Mark Higginson

“It was all fantasies and delusions based on naive interpretations of consumer behavior by people who had a whole lot of ideological commitment to the web, and very little experience with real world marketing.”

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Spot on about the ideological commitment; see ‘markets as conversations’ for a whole lot more on what amounts to a neo-liberal capitalist ideal that was very attractive to some with a techno-libertarian outlook.

What has struck me about working in the area of online marketing is both how much of my work is really about public relations and how much I had to learn given I had no prior experience in this area. What was also surprising was how traditional PR was actually based on very simple principles with a lot of meetings and handwaving to confuse the uninitiated.

The wider point in the post I quote from above is that the current vogue for talking about ‘native advertising’, hand-in-hand with the dread ‘content marketing’, is that it is a very traditional concept. The savvy individual should be aware by now that not only do people ignore display advertising it is a sector riven by fraud. However, in the search for an alternative that works the physicality of the medium is still ignored. The reason a magazine advert ‘works’ is that the medium requires me to physically turn a page and I expect to have to turn the pages to proceed - it is full-page. A television advert ‘works’ because I (usually) have no choice whether the advert appears in front of my eyes or not - it is full-screen. A billboard ‘works’ because it is large - it fills my field of vision.

People’s expectations for web advertising and what they will tolerate is very different; which affects implementation and performance. This is why Yahoo! is not going to recoup the money it has spent on tumblr through advertising.

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“After hundreds of stories and videos… we couldn’t be happier with our team’s effort… Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.”

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Content as marketing is hard work. I explain why here.

tumblr has got rid of the team given the job of “highlighting talented creators and their work, as found within and around the massively diverse Tumblr community” after one year.

“We didn’t see any statistically significant relationship between our buzz and our short-term sales.”

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The above is a quote from Eric Schimdt of Coca-Cola at a conference last week. From my own experience this is a completely correct assessment of the situation around how brands are mentioned on the web.

Unfortunately as Coca-Cola has by now no doubt spent significant sums on investing in ‘social media’ and is one of the ‘most popular’ brands on various social platforms this is tantamount to heresy. Hence Wendy Clark, also of Coca-Cola, playing the ‘social is part of an integrated approach’ card by claiming “we’ve been able to track closed-loop sales from site exposure to in-store purchase”.

This recalls the McKinsey consumer decision journey where apparently awareness, familiarity, consideration and purchase all lead to loyalty. Of course no data is given to support any of this.

What this shows is how large businesses still lack an understanding of how people talk about things on the web. In this context ‘buzz’ implies excited discussion that is relevant in some way to the brand. It is no such thing. ‘Buzz’ is simply a keyword-matched mention that could be anything and is most likely being used in a context of very little relevance to a brand’s marketing activity.

‘In one 2010 study where Coke pulled out more than 1,000 social-media messages randomly and had human raters compare them to automated sentiment analysis by one vendor, there were widespread differences.

“When we say it’s positive, the machine about 21% of the time says it’s negative,” he said. “That can cause some problems in our understanding” of how buzz impacts sales.’

Expecting an algorithm to give you context is foolish. It does not work. Inaccurately counting mentions as positive or negative tells you nothing.

‘Buzz’ cannot be directly linked to sales. Take out the spam and what you have is a background hum. If you are one of the most heavily marketed brands on the planet then that hum amounts to a severe case of tinnitus.

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“Audiences don’t want to hear an advertisement. They want to be gripped by a compelling story.”

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This post I spotted was called The Art and Science of Great Brand Storytelling. Strangely there was no art and no science in the article and it was not in itself a great story. It was yet another promotional post for content marketing, in this case for a self-described ‘post-advertising agency’. The author states:

“Audiences simply have no patience for branded messages that feel like advertising. Somehow, though, when audiences are exposed to content that is valuable, entertaining, emotive and simply enjoyable — even if it’s branded — they miraculously have as much as 30 minutes to watch. Instead of folding their arms and sitting back, audiences lean forward, open up and listen, often helping spread the message to their own audiences without prompting.”

No supporting evidence is supplied beyond links to a few big-budget campaigns, that require the kind of ‘deep pockets’ the author decries. As I said in this prior post:

“… you should be able to show a hundred examples of you doing this exact thing and a thousand more examples of other people doing the same, all with a measurable outcome.”

I do not doubt this could work in certain instances alongside other forms of advertising. But if you are going to claim it works universally then show it working, repeatedly, at the small scale as well the large scale. 

Two important points:

• Change, which should not be confused with ‘progress’, does not replace the old so much as it composts it
• In advertising physicality matters; a billboard is not the same as a banner advert

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“Sources say journalists have also been treated to a presentation by the paper’s Social Media and Engagement Editor, with reporters now required to tweet an average of once an hour.”

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“ Telegraph journalists are being required to tweet. An email from the group executive director Richard Ellis, outlining the paper’s plans to focus on digital media, was sent to the group’s 500-plus journalists on Friday evening, demanding: ‘All reporters must be on Twitter.’”

I’m not sure I believe this. Again I find myself asking who this content is for? I’m sure it’s great for Twitter as a platform to have the background hum of busy journalists posting throughout the day. Whether this policy is good for the staff or for the bulk of the Telegraph’s audience is another question. I wonder how this will be enforced?

It does make me wonder how marketing types expect these behaviours to become embedded in organisations whose remit is not to do with communication to a mass audience if, given the supposed importance of an authorial profile, the Telegraph is having to make this a requirement.

I’ve been told in countless social media presentations how forward-thinking the Telegraph’s ‘digital’ operation is; I wonder how this relates as it indicates that someone in charge sees journalists as needing to work across multiple platforms - specifically a platform that the Telegraph doesn’t control.

Update: with a paywall going up on the site this makes more sense. In theory increased social activity might prompt increased interest and a tiny proportion might burn through their twenty free articles and might decide to become subscribers. A lot of ‘mights’.

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