Influentials Don’t Influence Old Spice Viralness?

So, the Old Spice social campaign seems to have dominated digital marketing discussions for the past few days.  Seems like industry discussion lists, advertising trades and now the mainstream media are all over this one.

Sign me up as a fan.  I’m very pleasantly surprised that something like this can take hold in some select vehicles within the social sphere and bubble up in a very significant way to the mainstream media, without the benefit of a multi-million dollar ad commitment.  One site credits this campaign with having generated almost 6 million views and over 22,000 comments in 24 hours.   One of the things I find particularly interesting, though, is that we’ve watched the idea of “The Influentials” get trashed for the past two and a half years, with suspicious eyes being cast at anyone who mentions “targeting influencers” in marketing meetings.  Yet, how did Wieden + Kennedy prioritize who got a customized message?  In part by influence.

This is why Peter Shankman gets a shout out, while I probably wouldn’t.

Were we too quick to dismiss the role of influentials in earned media?  I think so.

Not Now

“Not Now.”  That was the original headline on my recent iMedia piece, before my editor changed it.

I wanted that headline because there are actually two huge problems with the state of digital ad targeting.  The first is that we’ve gone well past the fail safe line that DoubleClick and other companies stepped over in 2000, as it pertains to data profiling and consumer privacy.  The second is that a lot of it is coming to a head now, while there’s draft legislation on the table concerning digital consumer privacy.  Putting aside the first issue for a second, I can’t fathom why anyone would want to kick up the dust on ad targeting right now.  It could attract the wrong kind of attention and result in the typical ham-handed government regulatory response that we all want to avoid.  The simplest and easiest thing to do would be for the U.S. Government to get rid of the third party cookie.  This would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s exactly the type of thing that I’d expect from Congress.

Getting back to the first issue for a moment…  You’re going to be hearing a lot from Underscore in the coming months about privacy, transparency and how to be a white hat in the New World Order.  We’ve made some key hires in order to help bring you this guidance, since it’s really important to us to apply our perspective and make sure that our clients and friends in the industry don’t make the wrong choices now.  Once you step over the line, it’s much harder to earn back consumer trust than you might think.  To quote one of my favorite sages: “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”

So stay tuned.

Waiting for pixel.adserver.com…

We should really be asking ourselves whether, as an industry, we’re overburdening our ad delivery infrastructure.

Between ad exchanges, verification, rich media and other services responsible for multiple server calls whenever an ad is delivered, we’re introducing way more potential failure points into the process than was ever really intended.  It makes me wonder how many straws away from a broken back we are.  How many pages have you tried to visit lately where the delivery of the content is held up by waiting for some random adserver pixel to fire?

Something’s Got To Give

The transactional part of our business is about to undergo some significant change, in my opinion.  I’m not talking about the brand-oriented, placement-centric portion of digital display.  I’m talking about the action-oriented piece that is mostly focused on delivering Cost Per Whatevers at a manageable price.

There’s a big movement underway for brand protection, and more than a half dozen companies are credibly in the space with reasonably useful tools.  I’m predicting that this movement will be successful and that new technologies will fall into widespread use, blowing the lid off of transactional buys.  When this happens, advertisers are going to realize they’ve been advertising in places that they never expected to, and have been doing so for quite some time.  This will lead to an attempt to more accurately control placement for transactional buys.  As you might know, advertisers can exercise control over environment or pricing, but can’t drive both down simultaneously.

Many advertisers will have an additional “A ha!” moment.  They’ll see that the small slice of network inventory (10% or less) that passes for “premium” plays a key role in the success of their campaigns, while the rest is largely backfill.  The most obvious result of this realization will be increased demand for premium inventory, driving prices up for the top ad inventory on quality sites.

Much of this inventory overlaps with the inventory most interesting to brand advertisers, who look to impact brand attributes with their advertising instead of driving direct sales or clicks.  Increased demand will mean higher prices for premium inventory and drops in value for junk inventory, widening the chasm between what’s valuable and what’s not.

So, to the extent that the brand protection technologies become standard throughout the industry, we’ll likely see widespread changes in pricing dynamic.  When control is exercised over environment, something has to give.  That something is pricing.

On Recognizing and Disarming Trolls

My piece on iMedia is getting a good deal of attention this week, particularly in the Twitter-sphere.  That’s good, partly because it’s a bit challenging to come up with new column topics and feedback drives topic selection in a lot of cases.  This week’s piece about Internet trolls is a good example of that, since it was an expansion on a prior piece that someone asked for additional detail on.

Trolls are a funny sort. The funny thing though (to me) is that we can almost instantly recognize trolling behavior, but we often have trouble articulating why we think someone is trolling.  It’s like spam – we always immediately recognize spam, but we have a hard time describing what constitutes spam to a spam firewall that can filter it out for us.  We just know it when we see it.

Trolling is much the same way.  We know when someone posts something to one of our online communities with the intention to cause an uproar or to get a rise out of a specific group of community participants.  Yet, we see the damage that trolls can do when it comes to causing valuable community members to quit, or community moderators to have to invest too much time trying to keep conversations on track.  So how do you combat Internet trolls when you can’t articulate what it is about their behavior that makes them trolls?

Well, the old DNFTT (Do Not Feed The Trolls) thing works, but understanding the motivation behind different kinds of trolling behavior is also a big help.  In the linked piece, I spent some time delving into the motivations for some of the most popular kinds of trolling behavior.  This could have been a much longer piece and wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide, but it should help some of you who are in charge of moderating and growing Internet communities.  I hope it’s helpful.