Protectors

He went off to Congress an' served a spell, fixin' up the government an' laws as well; took over Washington so we heered tell, an' patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell.

— Thomas W. Blackburn

Walt Disney aired the first of three one-hour telefilms, "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter," in December 1954, and kicked off a nationwide craze for the coonskin cap.

The craze erupted in an era when Americans hungered for a return to times when protectors walked the land.

Parents and grandparents didn't count. Although they'd beaten the Nazis only nine years earlier, they chose in large part not to speak of it. They were too busy buying us coonskin caps. So we settled for Davy Crockett.

Sixty-three years later, protectors again walk the land, but they don't fight Indians or take over Washington. They assemble instead in our streets and parks, and fight Neo-Nazis and Klansmen.

My cap's off to them.

Patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell.

Mind the Gap, B2B Marketers

Nurturing leads is as important as nabbing them.

But a lot of B2B marketers, under the gun to generate leads, forget this. They ignore the "Content Consumption Gap," and blitz leads with premature follow-up calls.

NetLine examined 7 million long-form content downloads and concluded it takes 38 hours for a lead to read whatever he requests (C-level leads take 48 hours).

Dubbing the timespan the "Content Consumption Gap," NetLine urges marketers to practice patience and wait at least two days before following up a lead.
"Don't smother content-sourced leads," says NetLine's David Fortino. "Suggest that your sales team wait 48 hours before contacting, to ensure that the prospect is well informed enough to have an educated discussion."

Instead of dialing, Fortino recommends sending leads "a light-touch email:"

Thanks for checking out our white paper. I’ll check in with you in a few days to see what you thought. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

Tar Water

The philosopher George Berkeley (after whom the California city is named) thought tar water could cure every ill.

Famine and disease wracked his native Ireland in the 1700s, prompting Berkeley to propose a cheap and easy solution in his book Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water.

Siris—the title referred to the Nile, whose waters the ancient Egyptians believed a cure-all—became a best-seller, making every literate man and woman in the British Isles, in the words of Horace Walpole, "mad about tar water."

The book claimed tar water was a "distillation of divine fire,” originating from a “secret and occult source.” Like the waters of the Nile, it could cure anyone of any affliction. Berkeley stopped short of calling tar water a panacea, but noted that “twenty-five fevers in my own family [were] cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously.”

As prescribed by the philosopher, this cheap and plentiful elixir had the power to turn impoverished Ireland into a medical utopia.

Our own brand of tar water—courtesy the GOP—is freedom, a cure-all with the power to make America a medical utopia. Freedom from federally-backed health insurance, to be specific.

As Congressman Mike Burgess, referring to his party's plans to gut Obamacare, insists, “If the numbers drop, I would say that’s a good thing, because we’ve restored personal liberty in this country."

Little matter 50 million citizens could go uninsured, the GOP says: they're free. Live free or die.

Or maybe, live free and die.

As Granny said, "When you have your health, you have everything."

As Bobby said, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Fierce Competition

Are you mad enough to launch an event?

RAI Amsterdam wants to encourage your madness.

Entrepreneurs and would-be event producers can enter its juried competition, Start up Your Event, through early September.

Think Shark Tank for trade shows.

A jury of event professionals will judge the ideas for first-time events submitted in terms of opportunity, feasibility, audience reach, value proposition, brand positioning, innovation, and other success factors.

RAI Amsterdam will award the winner not only six days' free space—2,000m² net for an event in October or November 2018— but, more importantly, free consulting in experience design, community management, and attendee and exhibitor marketing.

The winner will be announced at the mammoth broadcasters' show, IBC, at RAI Amsterdam in mid-September.

"There is definitely room for new shows, maybe not necessarily in the traditional exhibition format that we are used to," says Denise Capello, RAI Amsterdam's head of business development. "The world is changing and innovation rules, so there are plenty topics to be found. You need to figure out the trends and needs. Your destination is just the final piece in the puzzle.

Capello says most would-be producers who fail do so because they lack insight into their audience.

"Over the years, we've seen a number of startups, and find lack of in-depth knowledge to be a key indicator of failure. Would-be producers need to produce better feasibility studies to support their ideas, better event concepts, and better audience insights, which come from canvassing."

To date, three event concepts have been entered into the competition, which was announced in June.

"We've also had a number of inquiries from consumer event producers, whose concepts unfortunately do not meet the entry requirements of the competition," Capello says.

"But they have inspired us to come up with a new partnership model for consumer events, the first hopefully launching in the summer of 2018."

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."