On Online Video

There's been a lot of great commentary on online video advertising these past few weeks, and I'm gratified to see people take a skeptical stance toward the sustainability of online video.  I've been saying for a while now that online video cannot sustain the influx of online advertising dollars on its own, that marketers are going to have to look to Conversational Marketing programs to help grow their businesses, and that pre-roll ads and other online video models are nothing but a Band-Aid that will make some people a good deal of money in the short term, but won't provide sustainable growth for online marketing. Curt Hecht, chief digital officer at GM Planworks fired a long-overdue warning shot earlier this month, saying there's a lot we don't know about acceptance of the pre-roll model.  Joseph Jaffe, in his inimitable style, said the ideal length of a pre-roll spot was zero seconds when asked about ideal length by iMedia Chief Content Officer Brad Berens.

One of the reasons I've been saying pre-roll is not sustainable is that it's merely the TV model online, which we already know won't work well since it's just pushing a message.  Look to pre-roll to become the new rich media banner - we'll see a honeymoon period lasting a year, maybe two, where click rates are higher than all other online ads, and then we'll see 0.1% response rates again.  (Not that CTR is a measure of anything important, but that's what marketers look to in the absence of any decent effectiveness metrics.)

Another reason is that the idea of pre-roll is antithetical to the notion of deep linking and the spread of ideas.  How many times have you stumbled across an interesting video link in your web travels, clicked it, and found you had to sit through 30 or 60 seconds of some shitty car commercial to get to the video you wanted?  Most folks don't have the patience, but more importantly, they don't have the tolerance for commercialism interjecting itself into the idea flow.  I find that I'm saying to myself "Shit!  I wanted to see Bill O'Reilly squirm under an assault from David Letterman, not some idiotic ad for some drug that doesn't tell you what it does!" when I'm interrupted by a pre-roll ad.

When we deep link, often we bypass any sort of real estate on the web site that hosts the clip that might help set the expectation that there's pre-roll before content.  (Many of the sites that I've seen try to set that expectation haven't been doing a good job to start with - I'm looking at YOU, cable news sites.)  As clips are set free from the environments that "own" the content, we lose any expectation that's been set, and we view pre-roll as intrusive, annoying and tangential to the thoughts and ideas cultivated by the content behind it.

I could go on all day about how pre-roll sucks as a model, but I think you get the picture.  Folks, if online marketing is to have a future, we need to find models that are both sustainable and consistent with expectations of customers.  Pre-roll is neither.

WOMMA's Sernovitz Still Parroting That I'm Spreading Myths

Andy Sernovitz wrote a response to my iMedia piece from a couple weeks ago, obviously miffed that it didn’t exactly cast Word of Mouth Marketing in a positive light. Like he tends to whenever I write something critical of Word of Mouth Marketing, he claims I don’t understand what Word of Mouth Marketing is. I’m growing tired of the semantic game and the parroting of the incorrect notion that I somehow don’t know what Word of Mouth is.

The main point of my piece was to drive a wedge between what I call Conversational Marketing and what some of WOMMA’s member companies call Conversational Marketing. There are two schools of thought laying claim to the same terminology, and my article was my way of saying, in part, “This one is ours. Lay off.”

Why did I think it necessary to try to drive that wedge? Word of Mouth marketers have laid claim to a number of different terms to describe the wide variety of techniques they employ. There’s “Word of Mouth Marketing” itself, there’s “Buzz Marketing,” “Stealth Marketing,” "Pass-along Marketing" and probably at least another dozen variants. I’m saying that “Conversational Marketing” shouldn’t be part of that lexicon, given that it was used to describe not a Word of Mouth technique, but a communications philosophy. That philosophy was grounded in the cluetrain manifesto and various bottom-up approaches to changing how marketing works today.

Andy said in his response to my piece:

People often think that word of mouth is all about street teams or what Hespos calls "using compensated agents." It's just not what we do.

See what’s happening here? When it’s convenient for Andy, he plays the semantic game and barfs up a strawman. I never said anything equating all word of mouth to street teams and using compensated agents. I was talking about Conversational Marketing specifically and why using compensated agents is incompatible with it.

It’s Andy’s argument that because I think all Word of Mouth Marketing consists of street teams and compensated agents, my points must be invalid. Except that’s not what I said. I accused a few “word of mouth marketers” (not all of them, and not WOMMA specifically, mind you) of corrupting the term “Conversational Marketing” and trying to turn it into something else.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, try visiting the website of MarketingWorks, Inc., a WOMMA member company. From their website:

MWKS is a leader in conversational marketing (CM) techniques. We are experts in creating genuine consumer enthusiasm, amplifying it, and sharing it. This includes direct-engagement with millions of people, through industry-leading online "buzz" methodologies.These powerful CM methods - including respectfully entering chatrooms, message-boards, blogs, social networks and other targeted online communities - are always opt-in. Once admitted into a recognized community, MWKS’ “Brand Ambassadors” provide clear exchanges with devotees, influencers and interested populations.

Do you see the difference? We think CM is bottom-up. These guys are talking about entering forums on behalf of marketers, which is a top-down approach.

Now, back to Andy’s statement for a second, because I want to make it clear that there’s a semantic game being played here and I don’t want to have to keep repeating myself.

Regarding the notion of using compensated agents, Andy says “It’s just not what we do.”

Bullshit.

Visit BzzAgent’s website, specifically this page:

The Central Hive reads and responds to your BzzReports and awards you BzzPoints you can redeem for BzzRewards.

There are two things I want to highlight about this.

1. BzzAgent is a WOMMA member company. In fact, it’s one of their governing members and it’s one of the best-known of WOMMA’s member companies.
2. In black and white on its website, BzzAgent says it rewards its agents with BzzPoints, which can be redeemed for prizes. This is compensation. A transaction doesn’t have to be conducted in U.S. dollars for it to be considered compensation. Just ask any of the elected officials who took fancy vacations on Jack Abramoff’s dime.

BzzAgent is not the only WOMMA member company that utilizes paid agents in some form. There’s the example I quoted several paragraphs back, where MarketingWorks offers to use "Brand Ambassadors" in online forums on behalf of clients. In doing so, they (and/or their Brand Ambassadors) become a compensated agent.

Heck, let’s use the example of WOMMA’s most famed member company of all (or is it infamous?). Edelman got busted for failing to disclose they were behind a couple of pro-Wal-Mart blogs. That makes them a compensated agent. While I do give WOMMA some credit for calling Edelman on the carpet, the changes Edelman has made to the Wal-Mart blogs in response to their membership review are inadequate. Many bloggers have made note of the fact that Edelman still fails to adequately disclose that it is the one writing the blogs on Wal-Mart’s behalf.

While the jury’s still out on what WOMMA will or won't do to Edelman in response to their transgressions, I want to point out two things.

1. Edelman is (or possibly was) another governing member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association
2. They helped write the frickin’ ethical guidelines

I’ve just showed you how three WOMMA member companies, including two governing member companies who helped give rise to the organization, are using compensated agents and are not operating as transparently as they should be. There are probably more. This begs a question, and I’ll pose it to Andy:

Andy, what percentage of the apple needs to be rotten before one makes the decision to toss it away?

Pretend you’re me for a second. You want to help give rise to a new bottom-up marketing approach you’re calling Conversational Marketing. You’re talking to Fortune 500 marketers about it and trying to get them to fund programs that are philosophically aligned with the ideas of transparency and bottom-up marketing. You want to make the whole thing white hat, but there are a few black hat companies polluting the idea stream and making it more difficult for you to speak about a credible concept.

On top of that, you try to distance yourself these companies, but when you try to do that publicly, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association shows up to try to erase the distinctions you’re making. Wouldn’t you be a little miffed?

It’s not that I think every company on the WOMMA membership roster is bad news. There are a lot of companies on the roster that I like and respect, and even work with in some cases. Heck, we pitch business with two of the companies on the roster, and we've worked with some of the other companies in other capacities. It’s not that I’m painting Word of Mouth Marketing with a broad brush. I just believe that WOMMA itself, by nature of its association with a few of its member companies, has too much baggage for me to want to see it associate itself with Conversational Marketing.

There’s more baggage than I’ve described above, too. While WOMMA has made admirable strides toward providing member companies with ethics guidelines, it lacks the wherewithal to ensure member companies adhere to them. How many member companies have signed the ethics pledge, Andy? Can I still count them on one hand? Or have you made progress there? Last I checked, member companies were reluctant to sign of on it. My guess is they don't want to restrict their activities until they get a clear picture of what services marketers want to pay for.

We’ve seen how WOMMA’s hands are tied with respect to ethics in the Edelman case. WOMMA has put Edelman on probation, but it remains to be seen how WOMMA will ultimately deal with Edelman and its behavior. If you ask me, a 90-day probationary period was the wrong approach. Edelman helped write ethical guidelines for the association and its member companies, flagrantly violated them, and openly admitted to its transgressions only when called out on them by bloggers. To me, if an organization wants to be effective at promoting ethical business practices, it should immediately throw out any members who violate the rules so flagrantly, out of respect for the greater whole and its credibility in general. Andy, why didn’t this happen?

From WOMMA's launch release:

A core goal of WOMMA is to help grow the acceptance and legitimacy of word-of-mouth as part of the broader marketing mix.

IMO, if one wants to grow acceptance and legitimacy, you distance yourself from the people and companies that are doing wrong. You don't let everybody else take the hit for the flagrant transgressions of one. You cut them out like a cancer and you move on.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do here. We want Conversational Marketing to have a shot with marketers. If we want that, then we have to distance ourselves from the companies that aren't doing it correctly. Unfortunately, that includes quite a few WOMMA member companies. It's nothing personal. It's business.

Corporate Agents at Work

Try to mask the fact that you're surreptitiously "seeding" online communities on behalf of an advertiser and you will most likely get caught.  It bears repeating, so I'll repeat it in boldface... Try to mask the fact that you're surreptitiously "seeding" online communities on behalf of an advertiser and you will most likely get caught. 

Most people can tell when they're talking to a PR flack in an online community.  There are a whole host of language and behavioral cues that people pick up on.  Much of the time its the poster's insistence on corporate-speak or the apparent inability to stray from a few select "talking points" that tips folks off.  However, the PR geeks are getting better at matching their tone and manner to the prevailing voice within a given community.  Still, we manage to pick up on the cues.

In some communities, shilling is justification for a thorough flaming or worse.  In other communities, shilling happens so often that it doesn't get anybody upset anymore - people simply attribute a crummy value to a shill thread and it sinks like a rock.  If I were a sociology or psychology major in college right now, I would be studying how people recognize shilling online - the subject is fascinating to me.

Among the not-so-subtle clues that a discussion thread is a corporate plant - affiliate links.  Let's just say a certain fast food restaurant pushing a viral video managed to match tone and manner fairly well when posting a link to the video.  They might not have been caught, except that their unfailing need to track everything made it completely obvious that the link they posted was part of a campaign.  Now their thread is getting so many negative votes it might as well have not been posted in the first place.  No one will see it.

Why more companies don't go full disclosure is beyond me...

What Else Is Broken?

Why the advertising industry can't seem to attract the intellectual and human capital it once did has been the subject of countless articles by industry pundits and a topic of discussion on quite a few conference panels.  Lots point to the breakdown of the broadcast model and fragmentation of audiences.  A few call out the notion of risk vs. reward, saying that it's easier for smart people to make more money with comparatively less effort in other fields. I'd like to throw something else out there.  How about adequate reward for one's ideas?

Advertising is about as far from a meritocracy as you can get in the information age.  New entrants into the field are rarely rewarded for creative thinking.  Rather, they're rewarded for their ability to play politics and for who they know, rather than what they know.

Considering creative thinking is what this industry needs (and claims up and down to need, BTW), it's easy to see how someone taking an internship or accepting an entry-level position could get fed up with the whole industry in 6-12 months.  Advertising promises to reward people for ideas, then turns around and rewards the exact opposite - the people who can destroy an idea by sanitizing it for a client so that there's no risk involved.  We too frequently praise the guy who cultivates the nincompoop forest. How can we expect talented and smart people to want to work in advertising when all they see is backstabbing political bullshit and the wrong people earning all the rewards?  Think about it.