Privacy

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

True Full-Stack Marketing

ScottR / Advertising, Bad Moves, Branding, Communications, Marketing, Privacy, Public Relations / #marketing, #publicrelations, digitalmarketing /

June 17, 2019

Yeah, you’ve seen the creepy robot dogs opening doors and getting knocked down only to get back up again (which I know I’ve seen in a movie scene starring a certain Austrian-born muscle dude who may have possibly run the state of California at one time) But the machines are really coming to disrupt the marketing profession.

Like you, I receive a lot of e-mails trying to get my hard-earned dollars and promising me the world with very little risk involved. For example, I recently received one that said Learn the Full Stack of Digital Marketing Skills for $99 — EVERYTHING you need for marketing.

“Wow, everything for $99?,” I said, rethiinking my entire undergrad and graduate education. I was incredibly curious about what might be in this “full stack” I’d be getting.

Well, the “full stack” includes a very impressive array of tools like:

Google Pay Per Click Advertising
Search Engine Optimization
Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat/LinkedIn Advertising
Re-targeting (that is the practice invented by Satan of feeding you the same ad over and over again until you buy something, go insane or block the company from your view forever.)
Landing Web Page Construction with Shopping Carts (to sell your amazing stuff)

And there you have it — the “full stack” you need to be an ace at marketing in 2019. Except, a few tiny things MIGHT be missing from this stack so I’ll just list those right here off the top of my head:

Research/Positioning/Strategy
Brand Messaging
Inbound, Attraction-Based Tactics including Public Relations (Media/Influencer Relations) and Content Marketing (including video)

But the biggest list miss (to me) was the E word. Empathy.

Empathy is critically important in modern marketing because before you inflict your “full stack” of stuff on the world, you have to assume that the audience doesn’t really WANT to hear from you. This very useful assumption allows us to go deeper and create BETTER marketing that just might be able to earn the attention, trust and respect of today’s audiences.

And it’s missing. Audience empathy is entirely absent in the vast majority of marketing approaches I see. It’s not even considered. And yet, ironically, marketing’s main goal is to build relationships. You have to have empathy to do that. You can’t just talk, you must listen. You can’t just take, you must give. You can’t just sell, you must connect.

That stuff I just said — THAT is actual marketing. And if your company’s “stack” doesn’t start with empathy and include a lot of giving and connection/engagement, you might be stuck with just doing an expensive digital advertising campaign and calling it effective marketing.

Rage Against the Machine Learning

ScottR / Advertising, Bad Moves, Branding, Communications, Marketing, Privacy, Public Relations / #marketing, #publicrelations, machinelanguage, privacy /

May 14, 2019

As Google will be quick to point out, yes, a machine can more quickly identify shapes, categorize things, and not miss any. Much more so than our feeble human brains. But here comes the million dollar question — IF marketing organizations had more information about their customers, would it REALLY matter? SHOULD they have this info?Would they REALLY be smarter? Or would they still send out more e-mails, cram people into funnels and really use the technology to just do more stuff, more frequently and poorly. Because as I see it, that’s what is happening with machine learning.

The “promise” of machine language and marketing automation is SO lovely. Google says “As consumer expectations grow for more personalized, relevant, and assistive experiences, machine learning is becoming an invaluable tool to help meet those demands. It’s helping marketers create smarter customer segmentations, deliver more relevant creative campaigns, and measure performance more effectively. In fact, 85% of executives believe AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.”

Uh-huh. And e-mail was supposed to help us communicate faster, more efficiently and more clearly than other methods too. Did it? I’ll wait while you go sort through the thousands of spam e-mails you received just since you started reading this one.

So according to Google, the phases where Machine Learning can get involved in marketing are as follows:

Audience discovery — Identify your most valuable customers. This is always good, BUT you CANNOT be creepy about it and this goes from zero to creepy in about two seconds if not monitored correctly.

Creative—Quickly serve the right message for every moment. This assumes the customer wants to hear from the brand at these moments and this isn’t accurate. Remember, your brand is at risk EVERY time you decide to communicate with someone so sending out more garbage is NOT the path to great relationships.

Optimization—Find the right customers in key moments. Again, you’re peeking through a lens that maybe you shouldn’t have access to so this must be done VERY carefully.

Measurement—Unlock the true value of each step on the path to purchase. Uh-huh, do I even need to say it again? Caution, caution, extreme caution should be used here.

Here’s your compass to navigating machine learning — what business are you REALLY in? How you answer will determine how comfortable you’ll be with the machines.

I WANT TO SELL, SELL, SELL — Congratulations! You’re in the “there are no limits to how creepy I’m gonna get to stuff my audiences down my funnel and sell some stuff to them! I want to know everything they are doing, feed it into a machine and use that information to serve up more ads during their “moments.”

I WANT TO CREATE LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS — Now, we’re talking. THIS is actual marketing right here where we exhibit Empathy, Trust, Brand Confidence, etc. And this is where we truly care about the AUDIENCE’s needs first and we know when to not be invasive, creepy and back off and let them have their “moments” ….without us.

You know, all comms technology was supposed to make things easier — the telephone, the TV, fax machines, computers and the Internet, e-mail, text messages — and NONE of it has worked this way. Mainly because aggressive marketing organizations are waiting right there to use every new tool to bother, annoy and generally creep out the audiences.

There is a much better way.

RobertsonComm helps our clients throw away their funnels and create powerful magnets to attract audiences, exhibit real empathy, not snoop on their data and their lives because that is NOT the way to win friends and influence people. New technologies like machine learning is no substitute for the real stuff that we do on a daily basis out there. …And spoiler alert — it never will be.

Personalization v. Privacy

ScottR / Branding, Communications, Marketing, Privacy, Public Relations, Social Media /

September 17, 2018

We want certain people in our lives to REALLY know us and hopefully like (or love) us. It’s said that one of man’s greatest wishes is to be truly known and loved. And when asked by survey companies, we (the people) tend to tell them that we want “more personalized” marketing. In fact, a recent survey by Salesforce demonstrates that 84 percent of consumers say “being treated like a person, not a number,” is very important to winning their business.

But at what cost? This is the very tricky tightrope that marketing must walk in the coming years. We want to create personalized content just for you, but to do that we need information about you. And marketers do have a metric ton of this information, but so far, really don’t do the best job of creating this Holy Grail of personalized content. Why?

Honestly, because it’s more work, takes a lot more time and marketing is notoriously lazy. Why send a targeted blast when you can send that same thing to hundreds of thousands of people (because it’s free, right?) and hope for a 1-2 percent “conversion” rate. And of course, we don’t measure the cavalcade of individuals we’ve upset or annoyed along the way. We just measure the conversions.

But in marketing, EVERYTHING counts. Every brand touch point, every letter on every piece of communication, every image, everything the CEO says (…or smokes in the case of Elon Musk). It ALL counts. And that is why building trusted brands is so damn difficult. Because you can do everything right for decades and blow the whole thing in a long weekend. We’ve seen it happen — yes, hello Chipotle, Bill Cosby, Papa John’s, Gibson, United Airlines, Nike, Facebook and definitely the NFL.

And the federal and state governments are coming to shut down the modern advertising practices of “mining” your personal online data and using it to create ad content for you. Get ready — they are coming for the $750 billion ad powerhouse Google, the $600 billion behemoth Facebook (yes, Instagram too), the $1 billion Twitter and anyone else that has profited from these practices over the past 15 years or so.

You see, the ad business is pretty much all automated now — there aren’t actual people deciding what you see and when and how often— there are algorithms determining what message will make you buy and convert you from a viewer to a profit center. And they’ll keep hitting you with that same message UNTIL you buy in a process clearly developed by Satan himself and known as “retargeting.” Folks, there is nothing that will destroy the rest of your relationship-building marketing efforts than hitting them with the same ad over and over in a creepy and needy fashion. I mean I guess you could say that’s “personalized content” – you clicked on it, you were interested and so now we must have the right to just beat you over the head with it until you submit and buy. This is not real marketing and it’s not even human.

You know, sometimes I have an answer or two, but not so much on this topic. Every brand and company needs to think VERY carefully about how to balance the desire for personalized messages to your audience, the ever-evolving legal requirements to do it and what it might do to the relationship with your customer if/when you get it wrong.

And folks, there aren’t any algorithms that will be able to do that job. That’s all experience, intelligence, creativity and judgment — and of course taking the time out of our busy schedules to THINK about marketing before we actually do it. I realize that’s a lot to ask, but to me, marketing is very personal.