The Digital Influentials, by Cory Treffiletti

The Oligopoly Response to Fragmentation in Media (Mediapost 6.3.15)

For all the talk of fragmentation in media, isn’t it funny how similar the digital media business is to the old TV business?  Take a second and think about it from the perspective of a mainstream advertiser…

 

In the old days an advertiser had three network television stations to choose from (ABC, NBC and CBS).  As cable TV became a force and the “major network” landscape expanded, most marketers would view the world in terms of 5 primary networks (adding CW and UPN) with a small handful of really strong cable players (i.e. ESPN, MTV, USA, TNT, etc).  These days you have the majority of dollars focused on the primary networks and a few major cable providers plus a strong pool of innovation driven by players like HBO and Netflix with their original series getting a lot of attention from the market.

 

The Internet is actually very similar, albeit reversed in its path towards the same outcome.  In the early days of the business there were many options for how to spend your dollars, but if you look at the way the business has consolidated you have a few major players that take the majority of the ad dollars (i.e. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft) and a pool of innovative companies who deliver audience and are evolving to deliver media revenue (i.e. SnapChat, Pinterest and more).  You can double-click into the business and come up with the names of companies in video and mobile who are doing good things, but the best tend to get acquired into these larger entities and packaged up for advertisers.

 

This oligopoly-driven view of the business is not a bad thing, but it’s an interesting one.  There’s no monopoly at play here, not even Google can claim to own the only position of power.  This is especially true when you dive deeper into the business and understand the difference between the media companies and the technology used to execute these kinds of campaigns.  No single company owns the path to implementation.  This is a complicated business, but I find it interesting that the digital media response to fragmentation is actually consolidation.  Consolidation has been predicted over the last few years, and if you listen to industry intelligentsia like Terry Kawaja and Mary Meeker, they are spot on that now is the time when these predictions are coming to fruition.  Consolidation is breeding efficiency and these larger media companies will also innovate either through development or acquisition, or even through mirroring what the innovators are coming up with through necessity.  An oligopoly still breeds competition and in a market where the media companies are not in control, but rather they are trying to keep up with the consumer who dictates how and when they will request interaction with brands and services, the oligopoly approach can actually create a stronger, more consistent path towards a strong business.  The oligopoly creates a strong core and that’s what this business will build upon over the next 10 years.

 

These next 10 years are a crucial one because the shift from the desktop to the mobile environment is an important one and the companies in a leadership position (those mentioned before in this article) are all very focused on mobile.  They are providing content across channels and they are monetizing that content accordingly. 

 

So from the perspective of a media buyer or a general advertiser, how much are you consolidating your dollars against the industry core vs. trying out the new innovative paths towards customer engagement?  Are your priorities aligned with your budgets?  Are you planning in a proactive manner or are you reactive?

 

What are your views on where things are headed?

My “Binge Clicking” Experiment Reveals The Web is Too Targeted (Mediapost 5.13.15)

Have you ever tried “Binge Clicking”?

 

The modern media era has ushered in the concept of binge-viewing, where a person sits down to watch all episodes of a show in a shortened time frame.  I recently did this with Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix, but I rarely have the time to do so between work, exercise and raising two boys.  Since binging is something most Americans do in one form or another, I tried an experiment to see what would happen if I started “binge-clicking”, or basically clicking on at least one ad on every webpage I was on for a pre-determined period.  For 2 days I clicked on at least one ad from every page where I spent some time as a consumer and I learned some interesting things.  Namely, that clicking on ads creates a significantly smaller universe for my media experience.

 

Our industry has thought about clicks in absolutely the wrong way for years, but its not for the reasons you might have read about.  In the old days, clicking was a way to uncover new content and find new destinations and marketers used them as such.  Banners were almost a discovery tool.  There was very little value attributed to awareness and simple exposure to a message.  Nowadays I would argue the click is borderline meaningless.  All it does is provide a quick measure for short-term impact resulting from ongoing frequency of exposure.  When someone clicks on an ad, its because they’ve been hearing about, or seeing a product, for some time and they finally decide to check it out.  If they don’t click, it’s not because the ad was ineffective, they simply didn’t need to know more at that time.  In my experience the last few days,  I found very few ads that were delivering me anything new – they were profoundly over-weighted towards retargeting.   The discovery role and awareness driving of online ads were almost nonexistent.

 

When I did click on the ads, I was able to get 1-2 degrees deeper into the web, at best.  Most ads brought me to a dead-end.  They brought me to a product site or a shopping cart for purchase.  The only exception there was Amazon and some of the retargeted ads I saw for them which dropped me into the almost endless world of Amazon – you can binge click for ever in those rainforests of economic interconnectedness.   Most of the time I would click through, land on the destination site and every click I was exposed meant to drive me to a shopping cart.  In terms of customer acquisition it is definitely more focused, but in terms of helping me uncover new products and services, it was utterly useless. The web has become a very focused environment and its lost some of the discovery elements that made it so exciting in years past!

 

No wonder click-through stinks.  The consumer knows that clicking will only get you to one page beyond where you were.    Consumers are not stupid – they know what the expect when they click on an ad, and most of the ads they see are intended to drive a sale, not present something new.  I feel the industry has created an over-dependency on retargeting and not enough marketers are using modeling to find new customers and increase awareness of their products and services.  The web is the most powerful tool for discovery of information in history and we’re using it like a used car salesmen who bombards you when you walk onto the lot. 

 

Data can be used for good.  Data can be used to find new audiences and my sincere hope over the coming months is to see more marketers user data to open up new lines of customers and prospects rather than continue to pummel the existing ones into submission.  Agencies are a huge piece of this because they can create more innovative campaigns and put data to good use if they are trusted to do so. 

 

Try your own experiment and “binge-click” for an hour to see what happens.  I bet you’ll be a little surprised how small the web actually can be.

The Impending War For Talent (Mediapost 5.6.15)

There’s a war going on, but you may not have noticed it.  It’s a subtle war and it’s about to heat up substantially over the next few years.  It’s the war for talent!

 

Companies are going to be fighting for the best talent to fill a bunch of open positions over the next few years, realizing that not every hire will be an A player right out of the gate.   The basis for this discussion is the fact that the workforce is getting older and the Baby Boomers are moving towards retirement.  The Baby Boomers represent the largest group of workers to ever have gone through the US economy at one time and as they inch towards the end of their working careers, they are vacating a huge number of jobs.  On the other end we have the oft-discussed Millenials.  These are the folks most often described as “entitled” when they’re discussed in the workforce, but they’re also a significantly smaller volume of employees than the Baby Boomers and they’ll not be able to fill all of the spots being vacated.    The third factor at play is the increasing role of technology and the efficiencies it creates, which in turn reduces the number of labor-intensive jobs in favor of more skilled workers.  How are these three elements going to weave together to create a balanced work force over the next 20 years?

 

It’s an interesting challenge.  On one hand, if you have fewer people than jobs, you would expect the unemployment rate to drop to record lows but on the other hand you have technology being developed to automate vast components of the workforce.  Which will progress faster and which will play more of a defining role going forward?  If you look at our industry as a microcosm of the larger macro-economic situation, I think you see the technology will only improve so quickly and rather than removing jobs it will redefine the kind of jobs that are going to be necessary.

 

The agency business is a great place to look at the impact of this war for talent.  Agencies hire a lot of people right out of school and they mold them into media buyers, account people and creative teams.  As media has gone more programmatic, the kinds of jobs are changing.  The jobs are becoming more focused on utilizing technology and the requirement for those entry-level jobs are changing.  Agencies are hiring more technical than ever before.  They’re hiring employees with stronger math and/or technology-oriented backgrounds.  These people are more valuable than the less-focused, more liberal arts-oriented students.  It used to be anyone could get into media if they showed an interest, but media is becoming more specialized.  When I went to school and graduated with a degree in advertising, I was a unicorn or a white whale – something to desire but very difficult to find.  Now those students will be the norm – you will need to hire people who have shown an interest and penchant for media in an age of technology.

 

With fewer people entering the workforce than there are jobs, agencies and media companies can try to be more selective, but in many cases they are simply going to need bodies!  That means the onus of training will be on the hiring companies to get these people up to speed on the roles they are going to play much more than they used to be.  There used to be more on-the-job training but my prediction is that in an era of more specialized needs, upfront training will be ever more important!

 

It’s a unique challenge facing companies over the next few years.  How to find the people coming into the workforce who have some measure of experience vs. balancing hiring people you’ll have to train on your own?  Couple this with the challenge of the “entitled” employee and you can see how hiring will be a very important element of business going forward.

 

This war can be won if you plan far enough in advance.  Are you planning appropriately?

Why Star Wars: The Force Awakens Needs Zero Marketing (Mediapost 4.22.15)

Last week was a special one in the history of being a geek.  In fact it was like Christmas came early.  The Internet loves some comic book and fantasy content – that’s for sure!

 

For those of you who may have been buried under a rock the last week or so, the Internet saw the premieres of Daredevil on Netflix, Game Of Thrones’ season opener and trailers for Batman vs. Superman, Fantastic Four, Ant Man and the most amazing, awe-inspiring trailer of them all – Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  I have never watched so much online video and then re-read what I just watched in forums and blogs as I did last week!

 

I could extoll the virtues of JJ Abrams and what will most likely be one of the greatest movies of our time, but that is for another day and another column.  This week it’s about the intersection of popular culture and marketing.  Back when I was in school, a professor I respected quite a lot said, “If you want to be successful in marketing, become a student of popular culture”.  I took those words to heart and have studied what the masses are interested in for many years.  Truth be told, it’s not that hard since I tend to really enjoy that stuff, as well.  When I was a kid I was naturally drawn to Star Wars, as most of the world was, and as I grew older my passion for the franchise only grew.  Star Wars represents one of the only standing, non-polarizing mythologies of our time.  It is almost universally understood and appreciated (like The Beastie Boys and gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches).   When the new trailer hit last week it ignited a firestorm of Internet activity and it felt as though every publisher in the world was posting click-bait to get their readers to their site leveraging Star Wars.  I swear nothing else happened in the world for 3 days while the geeks of the word united.  Even the Middle East seemed to slow down so everyone could watch the trailer and talk about it!

 

I had the unique experience of working on Star Wars and the starwars.com website for a year back in 2011 and it was one of the most fun projects I have ever had the pleasure of working on.  I witnessed what its like to not have to market something because its very existence is a marketable event.  This launch of the trailer proved it for me – there are very few, if any, brands like Star Wars and for this movie to be successful will require no marketing whatsoever – just a good story, a good director and a lack of Jar Jar Binks.  People will cover these trailers and announcements like vultures on a carcass in the desert, picking apart every last, little detail until Christmas actually comes and the movie is unleashed on the world.  In any other week the buzz around the trailer for Batman vs. Superman would have been deafening, but I feel as though it barely registered in the consciousness of the mainstream with all their attention diverted by a robotic hand, a bubbly droid named BB-8 and the words, “Chewie… we’re home”. 

 

What George Lucas did when he created the Star Wars brand was amazing and you may not know it but he also blazed the trail for Hollywood and popular culture on many levels.   Star Wars was the first example of toy merchandising on a grand level.  It’s the biggest example of brand associative content, where mainstream brands want to pay to associate themselves with Star Wars.  I remember the Burger King glasses from when I was a kid – collecting them was an obsession!  When the 747 wrapped as R2-D2 came out I told my wife, “Disney didn’t pay for that – Disney got paid for that”.  I don’t know for certain, but I would be willing to bet that was the deal!

 

Star Wars is a juggernaut and this year we’re going to see so much of it leading up to the premiere, and somehow I doubt we’ll be fatigued.  It’s a valuable brand, arguably more valuable than the acquiring parent company’s primary characters of Mickey and Donald and friends.  Whatever you feel, and whatever you think, most people will agree that the ability to embrace a new generation of Star Wars fans with this impactful mythology is something to look forward to.  I personally can’t wait to bring my boys, 6 and 4 when the movie opens and already avid Star Wars fans, to share that moment of excitement with them and bask in the same feelings I experienced as a kid.

 

May the force be with you for the next 7 months!

How To Avoid The Pitfalls Of B2B Brand Positioning (Mediapost 4.15.15)

Positioning a B2B brand in today’s age of cluttered technology start-ups can be a maddening endeavor.  There are endless companies out there trying to garner the attention of the same target audience, regardless of who your audience is, and you tend to come to a position which is inevitably already owned by someone else.   To be unique you have to understand two things.  First; what doesn’t work?  Second, what’s the right process to get to something that does work for your brand?

 

First order of business; what doesn’t work is what I refer to as the trifecta of lazy positioning.  The trifecta of lazy positioning is simply that your company is “First, Biggest or Best”.  Unscientifically I can say at least 75% of the companies you see in B2B marketing hang their hat on one of these three positions.  They’re easy!  They make a statement.  Your audience tends to latch onto these positions.  If you’re “First”, that translates to innovation.  If you’re “Biggest”, that translates to scale, which implies effectiveness.  If you’re “Best”, that implies effectiveness, efficiency and that your competitors are probably using the tool so you should be too. 

 

While Biggest and Best are enviable positions, they are not the output of strong positioning work.  They are lazy because you can grasp onto one and use it wherever you want without necessarily having to back it up.  Even if they do help you drive results in the short term, you need more substance for the long-term marketing to be successful.  When you’re “First”, your competitors will say you’re old and behind the times.  When you’re “Biggest” your competitors will respond saying you’re no longer nimble enough to respond to innovation and change in the market.  When you’re “Best”, there’s always someone gunning to take you down and they can use any of a handful of strategies to do it.  Positioning needs more meat and something more defensible than these three broad statements.

 

To come up with a good position, you need a process to come to what you should be hanging your hat on.  That process is actually quite simple.  The first stage is to align yourself with what you’re actually selling.   Go through the exercise to know what you actually generate revenue bringing to market rather than focusing solely on the vision for where you want to be.  You need to balance vision with the present and that will establish credibility that the market trusts you know what you’re doing.  Stage 2 of the process is to dive into the customers and understand their challenges and how they use your products to solve them.  Speak to your customers and ask them what benefits they see to using your products and working with you.  Don’t get caught in the product-oriented marketing cycle that most B2B companies fall into.  Don’t talk about how fast you are, but talk about the business impact of that speed.   Don’t talk about how big you are, rather talk about how your size enables scale which results in more impact on your business in a shorter period of time.  Stage 3 is for you to surface those benefits into a clear, concise messaging framework that can be used to develop the creative portion of your message.  That creative approach is where your brand personality will come alive in a way which demonstrates character through the essence of the brand while demonstrating the impact you can have on the market.  This process isn’t difficult.  In fact it’s quite standard and its actually pretty easy.  There are specific exercises you can undergo to gather this information, but more than anything it requires to ask questions first and dive into your customer’s business’.

 

Positioning work can be hard, especially when you don’t have a process in place.  With the right process, and an understanding of the pitfalls, you can come up with something unique, effective and ownable for your company.

Three Truths About Fraud (Mediapost 4.8.15)

There are some dirty truths about fraud and I’m really starting to agree that it’s beyond time our industry addresses the topic.  I latched onto viewability almost immediately when the topic was brought up, but I’ll admit I didn’t attach my passion to the fraud topic quite as readily because I found it hard to believe.   I now know the error of my ways. 

 

I’ve seen different reports and read many different numbers, but if the stats are to be believed then somewhere around 30-60% of all ad impressions served are either fraudulent or never seen.  This sounds ridiculously high, but within that range is a lot of ad spend.  Truth #1 on this topic is most agencies don’t care too much because they buy the inventory so cheap and try to cover the fraud through optimization, squeaking by and achieving the client’s metrics.  The opportunity cost of implementing fraud monitoring and viewability standards has to be calculated to outweigh the premium they would be forced to pay for the media.  That’s a tough pill to swallow for most agencies – it’s a fear of the unknown.  They don’t know if they can absolutely make the numbers work. 

 

Truth #2 - fraud is about more than just wasted money.  Fraud can be damaging for a brand.  Fraud comes in many shapes and sizes.  It can apply to paying for unviewable impressions and ads that never show up, but it can also apply to impressions that are displayed in a non-transparent environment through an exchange when you have no idea where the ads are actually shown.  If you’re not utilizing 3^rd party data from a reputable source, and if you’re not looking at tools and services to verify delivery, you risk your brand being shown on a site where you don’t want it to be displayed.  What if your brand is shown alongside inappropriate content or simply news content that’s not favorable?  Without transparency on the locations being bought, you have no recourse and no ability to protect your brand.

 

Truth #3 – and this one may surprise you – while fraud is clearly a large issue, it’s not something that would be hard to fix.  The industry wants to fix it.  The agencies can be pressured to focus and fix it.  The brands speak to how they would like to fix it.  The challenge is aligning everyone to agree to terms and stop bickering over it.  One of the main industry orgs could take the lead on uniting the other industry orgs, and with executive sponsorship from the 5 top publishers and the 5 top holding companies, this could get resolved quickly. The majority of the ad spend is pushed through those companies, and since they control the lion’s share of the dollars, they could impose self-regulatory policies that everyone else would likely have to adopt.  The top 100 publishers and top 100 advertisers, as a whole, could literally eradicate the fraud issue in a matter of months if they would get on the same page and those top 10 could lead the way.  The result would be higher premiums to be paid for verified inventory, and agencies would likely have to focus on the creative product a little more, but as a whole I would expect the quality of online advertising to increase dramatically.  The undercurrent of fraud is damaging to the entire industry, and as the larger media industry continues its shift towards digital and with TV looking to adopt more and more or our policies and process, this feels like the right time to get this problem solved.

 

Am I missing anything?  Is there another challenge to the fraud issue?

Can You Identify Your Audience? (Mediapost 3.25.15)

If your marketing isn’t working, it’s because you may not know who you’re talking to.  After all, if you don’t know your audience, how can you know what they want to hear about?

 

The ability to identify the audience you’re speaking to is the single most important requirement for any effective marketing campaign.  Of course, identification is no easy task, and we have to keep in mind that identification has to be balanced with a desire to maintain high standards of consumer privacy. 

 

Identification of your audience can be accomplished using many different methods on individual channels, but unifying that view and recognizing the consumer across channels and devices is where most marketers are still unsuccessful.  It’s not because the tools don’t exist (they do).  It’s because the methodology is intimidating and most marketers don’t know how to implement the tools and technology to make it happen.  There are numerous ways to generally identify a consumer, and they run the full spectrum of detail.  Cookies, registration ID’s, Household ID’s, device ID’s and statistical ID’s are among the most prevalent, and each of these can be aggregated together in a way which anonymizes the consumer and provides a degree of privacy while still providing the ability to determine if that ID belongs to an existing customer, a qualified prospect or a non-prospect audience.  Fundamentally, those 3 segments are the core of what you should be evaluating because it creates significant efficiency in your efforts.  For an existing customer, you should be delivering an upsell or retention message.  For a qualified prospect, you should be delivering a conversion-oriented message.  For a non-prospect customer, you should be suppressing them and eliminating them from your targeting so as not to waste dollars.  Just implementing these 3 segmentations can deliver significant value, having an immediate impact on your entire campaign and simplifying your efforts.  Plus, these 3 segments are easily digestible for the entire marketing audience.  It’s a natural, basic place to start. 

 

Identification doesn’t mean you literally have to ID the person you’re speaking to.  Identification means something simpler – more focused on broad stroke understanding of the people you are speaking to.  It refers to knowing something about the person you are talking to and it’s the basis for any effective relationship.  In the real world, you may not know someone’s name but that doesn’t stop you from having a conversation that can be customized based on the context and what you know about him or her while they’re with you in a common setting.  Identification based on behavior and location is likely more valuable than identification based on demographic data.   Just because someone is male or female, or of a certain age, doesn’t mean you know and understand them.  The intricacies of human understanding can be found in the knowledge of behaviors, and understanding what your audience likes, dislikes and is genuinely interested in will provide significantly more value.  For example, someone who searches for “cars” may be in market, or they may simply be an aficionado and how you use that context will dramatically impact how you market to them.  You can start with some personalization based on that initial behavioral info, but multiple dimensions of behavior provides you with more detail and therefore more opportunity to identify their motivations and become more granular over time.  The challenge is if you don’t learn across channels, then you can’t create that single view of the customer and you can’t target effectively, meaning you aren’t doing a great job of identification. 

 

Identifying who you are talking to and using that information, plus context, to deliver a personalized message, is key to your success going forward.  Don’t you agree?

Unicorns, Yeti’s and Griffin’s – Oh My (Bubbles). (Mediapost 3.18.15)

Unicorns, Yeti’s, Griffin’s; these are the topic du jour in Silicon Valley.  It used to be we talked about tangible topics like revenue, ROI, and customer experiences but today the press is all about mythical creatures and whether or not they are real.

 

The hyperbole around these mythical creatures is simply an analogy used to discuss what may or may not be considered a bubble in the investment world.  The answer varies by who you speak with, but the one thing that’s for certain is if there is a bubble, I doubt its implosion would have as much effect as the last one did on mainstream business, and there are two reasons why I believe that to be the case.

 

First, the floor of this digital economy is higher than it was back in 2000-2002.  The digital ecosystem has woven its way throughout the daily life of the average consumer.  Your parents and grand parents now rely on the web in a way that wasn’t present in the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s.  Digital had not yet become ubiquitous and the rest of the economy didn’t care too much if the floor fell out from underneath companies like Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite and others.  These days the digital economy is woven into everything, from your computer to your house to your car, and certainly throughout your entire mobile experience.  Companies like Google, Amazon, eBay and others are daily tent poles for how you interact with the world.  As a result, the average consumer cannot go about their day without them.  That kind of reliance on the Internet did not exist last time around, but now that it does its hard to fathom these companies crashing in the same way they did back in 2002.

 

My second rationale for overstating the bubble and any resulting crash is most hyper-inflated companies are running stand-alone, consumer-facing businesses whereas the infrastructure companies, primarily in B2B and acting as the foundation of the tech sector, are valued more in line with actual revenue.  The Unicorns, as they are often referred to, are more often companies like Uber, Lyft, Snapchat and others who’ve created large user bases and have not been as focused on revenue, to date.  If these companies hit a cliff and their opportunity for revenue falters, there’s not as much dependence from the rest of the economy on their success.  Their implosions would be silo’d, with little ripple effects on the rest of the digital landscape.  Conversely, the infrastructure companies that offer data management, advertising and marketing technology, business services like HR and back-office project management – these companies’ values are tied to revenue and would not take as sustained a hit.   If they are not hyper-valuated, then the crash would be less impactful.

 

My rationale leads me to agree there could be a crash in the areas of venture capital and investing in start-ups which would translate to a reduction – even a drought – in early stage investment over the next few years.  That being said, I feel as though a similar situation happened four years ago and VC’s started staying away from this stage already.  That has left the door open for angels to come in and get involved. If there is skittishness, then the angels are the ones who may decrease their propensity to fund, leaving more start-ups to bootstrap their businesses, or for early stage companies to find new ways to fund their ideas.  This could lead to more acqui-hires and related types of investing where established companies invest in ideas with teams at pre-negotiated buy-out options. 

 

All in all, while I love a good mythical creature or two, I don’t think the depth of the discussion is warranted.  This is a media cycle and a topic that will quickly burnout, but it does leave entrepreneurs with a very important takeaway – don’t be afraid to focus on revenue at an early stage.  If you can’t justify the business model, you can’t justify a mythical valuation.   If you focus on revenue, or at least implement a plan to get there at an early stage, then you are less mythical and more pre-historic.  After all, isn’t it better to be a dinosaur, once ruling the earth for millions of years, then to be a Unicorn, a creature everyone loves but who never truly existed?

 

I guess it’s a matter of personal taste.

How To Hire The Right CMO (Mediapost 3.11.15)

What does it take to hire a successful CMO in today’s marketing economy?  Answering that question is not easy because the environment keeps changing, but there are some key elements you must have in the person leading your marketing.

 

First and foremost a CMO must have the ability to lead without relying on ego.  To do this requires experience and confidence coupled with what I heard someone recently call a “humbitious” personality.  That word refers to exactly what you would think; someone who is ambitious, but approaches things from the perspective of humility.  Humility is a trait that can only be learned, and unfortunately not everyone learns it.  You have to have taken your lumps once in awhile to realize you don’t know everything and then you have to find the right balance between expressing your will and truly leading a team.  The right kind of CMO is one who can formulate a strategic plan, get others on board with that plan and then guide a team to execute that plan, while still realizing their plan will almost certainly have to change.   A plan is not rigid and should never be treated as such.  It’s a framework from which to react so your reactions are not simply reactive, but coming from a place with a plan.  A humbitious CMO creates a plan, but is willing to be proven wrong, checking their ego at the door.

 

A successful CMO in today’s environment is analytical, and who loves the numbers.  They will set up their strategy and immediately establishes metrics, which can be tracked.  The longer a CMO hides behind the moniker of strategy and brand development, the less likely they are to be successful because (while important) these are not direct business drivers.  You need sales and revenue, and a marketer is responsible to driving those metrics.  Building a brand is essential, but brand awareness metrics are a proxy for driving results, and results come in terms of revenue.  It’s ok for your CMO to be focused on strategy initially, but they should have a clear, short-term path to accountability and that can come in terms of establishing a dashboard of data, or hiring the people who will become immediately accountable. 

 

For success, you also need a CMO who is willing to sell.  You need someone willing to step up and lead a sales meeting at the drop of a hat.  They need to be able to tell your story, and they need to be willing to go toe-to-toe with a prospect, supporting that story in person.  If they don’t, they can never fully understand the customer.  To understand them, you need to know their motivations and what they require from a partner.  It’s nice to develop a storyline in your office, but you have to go direct to the customer to see if it resonates.  There’s simply no substitute.

 

A great CMO should also be capable of providing creative guidance, but they don’t have to have directly come from a creative background.   Creative is important because it defines how your message is delivered, but a good CMO will understand that and will hire the people best able to make that happen.  In house or through an agency relationship, there are lots of paths to go and a well positioned CMO will do their homework and find the right partners to execute.  They should be able to guide the creative process and establish a vision for the brand, but a good CMO should not spend their time tweaking colors and fonts in a deck.  It’s not a good use of their time. 

 

A good CMO is willing to learn new things.  In this environment, change is the constant.  New channels arise monthly and new strategies need to be developed.  The CMO who sticks to only one path is doomed to fail.

 

And most importantly, you want a CMO who is willing to NOT be the smartest person in the room.  This goes back to being “humbitious”, but you want a CMO who will hire the best people; people who have the potential to be better than he or she is.  You want to be hiring your successors, if possible.  In doing so, you create a winning formula and a team that can succeed under the right vision and guidance, and that is what a strong CMO should be doing.

 

What happens if you hire the wrong CMO?

Digitizing The Family Vacation Creates Time To Experience Your Family. (Mediapost 3.4.15)

How broad is the definition of a “Digital Experience” in today’s world?  Will my kids remember how quaint this era of digital is compared to what they’ll see when they’re older?

 

It would seem almost every experience is, in some way, a Digital Experience.  I just spent 7 days gallivanting around Central Florida’s theme park Metropolis, visiting Disney World, Universal Studios, Hollywood Studios and that entire experience has become digitized.  From the way you interact with the park to the attractions themselves, digital is woven throughout in a way that we only imagined a short 10-20 years ago.   In the airport, everything is managed via kiosk and your mobile phone.  In the hotels, you have wands and bracelets and magic bands to identify you and charge your rooms – even your phone can be used as a room key.  You can order movies via your phone, and your car can tell you the direction to get where you want to be.  In a crowd of thousands I could literally get everything I need and have tons of fun without speaking to anyone.  It creates more opportunities to focus on my family if you use it all right.

 

This is, of course, simply a microcosm for what our entire lives look like.  Your mobile phone is the hub and access point for everything from your job to your connected home.  The TV is simply one of many portals for content.  Even my oldest son, who is in Kindergarten and will grow up in a world radically different than the one I grew up in, has some of his homework assigned via our iPad.    It’s all connected – literally – but does it make things easier?

 

What experiences are left that aren’t digital?   You can argue there are still some “analog” experiences, but you can also provide examples of how digital technology has worked its way into everything and every experience has at least a little digital in it.  Between 1994 and 2014 we saw more technology advancements than probably any other period in history, including the Industrial Revolution.   I recall back in 1995, when i-Traffic was just ramping up and we were so excited about the Internet that we regularly cut out print ads and newspaper ads where we saw a URL included and we posted them on the wall.  There was a time when maybe 1-2 ads per magazine had a URL.  Now you would be hard pressed to find a magazine that had 1-2 ads without a URL somewhere.

 

My kids are going to be traveling to space the way I travel to New York by the time they reach 50.  They are going to drive in cars that have no gasoline (all electric) and are connected to the web wherever they go.  They’ll have real-time updates and their car will drive itself past traffic snags and get them where they need to go, on time.   They’ll read their books on their phones, which will of course fold up like paper via flexible, digital screens.  They’ll get all of the essential services delivered directly to their house and restocking the fridge will be automated.  They’ll only have to go to Safeway when they want to peruse some new products.  Digital technology creates choices and freedom with their time, unlike anything we have today, and hopefully frees us up to focus on what matters – our inter-personal experiences.  And of course, they’ll have drones to do their beck and call, picking up anything else they need so they can spend time with their kids and help them to become wonderful young adults, like we’re trying to do today for them.  In many ways they’ll be able to craft more experiences with their family, assuming the tech infrastructure around them doesn’t fail.

 

I wonder what kinds of memories they’ll have of these vacations and family trips that were so simple in their digitization?  Will they look back and fondly recall the lines at Disney World before every spot was lined up for them with the Magic Bands?  Will they remember holding my hand while we walked around and had a conversation about all the fun things we wanted to do while standing in line?

 

I remember some of those things when I was a kid.  I hope my boys do too.   The digital world, if wielded properly, becomes a powerful tool enabling you to focus more on your inter-personal and family relationships.  Don’t ever forget that the technology is there for you to use, not the other way around.