Total BS

Seriously.

Forrester recently did a presentation on Facebook marketing, i.e., an argument for social ads. Forrester’s research is useful. Its insights can be a bit suspect though. The recent Facebook presentation is the red-headed stepchild I’ll be picking on today; an argument for a marketing strategy that felt more like an advertisement for Facebook.So the deck started off making an argument for “Why Facebook?” Lots of traffic, good on-site metrics, juicy audience demographics, supposed to eclipse MySpace in 2009. Great. Whatever. You want a hooker, go to a Reno. We get it. (Actually I was surprised to see Friendster traffic increase 65%. I don’t know if it refers to the past year or if it’s a future projection, but I guess that’s where all the eons.com ex-pats have been migrating to.) We marketers make this argument all the time, because it’s the most obvious one, and because it requires the least amount of lying and number fudging on our part.Then it went into explaining how communities inspired trust, including a slide that highlighted the top 10 activities on Facebook, none of which included shopping or anything remotely money-related. This has apparently inspired trust, and resulted in us placing greater trust in our social circle, than we do in advertisements. I assume this is because we appreciate our friends not randomly chiming in with flashing banners and 30 second ad spots during our conversations.Then Forrester mentions that there’s scads of user and network data that we never had access to before. Except that anything that’s important, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft already do have access to, not to mention all the financial institutions that are selling the information that actually matters, like how much you’re spending, what you’re buying and the fact that you’re about to do a big faceplant on your 3rd mortgage. But anyway, for the sci-fi geek chick Claremont grad, have we got an offer for you. We know you’re a big Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Battlestar Galactica fan, so we can offer up cool, relevant ads like um, the latest ST, BtVS and BG DVDs. It’s so relevant! (Not so relevant for the married guy receiving dating ads though.)Then Forrester goes into the “bevy” of marketing opportunities on Facebook, which really reads more like a marketing spiel from the LinkExchange banner ad days. But this includes:

• Data on profiles and networks (which is great for trivia, but mostly useless in reality)
• Facebook pages and sponsored groups (which became popular on MySpace, but is just as useless today as it was before)
• A variety of ads (banner, contextual, social), which are based on the CPM model which has proven its ineffectiveness since the AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy triumvirate days.
• “Applications,” which as far as I’ve seen, seem to do a good job of attracting VC money, but do a poor job of actually building a sustainable, profitable business.

To cut a long story short, then the presentation went into showing off a variety of crap with marketized names. Like how the Facebook inbox is the new hipper e-mail, except it sucks way more and is liking riding a bike with your shoelaces tied together. I guess all this was supposed to show how innovative Facebook has become, when in actuality, it just reminds me how close Facebook is becoming to MySpace.Then there was a couple case studies. The failure was Wal-Mart, which if you’re familiar with some of their other web promotions, shouldn’t come as a surprise. On one hand, they may be web 2.0 failures, on the other hand, they have a $200 billion market cap and make more revenue than any other company in the world. I’m sure they’ll take that trade-off. Interestingly, the successful case study was Apple. I’d argue Apple is never fair to use as a case study, because their user base is so incredibly, illogically fanatic, that everything they do is a huge success or a complete failure. Either way, the numbers (and probably the returns) weren’t that impressive.About 3/4 of the way through, Forrester finally gets to the challenges. Which read sort of like challenges that I’d make up in a strategy deck, e.g., program may be too successful, super quick growth could cause infrastructure difficulties, success inspires jealousy, etc., rosy challenges like that. But they never mention what I’d consider the most important challenge:The complete uselessness of a “social” ad. At some point, I’d like to know what the value of a social ad is to a normal person.Nobody ever mentions this. Facebook’s marketing platform only exists, because at some point they have to start turning a profit (which apparently isn’t going to start next year) to appease their investors. So they started shoehorning ads into the Facebook user experience, because you know, this is web 2.0, and advertising is the only way to make money (which really is fine by me, since at some point, those dollars will get back to what I do), hoping that they’d strike it rich following the Google model. Except they forgot that for an ad to be effective it has to be:

1. Targeted, which you could argue that Facebook allows you to be super-targeted (that’s their shtick). Except that most of the “advanced targeting” information is either done better in other ad systems, so broad it’s redundant, or (ironically) so granular it’s useless. Plus, FB doesn’t have a back-end system tying all those various details together like say an Amazon can. And unlike Amazon, none of those interests are tied to things that matter - like purchases. So the fact that I chose not to purchase “V for Vendetta” on Amazon.com, after viewing the product page for 5 minutes, means a heckuva lot more than having “V for Vendetta” in my favorite movies list. 
2. Contextually relevant, which will be the eternal uphill battle for social ads. Because when is the right time to butt into a friendly conversation with a “relevant” ad? How bout never (unless you want to end up like this). It’s like when you’re walking down the street talking to your friend, and you see your ex standing out on the sidewalk, wearing a double-sided sign, handing out flyers in front of Radio Shack, and you’re so embarrassed, you avert your eyes and quickly hustle to cross the street, to take the way-out-of-way dirty alleyway route, just to avoid that whole interaction. Why would we believe that people online would respond any differently? 

So now Facebook’s once clean, totally functional interface has been plastered with ads that are a step classier than the stuff that runs on warez sites. And they’re stuck trying to sell a broken ad model to advertisers, by occasionally selling out their user base. On the plus side, it’s relatively cheap, and probably not any less effective than a Super Bowl ad. On the downside, that seems to defeat the purpose of the value of an Internet ad.Besides, social ads already exist. Amazon’s recommendation system is more targeted, relevant and useful than any social ad that Facebook will ever serve up. To be honest, if there’s ever an SNS that marries the mundane with the money effectively, I’d put my bets on Amazon running it.It feels like the goal of social ads is to eventually leverage your best friends by turning them all into micro-marketers. It’s like Zombies and Werewolves, only with ad jingles and kooky characters. It’s a marketing wet dream I guess. But where’s the benefit for the normal people? If I want to make a recommendation to a friend, I’ll personally make that recommendation. If I want to be part of a pyramid scheme, I’ll join scientology.

We have now hit a point in time in which advertising is positioned as a value-add, not to marketers, but to users. I can’t say I’m not intrigued by the concept, if only to see if people will buy the shtick or see through it as total BS (ah yes, my first BS-related pun ever).Facebook notes:

Advertising doesn’t have to be about interrupting what you’re doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it.

Much appreciated, I guess. And it makes perfect logical sense. This is why the contextual Google ads are such a success. But it fits better on Google, because “searching” has a much more natural bridge to buying. “Socializing,” however, doesn’t have that. Consequently, the ad model feels unnaturally shoehorned into Facebook. Never have I visited Facebook with a product or purchase intent in mind. Not to say it won’t work - at worst, it’ll provide better results compared to the randomizer ads they put out now - but the opportunities for it to work will be much more limited compared to Google, IMO.Also on a separate note, there’s been some recent buzz about Facebook replacing Yahoo as part of the “big 3,” along with Google and Microsoft. That’s the most retarded thing I’ve heard this week. And anyone who thinks so, is by extension, a moron. Facebook gets to be in the big 3 when it stops having its traffic quintupled by Yahoo or when its real market cap hits $37B+, not when internet geeks play chutes and ladders with imaginary numbers.

Approach a random person in a supermarket, in a church, in a club. You get 5 seconds to make an impression. In that 5 seconds, you can be confident, funny, interesting, mysterious, compelling and win your target’s interest or you can be boring, uninspiring, awkward, boorish, stupid and lose your target’s interest, or every once in a while, you can offer just enough to not really engage nor disengage your target… ostensibly, this is limbo. Either way, it only means you’re not buried yet, and you still have an uphill battle to fight.Unfortunately, limbo is where most people end up. Fortunately, when you’re engaging with people on a personal basis, it’s a lot easier to make this ground up. Generally, people are willing to put in more effort and working it out and finding a common ground. Because the potential reward is high and relative barrier to engagement is low.Unfortunately, limbo is where most ads end up. Unfortunately, when you’re engaging with people on non-personal basis, it’s a lot more difficult to make this ground up. Generally, people are only willing to put in the effort to work it out if they have a directly vested interest - basically it’s like two mercenaries making a deal.I’m not saying anything insightful here. It’s basic. And I’m sure that everyone in the industry realizes this on a intellectual level.However something gets lost in translation in reality. If I’ve seen one shoe company ad with crazy CGI and an athlete doing unrealistic feats I’ve seen them all. If I’ve seen one aspirational credit card company ad I’ve seen them all (MasterCard’s initial campaign was brilliant and is still clearly the most resonant, but with Visa & Amex ripping off the tone, it maybe time for MC to change the game moving forwards). And if I’ve seen one pharmaceutical ad with more airtime devoted to reading the important safety information than the benefits of the drug itself, I’ve probably seen them all.This is pretty much akin to all the guys who approach the knockout dime lounging in the club with “Hi, my name is X. How are you?” “Thank you very much. Next!“Why advertisers would think it’d be any different in a situation where they have even less ability to calibrate to their target’s needs and desires? I don’t know. Some people just don’t get it.Like most marketers, I’m wary of tying sales and revenue metrics directly to marketing/advertising campaigns, but I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Perhaps instead of killing innovation, it’ll actually root out bland advertising for what it is - marginally impotent.

Entering the Conversation: Audience-Generated Content is the title of a white paper I co-wrote with a colleague, Arch Dumenigo, with special contributions from Jason Snyder and Jedd Davis, a lifetime ago… the chart data’s from July, but I think the writing was finished back in April or May 2006. I had a lot of fun writing this at the time. I think my favorite part was coming up with a title. Let’s just say the code names and working titles were much better than what it officially landed as. But the white paper was basically a cheatsheet full of background information to inform certain clients about the changing digital landscape and bring them up to speed with what was going on with the web2.0 world, particularly audience generated content. I thought I’d take a quick look back on it to see if I’d just been drinking the kool-aid or whether it still made sense.The consumer engagement model… the thought behind it was good… we had a heckuva time with that cloud diagram, however. That was all my doing, I’ll take the blame. I think after several iterations I stopped caring and conceded that it made sense. In retrospect, it’s a bloody disaster. I don’t know what the heck is going on in that diagram. But the thinking behind it is still solid. Advertising still fails to successfully engage consumers in true conversations… by design. Which was fine back in the day when every advertiser were shouting down from the clouds at their markets, but once one of them starts trying to get chummy on a personal level, then to some degree everyone needs to get chummy. It’s an arms race. And I think consumer goods companies and marketers have done a pretty good job in trying to engage the consumer on their level. Although most of the time the strategy and the execution behind it is terrible and just basically ham-handed advertising in disguise. But I give them credit for trying and at least “getting” it in a Dilbert sort of way. But don’t get me wrong, advertising still serves a very important purpose. It’ll never go away, despite the naysayers. And I don’t think the paper is arguing for that. But generally, it’s good to mix it up. Rule of thumb: everything is good in moderation.The MySpace section… I can’t say I was ever a huge fan of MySpace page advertising, and anyone who’s been following along will know that I think MySpace is a colossal piece of crap - the web’s largest adware application. But adware’s quite profitable even though it’s about as appealing as goatse. So kudos to their billions of dollars. Anyway, I think the points all still apply. I spend zero time on MySpace, so I can’t speak to its adworthiness, but according to the MySpace kool-aid, it’s still far and away the most popular social networking site on the net, so anyone advertising there would do well to follow the suggested best practices. I couldn’t let a discussion about MySpace go without commenting on the puke-worthy design, so I’m most happy with bullet point 4. Advertisers… If it looks like it was designed by a color-blind toddler, it probably was. Stop wasting our time.In retrospect, there’s not much to argue with here. There’s a lot more facts and background research than I remembered. I can’t for the life of me figure out why it took so long to get out of the door then. But the more qualitative aspects of the paper still ring true I believe. There’s still work left to be done. I may personally be sick of the term “web2.0,” and there’s much rumbling in the tech blogosphere that seems to echo that sentiment and wants to move onto the next big thing. Momentum and excitement seems to have all but dissipated. But “web2.0″ is just starting to hook onto the mainstream. And large swaths of the population - if my parents are any indication - still have no idea what “web2.0″ is. Of course, maybe I’m just sick of the label. No self-respecting non-geek refers to flickr or facebook as “web2.0.” Same as no one referred to amazon or ebay as “web1.0.” Note to advertisers and geeks: do not reference “web2.0″ in any mass-market facing communications. Otherwise, you deserve to get smacked by a cold fish. But, back to point, there’s still much work to do in getting the basic tenets, qualities and executions of web2.0 implemented in a manner that’s seamless, useful and frankly… good.

Marketers are finding that Second Life isn’t the second coming. Who would have thought that a situation where a “game” with no point, with companies putting up home fronts with no point would lead to a user experience that ultimately has no point. Simple arithmetic says put all the non points together and you get nothing. Techcrunch and GigaOm have a nice little analysis on the CPM (ranging from $21-180). But this is a case where number crunching isn’t as necessary so much as a gut check.But kudos to those companies who gave it a shot. The money probably would’ve been better spent experimenting with a future technology that has promise versus a Compuserve chatroom iteration. But it’s always worth taking a shot on new things, even retarded new things, particularly when they’re relatively cheap. So it didn’t work, no big deal. There’s always Second Life 2 to look forward to.

About a month and a half ago, I started work at Digitas Health after a 3 year stint at an agency called SFGT.My main reason for deciding to work at DH was because it was a big company, a subgroup of Digitas, which is a sub-brand of Publicis, an international, public holding company. So DH is probably a company where there’s something in some sort of manual that suggests that I mention that the thoughts on this blog are my own and not associated with Publicis, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Probably. Whatever. I’m cool with that, it’s that sort of idiosyncrasy that played a big part in my choice. Especially coming from a smaller agency background. Now I get to take part in those wacky HR training meetings that Dilbert and The Office have made so notorious. I had my first one last week. Emotions management training. It was awesome.Of course, there were other factors in my decision. For example, I didn’t have a particular love for Pharma. But I didn’t have any problems with it. Especially coming from SFGT where walls and boundaries on creative expression were nonexistent, I figured shackling on the figurative handcuffs associated with Pharma would be a nice challenge. Otherwise, the people, the atmosphere, etc., everything was cool, but this was pretty much the case just about everywhere i interviewed. So I always came back to the bigness. And DH had that in a way that none of the other Philly agencies really had. I just wanted to see what the difference was in a larger agency, and see if I could cut it. No reason to believe I couldn’t. Or for that matter, that anything would be really different in a larger agency. But nevertheless it seemed like a different kind of challenge.So a month and a half in, what have I found?

1. Bureaucracy is in. There’s a layer for every job, and a job for every layer. Theoretically, in a well oiled machine, it leads to efficiency. For the most part, I’ve seen this to be a case. And generally, this has been a good thing. But sometimes it can feel limiting, especially coming from a smaller agency where you wear many hats. There are cases where I’d like to be more nimble. In those cases, I wouldn’t mind taking the damn ball and running with it (credit to Keyshawn).
2. Consequently, everything is expensive. Obviously more hands on deck means more mouths to feed. But it goes both ways on the agency side as well as the client side.
3. On the flip side, many layers means plenty of specific subject matter experts. You don’t come across many of these in a smaller agency.
4. The pharmaceutical handcuffs haven’t been that bad. I assumed it would be impossible to do anything cool. To some degree this is sort of true. But it hasn’t been as bad as I feared. Perhaps this is because I imagined it to be like a North Korean style lockdown.
5. Everything is a little more regimented. There’s less of an opportunity to free-form. Although I keep hearing that my previous experiences weren’t necessary “normal.” So maybe free-formity isn’t ubiquitous in smaller agencies in general. But nevertheless, it’s an observation.
6. Wacky company-specific acronyms. Nothing different in a larger vs. small company. They’re all insane with acronyms.
7. Wacky HR training meetings. Like I mentioned, I only got to experience one so far, but that was one more than I experienced before. I, for one, dig them. In a Christmas fruitcake sort of way. A nice curiosity.
8. Corporate culture. Hard to put my finger on this here. It is indeed a bit odd going from knowing everyone well, to not knowing most people. On the one hand, the constant new faces are refreshing. On the other hand, working in a smaller agency was sort of like growing up in southwest philly, a formerly tight-knit area. And I loved southwest philly back in the day.
9. Meetings galore. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m getting paid to go to meetings. There are certain days where work is simply sitting in on one meeting after another. And actual “work” does get done until after hours. With that said, I’d rather take sixteen, 30-minute meetings than the one marathon meeting we used to have. The best meetings I’ve ever been in have never taken longer than 15 minutes. Cuz it’s bing, bang, boom, say your piece, get out and run. Once you get longer than that, you’re probably getting redundant. And if you’re going over 2-3 hours, that’s when I break out the solitaire.
10. … originally I wasn’t shooting for 10 observations, but once I got to 9, I figured why not. So… large agency, small agency, neither have been able to provide me with an omelette chef. I guess some things never change.

Blogged with Flock

Plaxo’s been a company I’ve been watching for a while now. In fact, ever since it’s “evil” days. Unfortunately for them, that was my first and lasting impression of them. Subsequent apologies notwithstanding. So while I thought the concept was interesting and probably useful, it wasn’t useful enough to overcome my fear that I’d get spammed or that my privacy would be breached in some way. Regardless of whatever legalese was theoretically protecting my rights. But now with version 3.0, the functionality has seemed to have reached the point where the usefulness has overcome my rational (or irrational) fears. It’s taken more than a year and I’m still a bit leery, but sort of like making the trade off between a risky investment and a high return, I’m willing to take the plunge.Lesson learned? Nothing groundbreaking, but if I was doing a startup, I’d make sure that first impression was fan-fricking-tastic.

I’m sure there were a few business and communications goals when Ask.com launched their new “algorithm” ad campaign in March/April (I think).

• Increase share of searches (ideally stealing from Google, since the whole algorithm campaign seems tailor made for targeting Google)
• Increase first time traffic
• Impact ad revenue
• Improve Ask.com brand awareness
• Improve/change Ask.com brand perception

And for the past couple months, there’s been a pretty healthy amount of buzz around the campaign. But mostly because the campaign has sucked.The accepted belief is that any publicity is good publicity. That if people are talking about your ad, you’re getting the word out one way or the other, so it’s all good. To some degree this is true. But it really depends on the circumstance. For a flash in the pan, yeah anything’s good. For a company that’s planning to stick around for the long haul… well, if you had a choice, you’d much prefer the publicity for the right reasons.All the mystery around the Ask.com is driving traffic. According to Alexa, traffic’s up 24% in the past 3 months. Google traffic’s down 7%.So traffic is up. Revenue’s probably up. Share of searches has probably increased. People are talking. Empirically, you’d guess that Ask.com’s brand awareness is up. Perception is probably not changed, or probably has worsened, but that’s always spinnable. So from an ad agency perspective all this is great news. Another win for CP+B.Except this campaign has no legs. It’s built no affinity with users. And the only reason anyone’s talking about the ad campaign is because everyone’s confused and pissed off at the inanity of it.For the technically in-the-know, no one’s buying that Ask’s algorithm is better than Google’s. And for the layman, no one knows what the funk, an algorithm even is. So ultimately, their campaign’s built on a pretty baseless reason to believe.So statistically, the Ask campaign’s been a huge success to date, for all the wrong reasons. An unbelievable reason to believe. A nebulous ad campaign. Word of mouth that’s spread for the same reason Snakes on a Plane word of mouth spread, i.e., the suckiness.Six months later, everyone stops talking about how retarded the ad campaign is, the buzz dies down, and Ask’s traffic drops to about pre-campaign levels. Except now they’re tens of millions of dollars out with no measurable impact on their brand perception. But whatever. They had their 15 minutes of fame.To be frank, I really haven’t been impressed by anything CP+B’s done, from a strategic standpoint, since Mini (although I’m not claiming to have seen everything). And I felt Mini was really just a ripoff of the 70’s Volkswagen campaign. Ironically, I did enjoy CP+B’s VW campaign from an entertainment perspective. But it seems like everything I see from them is based on some completely jacked up concept. It’s great from a buzz perspective, but it’s easy to throw wack ideas out there just to get people talking.