#marketing

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!

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.

Marketing Approaches

ScottR / Advertising, Branding, Communications, Public Relations, Social Media / #attractionmarketing, #marketing, #pr, #publicrelations /

February 11, 2019

When you cook or bake, the approach you take re: the dish will often determine your success or failure. I found this out recently while making a grilled cheese sandwich. The bread you use, amount of butter, amount of cheese all can either REALLY work, or in my case, REALLY turn into a mangled, soggy and rather sad grilled cheese. …So the approach matters.

Same with marketing. Now some marketing firms and companies are happy running Google ads and social ads and doing robocalls and even re-targeting customers with the same creepy ads from site to site and it calling it effective marketing. I disagree.

I disagree because I believe marketing is about the relationship. Not one sale, but a lifetime of them. So here’s how my approach is different and I’d say much better.

Before we even think about beginning to communicate, we need a GREAT message. I define GREAT as messaging that is deep, powerful, emotion-based and 100 percent about the mental and emotional needs of the target audience(s).
Next, I believe in ATTRACTION-based marketing. This means making sure our content (blogs, videos, news, reviews, etc.) is SO good that it attracts its own following. And we work to continue to surprise and delight them with each piece of communications that goes out. This also means that we turn our backs on INTERRUPTION-based marketing like advertising, sales calls, un-targeted awful (and yet frequent) e-mails and even sponsored social posts.
Finally, I believe in EMPATHY, considering and respecting the audience’s right to be left alone and again, only reaching out when we have something GREAT for them.

And here’s a little secret. It REALLY works. You see, the clock is running out on interruption-based marketing. The government (state and fed) will be coming very soon with new laws to lock down privacy and fine anyone who doesn’t comply. Plus, if we’re really in the relationship business, why would we do anything that could jeopardize that relationship.

I think the future is very bright for the marketing profession. We do great and amazing work for our clients and build credibility and trust in a world where those things are in very short supply. Once we REALLY learn how to attract people, I’m sure we’ll wonder why anyone would ever consider interrupting them again.

Just like a grilled cheese sandwich, a marketing relationship is a very fragile thing. But done correctly, it can be AMAZING!