Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

Omniture to Acquire Offermatica

Announced this morning. We are being acquired.

In the interest of keeping my new job, I will direct you to the press release on the deal.

We are about 3.5 years into building Offermatica, which started with a blank piece of paper and a simple goal give marketing back to the marketer. After about 5 years with Fort Point Partners, we had learned the simple truth that technology would not transform marketing until we embraced the marketer.

Our motto from the first brainstorms was "Easy to buy, easy to use, easy to own". We sought to save the marketer from IT and IT from a marketer.

We did not know it would end up here. We tried every idea, we figured out what worked, we threw out what didn't. If an approach didn't yield measurably better results, it was a no-go. If it couldn't get done by a reasonable person, it was a no-go.

One day I will try to list all of our experiments -- One that stands out is MorrisandGreen.com, an actual ecommerce site started and run by the company. We took orders and shipped products to test our own ideas with real consequences and real customers. We were humbled when our ideas were bad, and delighted when we found a gem.

What did I learn?

1. Great marketing comes from great marketers, machines help them aim better
2. Engaged marketers lead to engaged customers
3. Speed is everything.

I am excited, and I look forward to the future.

Leaning Back with LookBack from TimeWarner

The new Look Back offering from Time Warner (see: Look Back Service Forces Consumers to Watch Ads in the New York Times) is baffling.  My prediction: DOA.

And it didn't need to be that way. 

TiVo is a fabulous example of a lean-forward device that changes media consumption.  Instead of turning on the TV and disappearing into the Barcalounger, the TiVo consumer sits with remote in hand, engaged with the experience.  They are not a vessel, they are the captain. Time Warner failed to embrace this lean-forward consumer.

Reminds me of a CEO friend of mine, who regularly complains that business would be awesome if it weren't for all the pesky customers.

The new Look Back offering is a TiVo, only you can't fast-forward over commercials and you can't store shows for more than a day.  It takes a great concept, the DVR, and removes the very features that make it great. Here, kids, have a cheap ice cream cone! Oh, yeah, no cone, and no ice cream, but the napkin is in the shape of a cone!

But it is easy to take swipes at ideas like this.  Certainly we have to understand that Neilsen is changing the way they measure media, and an unwatched commercial is now a real loss to the media property.  We need to sympathize with their need to fund the content!

Yup, we do.

But pretending we can jam the customer back into the Barcalounger where they belong won't work.

Instead, why not embrace engagement?  Have them rate the commercials with thumbs up and down.  Let them mail the shows to each other with a pre-reel ad.  Even better, open up the cable delivery networks to real innovation and let the tens of thousands of tech and design engineers that fuel Web2.0 go crazy on the ad.

Odds are someone would devise an ad unit that worked.  Or come up with a way to introduce user-selectable commercial channels, or create something unimaginably unimaginable (think Twitter) that can change the way TV works.

Almost any industry on the planet would kill to have a customer lean forward and engage with their product.  The DVR has opened the door to this engagement.  Time Warner needs to embrace their consumer, not insult them.

The Magic of Behavioral Targeting - Optimization Approach #3

Back in January - eons ago! - I set out to clarify optimization, a term that is often bandied about and regularly misunderstood. After a crazy quarter (we grew our client base 30% in three months!), I am back to finish the job I started.

We first covered testing, the most frequently used method of improving consumer response. With the targeting article, we covered how systems based on rules can be used to create more relevant experiences with better outcomes.

In this third article, we cover the most seductive, and misunderstood form of optimization, Behavioral Targeting. (The fourth, social optimization, I will explain in the near future.)

What Is Behavioral Targeting?

The holy grail of direct marketing has been a system that detects consumer behavior and changes offers or strategic marketing plan.  The first incarnation of this approach was called Data Mining, and was focused on using data to drive strategic planning. There is an apocryphal story about Wal*mart:

"By scanning each sale into a data warehouse, grocery stores have determined that men in their 20s who purchase beer on Fridays after work   are also likely to buy a pack of diapers. Thus, a display of Pampers or another brand might be set up in the beer aisle, or merchants will put one (but not both) of the products on sale on Friday evenings."

In the online arena, it is actually possible not only to process historical data, but also to act on it instantly.  In an ideal case, the web marketer would just plug in new offers or products and the system would automatically put the perfect one in front of each visitor based on these patterns while that visitor was still on the site.

Behavioral Targeting is really a refinement of targeting, or "rules based" optimization.  The difference is that while targeting uses explicit segments, predictive models seek  to discover rules within the data that are counter-intuitive.  Instead of When the user has searched for 'TurboTax', show this offer at this price, the predictive model can look at prior searches and visits to pick the ideal offer,

In simple terms, it's like having the haystack find the needle for you.

With behavioral targeting, you're saying that, if you have a big enough body of data around a consistent set of products and a consistent set of visitors, then it is quite likely that you will find correlations in how those visitors behave: different times of day, different types of product, different points of origin are some subsets that can be grouped together and perhaps predicted to behave in similar ways. 

Amazon.com

The classic example is the predictive models used by Amazon for product recommendation.  As near as I can tell, no other company has demonstrated a more lasting dedication to using predictive models:

To make behavioral targeting work, the system (or consultant) essentially works to build a model based on prior behavior that can be used to predict future customer preference. With this approach, a broad range of variables (time of day, source of traffic, prior purchase) are evaluated against performance, and a model is developed that is "fitted" to these conditions. The model is both explanatory, meaning that the past data supports its assertions, and predictive, meaning that it predicts how new customers will behave under similar conditions.

Where It Works

Ok, take a breath after that last paragraph.  You have my apologies for the excruciating terminology.  But there are simple places where you will run into predictive models every day.

Take search, for example.  When a consumer types in a search phrase, the search engines try to find the best list of sites.  To do this, they must build a model based on what they have found to be the most predictive characteristics that they can gather.  In Google's case, they weigh the content of the page, but also inbound links and a factor called "PageRank" (among other factors).  This model is employed every time a "SERP" or search result page is calculated.

Ok, so Google uses it, and Amazon uses it, so when should you use it?  The best times to use behavioral targeting are either:

1. In applications such as search and cross-selling where there are large sets of alternatives of a single type, and a large number of interactions.  This means books, music, web pages.
2. Direct marketing situations where you have a small number of offerings and a very large number of relatively well-profiled prospects or customers.  For example, credit card offers, loan rates, and other high-volume, high-value markets.

In both cases, behavioral targeting tends to work best when there is prior purchase behavior on the part of the consumer.  Such models are less effective in prospect situations as there tends to be less profile data on the visitor to correlate.

There are a number of vendors offering variations of on-site behavioral targeting and affinity marketing including Touch Clarity, Gilbert Systems, CleverSet and Loomia.  My company, Offermatica, offers Behavioral Targeting as well, based on our own profile.  Revenue Science and Tacoda (now part of AOL) are providers in the display ad market.  There are significant differences in the statistical approaches among the offerings. 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

On the surface, behavioral targeting seems like magic.  Why isn't all marketing done this way?

The biggest issue in targeting behavior is building the model of customer behavior.  While modern web analytics captures a staggering quantity of data, the models tend to be built to fit the available data, not the most predictive data. 

For example, the excellent music website Pandora would be impossible with most current data mining or analytics solutions. Pandora has distinguished itself for the quality of its recommendations, but its predictions rely as much on quality research and testing as on the math.

The secret behind Pandora's success is the Music Genome Project, a research effort that seeks to catalog and attribute songs based on major key tonality, dynamics of the lead singer's voice, the prominence of certain musical instruments, and the number of beats per minute within the song, and creates a channel that plays songs that have similar attributes.

An ecommerce website that sells music might use behavioral targeting in a different way. Rather than suggesting music based on attributes of the music itself as Pandora does, a site might look at the pages a visitor has viewed and make suggestions based on what was purchased by others who followed a similar clickpath.

Issues

But Behavioral Targeting has real drawbacks:

• For one thing, there is no such thing as a universal model. Models must be created and tuned for different applications - a process that can take months. 
• Behavioral targeting models and schemas require regular tune-ups to be certain that the groups or segments are still behaving in the way they were originally predicted to behave. They are opaque, meaning that a marketer has little opportunity to understand the reasons behind the correlations, and thus has little chance of learning from it.
• Behavioral models can also make some bizarre mistakes (offering a cross-sell that is completely irrelevant, for example).
• They tend to be "Black Box" and give much less information back to the marketer than testing or testing with targeting can provide
  
• And finally, they take the merchant or editor out of the equation, which can lead to serious "voice" issues. At its best, behavioral targeting is used to enhance the marketer, not to replace the marketer.

Behavioral Targeting is not likely to replace the marketer anytime in the near future.  As I have said before - Marketing is done by marketers. Machines just help us listen and aim better.

But it is an extremely important weapon in the marketer's arsenal, and savvy marketers should pay attention.

Other articles that you may enjoy on this topic (based on your behavior of reading this far!) :

Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners from Jon Mendez's optimizeandprophesize.com

The Promise & Challenge of Behavior Targeting (& Two Prerequisites) from Avinash's Blog.

Koral, Salesforce, and a Video you should watch

I ran into an old friend and co-worker, Mark Suster, at a Valley event last week.  I haven't spoke to Mark in probably a decade, but he has been very successful and is one of the more thoughtful software/business guys I know.

I Googled him after the event and came across a video he did about his venture history and, more importantly, what he learned about through building and selling software to enterprises.  It is absolutely uncanny how similar our experiences were and the lessons we took away.

Watch his video on Scoble's blog here.

Seriously, watch the video.  He is a very thoughtful guy and much more pragmatic than most software execs you will run across.

What I liked:
1. Simple insights that are devastating to the model of his industry - A content management system without folders is almost heresy to anyone but the Web2.0 world, but Mark got it - folders are just places to lose content in at large corporations.
2. The real dynamics of software development - When you charge a lot of money to large enterprises for your software, it will never be usable.  This might actually be a law of physics.

There is more, so watch it.

Both Mark and I met while working on a very large custom software project for a huge utility in Southern California.  It was years long and impossibly expensive.  In the intervening years I started an ecommerce software integration firm (Fort Point Partners) and he started an Internet firm for builders.  We both raised a great deal of money, suffered through the downturn and created new products. His recent venture, Koral, is now part of Salesforce.com.

'Official' at Last: Faster, faster, faster Marketing

"Many people think the technology revolution in
marketing is about Web sites and interactive
advertising. It’s not. Speed and the customer’s
experience with the brand are the two most important
marketing strategies today."

This is the lead-in to a new study by management consultancy Sapient and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (blogged here). The report, titled The New Marketing-IT Power Partnership, finds that IT and marketing must work more closely together in order to speed innovation and boost the bottom line.

Speed, and customer experience. Hallelujah!

Whether you call it Agile marketing, or Velocity marketing, or just marketing that moves fast enough to notice, it is the future.  And IT's job is to do everything in its power to increase responsiveness and take itself out of the path of the marketing cycle.  Marketers must be able to change programs and campaigns based on the changing needs of our customers, our campaigns will never be as strong or successful as they could be.

Another great quote:

"How does Netflix stay ahead of the curve? They
constantly experiment with how technology can
enhance consumer and partner touch points. In fact,
Netflix makes significant changes to its Web site
every two weeks in order to improve their customers’
experience.

Lets put it more simply.  Your customer, if they have a noteworthy experience with your brand (positive or negative) can publish their opinion in about 5 minutes on a blog, forum, wiki, or review site.  With the current state of IT and Marketing at many large brands, you can publish new information to your own digital media in about 4 weeks to 3 months.

They are running circles around you.

As we're all learning in the age of the Web 2.0, it's all about the customer experience, and we must learn to maintain a site that is as changeable as our customers, and that is as varied as the needs of our various customers.

So I agree, wholeheartedly: Yes, marketing needs to work with IT. If we can understand each other's needs and fears, we will have come a long way. (Perhaps we can even convince them to do away with the holiday lockdown...)

On the other hand, we as marketers need to learn to stand on our own. If our every site need hinges on the ability for IT to work us into their schedules - no matter how closely we work together and how understanding IT has become of our needs - we're still hamstrung. Marketers need the ability to test and to optimize in real time.

This is why we created Offermatica. After building Jcrew, Nike.com, BestBuy.com and about 40 other ecommerce sites, it became clear that no amount of spending on IT was going to solve the problem.  That is why we set out to create a content delivery platform that could move at the speed of marketing and target customers anywhere they went. The holy grail was to eliminate IT from the path of a marketer who had a great idea and wanted to get it in front of a customer fast and learn.

On a final note, the report suggests that marketers be the ones to reach out. It's time to stop working in silos and work as a team.

MSFT to Acquire AQNT - Seattle Roars back

According to Marketwatch this morning, Microsoft is acquiring Aquantive.

Doubtless this deal is directly linked to the DoubleClick aquisition by Google, and it continues the battles between Mountain View and Redmond. With the announcement of 24/7 heading into the hands of WPP, this leaves only a few standing - Accipiter? Zedo?

There are two ways of looking at this frenzy - First, with search highly optimized and relatively stable around the majors, marketing money is searching for a home and display advertising is certainly the largest spend that is still open for competition. With a predicted continuing influx of brand dollars into interactive, owning a greater share of the spend is a good growth bet.

The other side, however, is even more interesting.

What this is also a likely sign of is the maturation of the online media market from a real estate perspective.  For over ten years, there has always been limitless "frontier" of available marketing real estate, and we have finally colonized the last bit of land on the Pacific Coast.

The value of a good display ad network is not the technology (a team of quality engineers could relatively quickly).  It is the network.  Aquantive and Doubleclick have enormous numbers of impressions per month (DCLK is 6B/month).  The tags that drive this traffic are the value.  They are the real estate.  Just getting the tags on the sites took almost ten years.

As recently as a few years ago, it was not unreasonable to start up a new ad serving technology.  Falk AG, Zedo, and others were successful with pricing and technology strategies that drove demand. But this was because there was still new real estate that had not been exploited.

These days, the combination of ad networks like Blue Lithium and Federated Media (and many others) plus the publisher networks have opened up some new real estate in the long tail of small web sites and blogs, but the mainstream of traffic is already represented, and new, large sites like YouTube are rare.

I am glad to see Redmond in the game.  It is a hard business, and the question of what to do with Avenue A/Razorfish dwarfs the prior speculation about what Google should do with the Performics division of DoubleClick.  But strong product development will likely give a real boost to Aquantive's platform and that should benefit advertisers.

Google's Move to TV - Black Box or no?

Google has entered into television advertising with a new partnership with Echostar. The partnership includes the creation of an automated platform for ads running on EchoStar DISH Networks' 125 networks. Google will gain access to DISH ad inventory from across all channels and dayparts; Google's platform will then allow it to sell that inventory and provide measurement on those buys.

The buying of DISH Network ads will work much like AdWords and use a web-based auction system. The real-time reporting allows advertisers to see how their ads performed on a second-by-second basis and adjust creative or daypart scheduling accordingly. Advertisers can target by age or demographic data. Reporting data will be pulled anonymously from the four million DISH boxes currently in use. The program will, according to Google's Eric Schmidt, allow for the ads delivered to be more relevant and therefore more valuable to the viewer and advertisers, because they can be targeted more closely.

On the surface, this sounds like good news for advertisers. After all, commercial data on a second-by-second basis is something advertisers have long been searching for, yet even Nielsen's new commercial minutes ratings do not provide such detailed measurement.

But relevance and the ability to measure viewership alone are not enough. Advertisers will not be acting in their own best interests when they purchase television time via the AdWords ad management platform. Online, advertisers can look at the quality score assigned by Google, along with keyword bid, ad copy and landing page, to try to determine how the minimum price bid was determined and how they can improve how often their ad is served.

But on television, a "black box" process could hamstring advertisers, because the same tools for improvement do not exist.

There's also the problem of testing. Online, Google can be used to good advantage because advertisers can test different combinations of keyword, ad copy and landing page to see which drives the best ROI.

With television, testing is obviously far more cumbersome and costly. So while Google may be able to offer better measurement than the broadcast and cable networks themselves, what exactly are they offering to measure? Without a control ad against which to run a test, the measurement is far less useful. An advertiser may find that 120,000 people watched an ad. But, did they take an action as a result of the ad? Would a different ad from the advertiser have worked better?

As consumers lean more and more toward creating and/or choosing their own media for consumption when and where they want it (via linear television, time-shifted television with Tivo, via online sources like YouTube or broadcast network sites, via mobile devices, etc.) ads that aren't relevant haven't got a chance.

But I would love to see Google TV move beyond the black-box automation that it uses online.  If they do so, I believe that advertisers will be well-served.

What is Marketing Optimization? Testing, Targeting, and Behavior

It is the Year of Optimization.  The recent acquisition of TouchClarity by Omniture is yet another confirmation of an intense surge in interest in technologies that make computers sell better to people. 

But what in the world *is* optimization?

As a matter of disclosure I am not a PhD.  My ADD is a strong inoculation against advanced scholarly pursuits.

However, I have the unique viewpoint of experience.  I co-ran a company, Fort Point Partners, that was responsible for deploying a dazzling range of technology for companies like Nike, Best Buy, and about 50 other firms.  We launched rules-based systems (ATG Scenario Server, e.Piphany), search systems (EasyAsk and Endeca) and more advanced segmentation and modeling software (LikeMinds, Personify, netPerceptions to name a few).  We also ran a lot of tests.

Our goal was simple - make the computer capable as a salesperson. For us, optimization is a fancy word for making a selling process more relevant and engaging for your customer so that they make you more money. And the best optimization tool was one where a marketer could adapt and learn, but the machine did the work.

I see four major approaches to optimization that each have critical value for the marketer (I will use this space over the next week or so to go into more detail on each approach):

1. Experimentation - testing approaches including A/B, multivariate, Taguchi, optimal design and others. Showing different experiences to different control groups to determine a "winner" or "best recipe" based on conversion rate, revenue, or other outcome. Read more here.
2. Targeting - also referred to as "rules-based optimization".  Defining explicit segments and rules for delivering content experience. These can be simple definitions like "show the iPod when our customer searches for "iPod" on Yahoo or very sophisticated behavioral segments.
3. Behavioral - applying AI or linear regression to prior data to determine predictive factors from data to drive the display of content.
4. Social - offloading the work of relevance to the community through ratings, reviews, tagging, or other forms of participation.

Take Google, for example.  They are algorithm guys, right? They use a predictive model that is finely tuned to determine the elusive grail of "relevance" and their results are unbelievable. Yet they also use targeting and testing. True, they outsource the work of specifying the rules to us through keyword selection, bidding, and match type, but this is targeting at its finest.  And they test regularly - evaluating different treatments of the SERPs.

So what is the best optimization approach? Optimization is just marketing with math. If your user base ratings improve the relevance of your search results, then do it!  If testing helps to eliminate your CEO's bias towards acres of copy, do it! The marketing "mix" for optimization is going to take time to get right, but will yield tasty morsels of revenue improvement every step of the way.

We started Offermatica not because we discovered the magic algorithm that turned a computer into a selling machine, but because we found out that the keys to selling online were speed and control. Speed - because marketers had no time, so the machine was going to have to do the work.  And Control, because the marketer still needed to be "in the loop", either driving new ideas or removing crazy outcomes.

And remember this: Marketing is done by marketers. Machines just help us listen and aim better.

Convergence - No More Ducks!

I just read David Berkowitz's post, A Reluctant Case for Convergence, in the MediaPost insider. As usual, I appreciate David's thoughtfulness and perspective. But I feel compelled to warn about ducks.

Think about a duck.  Mediocre swimmer.  Adequate flyer.  A duck is a convergence of flying and swimming technologies. But you would never train ducks for flying contests, and marlin, wahoo and barracuda are probably better emblems for swim teams (Oddly enough, there are Duck football and hockey teams, but that is a different story).

Combining useful technologies into a single packaging because you can is not useful.  Combining them because it enables a fundamental shift in usefulness for a third purpose is the goal.  How do we tell the difference?  The new function must create sufficient value to a specific type of buyer to compensate for rendering the component technologies inconsequential.

Put another way, when being a great duck is valuable enough that it can be a lousy swimmer or flyer.

To extend the metaphor: Light bulbs are a great technology in their own right. As is internal combustion.  And while it might not be the latest in engineering marvels, but a comfortable leather chair is still a worthy achievement.

But it would strain credulity to imagine the invention of the automobile as the "convergence" of headlights, engines and seats.  It is an automobile.  It is an elegant adaptation of technologies, and it is eminently useful for a commuter and others. 

A car is a car is a car.

Put a different way, the car is not a convergence of lighting and lifting technologies, it is a car. It is an adaptation of technological development to a totally new and useful application for a consumer with a specific desire.

The distinction between convergence and useful adaptation is not ambiguous. 

The iPod is the convergence of laptop computing technologies (hard drive, USB), video displays (mini-LCD), signal processing and compression.  It is transformational.  But it is a lousy way to watch a tv show and has not been embraced as a back up file server.  It is a good music listening thing for people who like music, and that is enough.

I am not naive enough to think that the urge to create Swiss Army knives full of technology isn't a major driver of consumer electronics.  Hope will spring eternal in the form of refrigerator-based web browsers and cell-phone-based puppy finders.  But I do know that if the duck can't thrive on his duck-ness alone, then no amount of clever marketing about the merging of flying and swimming is going to get him through the winter. 

Chrysler, Time, and the Unpredictable Outcome

Just love this -picked up at Jaffe Juice (a marketing blog).  Time magazine names "You" as the person of the year.

On the time site, Chrysler runs an ad:

I know, someone is going to make the case that the ironic juxtaposition will increase awareness, and therefore it will be a positive campaign.

In reality, it is the poster child for why fire and pray marketing is too dangerous. Yes, it is what we are used to.  It takes time and money to produce a spot or build a site, so you have to take your best guess and go with it.

But if, after seeing this, you are still not sold that marketers need to have more ability to respond quickly, and that they need to get instant feedback on customer respose, and that they need to be able to make changes on the fly, then we shall have to part amicably.

No marketer on the planet can predict the future, and the future is guided by an ironic hand. No quantity or research or predictive modeling would have avoided the Time/Chrysler situation.  The ability to respond quickly, however, could have enabled Chrysler to capitalize on the situation.

What if they immediately redeployed a set of new ads, ads that might even make fun of their own? 

Ad:Tech Memories - it is about Lead Gen

Just finished up Ad:Tech and observed an interesting phenomenon. It seems that you either have an impressively constrained role in the marketing-cosm, or you are in lead-gen.

The roles in the interactive marketing firmament have hardened severely and unproductively - you are either SEO or SEM, ad creative or media, site or brand, etc. Sad, because consumers really don't consume media that way anymore.

Unfortunately, that is how it is fed to them.

The net result? An explosion of "Lead-gen" firms. I do not exaggerate. You couldn't swing a cat at Ad:Tech without hitting one. But what are they? And why are there so many? And why are they so profitable?

Perhaps Lead-gen is the Hedge fund phenomenon of the Interactive marketing industry. Groups of people that create arbitrage through math that normal folk would cring at. Perhaps they have technology that more precisely targets, prices, and aggregates leads.

Or, more likely, the only arbitrage is organization and staffing.

From an organizational perspective, a good lead-gen firm will not likely say "I can't control the landing page". They won't say "SEO is someone elses problem". They will look to find good leads and convert them into acquisition. They will learn how marketing is consumed to understand how consumers can be marketed to.

From a staffing perspective, they will hire people who are sick of being in a little box. They will hire marketers who "get it" and won't work in an environment of little boxes. These are people that brands, banks and retailers will not be able to retain.

This is an observation. It may be the right answer. Interactive Marketing may have become so niche-oriented that a modern corporate structure must outsource some or all to lead-gen firms. But agencies should certainly pay mind to it. You cannot out-market someone when you live by rules that they ignore.

Comments?

The Medium is the Brand - Conde Nast

So, Conde Nast acquired Reddit, the Avis Rent-a-car of the content voting sites.  A great example of an elite brand understanding that it is the experience, not the title, that matters online.

Too many established publishers (and media companies) assume that their title or brand name is the most important asset when fighting for online audience.  So newyorktimes.com looks like the New York Times in your hand (as best as it can).

But read this article At Condé Nast, it's print versus digital from New York Business about Conde Nast as an interesting counterpoint to today's Reddit announcement.  An interesting observation:

As part of destination site Style.com, which includes content from sister title W, the Vogue channel falls below the Nielsen/Net Ratings minimum reporting level of 340,000 unique visitors.

But neither Ms. Wintour nor Vogue Publisher Tom Florio is to blame. Since the mid-1990s, the online strategy for all of Condé Nast's magazines has been handled by the parent company's interactive division, CondeNet. In the CondeNet world, GourmetBon Appetit share Epicurious.com, and Condé Nast Traveler is accessed through Concierge.com. Even solo sites, such as Glamour.com, are run by the Internet division.

The "Vogue Channel" is not the moneymaker, is is Epicurious.  Now my wife is a foodie, reads food blogs, and is a regular user of Epicurious.  She also subscribes to Gourmet and reads it within hours of its arrival.  Does it matter to her that the titles are not the same?  Would she recommend it to her friends more if Epicurious were branded Gourmet?  That is very unlikely.

Why?  Because Epicurious as an experience is a fundamentally different beast.  It is about searching and sharing recipes.  It is about participating and contributing and learning tips from other foodies.  Gourmet is about that perfect dinner party.  They are both useful, and entertaining.

That is why I hail Conde buying Reddit.  It is an ugly site.  Really.  It has none of the glossy brand appeal of their print pubs.  But its brand value isn't in its richness of visual experience, nor in its high editorial value.  It is in its community and participation.

Conde would be crazy to create "Reddit" as a magazine, or to rename it to match an existing brand.  The brand attributes of an effective online content vehicle are radically different, and need to be loved and managed differently.

So kudos to Conde for resisting the pull of trying to remake online in the print image. Lets hope this is a harbinger of other print publications asking if the online properties are not just different channels for content, but actually fundamentally different models that require different thinking to be optimized.

What do you think?

Great Marketing is Killed by ADD

Seth Godin lists two factors that kill great marketing in his recent post: Fear, and Lack of Imagination.  Absolutely agree. 

the penalties for failure, even disappointment, are too psychologically strong, and modern organizations seem to be amplifiers of good and bad results - too much credit for the good, too much blame for the bad.  This kills ideas. 

But Seth neglects a major factor - glacial execution. In most organizations, the actual production and release of marketing programs lacks any sense of real urgency.  If you have a great idea (or even a strange one), it has to get out while it still has its life-force intact.  Six months later after meetings with 4 departments and 5 layers of management, any idea is likely a shattered carcass.

How long does it take to do a web site redesign - on average about 6-9 months.  To implement a cool technical feature - could be a quarter, could be a year.

It is my suspicion that a vast number of marketers have ADD/ADHD/what was I talking about again? The half-life of an idea may be hours, and is certainly no longer than a few weeks.  (If you are curious, here is the Harvard Test for ADHD).

So ask yourself how quickly can you execute on a marketing program, especially online?  Is time wasting away your best ideas?

** Please note that the Harvard screen is provided for entertainment value and is expressly intended for use by trained professionals.  For the rest of us, go nuts!

Outdoor - Can your "Site" be in the Line of Sight?

A story about a new use of Bluetooth technology in outdoor advertising caught my eye recently. Apparently, there's an advertising display in the school of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K. which monitors Bluetooth wireless transmitters in the vicinity of the display.

The monitor builds a record, based on the Bluetooth device, of the ads the device-owners have seen, so that each time the particular Bluetooth device is again in the vicinity of the monitor, the monitor can display the ads in such a way that a person is not shown the same ad too many times.

For now, that's about as sophisticated as outdoor advertising companies are getting with Bluetooth technology -- CBS is streaming clips of its new shows to Bluetooth devices as people walk by certain billboards, which is interesting and maybe fun for the users, but the streams are not targeted in any way.

But it got me thinking about the future of advertising as it ties to relevance. If, for example, owners of Bluetooth enabled devices could add profile data, outdoor ad displays that monitored Bluetooth devices could serve even more relevant ads, based not only on frequency but on actual interest.

Interestingly, the outdoor advertising space is booming, and it is new technology that is driving the growth. Online, the technology exists already. We can target consumers much more granularly than we already are. We don't need consumers to enter their profile data into a Bluetooth gadget, because, in many cases, we have their profile data online, simply because they've shopped with us, or filled out forms for more information, or requested a white paper.

Some specific ways to target:
--By search term
--By previous purchases
--By previous searches
--By length of time since last visit
--By length of time since last purchase

How some of this might work:
I know of an ecommerce company selling children's clothes. They created a function that allows a parent to enter a child's gender and age. Each time the parent arrives at the site, the home page displays the clothing specific to that gender and age group. The parent can also enter how they want the clothing sorted (by price, by discount, by category).

Good use of targeting, certainly. Frustratingly (to me), the company fails to take it to the next level. If a parent uses the site for a year, what happens to the size choices they had made for their children?

Nothing. If you chose size 3T for your young son, the site would still pull up clothes in 3T the next year, and the next... unless you choose to change your profile.

Instead, what if the site "grew" with the child, offering 4T sizes next year, etc.? It wouldn't be a perfect solution, of course, as kids grow at different rates. But it would certainly be better than assuming the child isn't growing at all.

Or how about this:
You send newsletters to your clients. Each newsletter has three articles. You track which client is reading which article. With the next newsletter, you send those who read article A only stories based on topic A. Those who read article B are sent stories related to topic B, etc. Those who click through to your website from article B are served content based on article B, rather than content about A, B, and C.

Take that one step further, as well: after those who have been reading articles about topic B for awhile (however long you designate), you know that their knowledge has reached a point where they can now devour articles on the next topic. You begin targeting them with the next level of information.

We're already there...
This stuff is all pretty basic, and it's being increasingly done by smart marketers. But we can, and should, take it even further. The more we can adopt it, the more consumers will be offered the content they want. And when that happens, they'll begin to seek out advertising, rather than simply tolerating it, because it will be absolutely relevant.

Advertisers won't have to worry about the "skip this ad" button when they're running a pre-roll ad. If we do it right, and the television industry learns from us, they won't have to worry about their ads being TiVo'ed through, either.

Don't let the oldest advertising form in the world -- the out-of-home industry -- catch up with us. Let's keep pushing the envelope and taking relevance and targeting to the next level.

When Your Product Shot Becomes an Ad

What if your product shot - alone and undoctored - becomes a stand-alone ad for your company? Is it up to the task?

Yesterday I wrote about how the definition of a product may be changing: Now that consumers have the ability to create their own media, there's no telling how or where your product will end up. Sites like This Next (and notcot.org, and others) dispense with the merchant's concept of assortment and replace it with the recommendations of real people who like to discover, shop, and share great products.

In thinking about that concept, I took it one step further: when an image of a product is taken from your site and used on a third-party site, it is as though the product shot is an ad in and of itself. When merchandising your own site, then, you should really be thinking about advertising.

For example, back to This Next: here's a white T-shirt somebody posted. It's from an online merchant called Moonblood.net:

What does the picture say about the company? Is it an effective "ad?" Does it convey the image that the company wants to convey, and will it be successful in generating clickthroughs?

Moonblood.net looks like a pretty tiny company and I'd doubt they have much of an online advertising budget (on the About page, they point out that they hand dye their T-shirts in the business manager's washing machine).

Participatory sites such as this, then, could make up a good portion of the company's outreach efforts.

So ask yourself whether your product images work well as an ad. If not, stretch your mind. How might you be able to expand the concept of the product shot? What more could you incorporate to make the image more useful to consumers?

This goes beyond old issues that merchants have encountered with affiliate networks. In those cases, the affiliate may have used a product shot or copy in a context that was unanticipated by the merchant. But the offers that were available to affiliates were always under control of the merchant. The product art and copy were created and distributed for the purpose of affiliate marketing.

In this new case *any* product image could find its way onto a site.  Doesn't matter if you intended it or not. 

One tip - post your own product on a social shopping site.  Get a feel for how it works.  Understand how your product images work.  They are your ad.  You need to understand how well the creative works.

Branding through Search? SES says so

Many smart folks (including our good friend Jonathan Mendez) on the Branding and Search panel at SES.

It seems that there are a few issues floating about in the branding/search nexus:

1. Can the impression of your brand or tagline with high repetition through text break through.  Jon made a convincing argument.  He made a great case for having the discipline to keep your messages in sync, especially when those messages are targeted at segments.
2. Can search reinforce offline branding?  Less concrete here, but some stuff to chew on.
3. Can search inform branding?  I think that online testing can help to clarify how a brand is being communicated. 

Moreover, we are in the "post-push" world, where it is much less likely that you can force a way of speaking or thinking out on an unsuspecting population.  Instead, you have to "join the conversation".  How could you present different brand treatments and listen to see whether you have really caught the "wind" - joined a legitimate conversation that is already happening.

When you test, you are probing the conversation, trying to find out whether you are on the right tack. Without feedback, it is just a guess.

Software Companies: Look to Your 20-Somethings...

Believe it or not, the PC software industry is nearly 30 years old. And I think that we sometimes get into the habit of fooling ourselves -- we believe that just by nature of the fact that we're in software, we're automatically on the cutting edge.

I went to a convention of software companies recently, though, and I was surprised by the lack of charisma and forward thinking when it came to the web. Of course there are the companies that are out with brilliant ideas and creative thinking. But for the most part, mature, well-run software and technology corporations are behaving similar to, well, to the way GE behaved back in the 90s:

They're online because they have to be there, but they're not making any great strides.

So I've been thinking about this, and I keep coming back to two points.

First, the future lies with 20-year-olds. As the web matures, they're the ones who know and understand implicitly what the web needs to be, and where it's going, and they're the ones I'm beginning to seek out. But, you might ask, aren't they young and awfully untested?

Sure. And that brings me to my second thought. As the cost and time demands of testing things online decrease, the ability to allow other members of the company to have a say in what happens, and how it happens, increases.

I can risk running with an idea that ultimately doesn't work, because I can test it against two or three or six other ideas to see which one does work. I can expand my pool of creative types simply by reaching out to more of the people with whom I work for their own thoughts on what constitutes a great idea. I can encourage a culture where all ideas are given credence, and where more ideas than ever before can see the light of day online.

Ryan Stewart, Rich Internet Apps are a Bad Idea

I want to go a step further than my previous post on Rich Internet Apps after reading a posting on ZDNet by Ryan Stewart. 

The simple truth? They have been the "Next Big Thing" for about ten years now.

The Microsoft interface is not a good interface.  It is better than a blinking cursor and a ">" sign, for certain, but they are not good.  So what is the obsession with trying to make the Web into Microsoft?  Baffling.

You want a good interface?  Read a book.
You want to now the best ways for humans to interact with technology?  Buy an old transistor radio.  Two knobs and a switch.  Tactile, good feedback, no manuals.

The Web (whatever version) has a massive advantage over Windows-type interfaces because it is consumable like a book.  Making it an orgy of listboxes, buttons, and selectors is bad, bad, bad.

Does Web2.0 Equal Marketing?

I was visiting escore.com today, and noticed a new redesign that is very Web2.0 in feel.  It even has a Google Maps "mash-up".  Frankly, it is a very nice-looking site.

But I had a very frustrating time actually doing what I was trying to get done, which was to find a local escore center.  There is a link in the upper right, in light grey, that goes to a page where the finder is on the lower-left.  So it is there, but not there.

Perhaps I am not a target customer.  A father, with two kids, looking for a Score Learning Center.  Maybe they are looking for the elusive 18-24 demographic and I just don't fit.

Or maybe the seduction of graphics and current design overwhelmed them, and they didn't ask what action are we driving, and who will visit.  Maybe they didn't actually test the design.

I am a little torn, because I do like it aesthetically.  But I hold the line.  Know who you are trying to serve; know what you want those people to do; then design for success and test. 

Just doing a Web2.0-ish design won't cut it.

Rich Internet Apps - Radical Simplicity or Oppressive Richness? (updated)

Updated: Check out The Internet Marketing Driver for a nice case study on interactivity and effectiveness.

There's a lot of talk lately about using things such as AJAX or Web 2.0 to make the web look and feel more like a desktop application, and I think there's a lot of validity in the subject. But I also think there's not. (You know me, I always see several sides of any situation.) So before companies even begin thinking about changes to their site in order to add an application-like feel and a more interactive experience, I ask them to consider this:

Are you thinking about Web 2.0 or ajax in order to move away from HTML - aiming for a site that feels more like a desktop application - because you believe that's how consumers intuitively think?

Or, are you doing it to give the consumer a more relevant experience?

I ask you to consider these questions because I believe they point to a flaw in the thinking of programmers who feel that interaction and applications are good simply for the fact that they mimic desktop applications. Windows, icons, the mouse - they're all programmer words that consumers have learned to use. But I'd argue that consumers still think in imagery and everyday words.

So applications for the sake of applications are, at least for now, too counter-intuitive. In fact, when I talk to people who create sites or areas on their sites with incredibly complex applications, they consistently tanked - I'm talking about as much as a 50 percent drop in conversions.

But sites that use AJAX to make a page more relevant will improve the customer experience work because they mimic the way customers think.

Look at Google Maps, for example. The application works as well as it does for a couple of reasons. It replaces content on a single page without having to redraw the content, which makes it faster and more pleasurable to use - and, perhaps, more intuitive. But more interestingly, users only need to fill out one field in order to find their map. When I wanted to look up an address in Denver, for example, all I had to type was the name of the hotel and the name of the city, separated by a comma. I didn't have to use the tab button to get to the next field.

Why is that important? Because it parallels how people think. We don't think of an address like this: "City, colon, Denver. Address, colon, Champa Street." Rather, we think, "Hotel on Champa Street in Denver." By allowing users to search in a way that's more intuitive, and by drawing content into the page rather than sending users to a new page, the page itself becomes more relevant as it's used.

For other thoughts on usability and applications, check out this post.

Why we're manic about usability

Phil Wainewright's Monday posting on ZDNet's blog about usability and on-demand software is spot-on.  The ongoing debate about on-demand really has nothing to do with hosted software vs. having your own infrastructure. Rather, it's about building applications that people can really use, and love to use, he writes.

There was, indeed, a time when software developers looked to build the next big infrastructure play (and some still do), he says, but the future now is about what he calls the "long-neglected backwater of usability."

The issue of usability by the end-user is exactly what we addressed when we started Offermatica in 2003. Our simple goal has been: easy to buy, easy to use, easy to own.

We are manic about making the tool usable by real marketers, not just 
fancy analysts (for more of my thoughts on analytics, see this post). And it pays.

More on Why I Say the Site Is Dead

I've explained what I mean when I claim that "the site is dead," (see left) but I still get some strange looks when I say it. So to clarify, here's the more long-winded explanation I wrote exactly a year ago when I first made the claim:

The Site Is Dead: Long Live the Campaign

Here's what we believe: the website is dying. It may, in fact, already be dead.

And that's a good thing, because in order to be truly successful online, websites and site usability, as they exist today, must become subservient to marketing programs. When that happens, marketers will cease to see the site as a destination or entity unto itself and begin to see it simply as a collection of web content -- the process through which product messaging and selling is executed.

Think that's a radical approach to a system that has been working pretty well so far? Consider this:

Eisenberg, Novo, and the Myth of Spastic Testing

Let me start by saying that I love the Eisenbergs.  Incredibly thoughtful and, frankly, right.  However, I want to dig into a recent ClickZ column by Bryan that reaches what I will call a "softly established" conclusion:

In the Taguchi/multivariate world, everyone seems to be asking for that black-box answer, and there is no learning taking place. So continuous improvement will hit the wall. There will only be wildly random testing across hundreds of variables that produces suboptimal improvement.

Now, where to begin.  First a story, then a list.  Joann.com, a craft retailer with physical and online commerce, wanted to test promotions to customers that were using onsite search.  Aside from the standard ones - free shipping, Internet-only products, and special product offers - we also tested offering a special discount if you purchased two sewing machines. Now, this was a "random" idea, and went against reason.  It also won by a long shot, with an over 100% increase in order value. The more interesting part is that the client actually did the work to find out why.  Turns out their customer base includes very social quilters and sewers that called each other up.  Simple, brilliant, and it never would have been tried without testing.

Now, the list, below the fold...

Data? Intuition?

Chris Baggott, in his excellent email marketing blog, covers the unsolvable dilemma of intuition v. data in marketing.

There is no substitute for good numbers and good math, but it can never *replace* humans.  There are enormous numbers of people who have used neural networks, data warehouses, etc. in the vain hope of achieving insight Nirvana.

I am very pro-analytics, but the fact is we stink at predicting the future even with vast information from the past.  Whether you are talking about new products, email copy, ads, or landing page optimization, the only way to truly know what the customer will do is to put it out there and watch what the customer does.  This won't make a crappy idea good, but it may point the way towards the best idea.

In the end, all great marketers produce great marketing ideas, but that doesn't mean they know what will work.

Staying Competitive in Keyword Buying

The rocketing costs of keywords -- projected by JupiterResearch to soar from an average of $0.36 in 2004 to $0.47 in 2009 -- means that marketers who don't focus now on increasing ROI from paid search will soon be unable to afford effective search engine marketing at all.

Luckily, staying ahead of your competitor in the paid search field can be relatively simple:

"The best practice for search marketers is to have each keyword lead to a unique landing page, which is tied conceptually to the keyword itself," writes Gary Stein formerly of JupiterResearch, in his December 2, 2004 report titled Landing Page Optimization: Maximizing Search ROI Through Simple Merchandising.

However, many merchants control hundreds of keywords, making customized landing pages for each term an unrealistic goal. Instead, create customized landing pages only for those keywords that bring the most activity to your site.

Then create broader category pages for terms that drive traffic but can still be bundled together sensibly.

For example, a travel destination site might create a single category landing page that encompasses lodging, car rentals, and entertainment in Florida. A separate category page might cover trips to Disney World.

Many companies stop customization at that level. But with tools like Offermatica, which works as a hosted application, merchants can highlight specific, relevant products within the broader category page, creating in essence a semi-customized page for individual users.

So, while a user who types in "Miami Beach hotels" might find himself at the broad Florida travel page, a specific Miami Beach hotel can be plugged into the page as a promotion. He might see, for example, a marketing box reading: "20% off a three night stay at the Miami Beach Marriot!"

By highlighting particularly relevant products, which tie back to the source keyword, merchants will increasingly be able to generate positive ROI, increase keyword spend, and successfully compete against bigger merchants with deeper pockets.

Reinforce Your Promotions - Now!

Offline, promotion reinforcement across multiple touchpoints is mandatory. Unfortunately, it is still a luxury for many online marketers. But only when marketers can take control of certain areas of the site for promotion purposes can they guarantee that the right people are seeing the right promotion -- and that they're seeing it often enough to positively influence their buying decisions.

Think of offline ad campaigns: we place ads in magazines, on billboards, on TV and radio, creating an integrated campaign to reinforce our message at multiple points with consumers. Ideally, this leads them to the ultimate destination -- the store -- where we again highlight the promotion and coax them to buy.

Yet online, we often find that a promotion -- free shipping, for example -- on the home page is so watered down by competing messages or by lack of reinforcement that by the time a visitor reaches a product detail page, the promotion has no power left to propel the visitor the last leg of the journey (to the checkout page).

Reinforcement of promotions can be relatively simple. For example, if you're offering an audience-wide free shipping promotion (the same promotion to every visitor) it's easy to include the free shipping messaging on category pages, product detail pages, and the shopping cart.

The next level, reinforcing a visitor's affinity, is slightly more complex. For example, if a visitor comes to an online pet store looking for dog beds, you obviously want to land them on the most appropriate page for that particular product. But as they browse, you can reinforce their affinity for dog products (as opposed to cat or fish products) by showing other dog-related messages ("10% off engraved dog bowls!").

The true challenge comes when you're running a series of promotions. Say you're offering:

A. Free shipping to anyone who hasn't bought in six months
B. 10% off a single item to first-time buyers
C. Special price reduction on certain items only for your best customers

You want: Group A to see this, this, and this on these pages; group B to see that, that, and that on those pages; and group C... etc.

This is the point where marketers throw their hands up in frustration, and the process stalls out. That's because the level of involvement between various teams, but chiefly between marketing and IT, becomes prohibitive.

But there is a solution: marketing must, to a certain extent, have the ability to put content on the site. This doesn't mean that marketers need to be in control of every bit of every page -- only that marketers be able to designate specific areas on specific pages for promotions, and to be able to change those areas on their own without requiring an investment of time from other departments.

When this happens -- when promotion reinforcement online becomes as mandatory (and possible) as it is offline -- promotions will truly be a powerful tool that positively and consistently influence buying decisions.

Long Live the Campaign

Here's what we believe: the website is dying. It may, in fact, already be dead.

And that's a good thing, because in order to be truly successful online, websites and site usability, as they exist today, must become subservient to marketing programs. When that happens, marketers will cease to see the site as a destination or entity unto itself and begin to see it simply as a collection of web content -- the process through which product messaging and selling is executed.

Think that's a radical approach to a system that has been working pretty well so far? Consider this:

-- The "media guys" and the "site guys" have separate budgets and separate fiefdoms, and each thinks in different terms, particularly when it comes to satisfying the customer.

-- Costs per acquisition are rising, yet there exists no single message driving customers from first click all the way through to acquisition.

-- Deep-linking from product or category specific keywords is becoming increasingly common, but conversions haven't significantly improved; we contend that's because the marketing program driving a visitor ends at the landing page (or doorway into the site) rather than at the exit (after a customer has purchased and is ready to leave).

-- Even the best IT departments cannot operate at the speed of marketing, so even if marketing departments wanted to manage the site as a series of campaigns in and of themselves, they may find it impossible.

So as obstacles mount and IT departments are unable to keep pace with marketers, something's got to give. We think that something will be the site itself.

A company that conducts a campaign for acquiring mortgage customers through Google, for example, will eventually have visitors from that campaign follow a "landing session" -- an entire campaign strategy from the minute a user sees the original link until the user fills out the mortgage application.

A financial services company offering credit cards through an ad on NYTimes.com won't send visitors to a landing page that then funnels them through the site's usual path. Rather, it will offer a sequence of landing pages -- again, a landing page session -- designed with that particular campaign, and that particular visitor, in mind.

Will some of the sessions have common denominators -- the shopping cart, perhaps, or the privacy statement? Absolutely. What will change is that marketers will become ever more deliberate in choosing the pieces that they assemble for visitors to see.

When the site stops being a "store," where everyone sees the same thing once they walk in the front door, we believe marketers will feel empowered, able to move forward again, without being stymied by technical obstacles. We'll stop having one group of people buying the keywords and another group filling a desire. CPA will be measured from first click all the way through to a converted customer.

Gone will be the days of the quarterly site release. The investment in a site will be driven on a campaign basis. And ROI will reflect these changes and once again be on the rise.