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Wednesday, October 13, 2010
The Perils of Persistence
By Jeff Einstein
The following is copy from an email sent to the head media
honcho at a global advertiser following a meeting with one
of his media agency's top digital strategists. Proper names
have been deleted to protect all (except yours truly, of
course)...
"Been ruminating on some leftover thoughts from a recent
conversation with one of your agency's top digital
strategists, and thought they might serve as a reasonable
basis for a dialog between us moving forward..."
"I've long maintained that marketing metrics rarely
describe those things that actually work, and more
frequently describe what can be sold by agencies and other
intermediaries to their clients. That said, I think it's
significant that most digital agency folks have turned
their backs on the click-through rate (CTR) as a meaning-
ful online brand metric in recent days. True to the above,
however, I would argue that the primary reason for this
has less to do with the value of the CTR as a brand metric
and more to do with the fact that they can no longer sell
to their clients any metric -- no matter how meaningful --
that performs at statistical zero."
"Rather than shoot a perfectly good messenger, it might
be more instructive to examine why CTRs are so abysmal. I
believe the answer is pretty simple, and it applies pretty
much across all channels: no one wants the ads and everyone
is equipped to avoid them."
"The entire ad industry is currently dealing a narcotic for
which there is no demand -- which explains why effective,
scalable brand reach is harder and harder to find and more
and more expensive to buy, especially online, despite the
proliferation of sub-$1.00 CPMs, massive ad networks, and
both demand-side and real-time bidding platforms. Indeed,
the lack of effective, scalable online brand reach explains
why digital media spends remain so miserly in comparison
to traditional reach media like TV: big brand advertisers
will always satisfy their fundamental need for effective
reach first. Everything else is discretionary. And for good
reason: branding is simply a function of effective reach."
"Unfortunately, the very concept of brand reach is entirely
foreign to most digital marketers. Most incorrectly assume
that reach is a function of somehow adjusting and/or
augmenting the supply of ads -- a reasonable enough assert-
ion when you also believe in the tooth fairy or the myth of
relevant ads, the patently absurd suggestion that there's
actually a consumer out in the ether somewhere in search of
a relevant ad. But as you likely already know, reach is not
a supply-side phenomenon at all. Reach describes the demand
side. In an on-demand media universe (and all commercial
media are now and always have been on-demand), advertisers
never truly reach audiences at all. Quite the opposite:
audiences reach advertisers. Reach is a measure of audience
behavior, not the ad supply. And the one audience behavior
that we can now trust with absolute certainty in an on-
demand media universe is the wholesale rejection of ads,
"relevant" or otherwise."
"Simply stated, advertisers can't generate effective, scal-
able reach with an electronic work product that no one
wants and everyone is equipped to avoid. Yet from what
your digital media proxy told me, this seems to be the
exact strategy pursued by your agency. While it's clearly
a strategy shared by the vast majority of big brand
advertisers and their agencies, it finds no security in
numbers because in truth it seeks ubiquity over perform-
ance, panders to lazy, tool-driven mentalities, continually
lowers the performance bar and wreaks havoc upon the media
ecology -- all en route to damaging the very brands it
seeks to protect and promote."
"It's a strategy that relies on brute market strength and
buying power, and otherwise completely ignores the one
thing we know for certain about your prospects: while they
may want your products, they sure as hell don't want your
ads. Now ask yourself this: What happens if we persist?
What happens if we continue to deliver ads to prospects
who simply don't want them?"
"Imagine you're a door-to-door salesman. Now imagine that
99.9% of all the doors you walk up to display a big bold
'No Soliciting' sign. Rather than heed the signs, however,
you knock on each and every door and -- failing to elicit
any response from 999 out of every 1000 doors you knock on
-- tack your product brochure up right alongside the 'No
Soliciting' sign. You return to the same doors month after
month, and leave your brochures behind each and every time.
Nothing you do seems to increase sales. Baffled, you double
your efforts and leave two brochures on each door -- to no
avail. You expand your territory, but all the doors in the
new territory are marked with the exact same 'No Solicit-
ing' sign. Undeterred, you leave three brochures instead
of two. Eventually your sales begin to decline as your
prospects -- pissed and abused -- turn instead to your
competitors."
"Persisting with a strategy that insists on delivering
ads to prospects who just don't want them will eventually
result in negative returns on your investment. Not only
will your ad performance continue to decline over time,
but each additional ad will constitute a withdrawal from
your brand bank. A couple of years ago I introduced the
phenomenon of what I called DROI -- Diminished Return On
Investment -- to a trade show audience. During the Q&A
that followed, one skeptical young man asked me, 'Why, if
what you say is true, does P&G pay for and deliver two
billion daily ad impressions?'"
"'Because,' I told him, 'the first 1,999,999,999 ad
impressions obviously don't get the job done anymore.'"
"Consumers have nailed 'No Soliciting' signs to their doors
precisely because they're being bludgeoned to death by the
ads now hurtling at them from every conceivable direction
in inconceivable volumes. Nowhere is the clarion consumer
call for 'No Soliciting' more apparent or more abused by
advertisers and marketers than in social media, where what
marketers misinterpret as a consumer desire to engage is
in fact the exact opposite: a desire to disengage. It might
be worthwhile to note that every single attempt by Facebook
management to open member profile data to marketers and
advertising has been met with fierce resistance by members
who want -- more than anything else -- to be left alone to
decide who gets in and who stays out."
"Again, what happens if you persist? For that matter, what
might happen if you don't?"
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About Jeff Einstein
Digital media pioneer Jeff Einstein is one-half of the
Brothers Einstein, a contrarian brand strategy and
communications boutique. The Brothers Einstein have just
announced the release of their Just BE Workshop, a full-
day, hands-on seminar designed to help senior marketing
executives lower the barriers to innovation and restore
common sense to its rightful place atop the hierarchy of
modern management tools.
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