Digital Discrepancies

Digital Discrepancies

I was born in the 1900’s.

I heard that line last month when comedian Nate Bargatze was hosting Saturday Night Live. Of course I didn’t watch it live on Saturday night, I saw it a few days later because we have YouTubeTV as our streaming service and my wife was catching up on some of her favorite shows.

Back in the 1900’s, (I’m talking about the century, not the decade) we saw a change in advertising targeting options mostly with the growth of cable TV that happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and what that brought us as consumers was hundreds of TV viewing channel options instead of just the local broadcast TV signals.

Baby Boomers like my wife and I, Gen X and even Millennials like my kids are different from the current Gen Z in terms of media and entertainment experiences and choices.  Social Media giant Facebook is on the cusp of being 20 years old, and that was a game changer.  Media was not just one way from them to us.  With Social Media, we all got the opportunity to have a voice online and share our thoughts and media beyond what the traditional media companies were offering.

A dozen years ago, I took a break from radio and worked for a couple of web based companies.  Targeting to the “right people” was the sales pitch for these new digital advertising options which was pretty cool we thought.  I mean if you could only send your ads to the people who are most likely to respond… that was a game changer too.

However, there are a few flaws with that kind of thinking because it ignores Human Behavior.   I’ll dig more into that in the future but the basics are that we don’t just respond to targeted ads when they are presented to us, there has to be a need on our part to spend our money, or something stronger than a targeted ad that has created the desire within us.

There is a real problem with highly targeted ad placement, in that the controls for the systems that spit out those ads are not very reliable. Some of us are overserved ads for things we might want to buy is one flaw.  Another is getting served ads AFTER we made the purchase because the algorithms haven’t been created to address that flaw.

MarketingCharts.com released a report that says:

Only 15% of US advertisers are very confident in their ability to see all creative running across all channels, and even fewer (13%) are very confident in their ability to tie creative performance back to campaign ROI, according to a survey  commissioned by Claravine and conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.

In total, the advertisers surveyed – all of whom spend at least $50 million on digital advertising each year – estimate that the wrong creative is served to the wrong consumer about one-quarter (25%) of the time. That includes a majority (56%) who believe the wrong ad creative is served at least 20% of the time, and about one-sixth (17%) who estimate that it’s served to the wrong consumer at least 40% of the time.

Advertisers believe that their ROI would increase by an average of 29% if they were able to serve ad creative to the right consumer every time.

Now, I’m not at all against digital advertising, I just believe it’s not as complicated as some will have you believe.

Instead of targeting individuals, you need to go back to targeting known audience groups.  You can do this with social media and other digital advertising but it’s what really what advertising was all about back in the 1900’s.

When mass media like radio, print, TV, heck even Cable TV were the choices business had, they used the characteristics of the media channels audience as the determining factor for where to spend their advertising money.

Going back to my knowledge and expertise in tracking digital targeted ads, I know that when you dig deep enough, all the data becomes less and less reliable.

I challenge you to think like a person, a consumer, a person that could be your customer and the habits and characteristics they have, and then create ad campaigns that speak to them with a relevant message on a form of media that they are likely to use.

If you’re in the Fort Wayne Indiana area, I can help you walk thru this process in person.  Contact me, Scott@ScLoHo.net and we can set up a time to help you avoid all of these Digital Dispensaries and actually grow for the future.

 

The Difference between Principles and Practices

The Difference between Principles and Practices

There are certain Principles that are Timeless.

There are certain Practices that have a limited lifespan.

We need both.

We also need to know and understand the differences.

I’ll use two different examples, one of which is my area of expertise, the other is simply an observation.

Personal Land Transportation is the example I’ll use for the latter.

The United States of America is just shy of 250 years old.  Our ancestors, the ones that arrived from other continents, came overseas way before the United States became a country.  Water travel, boats, ships with multiple people… it was a form of mass transportation.

On land, we have had, horses and other animals we could either ride or attach to something that was pulled.  Eventually bicycles became a popular form of Personal Land Transportation and then automobiles mostly powered by gasoline. Today the growth and popularity of electric vehicles continues to grow but it was be years before they replace gas powered personal land transportation automobiles.

I almost omitted rail transportation because it’s not a personal but a mass transportation system, however we as individuals have the freedom to use trains, subways and other rail based transportation to travel from one place to another over land.

The Principle is simple.  Get from one place to another over land.  It takes action and energy.

The Practices have evolved over time, and yet some of the early practices are still available.  The most independent is perhaps ourselves, walking.  All we need is fuel for our bodies and appropriate clothing.  You can go faster riding a horse or bike.  Motorized transportation is the Practice that most of us use these days to implement the Principle of getting from here to there.

Now I’ll apply this to my area of expertise, Advertising and Marketing using Human Relationship Principles.

The Principle is the closer you can spread the word about you and your business using what we as Humans respond to, the better.  Boiled down to a couple of words, it’s the Trust Factor.

The very basic is called Word of Mouth.  I ask you where to go for lunch and you recommend a place and tell me why.  Because I trust you, I trust what you tell me and I go there and spend my lunch money.   That Practice is probably equal to walking in my previous example.  Very effective, but a slow way to grow your business.

Signage is another practice.  If your business has no sign identifying it, I’m not going to trust I am at the right place. That kind of signage serves as an identifier of a physical location.  There is also the physical signage that is more closely though of us advertising. I’m talking about billboards that advertise your business. Or it could be a smaller sign I see somewhere.  Signage create a little bit of trust, but not as much as a friend telling me.  The benefits of signage is that one sign can inform many more people than word of mouth and it can be placed strategically to potential customers.

Other Practices for advertising and marketing your business is the traditional media models of newspapers, television and radio stations. Online we also have a multitude of ever evolving tech.

Some Practices work better than others and it’s due to the Human Relationship Principle, the Trust Factor and how closely it is applied. Some of the online practices have evolved to attempt to create a more personalized advertising experience. As you and I do ANYTHING online, we are adding to the meta-data that is used to serve us ads that are supposed to be more targeted and relatable to each of us.

This is where I want you to really pay attention to the Difference between Principles and Practices.

The Practice of personalized and targeted ads makes sense, but it does absolutely nothing when it comes to following the Human relationship Principle of the Trust Factor.

I’ll talk more about the what and why of creating the Trust Factor in your advertising and marketing in the weeks ahead but for now, please understand that just because the an ad message is targeted and personalized the way tech can do it with algorithms, doesn’t make it better if it ignores the Principle of Human Relationships.

Getting Linked

Getting Linked

Among the one-liners of business success, there’s one that I’ve noticed has been critical and it has to do with connections.

I’m going to focus on LinkedIn, but first here’s the one-liner:

“It’s not who you know, but who knows you that determines your success”

This is why I highly recommend using the power of social media to build a network.

In the 1990’s as a young advertising sales guy in Detroit, I was tasked with making cold calls to find businesses to advertise. It wasn’t fun and I actually quit.  Since I was not from the area, I had only a few connections and none were business owners.  Armed with a phone book and a car, well that was about it.  There was no social media in the 1990’s. MySpace launched in 2003 and Facebook after that.

But did you know that LinkedIn also launched way back then, in the early 2000’s?

LinkedIn used to be thought of as a place to find a job.  You’d fill out your employment history and it sort of functioned as an online CV or resume.

It has become much more than that.

LinkedIn promotes itself as a social network for professionals for professional connecting which is pretty much true.  I also recall the debates over who to connect with.

“Should I only Link to those people I know?”

Well, that is a good start and some of you haven’t even done that.

Please do that first.  Then it’s time to really grow your network.

Anyone that you are connected to has connections and while LinkedIn will tell you whom you share connections with, it will also show you something called 2nd degree connections.

These 2nd degree connections are where the real potential value is, I’ve discovered.

It’s the Kevin Bacon Effect.  The Kevin Bacon Effect was a fun gun to play to see who was connected to whom and how many people you had to go thru to connect to Kevin.  Look it up if you care.

Before I was preparing this article, I had no idea how many 1st degree connections I had. Just glancing at my profile, says 500+ which seems like a lot.  But when I dug deeper, I saw I have over 3,000 first degree connections!

Here’s the fun part, and I’m going to scale it down using a low number of connections.

100.

If I had just 100 connections, and each of my 100 connections had 100 connections, that means in theory I have 10,000 second degree connections.

Move that number up to 400 and do the math and that adds up to 160,000 connections.

Of course there are a lot of variables but according to LinkedIn, the average number of 1st degree connections is between 500 and 999 for active LinkedIn Profile users.  When I looked at my co-workers, I saw most having less than 500 which means they are missing out.

What are they missing out on?  And what are you missing if you aren’t active on LinkedIn?

When I am doing research on a company or a potential contact, LinkedIn is one of the top 5 searches I do.   My role with my radio station includes looking for potential candidates to hire for positions that may open up.  I also do some research on companies that might be a good fit as an advertising partner.  Besides the 1st degree connections, I can also reach out to 2nd degree connections.  And I do this free.

Yes, I don’t pay a dime for my LinkedIn account, and I usually don’t advise people to get a paid account either.  If you instead build your contacts and connections, you will grow it over time and it will become a valuable resource.

Finally here’s the added benefit that has been happening a lot, and that is people reaching out to me.  Every single week.  Some just want to connect for networking but others are seeking me out because they want to consider buying what I have to sell them.

Would you like people contacting you like that?  What are you waiting for?  Get Linked!

 

Own Your Space

Own Your Space

Here we are in the summer of 2022 and due to some recent business meetings I’ve had, I need to give you a piece of advice that I’ve said repeatedly over the years.

Own Your Space.

Not just any space, but your space online.

This applies to you as a person and if you have a business.

A dozen years ago, I was showing college students how I created my own personal brand, the ScLoHo brand with a couple of blogs that I updated every single day.

Then 11 years ago, my friend Kevin challenged me to create my own space, not for the ScLoHo brand, for me, Scott Howard.

And so I did.  It took a few months but I invested in my own website instead of using the free blogger sites from Google.  This is that website I created in 2011.

It looks much different than the first version.  The domain name, ScottHoward.me, was selected because the dot com version of my name was already taken.  So while the layout and design have evolved over the years, this website has been consistently been the Space I Own.

Recently I’ve seen business start-ups that don’t have their own website, they are relying on socials.  You don’t have a real business, you’ve got a hobby.  Until you spend a few hundred bucks, buy a domain and create a simple landing page, at the bare minimum, you aren’t real.

Not in today’s world at least.  Look, you don’t even have to use it to run your business, but if your own website doesn’t exist, neither does your business as legit.

I’m not into building websites anymore, but I can connect you with the people I trust.  Believe me, I want you to succeed, and there are always a few exceptions to most any rule, but do yourself a favor and get Your Own Space now, for your business and also for your own personal branding.

The Trust Factor

The Trust Factor

A couple of Thursday mornings ago, a couple things happened before 8am.

An email from Insider Radio that included the headline:

Americans May Love Social Media, But Survey Finds It’s Radio That They Trust.

Also it was the beginning of day 2 of a weather-induced work from home day as our area was getting non-stop snow with predictions of well over 15 inches which becomes much more severe when the winds kick in and “drifts up to 4 feet” were predicted by the national weather service.

(I heard that prediction listening to my local news/talk radio station WOWO.)  We ended up with a little less and by Friday, I was back at the office and by Monday most of the rest of the city was back to normal.

Social Media has been the darling media that normal Joe’s and Jill’s turned to for communication to the masses.  What began with MySpace and then Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and numerous others became the bright and shiny new place for advertisers to run ads.  Promises of “hundreds of people for mere pennies” and “trackable results” along with “targeted ads that produce less waste” were all made and continue to be made.

To which I can say, not really.

Look,  I am speaking from a multitude of perspectives.  Yes, I’ve spent the majority of my career in radio.  However a couple of times I worked full-time in the online world.  First time was 2011 when I anticipated never returning to radio and instead I was highly immersed in the digital world where we crafted websites that were built to convert traffic into sales.  We looked at, what appeared to be heat-map technology and a deep dive into analytics to design websites that improved the UX or User Experience and so I know how that is done and not just the technology but psychology behind it all.

I also worked full-time for a multi-million dollar world-wide company that transitioned from a print catalog sales model to an e-commerce based outfit.  I was one of a half dozen specialists in the Internet Marketing Department and my chief role was Social Media for our multiple brands.

Then there is my own personal success story of creating an online following and connections with the ScLoHo brand identity, so I am a believer in the power of online and if you and your business can’t be found online… well you simply don’t exist.  Get your company a website now.  Claim your social media profiles for you and your company.  LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram at the bare minimum.

However, if that is all you do, the online stuff, you are being short sighted and leaving yourself very vulnerable.

It was just announced that Facebook actually lost members recently.  That’s right the biggest Social Media company in the universe, saw a decline.

But that’s not the real reason you are vulnerable.  It has to do with the Trust factor.

A dozen years ago I was giving a presentation to students at Huntington University and part of the discussion demonstrated the good stuff that was happening on Facebook.  I used the example of my friend Heather who was looking for a new dentist for her family and so she asked for recommendations.  Dozens of friends responded with both recommended dentists and a few to avoid. This was modern day word-of-mouth and crowd-sourcing done on a personal level.

However when companies tried to tap into the social networks by running ads, it just wasn’t the same. It was an advertisement, not a personal recommendation.  Like so many other forms of advertising, except it started to become annoying because all we wanted to do was see what was going on with our friends and family and instead we were being served ads every few posts on our newsfeeds. I just took a look at my Facebook newsfeed and of the first dozen posts, numbers 2, 7 and 11 were ads.

Another factor creating distrust in Social Media is the political climate for the past several years.  I think it has intensified online when we were limited in our ability to gather in-person due to pandemic restrictions.

Here are some quotes from the story I referred to at the beginning of our talk today:

A new MRI-Simmons survey finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans say radio is either “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy” with radio topping every other media type other than newspaper – trailing by a mere one percent difference.

Also:

More than twice as many adults consider radio trustworthy compared to social media. When it comes to fake news, it seems Americans have concluded it is not traditional media outlets that are the source, but rather online media options.

And finally:

In its analysis, Katz says the MRI-Simmons research shows why radio is an “ideal platform” for advertisers looking to make their voice heard and their message count. “Radio is a trusted environment with vested local connections to consumers across demographics, and all types of media users,” it says, adding, “Radio provides the best chance for messaging to break through, resonate, and not be mistrusted by consumers.”

Contact me for more information and insight.