Archive for the ‘Stake in the Ground’ Category

This weekend, I had a coffee with a client who owns several boutique hotels in Mexico. We talked about some interesting ideas he has for a travel review site, with built-in mechanisms to verify the identity of reviewers, and weighted reviews based on the reputation of the reviewer. His motivation for thinking about this is the fact that, in his view, he has been screwed over by TripAdvisor. He described the prevalence of fake reviews on TripAdvisor, and the challenges he’s faced as a small business owner, without the resources or desire to game the system. I have heard the same complaints made by other hotel owners and marketers.

So it was with a sense of irony that I read this diatribe by Steve Kaufer, the CEO of TripAdvisor. In it he calls Google to task for unfair business practices, with the charge:

Links to Google Places appear at the top of the ‘natural’ search despite being an inferior product to sites that are dedicated to review collection and therefore more useful to the consumer.

He further cites the evidence that Google is currently under investigation by the EU Commission. On the one hand there are my client’s comments and the fact that pretty much every business above a certain size has been investigated for something, but on the other hand I sympathize with his frustration.

As I thought about his comments, I realized that, through no great achievements of my own, I have ended up directly in the path of the Google juggernaut many times over. Much like a Forrest Gump of Google disruption, I have found myself in the midst of battles, negotiations and detente with Google for the past ten years.

• [2000-2003] As one of the creators of the first (and best, for a time) pay-per-click bid management tool, I bounced between conference calls with Google and Yahoo as Google was gobbling up Yahoo’s market share in paid search.
• [2004-2006] I Then found myself working with the big advertising agencies in London, during the time when Google was contacting their clients, wooing them to work directly with Google on search marketing.*
• [2007] That led me to a brief stint at Microsoft, and under assault by Google on almost every front.
• [2008-2010] Next up were yellow pages publishers, of all things, where I advised on online content and advertising strategy.
• [2009-2010] Then came real estate, more specifically multiple listing services (MLS). I swear I was not trying to specialize in sinking ships.
• [2010-2011] Most recently, I have been working with news media publishers a bit, but it’s too soon to tell that part of the story.

I wish I could say that I have heroically led the charge forward in each of these cases, but I haven’t. I will say that in each situation there was a choice. The choice was between taking a defensive stance against Google or thinking ahead and focusing on market needs. In every case, failure came from trying to protect existing revenue. The argument goes like this: “most of our revenue comes from X. We can’t threaten X, so we’ll put together this under-resourced team to focus on innovation. But we’ll put them in this corner over here, out of the way, so there’s no risk to X.” Every time, same argument.

Occasionally, I have had the courage to call bullshit. After making the case to a yellow pages executive that names and addresses were no longer an asset, he looked me in the eye and said, “that’s all well and good Nico, but what we need right now are quick wins, not long-term strategy.” That typifies the stance of executives at each of these industries under siege.

So, is Steve Kaufer right and does Google sometimes favor revenue over what’s best for the consumer? Probably. But on the other hand, I have been a TripAdvisor user for many years, and it hasn’t evolved much. I think I know which choice they made.

* Anyone who was in the ad business in London at that time will remember it well. Not only was Google approaching advertisers directly, they also ended a kickback program that amounted to a significant discount on AdWords for agencies. It felt very much like war, and the agencies were armed with bows and spears, while Google carried heavy artillery. This was the time when Sir Martin Sorrell famously described Google as a frenemy of WPP.

I generally write here about topics related to online marketing with the goal of being useful to local businesses. This is a bit different, apologies in advance for my transgression.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer who was also for a time the Director of the National Public Library of Argentina. He mostly wrote short stories, and his stories were often explorations of the quest for knowledge in the face of overwhelming quantities of information. That he wrote about this subject before the advent of computers and digitized information gives him a unique perspective on an area that I struggle with constantly.

One story in particular has been on my mind quite a bit recently, “Funes the Memorious.” The story describes a boy who fell from a horse and acquired a perfect memory, the ability to remember every sensory detail of everything he had ever experienced. The story is written from the point of view of Borges, who ends up spending a night in conversation with Funes. At the beginning of the conversation the reader feels awe and even envy at the boy’s talents. He learned Latin in a matter of days, and said of his life before the fall that he “looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”

Of late I feel like I am capsized in a whitewater of media. I find myself wanting to comb through it all, to find fragments of knowledge and moments of human contact. Twitter epitomizes this for me. In Facebook I am mostly connected to people I already know. I use it to keep in touch, and to engage in casual interaction. In Twitter I am struck by the stark contrast between the torrents of repeated chatter and the occasional bit of insight making its way downstream. I learn new things and make new friends, but I also find myself wishing I were more like Funes. Where I find myself dragged under by the turbulence, Funes would find it as calm as a reflecting pool. Funes could follow a thousand twitterers and give every one due attention, even a thousand thousand.

But to be Funes is not a thing to wish for. Borges describes his plight:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the shaply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)

Borges further explains that “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Another way of looking at it is that ideas are given meaning by the spaces in between. If we think of everything that is called a “dog” as an individual entity without generalizing, it becomes difficult to tell where dogs end and jackals or wolves begin. This is the problem I have with media today. It affords me no spaces in which to build archetypes or even to let one individual stand out from the next. Sometimes I find it difficult to sleep, difficult to turn my mind from the stream.

I like to solve problems, but I can’t say as I’ve made much progress with this one. I think we are all suffering the plight of Funes to some extent. Some solve it by shutting off all of the streams, but that is not the right solution for me. I like meeting new people and learning new things, and to shut myself off from media would be to exclude myself from the prevailing currents of culture. Borges saw the coming challenges of an information society but he did not turn away from them, he faced them head on. We will find ways to bridge differences and make abstractions that allow us to be infinitely connected and yet sleep peacefully. In my own small way I hope to be part of that.

Two Octobers is looking for space in Denver – specifically, we are looking for space for two hard-working but very pleasant online marketers. Since we are a new business and don’t know how quickly we will grow, we would prefer not to lock in to anything long term. In fact, we’d be quite happy sharing space with other good folk. We are fairly quiet, and are known for sharing tea and baked goods with our office-mates. We don’t need anything fancy like fax machines or conference rooms. We don’t even really need desks, just room enough for a couple of laptops and a teapot.

We would prefer something walking/biking distance from Union Station, but would be interested in hearing about anything close to public transportation.

If you have a little extra room, or know of someone else who does, please let us know. Email or or give us a call at (720) 468-0012.

And if you’d like help growing your business, please let us know about that too.

Internet marketing is targeted. In contrast to the 30 second network TV spot, the internet allows marketers to target messaging by medium, location, topic, demographic and a variety of other factors. Yesterday I tweeted that I want to be a firefighter when I grow up. Today I was followed by @firefighterjob in Twitter. Most of the ads that appear in Facebook as I browse around are local to me or specific to my interests. In fact, I spent some time convincing my dad that there are ads in Facebook at all. He had seen them, but he didn’t recognize them as ads.

But not all advertisers take advantage of these targeting capabilities. And not all web sites encourage targeted ads. Going from one web site to the next can be like going from New Hampshire to Vermont.

When you drive across the border from New Hampshire in to Vermont, the landscape becomes friendlier, more compelling. At least that is what visitors said to me when I lived there. Then I would explain to them that Vermont doesn’t allow billboards. And a light would dawn, and they would say “Yeah, you’re right. That’s nice!”

Google.com is kind of like Vermont, in that respect. They have never allowed any kind of advertising that doesn’t fit in to the landscape. The ads that do appear don’t use color or presentation in a way that make them stand out from other content on the page. In fact, most of the ads appear along the right hand side, which is visually the least obtrusive real estate on the page. Google also seeks to make all ads relevant to a user’s query. Most other search engines have followed Google’s lead, but their progress has been slower than some of us would like.

Historically, Yahoo has been more like New Hampshire, allowing run-of-site ads that appear for all users, relevant or not. The good news is that Google’s approach generates better ROI for advertisers, and ultimately more revenue for Google, so Yahoo has been following Google’s lead and cleaning up of late.

What does this mean for marketers? Placing ads that are not relevant is digital pollution, plain and simple. It’s pollution we have taken for granted and overlooked, but that is changing fast. Google, Facebook and other sites are teaching us to care about the relevance of marketing. This means that marketers who broadcast ads regardless of user’s interests or intent face increasing risk. The risk is that consumers start to see those marketers as polluters.

The word “pollution” may sound strong. Can you really compare a Classmates.com ad to a plastic bag stuck in a tree? I believe you can. We spend much of our working and non-working lives online. We spend time with friends and meet our future spouses online. Why then should we allow our online world to be populated with valueless clutter?

The bad news is that there will always be polluters, but the good news is that there are a variety of marketing methods that do not pollute, and in fact those methods generally get better results with less investment. Rich media and viral ads can entertain and inform. Social marketing creates bonds based on mutual interest. Search marketing answers questions. Just as businesses are adopting no-impact and sustainable business practices in the physical world, they can and should be translating this behavior to online. Not only is it good citizenship, it is good branding.

Billboard graphic courtesy of Big Huge Labs’ Billboard Maker

Like information, marketing wants to be free. While Stewart Brand’s aphorism has become a slogan of software and music piraters, in its original context his statement was a bit more nuanced:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

There are similar forces at work driving the cost of marketing down. Primary among them is the fact that we can efficiently target large numbers of people at an increasingly lower cost. In many cases, the cost of the medium itself has arrived at zero – for example email, internet video and social networking. Many new businesses are getting the word out by leveraging these new, free media, such as the much-publicized story of the Kogi Korean food truck in Los Angeles. Ironically, even advertising giant Google spends shockingly little on advertising, counting instead on the market to spread the word virally because their services are so useful.

One of the top viral videos of the last week, courtesy of Visible Measures. Sadly, internet video is characterized by a preponderance of babies and kittens.

But as with information, marketing can also be valuable and people will pay for value. Google is creating value by being useful – arguably the Google search engine itself is a form of marketing, since it only generates revenue by helping Google serve more ads. And there is still a great deal of value in storytelling, a fact we internet marketers often forget.

I should also say that my point-of-view here is self-serving. I’ve spent most of my career helping marketers spend less. I believe that the current state of the advertising services industry is outdated. Much of the revenue generated by agencies is tied to how much of their client’s money they can spend on advertising media. Since the cost of media no longer correlates to the effectiveness of media, this model needs to change.

As marketers we can help navigate this change by helping businesses create value rather than buy media. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the relationship is much more tenuous than it used to be.