But there's not. At best we use the same PowerPoint template. And let me tell you, PowerPoint is not a process. It's barely qualified to be called a useful tool.

No matter how lauded an agency is for genius, or reviled for being hacks — no matter how big or small — every shop seems to treat each pitch like they've never seen one before. And every time we make the same mistakes: The account person or sales rep sits on the RFP for way too long, then the executive team eats up more time deciding if they want to get involved, the creative team bitches and whines that there's no time left, everybody gives up their weekend and at the last minute one industrious person wrestles control of the proposal, stirs the chaotic soup and we get a presentation. I guess you could call that a process. But then you could also call the gulf oil spill clean up a success, and we know how well that worked out.

Every agency has that process nazi, who loves to complain that the agency needs to get its act together. But the longer I stay in this business, the more convinced I become that we are beyond help on this front. Maybe it's the creativity of the whole thing that makes us believe that every pitch must be a unique masterpiece of the presentation universe. Maybe we're just a bunch of children pretending we know what we're doing. Whatever the reason, it's a time-honored tradition in this business that we are the mercy of egos, whims and delusions of grandeur that are all deaf to the needs of process and pipelines. So deal with it.

And if you are a process person, for the love of god, do not choose advertising as a profession. Believe me when I say you will change nothing in the end. All hope is lost behind these walls.