Color matters

When we set up our mapping standards, we spent a LOT of time evaluating the colors we would use to best convey the way the numbers ramped up or down in scale. We usually color segments from cool to hot, giving neighboring numbers close colors but not too close so as to be indistinguishable. It may seem like overkill to some people but, as with any graphic standard, it's worth spending lots of effort at the outset so you have a quality image every time down the road.

Look at the USPS delivery "standards" map. I saw this and couldn't resist posting this very short lesson with the case in point of what NOT to do.

Since these times are not guaranteed and based on ranges, a graded color scheme would be much better. Below is an edited sample of what I'd do differently. Incidentally, as I was recoloring the map, I found the greens to be particularly confusing. I think Houston to Washington is 9 days compared to 13 - 14 to Alaska but it's truly hard to tell.

Skewed and Screwed

Here's a quick (hopefully) post about collecting data via surveys.

One of the easiest things to mess-up when preparing a survey is to ignore the science of selecting the audience. You can't avoid beginning a survey with a certain bias and most times that is a good thing. For example, a knitters magazine sends a survey to their readers to better understand why people subscribe. That audience is designed to be targeted to people familiar with the product and the questions can follow that original assumption. When using their collected data and making assumptions, the audience needs to be stated first and foremost. In this case:

Good: "60% of our readers buy yarn more than once a month."
Incomplete: "60% of people surveyed buy yarn more than once a month."
Taken out of context, this statement is misleading.

Now, setting the obvious aside, consider the slightly more subtle. I recently took a survey posted by a Paper Industry newsletter (I know, nerdy). Their audience (and responses) will be skewed to some degree by the nature of the delivery of the invite. Mostly, it's perfect because it's at the end of the very newsletter for which they are collecting the data. However, if a 3rd party paper mill wanted to use this industry newsletter to invite people to take a general survey about paper buying habits, they would have started with a very narrow audience compared to their overall universe of potential buyers. Not bad data, just skewed from the outset. Further, if a book seller wanted to use this newsletter to invite people to a survey about their reading habits, the responses could be so skewed as to be unusable. Get it?

Here's what triggered this post. At the end of the survey, Survey Monkey asked if I wanted to take more surveys for a chance to win $100 and to help a charity of my choice. If I had the time and inclination, I could signup to be part of a very skewed and potentially misleading type of audience.

Professional survey takers are likely going to be at least one of the following:
- ignorant of the industry they claimed to know. If I want to take a lot of surveys, I'd better claim a lot of interests.
- not really interested in the questions, just "burning" through the survey to get to the entry for $100
- the type of person (Opportunity Seeker?) that is willing to spend their time on the chance they will win something. Without casting aspersions, you can imagine situations where this type of person could be contrary to the intended audience.
- other influences?

And speaking of incentives ...
It's hard to get people to take your survey. Adding an incentive is a good way to increase response. Also, people many times will spend more time with the survey if they feel like they are being compensated for their time. It's kind of a feeling of give and take. The incentive is probably better if it's smallish, just enough to say you value the takers time but not so much to attract people outside your target audience. The best incentive is something in line with your product/survey to further qualify your responders. EG, if Pampers offered a chance to win a trip to Maui, I might take their survey even though I don't have kids. If Starbucks offered a free coffee as an incentive, only coffee drinkers would be incentivized.

All this should seem like common sense when you think about it but given the number of surveys I see come across my computer screen, it feels like it needs repeating. When designing a survey, really study the whole process from start to finish. What do we want to know? Who do we want to target? Who is likely to respond? How do we pose the questions in the most unbiased way? And when finished, include the demographics and inferred habits of the audience and responders to make the most out of the data collected.

To quote David Byrne:
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
- from Crosseyed and Painless by the Talking Heads

Enticing subjects can bite you back.

There is sooo much content out there. Everyday I receive a lot of truly valuable information in the form of tweets, emails, blogs and the more traditional media like mail and TV. My problem is that there is simply too much to absorb so I have to make my decisions about what to read based on headlines and subject lines. Of course, I'm not alone. Most of us are filtering our digital inbox in the same exact way.

Enter the poor Digital Marketer. The harder it is to get someone's attention, the more sensational the headline needs to be, right? Wrong. A subject line that over promises – or worse yet, misleads – sours the content of that message and leads your subscriber to be suspicious of any future communications. In fact, this happened to me today:

LinkedIn sent me an email that a new discussion was started in one of my subscribed groups. The title of the blog is "Warning: This blog post will change your life." The group is run by a professional PR company, so I decided to check it out. Now, I didn't expect anything truly life-changing but I was disappointed to find that after clicking on the link, logging into LinkedIn and clicking on the link again, the blog was 50 alternatives to the word "awesome". Cute but also discrediting to the author and the company because now as I filter what I have time to read in my busy day, I've learned that this company likes to exaggerate the importance of their posts. Next time, when in doubt, I'll give it a pass.

The point I'm getting to is simply put. Step back and look at your whole message with your (casually interested) subscriber's eyes. The people you are trying to speak to are busy and have way too many things to read. Tell them EXACTLY what you have to say in the subject of your emails or the headline of your blog. If it's interesting to them they'll click-through, read the content and come back for more, if not, at least the subscriber won't be bothered by that particular message and maybe your next article will suit them better.

P.S. The blogger is right, we do use "awesome" way too much. Stop it.

Creepy Creative

Halloween is coming, hooray! But, while I like all the creepy imagery that is available for us to use, we always need to step back and take in the "big picture". This email that I just got from LaQuinta is just one example.

Never forget that information is coming at your consumers so fast these days that imagery is more important than ever. Pictures have never been so important in telling your story and the story La Quinta tells at first glance is that your well-made bed comes with a huge spider underneath. This may sound silly to you but people like me that are creeped-out by spiders and (gasp!) bedbugs. Will have just been given a terrible first impression.

In Defense of the Humans

When we leave computers to fully manage the distribution of our digital advertising, we run the risk of creating something like this horribly ironic ad on Yahoo where a speeding Volkswagen drives over the touching faces of a race car driver who recently died in a crash and his widowed wife. (see below)

The point of this very brief post is that while we can allow our campaigns to run automatically without supervision, human beings need to maintain enough awareness that they can ask their media outlet questions like "how do I keep my cool animation from circling around an article about a 15-car wreck?" I may sound crazy in assuming that it's possible to foresee all the negative ad/news combos out there but let me say 2 things:

First, Millions of dollars are being spent to track our every click and target our ads. Some of that research and programming money could go into eliminating the possible contradictory ad/news combos, resulting in an even more refined ad placement. With the bonus of not having your dealership boycotted by certain auto-racing fanatics.

Second, print publications have been doing this for years. When I worked at the newspaper, airline and liquor ads were flagged as possible conflicts and were pulled if there was news of an airline disaster or drunk driving accident. Copy editors and proofreaders also know to scan the ads prior to print and move inappropriate ads.

Finally, computers rock. Data-driven marketing has made us so much better at finding and talking to the right people. As marketers, we just need to be aware of what we are doing and keep our minds working, asking "what if" every time we make a decision about where a campaign is going to run. 

Is Texting the Ultimate in Direct Communication?

The adoption of the cell phone and prevalence of web-enabled smart phones has made mobile marketing a multi-billion dollar industry. Mobile websites, apps, and emails are all part of the mix with text messaging having paved the way. I hear it over and over: "watch how the kids communicate, that's our future." And so, marketers are continuing to jump into the text messaging (also referred to as SMS) arena, collecting as many mobile phone numbers as they can get their hands on. And then ... well, that's where the advertiser is a hit or hits the skids.

If you skim articles like I do, here's the point:
Texting is most effective when you reach your contact with a message targeted to their specific need at that particular moment in time.

The average text message is opened in less than a minute. The currently limited amount of "spam-like" texts heightens the expectancy of a relevant message from a familiar source. In day to day communication, a text is the most efficient way to communicate with a friend because it's immediate, yet less intrusive than a phone call. Many people have their phones on and with them 24 hours a day, leaving the shower as perhaps the last sanctum of solitude. This environment has created the perfect scenario for a brand to deliver a quick reminder on behalf of their new product or daily special. But is the public ready to give up control of yet another communication channel?

The admittedly anecdotal discussions I've been having with people reveal certain psychologies that temper the extraordinarily high numbers supporting the broad use of text-based advertising. A common consensus is "I use my phone for sending and receiving texts but I don't want random promotional messages." That in itself is unsurprising but when they say "random" am I right in assuming they mean anything that is not perfectly applicable to them at that specific time? For example, I signed up for texts from "Spicy Pickle," a very good sandwich chain. So far every text they have sent me after the initial "thanks for joining" message has been irrelevant to me. One reminded me that for Mother's Day I could encourage Mom to give them her phone # to sign up for a sweepstakes (terrible idea). Next, I got a message around lunchtime telling me of a new sandwich offer. That's better but I was occupied at the time and seeing it was from Spicy Pickle I ignored it until I remembered it that night which, by that time, caused the message to be just more "junk mail." For prolific texters, a very few unwanted messages from a company will spur an opt-out.

A hip young marketing professional I interviewed told me the following:
"I used to love getting texts from Express during the Holiday seasons simply because they had good specials going and I’m a savvy shopper. I then opted out of their campaign because they were sending it too often for me and I didn’t need any more clothes. I found myself [subscribing to receive texts] for bars promoting Happy Hour and was getting irritated at them too. I still get it from Macy’s which is fine, but I rarely read them. I still get them from radio stations and opt out of those immediately. On the flip side, when I do want clothes from Express, I will opt back in [for sales notifications], but will quickly opt out once I’m done."

Another individual who is a sales professional said that he's very protective of his phone number because he feels it's the one channel that hasn't been taken over by advertising. Still another young adult tells me that while he used to get a hundred or more texts a day, he tired of the interruptions and is now very reluctant to opt-in to text based messaging because of those inherited negative feelings toward the medium.

All that said, InterDirect offers text-messaging along with our other direct marketing options but we encourage extremely careful and calculated use to make it effective. Here are some tips:

1. Texts are PERFECT for personal notification of orders ready for pickup. E.g."your (dry-cleaning, specialty cake, alterations, auto-service, reserved table, pre-ordered book, hotel room, etc.) is ready.
2. Texts are APPRECIATED when used as change in service announcements such as: closing early, meeting times changed, power outages, work being done in your area, etc.
3. Texts can be VALUED when used for hyper-limited-time offers that are perceived as a reaction to things beyond a retailer's control. If used sparingly, a message about truly door buster sales on surplus items can make the recipient feel like they are in the "inner circle" getting special offers that only the most savvy shoppers are aware of. This scenario accomplishes 3 things: 1. drives traffic to the store during a slow period, 2. unloads truly overstocked, about to expire products, and 3. enhances the loyalty of the recipients and their appreciation of your communications. CAUTION: Using this method on a frequent, regular schedule can reduce the impact and make it seem preplanned and deceptive.
4. Some people really do want all their communications via text. At your signup page ASK them if they prefer text or emails. Then target your content as much as possible and make every effort to monitor their engagement.
5. When looking at statistics on how much any one group texts, remember that the more messages a person sends and receives, the less your message will stand out.

The Takeaway:

Data collection, storage and analytics are a huge focus in advertising and marketing circles. With a great plan, retailers who use text messaging have the unique ability to immediately connect with their customers with the perfectly timed and targeted message, resulting in responses beyond any other available channel. Every tiny step AWAY from that goal is an equally big step towards annoyance and abandonment.

P.S. As I said, my research is anecdotal. Please be encouraged to comment with your personal feelings about how you use texts in your daily routine. Please give your general age and occupation if you don't mind.

Do Track or Do Not Track, that is the question

Not being a politician or industry lobbyist, I probably shouldn't even tackle this question, so here's a comic that sums up my mood at the moment:

Admittedly, there is a certain amount of spin here because, of course, the goal of any privacy legislation is to keep individual's personal information, well, private - and that's a good thing. My point is simply that we are bombarded by meaningless messages all day long. Wouldn't it be nice if the ads that we saw and heard actually meant something to us? Most people turn to Amazon for an example of the right way to "advertise". When Amazon sends you an email, it seems more like a friendly note from someone that knows you because they are suggesting books and music that you really are likely to buy. What if all the ads we saw online were for companies and products that were pertinent to us? In a perfect world it's a win-win.

So much time and money is wasted in "blasting" ads out to the public. I can't speak for general advertisers but even direct marketers can be thrilled with response rates in the single digits. Be it direct mail or email. With Google's paid-per-click ads, even the best performing terms can easily be a fraction of a percent when comparing clicks to impressions. Such waste, not just in money but in the brainpower it takes to filter out all the irrelevant crap. And speaking of how we process things, I believe most searchers' brains have been trained to completely ignore the paid Google ads and focus solely on the "natural" searches. While sophisticated, targeted ads based on a person's web activity might be more expensive, the return we can expect from these truly targeted ads will surely outweigh the cost. As with the Amazon model, when people go to the websites that are using the targeted ad technology the visitor will see that banner ad as more "news" than "ad" and will begin to pay attention and click thru more frequently.

As for the privacy issue, that's a tough one. I remember when Amazon began targeting their emails and web ads. Initially I was "creeped out" by the "invasion" but eventually I came to appreciate it for it's value. Perhaps my biggest fear is that politicians will craft a bill that sounds good but will be so unwieldy that the online marketers find it impossible comply. If that happens, it will be a step back for the internet. Personally, I hope what the industry is doing to self regulate will be enough and will quell the political desire for government intervention but as Carla Rover at DigiDay writes, is it too little, too late? Finally, as it turns out we may have a ways to go before we will be really collecting meaningful data anyway. Joel Stein recently did very thorough research into this in a recent article in Time about how all our personal data is (and is not collected).

Smarter people than I will be debating this in the upcoming weeks and months so you'll get more information than you care to know about the pros and cons of the different bills. I just hope that politics doesn't win out over common sense. Feel free to weigh in on this and if you like the comic, you're welcome to reuse it with a little shout-out back to me.