Marketing Roadmaps

The Marketing Economy

On Cannes and the marketer backlash against influencers

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The early news out of Cannes, where the glitterati of the advertising world have gathered to rub shoulders, quaff rosé, do deals (or at least talk about doing deals) and generally celebrate their own creativity and business acumen in the hopes of snagging business from the legion of CMOs taking advantage of what has to be the best boondoggle on the planet, is that a marketer backlash against influencers is growing. At least according to Digiday’s piece on June 20th.

The basis for the argument is the announcement by Unilever CMO Keith Weed on Monday that the company is pushing for greater transparency in influencer marketing to combat fraud, create better consumer experiences and improve measurement.

In a prepared statement, Weed committed the company to not working with influencers who buy followers, to never buy followers itself and to prioritize partners committed to increased transparency and eradicating bad practices. He dramatically concluded with:

The key to improving the situation is three-fold: cleaning up the influencer ecosystem by removing misleading engagement; making brands and influencers more aware of the use of dishonest practices; and improving transparency from social platforms to help brands measure impact. We need to take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever.”

This is noble, and I commend Unilever for taking a position.

HOWEVER,

I take exception to the idea that we can have backlash against our customers. Influencers, true influencers, are our customers. People who love our products and want to share their opinions with their friends, family and fans.

So let’s reframe this accusation before we go too far.

What we are reacting to is fraud, perpetrated largely by automated systems in the search for scale. Yes, people bought followers to make their numbers look better. But the root cause — and this is true for many digital fraud issues —is the holy grail of scale over all else. Reach as many people as you can at the least possible cost. The volume ensures a certain percentage of buyers. Except at some point, the volume becomes the goal, not just the means to the goal.

We’ve been seduced by delivery metrics, taking shortcuts that promise to deliver more, for less. It’s a cycle of inflation that “looks good” but doesn’t actually deliver to our objective.

Why are we always so surprised when the shortcut turns out to be a dead end?

The problem isn’t influencers, who are, after all, your customers. It’s the never ending search for scale without a similar commitment to authenticity and performance metrics.

I suggest (and have for years) that we think about consumer to consumer marketing differently.

Relationships
Ground your influencer marketing strategy in authentic relationships with customers who want to advocate for your brand. Don’t neglect those with smaller follower numbers; sometimes they are your most effective evangelists.

A good influencer marketing strategy activates customers with all degrees of influence, using tactics that take best advantage of both the customer’s passion and her platform.

Performance metrics
The performance that matters is conversions. Everything else is a delivery metric. Even engagement. Although it can be a conversion metric for some objectives, for the most part, it too is simply a way to measure the delivery of a program.

Make sure your program has a conversion metric, and a way to get there. You can’t convert without a call to action.

Link back to sales. You can be super sophisticated using modern marketing platforms. Or you know, simply start tracking sales over time against marketing activity, including influencer.

How de we avoid fraud in influencer marketing?

  • Stop chasing scale and start working with your friends.
  • Measure what matters, not everything that moves.

Cheers!

GDPR 101: Focus on your Customer

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GDPR, the EU’s Global Data Privacy Regulation, took effect at midnight Brussels time today.

In its Winners & Losers article, which I encourage you to read in full, Digiday comments  “Bluntly speaking, any business that doesn’t have a direct relationship with users is in for a difficult time,” and goes on to note subscription-focused publishers as one of the GDPR “winners.”

My 2 cents: Moving forward, every publisher, every brand needs to think like a subscription-focused business.

The game is no longer JUST about acquisition or impressions at scale. Audience targeting is about to undergo a major sea change as available inventory shrinks and costs to produce it increase.

Customer loyalty and customer permission are the long-term keys to success in a post-GDPR world. To get and keep them, we need to deliver a stellar experience for customers. This means:

  • building a well-loved, well-known brand;
  • creating excellent, well-organized content ecosystems that incorporate all the touchpoints consumers have with our brands;
  • delivering a quality personalized environment for customers/readers/viewers;
  • leveraging customers’ passion for the brand or content by engaging them in the content. Influencer marketing for sure, but also community forums, face-to-face events, private chats.

Remember: consumers like it when content and experiences are tailored to them. Even ads. But they need to be truly tailored to their preferences. No one likes to be stalked by shoe ads just because they looked at the shoes once and their income level matches the advertiser target.

A final note: GDPR is often compared to Y2K in terms of the scope of effort required to comply, and on some levels, this is true. However, Y2K did have an end point. Either your systems fell apart on January 1, 2000 or shortly thereafter, or they didn’t. GDPR on the other hand is far from over. This is just the beginning of a new media environment.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Digital media predictions for a post-GDPR world

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Last week, a business acquaintance made a ballsy prediction on LinkedIn for which he took a fair amount of flak. Posting a comment, I noted that his essential point was not that much of a stretch. Of course, there were nuances to the argument, but a long statement with a bunch of caveats wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or thought-provoking. Predictions have to push at the edges or people won’t pay attention. So, I figured it was time to step onto the ledge and make some predictions about the future of digital advertising. I’d love to hear what you think, agree or disagree.

1. In a post-GDPR world, targeted advertising is going to become more expensive. Not immediately. There is still a lot of confusion (some real, some manufactured) about what is required.  In the end, though, the increased costs of delivering compliant targeted audiences combined with a decrease in available inventory as consumers retract or refuse permission, will increase ad rates to premium, not programmatic, rates. I’ve been arguing this for a while and the pundits are finally admitting it. 

2. Context will be queen again. In order to reach the right audience, we will turn to content-centric, community-centric marketing tactics. In part because they ARE more effective in converting customers, but mostly because the cost differential between them and targeted/programmatic advertising won’t be so great. It will be just that much easier to take the leap of faith to try these tactics, which are still working out their success metrics (more about that in a bit.)

This is the opportunity for niche publishers and brands to create content for their micro-audiences that both provides the necessary context for ads and sponsored content and creates a relationship and value exchange in which the consumer is more likely to give permission for the specific use of personal data. As an example, Pepper & Wits, a new content site for women 45+ who are navigating menopause is owned by P&G; we certainly should expect sponsored content and other brand outreach but the primary purpose is to offer value to the consumer and targeted context, not targeted ads.

3. “If you aren’t paying, you’re the product” is a cliché whose days are numbered. Consumers will start to care about privacy. It has been a LONG time coming, but I truly believe that consumers are finally understanding the true cost of free digital services/platforms, and are going to want real value in exchange for the right to use their personal data. “Legitimate business interest” is not going to be sufficient to use a person’s data without permission. Publishers and brands who are offering great content and building relationships with consumers will have a far better chance of obtaining (and retaining) permission.

4. Things are about to get more competitive. Facebook and Google are vulnerable in this new advertising economy. They aren’t in danger by any means, but their models are based on scale, not relationships. They have no friends, just users. This opens up a sliver of opportunity for niche content publishers to create better experiences for consumers and pick off a little wedge of the pie. The duopoly will still get (more than) its fair share, but they will be handicapped in delivering their biggest strength, targeted audiences at scale, so the little guys can dart in and nab their share in areas where Facebook and Google cannot play effectively, content and community. Niche publishers, bloggers, even brands who can make the long haul investment. And Amazon. Amazon already does a better job of community than either Facebook or Google, is nipping at their heels and has a distinct e-commerce advantage. I also predict Reddit will make a strong play for the “community ad dollar.”

5. All of this will drive innovation. Certainly, in ad tech to manage consent, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Folks are already working on challenges like better measurement and attribution models that assign value properly and proportionally to all the players in the value chain, not just the last click. This is crucial for branded content, video, social media and influencer marketing.

Community is also getting some attention. Two start-ups doing interesting things to connect brands with consumers: Social Data Collective and Suzy. Suzy (AskSuzy.com) is the evolution of social media and influencer business Crowdtap. It helps advertisers make and manage meaningful connections with customers by offering them access to its super panel of consumers. Social Data Collective has a slightly different approach; it asks consumers to share personal data with the brands they love in exchange for products/services.

But I think even more interesting things are on the horizon. For example, aggregators of consumer information that validate consumer audiences and can compare them across properties, including blogs and YouTube and all the other places that community will form, not just sites big enough to register on comScore. Audience data all the way down the long tail to validate that the context IS delivering the right audience. This “data hole” has been the bête noire of the influencer marketing business, but there wasn’t a strong enough incentive to solve it, when advertisers could just buy targeted audiences cheaply. To sell content and community as the right context, you need the metrics to prove that you’ve got the goods. It’s coming. I am certain. And it won’t need PII (personally identifiable information) to do it.

We also need tools to give consumers control over their privacy across platforms and processors. Right now, if you think someone has compromised your private data or is using it without permission, good luck tracking it down. Blockchain is the best bet for creating this privacy audit trail. Someone is certainly working on this already. In fact, if you know who, I’d love to chat with them!!!

So there you have it. My predictions for the digital media industry. If you need me, I’ll just be out here teetering on the ledge.

P.S. If you want to check out the prediction of my business acquaintance, you can find it on LinkedIn.

Customer-Centric Marketing. An idea whose time has FINALLY come?

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Activating the passion that consumers have for the brands they love and turning them into your advocates is the secret sauce to identifying and converting new customers as well as increasing the loyalty of retained customers.

This simple concept, customer-centric marketing, has been the basis of my work for more than 20 years. It’s why I embraced blogs and then social media so wholeheartedly. It’s why I advocate so strongly for transparency, authenticity and disclosure, because they foster trust, the currency of social interaction. Online and off. It’s why I have embraced GDPR and other privacy initiatives for the promise they offer to build strong relationships with customers based on a balanced, informed value exchange for personal data.

Customer-centric marketing is also an idea that is often given lip-service, but not nearly as often embedded in our corporate DNA. We talk a good game about building relationships with customers, incorporating consumer feedback, building products and services that delight them. But when it comes time to implement the marketing plan, we use the language of war. We target audiences. We deploy tactics. We execute plans. We profile the customers into personas who are expected to follow prescribed patterns of behavior.

Which is fine, to a point. It would be foolish not to aim your marketing efforts at the audience most likely to buy. But our language and our tactics both tend to dehumanize our customer, to the point that we forget they are people and not just impressions or clicks or conversions or profiles. Taken to the extreme, and make no mistake modern digital marketing exists on the very edge of this extreme, our marketing isn’t just automated, it’s robotic, and not in a good way.

More human tactics like social marketing, influencer engagement, event marketing and even branded content restore the balance and remind us that customers aren’t simply segmented groups of purchasing behaviors, they are people. Living, breathing people who love our products and services, and are simply waiting to be asked. While these tactics are very often more effective, they are nearly always more expensive than digital advertising which uses programmatic buying and consumer targeting to reach the right audiences cheaply, at scale.

The good news, for advocates of more human centered approaches (like me), is that GDPR promises to reduce that financial gap. The SUPPLY for targeted ads will be diminished when (inevitably) publishers can’t document permission or consumers withdraw permission. It also will be more expensive to deliver an audience targeted PROPERLY with personal data. Both scenarios will increase CPMs for the remaining inventory. More on these and other scenarios in Marketing Week.

Certainly, contextual targeting will pick up the slack for digital advertising. There also will still be a market for premium permission-targeted audiences. Niche publishers in particular have tremendous incentive to develop a strong value proposition, both for their content and in exchange for the use of personal data for targeting. I wrote about this last fall.

As the cost gap closes between digital advertising at scale and more engaging tactics like influencer marketing and branded content, marketers will have incentive to shift budget to customer-centric marketing, where relevance can be proven by our interest and engagement with content and brands, not simply implied by our browsing history or past purchasing behavior.

It’s then up to us as marketers to create the compelling, customer-centric campaigns that engage consumers and convert prospects to buyers.

I’m game!

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Additional Reading on GDPR. Tick Tock. Less than 3 weeks to go. 

The long term outlook for influencer marketing

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In a bid to demonstrate a shift in its behavior, Facebook implemented restrictions to the APIs for both Facebook and Instagram on March 30 — APIs that many third-party developers, including players in the influencer marketing industry, were relying on in order to support their products.” – MediaPost

Some are concerned that this restriction on data will negatively impact the third party partners. In my opinion, whatever short term impact this restriction on data may have on measurement and influencer marketing platforms, the long term outlook for influencer marketing has never been better. Increased privacy regulations like GDPR are creating a positive situation that will far outweigh the short term issues that the current Facebook changes present.

Here’s why:

Audience targeting is about to undergo changes that will likely result in higher CPMs. The requirements for managing consent will add to the cost basis, thereby increasing ad rates. Some forms of ad targeting may even become too cost prohibitive.

This opens the door just a bit wider for influencer marketing and branded content. They rely on context and aggregate audiences, which are not impacted by privacy regulations. They also have nearly always been more costly than programmatic media and Facebook boosts. As the cost gap narrows, more budget should shake free for human-centered forms of marketing.

AdWeek certainly thinks so:

Working with social media influencers is another important model for marketers to consider in this shifting landscape. The assumption by many marketers about working with influencers is that they are meant for one-off projects rather than as parts of a wider campaign strategy. Yet, the brands who see the greatest success with influencer marketing take a longer-view approach, creating a steady connection with their intended audiences.”

So do I.