Personalized, One-to-One Communications
Speaking of long, it seems that we’ve been promised “personalization” for a very long time. Like a decade? It’s been a hot topic and buzz phrase used by adtech and performance marketers, giving us visions of perfect messaging going to our ideal target audience, bringing us the holy grail of loyalty and sales.
There’s a great article my partner forwarded to me last week, perhaps you saw it; Forget personalisation, it’s impossible and it doesn’t work by two world class marketers who cite all the reasons that we need to put the idea to rest. Data is simply not reliable. Not now and with future privacy issues, it will never be. Adtech has been feeding us a bit of a story all-along (and that’s another story…)
Not Personalization – Storytelling Rules
Bob Hoffman also saw the article, and added his sarcasm and insights. For me the big take-away is that storytelling is far from dead (scroll down about halfway in the newsletter) . In fact it’s storytelling that has created the biggest and best brands, and sold the most inventory or drawn the largest spending consumers.
Walled Gardens = Doubtful Data (and fraud?)
Another topic in our shop is the vast amounts of money spent on performance digital advertising and the non-discussed issue of fraud. The phrase “Walled Gardens” was first coined in the 90’s in the context of the telecom companies. It sounds like something beautiful, when in fact, it’s a dark and mysterious place where marketers really don’t know the whole truth about their advertising and the data. Check out the Marketoonists perspective and related cartoon.
Article Highlight: Can you believe that 74% of all online advertising is controlled by Google, Meta and Amazon? And we can certainly trust them on what’s going on in their gardens, right? Perhaps the biggest culprit is programmatic which is simply problematic. For more on bad adtech data go to the top of that newsletter where he references the WSJ article on the issue.
Rather than blacklisting, move to whitelisting the sites you’re willing to advertise on, and be selective. The costs may go up, but in the end your ROAS will be greater. The thing is we’ve become addicted to numbers and what appear to be great CPC’s when most of the revenue is actually going to fraud or some great unknown and reported data simply not true. So turn to white labeling, spend more and get more qualified views and clicks.
Back to Storytelling & Be Famous
Storytelling has always worked. You know that we believe in the Power of Video. It delivers the greatest overall response for brand trust and sales. In advertising, it’s great creative that cuts through. In longer formats, smaller brands have delivered 2-3 minute “commercials” to engage.
But don’t stop there. OOH can deliver as well and now with digital OOH, it’s becoming increasingly effective for driving mobile response and call to action. And through the pandemic, direct mail has resurfaced and delivered as well. We’ll revisit these in more detail next time.
Meanwhile, be sure to let us know if we can help you to become more famous and keep you always on.
Have a great weekend!