The end of the year is always a good time to reflect on
the past. The older we get, the farther we travel. The
road to our present business has been one of buying,
owning and selling media of just about every type. Follow-
ing is a short list of media that we have bought and/or
sold over the years:

Billboards Radio Newspapers
Television Magazines Catalogs
Online E-zines Banners Online video
Subway Posters Local Cable National Cable

I’m sure the above list is not complete, but you get the
point: when it comes to media buying and selling, we’ve
pretty much tried them all, been there and done that.
You’d think after all these years of buying and selling
media across so many different channels that I’d find a
softer place in my heart for advertising. But in fact,
I’ve reached the conclusion in recent months that
advertising has outlived its usefulness as an effective
tool to influence people. Influence is not a pass-fail
issue, rather one that like most everything else rides
a continuum.

There is a point at which a quantitative loss or gain
ushers in a qualitative change or ‘leap.’ Start pulling
out your hairs one at a time and eventually you become
bald (high-minded theory aside, my own scalp crossed
that threshold some years ago).

Over the past several years, the advertising industry has
suffered a huge loss in “influence” and now has so few
hairs left that the model looks like the top of Mr. Clean’s
head.

If, however, you don’t believe advertising effectiveness
is declining then you should stop reading this article
immediately. Reason will not make you see. Only continued
pain might awaken you from the nightmare of a failed model
and misplaced sympathies.

So what are marketers, brands and, yes, even politicians
doing to counter this metaphorical hair loss? Their first
reaction is to “double down” and increase impressions.
After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t work anymore, it
only makes sense to do more of it, right? If shampooing
twice a week with doesn’t stimulate hair growth, imagine
if you used it every day!

It is “magical thinking” that doing more of what doesn’t
work suddenly works. We experience this “magical thinking”
with our economic policies that solves our debt problem by
piling on more debt. So it is not surprising that magical
or delusional thinking is gripping our advertising industry.

But there are some folks confronting reality and dealing
with a transition that eschews traditional advertising and
uses content instead of commercials to build and deliver
audiences. And they’re doing it in different ways: product
placement and content curation are just two ways of using
content instead of traditional advertising to build and
deliver audiences.

Now entering its third generation, the digital era has
precipitated two powerful truisms:

1. no one wants more advertising,
2. everyone wants more high-quality content

Perhaps not surprisingly, the above are the same truisms
encountered by print, radio and TV as well. Yet marketers
across all media insist on investing in more ways to
deliver advertising messages that a) no one wants, and
b) that everyone is now equipped to avoid.

Do you require proof that content works better to build and
deliver audiences than advertising? Consider how the Bush
team perfected the use of content to nudge a nation toward
war, despite the fact that no one can recall a specific
marketing message to that effect. What we saw instead was
a $250,000-richer Armstrong Williams on network cable
touting the Bush company line. What we read instead was the
NY Times’ Judith Miller presenting Pentagon views on WMDs.
Was she also paid for her “reporting”? And how about those
150 retired generals flown to Washington DC, briefed with
talking points and dispatched as “expert sources” to
newspapers, television and cable news outlets? Heck, you
don’t expect these guys to work for free, do you?

$1.6 billion in expenditures by the Bush administration to
“sell” or “influence” a nation into war… without a single
ad! At this very moment, the Obama administration is
invoking these same lessons as they condition the public
to support the Afghan surge. Governments and propagandists
the world over have long understood the powerful sway of
content. So why is the advertising ecosystem still trying
to cover its bald pate with such a lousy toupee?

No one watches TV, listens to the radio, reads a magazine
or surfs the web for the advertising. That era started
winding down the moment the TV remote control eliminated
the need to get up from the couch to change the channel.
Advertising has been in a perpetual state of declining
performance ever since, as each new digital device
designed to facilitate more media consumption also
equipped consumers with the additional technology to
avoid more ads.

I will end with an invitation for a dialog. If you want
to discuss how you can not just build audiences, but
deliver them utilizing content, give me a call. My direct
line is 708-478-4500 ext. 105.

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

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2009 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

A campaign [operation] without schwerpunkt is like a man
without character.
- Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg

Ever since Sun Tzu’s Art of War, business schools have
borrowed concepts from great military thinkers. Miyamoto
Musashi’s Book of Five Rings has been used extensively to
direct short and long term strategies. Patton’s brilliant
essay, Secret of Victory has guided my own personal
business philosophy.

One of these concepts, which I contend is more timely and
appropriate than ever, is the principle of schwerpunkt,
first introduced nearly 200 years ago by the German
philosopher, Karl von Clausewitz, in his brilliant
treatise, On War. US military strategist, John Boyd, and
his acolytes helped introduce the concept of schwerpunkt
to the modern US military.

There is no English-language equivalent of schwerpunkt,
and thus, it has been subject to varying interpretations
by its practitioners. “Center of gravity” and “focus of
intent” are common usages. But the phrase that seems best
able to capture its essence is “weight of effort”. Business
is a lot like war in that resources, human as well as
capital, must be deployed properly lest one lose the
battle or even worse, the war.

With this in mind, does it not make sense to ask ourselves:
Has online advertising lost its schwerpunkt?

The answer is a resounding “yes”. And to those of us who
offer a growing critique of the online industry, the
question seems almost rhetorical. When the weight of our
effort eschews creativity for algorithmic reduction, we
have indeed lost our center of gravity; our focus of
intent; our schwerpunkt.

We have fostered an attitude that devalues relationships
by placing technology at the fulcrum of a perverse cause
and effect. John Boyd believed that people came first;
empowered by ideas that were in turn facilitated by
technology. We have juxtaposed this simple recipe with an
inverted order that places technology first and people,
last. But technology does not dream, and without creative
sustenance, relationships starve to death. Creativity
can’t inspire technology, it can only inspire us. Relation-
ships, not technology, must define our schwerpunkt.

This misappropriated weight of effort is revealed in a
recent survey of advertisers who were asked to prioritize
the qualities they seek in an agency. The survey comes on
the heels of an identical one conducted three years ago.
The bottom line: a complete change in schwerpunkt in just
three years! Creativity and strategic thinking and planning
have become subservient to technology under the guise of
analytics.

In 2005, those marketers surveyed listed the order of
qualities they looked for in their agencies:

1. Quality of Creative Content
2. Price/Cost
3. Innovation and Strategic value
4. Traditional print, offline services
5. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
6. Proficiency in emerging/interactive

In 2008 the results of the same survey were quite
different:

1. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
2. Proficiency in emerging/interactive
3. Price/Cost
4. Quality of creative (virtual tie with price/cost)
5. Traditional print, etc.
6. Innovation and Strategic value

The sad truth is, our “focus of intent” or where the
industry is placing its “weight of effort”, our
schwerpunkt, has shifted dramatically away from
creativity, quality and innovation. What now passes
as innovation in online advertising is relegated to
technological innovation.

John Boyd was not against technology. In fact, he
practically designed the F-16. But he preached that
technology should never come ahead of people. This is
true in war as well as business. He spoke of three
components in warfare:

People – Ideas – Hardware

This translates into the modern troika of:

Relationships – Creativity – Technology

It is obvious that online advertising and media have put
its weight of effort into technology. The first two,
“relationships” and “creativity” now carry almost no weight
at all; rendered virtually impotent by a sterile, inanimate
master.

Our technology stands poised to “connect us” but in reality
we have become more alienated than ever before. How deep
can relationships created from Linked In, Facebook or
Twitter possibly be? How often have you found yourself
competing for attention against someone’s Blackberry? Is
it any wonder that our children prefer to text rather than
call each other on the phone? They now purposely avoid
speaking in complete sentences. ROTFLMAO!

We rely more and more on technological solutions to market-
ing problems. We’ve conditioned ourselves to accept a .3%
click-through rate precisely because it’s so precise! As
long as we arrive at such miserable click through rates
via mysterious algorithms that sift through mounds of
data, the .3% holds up well.

Worse yet, there is an unending source of funding from
the VC community that keeps this flawed game plan on its
misguided trajectory. Money has poured into You Tube,
MySpace, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter—relationships measured
by the ton in 140 characters or less. Ad networks push
quantity over quality and defend a 99.7% failure rate with
a straight face.

We have seen the enemy, and he is us. May the best
schwerpunkt win.

————————————————————

Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, the Web’s largest video
advertising network. With more than 80,000 advertiser-
friendly video clips licensed from major film and TV
studios, the Vidsense network of more than 20,000 safe-
for-work partner websites delivers millions of qualified
visitors directly to advertiser websites on a pure Pay-
Per-Click (PPC) basis. Vidsense is to Adsense what video
is to print — a far more engaging and compelling environ-
ment for consumers and advertisers alike.

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

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2009 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

Having been in online advertising since 1996 (I know, this
makes me old!), I’ve seen the maturation and different
machinations of the industry for more than a decade and
frankly, where we’ve ended up isn’t too impressive or
inspiring.

Traveling around the country speaking with marketers, it
seems the industry continues to fall deeper and deeper
into the buzzword abyss of audience-based targeting,
behavioral targeting, ad exchanges, ad networks, retarget-
ing, CPX, etc.

It seems like the art of advertising has devolved into a
mundane process of dropping cookies, tracking consumers,
then hitting them with bad creative through small squares
and rectangles on a digital screen – all of which doesn’t
make the following recent statistics too surprising:

- Only .02% of people who see an ad click on it; this
inversely shows we have a 99.8% failure rate (that’s a
statistical 100% failure rate)

- 8% of online users account for 85% of all clicks
(”Natural Born Clickers,” comScore, 8/09)

- Only 16% of users clicked on any ad; this means 84% of
the online population didn’t click on an ad (”Natural
Born Clickers,” comScore, 8/09)

- More than 50% of impressions and 90% of clicks placed
through ad networks are fraudulent (”Identifying and
Combating Fraud,” Mpire, 9/09)

Hence, the decisions marketers are making when it comes to
online advertising don’t make any logical sense. We know
how advertising works. We know what it takes to build
great brands over time. Although the web represents a
different medium, it is still advertising and the
fundamentals of incredibly successful advertising are the
same today as they’ve always been.

The five immutable pillars of great marketing are:

1) Right Product: the business produces a product or
service that meets a need in the marketplace

2) Right Positioning: the marketing team knows how its
product or service fits with respect to its competition

3) Right Creative: once the product and positioning are
right, it comes down to how it’s going to be communicated;
the right creative strategy in tandem with GREAT creative
execution is vital to success

4) Right Audience: marketers must ensure their great
creative is being seen by the right audience

5) Right Environment: the environment in which an advertise-
ment is placed is critical to how that brand and message
are perceived by the prospective consumer

The first two pillars are related to marketing and the
last three are related to advertising. Unfortunately, in
the online world, marketers are missing two out of three
advertising pillars. Everyone gets the audience part as
evidenced by all the BT, cookies and ABT industry hubbub,
but without great creative and the right environment the
campaign will not be successful.

This leads me to such questions as: how did we get here?
When did the industry decide to stop being creative and
start relying on algorithms and cookie tracking as our
marketing idols? Is this the best we can do for the brands
we love and represent? What happened to great advertising
and the building of great brands—can’t we use the Internet
for this also?

It’s time we end the delusion the online world is living
in. It’s time we start being creative again and produce
really successful advertising. Although there is a place
for cookie tracking, behavioral targeting, and algorithmic-
based targeting, without great creative and the right
environment, the campaign will not work.

Let’s get creative. Let’s remember why we chose to be in
advertising in the first place. Let’s challenge each other
and let’s look upon the web as a digital palette to create
great brands that resonate with audiences. Most of the
greatest artists in the world work in the creative depart-
ments of advertising agencies. We need to help them
unleash their creativity.

At Centro, it’s what we enjoy doing. It’s the challenge
we live for. We love coming up with creative ideas and
ways to help your message resonate with the right audience.

We look forward to doing something interesting with you.
Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Shawn Riegsecker
Founder and President

———————————————————–

Ever see one of those human evolutionary charts? You know,
the ones that provide a visual timeline of our journey
from primordial ooze to glass tower?

Let me suggest that this same chart provides a good analogy
for our industry, except we need to hold it up to a mirror
to get the full impact, because advertising in general,
and media in particular, are heading straight back to the
swamp.

What’s more, whereas we’ve been perfecting our posture for
7 million years, our virtual devolution has taken only six
decades.

To illustrate this thesis, let’s equate the sponsored
content model that spawned the golden age of radio and
television back in the late 1930s and ’40s with today’s
Homo sapiens. Back then, content was king and advertisers
controlled their own destinies. Agencies were named after
real people, and audiences were easily reachable and happy
to oblige.

Enter the commercial pod in the 1950s (Homo clutterus), and
the beginning of our trek backwards begins in earnest, with
more advertisers competing for and encouraging shorter
attention spans through a growing assault on our senses and
sensibilities.

The downward pressure continues to build with the introduct-
ion of FM radio (Paranthropus Marconius) and independent
television stations soon thereafter. Momentum takes control
and the audience grows more fragmented; the media gene pool
more diluted and polluted.

The TV remote control (finally, a real use for opposable
thumbs) and cable television (Australopithecus Ted
Turnerus) arrive on the scene and our backs begin to
stoop under the weight of too much media The Internet
(Dryopithecus Googleus) explodes before our very eyes and
we feel our knuckles reaching for the ground.

What did our soap-peddling ancestors understand about the
causal relationship between content and audience that we’ve
lost sight of over the past 60 years? With online video
content all the current rage, perhaps the answer lies
within one of three cogent questions advertisers can and
should ask themselves and/or their agencies:

1) Am I better off rubbing elbows with video content, other
advertisers, and audiences on a third-party publisher’s
site?

2) Am I better off rubbing elbows with video content, other
advertisers, and audiences on the content provider’s
site?

3) Am I better off hosting both content and audience all by
myself on my site?

With industry-average CTRs based on “legitimate” impressions
(no RON crap allowed) now congregating south of .1%,
question #1 answers itself with a resounding “NO”. The
same goes for question #2.

But if you answered “Yes” to question #3, congratulations!
You’ve escaped the revolving door to Darwin’s waiting room
(thanks, Dennis Miller) and are well on your way to media
survival in the 21st century!

Interestingly enough, content providers and publishers also
stand to benefit through this re-discovery of what works by
abandoning their misguided territorial claims to content
and allowing it to work its magic where it can work best,
front and center within the branded surroundings of the
advertiser who’s picking up the tab.

Whether we choose to believe it (let alone accept it) or
not, we are now playing witness to the demise of advertis-
ing as intermediary and to the resurrection of advertising
as destination. That’s because no other model except
advertising as destination embraces the three truths of
media on-demand:

1) Nobody demands more advertising.
2) Everybody demands more video.
3) Nobody and everybody are the same people.

Because we’re so invested in the advertising as intermediary
model our industry keeps targeting behavior hit-and-miss in
the rearview mirror rather than tapping behavior that we
know for certain already exists. We’ve devolved to where we
now define ad-supported media as advertisers supporting
content, rather than content supporting advertisers.

The course is clear. The way forward is to head right
back where we started.

————————————————————

About Mike Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Mike Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with very select rapid-growth clients to
help define and execute healthy brand strategies in a
toxic media environment.

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

In a recent article here on MediaBizBloggers, The March to
Addressability, Universal McCann’s David Cohen intones,
“Delivering the right message to the right consumer at the
right time is the holy grail of advertising.”

In another article, The Three Rs of Engagement, Catalyst
SF’s Cory Treffiletti labels these three Rs as “…recency,
resonance and relevance.”

Both are saying the same thing: Right message is to
resonance what right consumer is to relevance what right
time is to recency. More Rs, more fun! Six Rs!

But with all due respect to my esteemed colleagues, I
believe it’s a matter of close but no cigar in each case.
Neither hits the mark, and both miss it for the same
reason. Because addressability and engagement can only
occur in the right place.

Addressability and engagement are properties of the
message, not media targeting. Targeting neither addresses
nor engages anyone. Case in point, industry-average CTRs
that are now less than .1%. If the holy grail of
advertising is indeed found within the Three Rs of Engage-
ment, then why do the data reveal the exact opposite?
Anybody looking at the numbers would reasonably conclude
that we are bound and determined to foist the wrong message
on the wrong consumer at the wrong time – The Three W’s of
Unholy Disengagement!

The sober reality is that in an on-demand world, nobody
demands more advertising. That’s why response rates for
banner and text ads have now reached statistical zero. We
have the means to avoid the message, so we do.

But what about relevance? Messrs. Cohen, Treffiletti, et
al, would have us believe that consumers actually “want”
relevant ads and that given a choice between relevant and
irrelevant will respond accordingly. Which consumers are
these? Everything I read — including the latest from
comScore, Inc. — tells me that more than 999 out of every
thousand consumers choose no ads at all, relevant or other-
wise.

Let’s cut to the chase: The only place addressability and
engagement can occur is in the controlled environment of
an advertiser’s own website or branded landing page. There
are precious few brands and even fewer agencies that
understand this, although some – like Coca-Cola, Lexus
and Unilever (catch their engaging new Breyers Ice Cream
campaign at www.smoothandcreamy.com) – have begun to
experiment with it.

Advertisers need to cease their reliance on advertising as
intermediary and embrace advertising as destination through
the creation of environments to buy that, like the brand
examples above, engage the senses. To see exactly how to
achieve this seemingly elusive media symbiosis, I invite
you to spend a few minutes here perusing our Brothers
Einstein archives. Or, go to www.vidsense.com and see this
theory at work in proven practice.

Better yet, I welcome anyone so interested to call me at
(219) 878-1006 to discuss the possibilities. I won’t
promise you the holy grail (that, as the Hebrew National
folks might suggest, is better left to a higher authority),
but I will provide some needed relief from what doesn’t
work by offering you something that does.

————————————————————

Mike Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with very select rapid-growth clients to
help define and execute healthy brand strategies in a
toxic media environment.

———————————————————–

Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the
great captains of our lives and we obey them without
realizing it. –Vincent Van Gogh

I do a fair amount of reading, but most of the quotations
I reference in my writing come from personal favorites
collected over the past thirty years. For more than a
decade now, I have been sending them to a following that
has grown to about 20,000 readers.

My writing topics are often sparked by quotes that relate
to what we do for a living. The Van Gogh quotation above
is one of these. I use it with the full knowledge that
Van Gogh understood a great deal about emotion but very
little about marketing.

He could not sell his paintings when he was alive and his
way of endearing himself to the love of his life was to cut
off his ear and mail it to her in a box. Dale Carnegie he
wasn’t. But in the spirit of trusting the tale and not the
teller, Van Gogh can teach us a thing or two about online
advertising… if we only listen with both ears.

The digital revolution has brought many wonderful changes
to our lives. But like each and every other technology,
our cherished digital tools come with a real downside to
consider: the more that digital intrudes in our lives,
the more emotionally disconnected we become.

————————————————————
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————————————————————

Of course this is reflected in online advertising. With so
little emotional capital invested, declining performance
should come as no surprise. That’s because our industry
leaders, if you can call them that, are looking for love
in all the wrong places, no surprise since love – as a
purely emotional creature – falls far beyond the narrow
confines of their algorithmically attuned sensibilities.

Ask yourself: As a marketing professional, how much of your
time is actually spent trying to understand your audience?
HOW do you engage them? WHAT motivates them? WHY do they
– or you, for that matter — care? Just about every
philosopher and psychologist on the planet agrees that
emotions rule our lives. Not numbers, not statistics, not
metrics. Emotions.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing
with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
– Dale Carnegie

How many seminars or media conferences address the
emotional component of marketing? We need to grab people’s
attention. Isn’t this the first step in the marketing
mating dance? Yet when we ignore passion and emotion, we
find it difficult, if not impossible, to break through the
growing clutter.

As marketers, we must recognize the need to change how we
interact with the audience — not by just grabbing their
attention, but by cultivating it once we have it. We must
understand the crucial role emotion plays in this process,
and apply its lessons accordingly.

————————————————————
“I was a little surprised by this gift I got, but I
have to say, even after a year, it is still one of
my favorites.” – Bob

You too will love the Auto Seat Organizer. See why people
get one for themselves and a month later buy another one
as for a gift.

Containing multiple storage compartments and see-thru mesh
pockets, your car or truck will always be neat, tidy and
organized. See a picture of this or order (for just $7.99
or get two for $12.98 by visiting: Auto Seat Organizer
————————————————————

Most brand advertisers, marketers and their agencies are
too busy chasing string to focus on what needs to be done.
As an industry, we perceive Web surfers as rational
automatons. And the marketing models we’ve designed to
identify and reach them involve amassing ever growing
amounts of data in hopes of predicting future behavior.

Meanwhile, with virtually no emotional compass whatsoever,
advertising effectiveness and content quality continue to
stray from the path.

But there is a way out. It involves rethinking the way we
engage audiences. It means understanding where the nexus
of engagement resides. The process can begin anywhere, but
by creating what author Maggie Jackson calls a climate of
distraction, it becomes apparent that communication between
audience and brand is best controlled and enhanced on the
advertiser’s own site.

An actual illustration is in order. More than 40 million
people have seen a short video clip about a lion cub raised
in the UK and then released into the wild. Most viewed it
on YouTube. But judge for yourself whether viewers are
better engaged there, or here: http://www.TheLionDVD.com.

In this example, the video snacking takes place on a site
that controls the climate of distraction (or what Bill
Bernbach called the environment to buy). Also notice the
post roll AFTER the snacking takes place. (Full disclosure
here…my sister produced this snack, the post roll and
landing page.) And the other disclosure is that my media
company is providing her with hundreds of thousands of
online video snackers.

Let me close by asking a simple question of those of you
who clicked on the above link…did you feel anything?

————————————————————

Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense – The Video Snack Network.
With more than 80,000 advertiser-friendly video clips
licensed from major film and TV studios, the Vidsense
network of more than 50,000 safe-for-work websites
delivers millions of qualified visitors directly to
advertiser websites on a pure Pay-Per-Visitor (PPV) basis.

————————————————————

A realization struck me just a couple days ago: I was
thinking about the steady dose of critical assessment that
characterizes my weekly musings and my propensity to use
a rather large and heavy sledge hammer to bang away at
what passes for conventional marketing “wisdom.”

But amidst the headlines on torture, stock market
uncertainties and rising unemployment, perhaps it’s time
to point to some positive things our industry offers. Just
as there are more and more critical articles surfacing
that challenge the online status quo, I want to turn the
other cheek—or at least give it a try. Why? Who knows.
Maybe I’m just growing tired of preaching to the coterie
of folks who agree with me!

I recently was asked to speak at the CMMA (Chicago Media
and Marketing Association) monthly gathering. Together
with a video SEO expert, we discussed online video and
its enormous potential. I was struck by how few had heard
of the term “video snacking.” Given that nearly 80% (77%
to be exact) of all video viewing online is the result of
“video snacking” rather than search, we should talk about
this.

————————————————————
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————————————————————

So what exactly is video snacking?

Simply put, it is spontaneous video viewing that occurs
while doing something else. It could be a link to a video
sent by a friend or a link inside a news story. Or it
could be viewing some editor’s picks on a video site like
YouTube.

Video snacking stands in direct contrast to actually
searching for, and then viewing a particular video clip.
And again, for anybody doing the math, more than three
times as many video views occur through random video
snacking than through purposeful search.

Yet most of the trade ink surrounding online video is
geared to search technology, SEM, SEO. But if we really
want to understand online video and how to harness its
innate power and appeal, it behooves us to examine how
people actually consume it.

Advertisers, in particular, should pay closer attention to
how video is consumed. Why? I think my friend, Tom Cuniff,
VP of Marketing at Combe, Inc. (Just For Men, Cepacol,
Grecian Formula, Vagisil, and about a dozen other brands)
may have the answer. Here’s how he replied when asked why
video snacking was important to him and his company:

I really like marketing within the video snacking mindset
because I have the opportunity to intervene into his/her
awareness much easier than if they were doing purposeful
searching… unless they were searching for my brands.

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Tom is a savvy marketer. He understands that creative
“intervention” is what advertising and marketing is all
about. Intervening while people are “snacking” is a chance
to tap and satisfy this insatiable appetite for distraction
in a very positive manner. Besides, why try to intervene
with the 23% of consumers whose video attention is other-
wise focused? Those searching for a particular video clip—
their minority status notwithstanding—have already
“declared” their intention, described nicely in this
analogy from Mr. Cuniff:

Say someone is walking across the room to get a fire
extinguisher. They are focused on getting to the fire
extinguisher and I really will have a hard time getting
that person’s attention. But with video snackers, I can
get their interest more easily. It’s just common sense.

What Tom is saying is another formulation of what Bill
Bernbach said many years ago. Bernbach spoke of advertisers
creating “environments to buy.” Video snacking presents an
opportunity to resonate with those 77% of video-hungry
consumers looking for a satisfying video snack. In essence,
this proven behavior and the mindset that fuels it combine
to produce the ultimate environment to buy.

The wonder of the Internet is that we now have a virtually
unlimited supply of tasty video snacks to share. And we
definitely have the appetite. So advertisers, what are you
waiting for? It’s time to pony up to the nearest video
snack bar!

————————————————————

About Jaffer Ali

Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, the Web’s largest video
advertising network. With more than 80,000 advertiser-
friendly video clips licensed from major film and TV
studios, the Vidsense network of more than 50,000 safe-
for-work partner websites delivers millions of qualified
visitors directly to advertiser websites on a pure
Pay-Per-View (PPV) basis.

————————————————————

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with
the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
– Will Rogers

In Part 1 of Gimme a Break, I suggested that the reason why
advertising doesn’t work very well anymore is because we’ve
essentially eliminated the commercial break from our lives
– especially during the commercial break, which nowadays
more closely resembles a digital feeding frenzy, and hence
destroys the very ad model it’s designed to serve. In fact,
our entire on-demand lives have devolved into extended
digital feeding frenzies, with no time for reflection, no
tolerance whatsoever for intrusion, and no breaks from the
media action.

What bothers me most about the current state of advertising
and marketing, however, is how utterly predatory and
atavistic we’ve become since the mid-1990s, when twenty-
something digital evangelists decided that advertisers
and marketers should a) engage in brand dialogues with
consumers (mostly because there was suddenly a shitload of
new digital technology to foist on them), and b) conduct
said brand dialogues in a thoroughly mediated and seamless
digital world, which of course renders impossible the
requisite intrusion and time to establish and maintain any
meaningful dialogue – brand or otherwise – with anyone.
Baffled and besieged, older, more sober generations of
advertisers and marketers deferred immediately and stepped
aside, mostly because they couldn’t reboot their own
computers without the help of the twenty-somethings. The
days of the commercial break were clearly numbered.

Of course the predatory attribute I assigned above should
not be confused with anything or anyone forward-thinking
or proactive, and is wholly reactive instead (hence its
atavistic nature), far more akin to the desperate pride of
lions that haunts a watering hole during a deadly drought
than the same willful pride that hunts at night when water
and game are plentiful. Thus today’s generation of
advertisers and marketers, all clustered like starving
lions around the same watering hole, truly believe that
they owe their jobs to consumer opinion, and are therefore
compelled to react like lemmings as quickly as possible
to perceived consumer demand – with every digital
technology in their arsenal. By contrast, their displaced
predecessors knew otherwise: that there is no such thing
as consumer demand except to the extent that marketers
and advertisers create it. The good ones knew something
else also: that job one in creating consumer demand was
to create and protect the integrity of the commercial
break, what Bill Bernbach called the environment to buy.

But how can we possibly expect others to take a break long
enough to engage our brand messages if we can’t take one
for ourselves? Remember, we as marketers and advertisers
create and shape consumer demand. And if we can’t control
how we spend our own time, how can we as marketers and
advertisers possibly hope to influence how others spend
theirs?

————————————————————
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The following is an excerpt from a recent post I made to
the Oldtimers Foundation listserv:

To the question of how we can affect change in the midst
of our day jobs and selfish best interests, I would reply,
“First, slow down.” Our agendas are already far too full
and far too hectic to engage in or otherwise entertain
meaningful thought and discourse. We’ve turned time — our
only real inventory — into an enemy. We cannot begin to
accommodate new thoughts and behaviors unless and until
we find a way to intervene in our own lives long and
frequently enough to prepare the soil of our souls for new
seeds. We cannot affect meaningful change in ourselves or
others unless and until we reclaim our time.

Of course the reclamation of our time is easier said than
done, but — in all earnestness — I would suggest the
following remedial steps:

1. Change your career objective right now. Aspire instead
to take a nap, go for a walk, read a good novel or other-
wise tune out completely for at least an hour during the
course of each work day. No digital devices or electronic
media allowed (with the sole exception of music). We spend
our entire work lives striving for the moment when we can
retire, put our feet up, and take a nap. My suggestion
therefore is to eliminate the career middle man and head
straight for the nap. You (and just about everyone else
you know) will thank me later. It ain’t about money at
the end of the day; it’s about time, and how and where
and with whom we spend it. The rest of your work day will
fall magically into place once you aspire — first and
foremost — to take a nap as your new career objective.

2. Be conscious of your tools. Move your personal and
professional communications up the emotional impact ladder
at every opportunity. In other words, consciously choose
communications tools that require more deliberation and
deliver more heart and soul — like a phone call or a well-
crafted letter or a face-to-face meeting over an email,
text message or tweet — whenever possible. Always choose
quality over quantity (because it’s always your choice),
and always choose deliberateness over speed; don’t
communicate on the run except in emergencies. Remember:
speed kills.

3. Resist the narcotic impulse to check your email inbox
for the first hour of every day. Each time you sit down
first thing in the morning to check your email inbox, you
automatically put your own agenda dead last behind the
collective agendas of all the emails you find there. In
doing so you invite a purely reactive mindset that forces
you to play catchup for the balance of your day (and life).

————————————————————
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Each of the above suggestions requires time and conscious
deliberation. But that’s the point. We can choose to
intervene in our own lives and industry or someone or
something else will intervene for us — guaranteed.

Advertisers, take a nap, and when you wake up encourage
your agency contacts to take a nap also. Mandate a no-
email period each morning. Get them out of the fire-
fighting business and into the fire-starting business.
Their performance will improve and so will yours.

Agencies, create a digital media-free area where your
employees can sit down and talk quietly, read a book, or
just stretch out and take a nap. Their performance will
improve and so will yours.

Time is of the essence, but only when we honor it, only
when we befriend it. Consider therefore the words of Jim
Goodwin and Sydney J. Harris:
“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”

And entertain right now the sage advice of Lily Tomlin:
“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.”

————————————————————

About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help
define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic
media environment.

————————————————————

Best,

JA

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

————————————————————
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The Cheng and Ch’i of Online Advertising – by Jaffer Ali

British General: Then I think I can speak for Field
Marshal Montgomery. He’d say you’re asking the impossible
of your men.

George S. Patton: Of course he would. Cause he’s never
realized that’s what we’re in business for.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing about the
soul of online advertising. Much of what I’ve written has
been either misinterpreted or misunderstood, for which I
accept most of the blame. My only defense is my contention
that dialectical concepts don’t necessarily lend themselves
to simple narrative and/or articulation.

My intended audience is the growing culture of online
advertising professionals; my perspective one of an insider
who makes his living from the fruits of our collective
effort. Without exception, my point of departure is my
abiding belief in the profound potential of what we’re in
business for.

This matters a great deal to me because I am distressed by
how we have limited history’s grandest communication tool
to specious analytics that betray our best intentions. And
conventional media wisdom has always been to invest our
trust in the numbers, because the numbers don’t lie. Let
me suggest that there is no wisdom or truth to this
misguided notion, and that we’d perhaps be better served
by taking a long look back to see how best to move forward.
With this in mind, please allow me to introduce you to the
ancient concepts of cheng and ch’i.

No, cheng and ch’i isn’t some B-team comedy duo armed
with a Zig-Zag endorsement. Cheng and ch’i were first
promulgated 2,500 years ago by the Chinese general,
Sun Tzu, in his brilliant treatise, Art of War. I am
in debt to military strategist John Boyd and even more
so to Chet Richards for introducing these twin concepts
to the business lexicon.

Cheng and ch’i defy strict translations, but for our
purposes, here are the definitions:

Cheng: Conventional tactics or strategy. That which is
expected.

Ch’i: Unconventional tactics or strategy. Going beyond
that which is expected.

Patton, a student of cheng/ch’i knew that doing “the
impossible” obviously went beyond the expected. This was
ch’i and became the driving principle that inspired him.

Cheng and ch’i are like yin and yang in that the two are
complimentary and inextricably entwined. They can also
be transformed into each other. Think about this for a
minute. What is at first unexpected becomes expectation
over time. For example, witnessing your child’s first
steps is delightful ch’i. After a few months, it becomes
cheng or “old hat”.

It can also be the case that one person’s cheng is
another’s ch’i.

Let’s apply these precepts to our own cause. For the
quants among us, online analytics based on sophisticated
metrics is mother’s milk. It’s both necessary and
expected; pure cheng if you will. Accordingly, only the
newest, fastest, most complex behavioral algorithms can
achieve ch’i status in their eyes. But neither today’s
quantifiable cheng, nor tomorrow’s equally vapid ch’i
move us any closer to understanding what we’re in business
for. That’s because cheng and ch’i comprise a belief
system that transcends measurement.

————————————————————
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To apply my idea of cheng and ch’i to online advertising,
let me share with you the inspiration behind our own online
business model, Vidsense.

Vidsense is a pay-per-click video network; cheng pure and
simple. Vidsense uses a conventional metric—cost-per-click—
as its coin of the realm. Approximately 50% of all online
advertising is sold on a per-click basis, with Google, the
largest practitioner.

Not so long ago, pay-per-click was new and innovative. It
was delightful ch’i compared to its CPM-based predecessor.
But paying for clicks is no longer revolutionary,
innovative, or particularly clever. Paying for clicks is
now decidedly cheng.

With Vidsense, we place our weight of effort behind a new
paradigm that achieves the ch’i necessary to keep us
focused on what we’re in business for. We deliver clicks
like any other pay-per-click network, but we do it in a
manner that forges a genuine bond between brand and
consumer. Essentially, we transform advertisers from
their traditional role as hunters into a more actionable
portrayal as the hunted. Let me explain:

Vidsense engages consumers on their own terms predicated
on our belief that the best way to target your audience
in an on-demand medium is to let them target you instead.

For example, we recently conducted a successful campaign
for Just for Men’s Touch of Gray. The objective was clear:
Get boomer-aged men to visit Touch of Gray’s website where
they could take advantage of a line-extension launch
promotion.

To do this, we placed demographically targeted thumbnail
links to popular TV and movie clips across compatible
publishers within our vast network of more than 20,000
safe-for-work websites. Consumers who clicked on a
thumbnail were transported directly to Touch of Gray’s
website where the chosen clip was then viewed within the
exclusive confines of Touch of Gray’s carefully branded
environment. The results speak for themselves: Of the
165,000 Vidsense-generated click-throughs, fully 85%
fell within Touch of Gray’s prime target demo of men
45+. 90% were unique visitors, and more than a thousand
took advantage of a free coupon offer. These 165,000
visitors collectively spent nearly 6,600 hours on Just
for Men’s website, literally surrounded by the Touch of
Gray brand. Technically, we were selling the click
(cheng). But we delivered something totally unexpected
(ch’i). By honoring viewer choice and fulfilling
expectations, we delivered a happy camper directly to
the advertiser’s online showroom as a result. The hunter
became the hunted, and everybody was satisfied. The
content served as a common meeting ground reminiscent of
advertising times gone by. Cheng and ch’i were employed
together, inextricably entwined in pursuit of what we’re
in business for.

In another recent article of mine, Has the Online Industry
Lost Its Schwerpunkt?, I invoke another military stratagem
to analogize how and where to best place our weight of
effort. I suggest by proxy that there is an appalling
lack of ch’i in today’s online media ecology. From my
insider’s perspective, measurement is necessary, but not
a means to its own end! Numerical analysis ad nauseum
is the easy part—that’s what computers do best. But this
is not ch’i. This is not where we should focus our intent;
not where we should place our weight of effort.

I believe we can do better as an industry than to settle
for the same old cheng. Or worse, try to convince ourselves
that our cheng is ch’i. We need more creativity. We need
innovation that reaches beyond algorithmic reduction. We
need to embrace quality at every turn. We need to position
relationships at the fulcrum of everything we do. We need
cheng AND ch’i. Our schwerpunkt demands it, and to
paraphrase George Patton, it’s what we’re in business for.