Torturing The Data

If, like me, you are required to sit through a great many advertising and marketing presentations, I am pretty sure you've noticed something. These meetings have become far less about ideas and far more about numbers.

The advertising industry is trying its best to shed itself of the one thing that made it valuable and interesting -- ideas -- and become as one with its clients.

Before I dig myself a hole here, let me say that there is an important place for numbers in advertising. As a former science teacher, I have a very large bias toward basing advertising decisions on facts.

However, in a large percentage of meetings I attend, facts are not used to enlighten. They are used to confuse or mislead. This is done in two ways:

1. Using data disingenuously.
2. Using data without proper perspective.

This has always been true to some degree in traditional advertising. It is alarmingly true in the world of digital advertising.

The strategy often employed is to torture the facts until a piece of data that looks impressive on the surface can be squeezed out of it. Then it is presented out of context.

For example, while making a pitch for online display advertising, you will often hear a planner or digital media guru make a statement like this --

"According to Nielsen, 60% of people surveyed said they had clicked on a banner ad in the past 30 days."

On the surface, this "fact" seems substantial. Then you realize how many thousands of ads are served each month to the average person, and how it only takes one click to get over this threshold. Here are some more things that are wrong with the above statement:

1. Who was surveyed? Unless you know who the sample is, the statement is meaningless. The statement says "people" were surveyed. What people? People online? People in Cupertino? People with unintended click disorder?

2. It is self-reported. Most self-reported data is nonsense. The only way to get a true number is to measure actual behavior.

3. It blatantly and intentionally disregards the key fact. The key fact about clicking is that only one served display ad in a thousand gets clicked on. Any  discussion of display advertising click rates that does not start with this fact is intentionally deceitful.

One of the key tricks of this type of deceit is the cynical use of mathematical terms instead of plain English.  Ask the planner or online guru what the click-through rate is for Facebook ads and the answer you will get is "point-0-2." The purpose of answering this way is obfuscation. It is a lot less clear to say "point-0-2" than it is to say "2 in ten thousand."

Another disturbing part of the numbers-oriented presentations I see is the lack of perspective. Slide after slide of charts and graphs are shown without an ounce of perspective on what they mean. It reminds me of what the financial industry must have been like before the crash of 2008.
They had incomprehensibly complex formulas for derivatives and other financial instruments, and no idea at all what these numbers really meant or where the formulas lead.

Anyone foolish enough to think that our digital gurus understand more about their metrics than the PhD's on Wall Street knew about theirs, deserves everything he gets.

Culture Lag

For years I have been writing about the foolishness of marketers who squander their budgets marketing to young people.

They make a lousy primary target for most marketers. Yet they are the default (and sometimes unspoken) target for everything from cars to banks, even though they provide substantially less opportunity than other target groups (for stats on this, see The Amazing Blindness of Marketers.)

I have blamed this phenomenon on a number of things -- the callowness of media buyers; the dread that cmo's have of being thought of as anything but ultra-hip; the idiocy of calculating "lifetime value"; and the legends and rituals of marketers and ad agencies.

Recently I thought of a name for this phenomenon. Sometimes just giving something a name clarifies what it is. I call it Culture Lag.

Culture Lag works like this. Once in a while there occurs a unique cultural phenomenon. This phenomenon has a profound effect on society. When this phenomenon is over, the echo of it resounds for years (sometimes decades) even though the phenomenon no longer has power. This "echo" is Culture Lag.

When advertising came of age in the 1960's -- with the advent of universal television ownership -- there was, coincidentally, an enormous demographic phenomenon coming of age known as the Baby Boom. The Baby Boom was an unprecedented societal phenomenon with a huge bubble of population passing through the snake.

In 1964, the first of these Baby Boomers turned 18. These people provided marketers with an astounding and unprecedented marketing opportunity.

Intelligent marketers understood this and took advantage of it.

In the process, they got used to the idea that young people were an essential target. They forgot that the basis of their targeting was not that the people were young, but that there were zillions of them and they were a unique consuming force.

The social phenomenon called the Baby Boom required a new way of thinking. Forty years later, this is now an old way of thinking.

Economics and demographics tell us that young people are no longer a terribly attractive target for most marketers. Over 75% of the wealth of the country is in the hands of people over 50. And yet our advertising and marketing strategies today, if anything, are more focused on youth and youth culture.

Marketers have gotten used to a cultural phenomenon that is far weaker than it once was. Until they wake up, they will remain mired in Culture Lag.

Pepsi Screws Up The Narrative

Last year, in a much ballyhooed move, Pepsi-Cola dropped its long-standing annual commitment to Super Bowl advertising in favor of a social media campaign.

This sent shock waves through the marketing chattersphere.

It was highly trumpeted as another symbol of the ascendancy of social media and the decline of that dead old bird, the 30-second tv spot. The media loved the story, as it confirmed the narrative they had fabricated over the previous 5 years about the death of TV advertising and the magical power of social media.

From Mashable:
"Such a large move is noteworthy for any company, however Pepsi’s symbiotic relationship with the Super Bowl makes this shift to new media that much more seismic."

From Huffington Post

"In 2010, each of our beverage brands... will be less about a singular event and more about a movement," ...said a Pepsi spokesbozo.

From Time magazine:
"This is exactly where Pepsi needs to be," ...said the CEO of a brand-consulting firm.

Some other published nonsense:
"...instead of flash and celebrities, Pepsi is attempting to engage consumers in community service.

"...But the real story is about the industry... even traditional-marketing mainstays like Pepsi have to get the best return on their dollar. Pepsi knows the mass media mega-buy story... Pepsi’s saying that they expect get more value by connecting with their audience directly. "

If you enjoy a good laugh, go back and read all the pompous nonsense that was written last year. And also don't forget to check the videos of social media "experts" clucking over this.

Well, as luck would have it, Pepsi's absence from the Super Bowl wasn't quite as "seismic" as predicted. According to press reports, they're dropping a ton of cash in the Super Bowl this year.

As is typical, Pepsi's return to the Super Bowl is getting significantly less attention from the media than its departure did.

You see, it just doesn't fit the "narrative."