Journalism

The Coming Privacy Reckoning

ScottR / Advertising, Agency News, Bad Moves, Branding, Client News, Communications, Journalism, Marketing, Press Releases, Public Relations / #marketing, ccpa, privacy /

November 26, 2019

There is a disturbance in the Force of the marketing world. Have you felt it? The brand-spankin’ new CA Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020 and many organizations are going to have to get IT, legal AND marketing in the same room and working together to manage it.

So you know, The CCPA is a law meant to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California. The bill was passed by the California State Legislature and signed into law by Jerry Brown, Governor of California, on June 28, 2018, to amend Part 4 of Division 3 of the California Civil Code. Officially called AB-375, the act was introduced by Ed Chau, member of the California State Assembly, and State Senator Robert Hertzberg.

The intentions of the Act are to provide California residents with the right to:

Know what personal data is being collected about them.
Know whether their personal data is sold or disclosed and to whom.
Say no to the sale of personal data.
Access their personal data.
Request a business delete any personal information about a consumer collected from that consumer.
Not be discriminated against for exercising their privacy rights.

The CCPA applies to any business, including any for-profit entity that collects consumers’ personal data, which does business in California, and satisfies at least one of the following thresholds:

Has annual gross revenues in excess of $25 million;
Possesses the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households, or devices;
Earns more than half of its annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information.

And a quick note: Organizations are required to “implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices” in protecting consumer data. (This is where you need your friends in IT, and probably a big box of donuts)

Why should you care? Well, because a fine up to $7,500 for each intentional violation and $2,500 for each unintentional violation can be imposed. And California LOVES to fine its friends in the business community. Well, what should we do, Scott?

Fear not, here are Scott’s Privacy Tips for Super Nosy Marketers (yeah, it’s probably you):

Don’t be creepy—If you are collecting data and you realize you probably shouldn’t have it, destroy it and stop collecting that data.
Attract your audience, don’t interrupt them—No one ever gets in trouble for giving people what they want and drawing them nearer to it. That’s called marketing.
Remember the importance of brand messaging—If your message is all about YOU, they probably don’t care. And if you confuse, you will lose.
PR provides great visibility for messaging and ZERO privacy concerns—PR is about to become VERY popular…again. 🙂Empathy solves most privacy problems – if YOU don’t want it, neither do they. We know the storm is coming, first to California, then to the rest of the USA courtesy of other states and finally Congress. And we know that ensuring privacy isn’t just marketing’s job, but we are probably the cause of 90 percent of the violations so we should be the solution.

We don’t HAVE to be this awful thing that has to be regulated by the gov’t — we can be better than this — we should and we must.

Scott Robertson is a GDPR/CCPA privacy expert and can answer your questions and help you get your company into compliance!

You Understand, RIGHT!

ScottR / Advertising, Agency News, Bad Moves, Communications, Journalism, Privacy, Public Relations, Social Media /

October 21, 2019

I was recently at a pharmacy picking up a prescription and I had a quick question about the medicine, so I waited patiently for the clearly advertised service of “speak to a pharmacist.” Now, she wasn’t having a great day and you can really tell that when a person is rushing around, hurried, not smiling or making eye contact with you. She grabbed the package, ran through the caveats and instructions with the meds VERY QUICKLY and then she glanced up, made hard eye contact with me and said, You understand, right!” And it wasn’t a question. Yes, our time together on that lovely afternoon was over.

So “communications” is now (and has always been) about a sort of magical connection between sender and receiver where the intended message moves from one person to the other and the person on the other end gets it and provides that positive feedback to the sender to indicate the transfer has happened. But it rarely does.

I see this same approach sometimes at work in marketing & communications programs out there. A lot of companies are in a BIG hurry to sell you something and they won’t let a little thing like YOUR preferences or needs get in the way of THEIR goals!

So to help out here, let’s take a look at the things you need for people to understand a message:

Clarity — If you confuse, you will lose. Your message MUST be clear.
Empathy — If you do not ever consider the audience, their needs, their desires and even their right to be left alone, you will not achieve understanding.
Response—This is REALLY important and often left out of many approaches — what did they think about what we said or did? I’m not saying send out more surveys (remember, people don’t like additional communications from you) but there are ways to see if it worked (If it’s social media, did people Like it? Did they share it? If e-mail —did they OPEN i t? Did they click on anything? …And the list goes on.)

Just firing out more messages with bad messaging and aggressive tactics DOES NOT increase understanding. And as of Jan. 1, 2020 when the California Consumer Privacy Act hits, you just might attract some of the WRONG type of attention.

There is a better way. Learn how to be an attractor, (not an interrupter) with your brand. Create fantastic messaging that gives YOUR BRAND a STORY that isn’t just about selling! Avoiding the “You understand, RIGHT!” syndrome in your marketing & communications begins with caring about whether your audience REALLY gets it or if they’re just a little sorry they waited in line for so long to talk to you.

What Gives YOU the Right?

ScottR / Advertising, Agency News, Branding, Client News, Communications, Journalism, Marketing, Press Releases, Privacy, Public Relations, Social Media /

September 23, 2019

Before you send anything to anyone human to human, you need to have permission. That’s just good manners, right? As a society, we’re pretty good at this behavior one on one. But when the sales and/or marketing dept gets involved, that’s not always the case. In fact, it rarely is.

As I say often, if marketing & communications is the business of building long lasting relationships with our target audiences, then one SURE FIRE way to destroy those relationships is to mess up on privacy and consent.

Marketing as a profession has an extremely poor track record re: privacy under the all-too-common mindset that if a little bit of marketing is good, then a whole bunch MUST be better. And of course, this isn’t true at all.

And a lot of times, we just don’t have time to stop and think about the audience in any way on our way to sell them something. Case in point, I made the mistake of buying some guitar strings from Musician’s Friend recently. Since that time, they have increased their e-mails from one every few days to one or two every single day. Come on, man. Turn OFF the automation and use that noodle resting on your shoulders just a little bit OR…I will block your company both in future sales and future e-mails…forever. I want to like you. Don’t be an idiot and wreck it. You’re not gonna sell me more stuff because you send me more e-mails.

That’s what’s at stake every time we make the decision to communicate — absolutely everything. The entire relationship (we’ve worked for SO many years to build up) is in jeopardy every single time—and yet we put software in charge of it. When’s the last time YOU built a meaning relationship with software? Thought so.

With all of this in mind, here’s just a few tips to get privacy right.

Think before you communicate. Use that E word — empathy. Do they want to receive this now? Why? Would you? Empathy is VERY powerful stuff when used correctly.
Make the message in your communications useful to THEM — people like things that are helpful useful and appear to be about them more than about selling some more stuff.
Know the privacy laws — CAN-SPAM and GDPR are important but new privacy laws are coming from states and also at the federal level that will make “consent to communicate” language very important. Make sure your opt outs are being managed appropriately because there are legal and relationship penalties for getting this stuff wrong.

In marketing, we don’t automatically just have the right to communicate to the world. We must earn that right and we must ask for permission—and our stuff has to be GREAT once permission is given. Remember, we aren’t in the “let’s just sell you now” business, we are supposed to be in the long-term relationship business. And THAT business requires creativity, patience and discipline.

Scott Robertson interviewed for Medium piece about Branding

ScottR / Advertising, Bad Moves, Branding, Client News, Communications, Journalism, Marketing, Press Releases, Privacy, Public Relations /

July 22, 2019

It was my pleasure to be interviewed by Chaya Weiner for this Medium piece called 5 Things You Need to Build a Trusted And Beloved Brand!

https://medium.com/authority-magazine/5-things-you-need-to-do-build-a-trusted-and-beloved-brand-with-scott-robertson-and-chaya-weiner-f83ddf998ca

So Much MORE than Brand Awareness

ScottR / Agency News, Client News, Communications, Journalism, Press Releases, Public Relations, Social Media /

March 15, 2019

I always wanted to go into advertising. I was a musician who could easily write catchy radio jingles and produce the music to go along with them, so I thought that’s probably how it would go. But a funny thing happened on my way to the ad agency, advertising kinda stopped working. 🙁

And you see, I’m a big fan of things actually working, not just looking or feeling like they do. The appearance of marketing-looking work is NOT marketing in my opinion. The RESULTS are. And the thing that works the best for me (and my clients) is public relations. Good old PR.

PR is a tough one to describe in 2019 mainly because there has been quite a blurring of marketing disciplines in the digital age. But, here’s a really good way to keep it straight. PR is fundamentally about trust and credibility. And no other marketing arrow is gonna give you that. Not advertising, not promotions, not events, not social media —only PR.

And we live in a world where trust and credibility are at all-time lows, but somehow no one in the entire marketing profession wants to talk about that. Because marketing is actually the villain in that story.

Smoke, exaggerations, hype and just outright lies are the tools of some marketers, and we as consumers (both b2b and b2c) have learned from a very early age that they are NOT to be trusted. If trust is the goal, none of these paths will get you there. They won’t.

Now, some people (even PR people) will say PR’s primary role is “brand awareness”and “we don’t want to be measured by sales and things we cannot control.” LOL. Ok. Brand awareness is good, but the real treasure we’re seeking is trust and credibility. Because without those things, you aren’t selling a darn thing to anyone.

PR looks for credible and trustworthy messengers (media, analysts, influencers) to take our clients’ messages to their audiences and somehow transfer that trust to us. That’s the whole game right there. And it REALLY works. One of my clients recently SOLD OUT of two complete runs of a very cool product simply because we put the gadget on TV, radio, online and lots of credible people were saying “Wow, this is super cool — you have to have this.” …And so they did.

Now I love advertising. I love the control, the power, the creativity — everything about it. Except the fact that it just doesn’t deliver very much value except in a supporting role. The star of the marketing show in the trust-free world of today must be PR.

And we are SO much more than simple brand awareness. We do something that simply cannot be done in any other way. We systematically EARN trust and credibility for brands, which leads to sales and growth and all of the good stuff. And maybe, done in this way, marketing doesn’t have to be such a villain after all?

Give Me Something To Believe In

ScottR / Advertising, Branding, Client News, Communications, Journalism, Press Releases, Public Relations, Social Media / #advertising, #publicrelations, #socialmedia /

January 15, 2019

Did you know that nearly half of all Internet traffic today is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.

What’s a bot? Well, it’s a software program designed to do one very specific thing—impersonate a human being. Some are so sophisticated in their multi-level behaviors, they can fool the software designed to find and filter out the bots, which is kinda like bot on bot crime. And this is all done to inflate audience numbers so sites can charge more for advertising — oh you knew the money was gonna be a part of this somewhere, didn’t you?

Now in the glorious profession of marketing and communications, we’re all about reaching and building relationships with people. We have no interest in bots. And we have no interest in bots acting like people. We’d just like the people, thank you.

Heres a good stat from Facebook for you. FB claimed that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes. Because people do not watch portions of a minute of videos and add them up. It kinda messes up the story, you know?

Traffic isn’t the only fake thing out there. Instagram this week reported more fake followers, fake profiles and fake metrics. Twitter shut down more than one million fake accounts designed to fake follow real brands and people. Sheesh!

Today in marketing we have more data and more metrics than at any time in my career, yet I trust those metrics much less. Mainly because of all of the fake traffic and the bots. So how do we REACH actual people in 2019 and beyond?

1. Make YOUR message all about THEM — I don’t know about bots, but people are REALLY into themselves and the stuff that’s going on with them, their needs, wants, desires, dreams. etc.
2. Help THEM get what THEY want — Again, the nuances of marketing these days should be about connecting the hero (your customers) with the things they need.
3. Get someone else (besides you) to carry the message — the media or influencers are a great place to start. When you find a channel that your audience trusts, see if you can get them to tell your story.

And yes, I’ve just described modern public relations. Great message, great delivery, great measurement. Repeat as needed until you retire or the bots take over everything and enslave our race. After walking the halls of CES, don’t worry, it’s coming. We had a good run. 🙂

The real people are out there and they WANT to connect with brands and believe in brands–for their reasons, probably not ours. And WE want to believe we’re reaching them. Maybe just maybe there’s something real out there after all.

Journalism Should Be Better

ScottR / Branding, Communications, Journalism, Marketing, Public Relations /

October 25, 2018

I went to J-school at The University of Missouri-Columbia. If you know me, you know it’s no secret that I really wanted to be a “rockstar,” like Def Leppard and Poison. But even with the long hair (yes, I had some once upon a time) and earring, my parents weren’t going to fund that particular career path, so I chose “advertising and public relations” and that field of study was housed in the J-school. They made me learn about journalism there and I studied among people who were going to become professional journalists and “change the world.”

Unfortunately, they did…and not really for the better. Of course, a few things happened along the way including a massive reduction in the amount of people actually working in journalism. In the past two decades, we’ve lost basically 70 percent of the profession at every level and that is because none of us want to actually pay for good editorial content because we perceive it to be “free” and “everywhere.” Money is the root of all evil and I believe that all of the “evil” in journalism we see today comes from a huge LACK of money.

That led to the quiet consolidation of our TV stations, radio stations and newspapers into conglomerates that (for efficiency reasons) serve the same news to local markets along with the same bias, etc. Those of us in PR know this because we see the “feed behind the feed” as we monitor news, but your average person might not know that messages can be pushed out into local markets in exactly the same way (same exact words read by news anchors actually) and delivered into hundreds of communities. Hey, when we get a nice holiday gift piece for a product or service on a local station, would we rather see that in one market or 1,000? So you can start to see the problem, right?

The national media have always leaned a bit to the left and most people know that. But that gentle lean has turned into a full-on downward dog pose right into an almost insane level of liberal bias. 92 percent of the news media coverage of President Trump has been negative in tone and that’s just crazy. Unfortunately, this has been noticed by all and as of 2018, the media enjoy the LOWEST credibility levels in history among both Democrats and Republicans alike. Yikes.

As you can see from the graphic above, it is also now commonplace and acceptable at Gizmodo (a leading tech outlet) to call the President of the United States (the most powerful position in the free world) an “idiot” and amplify an individual reporter’s opinion into what could be perceived as fact. Journalism has fallen into a very dark place and it’s taking all of us there.

What was supposed to inform people, now incites them. What was designed to increase the intelligence of the American people, now limits it. What was supposed to give us interesting things to discuss has now cut off all discussion altogether. And I would like to see our friends in the media, take a breath, take that amazing First Amendment, read it through, realize the immense responsibility it bestows and get back to some actual journalism.

That’s what they taught me at Mizzou J-School and I still believe that journalism can be saved. We’d all better hope so.