Content Is The New Magic

Recently I praised Fast Company for publishing a very good piece about the dream world  marketers are living in in which they think Facebook members give a shit about their brands.

Well, it didn't take long for Fast Company to revert to form. Last week they published a self-promotion piece disguised as an article called Why You Should Buy Facebook (And Sell GM). It was written by a "content" hound and it explains to us dinosaurs, with great forbearance, why "content" shared on Facebook is the new online marketing magic.

According to his guy, like everything else in the long line of online marketing miracle cures, content -- especially that which is shared on Facebook -- will soon be replacing traditional advertising.

As usual, the argument is not a discussion of facts, it's the oft-told battle between the tired old forces of reaction and the heroic new crusaders of virtue.

Conveniently, the author neglects to inform us that the identical claims have been made for previous online wonders including podcasts, blogs, banners, widgets, user generated content, Twitter, apps, YouTube... and it has all proven to be seriously delusional.

So fire up your cliche meter, here we go.

"There's a battle brewing between the old-world thinking of Madison Avenue and Wall Street and the mindset of the Facebook generation...Facebook is about replacing traditional ads with shared content; it's about new ways of sharing with friends and strangers, not old, failing ways of shilling for products...

This guy needs a jargon make-over. If he's going to be channeling the magnificently wonderful "Facebook generation" he really ought to stop quoting 5-year old social media powerpoints.

Also, we idiots are...

"...famous for opposing any threat to (our) power and (our) ancient ways of operating"

Yeah, all this power is really going to my head. And does anyone know where I can get my abacus re-beaded?

You see, we are suffering from...

"...a complete failure to understand where Facebook's real economic value lies... (we) should be dreaming that a friend or a stranger shares an online link to a piece of content authored by their brands."

I think the operative word here is "dreaming."

He also inadvertently neglects to include the two most important facts about advertising and marketing on Facebook:

• Click through rates are a staggering 5 in 10,000
• Engagement rates with "shared content" are below 1/2 of 1%

Finally, this guy loses any and all credibility by quoting extensively from the appalling, misleading, and completely unscientific piece of garbage from Nielsen called Global Online Consumers and Multi-Screen Media: Today and Tomorrow that we took apart here last week.

Apparently unconcerned that Facebook makes about 85% of its money on paid advertising -- not shared content -- the author concludes...

"It doesn't take a genius to figure out how Mark Zuckerberg and his shareholders will make money on this exploding phenomenon."

This confirms something I've suspected for a long time. I'm no genius.

Nobody Ever Clicked On The Mona Lisa

Earlier this week, in a post entitled Why Clicks Matter, I expressed the opinion that the only sensible expectation for online display advertising is that it will generate clicks.

Now that the dirty little secret that almost no one clicks on display ads is out, one of the arguments that apologists, sales hustlers, and people who don't understand advertising drag out is "oh yeah, well nobody ever clicked on a TV spot."

There are several reasons this argument is appallingly stupid and disingenuous.

First is the most obvious. TV doesn't rely on "interactivity" for its effectiveness. TV spots have a 60-year history of building brands -- thousands of them in hundreds of categories -- without the magic of interactivity.

Display ads have nothing. In the 15-year history of online display advertising is there a single instance of a major brand of anything being built by display ads? It is perfectly clear to anyone with a functioning cortex that display ads rely on interactivity for their value. TV spots don't.

Second, when traditional advertising is lousy at motivating people, agencies always haul out the  "branding" argument. This is what the display ad crowd is now trying to do. They are trying to sell us the idea that display advertising is brilliant for "branding" -- whatever the hell that means. Only a blind fool believes this nonsense. Every study ever done tells the same story --  display ads are essentially invisible.

Finally, as Harvey Briggs points out here, whether we admit it or not, TV spots are part of the content. Everyone is willing to acknowledge this on Super Bowl Sunday, but the other 364 days we pretend it's not true. Display ads are clearly not part of the content. They are barely even part of the page.

The argument that "nobody ever clicked on a TV spot" is the witless, desperate argument of apologists for an over-hyped, marginally effective mode of advertising. It has the intellectual integrity of asserting that Babe Ruth was a lousy athlete because he never scored a touchdown.

Amazingly, there are naifs throughout the marketing industry dense enough to accept it.

The Google Bamboozle

An interesting article this weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle had me thinking that Google may be heading toward a greed tipping point. They are getting too big and too piggish.

Google makes its money, first and foremost, by misdirection. You type in a word and they serve you listings from people who have bought the right to that word.

Yes, they also serve you "natural" listings, but they don't make any money on that. They only make money on misdirection.

Because it's for sale, their paid search has little credibility. Now they are busy undermining the credibility of their natural search.

Google is getting deeper and deeper into content. This creates enormous opportunities for mischief. Google's natural search is supposed to serve you the most relevant result for your inquiry. But since they've bought Zagat, can you really expect that they will not lean toward Zagat reviews rather than Yelp reviews? And will Hulu get fair treatment compared to the new programming being created for YouTube, which Google owns?

According to the Chronicle, Google will also soon be introducing a new product called Google Shopping which will replace Google Product Search. The difference? Google Product Search allowed you to compare prices of products from many retailers and websites. Google Shopping will charge retailers to be included, so you'll only get results from companies who grease Google.

According to the Chronicle, some clown named Sameer Samat, who is a VP of something at Google, contends that this is not about them making more money. Heck no! You see, they are doing this for us -- to provide us with more accurate information. Shucks, ain't that sweet of them?

But then again...

In 2004 Google said,

"Because we do not charge merchants...our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased..."

So I guess now that they are charging merchants we have no choice but to assume the results will be irrelevant and biased.