The Evil Marketer

I love Netvibes, and not just because I use them as my homepage. I love them because they get it. If you missed it check out the two vids from their CEO. He makes one bold claim — that web pages will begin to disappear over the next couple years to be replaced by widgets. He’s partly right, of course; there will always be good reasons to have information on a web page rather than exclusively delivered via RSS, but as we are exposed to exponentially more bits of information each day there will be less desire for us to spend more than a few seconds on any one story or piece of content. I’m not going to get into the social and cultural implications of that here; what interests me of course are the implications for us evil marketers.

Almost all online advertising right now is built for web page views. The structure, content, measurement, tracking — everything is designed with a web page in mind. If the web page goes away we’re left with a platform built of tiny bits of content and information grouped together on one page read by people who are trying to get through that content as quickly as possible. What’s an evil marketer to do?

Don’t panic my friends. Ads on web pages never really worked very well anyway. Oh sure, they gave us triple digit ROI, but that only seemed great because we were used to throwing millions of dollars at 30 second TV spots (shudder). But most ads get less than 1% click through and convert at about 2-3% once clicked. Embarrassing. Good riddance, I say. What we should be doing is pushing content to users that they want to see that is simply an advertisement in disguise. Sponsored feeds, incentivized and rev-shared product recommendations, brand love created by influencers designed for a specific niche audience. It’s all good, and it will all happen.

There isn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for all of this yet — RSS ads are really in their infancy and are still mired in the idea that we need to insert ads next to content. Have we learned nothing yet my friends? People don’t like ads that are next to their content. They absolutely hate pops because they obscured content. They skip TV ads because they interrupt content. They rebel against pre-rolls that make them wait for their content. See a pattern here? The only time they like “ads” are when it’s a trusted influencer giving them advice on what they should buy and hopefully giving them an incentive to do it. So let’s just make sure everything we do is with that model in mind and don’t fear the end of the webpage.
Love,

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

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

There is a healthy (or unhealthy as the case may be) majority of traditional advertising analyst types who simply don’t understand what is happening right now in marketing. They see all this web 2.0 innovation, consumer generated media (CGM), massive shift in publisher power, rise of social networking, less control over brand, etc, as a “fad.” If you’re one of these unfortunate souls please take a moment to listen to the Evil Marketer give you the low down on the paradigm shift going on in your industry to which you are somehow recklessly oblivious.

Here’s a very good example of the arguments that these pundits raise in defense of their position. Let’s break them down one by one and show them the error of their ways, shall we?

1. “…it’s hard to imagine how there won’t eventually be a backlash against ubiquitous user-generated video clips, blogs and the like.”

Good point. I mean, there has certainly been a backlash against all those billions of informational web pages out there that users can access for free on their own time. It’s just too much information and too easy to find and almost always gives me exactly what I am looking for! People are turning off their computers and flocking back to the library and the Yellow Pages in droves. I’m sure people will grow tired of endless, free entertainment that is unavailable anywhere else and manages to speak to them in specific ways no other media ever has in the history of the world. They’ll just throw up their hands in frustration at all that entertainment and go back to watching Matlock.

2. “At what point do we have social saturation when every person and every marketer tries to film every idea they’ve ever had? The best content will always rise to the top but there will be a ton that probably won’t get covered and people may stop posting when it becomes evident that nobody is interested…”

Yes there is something wrong with a world where everyone is free to create art and get it seen by billions of people. And we all know that TV and movie and music production companies are experts at producing great content that appeals to every person. Please. The point here is there is an audience for almost anything, no matter how small. And artists will create art even if no one cares; it is the nature of who they are. They will not stop, and if anything their output will grow because somewhere out there is someone who will like what they produce.

3. “…what ‘You’ need to do is actually generate profits and revenues in order to have a real say. And it’s unclear just how effective ‘You’ will be.”

Ah, this is the crux of their argument: if you produce some crap that only 5 people watch then you can’t monetize that and it’s essentially worthless. Stop thinking in traditional mass media terms people! Of course you can’t monetize an audience of 5. But if you have a million videos that each has an audience of 5, not only can you monetize it, you can target your marketing like a laser AND measure response in real time all the way to purchase. Not to mention much of the “advertising” will be the content itself, tailored in a very specific way to a very niche audience, produced for FREE by your own customers. How can you not get that?

4. Here’s a longer excerpt supporting their argument in #3:

To wit, one of the most buzzed about online videos, of two Chinese kids lip-synching to “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, has been viewed about 1.3 million times on YouTube since the video was added to the site in November, 2005.

Meanwhile, a show like NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” or CBS (Charts)’ “Smith,” which was the first cancellation of the fall TV season, are branded as failures even though they generated nearly 10 million viewers a week and are supported by advertising.

Oh my God can you be more clueless? You’re actually comparing the relative strength of a stupid video 2 guys in China made with a webcam with shows starring recognized actors, produced for millions of dollars, written by a team of professionals, and which were probably tested before audiences for weeks??? The point is that a million people have watched that video even though it cost nothing to produce and starred nobody. It wasn’t monetized because people like you haven’t figured out the best way to do it yet. As soon as YouTube gets off its ass and starts running 5 second pre-rolls to its most popular videos, a video like that could generate millions in revenue — again all of it tracked down to the timestamp of purchase. And it might only cost you per click (or maybe even, dare I say it — CPA).

5. “But so far, the amount of money people are making is negligible.”
followed by
“YouTube probably will be a winner [as well as MySpace].”
followed by
“But the scores of startups that have cropped up in the past two years to challenge the YouTubes and MySpaces may find it difficult to profit from ‘You’ no matter how creative ‘You’ are.”

Ok, first you argue that you can’t make money distributing CGM. Then you say that YouTube and MySpace actually will make money. Then you qualify that by saying no one else will. That sound you hear is the Evil Marketer sighing very deeply.

6. “‘This idea of having customers generate ad campaigns would be a good idea if it really was consumers,’ said Stevens. ‘People winning these contests are not coal miners, cab drivers or people who sell shoes at Bloomingdale’s. They are people at small agencies or independents.”

And your point is? That this whole CGM thing won’t work because a shoe salesman can’t produce a winning SuperBowl commercial? Not only are you obviously wrong about the potential influence of CGM, you’re also wrong about the power of that shoe salesman, and THIS is where you are really missing the boat.

Let’s take a look at a lifetime shoe salesman; we’ll call him Frank because I suspect that’s what his real name is anyway. Maybe he’s making what, 40k a year? How much knowledge does he have about shoes? How much influence does he have when a customer comes in and needs to make a decision? If he could more efficiently monetize that knowledge and that influence somehow, do you suspect he could make a lot more? I do. The system may not yet be in place for this, but I believe one day there will be organized networks of influencers like the guy who’s sold 50,000 pairs of shoes in his lifetime. If I’m looking online for a pair of shoes and there was a network in place to allow Frank to assist me in a decision, and if he was paid a flat rate by a specific online store just to have access to him plus a commission on the shoes he sold (all trackable of course, including what pair of shoes the customer originally wanted and even what ad they clicked on in the first place to get to the site), not only would he be making a lot more money selling a lot more shoes (from home), but I would be willing to continue to buy shoes from that vendor there just so I could get Frank’s help, because I like Frank and he is a hell of a lot smarter than any automated “suggestion” system or FAQ page.

What does that have to do with CGM you ask? Good question.

The point is that the internet allows everyone a way to better exploit and monetize their talent. It has enormous economies of scale, ultimate reach, and requires very little real-world overhead or infrastructure. All advertising is, at its essence, is a way for clever people to get people talking about or interested in a product. Remove the infrastructure required in running a major ad agency, expand your potential customer base to the billions, and tap into the resources of thousands (maybe millions) of smart people, people who have influence and expertise and maybe already love your brand, and only pay them if they produce results.

Or not.

Love,

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