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.

————————————————————

Article Link: http://www.jackmyers.com/commentary/Jaffer-Ali/44816567.html

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all
science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can
no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as
good as dead: his eyes are closed. — Albert Einstein

This article was inspired by Dr. Robert Fuller of Bradley
University. He is a professor of Religious Studies and my
son sent me a link to his brilliant lecture which was
taped and made available online:
http://admissions.bradley.edu/clients/bradleyedu/btvplayer/index.php?videoid=14&btv=off

Some may find it odd that I could gain marketing inspira-
tion from a religious scholar, but as I listened and
watched Dr. Fuller, I could not help but think that the
major problem today with marketing in general and with
online marketing in particular, is the conspicuous absence
of the essential and vital capacity to wonder.

Our sense of wonder has been crushed under the weight of
false promises promulgated by technological clay idols of
our own design. In fact, I contend that the failure of
these algorithmically precise yet dispassionate media
models is in direct correlation to our estrangement from
that special sense of awe.

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So, what is wonder? Perhaps it’s easier to describe through
what Jung called circumambulation… or talking around the
subject. Wonder involves the unexpected, those inexplicable,
spontaneous feelings that inspire our thoughts and actions.
And isn’t that what good advertising and marketing is all
about?

Wonder invites possibilities. This is in stark contrast
to algorithmic limitations. In fact, if your marketing
campaign does not evoke a sense of wonder, you should
immediately go back to the drawing board. Why? Two reasons:
1) Because wonder gives new meaning to the world around us,
and 2) It’s our job! If we decide that what we do is indeed
a sacred journey, then not only will we be enriched through
wonderment, we will enrich all around us.

That’s because wonder connects us. We live in a fragmented
world and wonder draws us into something greater than
ourselves and unites us. Great marketing sustains this
sense of wonder by reaching and touching something inside
of us. It is an emotional connection, a transcendent state
through which soul is injected into the process.

We have become so enamored of numbers that we have closed
ourselves to the possibilities and potential in what we
do. Wonder emanates from within. But the growing noise in
our heads has all but drowned out the wondrous feelings
our hearts beg to express.

It is not our possession of knowledge that threatens our
sense of wonder. It is our abandonment of wonder and
mystery as essential, that is destroying it. You have to
remain open to the possibilities in order to experience
wonder. And you need to experience those possibilities
before you can articulate them.

It’s a damn shame that our online industry has ceased to
wonder, because we could all use a healthy dose of what
could be. That being said, I find it interesting and
utterly appropriate that the antidote to what ails us
would come from a professor of religious studies.

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

Reawakening our sense of wonder is really the task at hand.
If you can do this, from the inside out, you will transform
your life. This inside-out transformation will manifest in
your business model… in your advertising campaign… and
most of all, in your relationships with others and the
world around you.

Carl Jung said, “The self is our life’s goal, for it is the
most complete expression of that fateful combination we
call individuality.” Once we experience wonder for our-
selves, we then can then transcend our individuality and
speak to others in a shared language of the heart.

If we believe that life is a sacred journey, then wonder
is our roadmap to a great life. It’s also the blueprint
for true marketing. If you are heading up an advertising
or marketing campaign, please heed this simple advice
from one of Dr. Fuller’s heroes:

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he
needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share
it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery
of the world we live in. — Rachel Carson

————————————————————

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.

————————————————————

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is
the illusion of knowledge. –Daniel Boorstin

The title of today’s commentary was lifted from Friedrich
August Von Hayek’s acceptance speech for the 1974 Nobel
Prize in Economics. He chose that August forum to rail
against his discipline, for he had seen economics fall
under the sway of “physics envy.”

Thirty-five years later, his critique of the state of
economic theory still rings true, especially in the context
of the online marketing landscape. To wit, there is a
branch of online marketing whose preoccupation is collect-
ing as much data as possible on the individual and then
mining that data for discernible patterns of behavior. The
goal, according to Eric Schmidt of Google, is “to predict
even what you will search for before you search for it.”
In short, the goal of behavioral data collection is to
predict human behavior on a micro level.

Just as in economic theory, in which more and more
variables are measured in the vain attempt to predict
behavior, Hayek pointed out the human limitations inherent
in such complex behaviors and predictive systems. In
Hayek’s own words:

“We know… a great many facts which we cannot measure
and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and
general information. And because effects of these facts
in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by
quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by
those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific
evidence; they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction
that factors which they can measure are the only ones
relevant.”

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Marketing online has followed the path of mathematical
reduction. Proponents of this school of thought are not
the creative ad men of days gone by, but technocrats with
MBAs, engineering and yes, even physics degrees. Hayek
again cautions:

“It has led to the illusion that we can use this [math
technique] for determination and prediction… and this
has led to a vain search for quantitative or numerical
constants. This happened in spite of the fact that founders
of mathematical economics had no such illusions…Vilfred
Pareto, one of the founders of this theory clearly stated,
its purpose cannot be ‘to arrive at a numerical calculation
of prices’ because as he said it would be absurd to assume
we could ascertain all the data.”

Some reading this might protest that behavioral targeting
is useful even if we cannot ascertain all data for predict-
ion. After all, something is better than nothing, right?
Upon closer inspection though, the answer may be perhaps
not. Plausibility aside, in actual practice the false
illusion of knowledge we do NOT possess has proved
disastrous. Remember, marketers are making investments
based upon these admittedly flawed marketing premises.

Also, that which distracts marketers from doing what they
should be doing — namely marketing — is not a good thing.
If creativity becomes an afterthought, you are already
way behind in the game. If you are not constantly thinking
about what you can offer your audience, you already have
two strikes against you. Again Hayek:

“There may be few instances in which the superstition
that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done
positive harm…[but] an almost exclusive concentration
on quantitatively measurable surface phenomena has produced
a policy which has made matters worse.”

A growing number of online marketers want to wrest control
back from the quants. As self-proclaimed marketing experts,
they’ve had their day in the sun, right alongside the
legions of other soft “science” experts: the psychologists,
political scientists, economists, and historians. Like
everywhere else that quasi-science triumphs over common
sense, the quant stamp on the online market has been a
dismal failure.

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

We all wanted marketing to become a science when it is in
fact, a lost art. Our collective delusion was that we could
hand the keys to marketing over to the guys with pocket
protectors. We abrogated our responsibilities as advertis-
ing and marketing professionals. We bowed to the false idol
of science. Hayek, a true scientist in his own right, said:

“Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science
is only too often based upon a false belief that the
scientific method consists in application of a ready
made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the
substance of a scientific procedure, as if one needed
only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social
problems.”

I can almost feel the daggers from the quants who are
still reading this. They inevitably will try to save their
discipline (and jobs) by claiming that they can truly
predict behavior. But the complex interaction of inherently
unpredictable human thought with unknowable events makes
this “discipline” even more of a fool’s errand; its
relative “success” limited in time and degree.

Who better than Professor Hayek to close this piece:

“If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to
improve [marketing models], he will have to learn that in
this, as in all other fields where essential complexity
of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full
knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”

————————————————————

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
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for-work partner websites delivers millions of qualified
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environment for consumers and advertisers alike.

————————————————————

———————————————————-
Walking the Talk – Embracing Uncertainty
– by Jaffer Ali

To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain
is to be ridiculous.
–Chinese Proverb

My modus operandi after graduating college was to eliminate
as much uncertainty in my life as possible. Maybe that’s
because I believed my only alternative was to be like the
feather in the wind at the beginning of Forest Gump.

After becoming the CEO of a direct marketing company,
“visibility” became my magic word. I wanted predictable
results… predictable processes… I craved the comfort
of certainty. When uncertainty reared its head, I armed
myself with all the data one could muster and fought back.

But something didn’t feel quite right. I hungered and
thirsted for information, yet was starved of real
knowledge.

“…rare events cannot be estimated from empirical
observation since they are rare.”
–Nicholas Taleb, Author of The Black Swan

————————————————————
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Our most profitable catalog mailing ever featured over
1500 military videos. It took four months to get this
catalog from product selection to mailbox.

Then one day after sending out a few million catalogs,
President George Bush (the original) launched a massive
military operation named Desert Storm. Our response rates
plummeted 80% and nearly bankrupted us. Nobody wanted to
watch videos of past wars when there was a brand new one
live and in color on CNN.

Yet Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “God does not play
dice with the Universe” remained terra firma for me.
Randomness and uncertainty could be tamed by working
harder than everybody else. In those years, I often left
home before my kids awoke and got home long after they
went to sleep. Hey, eliminating uncertainty is hard work!

After selling the catalog operation, the non-compete
provision allowed for TV direct response and online market-
ing. The year was 1996 and we contemplated re-purposing
some of the top titles from previous DR campaigns; among
which was a Shirley Temple compilation. We tested in early
December of 1996 and produced a cute commercial of a very
precocious 6-year-old Shirley Temple.

Then on Christmas day 1996, JonBenet Ramsey was murdered
and garnered nationwide headlines. Suddenly, our little
Miss Temple didn’t seem so “cute” anymore. The promotion
died after a promising test, brought to its knees by my
old nemesis uncertainty.

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting: Concurrent
to our Shirley Temple debacle, we were also in test with
two Riverdance commercials. The results were marginal, but
unbeknownst to us, Michael Flatley’s company had made a
deal with PBS to air the entire Riverdance performance
in late 1996. Conventional thinking suggested that a
commercial-free airing would hurt our sales. But just the
opposite occurred. Sales jumped AFTER the PBS airing!
Riverdance became the hit DR product of 1997, thanks in
no uncertain terms to uncertainty. I was beginning to
appreciate uncertainty in the context of its alter ego,
otherwise known as LUCK.

Fast forward to the world of online marketing.

Online marketers are heavily vested in the notion that
predictive modeling of human behavior is a rational
process. This is what happens when MBA-driven venture
capitalists pour billions of dollars into behavioral
targeting methodologies hell-bent on eliminating—or at
minimum taming—uncertainty. And yet, what does our most
recent report card reveal? Industry-standard click-through
response rates of .35%. That’s a 99.65% failure rate for
anyone who’s not certain of exactly how to interpret the
data.

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Thankfully, life’s lessons cured me of my quest for
certainty. But I ended up in an online arena which still
clings to the illusion that rational behavior is something
that can—and should—be measured. Interestingly enough, I
came to learn that in the original Sanskrit, “measurement”
and “illusion” had the same meaning.

Behavioral Targeting (BT) promised a new way to account-
ability. But the underlying assumption that humans are
rational creatures is flawed; made even more specious the
closer we look. We need delve no further than the stock
market to see what we get when we place blind-faith in BT
models that tell us who, what, where and how, but never
“why”. As Dr. Phil would say: “How’s that working for ya?”

So let me say as emphatically as I can that eliminating
uncertainty is not a strategy. The way out of the mess
is to EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY!

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold
his powers.”
–Erich Fromm

We need to manage a portfolio of uncertain futures. Forget
about trying to out-think chance. It is a fool’s errand.
We live in a quantum reality of almost infinite
possibilities. We can let our creative juices flow and
pursue an ongoing and unending journey guided by
uncertainty.

If we wake up every day open to these possibilities,
certain or not, we will go to sleep each night a little
wiser. We must welcome and embrace what we do not under-
stand. It is when we question our assumptions that we
begin the creative process. It is through uncertainty
that greater truths emerge. On that note, I leave you
with a precious quote from Van Gogh:

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the
sight of the stars makes me dream.”
–Vincent van Gogh

————————————————————

A quick review of recent articles concerning online market-
ing reveals that seven in ten deal with some form of
targeting. Behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, geo-
targeting, demographic targeting…you name it, there’s a
targeted label for it! This meme is so strong that media
pioneer Jeff Einstein suggests we are more interested in
targeting than we are in marketing.

So is this article just more of the same? Sort of… but
with a twist. Let me suggest that in an on-demand universe,
the time has come for advertisers and marketers to stop
targeting their audiences and let their audiences target
them instead. But before we get to the pragmatic hows,
let’s ask:

WHY should your audience target you?

For starters, it’s only logical. When you deconstruct the
search process you realize it’s the audience — not the
advertiser — that’s doing the searching. For that matter,
what difference does it make WHERE the search begins?
What’s important is where it ends up. For example, let’s
say you’re Zappos and you’re looking to attract people
searching for shoes. Regardless of where they begin their
search, if they end up at Zappos, they have in effect
targeted you.

By letting your audience target you, you allow common sense
to prevail over the mountains of indecipherable data and
specious behavioral algorithms that, truth be told, only
serve to reveal precisely why you fail to engage — and
often repel — your “target” more than 99% of the time!

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By letting your audience target you, the advertising
environment is transformed from one of contention to one
of cooperation. In Bernbachesque terms, this engagement
of the audience on its own terms creates the coveted and
essential “environment to buy”.

By letting your audience target you, a more comfortable
relationship ensues. The pursuer becomes the pursued in a
marketing mating dance where you encourage the audience
to take the lead. They come to you because they WANT to.

By letting your audience target you, you invite them into
your online home. And on your home turf, you dictate the
décor, you decide what to serve, you are the gracious host.
A :15 pre-roll or banner ad that is largely ignored simply
can’t – and doesn’t – compare.

Given the above, the value in letting your audience target
you would seem obvious. Just as our founding fathers viewed
the truth that “all men are created equal” to be self-
evident, they still saw the necessity to proclaim that
truth in the Declaration of Independence. I think they knew
that self-evident truths are often anything but.

Let’s now move from the conceptual “why” of audience search
– a basic need to know — to the pragmatic “how” that
need can best be satisfied.

To begin a campaign whereby your audience targets you, it
is critical that you first understand exactly whom — age,
gender, sensibilities, etc. — you want pursuing you. It’s
taken for granted that you know this and aren’t merely
caught up in another self-evident truth. Armed with the
cogent information, you must now lure your audience into
your lair. Romance them. Seduce them. Engage them. Invite
them in. Do not fall prey to algorithmic erudition. Do
not be sweet talked by the quants. Embrace instead a new
language that articulates your schwerpunkt (weight of
effort or focus of intention); one that communicates
the essential dynamics of a healthy brand/consumer
relationship.

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To this end, we’d all be well-advised to heed some very
basic lessons learned in the golden ages of radio and
television, when content was king and advertisers
controlled their own destinies. This is exactly what we
strive for with our own business model when we use proven
content as the honey that attracts the bees.

We begin this process through strategic placement of
thumbnail links to popular TV and movie clips across a
broad spectrum of the more than 20,000 websites in our
video ad network. Viewers who click on a thumbnail are
transported to a paying advertiser’s website where an
embedded video player launches the chosen clip (the
operative word is chosen). In so doing, we tap viewer
predisposition on behalf of our advertisers and reverse
the roles in the traditional “targeting” paradigm. The
hunter becomes the hunted. The pursuer becomes the
pursued. The advertiser becomes the target.

I cannot stress this enough: It is not the website that
is all-important, it is the search itself. The search
creates the self-selection process. It identifies the
hand raiser if you will. With video, the type of content
determines and segments the audience. A Liberace video
clip will yield a different viewer than a Kanye West
clip. Through careful attention to the causal connections
between 1) audience and content, and 2) content and
advertiser, the process forges a genuine relationship
between brand and consumer.

Research confirms that the audience doesn’t care WHERE
they view the content. The satisfaction is in the viewing,
so when the right content is offered and chosen, and the
viewing enjoyed on your site, you’ve essentially welcomed
a satisfied guest into your home.

If we ask better questions we’ll get better answers. By
inverting the targeting paradigm advertisers will be
compelled to think differently and new relationships will
flourish. Creativity, seduction and romance will once
again grace the marketing lexicon as the pursuer becomes
the pursued, love-struck by Media Cupid’s arrow.

————————————————————

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.