The Digital Influentials, by Cory Treffiletti

Mobile Marketing Should Be Less Distraction, More Interaction (Mediapost 8.29.12)

Has the time for a truly integrated mobile marketing effort finally arrived?  It depends on how you read the numbers regarding the level of engagement with mobile content.  I personally think the time has come, but it requires a very gentle “touch” to ensure mobile is less distraction and more interaction.

Time magazine certainly thinks the opportunity for mobile has arrived.  Time is one of my favorite magazines, and when something shows up there I consider it to have achieved mainstream recognition.   

According to Time, mobile is core to the daily experience of the average person; though some of the numbers were rather surprising and suggested we still have a ways to go with mobile as a stand-alone medium.  On a high level mobile is indeed a personalized marketing opportunity, but that opportunity is in itself very fragmented.  Mobile users are multi-tasking and much of their interaction is already considered a distraction, invading into their personal daily lives.  If mobile is a secondary vehicle that interrupts other interactions, how effective can mobile marketing be since it is essentially a third-layer of distraction?  Simply put, if you are in front of the TV, on your phone, and an ad pops up, that ad is 3 degrees of separation from your attention.

Lets recap some of the most interesting nuggets from the mobile technology overview issue that hit newsstands on August 27: 

• In the US, 29% of people start and end their day with their wireless device.  This doesn’t seem very high, especially given that we are 15 points below the international average.   I would imagine if you broke this number down by age, the younger the audience, the higher this number.  In my immediate community I would guess this number is closer to 75%.  My guess seems supported by the fact that 68% of people surveyed say they keep their phone next to their bed at night.
• Overall, (similarly) 29% of global respondents feel we place too much emphasis on technology in society.  Even though I live and work in this business, I would probably agree with this.  I love my technology, but it definitely should play second fiddle to my family.  Unfortunately, in the US, 35% of users admit to using their mobile device while playing with their kids.  This is disheartening to me.
• Also in the US, only 34% of users think they go a few hours per day without their mobile device.   I would have thought this was higher, and in metropolitan areas I would suggest it is twice this level.  I have actually witnessed people having panic attacks when they realize they don’t have their phone on them.  I try to put my phone down for 2-3 hours each day minimum, but it’s hard.  It’s always ringing and distracting me from where I am at that moment.
• 17% say they check their phone at every meal, regardless of who they are eating with.  What does this say about our dinner etiquette?  How engaging are those dinner conversations if you can nod off and check your phone?

I jest a bit to exaggerate a point – mobile is a difficult media to make effective for marketers because we haven’t yet identified the right way to do so from a delivery perspective.  It is a personal medium and yet the marketing efforts are very invasive – more a distraction than a truly effective delivery vehicle. 

For mobile to become a truly effective medium, the messaging has to be engaging in and of itself, enough so to gather the full attention of the audience.   The message delivery must be intended to drive interaction of some kind, though maybe not a click but at least some kind of measurable response.  Attribution models that take into account mobile would be extremely helpful if we can quickly mature to that point.  In the interim, creativity should be explored on how to make use of the medium properly.

What are you seeing that would suggest mobile has arrived or where it needs to go?

Advice For An Aspiring Career in Advertising (Mediapost 8.22.12)

There’s a video on YouTube of a guy answering the questions he asked of himself more than 20 years ago.  It’s an unbelievably compelling idea and one that has generated millions of views.  Sometimes I wish I could do that.

Of course without time-travel I can’t speak to myself from 20 years ago, but at the least I can give advice to the fresh-faced versions of me who are currently surfacing in the work force.   Maybe I can give them a nugget of advice that will help in their careers and provide them with some of the knowledge that I’ve accumulated from people and experiences I’ve seen.  Where do I begin?

First of all – the world doesn’t owe you anything.  To have a strong career requires work, and if you don’t put in the work then there are 30 people standing behind you waiting to take your spot.  You’re not entitled to work because you graduated from college, and you’re certainly not entitled to make a lot of money and be promoted in your first 12 months.  Be patient, work hard, and the rewards will come.

You don’t have to start your career in an agency, but I highly recommend it.  It’s an amazing environment in which to cut your teeth and gain valuable experience across a multitude of clients and categories.  The speed of this business is remarkable, and your learning curve will be steep in an agency environment.  After a few years, at least 4, you will have a firm base for your career and you can make decisions that will propel you forward in your career.

Whatever you do, if at all possible, your first job should be no less than two years.  Don’t bounce around because you get bored, or because you see others getting exciting opportunities.  Be loyal, be patient, and be a sponge.  Learn everything you can without looking at the clock, and at the end of every day or every week you have to recap what you did and objectively examine what you learned.  Even keep a journal so you can record it for later use.  This reflective learning will make it easier for you to connect the dots on the ladder of success at a later date.

Never say no to a meeting.  Everyone is worthy of your time, and every interaction is an opportunity to listen and learn.  You need to practice listening and you need to practice applying what you hear to solve problems in the daily challenges you face.  Listen to a pitch and see if the pitch is relevant to your customers?  Mold the idea and merge it with other ones until you’ve fully determined if it’s applicable or not.  This process of weaving together ideas creates a foundation for strategic thinking with a partnership focus.  Strategy and partnerships are at the root of all things in marketing.  Plus these kinds of meetings are valuable networking for you and your career.  You never know when that sales person will recommend you for your next gig!

Write whenever you can.  Write articles, write presentations, and write a POV on a topic even if it is not going to be used immediately.   This kind of extended strategic thinking also helps you to hone your skills and make it easier for you to see the strategic connections down the line.  I got lucky when Mediapost took a shot at letting me write a weekly column, and 11 years later its still going!

Routinely put yourself in uncomfortable positions.  Present to large groups of people you don’t know.  Take on new challenges you weren’t previously prepared for.  Reach out to very senior people in your industry and ask them to let you buy them coffee for 15 minutes.  Take a meeting with a customer and break down everything you’ve done to date and start over with a new attempt at the strategy.  All of these efforts encourage you to rethink what’s been done and challenge your previous thinking.   You can’t rest on your laurels and you can’t be complacent if you want to succeed. 

Keep this one thought in mind – you’re not as smart as you think you are until you find people you know are smarter than you.  If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re wrong.  If you recognize the intelligence of the people in the room, and if you even try to ensure that the people around you are smarter than you, then you’re destined to keep learning and grow.   This kind of respect for your co-workers will create lasting relationships and it will force you to keep working hard so that you don’t let anyone down.  A team of people can do better work than any one individual can, and you need to respect them in order to work well with them, and succeed.

And one last thing to keep in mind… always assume best intentions.  Things happen and people will get upset about the ways things are going, but if you assume the people around you have best intentions you can more easily forgive them, move on and focus your energy against the things that matter like problem solving, and not the other less impactful things like politics and jealousy.

These are the kinds of insights I recently gathered in my first book called Internet Ad Pioneers (shameless self-plug).  It’s a collection of stories of some of the people who helped build and grow the Internet ad industry.  These people have even more advice and insights into how to be successful so if this kind of thinking is of interest, then check it out.

 

Internet Ad Pioneers: New Book Shares Stories, Challenges and Milestones That Helped Shape Internet Advertising Industry.

Internet Ad Pioneers: New Book Shares Stories, Challenges and Milestones That Helped Shape Internet Advertising Industry.

This unique collection of narrative interviews shares the stories of the unsung people behind the birth and growth of a multi-billion dollar industry.

San Francisco, CA – Eighteen years ago the internet advertising industry was still an infancy concept, managed by a small handful of marketing visionaries. Almost two decades later, with an industry value of over $45 billion, the sector has seen rapid growth and a wealth of success stories. Now, for the first time in its history, the stories and experiences of its key players are shared in Internet Ad Pioneers, a new book by Cory Treffiletti.

Through a series of narrative interviews, the book shares the stories, key challenges, important milestones and impact of specific moments for the people who helped shape the Internet advertising business. With a valuable insight into the people and decisions behind the technology, it’s a must-read for anyone who works within this growing industry.

“Some of these are people you may know very well, and some of them you don't. Some have run global advertising agencies and some have led marquee start-ups that you use every day. Some are responsible for the very first ads you ever saw on the internet. All of them have left their mark on what is now one of the fastest growing categories of business in the world,” says Treffiletti, a prominent digital media thought leader and executive.

Continuing, “Without their leadership, knowledge, and most of all their passion for doing something new, none of this would have ever happened. It's the story of the Internet advertising business, as told by the people who grew the Internet advertising business.” The book sheds light on what has become an interesting modern-day paradox; an industry that every internet user has helped to grow, while the pioneers have remained relatively silent. “I felt these people should be recognized and that the thousands of people in this business would love to hear their stories!” Treffiletti adds.

Internet Ad Pioneers: The Stories Of The Unsung People Behind The Birth And Growth Of The Internet Ad Industry, published by CreateSpace, is available now from Amazon.com. For more information, please visit Cory’s blog, as well as Mediapost’s Online Spin page.

 

About the Author

Cory has been a thought leader, executive and business driver in the digital media landscape since 1994. In addition to authoring a weekly column on digital media, advertising and marketing since 2000 for Mediapost's Online Spin, Cory has been a successful executive, media expert and/or founding team member for a number of companies. In the agency space Cory has been part of the initial team as VP Client & Media Services for i-Traffic (acquired by Omnicom), VP Media Services for Freestyle Interactive (acquired by Aegis/Carat), SVP Managing Director for Carat Fusion (Interactive), VP Media for Real Branding (acquired by Schawk) and President of Catalyst S+F. In the start-up media space his experience includes roles as Director of Marketing for IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive (acquired by eMusic), Chief Marketing Officer for Sharkle (acquired by ViTrue), co-founder of The Republic Project and co-founder of The Virtual Fan Network.

He currently serves as SVP Marketing for BlueKai and is a graduate of the Newhouse School for Public Communications at Syracuse University.

The Opposite Of Customer Insights Is Context (Mediapost 8.15.12)

What are the opposite of customer insights?

The marketing business is all about generating and utilizing customer insights through data and I’m certainly a firm believer in the power of insights, but lets not forget that sometimes the best way to uncover value is to examine the opposite of something and see what value that brings.  In that vein, what’s the opposite of a customer insight?  Maybe it’s contextual outsights?

If customer insights are the practice of creating data and measuring the attributes of your customers to craft a 360 degree view of who they are and how to speak to them, maybe contextual outsights are the practice of gathering as much information and data regarding the location of those messages and the external impact around them to ensure they break through the clutter and resonate with your target.

Effectiveness in marketing is all about targeting and frequency, and targeting has to take into account context.  You can have the most targeted ad but the location of that ad will either lend or take away credibility from it.  For example, if you know everything about the user and can deliver them a customized message based on previous purchases, prior behavior and current intent, but that message shows up on an adult website then your message loses credibility immediately.  That’s a more extreme case than most advertisers will deal with, so a more mundane example would be when your Harley Davidson ad shows up within news content about a celebrity motorcycle accident resulting in the death of a pedestrian.  That is about placement, and that placement is rather unfortunate.  That is an outsight you wish you knew in advance and that’s more often than not an example in the ad network and ad exchange landscape.

The problem with contextual outsights is the industry is quickly advancing towards a non-transparent environment through the advent of exchanges where much of your budget is being allocated blindly to sites based on pure audience buying.  I’m a fan of audience buying because the targeted nature of the ads and the increased performance they see, but to be truly valuable to brands and resonate with the consumer, you need to have understanding of context.  Buying direct from publishers allows you to do that, and some exchanges will allow you to black list sites, but its very probable that publishers and advertiser alike need to have tools in place that allow them to measure the contextual relevance of a page and determine ad placement based on immediate context in a transparent manner.  Advertisers need the tools that allow them to verify location and context.  I know these tools exist, but I wonder how broadly they’re used?

Its very clear that audience buying, or programmatic buying, is going to become the norm for many years to come but it can’t be at the complete loss of the understanding for context.  A marketer has to understand the location and external effect of the surrounding content on their message and an opaque ad-buying landscape doesn’t do that for them.  There are ways publishers and channels such as exchanges and networks can do this by tagging content on their pages and managing those tags in a DMP plus CMS solution.  Through efficiently placing tags on content and feeding that data through these platforms, it’s very possible and highly probable that programmatic buying can manage ad placement alongside context while preserving the brand.  This has to be the future since marketing and advertising is definitely more than just clicks.  It’s about exposure and broadcasting a message to a targeted audience.  If my TV commercial for a fast food chain featuring a 1,200-calorie burger shows up during an episode of The Biggest Loser, I lose credibility.  The same goes for online advertising.

So when you are working with your partners, ask them what tools they have in place for understanding context.  It may be categorical, and it may be more precise, but there should be something that allows you some measure of comfort that context will be taken into account.

Don’t you agree?

 

Internet Ad Pioneers: The Stories Of The Unsung...

It took almost two years, and although i was sad i couldn't include everyone i wanted to include, or who deserved to be included, i am happy to say that my book is complete and it is now live on Amazon.com!  You can check it out, and buy a copy if you are so inclined, by clicking here:

http://amzn.to/TisAbJ

I learned alot in this book.  There were three primary trends that arose from speaking to these people.  

• The business is about people - not technology.
• Passion drives performance - if you are passionate about what you do, you will be a success.
• Focus on a goal and stick to it - maintain your focus on a specific vision, and you will be a success.

The book features a number of amazing people who have helped shape the Internet advertising business over the years, and many of these people deserved to be recognized and may not have been in the past.  I hope you get the chance to read it, and if you like it, pass it along.  

Thanks to everyone who was involved, who participated, and hopefully it goes well enough for volume 2!

Happy reading!!

Embrace Data Or Start Looking For A New Career (Mediapost 8.8.12)

If you’re a marketer and you want a career that will flourish in the next 5 years, you’d better wise up to data.  I did.

I recently joined the ranks of the initiated by jumping both feet first into the world of data-driven marketing (in full disclosure, I joined BlueKai about 3 months back).  I’d been listening to the discussion for the last couple of years, and even hosted a debate in San Francisco with the Bay Area Interactive Group (SFBIG) around the “Content Buying vs. Audience Buying” discussion.  The topic was interesting, and both sides were very passionate about their points of view.  That event was more than a year ago and on that day content buying won the debate, but it feels like a really long time ago.  Much longer than one year!  It’s not the same case today.

Data is fast becoming the center of the marketing universe and the future career of a marketer depends very heavily on their ability to understand how to use data and implement it for their needs.    You can still buy premium contextual placements, but data should be informing everything you do, from the decision to purchase that media, to the messaging you place there, to the optimized landing page where you drive the user dependent on the data you have available about them.  If you know where to look and what sources to tap into, whether your own 1^st party data or the wealth of 3^rd party data that’s available, you can create a 360 degree view of a user and leverage that information to dramatically increase the performance of your marketing.

If you look 5 or even 10 years down the road, you can envision a future in which data informs as much as 75% of all your marketing efforts, and that is a multi-billion dollar business!  Your online display advertising, your CRM, your site experience, and even the rest of your addressable marketing such as digital video, digital TV and mobile will all be informed by data.  The age of the static ad network is officially over and the world of data-driven marketing is here. 

So as a marketer, what can you do now to prepare yourself and ensure that you are still a valuable piece of the pie for years to come?  My advice is for you to soak it all in now, and lean on your partners to become educated and “in the know”.  You need to identify a key partner or two in the data-driven digital marketing category and go deep with them.  Invite them into your meetings, especially the internal ones where the team can use some education.  Craft a calendar of lunch n learns and other knowledge-driven events but make sure the content for these events is focused on real-world challenges and not pie-in-the-sky thinking.  You need to understand this world in context.  Specifically you need to understand it in YOUR context.  Throw real challenges at these partners and work with them to uncover the right solutions.  This does, of course, mean you have to pay them for something, but that investment now is likely going to pay high dividends over the next 5 years as the data amassed grows exponentially and your internal value increases proportionally.  Remember what it was like to be the “digital” guy/gal in your company back in 2000?  It’s like that, but even more necessary because there’s no avoiding the topic at this point, like you could ignore the web for a brief period following the bubble burst.  Digital is here to stay, and data is the driving force behind it

Regardless of who you work with and what avenue you choose to go down, treat your partners fairly and with respect because your future career and earning potential may rely on what they can help you to earn.   If you stick your head in the sand, and you try to ignore the coming storm then you’re sealing your own fate.  Planned obsolescence is never a good business decision for a marketer.

Don’t you agree?

 

The 3 Keys To Your Personal Success Are… (Mediapost 8.1.12)

If you want to have a successful career in business then you need to know the three most important factors that can help you achieve your goals.  They are (in no particular order) luck, talent and timing.

At first glance you may laugh it off, but if you dive into things then you’ll realize I’m not wrong.  Success comes in many ways, but if you’re going to be successful then you need at least two of those factors to be in place, and the most successful people have all three at the same time.  If you don’t have them working for you, you face an uphill battle.  Let me explain.

You can be the most talented person in the world or you can be the most knowledgeable regarding a specific topic, but if no one knows about your ideas, then success will be unattainable.   On the flipside you could be in the right place at the right time and meet the right people, but long-term success won’t come unless you truly know what you’re doing.   And in both those situations, a little luck never hurt.

Some people will tell you that you make your own luck, and to some extent I agree.  If you plan on being successful, it takes hard work and that work has to be applied to two specific areas.  The first is in learning your craft and the second is in networking within your chosen area.

Learning your craft is a long-term, full-time exercise.  You are never truly finished learning a craft.   A master craftsman will tell you they practice their whole lives and are always improving.  The same goes in business because the dynamics of business are continually changing.  You have to learn from those around you and act like a sponge for knowledge.  That process can create talent and talent is a key piece, even a core requirement, for your success.

Networking is the other area where you need to focus your efforts.  Networking means cultivating relationships and interacting with people if only for the purposes of sharing knowledge.  It means reaching out to people to ask them questions and engage with them when you have no ulterior motivations at play.  Some people are “users”, which means they clearly only network in situations where they think they can benefit.  If you’re of no immediate benefit to them then they’ll not give you the time of day.  Those people will never succeed in a meaningful way.  They may end up with money, but they’ll end up with very little personal integrity.  You want to network in a way that is genuine and about listening and learning from other people, and sharing your knowledge with them.  Don’t look for the quick hit, but rather try and build a series of truly meaningful relationships.  Be honest, be open and always be full of personal integrity.

If you treat your networking in this way, then you do tend to make your own luck and as the Rolling Stones say it, “Time Is On Your Side”!  Timing can be at your disposal as well if you cultivate and foster good relationships because people will think highly of you, and when the time comes for something good, they’ll know who to call.  Be genuine in these relationships and success can follow closely behind simply because you aren’t overtly looking for it.  I know there’s a cliché in there somewhere that success finds those least searching for it.

Scientists and businesspeople, as well as creative artists and musicians, all work hard at their careers.  They learn a craft and they network with others to share their insights.  They put their energy into learning and interacting with others.  They develop their talent, and they try to create their own luck, and along that path they can achieve success.

So my advice to you is simple.  Put your energy into learning and sharing knowledge with others around you.  Treat people with respect and a genuine interest for what they do.  Foster strong inter-personal relationships while you develop your own talents, and success will be at your doorstep.  And if you operate in this manner and you are genuine in your interactions, then luck will come your way.

Good luck!