The Rise of Branditos

The new breed of online advertising players

If you're responsible for your company's brand presence online, better pay attention.  It is entirely likely that at least 25% of your ad spend is going to fake traffic, bogus publishers and invisible Web visitors.  But don't take my word for it.  Check out what Mike Shields at AdWeek has to say.  He's the only one with the balls to expose these criminals.

 

“Somebody needs to give a shit.”

Nate Woodman, COO Digilant

This just keeps getting worse.  And no one is doing anything about it.

It's like the Mafioso Code of Silence.

Snitches get Stiches. 

The Future in 3-D

Earlier this summer I had something happen to me for the first time: I broke a tooth.  It wasn't painful (the nerve wasn't exposed), it simply fell off. The only distressing part was when I thought about what it was going to cost because crowns run $1,500 and up.  I checked my bank account then booked an appointment with my dentist for the next day. 

My dentist is a nice chap with a soft touch and comfy chairs.  He explained to me that it could take up to a week to create a crown and that it would cost $1,800.  He then offered me an alternative.  He pointed to a large metal box in the corner of his examination room and said with that he can create a custom-made porcelain crown for me within an hour.  And, more important, it would cost $400.  Anything you say, Doc!

He set to work, first by grinding off all the jagged pieces and creating a suitable surface for the crown to rest upon.  He them stuck a ballpoint pen-sized scanner into my mouth and did a complete 3-D scan of the tooth that the computer analyzed and created a model of the crown.  With the push of a button, that metal box started buzzing and a high-pressure water jet cut the crown out of a block of porcelain. Within 40 minutes it was done. He applied some glue, stuck it in my mouth and hardened the glue with a UV light.  He then told me that if that crown ever fell off, he could make a duplicate and have it put on that day.

That was my first encounter with 3-D printing and it certainly won't be the last.  Many have said the Internet was as revolutionary as the Gutenberg Press.  Well, 3-D printing will be bigger.  Much bigger.  Just as the Industrial Revolution changed all of manufacturing, 3-D printers will re-define almost every aspect of society and it's happening now, as I recently discovered.

Here's what an investment hotshots said about it in an interview:

You can imagine needing to buy a scissors or a screwdriver but instead of going shopping you press a button on your desktop 3D Printer and it appears the next morning in the exact color, shape or sharpness you want. Imagine printing many things as well as what bringing manufacturing into our homes will mean to the world. Plus the plunge in manufacturing jobs that's going to follow.

This is not a dream for the future you know, right now you can buy a 3D printer on Amazon and a guitar has been made from it. Somebody actually printed a gun that fired a bullet, Boeing is already making planes and they've even tested a rocket fuel injection nozzle. 

I see another industrial revolution bigger than the Internet. It's going to transform manufacturing from factories to the residence. If you if you have a vehicle [and need a] discontinued part you can just have it printed on your own layer by layer, atom by atom overnight. It can be done with plastic but also with metals. It's going to redefine medicine, dentistry by printing orthodontists tooth braces, hearing aids are already being fitted precisely to the shape of the inner ear. Body parts like a prosthetic limbs. Somebody gets a jaw shot off in wartime they can just build a new jaw and then they can even spray cells onto it to become skin. 

This is the biggest thing I've seen, much bigger than China and I'm very excited about it because as I said you get a machine from Amazon for $1,300 and that is going to come down over time. Now it's plastic but later going to be bronze, carbon fiber, ceramic cellulose, even food.

You can read the whole thing here.

All these developments make one eager to see what surprises tomorrow brings.

Well, this is interesting...

Are some marketers coming to their senses and realizing that digital marketing is a tactic and not a strategy?  Is "the idea" regaining it's place as the end goal for advertising?  One can hope.
http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/EmailNews.news?ID=31969&Origin=WARCNewsEmail&utm_source=WarcNews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WarcNews20130920

The Bot-Bomb Bubble?

Attention CEOs:  It seems bots are bilking billions from you, and no one in the online ad business is willing to tell you about it.  Except for Mike Shields at Adweek.  Last week, Mike wrote about a report from Solve Media that says advertisers may be on track to blow over $9 billion in online advertising because of fraudulent activity.  Solve Media says that in Q2 46% of web activity and 35% of mobile activity appeared suspicious, i.e. not human.  That's up from 43% and 29% respectively from Q1. 

And, if you're a global advertiser, it gets worse.  Solve Media says the while 46% is a damn big number for the US, it's nothing compared to the rest of the world, especially China (92%), Venezuela (80%) and Ukraine (77%). 

Some in the online ad business question Solve Media's motives (discredit the messenger instead of the message) because it developed CAPTCHAs, and that it is only trying to sway website publishers to use its product.  But Solve Media doesn't track bots.  Its CAPTCHAs, used by more than 6500 publishers globally and which tracks 230 million actual, honest-to-God human interactions, can tell who is human and who (or what) is a bot.  If Solve Media was the only one bringing this to light maybe I wouldn't be too concerned.  But it's not.  Other companies have noticed the growing fraud in online advertising. 

I'm shocked that more CEOs are willing to blindly spend truckloads of cash on online advertising without knowing its effectiveness.  I'm shocked that I haven't heard a chorus of CMOs shouting about this. Maybe it will happen once this story goes mainstream.  Or maybe they'll have had their asses fired before then.  I'm also shocked by the silence from online ad agencies.  It could be that they either are too busy swilling the Kool-Aid or they are aware of the issue but won't say anything while the cash keeps rolling in. I think, though, that just like before the Dot-Bomb explosion, they'll maintain the status quo and take the cash.

Old hands like Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, has been tracking this story and for years has railed about the unquestioned faith agencies and CMOs have in online advertising and the declining state of the ad business.  A lot more leaders have  to stand up and scream about this because it threatens the integrity of the whole industry. 

Still, the drumbeat continues.  We continue to hear from the digital gurus that all things traditional are Dead, all the rules have changed, and new paradigm has arrived.  The truths of the past are tenets from an ancient, outdated religion to be dismissed by today's advertising atheists.  Yeah, sure, but there's one thing about atheists and it's best summed up in an aphorism misattributed to G. K. Chesterton: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing.  He believes in anything."  Today's ad leaders and CMOs appear to believe in anything.

Making Big Data Work

"Hmmm.  I see Mrs Mittleshmitz  just bought six more cans of Hint-O'-Bacon spray cheese. Wilhelm, email her a Buy-Eight-Get-One-Free coupon"

I did something last week I haven't done in a long time.  I actually read a whole issue of Marketing Magazine and its twice-daily emails.  On most occasions Marketing only offers stale news or filler "content" or both—its Fall TV preview is an egregious example.  But this time was different.  It featured articles on Big Data that, by an odd coincidence, coat-tailed its Data Driven Marketing event of August 20. 

The main issue with big data is how to make sense of billions of consumer data points in a timely manner and not get it all screwed up.  There's a lot riding on this because many marketers believe that if they torture the data enough with the right analytic it will confess a truth about how and why consumers act the way they do.  But, finding unicorns can be a bitch. 

Data models are only as good as the parameters and the assumptions used to construct them.  And the more data used to create the models, the greater the chance for error or misinterpretation.  Then, there is statistical noise, as well as false positives, that skew results, among other problems.  And just because certain things are detected doesn't mean they are connected.  Correlation is not causation.

Case in point: the lead article of the magazine, Lost in Data Translation, mentions Kevin Keane, who now runs a "neuromarketing" outfit called BrainSights but at one time was a data cruncher for a booze company.  One day, Kevin noticed a huge spike in sales that neither he nor the client could explain. Maybe it was a new ad campaign or perhaps a large shift in consumer preferences.  Unsure of the cause, he decided to sit on the results and dig deeper.  Turns out that was the right thing to do.  Kevin discovered that sales spiked because of something the data could never reveal: because of a threatened LCBO workers strike consumers were stocking up.  Kevin applied a valuable element to his data. 

That element is identified by Matthew Quint, director of global brand leadership at Columbia Business School.  I'm overlooking the fact that he teaches at Columbia for the moment because he uses a quote from Einstein (Princeton) to stress what big data lacks: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”  Quint says, “Sometimes data is only valuable with a human interpretation on top of it – what the data reveals and what insights come from a human analysis of it – but also sometimes we miss things, as humans, with our gut instincts, understanding and anecdotes.” Overlaying the data with some human insight has benefits, but it will provide much more if marketers apply it in a different location.

Right now marketers sift through terabytes of consumer information every day to create models of their ideal loyal customers—the golden grains of profitability.  What they winnow out, however, could be much more valuable.  The chaff—light customers—are separated out because they have no apparent historical worth or loyalty.  But that is dead wrong.  Loyal customers are nice and all, but they are usually too expensive to retain; besides chances are they'll buy your product anyway. 

The biggest opportunity for data marketers comes from finding light customers, those who rarely buy the brand or do so two or three times a year—the segment that provides about 60-70% of a brand's sales.  Applying that layer of human interpretation on top of the data to understand and reach the light buyer is the way to increase penetration (increasing the customer base) instead of increasing market share (getting regular customers to buy more).  This is where big data can pay off. 

Just Random Stuff to put off doing your job on Monday morning

If cats controlled the Internet (more than they do already):

http://www.buzzfeed.com/catinternet

Wired discovers the obvious:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3016221/leadership-now/marketers-these-eye-popping-stats-will-make-you-stop-chasing-youth-start-cour

Days of reckoning for agencies?

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/look-how-agency-compensation-has-changed-151921?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=AWK_NewDaily&utm_campaign=Adweek Newsletter Template - July 12 - Daily Digest

… and, in a related way, this:

http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/are-there-too-many-jobs-in-advertising.html?spref=tw&m=1

Train Announcer of the day:

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2013/08/21/train-announcer-of-the-day/

So... you're a photographer?

http://sobadsogood.com/2013/08/13/22-glamour-photographs-that-will-leave-you-speechless/

FYI of the WEEK:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/08/peeling-back-the-foil-the-origin-of-the-tv-dinner/

Dressing up the numbers?

I opened my eMarketer email from this morning and below the fold was an article, "Digital Set to Surpass TV in Time Spent with US Media." The first table, complete with mice type (must read that), shows that digital usage is broken down into online (with that vital asterisk), mobile (nonvoice) that includes tablet and feature cell phones—the one's that are considered not smart—and other, which isn't explained. It also shows how its results differ from other research firms because it lumps a lot of other stuff in with its numbers and gets a bit fuzzy with handling multi-tasking time.

 What caught my eye, though, was there was no explanation of what constitutes digital usage. TV usage is pretty self explanatory—turn it on, watch a show, turn it off—but digital usage can be anything from texting to posting pictures of your cat wearing sunglasses. It's like comparing a hammer to a Swiss Army knife; the hammer only does one thing while the Swiss Army knife can do many… except, of course, what a hammer can do.

That people are using mobile and tablets instead of desktops and laptops is not surprising as sales trends show people shifting from one device to the other. In fact, they're obsessed with them. Sit in any meeting, have a conversation with your teenager, ride any public conveyance or walk down any street and you'll see people totally absorbed and, sometimes, dangerously unaware of their surroundings. Like here, here and here.

To be fair, eMarketer should provide a breakdown of mobile usage by task: checking and reading email, texting, posting cat pictures, information gathering (schedules, prices, locations, blog and news viewing, etc), purchases and TV viewing. Apples to apples, not hammers to knives.