Lairig Marketing

Columbus Circle – The Tunnel of DOOH Love

Whatever you’re doing right now, if you are within ten miles of Manhattan – stop. Put down that pen. Oops. Um, put down that iThing.

Go directly to 8th Avenue and head down the subway entrance at 57th, 58th or 59th Streets. At the bottom of the steps, walk in the downtown direction, opposite the turnstiles.

Feast your eyes – and ears and hands – on a digital out-of-home masterpiece that takes up an entire block in the underground passage of the Columbus Circle subway station.

We’ve cheered the DOOH industry before, one of marketing’s best kept secrets. Purina has taken it to heart.

To a dog lover’s heart, that is. Along the passageway’s west wall is a floor-to-ceiling interactive experience for Purina’s Beneful brand of dog food. (An unfortunate name, sounding too much like the product that helps adults poop – dogs do not appear to need help pooping.)

The ins and outs of the display are described in rich detail here. It wouldn’t look out of place at Disney World. And you’ll see from the linked article it even includes the requisite social media integration, where you can take a picture of you and your “virtual dog” and SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS !!!

Hats off to everyone involved in this one, especially the people responsible for securing the location. It’s an area seemingly under never-to-be-finished reconstruction. (ING did an excellent campaign in the same spot during last year’s New York City Marathon.)

The location has “captive audience” written all over it – a confined area, with no escape, nothing else to look at, and never too much pedestrian traffic that would block your view.

Maybe this will be the “tipping point” for DOOH. When advertisers see how much better this is than a display ad on some pet site, how much more engaging it is than a pre-roll video on The Weather Channel website, how many more smiles it puts on people’s faces than a YouTube upload.

Not sure what the CPM is on this, but we’ll wager it’s worth about 100 times whatever the IPO insiders are charging for a crappy display square on Facebook.

The Beneful campaign should prove, once and for all, that digital out-of-home advertising is no dog.

DVR Versus Online Video – “Roll” Out The Barrel (Of Ads)

The DVR is underrated. It can do just about everything except make wine. It even allows the user to SKIP (THROUGH) TV COMMERCIALS!

Yet.

Yet, DVR penetration of U.S. homes is starting to level off, and we predict won’t cross the 50% threshold without some major disruption (technology, pricing, etc.). In addition…although oddly there is no reputable, recent data…we do know ad-skipping by DVR users is nowhere close to 100%.

Some media pundits are now throwing the future of DVRs into the “cord cutting” mix. After all, they posit, if you don’t need your cable company, you don’t need a box and – presto – no DVR.

Whether they are cord cutters are not, there is no question that the demand for online consumption of video programming (in addition to videos of dogs on skateboards) is currently insatiable. But a funny thing happened on the way to the online viewing forum.

Advertising.

Just like on TV, the advertising solution for online video is - * drumroll * - online video. Often the same commercials you see on TV, simply shipped over to an online ad trafficker.

Except.

Unlike the DVR experience, you cannot skip online video ads. Lairig Marketing has touched on the topic of faux “completion rates” before. Whether pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll, all eyes (!!!) are on the data that show whether or not the user bailed out during the advertisement.

We already know the insanity of clicking on a link on The Weather Channel – e.g., LIGHTNING STRIKE BLOWS OFF MAN’S HEAD ! – and having to “watch” a 30-second TV ad before the 17-second video plays. Anyone who willingly complies with this sort of scenario on a continuous basis is an imbecile.

But as more and more long-form programming comes online (more Hulu, TV Everywhere, etc.), including on iPads and smartphones, how will viewers weigh the trade-off? Will they “watch” full 30-second spots every five to seven minutes…THAT THEY CANNOT SKIP ?

Will advertisers then push too far, and load in 60-second spots? Or perhaps interrupt programs more frequently? Imagine watching a hockey game online some future day, where an ad rolls every time there is a stoppage of play. Imagine watching The Big Bang Theory with ads playing after every change of scene.

It might all be enough to make viewers skip back to the DVR.

Little Data Kicks Big Data’s Butt

A month ago we posted a thoughtful piece on the “Big Data” meme-of-the-month currently Pac-Manning its way across the marketing (and IT) landscape. Tons of bits and bytes, looking for a problem to solve, as we said then.

To point out how overengineered Big Data is, we also said this: “Most marketers can’t even tell you how many website visitors they had yesterday.”

Today we back that up with a true story.

Background: Lairig Marketing helps a client rethink and execute a customer e-newsletter. It is emailed to tens of thousands of customers, with a headline and two-sentence abstract describing each of three articles. For some reason, a digital person decides to put social media links (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) in the email alongside each article’s abstract.

Expectations are that customers will link through to read one or more of the full articles on the client’s website, at a rate higher than prior newsletter issues.

We track the email data after a few days, eager to check the newsletter’s performance. Counts of “clicks” show that three-hundred or so people have linked through to article #1, nearly four-hundred to article #2, and 150 to article #3.

Then this: nearly 2200 readers clicked on the “Tweet This” link for article #1, 2150 for #2, and 2250 for #3.

Dumbstruck that more than one reader would have retweeted a 50-word article abstract FROM AN EMAIL, we asked the email vendor to recheck the data (to protect the vendor, we’ll only say it is a four-letter name beginning with the letter “Z”).

The data come back with the “tweet” numbers essentially divided by 2. Some sort of “mistake” we are told. And, by the way, if we want an updated set of numbers it will cost us additional out-of-pocket.

Net net: we are being held hostage. By sh&t data. We know the “tweet” numbers should be zero. So what faith should we have in the rest of the data?

A simple, but illustrative example of what will happen in about a million businesses today across the U.S., and it promises to cut Big Data at its knees. Imagine if we responded in “real time” to these 3000 phantom clicks. It’s why Big Data will have us firing nuclear missiles on Canada soon.

Until Little Data is clean, Big Data will be a flop.

Whoever came up with the name for those hard square disks we use to insert into our desktops was a genius.

Google Does A Double Split

While the "Do No Evil" guys shocked Wall Street with its faux (and evil) stock split, announced during last week’s quarterly earnings review for Google, there was another “split” discussed, and it seemed to fall through the cracks.

Over the two days following the call, GOOG fell $35 (nearly 5%), made worse by $10 of pre-announcement run-up. Google didn’t meet expectations in a key metric – cost-per-click for the paid-search business that still constitutes the bulk of Google’s total revenues.

Cost-per-click “growth” for Q1-2012 was negative 12% compared to a year ago, and down 6% quarter-over-quarter. This metric caught everyone’s eye in Q4, when Google saw the first year-over-year decline in CPC in more than two years.

CFO Patrick Pichette had this to say, in an attempt to calm listeners on the earnings call:

“…dynamics around CPCs and paid clicks are just simply very complex…”

SIMPLY complex. [We love reading earnings transcripts for these verbal tics…]

Pichette then spun the complexity wheel by stating the CPC decline was driven by five factors. The one marketers should pay attention to = “…the shift in search activity from desktop computer to mobile computer.” This is the other “split” that everyone else might miss.

This, of course, is not good news looking forward, unless the many, many hands on the mobile advertising steering wheel get it together. One major driver in raising CPC is demand (i.e., more marketers bidding on a keyword, ratcheting up its price), and as we have said at Lairig Marketing about a billion times, “The Year of Mobile Advertising” is about six years late.

One wonders when someone will come up with the idea to track the CPC metric for iPads and other tablets SEPARATE from smartphones. The delta there must be significant, and getting larger over time.

The mobile CPC dynamic will certainly impact Facebook, but will be a discussion that won’t take place before the IPO, we wager. But you only have to look at Pandora’s stock price to see what low mobile CPCs mean from a business standpoint. After debuting at $16 last June, Pandora tread water around $12 until this March, where it has trended straight down to $8-and-change.

Mobile CPC is indeed a sensitive topic. When a Barclays analyst took another attempt at interrogating Google’s cost-per-click performance on last week’s earnings call, CEO Larry Page had this to say:

“I'm just going to close the call here…”

And then he split.

The Death Of The Website Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Alert readers will note that we added Digiday to our small list of “Great Resources.” Its daily email newsletter is short and sweet, highlighting four or five abstracts you can link to for a full read of no longer than ten minutes.

The topics covered are not the typical recycled press releases. They are often provocative. The kind that can get our dander up, here at Lairig Marketing.

Case in point: a recent article, authored by a senior exec at a top-five digital agency (that shall remain nameless, lest folks think we are picking on them).

The essence of the piece is intimated in today’s headline – that traditional websites are going the way of the buggy whip. We’ve heard this many times before, circa 2010 a la “Why Facebook Can Replace Your Website.” Google that phrase today and read dozens of articles completely debunking this supposition.

The Digiday article took the soup-du-jour angle of attack on traditional websites – mobile, especially our dear friends, mobile apps.

Here are some provocative statements from the recent Digiday article, with our counter:

“Digital marketing used to all be about getting people to your destination and convincing them to stick around. In the mobile app era, that’s a losing proposition.”
- Hmmmm, a mobile app uses the same exact concept.

“…the traffic flow has reversed; it’s about getting your relevant content to users at their destination.”
- Um, content has always flowed this way. A PC user never actually “went” to a website – the bits and bytes are sent from a server to their old-fangled machine. No reversal at all.

“Along with dot-coms, traditional written language is also becoming a thing of the past.”
- Um, a f&cking ridiculous claim. Credibility sinks like a stone.

“If you’re going to create an app…[c]ontent can be quickly made available via mobile sites, which are much more easily maintained.”
- Ah hah! So content DOES come from a “site” – in this case a MOBILE version of a traditional website.

“The amount and type of content that needs to exist on corporate websites will become far more limited as content is spread to relevant places across mobile and social platforms via the cloud.”
- Spread from where? What entity will hold all this “spreadable” content? A website, maybe?

“Some might even say that Facebook brand pages are the new dot-com…’
- See debunking reference above.

If you believe mobile content can replace your current website, then run the following simple test: Turn off your site. Right now. Shut it down, for a minimum of two weeks.

Find out now what you’ll be missing then.

Big Data – No Big Deal

The concept of “Big Data,” known to IT folks for a few years now, has found its way to marketing “meme-ville.” It will likely finish 2012 as one of the “top five marketing issues.”

McKinsey made hay with some appropriately massive Big Data white papers in 2011, emphasizing the ways marketers could harness it. First, McKinsey’s definition:

“Big data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze.”

The overly long trail runs cold, however, due to McKinsey’s inability to get into the technology weeds. Instead, lots of mumbo jumbo like this:

“McDonald’s…has equipped some stores with devices that gather operational data as they track customer interactions, traffic in stores, and ordering patterns. Researchers can model the impact of variations in menus, restaurant designs, and training, among other things, on productivity and sales.”

What “researchers” is McKinsey referring to? McDonald’s has two restaurant designs – what variations are feasible to test? Who has ever tied cause and effect between “training” and “sales”? What “other things”?

The IT guys are no better. Here is IBM, defining Big Data “velocity”:

“…big data must be used as it is streaming in to the enterprise in order to maximize its value to the business.”

LMAO. Most marketers can’t even tell you how many website visitors they had yesterday.

The requisite surveys are now underway, to see how prepared marketers are for this brave new world. According to a study done in February by Columbia Business School and the New York AMA (Marketing, not Medical), the biggest challenge to success with Big Data is “lack of data sharing across the organization.”

Perfecto, for the guys like IBM. “If we can just fix the technology…”

Database marketing, a practice unknown to most marketers, is nearly 25 years old. It started with a problem to solve – how to make marketing slightly more efficient and vastly more effective? A problem looking for a data solution. A workhouse still in existence.

Big Data, however, reverses the equation. We have embarked on a years-long journey, throwing good money after bad.

Where data, and all its related high-powered technology, can look for a problem to solve.

The Online Consumer Is Out Of Control

You’ve heard it since circa 2000: “It’s a brand new world out there. The consumer is in control. Of everything, INCLUDING YOUR BRAND.”

This sentiment was born from the consumer’s ability to simply surf the Web. Have mouse, will travel.

From a content standpoint, it wasn’t true, as people flocked to sites that everyone else did. A popularity contest. How else to explain Vevo, or Mashable?

More striking is “control” from a data standpoint. Over time, we’ve come to learn that every single thing we do on the Web is tracked. By hundreds of third parties who attempt to define who we are by what we do online.

Based on that information, in theory at least, marketers can send us “targeted” advertisements, messages that match our interests.

It has been an abject failure.

Check out some of the sites below to see for yourself how much each tracking company knows about who you really are.

• http://exelate.com/new/consumer-privacy/exelate-opt-out/
• http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting
• http://www.google.com/ads/preferences
• http://tags.bluekai.com/registry

Only one of them knows my gender and age range. Another has me pegged as a computer programmer. Another thinks I am a finance professional (note to Occupy Wall Street – I AM NOT). How ”well” do they know you?

Sensing this, data-tracking companies like the ones above give you the option to correct inaccurate or missing information in your online “profile.” My guess is that somewhere around 0.7% of Web surfers have done so.

Rather than throw in the towel on this Search For The Holy Data Grail, a few entrepreneurial sorts are dressing it up as a complete “personal online data management” service, according to AdWeek. One of the companies even gave itself the name “Personal.”

There, instead of helping out by simply checking a few boxes on a profiler, Personal will let you store and categorize your actual transaction data. This is called “handing over the keys to the kingdom.”

I would also call it “giving the supposed already in-control online consumer MORE control by letting them give outside companies ALL their private data so marketers can REGAIN CONTROL.”

I’ll estimate that 95% of the online population is going to give a big fat “opt out” on this one. The best “control” feature ever invented.

Mayor Koch Moment #6 – How’m I Doin’?

We end our three-month losing streak with our June 2011 prediction from last December. Here’s what we forecast back then:

“After continuing to lumber through the first part of the year in its U.S. business, Walmart announces a major out-of-category acquisition. Questioned at the press conference about the not-so-apparent cultural synergies, a frustrated CEO says ‘How the f&ck else are you supposed to grow a gazillion-dollar business?’ ”

As far as we know, there was no such CEO quote, but the rest of what we forecast came true. Walmart completed its ninth straight quarter of declining U.S. same-store sales. And that out-of-category, culturally unsynergistic acquisition actually came 50 days before June.

Walmart paid the princely sum of $300 million to buy a Silicon Valley outfit called Kosmix. From a pure financial basis, you would call Kosmix an accretive sinkhole. No hard goods to sell – no revenues to leverage.

Kosmix is typically described as a “social media filter.” Whatever that means. Kosmix is out of category and out of character for Walmart because it imports technology into a culture of “we build our own.” But Walmart has no other choice.

Trailing Amazon in e-commerce by a ratio on the order of six to one, figuring out a way to break the search stranglehold Google has on etail is critical to Walmart’s future. To that end, just a few weeks ago, the Boys of Bentonville picked up OneRiot, another shop of geeks, this one an “advertising network for the real-time social Web.” Whatever that means.

Not so coincidentally, the two masterminds behind Kosmix created a number of e-commerce solutions for Amazon. And now that they steer the skunkworks operation weirdly labeled @WalmartLabs, located in Silicon Valley, expect to see some very new ideas coming from walmart.com, very soon.

It’s a strange feeling to believe that Walmart will innovate with online technology this coming holiday season to reverse its sales slump.

Just as weird a feeling as it must be to arrive in Bentonville fresh off a plane from Mountain View.

Women’s Glib – Recession-Proof

Looking at the “top movers” on the stock market Wednesday, I was surprised to see our friends at Demand Media up 10% on the day. Turns out management had announced a plan to buy back $25 million of shares, in an attempt to arrest DMD’s stock-price plunge.

(Even with that 10% jump, at the end of Wednesday DMD was down 72% from its IPO high, four more percentage points than when we wrote about them a couple of months ago.)

Just as interesting, though, was a second press release, completely overshadowed by the stock buyback news:

“eHow, a Demand Media property…today announced the launch of Shift, a new channel created to inspire women who want to make changes in their lives and positively impact others around them.”

Now, back to what we said at the end of July:

“[Demand Media] doesn’t generate “heavy readers” or “fans.” Just fly-by Web searchers…DMD’s advertising-based business model requires millions of “fly-bys.” And a million-plus-one the next day, and so on.”

We said DMD needed to pull a rabbit of its hat to survive. Instead it went to the deepest well on the Internet – content for women. And it picked the most overdone topic, outside of coupons and meatloaf recipes = life inspiration. Could there be anything more general and generic?

And crowded. Oprah. Suzie Orman. A gazillion mommy bloggers. On and on. Any last tidbit of inspirational thought has been wrung dry.

Yet women don’t care. They will, for a time, add Shift to their daily routine. And leave vapid comments. For example, here is one of the first reader comments on Shift: “Inspiring! Looking forward to lots of elevating information!” Note the exclamation points!

This will go on for a while until women realize that 95% of the content on Shift is simply reorganized content already existing, as is, on eHow’s main site. Which, we’ve been told by SEO “experts,” is a Google no-no. By rights, none of the content on Shift should therefore show up in a Google search (side note: no SEO experts have responded to our challenge, and Lairig Marketing is now unindexed by Google since September 27 – methinks another Panda is afoot and none of the experts has a clue).

So, give Demand Media an “F” for Shift. Better yet, take the “F” away, and what’s left describes the site pretty well.

A Challenge To SEO Experts Everywhere

Another sign of our strange world – there is MORE THAN ONE major online publication for the search industry. Thousands of people visit sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and Batelle Media EVERY SINGLE DAY for reasons that are unclear to me.

Here’s all you need to know about search engines:

• Start and end with Google.
• Google sees what everyone has recorded online.
• Google ranks all that content by keywords.

That is all we really know.

Yet every day, nearly 15 years after Google launched, you will find approximately 2,471 online articles from the three sites noted above plus a bunch more, claiming to tell you how to beat everyone else at Google’s game.

Yes, you alone can rise to the top of page one’s search results for ANY KEYWORD YOU WANT as long as you follow these “EIGHT TIPS TO GREAT SEO.”

The same article, over and over and over, dying to be awarded top spot for a search on “best SEO tips.”

Not a single one of these so-called search experts has any idea what to say, though, when Google doesn’t quite work the way it is supposed to. I shall attempt to prove this by putting out an open call to “SEO experts” everywhere: Solve my Google search problem.

After the recent Panda transition, a debacle during which Lairig Marketing was not indexed for a full month, this blog was indexed daily, both on Google’s Web and Blog search tabs. Then, mysteriously – which is really a redundant word when referring to anything Google – about a month ago, this blog was indexed only once a week on Blog search.

Yet it was indexed DAILY on Google’s Web search. Whaaaaa?

Until this week. Now, Lairig Marketing is indexed “whenever” Google feels like it, in both Web and Blog search results. Maybe every four days, maybe every five. Who knows? Who cares?

There isn’t an SEO “expert” alive who (a) knows these types of incidents even exist, and (b) would have the first f&cking HELPFUL idea on how to solve for it.

My challenge is a rhetorical one, of course. Since this post won’t be indexed, it can’t be found.

But you can bet your bottom keyword that as we speak, thousands of eager search engine beavers are lapping up another “What You Didn’t Know About SEO” post.