The Ad Tech Monster

Ad tech is destroying the web, says a new report from Kalkis Research.

Media firms, desperate for readers, are turning to ad tech providers to deliver them.

But the providers' algorithms—unintentionally—are driving readers instead through a loop of shady websites.

The fraudsters who own these websites have one goal: to nab the ad dollars of big brands like Walmart and Nike.

The scheme is complex:

• First, the fraudsters run ads that drive readers to "shell" websites, stuffed with stale, stolen and stupid content.

• But readers of high value to ad tech providers—readers with the right demographics—are then redirected through a loop of other shell sites; redirected against their will via automatic pop-ups, pop-unders, and new browser tabs.

• The automatic looping improves the "audience quality" of the the shell sites. Once that quality has been established, the fraudsters sign lucrative contracts with big brands to display their ads on their shell sites.

"Traffic laundering is thriving," the researchers say. "Bad guys have become experts at gaming ad tech metrics and monetizing fake or unwilling visitors."

The fraud is fast turning the web into "a clickbait jungle."

The researchers blame ad agencies, which have so far failed to detect the scheme.

HAT TIP: Ann Ramsey pointed me to the new research.

Email: The Postman Never Rings Twice

Sorry, email marketer.

No do-over for you.

If your emails don't deliver on these four basic needs, you're dead, says e-mail marketing guru Chad White:

1. Respect
2. Function
3. Value
4. Experience

Foremost, customers crave respect. Customers should be notified they're opting in to receive your emails, and find it easy to opt out. "Disregarding permission puts your brand at an immediate disadvantage in the inbox," White says.

Customers also crave function. Your copy should be accurate; your text, legible; your graphics, discernible; your links, clickable; and your design, responsive. "If your emails have broken links and images or have text that’s too small to read on mobile devices, for example, your clicks will suffer."

Customers crave value. Your emails should be useful. They should deliver news, alerts and special offers. Better still, they should be personalized, so they deliver content that's targeted and timely.

Finally, customers crave experience. If your email isn't an experience, it's a waste of time. Customers share treasures, not trash. Experiences, White says, are produced by:

• Targeting niche audiences with triggered messages
• Taking advantage of events and charity work, "which are innately more share-worthy"
• Delivering extra-special content on occasion
• Using design and layout to differentiate your emails; and
• Featuring “share with your network” buttons in share-worthy emails

It's easy to learn if your emails deliver, White says. Just count your opens, clicks, conversions, and forwards.

Ding-dong.

Too Much Marketing, Too Little Storytelling

Mania for narrative persuasion has sanctified storytelling.

But merely mentioning your company's name less in your copy doesn't make you J.K. Rowling.

Most marketers are storyteller manqués.

"There’s just too much marketing the old way, and too little storytelling," says journalist-turned-marketer Tomas Kellner.

Storytelling takes an understanding of story arc.

Story arcs deliver "the pleasure of pity," said the 18th century playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.

We're led to pity when we learn about other people's suffering. But for the listener to feel pity, the storyteller must:

• Provide vivid details. Because suffering told can't equal suffering witnessed, to provoke pity the storyteller's details must be vivid.

• Make the characters accessible. To feel pity, the listener must experience a resemblance between herself and the sufferer, Schiller says. "Where this resemblance is lacking, pity is impossible."

• Provide tons of details. To work, the story must be complete, Schiller says. No important detail can be left out. "We must have unrolled before us, without a single link omitted, the whole chain of determinations."

• Draw the story out. The suffering must be durable. The listener wants to flee suffering, but shouldn't be allowed to do so too soon.

Storytelling isn't designed to teach, Schiller says. That's what history lessons are for. Storytelling is meant "to move us, and to charm our souls."

Literary agent Julian Friedmann tells it well:

Make the audience feel pity for a character. Then make the audience experience increasing amounts of fear for the character, as you put the character through increasingly worse circumstances. Finally, release the audience from the tension of anticipating the terrible things that are going to happen to that character, and the audience feels great.

Social Media Marketing, Meet Maslow's Hammer

Abraham Maslow said in The Psychology of Science, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Social Media Examiner recently asked 5,086 marketers whether social media marketing improves sales. The findings speak volumes:

• One-third of marketers with less than one year's experience in social media marketing say it improves sales, while

• Two-thirds of marketers with more than five years' experience in social media marketing say it improves sales.

As a marketer's experience in social media marketing increases, so does her belief in its efficacy.

Digital marketer Jay Baer wonders whether seasoned social media marketers' belief is simply self-justifying.

"People who have been employed in the social media business for multiple years could be convincing themselves that social media is effective, because if it wasn’t a portion of their entire identity and professional worthiness would be called into question," he says.

But Baer chooses to read the findings as proof of something else: social media marketing works when you commit to it long term, not short term.

"This data shows that time horizon is a great determinant of social media success," Baer says.

I agree with him, and would add: social media marketing is merely 2016's edition of PR; it works when you treat it like an enterprise, not an event.

What do you think?

Innovation's in Our Bones

Whenever I despair of our species, I remember that innovation is in our bones and such a marvelous thing, as two case studies illustrate.

Case Study No. 1

For the past 15 years, UPS drivers have been forbidden to turn left.

That's because company engineers discovered in 2001 that left-hand turns were inefficient, as a UPS spokesman told Fortune.

Left-hand turns wasted time and money.

So the engineers used GPS software to re-route drivers, eliminating left-hand turns.

The move—annually—shaved 20 million miles off drivers' routes; increased deliveries by 350,000 packages; saved 10 million gallons of gas; and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 metric tons.

Case Study No. 2

In 1940, film comedian W.C. Fields built an exercise room in his Hollywood home. 

He equipped the room with a stationary bike, a rowing machine and a steam cabinet, and hired a personal trainer to help him get buff.

Fields followed the trainer's instructions faithfully, but added touches of his own.

As directed, Fields dressed in sweats and mounted the stationary bike for long rides; but also drank several martinis en route.

He would work out in the rowing machine, but drink gin and sing sea chanteys while at it.

And he'd sit in the steam cabinet for an hour, sipping highballs the whole time.

"This is wonderful—these workouts are going to increase my liquor consumption two or three hundred percent!" Fields told the trainer.