The data deluge is not slowing down, it’s actually speeding up. I believe that the practice of marketers sifting through the gobs of data in order to pull out worthwhile actionable information is precipitating paralysis by analysis. There are some companies (like Amazon and Netflix) that have managed to successfully filter their own customer and prospect data in order to offer real-time marketing suggestions to customers. Yet there are countless other companies that have been collecting masses of data but have no idea as to what to do with that data.

Are we over-measuring? It’s possible. In the context of companies spending so much time and effort organizing and stacking data they often fail to act, or when they do are conflicted as to what the data is telling them they ought to do. Look, I’m a big believer in data collection and its ability to assist companies in making better marketing and media decisions. Yet in the rush to measure EVERYTHING it’s only natural to then draw lines of connection borne from the data itself that does not necessarily have any correlation to good marketing instincts. What does one do when collected customer data suggests one approach which is at the same time contradicted by what is known to be a sound marketing practice?

Don’t read me wrong. I particularly enjoy challenging my own assumptions and I have on many occasions found the marketing data to be completely opposite of what I would have thought would be the case in terms of customer response or affinity. When that happens it’s our practice to test again to learn if our instincts were incorrect. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you are testing an email campaign with an offer. You see results that show people prefer content over a sweepstakes. At the outset of the campaign you expected based on experience that a sweepstakes would outperform non-sweepstakes. Yet in the subject line of the email you note ‘Win…’ and really what may have happened is that spam filters sent that email to spam purgatory and recipients saw far fewer of those emails than they did for the offer of content. Drawing the conclusion that providing content is the way to go in the future may not be the right decision.

My point is not to stop testing or stop collecting data but to not blindly make decisions on the basis of the data alone. In the meantime we marketers will continue to swim in data and hopefully keep our head above water.

Are you drowning in data?

The upfront television ad-buying market seems to me to be a high-stakes poker game in an expensive casino. Networks, both broadcast and cable, promote their new (and old) shows to advertisers in an effort to get maximum rates for their programming. Successful programs like CBS’ 2 Broke Girls would constitute a ‘win’ in the casino whereas the NBC show Playboy Club that flamed out in less than a month last fall would be a losing bet.

As Mr. Carr puts it:

‘Part of what keeps legacy television in the game is that it is the last refuge of mass and reach. For retailers who want to flag a sale or an entertainment company with a weekend movie opening, a commercial on a broadcast network or a highly rated cable station can still hammer a message into a lot of noggins. In this targeted age, it’s breathtakingly inefficient — you pay to reach everyone, even the millions not in the desired age group — but making a big television buy is a kind of comfort food, easy and familiar.”

I suspect that the days of upfront television buying are nearing an end. This is not a hope or desire of mine, more of an observation that increasing numbers of advertisers will just say no to the Monte Carlo aspect of outbidding one another in order to spend money on any particular show or shows.

But for the present with the CW network booking $9 billion in advertising revenue and the big four up 2 to 4 percent over 2011 the end is seemingly far from near. Cable networks which now surpass broadcast networks in ads booked during upfront anticipate nearly $10 billion in buys for the new season. There will be winners and losers – both in the creators of the shows themselves as well as the advertisers that were unlucky enough to back the wrong ‘horse’. The whole thing just seems archaic to me.

The stock market is seen by many as a giant casino. Do you think the television upfront market is really any different?

For starters there’s zero dialog. The ‘music’ marries so well with the images and I consider this a great job of editing. The pace of the spot is almost dizzying even if you are not a fan of basketball or the NBA.

In the ad business it’s so easy to offer criticism and by that I don’t mean constructive criticism. When a client gives an agency a directive to produce advertising to promote an event (and the brand) it rarely starts off as a blank sheet of paper. This NBA playoff spot strikes me as being the brainchild of the agency – I wish I knew which agency it was so I could offer my kudos to them.

What do you think of the ad and is it groundbreaking? Do you have any other examples of provocative and effective recent television ads?

Foursquare has indicated it is planning to allow merchants to buy special placement for promotions or personalized local offers as of July. This is in keeping with the delivery of value-based promotions once a user ‘checks-in’ that Foursquare users like me have been enjoying for more than a year. I still get a kick out of obtaining a discount (free drink, appetizer, or other benefit) after I’ve already decided to go to a certain place and then check-in once I arrive. That’s real customer value. It will keep customers coming back and checking in and the special placement plans will only continue along that theme.

There are still issues – with check-ins due to the imprecise nature of GPS on smartphones. For instance I have upon more than one occasion forgotten to check in at a place I visited but did so after the fact – that is after I had left the location and had gone someplace else. While I cannot check-in to a place that’s ten miles away it seems I can check-in at a place I am going to before I get there, after I’ve left or most concerning – a place I did not go to at all.

What I am highlighting is that there has to be a general mistrust of check-in locations until the supposedly soon-to-be forthcoming (maybe July with the launch of the personalized local offers?)
improved GPS integration with Foursquare’s platform is launched. Until that time Foursquare user behavior (frequency and proximity) data will be suspect and its veracity compromised. Mr. Crowley’s point that “We are building software that’s able to drive new customers and repeat visitors to local businesses” sounds great but unless local businesses can be confident a user is actually in or within 100 feet of their business I believe merchants will be reluctant to participate.

My friends tend to snicker about my continued use of Foursquare. There are occasions when I get ‘badges’ for visiting my 10th coffee shop or 5th wine bar. What those friends fail to realize is that I am getting value far beyond the public display of a check-in which can easily be seen as self-aggrandizing.
It’s decidedly not self-aggrandizing to take advantage of discounts for places I’d visit anyway right? What Foursquare hopes is that the next level is getting me (and therefore delivering real marketing value to local merchants) to go try a new place because I’ve received an offer for a discount to a place I might never have really considered visiting.

As Garry Trudeau once had Mike offer in his wonderful strip Doonesbury so many years ago – ‘I prefer not to think of it as selling out – I prefer to think of it as buying in’.

Are you ready to buy in?

As a marketing agency I am well aware of the desire and need to leverage and monetize assets whenever and wherever possible. I did not count on getting an ad-free radio broadcast and that’s fine. I don’t know about you, but not being able to listen to a radio broadcast in real time without paying what is a fee (nominal though it may be if looked at over the course of a 162 game season) still struck me as usurious. I understand that there are always complicated licensing arrangements when it comes to broadcasts and re-broadcasts on the web. But surely there are a number of other ways for MLB to derive revenue without insisting on my paying $19.95 to listen to 4 innings of one game. I might never have had occasion to listen to another game all season!

The MLB smartphone application for iPhone, Android, or Blackberry (while it lasts) is really good and a good value proposition, and in fact I’ve subscribed for the past two years but did not this year (I just had not yet gotten around to it and now probably won’t). In the past I would be able to listen to the live feed of the game on my phone (the app is somewhere around $15) and watch highlights of any game as soon as they are posted. However I had no idea that if I wanted to listen to a game outside of a terrestrial (that is non-satellite) radio station, I would have to sign up and pay the proverbial piper.

Baseball is known as America’s pastime. Maybe it should be renamed America’s revenue opportunity. Forget for a moment that to attend a game at Citi Field requires a family of four to consider which meals they will not eat for the week (parking is $20 and even inexpensive tickets (if bought as part of a plan) can be $12/game although you would need buy 81 games to achieve that price). Imagine if the Mets actually had a chance to make the playoffs.

I feel that offering the opportunity to listen to a game for free (with ads and promotions and I’d even sign up if they required it so MLB could market to me) would be good for baseball and the promotion of the game. It seems to me that the next likely step for MLB.com is to move terrestrial baseball coverage to satellite radio (which I still won’t pay for). Then only paid subscribers will be able to listen to the game.

What do you think?

I can’t say that I don’t read a weekly news magazine since I am subscriber to the Economist but in outside of the Economist I don’t have much use for weekly magazines. There are many weeks that go by that I don’t have time to actually read the Economist and they pile up (ominously since each full issue takes a couple of hours to read if you read it from cover to cover) until I take a trip someplace where I can read them unencumbered. I’ve taken to reading those old issues of the Economist back to front since I have found the content to be consistently more interesting and fun in the back. The front section with topical recent news is pretty boring three weeks after the fact and I’ve already read about the events covered in newspapers and online.

Questions that cross my mind –

1) How is Time Magazine winning awards and still appealing to so many people?

2) If I were to subscribe (hypothetically) could I treat it the way I treat the Economist and when the pile gets big read it from back to front and have the same engaging experience?

3) Not that I need another periodical to read but would I get something out of reading Time Magazine every week? After all it did win a prestigious award. It should be great right?

For me Time Magazine is something I see in a waiting room when I go to see the doctor or dentist. I know
I will incur the wrath of many but sort of akin to the way I look at Reader’s Digest – I’d never pay for it but if I am sitting and waiting someplace and the magazine is there I might pick it up and flip through it.

Reading back over this post I see that I’ve probably defined myself as a magazine snob. If so then I am guilty as charged.

But Time Magazine readers – tell me why you subscribe. Do you enjoy particular writers and/or regular features?

Calling handheld devices mobile phones is fast becoming a misnomer. Of the tasks people perform on their mobile phone my guess is that phone calls are near the bottom of the list. So calling them mobile phones is more of a legacy term than anything else. My trips to Asia have shown me for more than ten years that the handheld computer (that’s really what it is) is the be-all and end-all device. People in Asia do use tablets like the iPad and Android tablets but they are not convenient to carry around on the weekends or when people are not on their way to or from a meeting.

Tablets are the second hottest thing in technology right now. Worldwide the sale of handheld mobile devices crushes the sale of tablets. And handheld mobile devices are getting better and will continue to improve. A projectable keyboard would be a great place to start. This is also a problem when typing on tablets. Apparently these projectable keyboards are past the prototype stage but not yet ready for prime time.

I saw a statistic this week that more people today have access to a mobile phone than to clean water or the electrical grid http://bit.ly/xcvpqa. While that strikes me as being more than a bit sad, it is just another indication of what I see as the overall trend.

This week I went to see an associate of mine, Shaun Rein who just wrote a very interesting and well-written book called ‘The End of Cheap China’ http://amzn.to/KliLc6. Mr. Rein points out that living in China he recently met a young woman that has a salary of US $1200 per month. She had just plunked down US $1000 for an iPad. When he asked her how she did it she told him that she went without lunch for six months and saved in other areas.

Tablet computers are cool now but will never achieve the market penetration of personal handheld computers (I mean mobile phones). The screen is small and not ideal for reading anything long form but I suspect that there will be ways to increase the display area (how about screen projection?) so you would not need to carry anything but one device – your personal handheld mobile computer.

Am I dreaming? I hope not.

Driving long distances can be boring but should not be all that tiring. Flying 16 hours to Asia through 13 time zones is also boring and can cause jet lag that does not really kick in until a few days after one’s arrival. But in and of itself it’s not all that arduous to sit in a seat, eat, read, watch movies and get up to go to bathroom every once in a while.

Traveling by covered wagon – now there’s something that I imagine would make you tired. I don’t know much about covered wagons. Sure I’ve seen paintings, some old photos, and movies depicting the lives of American settlers traveling west (did covered wagons ever travel east?), and it looks completely non-glamorous, uncomfortable, unsafe, dangerous AND boring.

I don’t like flight delays or traffic any more than anyone else. I do try to keep in mind that not even 150 years ago traveling around the United States was much more tiring and dangerous than it is today. Traveling outside the United States to Europe or Asia required taking a ship which also was often dangerous and nearly always boring.

In the entirety of human history the main method of transportation for mankind has been…walking. Sure there were horses for those that could ride back in 1862 (think Civil War), but traveling was truly a different experience than what we complain about today. Think about trying to explain a flight cancellation to a Civil War General for a 3000 mile flight that required you to connect through multiple cities in order to get to your destination – the same day. I would not expect any sympathy to say the least.

How quickly mankind has forgotten the way it used to be.

As we drove beyond Washington DC deep into Virginia I noticed there were almost no signs for Starbucks. This was even more so the case in North Carolina. Prior to that it seemed every rest area had a Starbucks sign. In fact I was surprised to notice that it seems to me that there are not as many billboards as there used to be. This is not a bad thing in any way but for me was unexpected. Dunkin’ Donuts was only slightly more in evidence. That same thing could not be said for McDonald’s and Wendy’s (strangely I did not notice as many Burger King signs).

I did not see many electronic billboards on this drive overall but nearly none in after I passed Richmond. The section of the road from Richmond into South Carolina had extremely light traffic on this occasion during a midweek afternoon. What began to dawn on me was how similar things looked over an 11 hour drive except for the trees and vegetation. Connecticut looks something like North Carolina, at least along the side of the road. Ok maybe you cannot get to Waffle House in Connecticut so the brands may change but the song remains the same. I think I might have heard that somewhere before.

Is the United States is becoming so homogenous that it’s becoming kind of boring?

What I mean by ‘not without warning’ is that I find people increasingly prefer to set up phone calls by arranging a time to speak. The idea of giving a prospect or client a call just to check in is not looked upon the same way it was before there were smartphones. In fact it is often noted that those under thirty years old would prefer texting a message to actually having a conversation.

Here’s what I am not going to do. I will not wax nostalgically for the days when my own cold calls, other calls from vendor, and calls from people I do not know well, would take up a fair part of my day. I really do not like cold calling (never did), nor do I particularly relish calls from vendors that I don’t know well so I don’t miss those at all.

While it’s quite a bit easier to not have to try to call in from the seventh hole on a work day, I feel that all the ‘efficiency’ in planning a telephone conversation is removing some of the important human element in business relationships (and personal relationships too for that matter). We are all in such a hurry to get more things done and be more effective in these times of ‘do more with less’. Yet with all the increases in productivity we answer emails on evenings and weekends far outside of what used to be considered ‘normal working hours’.

So would more phone calls make things better? As we know email communication often makes it difficult to determine ‘tone’. Phone conversations are much better than emails to gauge how someone feels. It’s my opinion that people could spend more time talking with one another on the phone or better yet, in person.

With the advent of the texting generation and overuse of email people seem to have gravitated to talking at one another instead of with one another. Take a look at the United States political landscape if you want to see prime examples of a lack of civility.
Is the idea that nobody calls anymore contributing to an overall lack of civility?