Pre-Game Day Super Bowl Ads

I was served up an ad trailer of a game day ad by Toyota. And it was the feeblest 30 seconds of my day so far.  Part of the excitement and anticipation for the half-time show is to see what new spins on ad creatives that agencies and corporations have come up with, to laugh and be amused. 

This ad trailer already has more than 44k views. I imagine the email advertisement went to all current Toyota owners who are also registered subscribers. I can understand why marketing and sales would have chosen to run a preview of the ad; perhaps they can use early feedback to tweak the ad components or to test campaign tracking; but isn't that what Q/A testing is for? Or maybe they want to prep the audience for what looks like it will be an over-spent ad spot.

Anyhow. I don't see the point of wasting an existing customer's time to read an email to click through to a video hosted on YouTube for content that isn't even an entire ad. Ugh. And the micetype? Watch outtakes? Not even close. These are just clips of the same ad hastily pasted together.

The saddest part? There will be Super Bowl ads on game day from companies and organizations that lack deep-pocketed agency resources but will be able to pull off a good ad that drives home a relevant selling point and reasons why you should buy or invest in that company.

Internet of Things

When people ask me what I do, I usually tell them that I consult on questions that are too small or obscure to ask of a full-service marketing agency. My clients come from different backgrounds and not everyone is as tech as someone who immerses in it for fun. I was recently asked, "Internet of Things. This is supposed to be the future. Can you find out what it is all about?" This was my response:

Mobile App Auto Email Opt-In

I met up with a long-time friend in Los Angeles who told me about this new dating site called "Coffee Meets Bagel". An interesting enough name that got me hooked. However, as a marketer, after being on the site for less than an hour, I found that I couldn't unsubscribe nor delete my account. And, because I have so much fictitious info on Facebook, much of what is displayed on the CMB profile is inaccurate to say the least and there are aspects of the CMB profile that you can't edit, like your age. Apparently I have a bachelor's degree from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, according to my CMB profile.

What caught my attention on their privacy page was this statement: "...we reserve the right to send you certain communications relating to Coffee Meets Bagel such as service announcements, security alerts, update notices, or other administrative messages) without affording you the opportunity to opt out of receiving such communications." 

Oh really. Plenty of startups have burned on such flagrant disregard for privacy standards.

If I delete the smartphone app, would that in turn really delete all my info on their server; or would they continue to use my info to hook other people into the system?

From the app's web and iPhone interface, it doesn't look like I can delete my account at all. How to do this is not apparent. I had to look at the intro email and it's not terribly obvious. It's in the mice print section of the email where one normally unsubscribes. But, before you opt for permanent deactivation, be sure to unsubscribe yourself from everything you've been already subscribed to. Because heck, there isn't anything more annoying that receiving email from a deleted account. 

One thing comes to mind when it asks for my mobile number as a means of tracking, I mean matching, my profile to a potential bagel: lead generation. Nothing nefarious here. But it has the makings of bait and switch written all over it.

Social Media Metrics for NonProfits - Facebook

It would appear that the only engagement lift this nonprofit association gets is when posts are promoted for recruitment or to get members and non-members to participate in an activity, and by promoted, I mean to say that we have to pay Facebook a scaled nominal fee each time we want to promote an event. The worthwhile metrics aren't tied to views, reach or engagements; but rather followers who become active, paid members; and subsequently those who renew their membership status year-over-year.

When I joined this professional association group at the start of the year, we had just over 1,500 followers. We now have roughly 1,890 followers; though no real data to benchmark how we are gaining or losing followers, e.g., as a result of event or new membership promotions.

Facebook's default report dashboard

Facebook's default report dashboard for latest posts

The table for engagement by latest posts pretty much tell you what common sense tells you. Compared to the total reach (number of followers), the individual posts have practically no traction with our members. And, the only times when we show some measure of reach is when we pay to promote certain event posts.

One thing to watch out for is how your whole community page or association page is setup on Facebook, because in the above example with the latest posts, you might be the administrator and manage access; but you won't have any access to detailed reports if you didn't setup the promotion yourself. Now, tell me Facebook, how is that sane?

A typical reporting error in Facebook. It begs the question,
why can't all admins see the same reports?

iOS 7: The Cool Things About This Update

Aside from the Gmail app crashing totally and rendering my unproductivity even higher, I can say that the rest of the embellishments that made it into this version of the user interface are more than just eye candy. In no particular order, here are the ones that caught my eyes:

• Yahoo! Weather. If you have this native app configured to show different cities, there is now animation tied to whatever is going on in those cities. Beijing, for example was foggy, and fog drifted across the screen. The same is true for night vs day, or cloudy (clouds drifting), and when the rains come back to the Pacific Northwest, droplets of rain will probably be washing the augmented reality screen. A big plus: moon phases, sunrise and sunset times are in.
• Clock. Before, you might have thought that this was a static display; and now a red seconds needle also shows.
• Compass. The compass itself got a facelift, which looks prettier than the basic compass it used to look like. If you swipe the screen, you get a digital level which can be used if laying the smartphone flat on a table, or on its side for say, hanging a painting.
• Camera. You can take stills, video, or panoramic -and- select the image type (e.g., monochrome, noir, instant, fade, chrome, etc) from the same camera window. No more fiddling with embedded menus. Yay!
• Calendar. Before, it looked pretty much like blocks and arrows, right? Now you can scroll through the calendar year or quickly look at past or future years. It is a slight improvement; though I liked the simplicity of the older calendar feature.

iOS 7: Things You Should Know About this Update

If you are a Gmail app user and you update to the current version, you may notice a few things. Like, Gmail ceasing to work. Much of my day was spent like this:

Delete. Reinstall. Delete. Purge cache. Reboot. Reinstall. Delete app. Delete acct instance within native mail app. Reinstall. Add gmail acct back to native mail app.

I found out a lot about the new features. I mean really, who has time to read Apple release notes? I spent a lot of time looking at the settings and turning all the new things "off". 

Is offering a discount enough?

"Your mystery offer is waiting <checkmark symbol> it out". That was in my inbox this morning from Shutterfly. Thank goodness Google Mail rendered the symbol correctly; though I wonder how many customers got the question mark instead for that special character insertion. I would think that I am already a customer since I made a purchase earlier in the year and while Shutterfly might have marketing automation capabilities, whoever is managing how content is delivered to customers and prospects is doing it from a batch and blast perspective; which is okay if your company fits one of the following scenarios:

• a consumer products oriented company with a high churn rate
• customers respond better to discounts because you've conditioned them to expect it
• your company is a market share leader in its industry, and you simply don't care about losing existing customers
• your CEO dictates the marketing plan
• your products are more of a commodity than a premium brand

Before and after purchasing from Shutterfly, I'd always gotten promotional emails and like most consumer emails they are spammy...meaning I get more than four per month. And to top that, all the discounts have been in the 40% to 50% range or free products (e.g., 12 free thank you cards, free photo magnet, free photo book, etc.). It makes me think that their loss-leader costs are minimal.

Take this Shutterfly email as an example. What do you see?

Shutterfly promo email from 2013-08-22

If you saw in the email preview screen that you only got up to 40% off for buying something from Shutterfly, you might just be in the 90% who would see just that. However, if you were really tuned into promotional offers, you'd see that it's up to 40% in addition to existing sale prices. Which did you see, the former or the latter response? If you saw the former, chances are you deleted the email since it didn't look any different than any other Shutterfly promotion. If you saw the latter, it might take you a second glance to see if you really saw the right offer and perhaps that is enough for you to click through. 

If this is a totally new offer (as in, this product pricing scenario has not been used with new customers), the offer needs to be called out in a color other than black text on construction yellow. The italicized black text is still more of the same. This is a callout for the "on top of sale prices" to be in a different color. It's hard to tell though if such an offer would really impact Shutterfly's media plan without having the production data. And, it is just one offer campaign out of dozens that Shutterfly runs each calendar quarter.