Bad Marketer, No Cookies for You!

What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself?

— George Orwell

Since Apple, Amazon and Facebook's recent admissions to eavesdropping, I interject blather into my phone calls, so marketers waste money targeting me.

For no earthly reason, I drop random nouns like "Kumquat," "Flag Day," "Jeggings," "Aardvark," and "PT-73."

As Orwell said, when the lunatic is more intelligent, what can you do?

In 2021 alone, digital marketers will spend over $455 billion on ads. With financial clout like that, we're powerless to stop them from targeting us.

Our phone calls are likely to become the primary tool they'll use in the future, because today's leading tool—cookies—are going the way of the dodo.

Data-privacy nudniks are taking cookies away, denying marketers the ability to track you on line. (Ironically, socialists in the EU are to blame.) 

Apple's Safari already blocks cookies by default. Mozilla's Firefox does so as well. Google's Chrome will begin to do so in 2023.

Bad marketer, no cookies for you!

But ubiquitous, AI-powered surveillance won't end simply because cookies go away.

 

Cookie-less, marketers will of necessity turn to phone calls for clues to our desires. 

Phone calls will provide our fingerprints.

There is, of course, a high road marketers could take to target you. 

It's called "consent management" (sounds like something an overworked lecher does.)

No—trust me—marketers will take the low road; they always do.

And Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google will be delighted to collect the tolls.

Smokescreen

The correct use of propaganda is a true art.

— Adolph Hitler

Petitions are a standard lead-capture tool for fledgling nonprofits, which is why David Brog's digital agency recommended one this week.

Brog's petition-of-the-week targets fellow racists who want to ensure people of color know their place.

But propriety won't let him be completely up front.  

He requires a smokescreen.

The smokescreen he uses consists of, believe it or not, an internal report produced by the National Archives.

The report is innocuous. 

But if you believe Brog, it conclusively proves people of color are about to replace all Whites.

Brog is a busy DC lobbyist and lawyer who pays himself handsomely to generate panic among uniformed and stupid people. The kind of panic that leads them to open their wallets.

A Zionist, Brog believes Wokeness threatens Israel. 

He keeps company with other ultranationalist loonies like Steve Bannon, John Hagee, Yoram Hazony, Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley.

Brog's new nonprofit—he runs no less than three—is the Emergency Committee for America. 

To pay his super-size salary as the group's executive director, he needs donors—lots of them.

To line his pockets, he's happy to engage you and tell you that people of color will replace you.

And as they do, they'll bring an end to civilization as we know it, take over our government, and impose Sharia law and Chinese-style one-party rule in its place.

Brog preys on you while he lines his pockets, even resurrecting the Nixonian phrase "Silent Majority" to imply he speaks for a whole bunch of Americans.

The gist of his message this week goes like this: 

The Marxist revolution will begin any hour. It kicks off not with a bread riot, but a performance-art piece. Self-respecting whites must stop the revolution and the  "desecration of the National Archives." Okay, I'll stop it, if you can't—but first I need your money. All major credit cards accepted.

A simple answer to a complicated question. 

And pure hooey.

But that's what clever propagandists are all about.

They cynically transform complex questions of social and economic justice into violent dramas involving mysterious forces out to victimize you; and they do it in ways that disguise their true aims. 

For Adolph Hitler, the smokescreen was the Sudetenland. The mysterious forces were Jews. His aim was power.

For Joe McCarthy, the smokescreen was the Department of State. The mysterious forces were Reds. His aim was fame.

For David Brog, the smokescreen is the National Archives. The mysterious forces are people of color. His aim is wealth.

Beware all propagandists.

But is It Scalable?

There are no accidents in life.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I'm sick of algorithm-writers trying to manipulate me.

They suggest who I should follow (like Tomi Lahren, someone I loathe); what I should say (they autocorrect "You're my honey" to "You're my hiney"); when I should shop ("It's time to add more data"); and where I should go ("Belize awaits you!" So does Hell.).

It seems no matter where I turn, an anonymous algorithm-writer—likely to be wrong about my wants—has his grubby finger on the scale.

Even book-writers—some, anyway—are trying to manipulate me, by "click-farming" their way onto Amazon's best-seller lists.

Book-writers hire Chinese click-farms to fake Kindle downloads of their books, which Amazon counts as "sales."

A couple thousand Kindle downloads, which today would cost about $400, can put a book—even one with no previous real sales—on the top of Amazon's Top 10 charts.

The fake Kindle downloads also feed Amazon's "Books you may like," suggested purchases served by—what else?—algorithms.

Whatever became of scrupulous writers? Writers who trusted to the originality and incisiveness of their books to boost sales?

Writers of books like Being and Nothingness.

Written by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 722-page book examines the experiences of individuals from the standpoint of radical subjectivity.

Weighing precisely one kilo when published in Paris in 1943, Being and Nothingness sprang to the top of the best-seller list, to the author's surprise.

Who were all these Parisians in the midst of the Occupation so eager to read a philosophical investigation of human existence?

They were grocers, it turned out. 

Grocers were using the book on their scales to replace the one-kilo lead weights that had been confiscated by the Nazis, to be melted down for bullets.

The Empire Strikes Back

Ad blockers may appear the victors, but publishers are fighting back, "taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures," according to TechCrunch.

A new study by two universities finds nearly a third of the top 10,000 websites are using quiet techniques to fake out ad blockers.

The researchers repeatedly visited thousands of sites, with and without ad blockers added to their browsers.

By comparing the source code of pages visited with and without blockers, they could tell when page content changed based on the presence of a blocker.

The researchers found over 30% of the top 10,000 websites are retaliating against ad blockers; and 38% of the top 1,000 are.

Retaliation takes the form of source code that produces ad-like “bait” (for example, by including photos named "banner"). 

The bait triggers ad blockers, alerting the website to their presence; the site then deploys ads in ways blockers can't detect.

The researchers warn that a "rapidly escalating technological arms race" is on between publishers and ad blockers.

Hedging

"Lead-gen leaders" are twice as likely to use a multi-channel approach as "mainstream companies," according to a survey of 1,000 B2B marketers by Digital Doughnut.

You could say lead-gen leaders understand hedging.

They know that "no single class of content asset stands out as particularly effective for driving good-quality leads," as Digital Doughnut reports; and yet, at the same time, that every class―if used well―can drive good-quality leads.

The channels they find most effective? The answers below might surprise you.

Source: The State of B2B Lead Generation, courtesy Digital Doughnut

How to Bust Public Enemy Number 1

Banner blindness is lead-gen's Public Enemy Number 1.

Ad blocking may be copping all the headlines; but if your ads don't arrest prospects' attention, they might as well be blocked.

Here are four things you can do to bust banner blindness:

Build better ads―follow tried-and-true ad-design principles and focus prospects' eyes on your call to action. HINT: Photos of smiling faces work wonders.

Help prospects―"contextually target" your ads to amplify the content on the pages where they appear. Help readers who may be searching for specific information or solutions.

Entertain―invest in high-end video. Testimonials are highly effective.

Go native―forget about banners and embed your ads in the editorial stream.

Not Our People

Hidebound execs often don't grasp why you'd recommend multichannel marketing.

They project their own media habits onto customers.

"Our people don't watch videos. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't watch videos.")

"Our people don't attend webinars. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't don't attend webinars.") 

"Our people don't read newsletters. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't read newsletters.")

Foreclosing the use of entire channels based on your own media habits is foolery. A diversified marketing spend is a smart one.

And yet execs do it all the time. At their own peril.

A new study by IEEE reveals, for example, that many engineers like videos, webinars, and  newsletters. They also like many other channels:

• 67% routinely watch videos on YouTube
• 64% routinely read online catalogs (and 40% read printed ones)
• 36% routinely attend webinars
• 33% routinely read free newsletters
• 30% routinely visit online communities
• 22% routinely attend trade shows and conferences

No matter who they are—doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—you need a firm grasp of your customers' media habits, to counter the recalcitrant exec who says, "Not our people."

If you don't have that data, get it now. A simple online survey will do.

Can You Ever Send Too Much Email?

Does a rise in unsubscribes mean you should cut email frequency? Does a decline in opens and clicks?

Maybe not, says IBM.

Standard email metrics can deceive, unless you allow for the "frequency math effect," according to the company.

To understand the frequency math effect, you must assess unsubscribes, opens and clicks both per message and cumulatively over a sending period.

Looking at only the per-message metrics can mislead you to think you're sending too much email. Only by knowing both your per-message and cumulative metrics can you know whether frequency has an overall net-positive or net-negative effect.

For example, suppose you double frequency to four from two times a week. You might see unsubscribes rise, and opens and clicks decline from one message to the next.

But should you panic?

No. When you send email frequently, you should expect more unsubscribes—but, in the long run, more opens and clicks, as well.

All the Way

The standard B2B marketing tactics are obsolete, says Evy Wilkins, VP of Account Based Marketing at Traackr.

Disruptors like ad blockers and email filters have outmoded them.

Thank goodness there's influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing works, Wilkins says, because most customers rely on expert opinions  to make buying decisions. 

They find the opinions on social media. 

When you win the love of opinion leaders (who'll parrot your sales-talk on social media), you can again begin to romance customers.

But it takes a change of heart.

"For decades, marketers have been in a rhythm of campaign-based activities," Wilkins says; but "influencer marketing is about long-term relationships that don’t go up and down with budget levels."

Influencer marketing, Wilkins says, is "always on."

You can't woo an influencer, for example, to love your brand for eight weeks, targeting only 30-year-old English-speaking males who work in greater San Francisco.

It doesn't work that way—even when you pay the influencer.

Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.

How to Build Your E-list

Serious B2B marketers know e-lists are the way to sway an audience (only face-to-face and telemarketing are better).

But how do you build an e-list?

Pratik Dholakiya, co-founder of E2M, recommends these six steps:

Find your keyword. This step separates the winners and losers. Winners choose a keyword that attracts their prospects; losers don't. Winners chose an intentional keyword, knowing it's probably the one most prospects search with, when shopping on line (mine is "copywriter"). Then, they lace their content with it (copywriter, copywriter, copywriter).

Plan unique content. Prospects will part with their email addresses if you offer content competitors don't. Here, substance always trumps form. Prospects want to learn from you, and don't care much whether you provide an e-book, white paper, video, podcast, webinar, template, spreadsheet, calculator, or quiz. Just be different.

Construct your landing page. Think "tiny house." Short and sweet landing pages work best. Focus on prospects' pain-points and the grievances they harbor about your competitors' me-too content. Be sure to split-test your page, to be certain you've chosen the right pain-points and grievances. (Tip: develop your landing page before you develop your content. You'll discover what you're really selling people.)

Blog, blog, blog. Blogging's pure Google juice. You'll not only drive traffic to your landing page, but entice prospects to request your content. (Tip: write posts that explain why your content differs from competitors', but don't crow about it.)

Hammer your audience. Don't sit back and wait for inbound traffic; send emails, early and often. Keep them brief and include "influencers," as well as prospects, on your list. People like to share good stuff, so you'll accelerate your list-building effort.

Rinse, repeat. This step, again, separates the winners and losers. Winners work at list-building, again and again; losers think "one and done." Pick another keyword and repeat the whole process.

BONUS TIP: Kick-start your list-building effort by renting good prospect lists. We can help you.

Chunky

Small is beautiful.

— Ernst Schumacher

Bevies of experts believe "micro-content"—marcom you mold into "bite-size, digestible chunks"—can counteract customers' growing intolerance of marketing.

I'm not so sure.

If micro means publishing crap, small isn't beautiful.

If micro means posting "rough and ready" videos, small isn't beautiful.

If micro means turning tractati into tweets, small isn't beautiful.

In all these cases, small isn't small: it's only small.

If your sole success-metric is views, micro may be fine.

But if conversions are your bag, better work at it a wee bit harder.

Owning Up

To err is human; to admit it, divine.

— New Richard's Poor Almanac

Visit GiveWell's website and you'll find something remarkable: a label in the main navigation that reads "Our Mistakes."

Click and you'll jump to a page headed, "This page logs mistakes we've made, ways in which our organization has failed or currently fails to live up to our values, and lessons we've learned."

The page is long, long, long.

Alexander Pope once wrote, "No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday."

How many organizations are gutsy enough to own up?

Not enough.

Conference Planners: Make Every Moment Instagramable

Planners, I pity you.

You haven't cracked Gen Y's code yet.

Now you have to wow Gen Z.

The US Census Bureau reports 74 million people belong to Gen Z. In just three years, they'll represent 40% of attendees.

Their intolerance of passivity makes the rest of us look like sheep; so does their penchant for social media activism.

And therein lies both the problem and the solution, says Skift.

No longer can you deliver your grandfather's conference and expect Gen Z to stand for it—or sit through it.

“If it’s not interactive, they’re not going to stay at the meeting,” planner Cindy Lo tells Skift. “They need to be entertained and they’re looking for those Instagramable moments.”

But if you try only to razzle-dazzle Gen Z members, Lo says, you'll fail. You have to razzle-dazzle them authentically. And you have to do it long before they'll even register.

And you have to do it long before they'll even register, because they judge a conference's real values before deciding to engage.

“Gen Z can sniff out fake so fast,” Lo says.

But how do you avoid appearing "fake?"

One way: avoid interruptive calls-to-action like "Tweet this!” in your marketing. Gen Z members understand marketing better than previous generations and abhor tacky commands.

Another: be Instagramable in your marketing. Use tons of imagery to promote your event, keep your copy short, and make both mobile-friendly. You'll not only convert more Gen Z members into attendees, you'll turn them into advocates for your brand.

Ruined Your Relationship with Readers?

Has your relentless pursuit of eyeballs ruined your relationship with readers?

I bet it has.

If all you do is dangle click-bait and recycle sales-talk, you're driving readers away―and wasting your chance for romance on the biggest social network of them all, email.

Only value keeps the relationship alive.

Newsletter publisher Inside proves it. In less than a year, the startup has attracted 300,000 readers. Its newsletters garner 40% open rates, 10% click rates.

The secret sauce? Good content.

"We think news on the internet is broken," the company's website says. "Too much writing is optimized and incentivized for traffic and virality, instead of impact and quality."

By focusing on value instead of hits, Inside keeps readers reading. And a happy reader shares her love―causing your list to grow.

So how does Inside do it?

According to Austin Smith, Inside’s general manager:

• Five full-time staffers and 10 freelancers produce all the content for 28 newsletters. Staffers are generalists with multiple beats.
  
• Each newsletter comprises 70% curated content, 30% original. The content is "deep dive," business-only, and written for an advance audience.
  
• Staffers favor stories readers may have missed because other news outlets have ignored them.

Digital Indecency

I imagined the web as a platform that would allow everyone, everywhere
to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate.

— Tim Berners-Lee

Starfleet General Order 1, you'll recall, was the Prime Directive: all personnel should refrain from interfering with the natural development of communities.

Marketers, by cravenly ignoring the web's Prime Directive—to help users share and collaborate—are destroying the medium, says Kirk Chayfitz this month in Chief Content Officer.

Marketers "have failed to see that digital requires a creative approach that is diametrically opposed to the blunt-instrument sales messages of traditional ads," he writes.

As a result, users are demonstrating their "exponentially growing disgust with an industry that has admitted showing little or no regard for people's needs and desires."

They're blocking ads.

Chayfitz prescribes these six rules for restoring "digital decency" to web advertising:

Take responsibility. Marketers must stop blaming agencies; they write the checks.

Do no harm. Ads shouldn't fan users' frustrations. Keep data loads light, don't block content, and don't distract with needless video and animation.

Bust silos. Integrate all digital advertising under one officer.

White-list the sites you want to support. Don't fund fraudsters, charlatans and extremists by running ads on their sites.

Audit. Put the right to audit ad buys in your contracts with agencies. Insist on accountability.

Be useful. Provide users valuable experiences, not repetitive sales pitches. "The dream of digital was always to democratize communication and help make a better world," Chayfitz writes. "Take that to heart."

Digital Damage

Digital ads could be alienating B2B buyers, says Julie Ogilvie, senior research director at Sirius.

Because the ad units are tiny and compete in cluttered environments, B2B marketers are resorting to intrusive techniques that may be damaging their brands.

Ogilvie cites three:

Retargeting. "The idea behind retargeting is solid," she says. "However, in execution it can become annoying if the ads are popping up for months on end or are appearing in inappropriate environments."

Clickbait. Digital ads sporting sensational headlines "almost always disappoint in terms of what is delivered." The disappointment is reinforced when retargeting is used.

Native ads. Digital ads dressed as editorial content can also annoy and disappoint. Although buyers will respond, "many people still end up feeling deceived by messages that appear to be one thing but turn out to be another."

"In all these examples, people have come to feel that they are being tricked or harassed by advertisers," Ogilvie says.

Techniques like retargeting, clickbait and native advertising generate impressive response rates, she admits.

"But response rates do not always equal conversion rates—or revenue. And there is still the question of short-term vs. long-term gain. Brands are about building relationships and trust with our audiences."

You need not worry overmuch you're alienating your whole audience.

While you may be angering Boomer and Gen X buyers, the majority of Millennial buyers have installed ad blockers.

The Return of the Native

At a workshop on ad retargeting I recently attended, a well-seasoned colleague dropped the word "advertorial" in conversation.

My response: "I bet that's something no Millennial's ever heard of."

Before The New Rules of Marketing and PR ushered in the era of "brand journalism," advertorials were a staple of B2B advertisers and publishers.

And they still are—even more so. But today we call them "native ads."

A wolf in sheep's clothing, a native ad is meant to trick the reader.

The term "native" implies the ad has infiltrated the flock.

It says nothing about its clothing—its look and feel.

But that's misleading, says ad salesman Rich Rosenzweig.

An ad isn't "native" just because it's commingled with non-branded content, Rosenweig says. It's native because it disguises itself—and doesn't "interrupt" the reader.

"An ad unit is native only when it matches the look, feel, user path, and quality standards of the editorial content to which it’s adjacent," Rosenzweig says.

Artless native ads—non-skippable video ads, in particular—backfire, because they interrupt readers.

"Poorly executed native ads wind up tarnishing both the advertiser and the publisher; an unexpected interruption contributes to ad blindness, ad avoidance, and ultimately, ad blocking," Rosenzweig says.

Publishers are more to blame than advertisers, because they've dropped all standards.

"The relationship between branded content and the editorial feed is very much in flux," Rosenwieg says, "with different publishers taking wildly different approaches to how they position one against the other."

If publishers don't adopt a few reader-friendly standards soon, they're likely to drive them all to safer pastures.

B2B Print Advertising Lingers On

Print may be passé, but B2B marketers nonetheless spent $9.75 billion on print ads last year, according to MediaRadar. That's more than the GDP of many nations, including Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Oman and North Korea.

Ad dollars are no doubt shifting to digital, as B2B marketers devote more of their money each month to email, native ads, and video ads than print.

And 6 of 10 B2B marketers who spend money on digital advertising spend nothing on print.

The stalwarts who do are narrowing the list of magazines they place ads in, favoring industry-leading ones over niche ones.

B2B magazine publishers, of course, are scurrying to go digital and diversify their lead-gen offerings.

A Buck is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Twenty percent of every digital ad dollar is wasted, according to a new study by The & Partnership.

Last year, $12.48 billion of the $66 billion marketers shelled out for digital ads flowed into the hands of crooks committing botnet and adware fraud.

Botnet fraud occurs when an ad is presented, but never viewed by a human; adware fraud, when it's never even presented.

The money wasted exceeds the cumulative digital advertising revenue of all 80 members of Digital Content Next, a trade association whose members include AP, NBC, NPR, PBS, Turner and other publishers.

Fraud will worsen this year. The report predicts $16.40 billion will be lost to it in 2017 (20% of the $82 billion marketers will pay for digital ads).