The Evil Marketer

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

This is first in a series of short vignettes from what the Evil Marketer sees in his marketing crystal ball. The names have been changed to protect the evil.

Chapter 1: The Influencers

From the text logs of IPhone 4.3 Influencer Network, March 2, 20XX:

Session begins at 13:05:24

Subscriber 146766: yo dood thx fr the engmt ring ref — she totally frkd!

Subscriber 146777: no prob, i commd 250cr for that and kay’s bumped me to lvl 3 influencr

Subscriber 146766: swt is that your top lvl?

Subscriber 146777: in jwlry vert, bluenile and zales still at 2

Subscriber 146766: amy just made 5 at saks.clothing she gets top comm, coupn rights and 2 items/mo

Subscriber 146777: grl verts are all better bt hard took me 50 refs to get to 2, been at 5 at nintendo.fantasy frver

Subscriber 146766: cn u get me a coup for new zelda/

Subscriber 146777: 1 sec

Subscriber 146766: (System Message) Coupon Available from authorized user SkaRulezzz / 10% off entertainment.games .nintendo.fantasy title: Zelda Reborn Again / click to accept…

Subscriber 146777: (System Message) Coupon Accepted! You have earned a commission of 1 credit for coupon acceptance and will receive 15 credits for purchase within 3 days. You are currently a level 5 Influencer in entertainment.games.nintendo.fantasy. Click to convert credits into Paypal or MyBrands merchandise…

Subscriber 146766: swt thx dood u need any gear? 4 more refs gets me to 3 at bb, dbl comm for audio

Subscriber 146777: m me lata gonna troll the mall c if i can get some ez refs

Subscriber 146766: lata

Session ends at 13:10:02

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

The Evil Marketer finds it amusing when consumers start freaking out about things like third party cookies (though that hubbub has thankfully died down of late). Yes, dear consumer, we have ways to watch you as you jump from site to site, and we can combine that information with what you purchase at those sites and what ads you see, to eventually develop a mildly accurate idea of what kind of online consumer you are. On the evil scale, it’s maybe 1 out of 5 pitchforks. To be frank, it’s sooo 2005.

What really gets our evil mouths watering are articles like this that show just how little privacy you have left. I get so excited about stuff like this I can barely type :). The research here shows what any of us might have guessed already — that if you have a relationship with someone who has purchased a specific product, you are much more likely to buy that product yourself. This has been true forever, of course. But for the first time we are actually able to track and measure it — actually quantify the value of existing consumers and the influence they have over their peers. In this case, the stat they arrived at was this — consumers are 3-5 times more likely to purchase a product if someone in their social network already has it. And just how did this article get its data you ask? By mining the details of a telecommunications ad campaign that tracked whether converted customers had talked on their phone to someone who already owned the product.

Let me pause for a minute to let my heart rate decrease and then I’ll say it again.

The telecommunications company knows if you talked to someone else within their network, and used that information to see if users were more likely to purchase the new product they were pushing.

The implications are staggering, of course, though the Evil Marketer has seen it coming for some time now. You poor little consumers installing your anti-spyware/third party cookie blocking software on your computers are, meanwhile, probably subscribing to one company to receive your cable tv, phone and internet. Has it ever occurred to you that your provider knows what tv shows you are watching (and/or Tivo’ing), what web sites you are visiting, and who you are talking to on the phone? All with timestamps? All aggregated into (potentially) one database? And charging you for it??? MUHAHAHAHA

As soon as they figure out how to wrap up that info into a nice tidy package and sell it to advertisers, the whole world will change. And it’s not just service providers — social networks sites like MySpace are treasure troves of private data — and the sweetest part for us marketers is that one of the prime demographics live on these sites and willingly give up all manner of information about what they like — music, movies, gadgets — and what relationships they have with others who also give up that info. As soon as these sites leverage that data and strike up a juicy deal with Google or the like, “online privacy” will become as quaint as vinyl albums or rotary phones — or mass marketed million dollar 30 second tv spots.

Don’t fret my dear consumer, there is good news for you too. Leveraging this info will probably allow service providers to drastically reduce their fees — you may even get tv, phone and internet for free some day soon. And you’ll start seeing ads that actually interest you and promote products you were already researching. It will seem a little creepy at first that you see a coordinated campaign for a new dog food on your cell, tv, and computer home page moments after scheduling a vet appointment, but you’ll get used to it.

Greetings suckers! I see you’ve followed a link from one of my carefully managed, behaviorally targeted, hybrid CPC/CPM/CPA, consumer-generated, and/or contextually driven stealth ads. Gotcha!

How does it feel?

You feel violated, don’t you? You probably feel like taking a long, hot shower — weeping uncontrollably as you slowly sink to the floor of your tub, skin raw and red from excessive loufah-ing. But the pain just won’t go away. And not just because you realize that the loufah was purchased from a follow up email coupon auto-generated from a cart abandonment tracking system.

I’m really sorry about all of this.

No I’m not!

As an online marketer, I have no shame. My job is to make sure that you buy the stuff I’m pushing; any ethical considerations are easily disposed of with some carefully worded rationalizations. Rationalizations that I firmly believe, by the way. If I didn’t I may have trouble sleeping at night while my third party cookie niche-marketed behavioral tracking system was watching you surf my client’s sites. Boy you sure spent a lot of time looking at that lingerie page, which is odd considering I’ve got you tagged as a 40-something male earning between $50-100k a year whose last purchase was a $59 power saw purchased via a “make the putt” interactive flash ad. Buying for the wife are we?

If I can coerce you into telling your friends and family to buy the stuff I push, all the better. Then I’ll cross sell you and up-sell you and everyone you know. I may even re-sell all of your contact information to my so called “business partners” (here’s some news — a business partner is anyone who will pay me for your private data), so they can begin the process all over again.

“I’m scared,” you say, trembling. “What should I do?”

There there little consumer, don’t be scared. This thing is bigger than you are, smarter than you are, and is designed to respond quickly to any fight you put up. Just take it.

Why, you ask, am I spending my valuable time telling you all of this instead of figuring out better ways to track your every move? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because a very small part of me wonders if maybe what I’m doing is wrong. That part of me that wanted to write the Great American Novel, or used to think commercials were somehow “bad.” Or maybe I just love marketing so much that I have to write about it even when I could be doing something else important, like playing with my kids or watching sunsets.

I think it’s that last thing.

Please come back, there’s much more to come. There is plenty of marketing evil to talk about and to learn from, and it just gets more interesting every day.

Love,
The Evil Marketer