The Evil Marketer

The U.S., despite slowly losing its dominance in science and technology as the world experiences further flattening, will continue to lead the world in its export of culture and popular media. I assume there’s not much debate about that — one can certainly imagine the next Microsoft or Google coming from India or maybe China, but not the next Madonna or Star Wars or Friends. Central to that cultural strength is our ability to market, as well as the increasing blend of marketing and media/entertainment we’re seeing every day. As the platform for that entertainment changes drastically from the boxes in our living room to our computer screen and mobile phone display and ipod, and as the source of that entertainment changes from centralized behemoths to individual users, marketing is going to change drastically as well. Those changes are going to fundamentally alter the way we experience our media, the brands we use, and even our relationships to each other and the ways we make an income, and because of our influence in these areas, they will change the world.
Here, briefly, are 9 of those changes. Why not 10? I’m an evil marketer and I wouldn’t feel right giving you exactly what you expected, that’s why. *evil laugh* Though not written in stone, the technology and/or marketing models already exists for many of them, and the others seem not only feasible but likely.

1. The Rise of the Influencer Network

The notion in marketing of an influencer — someone that drives customers to certain brands based on their level of trust and respect — has been around a long time. But never has it been more important. Influencers used to be much harder to find, had a much smaller base of customers, and were impossible to track; all of that has changed. Anyone anywhere with a certain level of expertise in a certain niche can use a blog to gain the trust of a certain amount of users; these blogs are easy to find, links from them are easy to track, and the potential user base of a blog is almost unlimited. All that’s left is a centralized system to organize these influencers and put them in contact with advertisers so that anyone with a little influence in a little niche can profit. Read more here, here, and here.

2. Free Internet, Mobile, and Cable

All of these services are already being consolidated into one package by providers. The amazing amount of data available to a single company that can track your internet usage, phone calls, and TV watching habits is worth a lot of money to advertisers. If you’re willing to let your provider share that info with advertisers (fairly anonymously), they can afford to give you the bandwidth for free, and will.

3. Language and Economic Barriers Disappear

Real time online translation is just a few years away. As soon as those language barriers disappear, not only can you have close friends anywhere in the world regardless of nationality (greatly expanding the power of social networks and the marketing tied to them), but us evil marketers will have instant access to markets that previously had these barriers in place. If you think our culture and the associated marketing machine behind it is powerful now (having already been given an enormous boost by the internet), just wait until our cultural influence can spread even more easily to people around the world and marketing messages and platforms are automatically multilingual. Combine that with a rapidly emerging middle class in India and China and potential audience for products grows exponentially. Influencers in each cultural niche will still be needed to craft messages, but that should be handled by #1 above.

4. Google Loses its Core Audience to Wikis

Google is no longer my favorite search engine; it’s increasingly more driven by large advertisers (both paid and natural search) and I’ve found much better results using wikipedia or a service like sidekiq if I want to look for something more specific. I’m not the only one who feels that way, either. Most people in the industry seem to use Google more for competitive research than actual search. Next to stop using it will be people like my mom, and once they’ve lost her, the one trick pony will have a broken leg. The effects of this shift are hard to predict; but because they currently control about 50% of search and a huge chunk of every advertising dollar, the shift will certainly benefit smaller niche networks and start money flowing there instead. There will also be a shift back to content sites that actually contribute something to the conversation rather than just linking everywhere.

5. No More Starving Artists

An exaggeration of course — there will always be starving artists who deserve to starve. But now that anyone with any level of talent can find an audience, they should be able to monetize their talent via sponsorships or even direct marketing. We already see a rise in independent filmmakers and writers giving their works away for free in exchange for traffic and influence; once there are more systems in place to easily monetize this traffic and influence most people with talent should be able to make enough to cover food costs each month.

6. The Mobile Phone Rules Your World

I know, it already does. But we haven’t even touched the marketing potential of the device. Once we accept the use of our cell phones as a payment device, and once phone technologies like mobile coupons, map coupons, cameraphone scanners or mobile price comparison become more mainstream, the ways we shop — especially when we are buying offline — will change forever. Coupled with GPS and better mapping technologies, you will be alerted to coupons as you pass stores, or have the ability to recommend a product or movie to a friend with a phone-coupon — and you’ll get a commission for that referral. That sort of incentive will allow viral marketing to be trackable offline and will allow everyone to profit from brands and products they want to recommend.

7. Brands get Personal

In the under-rated movie Idiocracy, the protagonist finds himself in a future world where us evil marketers have essentially destroyed culture; among other effects, people are named after brands — Frito and Mountain Dew, for instance. While this is (probably) far-fetched, there will be much closer relationships between people and the brands they use in the future. We already see overt branding of sports figures and venues — NASCAR has given almost everything available for branding; the wildly successful Nike/Michael Jordan campaigns 20 years ago equated his airness with his shoes; almost all sports stadiums are now branded. This effort has been grounded in pure mass market branding — spending billions of dollars to make your brand ever-present without actually measuring the impact of the spend. What if instead Apple could “brand” the top 3 coolest students in every high school and actually measure the impact of them wearing their shirts, always having an iPod or iMac with them, promoting Apple on their MySpace account, etc? Social networks that concentrate on schools make the identification, the measurement and the organization of such a campaign possible. Which do you think would be more effective, spending a billion dollars on a TV commercial campaign or giving away $10,000 scholarships each to “brand” 100,000 teenagers?

8. True Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is in the stone age of its evolution at best. A consumer visits a car site, pop him (or her, you probably don’t even know) a car ad on the next page load. Yawn. What we evil marketers need are three things: more data, better data, and mo’ better data. We don’t have enough data on all of you yet because of those ridiculous concerns about privacy. Here’s a piece of news for you — we don’t care that you are a rich guy into women’s lingerie or a poor grandmother who visits the High Times website or a middle class teen goth who is downloading Barry Manilow mp3’s. Well, let me rephrase that — we do care about your gender, your economic status, and the things you might want to buy, but we could care less who you are. When all is said and done, we have the same interests as you do — not to show you ads that don’t matter to you or irritate you but instead show you ads for things you want and can afford and need right now. Let us know more about you — anonymously — and we will invest billions of dollars of our own money to develop technology that can target ads to you that will be so timely it will seem like we are in your head. You will know immediately that Macy’s is having a sale on panties or that the head shop around the corner is giving away a free one hitter with every bong purchase over $20 or that Barry has just released a limited edition box set, and you will love us for it. And as mentioned in #2 above, we’ll even give you stuff.

9. No More Ads

You read that correctly. And I didn’t mean, “No! More Ads?” either. Every time us evil marketers come up with a new way to push an advertisement at you, you figure out a way to ignore it. Spam, pop ups, tv commercials, banner ads — all of them are blockable or skippable or at worst ignorable. Even Google AdSense text links are starting to fade into the background for many savvy users and should start to lose their effectiveness over time. You’ve taught us something — you hate ads. Yet we spend billions giving you more of them. Why? I’d argue at this point it’s sheer laziness combined with old-school thinking and just general stiffness. There are so many more effective ways to make you discover our products — word of mouth, sponsorships, incentive marketing, product placement and more — all of which happen (or at least appear to happen) naturally and unobtrusively and will work much much better and are much much more measurable. None of the other 8 innovations above need standard ads to work, and most of them won’t even work with standard ads. Don’t get me wrong — you will be exposed to branding everywhere and your friends may be recommending products in exchange for commissions and you will have coupons and cash back offers popping up on your cell phone at appropriate times, but they won’t be ads as you know them now.

What do you think?

Love,

The Evil Marketer

In part 1 I set forth a basic argument that word of mouth or influencer marketing (or open source or citizen marketing or any number of related terms), while always the most powerful marketing technique has thus far been an off-grid activity usually unmeasurable (and thus unmanageable as far as ROI is concerned) by us evil marketers. Because the internet and associated technologies now enable the tracking and management (to a limited degree) of influencers, the time has come for an organized influencer network that should behave in much the same way as an ad or affiliate network.

There is one major reason such a thing has not yet been created — as soon as you create a system to reward people for promoting brands it’s going to devolve into a situation where the “recommendations” carry just as much weight (and sometimes less) as a normal advertisement. In other words, open up an influencer program to anyone and any brands, and you end up with a basic affiliate network. Affiliate networks are great, but they inherently suffer from the same problem as other traditional online advertising in that ads may be convincing, but we don’t inherently trust them. There are few exceptions to this, and those fall into the realm of affiliate links disguised as blog posts or other such “stealth” endorsements (with a small percentage of those being legitimate recommendations that simply run through an affiliate link).
The influencer network would have as its publisher base those select people from each vertical who command enough respect and trust that they can act in the same role as a “paid” or “celebrity” endorsement. These marketing relationships occupy the one, most valuable niche in all of advertising — obvious advertisements that consumers still inherently trust (at least when compared to normal advertising).

The influencers in the network would choose the brands they wish to endorse (at least initially), based on genuine respect and love for the brand, but would be compensated for that endorsement. The method of endorsement and compensation for it could vary widely based on vertical and influencer “level”; a rating and/or trust system would be in place for users (both inside and outside the network) to vote in various ways to change that level.

The devil’s in the details of course, and here are a few of them:

• The influencer would need to promote products or brands in a mostly measurable way, via tracked links, coupon codes, printable coupons, or email subscriptions; they would also need to brand their site/sites in a way that is agreeable to both influencer and advertiser
• The influencer could set desired rates and promise a certain level of traffic; these rates would generally be a paid contract over a certain term, but could include bonuses based on CPA or CPC
• The influencer must agree to never promote rival products or brands while under contract
• A rigid approval and vetting process would need to be in place for entry as an influencer; applicants would need to show proof of influence as well as traffic and/or previous affiliate commission numbers, and the applicant would need to concentrate on one vertical
• A network managed by one individual but consisting of several sites and blogs could apply as an influencer and thus use its aggregate influence under one influencer account

You have questions, I’m sure. Here are answers to some of them:

Isn’t this the same as traditional sponsorship or endorsement deals available in offline advertising?

Yes, but with a crucial difference: offline endorsements and sponsorships are always celebrities or media with a mass appeal and almost always concentrate on pure brand marketing. An online influencer network would allow advertisers to get endorsements from very niche markets, and could even target local markets just as easily, all in an open marketplace that had the full weight of ROI measurement behind it and thus turn endorsements into direct marketing.

How will an advertiser know to trust the impact of an influencer?

The network’s main concern will be managing the value of influencers, and can do this with metrics from previous relationships as well as ratings from other inflluencers and consumers. Advertisers can always sign short term contracts to “test” the influencer, and the results of that test will be a part of the influencer’s value moving forward.

How will the influencer network make money?

By charging a percentage of each contract to the advertiser, as is common in affiliate networks.

How is this different from an affiliate network?

There is some crossover, but affiliate relationships are almost always CPA and put the burden of risk on the publisher despite what potential influence they bring to the table. An influencer network puts the burden of risk back on the advertiser but softens it via the metrics that online advertising gathers. It creates a much more formal relationship between publisher and advertiser as well.

Aren’t there sites and blogs already doing this?

Yes, of course. The problem is that the advertiser is responsible for finding these sites, working out the contract, and managing the relationship, and publishers don’t have a central place to go to find all of these advertisers. There are a handful of existing ad networks that claim to do sponsorship deals, but they are usually with their own properties. Furthermore, offline mass marketing endorsements are easy in the sense that the advertiser already knows who to approach; online verticals are made up of hundreds of niches, all of which may need a certain “spin” on the marketing effort, and it would be nearly impossible for any agency to find and rate all of them. A standard as well as a network is needed to coordinate this.

Do these endorsements always need to be online?

No, and that’s where things get really exciting. Online advertising is finding ways to move offline, via mobile phones, GPS, instore linkups with online content, and more. And that’s just the beginning.

To discover more about the potential future of influencer networks, stay tuned.

Love,

The Evil Marketer

This is first in a short series of posts that describe the Evil Marketer’s proposal for an influencer network; a radical new concept that could affect the way many of us experience marketing and brands based somewhat on the idea of “open source marketing” or “citizen marketing” introduced by other authors.

When yours truly thinks of the ideal marketing scenario, there are 3 core issues to consider and another, like the one true Ring, that rules them all. The three are:

1. Right Product
2. Right Time
3. Right Incentive

Almost every aspect of online marketing revolves around these three core principles. Google AdSense is a perfect example. It, by its very nature, already has #1 and #2 covered — the user is looking for the product right now (Right Time), and Google does its best to find the best match for what the user is looking for (Right Product). If the user sees a link that guarantees x% off, or if instead they find the merchant through a combination of Google and a coupon site, then all 3 are covered — a marketer’s perfect storm. All that’s left is to convert them quickly. Because if it’s not quick, there is always the potential for the One That Rules Them All to intervene:

Wife: Whatcha doing?

Husband (finger hovered over the “Order” button): About to buy a new X. The price is right, I need it ASAP, and I even found a 10% off coupon.

Wife: Just as long as it’s not Brand Y. My Dad [who is an expert on X’s of all kinds] says its the worst on the market and only suckers buy it.

Husband: Oh. I better keep looking then.

I am, of course, talking about the influencer.

Influencers aren’t always steering people away from products; in fact the internet has grown the positive aspect of the influencer more than anything else in history. What is the one thing in the above scenario that would have prevented Husband from listening to Wife after the damning opinion of Dad-in-Law the influencer? If Husband has seen a series of 5 star reviews at Amazon, headed up by a top 100 Reviewer who said that Brand Y made the best X he’d ever purchased.

Influencers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they have a few things in common:

• They have more influence in certain niches/verticals than in others
• Their influence can be weakened or enforced greatly by the results of their recommendations
• Their scope of influence can vary widely, from one friend to millions of people
• Their influence can drop if they are being compensated for their recommendations (but not always!)

And one final commonality — the influencer and his or her recommendations, despite being the most powerful marketing force on the planet, have been almost entirely hidden from a marketer’s view or measurement.

Until now.

No, we can’t listen in to your private conversations and track a friend’s recommendation of a new movie to the actual ticket sale — yet. But most online word of mouth type marketing and all affiliate marketing (much of which is based, in some part, on an influencer recommending a product) can now be tracked, and as soon as mobile marketing takes the next step and starts letting you refer products and services and movie tickets to your friends via a trackable coupon or other incentive, then we will be watching over your shoulder, dear consumer.

The problem is that most of this is still de-centralized and segmented; Amazon reviewers, mobile marketing, social network members recommendations (especially recommendations from those with a lot of “friends”) — none of it really works together so an advertiser has a clear sense of where the influencers live and more importantly, how to get them talking about their products.

In part 2 I’ll discuss how these influencers need to stop giving away their “influence capital” for free and start monetizing it, and how a centralized network (or series of networks) needs to be developed for advertisers to strike deals with these influencers in way that doesn’t decrease the trust the influencer has gained.

Love,

The Evil Marketer

Feel free to mark today on your calendar as the day Google officially lost the right to claim they do no evil. Via JenSense, they’ve updated their policy to ban sites that use other ad types of the same appearance and color as the AdSense unit on those sites. This essentially means they are telling their publishers that they can’t try similar ad units from other ad networks or affiliate programs if they want to keep using AdSense.

Feeling the heat are we?

As I mentioned just yesterday, there are competitors to AdSense popping up everywhere in the form of private labeled PPC networks, and all of them offer things Google can’t or won’t. Meanwhile Yahoo and MSN are upgrading their networks and leveraging the sweet sweet data they gather from their userbases to deliver better targeted ads, among other things.

As an Evil Marketer, I am torn. I would usually be more than happy to welcome Google to the ranks of evil marketers (if only I could charge dues), but preventing publishers from optimizing their sites — which usually requires some sort of A/B testing of competing ad units — is against the Evil Marketer creed. I’m afraid I can’t endorse this kind of thing. Google has turned into another monopoly trying to ward off competitors, and monopolies aren’t good for anyone.

Courtesy of Andy Beal , marketers are finally finding a way to use email to market that doesn’t make everyone detest us. I generally stay away from email marketing, mostly because I don’t respond well to it myself. One of the few places it works is when it’s included seamlessly in a newsletter from a trusted source. Amazon does this well, for instance — they rarely email me but when they do it’s almost always to let me know about something I actually want to buy. They have led the way in leveraging the information they gather; information that is submitted for free from its users, of course.

Social networks are an ideal place to turn what is usually an obnoxious way to grow an email list — finding third parties to get users to opt in — and turned it into exactly what it should be: allowing the niche and its alphas to determine the best newsletters that speak to the community, and encouraging the community to sign up. Advertisers just have to find these communities and work with them to find out what content they want, then cross promote or upsell or even sell third party ads in the newsletters that contain that content.

This is just the first step — next step is allowing the members of the community who gather emails to get a commission per email gathered. This allows the newsletter to not only command the attention of a particular niche, but allows the individuals within that community to push the newsletter to other closely related niches, and even give the advertisers ideas about new content to add to speak to those niches as well.

You can all see where this is headed, my evil friends. The final step is allowing the newsletters to easily include content from the influencers as well as allowing different versions of each newsletter to be distributed to different niches automatically based on the source of the original email (and that source’s place in various communities). Throw RSS into the mix, along with competent data mining of open and response rates for various newsletter sections (based on niche interests, source of original sign up, number of downline referrals from recipient and what their niches are, etc), and you’re getting close to where things are going to be — the advertiser no longer publishes the newsletter at all; the community does all the work to push the products in exchange for a cut from the users they originally referred, and because the commission hinges on converting that downline, they work harder to prepare content that persuades those users to convert.

More food for thought,

The Evil Marketer

AT&T announced today that it’s going to kill off the Cingular brand. That’s right — probably the most recognized mobile brand in the US, certainly among younger consumers, will soon disappear forever. It’s never easy for yours truly when a brand dies; when I think of all the time and energy invested by fellow evil marketers nurturing a shiny new brand from infancy, through the awkward tweens all the way to maturity, I get a little verklempt.

Oh Cingular I barely knew thee!

Though your claims of “Fewest Dropped Calls” were probably a load of crap and your customer service sucked so bad that New York booted you off the BBB list, your brand was so powerful that you still became the #1 US mobile carrier. Of course it helps that you gave us evil marketers such a healthy budget to work with — according to your quarterly reports, you spent nearly a billion dollars in the first 3 quarters of 2006 to acquire just over 4.6 million customers.

That’s $217 per new acquisition!

I wonder what percentage of my bill each month is for you to fool people into switching to your sub-par service? Don’t get me wrong — like any evil marketer I will gladly pay more for my products and services so that my money can be frittered away being dumped into outdated marketing efforts. After all we’re all having trouble justifying our ad budgets these days — the days of the wildly expensive and almost completely ineffective 30 second tv spot are numbered. We can get trackable, measurable returns from online advertising but those damn publishers don’t charge enough! How the hell are we supposed to spend $217 per new acquisition online with CPM inventory drying up??? We like CPM — it’s almost like tv ads, so it’s more comfortable and less scary than all those new, complicated online methods we have to deal with.

Don’t panic, my evil brethren. I’ve got the answer for you. Average ad buys may be plummeting, but there are so many more ways to spend our ad budgets online. Take affiliate marketing — you can pay a set price per acquisition and spend as much as you want. Believe me, if you offered a $200 bounty for new customers via one of the affiliate networks, you will be overwhelmed with niche affiliates pushing your brand on every person who hits their site, and the message will be targeted for that niche specifically. Mob marketing, my friends, is the future. What a “brand” is in this model will scare you — but we’ll talk about that later.

My one piece of advice for today is, to paraphrase Kubrick — learn to stop worrying and love the mob.

Love,
The Evil Marketer