Self Deception: Broadcasting Works Better Than Dialogue

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I’m very proud of a campaign I once designed that involved consumers of a particular brand in a conversation. At an agency I once worked for, we designed online ads that sought permission to send fans of this brand a regular newsletter chock full of brand lore, games and all sorts of other opportunities for further engagement. It essentially involved consumers in a two-way conversation, managed by CRM software, which gave them a brand community around which to rally. Online ads performed the acquisition function and CRM software allowed us to use e-mail to manage the conversation. I’ve never seen such devotion to a brand come out of an online marketing campaign. As part of one of the newsletters, we provided a link to a game that featured the brand prominently. A technical glitch disabled the game after a certain period of time, and we were swamped with complaints from people who loved it and wanted us to put it back up, so we did.

We also received (unsolicited, mind you) stories from participants in the program concerning their history with the brand and why they loved it so much. We shared these stories with the client when they came in.

The program, however, was canceled. Originally, it was designed to reach the brand’s core target (older folks). When the program surged in popularity and began to attract a younger audience, the client deemed it ineffective at addressing the core target. My team protested that there was no need to deny younger folks the ability to participate and highlighted the value of the program – generating loyalty, favorability and a forum for the brand. Despite marked increases (via a series of online surveys) in brand favorability and loyalty, the program was strangled in its cradle and taken off the Internet. The e-mail addresses, contact information and interaction data gleaned from the program were all left to rot in a database somewhere. The thing that kills me about this is that conversation development is one of the Internet’s great strengths, but many marketers don’t see development of conversations as an asset. Instead, they see it as a threat – something that can grow outside their realm of control and outside their ability to address it. This simply has to change if Internet marketing is going to become a cornerstone of marketing strategy.

Let me offer up an example of a company that does it right. In 1996, I purchased a signal processor for my guitar made by a company called DigiTech. The processor was quite difficult to understand fully, so one of the things I did upon acquiring it was check the Internet for resources that would help me understand how best to use it and understand its capabilities. I found that an online community had sprung up organically around this product – DigiTech’s GSP-2101. The GSP Users Forum had been started by a GSP owner named Steve Schow, who had no official affiliation with DigiTech whatsoever, and the community consisted of an e-mail discussion list and a few web pages where people could share the programs they had developed for the processor.

Over time, the community grew in size and attracted the attention of a gentleman in DigiTech’s marketing department named Randy Thorderson, who had helped develop the GSP-2101. Randy had the foresight and the presence of mind to see the GSP Users Forum for what it truly was – an opportunity. In the days when corporations were routinely shutting down fan sites and unauthorized web sites, Randy instead chose to become a member of the community. He joined the list and served as DigiTech’s official representative to the community, answering questions about the product, sharing his own ideas and taking suggestions for the next iteration of the product.

While Randy was certainly flamed many times on the list for what some list members thought were flaws in the product, he eventually helped cultivate a positive experience both for DigiTech and GSP owners. When the next version of the product came out, he let the community know how their suggestions had helped to shape it. He shared custom programs for the processor that he had created in his spare time. Generally, list members saw the community as a great asset and DigiTech was able to cultivate loyalty, get some great new product ideas, and even use the group as a sort of informal focus group.

Randy was not afraid of the conversation. After spending some time with the community, his efforts were rewarded by DigiTech and he was promoted within his department. When I see Randy’s shining example of how to market online via consumer conversations, I can’t help but wonder why others in similar positions within their product marketing groups can’t see these conversations as assets.

Looking at the way many companies market online, I see four main attributes that help delineate between companies that embrace the community/conversation approach and those that don’t:

1) Ability to Recognize Communities and Conversations as Assets – Either you see it or you don’t. Some marketing professionals react to a fan website by immediately going to the legal department and issuing a nasty letter. Others see devotion to a brand as something that ought to be cultivated, and they take a markedly different approach. It’s this second type of marketing professional that can learn to use the Internet as a marketing vehicle appropriately.

2) Transparency – Some companies want to be transparent to their customers and have them play a participatory role in the direction of the brand and the products under that brand. Other companies want to keep things very close to the vest. It is the company that falls into the former category that cultivates brand loyalty and long-term success.

3) Tolerance for the Chaos Factor of Online Conversations – The biggest chance a company takes when embracing brand conversations is that they could grow beyond control. There are several ways this can happen. The sheer number of online users participating can grow to an unmanageable size quickly, online users can demand things that companies are unprepared to give, or a marketing professional could find his or her time dominated by the need to participate in these discussions. While all are legitimate concerns, the company that succeeds usually finds a way to facilitate rather than clamp down. The truth is that the conversations are going to occur one way or another. Wouldn’t a company want to participate and help shape the discussion, rather than ignore it and thus ignore the opportunity?

4) Devotion to Strategies Other than the Mass Market Approach – Some companies look for ways other than the mass dissemination of sales messages to help market their product. Others are focused on the numbers game – the highest number of customer acquisition or sales messages disseminated to the largest number of people in the target audience. The willingness to see a different approach and concentrate on the lifetime value of a loyal customer are what separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

The truth of the matter is that conversations about brands and products are going to occur whether or not the company behind those brands and products participates. The companies themselves can provide forums, or they can be lazy non-participants and let communities spring up on their own. How many companies have had to deal with BrandXSucks websites springing up like mushrooms? Or a rash of negative feedback on consumer review sites like Epinions? How many Yahoo! Groups, independent message boards and other low- or no-cost forums have sprung up to discuss products, regardless of what the company producing the product does or says?

How many of the negative comments that are posted to these forums could be easily addressed by having a liaison to the company present to answer questions and solve problems? Dedicating such a resource is a credit to the company in and of itself, because it demonstrates a willingness to listen and invest in the conversation.

Steve Hall from AdRants once picked up on one of my Online Spin articles and wrote the following, which I heartily agree with:

Hespos also discusses what really amounts to fear and laziness on the marketer's part to engage with the consumer in a meaningful conversation and suggest the creation of simple brand-hosted message boards and discussion lists the draw consumers into a conversation about a company's product. Certainly, bad things will be said about any given product but wouldn't a smart marketer want to know everything about their product including what might be wrong with it?

I'd go a step further and suggest the creation of an entirely new discipline headed by a director of customer/consumer conversation/dialog. The sole responsibility if this person/department would be to converse and listen to the consumers with no interest in selling product. Sure, product management, marketing, sales and customer service touch this area but not enough to make it effective. Each of those disciplines has a goal that is counter to having an open, honest and friendly discussion with a customer or prospective consumer.

He closed his post with the following statement:

Give a shit. Basically, that's what this boils down to. Consumers are not a vast collection of numbers on a spreadsheet or a nice collection of 5 categories with silly marketing names like "early, suburban adopter." They are people with real concerns that will, ultimately, lead to a better product. Listen and give a shit. That's good marketing medicine.

To Steve’s thoughts, I’d like to add the following…

The conversation is not to be controlled, stifled or led astray with dishonesty. Consumers, particularly the ones participating in the conversation, have finely-tuned BS detectors that will pick up on any such attempts and they’ll move the conversation elsewhere. Instead, a consumer conversation effort should aim to represent the company’s brand, products and ideals in a transparent way. It should answer whatever questions are asked – truthfully or not at all. It should move the conversation forward, taking constructive criticism and acknowledging it for what it is – not just a suggestion for how to improve, but an investment in the brand of time and thought on the part of the consumer. At the very least, such investments need to be acknowledged. At best, they help shape brands and products by providing new ideas and insight – and the consumer becomes more loyal as he realizes his insights are taken to heart.

The billions upon billions of ad impressions served online can be conversation starters. Only a small fraction of them truly are. And that is where the self-deception lies. We kid ourselves when we fail to see the true value behind our outreach to audiences on the Internet. We think of online advertising solely as a way to extend reach to audiences we might not reach through other media, or as ways to get potential customers to click and buy. While there certainly is value there, failure to recognize that markets are conversations is just another instance of self-deception. If we are to fully recognize the value of online marketing, we need to stop kidding ourselves in this manner.

Burst's Jarvis Coffin Has Much The Same Opinion

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Here's a link to a March 30 article by Jarvis Coffin, president and CEO of Burst! Media, that shares my opinion on the whole blind buying thing. It appeared on Media Daily News.

Speaking of Mediapost, here's an article I wrote back in 2Q 2003 on much the same subject.

And this is pretty much my point - the problem has been identified for quite some time now. The fact that it's still a problem indicates that we're deceiving ourselves.

Self-Deception: Pretending The Evil Isn’t Right Under Our Noses

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This is the second in a series of several articles regarding the state of the online marketing industry. Each article in the series deals with the notion of self-deception, the idea that we're kidding ourselves regarding many of the things we think will lead the online marketing industry to success. It is vital to the success of the industry that we examine these instances of self-deception and address them. Three months ago, my grade school chum Craig and his wife Jen purchased a brand-new Compaq PC with their wedding money. I helped them set it up and Jen later subscribed to Verizon Online DSL. Craig and Jen haven’t really owned a computer before, and they planned to use their new machine to surf the web, get e-mail and maybe let their daughter Kayla play some educational games. Jen also uses the Microsoft Office suite for schoolwork and such.

When the PC was only two months old, Jen gave me a call, sounding somewhat frantic on the phone. “Tommy, can you come over and take a look at the computer?” she asked. “I keep getting kicked off MSN and everything’s taking forever to start up.”

It was a couple weeks before I could get to it, but when I finally did, I was amazed at what I saw. Jen and Craig’s PC was infested with malware to the point at which it was taking over 10 minutes to boot and load Windows. Once it did boot, clicking on almost any application would immediately cause a crash. “Piece of s—t,” Craig muttered under his breath, adding sarcastically “What a great way to use our wedding money.”

Thorough system scans and repairs using both Ad-Aware and Spybot: Search and Destroy managed to take care of most of the damage. But there were still a couple applications that required a manual registry edit to eradicate, and I simply didn’t have time to take care of it, as I had to go home to help my sister out with some work we were doing around the house. I added a 256MB of RAM to the machine, cleaned it as best I could and went back to my place to help my sister.

After helping my sister out, I was once again asked to take a look at a sick computer. This time, it was my mom’s laptop.

Mom’s laptop was my old laptop. I used it at the office for a while, but then I bought a new machine. It spent some time at the office, being used by an intern before being wiped of most of its application data and given to my Mom to use for e-mail and web surfing.

While our office intern was using the computer, she downloaded a free screensaver. Big mistake. The computer was infected with something that constantly spawned pop-up ads. I later found out that this was yet another piece of malware that could not be uninstalled without a registry edit.

Before I go any further, it’s important that I define “malware.” The meanings of the terms “adware,” “spyware” and “malware” are constantly changing, so it’s important that I define the class of applications that are the culprits in these cases.

Malware (noun) – Any application that generates advertising on an affected machine and also meets one or both of the following criteria:

1) Does not seek explicit permission to serve advertising to the end user. 2) Does not allow the end user to easily uninstall the application

It took two hours of searching Internet message boards for an antidote and manually editing the machine’s registry to get this malware application off my mom’s computer, not to mention the time spent installing Ad-Aware and Spybot and deep scanning the machine.

My mom simply stopped using her last computer for a similar reason. Floods of spam invaded her Inbox until all the time she had hoped to save by communicating via e-mail was taken up with managing and deleting spam. Finally, she just shut the machine off and never used it again.

If you’re the alpha geek among your novice friends, you probably have similar horror stories of your own.

The truth here, staring us right in the face, is that a seedy underbelly of the online advertising industry is ruining the consumer experience for many novice computer users. If it continues, we risk turning consumers away from their computers en masse and crippling the uptake of Internet connectivity (particularly via broadband connections) worldwide.

This is obviously not good for the Internet marketing industry. Ironically, it is the demand for Internet advertising that is driving the proliferation of malware and spam. This, of course, begs the question that many of my colleagues have asked in recent months – “Who the hell advertises with these guys?”

The answer to this question is simple. We do.

We’re feeding the malware jerks who infect PCs with non-permission-based applications. Our demand for online advertising causes them to exist, and our revenue keeps them alive. Same goes for spam, albeit to a lesser extent, for reasons I’ll share a bit later.

The culprit here is what media professionals call a “blind buy.” Typically, here’s what happens…

A client calls up their advertising agency and tells them they need 10,000 sales leads in the next month, and that they’re willing to pay $100,000 to acquire those leads. The client wants a media plan right away, and the leads must be guaranteed to come in and the client is willing to pay a maximum of only $10 for each lead.

Since the media plan is due right away, a media planner will call one of several “lead generation” vendors or “performance-based advertising companies” to help fulfill the objective. These vendors have something of a standard deal structure that is referred to as a blind buy. The vendor will generate the number of leads requested, but the media planner is not permitted to know where his ads are running. Ostensibly, the media buyer is not allowed to know this because the vendor must protect his business model of brokering ad inventory. If the media planner knew where his ads were running, he could conceivably approach the publishers brokered by the vendor directly, negotiating more favorable pricing. Since the planner has no time in which to do this, the vendor is typically protected from such side deals.

But the real reason the lead generation vendors don’t want the media planner to know where his ads run is that the media planner would be appalled by the venues the lead generation vendor has chosen. Among these venues are spyware and malware applications. This is how otherwise respectful advertisers end up running with malware vendors and subsidizing their unethical practices.

Some lead generation vendors also use spam to generate leads. In this case, the ruse is a bit easier to spot, since lead generation vendors will ask often ask for text advertising to be used in an e-mail. But often, they don’t do so, allowing spammers they work with to write their own copy for spam solicitations that generate sales leads.

In many cases, the ads simply run, the leads are generated and the media planner (hence, the advertising client) never know that their advertising dollars are underwriting malware and spam. Occasionally, a consumer complaint makes its way back to the advertiser, who demands an answer from the agency. The agency calls the lead generation vendors, demanding an answer. Then, one of two things happens:

1) The lead generation vendor attributes the spam or malware activity to a “rogue affiliate” who has since been dropped from the advertising program, or 2) The lead generation vendor disavows any knowledge of the situation and either blames it on another vendor the media planner uses or on a hacker or script kiddie.

This is usually enough to satisfy a client. The vendor assures the agency that it won’t happen again, the agency assures the client, and the program continues. The client is not incentivized to shut the program down, since the leads are rolling in, and the agency and vendor are able to distance themselves from blame by attributing any problems to rogue affiliates or others unaffiliated with the program.

The media buyer in such cases is either ignorant of the ramifications of a blind buy, or he is kidding himself. Entering into a blind buy is tantamount to allowing any Internet entity to provide sales leads, regardless of the format or the venue. The truth is that we are feeding the evil and contributing to the proliferation of malware and spam, all while asking “Who are these people who advertise in spam and adware?”

As countless computers become overwhelmed with spam and malware, quickly turning into $2,000 doorstops as they become riddled with infections and influxes of bulk e-mail, it’s obvious that malware and spam are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. We cannot profit from an industry that strangles itself by overriding consumer control to the point at which consumers no longer wish to participate.

So, what do we do about it? I have some suggestions:

  • The “blind buy” must be phased out, if not eliminated immediately - While this will cause advertisers much short-term pain as their lead programs take a hit, it simply must be done. Advertisers should know where their ads are running at all times. Clicks, leads or sales that come in from unapproved publishers must be disallowed and advertisers should not pay for them. This will choke off the revenue stream for malware operations and many spammers.
  • We need to add language to standard terms and conditions for advertising contracts immediately - The Interactive Advertising Bureau should incorporate the following language (or something similar) into the next version of its standard terms and conditions: “Vendor may not authorize any publisher or ad vendor other than those specified on this insertion order to run client advertising. Neither Client nor Agency are liable for any charges arising from ad activity run with unapproved publishers or vendors.” This will ensure that the agency and client always know where the ads are running, and it keeps vendors from adding random spammers or malware vendors to performance-based buys by removing their revenue stream.
  • Ad tracking technology needs to become much better at picking up online ads - Most tools that perform this function are competitive tools that track where advertisers and their competitors are running on the web. But they fail to track much of the activity that runs on smaller sites. If these tools could be adapted to pick up tier three and tier four sites and desktop applications, media planners could spot any unauthorized activity.
  • Turnaround times for media plans should be increased - A media planner can turn around a blind buy in less than a day. A CPC or CPL plan negotiated with individual publishers could take several days. When the client calls and needs something yesterday, that request leads buyers to the only source of leads or sales they can turn to in such an abbreviated timeframe – the vendors who provide blind buy opportunities. If agencies had more time to turn around planning requests, it’s a lot less likely they’ll use blind buy tactics.

We’re kidding ourselves by claiming not to know where the revenue comes from that keeps malware vendors and many spammers in business. The evil is right under our noses and unless we wish to continue to fund the onslaught of malevolent applications and bulk e-mail, we should immediately get a handle on where our ad dollars go. If we fail to address this important issue, we run the risk of turning off consumers and slowing or stopping adoption of the Internet channel.