Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 173

Smarts Brands Will Create Their Own Digital Products And Services

Marketing is so much more than advertising.

One of the bigger ideas (and evolutions) in marketing that I covered in my second business book, CTRL ALT Delete (which was published in 2013), was the idea of utilitarianism marketing. The fact is that marketing dollars don't have to (only) go to advertising. Now - because of digital - all brands have the ability to develop and create real and functional tools for their consumers. Yes, these can be apps. Yes, these can be publications. The greater thought here, was that brands are in the nascent days of being able to create and sell digital products and services to better market themselves, and better connect themselves with consumers. 

The original thought.

Let's say you're a retailer. Let's say that you've embraced e-commerce. The models are still similar. Whatever you could buy in the store, you can now shop online. This is great. This is profound. This is (still) the future. Now - more than ever - most businesses (small, medium, large, B2B and B2C) need some kind of e-commerce strategy in place (even if it's simply ordering, instead of purchasing). With that, if you are a retailer - and you have put some kind of digital commerce model in place - why would you not start developing and selling adjunct digital products and services? Macy's is still selling you physical goods online. What if they had some kind of great digital fashion app? What if they provided a Netflix-like model for certain types of valuable content? Fine, these may not be the best ideas, but the point is salient. The opportunity is clear.

Consumers - more than ever - are buying digital products and services. 

How many new devices do you think were purchased and gifted over the last holiday season? Computers, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, wearables and more. There's a reason why some of the more popular posts in places like cnet and Business Insider are articles with titles like, "The 20 Must-Have Apps For Your New iPhone." This is, precisely, what consumers are looking for. The timing could not be more perfect for brands to have (some kind of) digital products and services in place. 

Amazon is a model of excellence.

Without missing a beat, Amazon created their own, exclusive holiday sales event on December 30th called, Amazon Digital Day. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and now... Digital Day? Why not attempt to recreate the enthusiasm that comes with these super-special commerce events for only digital products? Amazon wound up discounting over one thousand digital items. It's not only a great way to encourage post-holiday spending, it's the type of sale that doesn't need to stress over inventory (it's unlimited!), fulfillment (the servers need to stay up, while the humans and robots can take a break from picking and packing) and more. Consumers got a whole bunch of new devices, so now they can fill them up with not only apps, games, movies, programs and music, but also digital subscriptions to online media properties... on the cheap. This was a brilliant play for Amazon and a sign of what's to come at retail and for brands.   

So smart. So ready for other brands to replicate.

The challenge, of course, is that most brands are still struggling with how to make their digital experience more aligned with consumer's current expectations (native, mobile-first). It's not just about having a responsive experience anymore. Consumers are used to swiping right and flicking their thumbs to get what they want. The opportunity seems boundless. Brands need to study what Amazon did by developing Digital Day, and they need to unpack and experiment with digital models for themselves. No, most brands won't be able to hold their own Digital Day, but the thinking needs to be done. If I were leading a brand, I would start here: what could our brand create that could be sold on a day like Digital Day? 

Start there. Start digital-first.

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Programmatic Advertising Creative. Winter Is Coming.

Software eats the world.

Statements like that are all fine and dandy, until they start hitting a little too close to home. Software is knowing on the door of the advertising world, and many are none-too happy about it. While programmatic buying continues to be a hotly discussed topic in the advertising world (here's my none-to-subtle take on it: Display Advertising Is A Failed State), there seems to be more motion in the marketing technology and ad tech space for programmatic creative. Yes, you read that right: programmatic creative. Instead of having teams of smart creative types develop the best creative possible for a brand campaign, let's allow the computers to figure out the message, how to personalize it and deliver it to the consumer.

If you layer programmatic creative on top of programmatic buying, what does the future hold for advertising?

Recently, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, The Process of Making Digital Ads is Gradually Starting to Become More 'Programmatic', that looked at some of the fledging startups that have generated significant venture capital interest in this space. They also looked at Flite, which was acquired by Snap (Snapchat) recently, as further proof that this is where our world is headed. It's easy to see how the current uses of programmatic creative are being deployed - and why this is happening. Hint: it's mostly doing the creative automation work for the retargeting process. It goes something like this: A consumer searches for something online, instead of that data being fed to an agency to produce an ad, the technology enables a way for a simple/templated ad to then follow that consumer all over the web (charmed, I'm sure). The more personalized these ads (mention of the product, brand and image), the more likelihood that a future purchase will happen (at least this is what the retargeting and analytics professionals are telling us).

What if programmatic creative delivers on its promise? 

Branding - as we know it - is going to change if programmatic creative gets momentum. We used to talk about brands and advertising within the realm of the "big idea." The big idea is that each brand should have one big statement that it stands for. This idea that each ad campaign should have one big statement that it stands for in the marketplace. Has this way of thinking become way too traditional for our modern world? Should a brand (and an ad) tell the same story to their entire audience? Should a brand (and an ad) have one unique big idea, or is that old-school thinking? What happens in a world where programmatic creative becomes a real platform, and the technology to deliver all kinds of different messages to different people if viable? Does this make advertising more effective, while making the brand sentiment whatever is needed - in the moment - to make a sale? That's something - serious - to think about.

There is a lot to fear about programmatic creative.

The human side is the easiest part for us to fear. The idea that no computer brain can be more creative than a human brain. The idea that no computer will ever be able to write a song that brings tears to our eyes, a movie treatment that moves us, the next great novel, or the next brilliant tagline. We don't want to believe that a computer can replace the human condition. Humans will know when it's another human, and creativity is something that we have cornered the market on. This part, I am not so sure about, but it's still (mostly) the stuff of science fiction. What's really nerve-wracking, as you explore the current world of programmatic creative, is how it hollows out the value of a brand. In fact, if you flick through the myriad of startups who are in this programmatic creative space, you will hardly see mention of what happens to the brand. The sentiment is: let's not worry too much about the brand, right now. You're spending billions of dollars on advertising that is not effective. Make the ads effective by making them all so hyper-personalized... we can worry about the brand later. Trillions of different ads - with different creative - all served based on who is seeing the ad and what kind of offer will motivate them. 

Brand first. 

If we want programmatic creative to be something real and tangible, I would bring forward this thought: let's make the brand programmatic first. If a startup can truly develop the first programmatic brand (all technology... no humans), then go ahead and make all of your advertising align with that. The idea that programmatic creative solves the "problem" of having the people who create an ad not being in the same part of the world as the person who is buying the media campaign, could be a little shortsighted. Using technology to template ad creative so that it can be served in near-real time, is probably a smart strategy for many global brands. But, using technology to develop the creative platform, and then handle the full ad production of it - simply because a brand is global or is spending a lot of dollars - seems like a tragic lapse in brand thinking. Yes, we are experiencing a technological advancement of programmatic creative in our industry, but what do we do about the brand and its value?

So, will programmatic creative kill ad production or will it completely turn a brand upside down?

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My 3 Words For 2017

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2017. What's your plan?

It's the second day of the new year, and you are already stressing out... aren't you? (Maybe I'm just projecting). You've set up your resolutions. You've got your goals in place. Maybe you've even created a moodboard for your office to visualize, or you blocked off some time every day on your calendar to meditate. I did what I normally do: I put a little bit of time aside to choose my three words that will define my 2017.

Only three words?

Every year, Chris Brogan does an exercise he calls, My 3 Words For The Year. Brogan explains it like this:

"In an effort to tell bigger stories, I've found that the concept of three words allows me to think in more dimensions about what I want to do with my life and it lets me apply lots of tangible goals instead of what most people do when they focus on just a finite task. It's a bit like turbo-charged goal planning."

Going public (again).

I've been doing this exercise ever since Chris first introduced it (I think it was back in 2006?). Each year, around December - without prompting - I find myself starting to think about my three words. The pressure is on. It's a good pressure, but it's pressure. Especially with the year that I just had. All of us hope to do more, be more and achieve more. Nailing it down to three words is always a welcome challenge. This year, I have decided to make them public (as I have done for the past few years), in the hopes that you will be encouraged to take this exercise on, and share it with the world as well. So, here's goes everything...

My 3 Words For 2017:

Next. What's next? About halfway through this year, I had some meetings with my speaking agents. As the years peel off, it's easy for them to make assumptions about the type of presentations (and audiences) that my content is best suited for. When I started out in that business (over a decade ago), I was known as the "personal brand" speaker. This quickly evolved into the "social media" speaker, and this (kind of) evolved into the "digital marketing" speaker. None of those are "off," but they're not the full scope of what I do. Plus, if a brand calls my bureau and asks for a speaker who can talk about "what's next in business and consumer behavior," I'm often not thought of, because these agents are still thinking "personal branding", "social media", etc... This year, I'm going to have them (and my content) focus on what it's really about: what's next? (And what's now!). Also, the new tagline/mission for Mirum (our agency) is "let's make what's next." I love the line... I love the sentiment. This year, "next" is going to be where I put my focus and energy. From the content that you read here, to the thinking for clients to the stuff you can expect me to say from the stage. 
Connect. I've been deeply depressed about the state of social media. Everything that was written in The Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999 came to be (some of the thinking is still evolving, and will come true in the coming years). That is the best part. With that, the social media space evolved so quickly, that it also became highly monetized by advertising. The monetization has created giant new media companies (take a look at Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc...). These social spaces, where real human beings could have real interactions has become a "pay to play" arena. You could have millions of followers, but now, you have to boost, pay and advertise for your online voice to get heard. Social media is a paid media channel channel. It's easy to just accept this and turn all of your content into an ad. I'm going to ignore this. Seriously. I'm going to go back to the days when I first started writing this blog (2003). I am going to focus on using my words and my audio work (podcasting) to connect more with you. Not just the content. I want to, personally, connect more with the people who enjoy this content... and I want to be more connected to the content that you are creating and sharing. If we all agree to connect a little bit more in 2017, I believe we can reverse this very dangerous trend of allowing social media to be a paid channel (only). Also, some of my closest friends are people that I met by the content that is created in social spaces. That was special. That can be special again.
Reclaim. This is a tough one. It's a tough one to share, because I don't (ever) really put my personal stuff "out there." I often tell people that I prefer to be very personable, without being personal, but I have serious work to do on the personal front. It's not about improving over the last year, but it is about reclaiming the "me" that I know (and liked best). I need to reclaim three very specific areas of my life for 2017. These are areas that were habitual for many years, that I let go of (and I'm the worse for it). 1. My writing. I lost my level of frequency. I need to amp this up and reclaim my daily writing ritual. 2. My reading. I used to read 2-3 books a week. I'm not sure that I read ten books all year. I skimmed, bought and talked up books that I, candidly, did not read with the same intensity and scrutiny as I have in the past. I need to spend more time in the books and less time skimming the feeds. 3. My fitness. This will be the toughest. I need to take better physical care of what I eat, develop a proper exercise regiment that is adaptive to my family/travel schedule, and reclaim my meditation/mindfulness practice. None of these will be easy. The work has already begun. 

What three words will define your 2017?

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Fresh Business Thinking With Seth Godin - This Week's Six Pixels Of Separation Podcast

Episode #547 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Mirum Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Well, that was a pretty insane 2016, wasn't it? And, not just from a political standpoint (but, yes, that too). In an effort to change mindsets, think differently about 2017 and get some insights that may spark a change in your thinking, Seth Godin agreed to come on the show, and talk about where he sees the world, where the opportunity lies and how to think about this coming year with optimism (or, as he calls it, realism). Seth just published a monster of a book. Yes, big ideas (that's what he does), but this time he packed it into an even bigger format. The book is hefty. What Does It Sound Like When You Change Your Mind is a huge collection of Seth's writing. 800 pages, over-sized, and over-weight. I'd call it a collectible coffee table book, but I'm worried it will crush the average coffee table to bits. As always, Seth is philosophical, practical and a ray of light and prosperity. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Mirum Podcast #547.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #341

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another: 

Coal Is Dying - Coal Country Doesn't Have To: Creating The Post-Coal Economy In Appalachia - Fast Company . "We need more reporting like this. Done by people who are from the communities in which they report, talking about the future and inevitable changes, and focused on making a transition rather than protesting the inevitable. A good, long, personal read into the heartbreaking circumstances in the Rural East." (Alistair for Hugh).
Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI - TechRepublic . "First, I love the gerrymandering of terminology right there in the title. Proponents call systems where computers put people to work ' crowdsourcing' or ' urking' or 'the wisdom of the crowds'. Detractors probably use terms like 'clickworkers' -- what could be more dehumanizing? But the reality is that every time you help a computer, you're hastening your own demise by teaching it. That's true whether you're playing a game with Google's AI (and teaching it to better recognize images) or doing clickwork for Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This is a fascinating, fact-packed piece that sounds right out of a William Gibson novel." (Alistair for Mitch).
What the Octopus Knows - The Atlantic . "The octopus is, I think, the most fascinating animal on the planet. I keep sending links about  octopi, and here is another one." (Hugh for Alistair).
'Profitable' Washington Post adding more than five dozen journalists - Politico . "Good news in the world of journalism business models is hard to find, but since Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post, things are looking up. Readership is growing. The paper is, apparently, profitable. And, it's adding staff, a remarkable thing these days." (Hugh for Mitch).
The Argument Against Terraforming Mars - Nautilus . "These past few years, we've heard, read and seen a lot about the planet Mars. 'We should go there,' seems to be the general consensus. Everyone from NASA to private industry is trying to figure it out. Tesla's Elon Musk really wants us to be the first multi-planetary species (to our knowledge). We can go there and build a better... here, I guess. This is a smart look at why we should think twice about trying to populate Mars. TL;DR: we don't do these things well and we don't have the right, apparently." (Mitch for Alistair).
5 Top Designers Own How To Create The Ultimate PowerPoint Presentation - Fast Company . "This article glances over some of the better/more in-depth thinking of people like Nancy Duarte, when it comes to presentations. It happens all too often: professionals pump up slides with everything they're trying to say, while totally forgetting the whole point of a presentation, in the first place. You're there - as a presenter - to share content. No one will be able to share this message, if it's cluttered, unprofessional and not presented well. Seems basic enough, but strong presentation skills are still one of the more rare commodities in offices today." (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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When Technology Knows More Than You

What really gets you excited about technology?

Personally, it's one simple (yet complex) thing: technology blows my mind when it knows (and does) more than a human ever could. Maybe this is why stuff like YouTube, Twitter, etc... never really blew me away. Streaming videos online or following people in 120 characters or less... not exactly stuff we didn't see/imagine before. Not exactly transformative technology. Sure, it's lots of smarts, and it's two types of online technologies that I love deeply, but it never got me excited. Had either of those platforms not gained traction and an audience, it would not have surprised me. The technology that is "transformative" (as I would define it) is when it does something that no human could do/think/act on. 

That's the promise of Big Data.

Professionals often confuse lots of data for big data. The promise of big data was this: the ability for technology to take multiple data sets and manipulate them at a rate and pace that would never be humanly possible. If that was all, it would be impressive... but that's not all. Then, the technology would be able to provide insights and opportunities that no human could have never surmised. To me, that's mind-blowing. To me, that's what's exciting about technology.

The promise of self-driving cars.

Many people tell me that they are very worried about being a passenger is a self-driving car. I used to feel like that. Not anymore. Candidly, I can't wait for all of you to be off of the road. Seriously. Years ago, I was fortunate enough to be a passenger is one of Google's first self-driving cars on a public road with non-Googlers. It was a truly transformative experience. I went from, "there's no way I trust a computer/Google with driving me anywhere," to, "how soon can we get all humans off of the road?" 

Why did this happen?

Quite simply: the computer removed human emotion and experience from driving. It doesn't get tired. It's never "in a mood." Its doesn't get distracted by things like the radio, a text message, a fight with the kids, or a squirrel. The technology was doing so many things at once, that it was - in a word - overwhelming. Couple that with the fact that the onboard sensors are able to read the world around it, at a much greater distance than the human eye can see (miles/kilometers into the distance) and you can imagine the power. It transforms everything we think we know about getting from one place to another. It transforms everything we think we know about roads, infrastructure, traffic, lights, logistics and so much more. I know... I know... it's not perfect, and it's not ready for prime time, but it's coming. As Futurist Kevin Kelly likes to say, "the future happens very slowly and then all at once."

Watch technology do something miraculous.

There's a viral video making the rounds now. It shows a Tesla vehicle initiating its front-collision warning alert. This technology not only alerts the driver, but it also brakes the car - a full second before a collision ahead of the vehicle even happens. It's both terrifying to watch and - at the same time - a miracle of modern technology. Would the driver have braked had the technology not been in place? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Would the technology have hit the brakes in a million other scenarios just like this one? Probably... without fail.

This is what makes technology great. There is a new world of possibilities when technology knows more than you. 

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If Your Agency Is Not Consulting, Then What Is It Doing?

For marketing agencies to survive, they must start looking more like the consultants.

This is one of the bigger themes that seems to be cropping up lately in the marketing industry. It's happening for a bunch of reasons. There is a large push from brands to develop in-house marketing capabilities. This is not only a smart move, but a strategic one as well. For years, marketing was seen not as a profit centre, but an expense. Marketing was the place where the business went to spend its dollars on getting attention and acquiring customers (beyond sales). Now, it seems like many businesses are (rightfully) following the sage thinking of management legend, Peter Drucker:

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two-and only two-basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."

While Drucker didn't say this yesterday (it happened long before then... around 1954), businesses are realizing just how important marketing is, and how - when done right - it can be the difference between a commodity brand and something that looks a little closer to Apple.

So, what value does the marketing agency bring to the mix?

There is no doubt that the marketing business is facing challenges. There is no doubt that agencies are faced with mass consolidation, as the major holding companies need to feed their engines of growth (look now further than us. Our agency, Twist Image, was acquired by the largest holding company, WPP, in 2014 and rebranded as Mirum in 2015). Our reasoning was driven by a competitive marketplace, and the need to add products, services, geography and more to ensure a future of growth and innovation. In this world of consolidation, the major accounting/consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte, etc...) have begun to offer marketing and communications services, while also acquiring several agencies to bulk up at speed. Those who have been exposed to both sides of the consulting and agency space are keen to have these ad agencies look much more like consulting operations.

This begs the question: were agencies not offering consultative services before?

Some might argue that the difference is that consultants offer business solutions that results in serious business growth, while agencies have been relegated to providing production and media services that only create a place where attention is served. Some might argue that a consultancy is about the people that the brand hires, while agencies have been relegated to the things that the brand is buying. What's missing is another truism: consultants tend to be led, hired and directly engaged with the CEO, while agencies tend to (sometimes) work the CMO or - more likely - a director/manager level professional in the marketing department. Consultants have such broad scopes of work, that being able to "produce" and not just "tell" a brand what they should be doing is a logical and strategic business play, as these massive consulting firms also need to show growth and future-revenue opportunities. 

Agencies have always been consultants.

Maybe not every agency, but the better ones (that most of us know, love and respect). The better agencies have always supplied brands with the right people, able to not only do the work, but have the experience from previously working with a competitor, or working on a brand that sells to a similar audience. Agencies have been working (tirelessly) to invest in their people, teams and knowledge. Agencies have always been a strong partner to the marketing department (and others in the organization, when given the chance). Unfortunately, in recent times, procurement and other business issues have forces agencies to act more vendor-like. While it's easy for the consultants to point this out as a core problem, this change was not created by agencies, but rather by large brands in an attempt to commodize and drive down the cost of marketing. Consultants may not feel this now, but they (eventually) will. 

Being more than an agency that answers to a creative brief.

In a perfect world, agencies would do more than answer the creative brief. Now, internal marketing teams need to validate their own jobs, salaries and roles within the organization. The shift from a few mangers handling the relationship with the agencies, to internal marketing professionals working to optimize the agency's role (while validating their own) is a reality. It's not that agencies have not been acting like consultants for a very long time, it is that the world is changing. Brands have very different marketing teams than they did years ago. Brands are looking for ways to save money - each and every day. Consultants are doing their best (at the CEO level) to ensure that all output of their work is billable within their own organization. Agencies, are being brought in through procurement and managed through one department (the marketing one) within the organization, without a relationship to the CEO. Smart agencies still get it. Smart agencies still are hyper-consultative. Smart agencies look more like business solutions organization than a production facility. 

It's not that agencies are not like consultants. It's that consultants have a vested interest in making a brand believe otherwise. 

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Math Is Hard... Or How To Make Your Advertising Count

At what point will advertisers hold the publishers really accountable?

Those who were early into digital marketing had many hopes (like me). That advertising would be highly targeted and relevant. The net effect of this would be that online advertising would not only be better than other media formats, but that it would be worth more to advertisers, because consumers would appreciate it more. That advertising would be super-accountable and measurable. The net effect of this would be that online advertising would know where ads were served, what happened to those who saw, clicked and engaged with the ad. We would know this down to each and every impression. That advertising would be more interesting. The net effect of this would be that online advertising would not just appear on three television networks (like we had back in the day), but that there would be thousands of publishers with niche and unique content that could foster an ecosystem, where both diversity of content and relevant ads could live side by side. 

Wow... how did so much go so wrong?

Yesterday, I wrote about how the dream of targeting and relevance has taken shape (check out: Display Advertising Is A Failed State). Now, we're in an even-more precarious situation, where advertisers shifted dollars from a world of three major television networks, down to a place where the vast majority of online advertising spending is happening in (primarily) two places: Google and Facebook. With that, many believed that from a technology standpoint, it would be hard (maybe impossible) to put systems in place better than these two Silicon Valley behemoths. Groups like the IAB (full disclosure: I sat on the board of directors for IAB Canada many years back) could create some form of industry standard, in terms of ad serving, ad formats, etc... Well, it seems like we're living in a world where Facebook had mis-reported how much time users were spending watching videos, then an issue with overall video performance, then engagement numbers for links and live videos, then problems with traffic to Instant Articles and some other measurement challenges. A few days back, Twitter came forward and admitted that their Android app overstated video advertising metrics by as much as 35% due to a technical error. These were not the only instances, and these all happened in this past year.

Don't worry, advertisers.

From my view at this keyboard, it didn't seem like the advertising community pushed back all that hard against these two media publishers. And, while Facebook has launched third-party verification and viewability initiatives, it does beg the question: who will really be watching and - more importantly - what does an advertiser do, in a world where they have limited choices for where to put their ads? Advertisers and media companies don't have the technological infrastructure to develop/be smarter than the Googles and Facebooks of the world and, ultimately, need them (maybe more than ever) to help the brands that they represent to reach a significant online audience.

Math is hard. 

There is no doubt that this is a complex world of advertising, and that many of us never saw these problems coming. It's easy to look at the Internet, these major online players and think, "just get it right!" Many won't remember that the Internet was not built to be an engine of commerce. If has, slowly, become this over the last decade and a half. It's not perfect. It is evolving. Still, it was never meant to do the things that we are expecting it to do these days. Still, publishers, media companies and yes, even the brands, need to be more accountable for what ads are being served, where that's happening and who - exactly- is seeing those ads (and what they're doing after that moment). It's fine for Facebook (and others) to make mistakes. It's fine for them to be transparent about those errors. It's fine for them to either compensate against these mistakes or prove that it had little-to-no-effect on overall campaign performance. It's not fine for everyone in this mix to simply allow the publisher to hold all of the cards. 

A better third-party system.

The analytics should not lie. The analytics should do more. The analytics need to know the difference between a real view and a spam farm. The analytics need to know the difference between an ad being served to the right consumer, instead of being diverted to a fake news site via some kind of bot hack. The analytics should know (and agree) on what an actual "view" means (and this should be universally accepted). With that, maybe we need to take the analytics away from everyone (the brand, the media company and the publishers) and let all of it reside with a true third-party source, that can be solely responsible for serving this media trifecta with what happened? Does that exist? Are these the solutions that Google and Facebook have put in place? Do the brands, media companies and publishers all agree on the solution? 

If you want to look at what might be one of the biggest marketing trends in the coming year, you may want to focus on accountability and a better system of analytics.

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Display Advertising Is A Failed State

Display advertising has a huge problem. It's all going to come to head in 2017.

There is only so long that this charade can go on. When someone says that the 30-second spot is dead or that television advertising (or newspaper advertising... or radio advertising) is dying because of online advertising, they could not be more incorrect. On one had, the smart advertisers are finding a tremendous amount of value in certain online/digital advertising channels (think about search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, specific targeting capabilities on Facebook, being smart with YouTube pre-rolls, etc...). On the other hand, the idea that any form of traditional advertising is going to be dead because of online advertising (mostly banners... or display advertising) is simply not true. 

Display advertising has failed the advertising industry.

Back in October 2010, I posted an article titled, The Web Has Failed Advertising. Here's my thinking (from way back when)...

"The web has not failed advertising. Advertising has failed the web.

Let's tweak my last turn of the phrase: advertising - as we have known it to date - has failed the web. Bad, boring and interruption-based advertising always struggled to capture mindshare. Traditional marketers beat that reality through frequency and repetition (in layman's terms: shoving more of it, more frequently, down our collective gullets). More modern online advertisers not only followed that tactic, but they also cluttered the pages with multiple messages in multiple sizes in a very primitive way (low quality images and creative to ensure speedier downloads).

We did it to ourselves, really.

When those models began to fail, we switched the name of 'banner advertising' to 'display advertising,' as if that turn of the phrase would make brands (and consumers) forget the big promise of online advertising: that consumers will take action and click on your highly relevant and targeted ads. The truth is that there is a lot more to online advertising than just those little square boxes that surround every piece of content we see online. In fact, search advertising (the kind that Google mastered) hasn't failed the web at all. Email marketing has not failed the web (well, spam has, but that's another story for another post). Affiliate marketing works great too."

Fast forward to today: there is still tons of money being poured into display advertising. More than ever, in fact.

Programmatic was supposed to provide something unique to advertisers: more precise targeting, better inventory, more options, way better pricing... and much more, all through the power of computers, automation and an auction-based system that would give advertisers a level of control, mass inventory and more. In essence, remove the humans, increase the automation, layer in some nascent machine learning, and a whole new world of inventory would be open to more and more brands. The promise was interesting. Many still prescribe to it. Many are still investing in it. The end result? It works for few, fails many more and could be enabling tons of money to the wrong people.

Display advertising is a failed state because brands are losing control of where their advertising is showing up.

We learned some tough lessons very quickly, in the early days of online advertising. I was there. I was selling. It was for one of the top meta-search engines on the Internet. We had a premium banner advertising solution, because we could enable advertisers to buy their banner ads against keywords that were relevant to their industry (long before Google mastered it). Of course, the immediate challenge we faced is that ads began showing up on websites that were gaming the search engine space, and brands did not want their ads aligned with these types of publishers and properties. That seems obvious now, but not back in 1999. Online advertising, as we know it today, was non-existent back then. We were the pioneers.

There is irony in this.

If you look at the current rise in programmatic, fake news sites and other unscrupulous publishers creating sites and pages with the sole intent of driving traffic to generate impressions for advertisers, you will notice that we're back to square one. Same problem as the late nineties. Only now, it's at scale, and there are millions of dollars at play. Think this is over-stating the problem? Read this from The Drum: Russian fraudsters divert $5m a day from major publishers in 'biggest ever ad fraud'.

"the criminals... had created 6,000 domains and 250,267 distinct URLs that looked like legitimate websites. This reportedly tricked the algorithms in the exchanges to thinking their placement was best, over the more trusted websites with the audiences that the ad spend was intended to reach. It says a bot farm was used to create traffic, with 570,000 bots used on the ads... Those bots specifically tricked the system into thinking people were watching as many as 300 million video ads a day, averaging $13.04 per thousand faked views." 

You get what you pay for.

Advertisers want one thing: to be where the eyeballs are. What we're now seeing is an advertising format that is so complex that it's hard to know who is the human and who is the bot. So, what's really happening here: advertisers are now the ones who are (unwittingly) being the venture capitalists to sites and organizations that are clearly poisonous to online culture. It's a fact that these fake news sites (and others) are amplifying stories that are not true, or helping to further spread conspiracy theories and other terrible stuff. So, it's one thing when media companies have in their contracts that a brand's advertising cannot appear on gaming or sexual explicit sites, but it's a whole other world when brands are happily paying less, for what they think is more audience at the benefit of automation, when - in reality - they are funding some obviously nefarious organizations. In the end, these brands are now - without question - facing a world of true ethics and scruples. What is the price for all of this automation? Do brands understand these huge ethical questions that are now a true reality? 

It's not all bad.

If brands do the work, they can easily find countless great publishers, with inventory that is targeted and relevant to their audience. It may not come cheap. It may not come through automation, but it exists. This is where the problem continues. The work is more complex, it involves human intervention and negotiation. So, here's the thing that brands must face: do you want a perceived audience at low cost with little-to-no human interactions at the cost of corporate ethics and values, or do you want to do the hard work or finding the right space, the right placement, the right creative and the right result for what the brand needs to accomplish (which will cost significantly more). 

It seems like an easy answer. Still, it does not seem that brands are answering this very obvious call. 

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The Persistence Of Brands

"Nobody wants to be branded anymore," said Aaron Levine, head designer for Abercrombie & Fitch.

Well, if that line from the Wall Street Journal's article, Crocodiles (and Polo Ponies) Go Missing as Scalpel-Wielding Consumers Revolt, doesn't make your marketing brain stand up and take notice, who knows what will? There's nothing (really) new in this article. It's a meme that rises to the mass media every few years. There's this thought that human beings are becoming less and less concerned, interested and caring about brands. People want quality, and they no longer feel the need (at the same time) to be advertising for some business by flaunting their corporate animal in the upper quadrant of their polo shirt. Brands have (somehow) become less important, and individuals are more interested in buying clothes that are (somewhat) personalized, or that speak to them by allowing their own personalized style to flaunt.

Slow down there, just a second.

People confuse the power of a brand with the value of a brand. They are not the same thing. Brands are more important than ever. Brands are also a lot bigger than the fashion labels. The other week, I was complaining about my new Apple MacBook Pro. I was/still am in dongle and power cable hell. Everything that I had accumulated over the years became obsolete in one swoop. Many quipped (on Facebook, of course) that I could have purchased a much better equipped and speedier computer, had I just switched over to PC. I know. For decades, I was a hardcore PC user before switching over to Apple, about five years ago. Why pay a premium? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but it's not hard to admit that Apple is a premium brand. Period. Full stop. I like the Apple brand. Almost everything about it. If human beings were simply pragmatic, and only bought for functionality and longevity, there would be no automative industry, no computer industry, no fashion industry... in fact, there would probably not be that many products or services in the market. We would only buy the things we - as human beings - absolutely needed. We would only buy those things, if they were the lowest price possible with the best quality available. 

Brands are an important part of our world.

Most people see brands as a nuisance. "Grab that scalpel and scrape off that crocodile from my shirt!" I don't. Most people don't. You probably don't, either. The Wall Street Journal (a brand unto itself), fails to deconstruct the immense value that brands bring to our culture, to our economy, and to our world. Who do you trust? Brands have (and will continue) to provide a level of trust, emotion and experience to consumers. Brands don't do this on the sole basis of creating a healthy environment for competition. Brands don't do this solely to differentiate themselves from one another. Brands don't do this just to charge a premium to consumers. Brands do this because there is a massive market demand. It's not perfect. There are many brands that are perceived to be luxurious, that are not of high quality. There are many brands that are perceived to be cheap, that provide an experience that is over-and-above their competition. There are brands that - sadly - lie and manipulate the public to simply increase revenues. Maybe the logo is obnoxious, but there's something about the brand. So, don't confuse people getting tired of a logo on a shirt for the brand's end of days 

Still, brands matter.

In fact, I would argue that whatever happens in the economy, one of the main key performance indicators we can look towards, is the health, growth and adoption of brands (new and old) to see how our world is doing. Yes, brands make people do stupid things (like trample one another for a better price on Black Friday). Yes, brands keep more people employed than you can imagine (every company is a brand). Brands matter. 

If there is a persistence of time, count on the persistence of brands. 

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