It is that time of the week again friends. For those
subscribed to Quote A Day, you will instantly notice
the theme of FEAR. But today it is applied to online
marketing. I hope you enjoy this offering.

Best,

JA

Questions? Comments? Email: quote (at) Quotes2u.com

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Fear is The Mind Killer – Jaffer Ali

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to
see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
–Frank Herbert

The phrase that graces the title of this article was first
mentioned in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Island. Three years
later, Frank Herbert used these same words in Dune, for
the Bene Gesserit members as a litany to calm themselves
in perilous times.

Do we live in perilous times?

The quick answer is, of course, “yes”. But what makes them
perilous has less to do with what’s happening around us
and more to do with what’s going on inside us. When you
look around, you can sense the fear. Peril breeds
insecurity. Fear begets more fear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Fear defeats more people than
any other thing in the world.” This parses with my own
experience with online industry discussion groups. The
dialogue has become guarded, the fear palpable, fueled by
an even greater fear to look the enemy in the eye.

Worse yet, we’ve empowered this demon by succumbing to it.
Instead of performing to our hopes and dreams, we’ve
surrendered to our fears. Instead of confronting our flawed
logic, we’ve become unwitting pawns in a chess game we
cannot win. Under the rubric of practicality, we’ve
crushed the spirit that should inspire us.

Fear has led to a rush for the comfort of the herd. Online
was once a place where, inspired by our hopes and dreams,
lions roared and innovation flowered. Yet now, with but a
handful of notable exceptions, innovation has ceded to a
specious, algorithmic definition of human behavior.

Fear obscures vision. Otherwise it would be easy for
anyone to recognize that “innovative” mathematical models
do not translate to better response rates at all. Case
in point: I was recently contacted by a major online
publication wishing to sell me advertising. They claimed
to offer “the most targeted” audience for our message.

They said we could expect a .35% click through rate.

The real tragedy is not the low CTR. The real tragedy is
the sales rep’s–indeed, our entire industry’s—proud
defiance of the cup being precisely 99.65% empty! What
else but fear to confront the truth could justify such
utter idiocy? About 100 years ago, there was a French
Prime Minister, Leon Blum, who said, “The free man is he
who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.” With
success measured by a CTR of .35%, it would appear the end
is even nearer than we thought!

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There are crimes of commission, and crimes of omission.
Touting a .35% response rate by any measure is a crime of
commission. Refusing to note, let alone address, the
companion 99.65% failure rate is a crime of omission. The
point is, either way, we’re criminals who have stolen their
own trust. Common sense dictates that a problem must be
acknowledged before it can be solved. Similarly, we must
confront our fears before we can overcome them.

Ray, the little kid in Jerry Maguire said, “D’you know
that bees and dogs can smell fear?” Let’s apply this
axiom to our own media ecology:

Brand managers:
This group has become subservient to the spreadsheet,
compelled to produce an ROI within a time horizon that
has effectively reduced the entire marketing process to
the transaction.

Agencies:
These folks have been reduced to sycophants, afraid to
tell their clients–much less, themselves–what they need
to hear. Instead, agencies rework their mission state-
ments to fit the language of the spreadsheet-driven brand
managers.

Publishers:
Faced with ever declining CPMs, media owners court the
agencies who serve the brand managers who defer to the
math.

Can you sense where I’m going with all this modern-day
version of There Was An Old Woman? You know, the song
about the old woman who swallowed a fly. Where every
stanza ends in “perhaps she’ll die”.

There are so many brilliant minds in our industry, yet
we’ve allowed fear to take hostage the very thinking that
should free us. We’ve chosen to play it safe. We’ve
sold our souls to the lowest bidder. We’ve consigned
performance to a 99.65% failure rate. We’ve disengaged.

A quote from Eleanor Roosevelt might help right now:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every
experience in which you really stop to look fear in the
face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot
do.”

I am writing for my friends and for my two boys studying
media at Bradley University. I want to help an industry
that has fed my family for so many years. The old woman
doesn’t have to die. There is a way out. We can look
fear right in the eye and stare it down with our hopes
and dreams. We can triumph over all that comes our way.

I leave you with yet one more thought; one that reaches
beyond religiosity. Please feel free to replace “faith”
with “dreams” if you wish.

Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith
empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear
sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes
serviceable.
–Harry Emerson Fosdick