Category: Marketing

Does “Long Tail Media” Pencil Out?

There’a a provocative post by Chris Anderson on the Long Tail Blog about public radio. Mr. Anderson is a fan of a number of public radio shows, but doesn’t much like his local station. And he hates Pledge Week. So…

I’m listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having a phone that automatically loads the latest shows. I don’t have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore…

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.

Anderson believes that radio is going to get “microchunked” so that people can listen to just the shows they want without ever tuning into the station that originated it. He talks about avoiding Pledge Week — I suppose the equivalent is avoiding the ads on commercial radio. 

This is especially interesting to someone like me — my day job is selling advertising on a group of commercial stations. I’m somewhat skeptical (and yes, it’s in my self-interest if the old model holds together long enough for me to get to retirement age). But I wonder:

 Who’s going to pay for all this? Right now, someone can hire me to design a campaign that will deliver their sales message to hundreds of thousands of people. They pay significant dollars for the access to this large audience, which allows my company to pay for the equipment, announcers, engineers, license fees, traffic reporters, and other expenses involved in putting on a broadcast. And there’s enough money left over to compensate me for designing the campaign.

What happens in this magical future when media’s microchunked, and the campaign reaches a few hundred people instead of a few hundred thousand? Does everyone’s paycheck get microchunked, too? And if that happens, how many of these shows actually get produced?

 Just asking.

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A Cautionary Tale

Can advertising work too well?

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about an auto collision shop I worked with in the late 90’s. The amazing Todd Tolces created a very entertaining series of commercials in which humor was wrapped around a good sales message (I contributed by playing the commercials for the client and cashing the commission checks).

It took a couple of months, but the campaign began to bring in customers. And then more customers. After a while people were driving their dented cars long distances to have them fixed by this particular shop.

The business grew, and the owner desperately needed more technicians. But with unemployment at record lows, good technicians were impossible to find. So they he hired a couple who weren’t so good, and the quality of their work dropped off. Although we continued to run their commercials, I stopped referring people there after they botched the job on my boss’s car.

Word of mouth turned bad, and the shop lost several big fleet accounts. After a while there were layoffs, and they couldn’t afford to advertise anymore. The business very nearly closed down.

All because the advertising worked, and they weren’t ready.

Are you?

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Good Advertising Can Kill a Bad Business

I read that somewhere — unfortunately, not even Google can remind me where.

But it came to mind the other day when I met with the owner of a home improvement company. I’d put together a very powerful ad campaign for him, and we were scheduled to hit the airwaves in six days. But he wanted to postpone it.

My initial reaction was to try to talk him out of postponing. It’s been a rough few months in the industry, and I was convinced that the campaign would truly enter the conversation that homeowners were having as they thought about remodeling.

But he stopped me short with a surprising statement — in the past two weeks, his traffic had jumped considerably. Interest rates had dropped to the point where buyers were finally being lured back into the game. His salespeople were (finally!) so busy scheduling jobs that they couldn’t handle any new ones. He didn’t want the phone to ring until he had more people in place to take care of the new customers.

Although it took money out of my pocket, he was right to postpone. If the campaign had launched and gotten the job done (and trust me… it’s good), he risked disappointing and angering his new customers by putting them off or doing shoddy work. They would have ultimately taken their business elsewhere, and the word-of-mouth would have been disasterous.

Better to wait a few weeks and get it right.

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The Downside to Viral Marketing

Much talk recently about how social media and viral marketing are changing the way things are advertised and sold. Done well, it has some real advantages for marketers. Nancy Arter on RRW Consulting’s Direct Marketing blog has a very interesting post on the subject. Here’s an excerpt of her view:

“The idea of customers selling on behalf of marketers is an idea whose time has come. Think of all of the time we spend trying to isolate that perfect consumer or business that may be willing to hear our message. Think about the hours of sleep lost over whether the DM campaign that’s hitting mailboxes in the next week will reap us a .5% or a 1.5% response rate — and the repercussions of either. With this shift, it’s all about the customers preferring our product, and preferring it so much that they discuss why they prefer it. What a concept!”

That’s the potential upside. Here’s the potential downside, courtesy of Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo:

“Word-of-Mouth is the new Mass Media. Video games and cable TV stripped our kids of their innocence at an early age, but the Technology that robbed them of idyllic childhood also empowered them with cell phones, blogs and blackberries.

Viral marketing wasn’t created by the advertising community. It’s simply the result of a horizontally-connected generation (1.) sharing their happy discoveries with each other and (2.) trying to protect one another from mistakes.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS: It’s no longer enough just to have great advertising. When your customers carry cell phones and can email all their friends with a single click, you need to be exceptionally good at what you do.”

Viral marketing only works if the consumers doing the viralizing (a word I believe I just made up) are happy with what they bought. If they’re not, they’ll take it out on you with blogs, forums, and Amazon’s Customer Reviews. If the product is shoddy or the service is poor, the chorus of consumer voices can quickly wipe out any gains an advertising campaign can make.

 

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What You’re Facing in 2008

Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo has a remarkably clear-eyed look at the forces you’re up against as you go to market in a rapidly changing society. Scroll down to “What to remember when selling in 2008.”

Inspirational excerpt:

 “Naiveté is rare today. Your customer is equipped with a bullshit detector that is highly sensitive and amazingly accurate. And the younger the customer, the more accurate their bullshit detector.

When selling, remember: If you don’t admit the downside, they won’t believe the upside.”

When you read the full article, pay special attention to #4, Word of Mouth is the New Mass Media.”

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