Opinions And Ramblings By Adam Kmiec On All Things Media

If you’re a frequent Mad Men watcher, I wonder if you’ve started to notice the strange phenomenon I’m noticing.  The ads, you know those “annoying” commercials, are getting a hell of a lot better.  When Mad Men first launched the commercials were your run of the mill, everyday ads.  In short, they were boring, expected and lacking soul. Even the BMW ads (and you know I’m a huge BMW fan) were nothing to tune in for.  But, as Mad Men has taken off we’re seeing advertisers up their game.  The content in Mad Men is so good, advertisers are having to make their ads better.

This is a win-win for the user.  Commercials are simply part of a TV viewing experience.  Yes, even if you have Tivo, they are part of the experience, because you have to skip them.  But, when the ads become enjoyable, entertaining, riveting and immersive, the user almost doesn’t mind watching them…almost.

Not unlike TV Shows mailing it in for an entire quarter, until just before sweeps week or an awards cut-off date, we’ve grown accustomed to ads being horrendous all year, until the Super Bowl.  That’s the one time when marketers and advertisers and clients and agencies come together to create ads that are interesting, emotional, fun and more importantly, worth hunting for on USA Today or YouTube, to watch again.  I’ve long lamented that marketers and advertisers should treat every day like it was the Super Bowl, bring their A game and never mail it in.  But, let’s be honest, that just doesn’t happen with the exception of a few brands (eg Nike and Apple).  It’s fun to see marketers and advertisers alike acting like Jr. Art Directors fawning for the approval of Don Draper.

Am I the only one noticing this?

Everybody wants to know the ROI. It’s the first question every marketer is asking when evaluating an idea. We’ve been trained to think of ROI as the output of an input. For example, if you spend $1,000,000 on paid search, how many “widget” sales will you generate? If each widget yields a profit of $1.00, you’ll need to generate 1,000,001 sales to from that paid search campaign to be ROI positive.

I realize that’s a very simple and linear example. But, it works for the purposes of this argument; and here’s why. If I told you the paid search campaign would only generate 500,000 widget sales, there by generating $500,000 in profit, you’d call the $1,000,000 investment unwise since it’s an ROI negative program. On the surface, you’d be 100% correct. But, what if I also told you that if you didn’t do the program, your competition would generate 750,000 incremental widget sales at your expense. In other words, you’d lose 750,000 widget sales to your competition if you didn’t spend the $1,000,000 on the paid search program.

Sure, the paid search program was ROI negative, but not doing to the program was even more ROI negative. Rarely do we consider what happens if we did nothing. From the very simple example above you can see why not doing anything could be the most ROI negative decision you could make.

Chew on that.

Unique Visitors.  Time Spent On Site.  Repeat Visitors.  Bounce Rates.  These metrics and so many more and quickly becoming less a means of determining how well your site is performing.  Unique Visitors was supposed to tell us about the reach we were generating, while things like Time Spent on Site and Repeat Visitors was all about “engagement.”  And of course, the Bounce Rate told us how appealing our site was; if you will it spoke of “interest” to the visitor.

So the formula and approach for measuring success was simple.  We run a bunch of TV, print and outdoor that has a URL in it.  Of course that URL is written in minuscule font and only up for 1/2 a second during the spot, but I digress.  All these people see this URL and of course say, hey, I’ve been itching to visit a site about erectile dysfunction, so they type it in and come to the site.  After all this is a sequential process, right?  I mean we’ve only seen the path to purchase funnel a billion times over our careers.  And then after you visit the site, you’re of course going to spend gobs and gobs of time getting all the information you need.  Then, even though you have all this information you’ll of course want to come back multiple times to read all this information again and again.

Perhaps, my favorite misconception is that more time spent on site is better than less.  I’ve seen situation after situation where the reason time spent on site is so high is because the site is to difficult to navigate that you can’t find what you’re looking for.  I think you’re starting to see the lunacy of this model.

Today, though, the means for how we evaluate the performance of a site are even less relevant because simply put, people just don’t want to spend on your website.  They’d rather hang out on youTube, Facebook, etc.  This is why brands are rushing to build real estate on those sites.  So great, you’ve built a Facebook Business/Fan page.  You have 100s of thousands of followers who spending time “engaging” with your brand on Facebook.  Well, doesn’t it reason that if they’re spending time with you there, it’s coming at the expense of spending time on your website?  So, why is it so difficult to wrap our heads around the idea that previously key metrics, like Unique Visitors, should be decreasing?

Despite the obvious reasons why these data points are less important, we still rely on them to tell a story.  Why?  Simple, because those are the numbers being used internally by brand managers (and the like) to indicate their success to their superiors.  The same KPI report being used today, is the one that was used last year, the year before that and 5 years ago.  Internally, people have been conditioned to evaluate performance a certain way and it’s too difficult, daunting, challenging, time consuming, etc. to get them to change.

However, change, they must.  And it’s our duty to help them change.  If you don’t take it upon yourself to help guide the conversation and evolve how performance is being measured, you just might find yourself getting fired for not meeting a goal that’s impossible to meet.

“The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

That was the last few passages from the GREAT short story, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson.  People generally believe that winning the lottery is a great thing.  But, what happens when the lottery winner is the person that is stoned to death, as is the case in The Lottery?

We generally believe that options are a good thing because they provide opportunity and choices.  But, what happens when the person you love sees you as an option and won’t accept your proposal?

Lying is supposed to be bad, but isn’t it ok to lie to protect a surprise?  Quitting is something that shows weakness, unless of course you’re quitting cigarettes.  Trust your parents, because they have your best interest in mind, well unless your parent is Michael Lohan.

To advance the ball forward, assuming forward is a good thing, we need to start reframing what we think we know.  We need to challenge the beliefs we hold close to home.  It’s only when we stop accepting things for we’ve been told they are, they we can start creating things that stand out.