Consumers are selfish, irrational and disloyal. It’s their right.

 A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007


When Carling Black Label brought a case for trademark infringement against a group that had parodied the brand in South Africa, it was said in court that “Black Label has the luxury of having the most money, and therefore the most speech”.  The court saw the company as having a greater voice, and sought to protect the freedom of expression of the consumer.

But as we’ve seen in recent years, that balance has been swinging away from companies as the internet empowers the individual to get even.  Untrammelled by any requirements of taste, decency, accuracy or balance, consumers can say pretty much what they like – so when they’re also right, it can mean pretty fierce language and tactics which companies are rightly circumspect about confronting.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the opprobrium WalMart had attracted by using flogs (sales promotions posing as blogs) to promote themselves, and the PR storm Kryptonite suffered at the hands of bloggers when their $90 bike lock turned out to be openable with a bic biro.

Now it’s the turn of a company in Britain to get burned, and there are useful lessons to be drawn for all of us. 

You might have seen TV ads and tube cards in recent weeks for a group fighting the ‘information revolution monopoly’.  Ask, the search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is trying to persuade consumers that there should be freedom of choice in where they get their information from, and they’re directing consumers to a site they’ve set up at www.information-revolution.org.

The TV ads run without a soundtrack, and look like they’ve been shot on a webcam – activists are seen holding up messages on cards to camera, suggesting people visit Ask.com.  On the site itself, a link then takes you to the information revolution microsite, where you’re presented with a manifesto and message boards where they encourage debate.

And this is where it all starts to peel apart.

From reasoned criticism of Ask’s site – “I use Google because most likely I get the result I want without…having a huge large type sponsored advertisement links like ASK and MSN do” to fry-eyed “Way to go, Jeeves, now you’re not only incompetent and stupid, you’re evil as well”, hundreds of posts have lambasted Ask’s campaign.

Whilst the campaign is tongue in cheek, this makes no impact on the messageboards, where people tend to have a very literal interpretation of advertising.  What comes through is three basic complaints – consumers are being driven to a site under false pretences, they are being patronized by a fake ‘revolution’ line which belies the selling message, and finally that the product’s no good.
In the hundreds of posts, I couldn’t find a single positive one.

We can all see what the benefit to Ask might be if we used search engines other than Google, but consumers clearly struggle to see what might drive them either emotionally or rationally to Ask.  And herein lies the real message for all of us who are secretly relieved we didn’t sign this one off.

Consumers are selfish, irrational and disloyal.  It’s their right, and so it ever has been.  They don’t mind being sold to, but they resent being misled – even if the agency and the client think it’s witty.  So you’d better do what it says on the tin, because they’re not going to take it lying down if you don’t.

Feedback will be swift, and it will be merciless.  They will revel in your discomfiture, and hijack your communications to serve their own agenda.  They will expose your every weakness, and pick it to bits.

And this is Ask’s problem.  If their product is superior, consumers can’t see it and the campaign doesn’t show it.  And where in traditional media it might have ended at that, with some swiftly-forgotten brand-tracking data, in digital the effect has been to aggravate consumers and give a platform to detractors.  As one forum contributor puts it, “I love the smell of back peddling in the morning”.

Ajax and the death of the page view

 A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

Anyone who’s spent any time in digital starts to look differently at change, and it’s sometimes hard to take seriously what are seen as ground-shaking moves in traditional media – a newspaper moving to a smaller format, a radio station reducing ad minutage.  It seems the digital media world gets reinvented every six months, and we revel in that warp-speed evolution even if we don’t always know where it’ll lead.

So it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that the way we measure online media is all set to change (again).

In the beginning there was the ‘hit’.  A hit describes a call on a server to send a file, and since a web page is made up of lots of elements (pictures, text etc.) and each of these is a file, one page could be twenty ‘hits’.  So this was a pretty useless way of gauging traffic to anyone other than a network engineer, and it was rapidly abandoned (though the term is still misused) in favour of the page impression.

Now we were talking a language media folk could understand.  A page impression represented the viewing of a single web page, and since this was analogous to how people look at newspapers, everybody felt pretty comfortable about it.  It felt like it gave us an idea of the scale of usage of a site – something we could benchmark.

Of course, wily editors responded by splitting stories across multiple pages to boost the count, and media buyers (coming from a press background) widely misinterpreted it as being a substitute for circulation.

The reality was, it never really mattered how many page impressions a site does in a week unless you were buying the whole site.  Web display advertising is generally bought on an impressions basis – I might buy 100,000 impressions over a week; the fact the site delivers a million impressions overall is a matter of supreme indifference to me as long as I get what I paid for.

So we started measuring unique users, the number of people (actually computers) visiting sites, and combining this with page impressions – effectively measures of reach and frequency respectively.

And so it’s been for the last few years, and everyone was pretty happy with it.

Unfortunately it’s becoming redundant.

The way the web works, the way it presents itself to users, is changing – largely driven by three new technologies, RSS, Ajax, and Widgets.

In ‘traditional’ web pages, the only time a server actually sends a file to you is when you click on a link.  All the time you’re looking at the page, there’s no traffic from the server.  An Ajax page is different.  It’s actually an application, monitoring what you’re doing and downloading more stuff unseen by you in anticipation of things you might do next.  This means when you click on something, the response is instant as the data’s already there. 

It also means you often don’t even click – all you need is anticipated and delivered within that page.  You can see an example of this at www.ba.com – enter a destination city, and it will suggest options before you finish typing – “Lon” suggests ‘Londonderry’, ‘Long Beach’ and ‘London’, type one more letter and the redundant options disappear.

Similarly, RSS feeds information constantly into your computer – you don’t need to visit the site to get your team’s score, they’re delivered to you.  Increasingly popular, widgets are small applications you install on your PC which perform tasks, often automatically retrieving information for you like the weather forecast.

The consequence of this evolution?  The page view has become decoupled from site usage.  This has huge implications not just for publishers, but for advertisers too – because it also undermines the click as a measure of interaction. 

This is challenging because we really don’t know where it’ll lead, but ultimately it’s healthy.  People are obsessed about clicks, but they’re a pretty blunt measure of interaction.  If the impact of this change is to make people think harder about how their communications work, it can only be a good thing. 

Internet is the future of TV

 A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

I grew up with TV.  Double Deckers, Grange Hill, Banana Splits, TOTP – these were the media franchises we engaged with, and acted out in the playground.  We never gave a thought to what went on behind the screen – the technology of how it was delivered, and we certainly never felt wonder at the brilliance of the innovations that delivered it to us.

But my parents didn’t grow up with TV.  My Dad was 18 when the coronation brought the first TV to their house, and its tiny monochrome screen introduced the family to a new world.  My parents’ generation was there as television developed, and recognised its advances – definition improving, the introduction of colour, live pictures from the moon.

They regarded TV as technology in a way I never did – to me it was just there, and my mates and I watched it.  And now I’m repeating the pattern.

When I look at iPods, instant messenging, Skype, internet video, I see technology.  I work hard to understand its social and business implications, but I have to teach myself to use it.

My children on the other hand have grown up with it.  My son’s frustration that he can’t rewind the TV – his indignation that people schedule programmes at times other than when he wants to sit down and watch – has to be seen to be believed.  He’s grown up with the CBeebies website, and Homechoice video on demand.  He listens to story CDs ripped onto an MP3 player in the car, and DVDs for treats. 

He doesn’t see anything special in any of this.  To him, the technology is transparent, and he knows intuitively how to use it. 

Older kids spend hours at their PCs on messenger – if you ask them what they’re doing, it’s not “using the computer” but “talking to my friends”.  They listen to the radio over the web, and watching TV over the internet on their PC is second nature.

So when the BBC announced a deal with YouTube last week to open three channels on the site it wasn’t just a logical development, it was an essential part of the BBC’s drive into the online platform.

The YouTube deal is billed as a promotional platform for BBC content, with two entertainment channels showing clips of TV programmes and ‘making of’ material, and linking back to the BBC’s websites and other content.  But it’s more than this; the ad-funded news channel launching later this year is a serious commercial venture into a new platform on a global stage.

This is particularly significant when you consider the BBC’s iPlayer platform slated to launch in the autumn, carrying catch-up TV content downloadable to your PC.  The BBC’s ambition for this is to sign other broadcasters to their platform – using the BBC to kick penetration, just as they did with Freeview.

The BBC was the critical success factor in the growth of Freeview.  They brought attractive content, marketing muscle and most importantly a vision to a moribund platform with two previous failed owners. 

Nobody could describe the internet video market as moribund.  But what it lacks in leadership it makes up for in contenders – Google, MSN, Yahoo and more recently, Joost are all jostling for position, knowing that audiences will not typically download more than one software platform to watch TV on their PC. 

There’s likely to be a significant first-mover advantage in this market, and the BBC’s move is the first serious one in this country.  If it can sign other broadcasters and get to market quickly enough, its impact could be felt rapidly as young audiences desert broadcast TV in even greater numbers.  When there’s a real benefit, these software platforms can spread incredibly rapidly – Skype took three years to go from first beta test to 100 million users, and Napster a year to get 40 million.

All of which means, if you’re in the business of targeting young people on TV, you might want to watch this space…

Elvis Presley and the growth of search

 A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2007

In 1954, the year he released “That’s all right”, there was just one Elvis Presley.  By his death in 1977, there were 170 Elvis impersonators.  That number is now estimated to be over 85,000 – and at this rate of growth by 2019 they will make up a third of the world’s population.

Back in the late ‘90s this anecdote was used regularly to satirise the endless supply of projections the internet’s growth tended to generate.  But the continued growth of paid search – the advertising taken by Google, Yahoo, MSN et al – is sticking two fingers up at such scepticism.

Search marketing in the UK grew 58% in the first six months of last year, and there’s no sign that this rate of growth is abating.  Google is widely expected to be the fourth largest media company by revenue in the world this year, and in the UK, the paid search market is already bigger than radio. 

But the dizzying growth of search and the powerful results it creates for their businesses is creating a dangerous tunnel-vision amongst online marketers.   They risk failing to reflect how consumers act online – and a marketer moves away from the consumer at their peril.

It’s always been recognised that different media work together.  Campaigns are created across TV, press and outdoor, and this is an accepted part of advertising life – reflecting consumers’ consumption of media and the different strengths each medium offers.

Online however, search is often treated as something different.  The ability to measure a cost per sale on search advertising is a powerful attractor to marketing folk, who have laboured for years under the disbelieving eye of their FD.  So there’s a real temptation to attribute the creation of a sale to the last step in the acquisition process – often a search – and call this ‘accountability’.

The impact of TV, press or other internet ad forms is ignored, because the last step was a search.  But understanding that these other channels might have influenced the inception of a search is not enough.  We need to understand the degree to which these media impact on searches in order to assess the true value of search, and recognise the precise role it plays – not just in a high-level ‘strategic’ way, but on the ground, minute-by-minute.

Search operators understand this interdependence.  That’s why Google are developing display products, why MSN launched Adcenter to integrate the management of display and search, and why Yahoo are rebuilding their interface with advertisers to move seamlessly between search and display.

But many advertisers and agencies continue to manage search, affiliate marketing and display in silos – using different tracking systems, different KPIs, teams and even companies.  These are specialist disciplines, but if they’re not tied together around the brand’s needs then they’re failing to deliver on the interdependencies that are proven to exist.

At worst, there will be duplication – results claimed by search, and also by affiliates or display, with no way of de-duping.  The ability dynamically to divert budget from one channel to another will be hampered by individual targets and P&Ls.  And the potential to exploit these synergies – how display can increase the cost effectiveness of search by influencing the ratio of brand to generic searches, how display advertising can form a crucial part of an affiliate incentive programme, how rules of engagement for search need to be agreed with affiliates – all of these can be lost in the gaps between silos.

Integration has long been an objective within traditional media operations.  Online, the integration of search, affiliates and display has tangible and immediate benefits – not at a corporate “one-stop shop” level, but at a real, down in the detail operational level – and many advertisers are way behind both media owners and consumers in reflecting this.

Search might be set to outstrip Elvis impersonation as the fastest growing industry ever.  But the irony is, it’s at the same time over-valued and under-exploited by many of the people whose businesses rely on it. 

The new media planner

How quaint it is that everybody who reads the Guardian newspaper sees the same ad.  Geography teachers and media executives, social workers and architects, all seeing the same brands.  People who buy 4x4s see Prius ads, people who never travel see easyJet ads.  This is how it always has been in traditional media, whether it’s TV, press or radio.

But this isn’t how life is in digital, and it could spell the death of the media planner as we understand them now.

Almost from the start, online advertising (and let’s be clear here, we’re just talking about banner-type ads) has been served to users in a ‘carousel’ – if I look at MSN’s home page at the same time as another person, there’s a good chance we’ll see different ads.

Initially, this was simply random.  But technology quickly enabled advertisers to target people based on the characteristics of their internet connection – where they were in the world, what language their computer was set to – as well as time of day, day of week etc.

But whilst this was useful, we still didn’t know anything about the people who were looking at our ads, and traditional approaches to media planning still dominated – inferring characteristics of consumers based on the site’s overall profile.

But technology is now being applied which could change all that, and improve the efficiency of the online channel still further.

Behavioural targeting is being used by publishers to create individual profiles of visitors to their site.  So a reader who has visited the motoring section of the Guardian’s website twice in the last month might be shown a car ad whilst they’re in the arts section.

Increasingly, the growth in advertiser demand is leaving sites short of first-class inventory, and behavioural targeting offers them the ability to charge a premium for ads appearing in less demanded environments.   And for advertisers, this is an important hedge against media inflation, as shortages would otherwise drive pricing up.

Revenue Science, who provide this technology to the Guardian, now work with most of the UK’s leading newspapers sites, and similar technologies are employed by a range of other publishers, including Yahoo, who are using the search behaviour of their visitors to segment and target them with display advertising.

But there’s an interesting conundrum that remains unanswered.  Publishers are using technologies to ‘top-slice’ their inventory, putting all of the more valuable consumers into one segment and selling them to advertisers at a premium.  Good for them.  But if they’ve taken the more valuable consumers out of the overall pot of impressions they have to sell, then what remains – the segment made up of all the people not deemed worthy of selling at a premium – is worth less.

Smart buyers are pursuing this in the market, arguing that a discount should be applied to any ‘untargeted’ media they buy.  So in the end, whilst this technology might be very smart, it could result in a zero-sum game for publishers as the premium for behaviourally targeted inventory is offset by the discount commanded by the leftovers.

But it isn’t just individual sites that are applying these technologies.  Ad networks (who sell inventory on behalf of multiple publishers) are segmenting audiences based on their behaviour across the network and their responsiveness to advertising, to target consumers across the network – making those ads more valuable to advertisers.

Media has come a long way from showing the same ad to everyone.  But behavioural targeting is moving the game on another step, as it shifts the focus of planning from media to consumer-centric.  This is a fundamental and exciting evolution – the challenge is for media planners to adapt, as the environment decouples from the ad message. 

As this happens, we could see a new breed of planner emerge, one who combines understanding of brand, consumer insight and a fluency with the new media ecosystem – a hybrid of account, data and media planners.  Perhaps they’ll drop the qualifier, and just be planners.