The Perils of Persistence - Jeff Einstein - MediaBizBlogger

The following is copy from an email sent to the head media honcho at a global advertiser following a meeting with one of his media agency's top digital strategists. Proper names have been deleted to protect all (except yours truly, of course)...

"Been ruminating on some leftover thoughts from a recent conversation with one of your agency's top digital strategists, and thought they might serve as a reasonable basis for a dialog between us moving forward..."

"I've long maintained that marketing metrics rarely describe those things that actually work, and more frequently describe what can be sold by agencies and other intermediaries to their clients. That said, I think it's significant that most digital agency folks have turned their backs on the click-through rate (CTR) as a meaningful online brand metric in recent days. True to the above, however, I would argue that the primary reason for this has less to do with the value of the CTR as a brand metric and more to do with the fact that they can no longer sell to their clients any metric -- no matter how meaningful -- that performs at statistical zero."

All media and advertising professionals, companies, organizations and educators are invited to become MediaBizBloggers. For more information, contact Jack Myers at jack@mediadvisorygroup.com. www.MediaBizBloggers.com is revenue-free and accepts only pro-bono advertising for industry organizations and charities, and there is no cost to include your blog.

"Rather than shoot a perfectly good messenger, it might be more instructive to examine why CTRs are so abysmal. I believe the answer is pretty simple, and it applies pretty much across all channels: no one wants the ads and everyone is equipped to avoid them."

"The entire ad industry is currently dealing a narcotic for which there is no demand -- which explains why effective, scalable brand reach is harder and harder to find and more and more expensive to buy, especially online, despite the proliferation of sub-$1.00 CPMs, massive ad networks, and both demand-side and real-time bidding platforms. Indeed, the lack of effective, scalable online brand reach explains why digital media spends remain so miserly in comparison to traditional reach media like TV: big brand advertisers will always satisfy their fundamental need for effective reach first. Everything else is discretionary. And for good reason: branding is simply a function of effective reach."

"Unfortunately, the very concept of brand reach is entirely foreign to most digital marketers. Most incorrectly assume that reach is a function of somehow adjusting and/or augmenting the supply of ads -- a reasonable enough assertion when you also believe in the tooth fairy or the myth of relevant ads, the patently absurd suggestion that there's actually a consumer out in the ether somewhere in search of a relevant ad. But as you likely already know, reach is not a supply-side phenomenon at all. Reach describes the demand side. In an on-demand media universe (and all commercial media are now and always have been on-demand), advertisers never truly reach audiences at all. Quite the opposite: audiences reach advertisers. Reach is a measure of audience behavior, not the ad supply. And the one audience behavior that we can now trust with absolute certainty in an on-demand media universe is the wholesale rejection of ads, "relevant" or otherwise."

"Simply stated, advertisers can't generate effective, scalable reach with an electronic work product that no one wants and everyone is equipped to avoid. Yet from what your digital media proxy told me, this seems to be the exact strategy pursued by your agency. While it's clearly a strategy shared by the vast majority of big brand advertisers and their agencies, it finds no security in numbers because in truth it seeks ubiquity over performance, panders to lazy, tool-driven mentalities, continually lowers the performance bar and wreaks havoc upon the media ecology -- all en route to damaging the very brands it seeks to protect and promote."

"It's a strategy that relies on brute market strength and buying power, and otherwise completely ignores the one thing we know for certain about your prospects: while they may want your products, they sure as hell don't want your ads. Now ask yourself this: What happens if we persist? What happens if we continue to deliver ads to prospects who simply don't want them?"

"Imagine you're a door-to-door salesman. Now imagine that 99.9% of all the doors you walk up to display a big bold 'No Soliciting' sign. Rather than heed the signs, however, you knock on each and every door and -- failing to elicit any response from 999 out of every 1000 doors you knock on -- tack your product brochure up right alongside the 'No Soliciting' sign. You return to the same doors month after month, and leave your brochures behind each and every time. Nothing you do seems to increase sales. Baffled, you double your efforts and leave two brochures on each door -- to no avail. You expand your territory, but all the doors in the new territory are marked with the exact same 'No Soliciting' sign. Undeterred, you leave three brochures instead of two. Eventually your sales begin to decline as your prospects -- pissed and abused -- turn instead to your competitors."

"Persisting with a strategy that insists on delivering ads to prospects who just don't want them will eventually result in negative returns on your investment. Not only will your ad performance continue to decline over time, but each additional ad will constitute a withdrawal from your brand bank. A couple of years ago I introduced the phenomenon of what I called DROI -- Diminished Return On Investment -- to a trade show audience. During the Q&A that followed, one skeptical young man asked me, 'Why, if what you say is true, does P&G pay for and deliver two billion daily ad impressions?'"

"'Because,' I told him, 'the first 1,999,999,999 ad impressions obviously don't get the job done anymore.'"

"Consumers have nailed 'No Soliciting' signs to their doors precisely because they're being bludgeoned to death by the ads now hurtling at them from every conceivable direction in inconceivable volumes. Nowhere is the clarion consumer call for 'No Soliciting' more apparent or more abused by advertisers and marketers than in social media, where what marketers misinterpret as a consumer desire to engage is in fact the exact opposite: a desire to disengage. It might be worthwhile to note that every single attempt by Facebook management to open member profile data to marketers and advertising has been met with fierce resistance by members who want -- more than anything else -- to be left alone to decide who gets in and who stays out."

"Again, what happens if you persist? For that matter, what might happen if you don't?"

About Jeff Einstein

Digital media pioneer Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a contrarian brand strategy and communications boutique. The Brothers Einstein have just announced the release of their Just BE Workshop,a full-day, hands-on seminar designed to help senior marketing executives lower the barriers to innovation and restore common sense to its rightful place atop the hierarchy of modern management tools.

Read all the Einstein Brothers' MediaBizBloggers commentaries at the Brothers Einstein - MediaBizBloggers.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger