Dopp Juice Archive

Watch out everybody! Jenka is getting busy tearing down misconceptions about ad agencies and new marketing standards (and is doing a damned good job at it, too). Check out her recent article, “How Your Ad Agency is Sabotaging Your Campaign“. This woman is ruthless without being wrong, and makes point after point about what to look for. Here are the points I’m most concerned with:

‘User-generated content means audience engagement, message relevancy (if it’s not you’ll hear about it right away), authentic endorsement, and even the enablement of culture and identity expression. You should be excited. This is all pretty awesome stuff! But if consumers are making the “ads” for free, then how does the agency validate its cost? There’s a bit of a conflict of interest going on, for sure.’

Takeaway: Don’t poo-poo the free options out there. They are often more valuable than the paid options. You just have to approach them strategically. And that takes target audience research and knowledge of the mediums.

‘…if the audience isn’t getting involved then the traffic doesn’t mean all that much. ‘Engagement does. From click-thrus, to subscription rates, to form submissions, the measures of a campaign’s success are revealed through audience interaction patterns.’

Takeaway: Did you hear that? She said traffic doesn’t mean all that much. Stop bragging about your hit count and start bragging about your conversion rate and sign-ups. Get Google Analytics running on your site and spend a day learning what the reports mean. Don’t spend bags of money on pulling people into your website (SO easy to do) before you know what they’re likely to do there. Mass traffic doesn’t matter, quality traffic does.

‘Agencies … are so stuck in doing things the way they always have that their approach to new options is still, unfortunately, through the same old processes (uploading a TV spot to You-Tube, anyone?).’

Takeaway: I want to add to this point with something Jenka has emphasized before: some things are changing, others are not. The need to research your target audience, for example, is not going anywhere. How and where you reach that audience, on the other hand, is changing all over the place. And in such a rapidly changing time, you can’t afford to be making assumptions about any step in the marketing process. You have to step up, pay attention, see what’s working, and avoid what’s not. And the next time you do it, you need to assume that a whole bunch of things have changed yet again. Change, change, change, change, change!

1: It’s possible to blog anonymously. …plus 1: Blogs are increasingly useful sources of opinions and reviews, helping people to determine where to spend their money. …equals 2: Some businesses have discovered that they can blog anonymously as fake customers, saying wonderful things about themselves and increasing their business. It was bound to happen. Some people call it creative marketing. Some people call it evil. I call it a grey area in a set of new standards that are still being defined.A great example of this was the 2006 Wal-Marting Across America blog. Basically, a couple travelled across the U.S. staying in Wal-Mart parking lots and writing about how wonderful Wal-Mart is. It was a beautiful creation until word broke loose that Wal-Mart was secretly paying for the blog. The public, as you might imagine, got rather angry about the lack of disclosure. Now, if you go to the site, all you’ll see is a letter from the writers to their angry audience. I’m particularly fond of the line, “Even these personal attacks wonÂ’t sour my feelings about Wal-Mart.” The writers may be genuine Wal-Mart fans, but the fact that they didn’t disclose their corporate sponsorship is going unforgiven by the Internet at large. In Europe (but not the United States?), they’re passing laws that will subject businesses with false blogs to criminal prosecution. The laws will go into effect Dec 31. This also applies to fake reviews on Amazon.com and other review websites.Hint: Now might be a good time to tell your favorite under-handedly self-promoting business that they should knock this kind of behavior off for their own good.

In the last few weeks, there’s been a viral posting across liberal blogs on how to get free goods out of the Focus on Family website. Basically, Focus on Family is a right-wing conservative resource that has a donation-based online store. They sell DVDs, CDs, books, and other fun stuff. Some of it’s valuable to everyone — like the “Chronicles of Narnia” DVD. Some of it’s offensive propaganda, like “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.” But the things is, it’s donation-based. And if you offer to donate $0, they’ll still place the order. So instructions have been spreading across the liberal blogs on the web on how to “hit these guys where it hurts” and get free stuff in the process. Today I learned that they’re no longer accepting orders that have a $0 donation. And with the onslaught of $0 orders they’ve received in the last few weeks, I’m sure they’re going to disregard most, if not all of them, anyway. So who won?After stepping back to look at it, it seems like Focus on Family won. They now have thousands of links to their website from places that don’t even like them. And even more people have *visited* their website and explored it thoroughly. They’ve received tons of bad publicity, but it’s still publicity. Their search engine rankings will absolutely benefit from this situation.And you know, it kinda makes me wonder if they were behind it all along….