How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing?

It seems like a busy holiday season is already underway for marketers, and hopefully for the economy, shoppers as well.  Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a rough count of how many marketing messages I was exposed to in a given day.  Here’s what the day looked like:

5:30 a.m. – alarm clock goes off with 1010 WINS news radio in the middle of an ad cycle – 2 ads total.  Nice start to the day.

5:45-6:30 – in the gym, watching Today In New York News on NBC for 30 minutes, approximately 6 ad pods, 6 ads per pod – 36 ads total.  So we’re at 38, and it’s still dark out.

7:00 – walk to subway and take train to work, then walk to office from subway.  Probably see 6 outdoor ads of various kinds on either walk, then about 8 more on the subway within clear eyeshot – 20 ads total.

7:30 – quick scan of My Yahoo – 2 ads total.

7:32 – read Wall St. Journal online, 15 page views, 3 ads per page – 45 ads total.

7:40 – Catch up on RSS feeds and blogs, probably about 100 pages total, only 50% have ads – 50 ads total (plus another 25 during the rest of the day).

7:50 – Sift through email – even forgetting the spam and other crap I delete – 10 ads total (plus another 10 during the rest of the day).

8:00-noon – basically an ad free work zone, but some incidental online page views are generated in the course of work – 25 ads total, plus a ton of Google paid search ads along the way.

Noon-1 p.m. – walk out to get lunch and come back to office, so some outdoor ads along the path – 12 ads total.

1-7 p.m. – same work zone as before – 25 ads total, plus lots of Google.

7 p.m. – walk to Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks get clobbered by Milwaukee, see lots of outdoor ads along the way – 20 ads total.

7:30-9:30 – at the Garden for the Knicks game, bombarded by ads on the scoreboards, courtside, sponsorship announcements, etc.  Approximately 100 ads total (and that’s probably being exceptionally generous).

9:30 – subway ride and walk home – 14 ads total.

10:00 – blitz through episodes of The Daily Show and West Wing in TiVo.  8 minutes of :30 advertising per half hour, or 48 ads total, fortunately can skip most of them with TiVo.

11:00 – flip through issue of The New Yorker before bed – 50 ads total.

Total: 492 ads.

I’m sure I missed some along the way, and to be fair, I am counting the ads I skipped with TiVo — but hey, I’m also not counting all the ads I saw on Google, so those two should wash each other out.  On the other hand, if I drove to and from work in California, I’d have seen an extra 100 billboards, and if I read the New York Times print edition, I’d have seen an extra 100 print ads.

Approximate cost paid to reach me as a consumer today (assuming an average CPM of $10): just under $5.  Sanity check on that — $5/day*200 million Americans who are “ad seers”*365 days is a $365 billion advertising industry, which is probably in the right ballpark.

What are the two ads I consciously acted on?  An offer from LL Bean through email (I’m on their list) for a new fleece I’ve been meaning to get, and a click on one of the Google paid search results.  No doubt, I subconsciously logged some good feelings or future purchase intentions for any number of the other ads.  Or at least so hope all of the advertisers who tried to reach me.

What’s the message here?  A very Seth Godin-like one.  Nearly all of the marketing thrown at me during the day (Seth would call it interrupt marketing) — on the subway, at the Garden, on the sidebar of web pages — is just noise to me.  The ones I paid attention to were the ones I WANTED to see:  the email newsletter I signed up for from a merchant I know and love; and a relevant ad that came up when I did a search on Google.

Brand advertising certainly has a role in life, but permission and relevance rule the day for marketers.  Always.

My 360 on Your 360

Last year, I wrote about the 360 review process we do at Return Path, which is a great annual check-in on staff development and leadership/management.  In Part I of What a View, I described the overall process.  In Part II, I talked specifically about how my review as CEO worked, which is a little different.

This year, we changed the format of our reviews in two ways. First, for senior staff, we continued to do the live, moderated discussions, but we dropped having people also fill out the online review form.  It was duplicative, and the process already consumes enough time that we decided to cut that part out, which I think worked well. 

Second, for my review, instead of having the Board review me separately from the senior staff, I combined efforts and had all of them participate in my live moderated discussion together.  I also think this worked well, although we did receive some feedback about how to modify the format slightly for next year.  It was great for the Board to get a window into how the team feels about me, and vice versa, and it produced a single, unified development plan for me, which is much more helpful than two sets of feedback about different questions and issues.

The one theme that came out of this year’s live reviews, which is definitely worth thinking about, is the impact of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that once something is observed, the act of observing it can actually change it.  Because the live discussions are face to face (anonymous to the person being reviewed, but not anonymous among the reviewers), some people mentioned that they were conscious of what they were saying in the presence of others in the company.  Others didn’t particularly care about that but did say things that could be construed as negative about some of their fellow reviewers.  Someone came up to me after one session and said "I wonder what the rest of the group thought of my comments — I need a 360 on your 360!"

The reality is that transparency is a good thing.  There shouldn’t be any state secrets about someone’s performance, especially when the person is in a senior management position.  All people always have things they can improve upon, and the open discussion around what they are and why they happen produce MUCH better results for the people being reviewed, uncomfortable as it may be at times.

The sessions are confidential, so participants should feel comfortable that their thoughts won’t be shared outside the room.  Plus, we provide a mechanism to give feedback that really is hard to provide in public for whatever reason via email or one-on-one conversations with the moderator.

• Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Entrepreneurial Employees
  Good quick point of view on what makes a great employee in a startup.
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

Book Short:  Underdog Victorious

The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book.  It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book.

That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages.  The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent.  They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to win an election every single day.  A lot of the tactics suggested are timeless and good to remember…things like never declare victory, always play offense, always respond to attacks, remember to communicate from the inside out, and remember to sell employees on a mision and purpose in order to make them your main ambassadors.  The laundry list of tactics is the book’s greatest strength.

• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » They’re meltinggggg
  Jeff Jarvis on Why We’re Glad We’re New Media…good stats on all the troubles facing “old media” nowadays (box office, newspapers, music, radio, books)
  (tags: Technology Media)
• Our Customer Is The Entrepreneur | Union Square Ventures
  Fred Wilson on how VCs relate to entrepreneurs vs. their limited partners. They should think of entrepreneurs as their customers, and think of LPs as shareholders.
  (tags: VC Technology Entrepreneur)

A Typepad User, and Proud of It

SixApart showed huge corporate courage today when they emailed their entire blog user base, apologized (for the second or third time) for service interruptions the past month, then announced a cash remedy.

As a default, they’re giving everyone half a month of service for free.  This is obviously a huge hit to the company financially and probably more of a gesture than anyone expected.  But better than that, they allowed users to click through to their web site and automatically get a full month for free — or a month and a half for free — if they felt in good conscience that the service outages were more harmful to them.  They also quite intelligently allowed users to click through and decline the service credit if they weren’t inconvenienced by the outages.

This is everything that customer service is supposed to be.  Prompt.  Proactive.  Generous.  Allowing customers to be in the driver seat about remedies.  After a HORRENDOUS weekend of customer service gaffes by United Airlines (a story for another time), I couldn’t be more struck by the contrast.  And SixApart isn’t even an employee-owned company teetering on the edge bankruptcy.  Way to go, SixApart!

Hackoff – The Blook, Part II

A few weeks back, I posted about a new blook (book delivered in single episodes via blog) called Hackoff.com – An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, by Tom Evslin.  A few weeks into it, and I’m hooked.  It’s:

– complete and total brain candy, or mental floss as Brad calls it

– a great 2 minute break in the middle of the day (episodes are delivered once a day during the week)

– a very entertaining reminder about some of the wacky things that went on back in the Internet heyday

– a good look into some of the processes that go on behind the scenes in taking a company public

If you haven’t started the blook yet and want to give it a try, you can catch up on all of the first episodes and subscribe to the new ones here.   You can also preorder a hardcover copy of the book here on Amazon.com.

Book Short:  Allegory of Allegories

Squirrel, Inc., by Stephen Denning, is a good quick read for leaders who want a refreshing look at effective ways to motivate and communicate to their teams. The book focuses on storytelling as a method of communication, and Denning employs the storytelling method fairly successfully as a framework for the book.

The specific kinds of messages he focuses on, where he says storytelling can have the biggest impact, are:  communicating a complex idea and sparking action; communicating identity – who YOU as leader are; transmitting values; getting a group or team to work together more effectively; neutralizing gossip or taming the grapevine; knowledge-sharing; and painting a vision of the future that a team can hang onto.   The book even has a nice summary “how to” table at the end of it.

Thanks to email guru David Baker at Agency.com for giving me the book.

Return Path Blog is Up

Today we launched our new corporate web site at Return Path.  We’re trying an experiment.  We’ve reinvented large portions of the site as a corporate blog (for those of you who follow Fred’s blog, the two of us just realized last week that we had both done this to our companies’ web sites at the same time without knowing it).

As I said in my introductory post on the new site, we’re casting the blog as an Online Resource Center for Email Marketers.  There are no hard and fast rules for how corporate blogs are supposed to work, so we’re experimenting with it.  I hope all of our friends, employees, customers, and investors, as well as journalists who cover online marketing, and other marketers who care about email, subscribe to it and give it a shot — and also give us feedback. 

Since there aren’t a lot of precedents for good corporate blogs, we’ve created the following guidelines for ourselves in publishing this blog:

    * We will treat you the way a publisher would treat you — as a valued, paying subscriber
    * We will give you a new and deeper level of access to our and industry data and experts
    * We will respond to your feedback and comments promptly and not defensively
    * We will not clutter up the Resource Center with third-party advertising
    * We reserve the right to occasionally post about Return Path, but not in an annoying way

I hope these are reasonable, and if they work, I hope others will adopt them as well.

My personal blog, OnlyOnce, will continue to exist in its current form, and I will follow Fred’s lead and cross-post between the two blogs whenever it’s relevant.  So I’d encourage you to have a look at the new Return Path site, and feel free to subscribe to our blog via RSS, or by entering your email address in the top of the "Feed Me!" form on our home page.  We promise you a regular, but not overbearing, stream of interesting facts and insights into email marketing from me, George Bilbrey, Stephanie Miller, and many others on the Return Path team like that you won’t be able to get anywhere else!

Counter Cliche:  Failure Is Not an Orphan

I haven’t written one of these for a while, but this week, Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week, Success Has a Thousand Fathers, definitely merits an entrepreneurial point of view.  Fred’s main point is right — it’s very easy when something goes right, whether a company/venture deal or even something inside the company like a good quarter or a big new client win, for lots of people to take credit, many of whom don’t deserve it.

But what separates A companies from B and C companies is the ability to recognize and process failures as well as successes.  Failure is not orphan.  It usually has as many real fathers as success.  Although it’s true that Sometimes, There is No Lesson to Be Learned, failure rarely emerges spontaneously. 

Companies that have a culture of blame and denial eventually go down in flames.  They are scary places to work.  They foster in-fighting between departments and back-stabbing among friends.  Most important, companies like that are never able to learn from their mistakes and failures to make sure those things don’t happen again.

Finger-pointing and looking the other way as things go south have no place in a well-run organization.  While companies don’t necessarily need to celebrate failures, they can create a culture where failures are treated as learning experiences and where claiming responsibility for a mistake is a sign of maturity and leadership.  And all of this starts at the top.  If the boss (CEO, department head, line manager) is willing to step up and acknowledge a mistake, do a real post-mortem, and process the learnings with his or her team without fear of retribution, it sets an example that everyone in the organization can follow.

CEO Diary:  What Makes a Great Day?

5:30 a.m. – run (have to keep up with Brad)

8:45 a.m. – networking coffee with former main contact at large strategic partner; now CFO of another company in the industry

9:30 a.m. – work time/email/read newsletters, Wall St. Journal online, various RSS feeds

10:30 a.m. – internal meeting to discuss mothballing a product feature that’s hard to maintain and doesn’t generate much revenue

11:00 a.m. – internal meeting to clarify roles and responsibilities between account management and  client technical operations

11:30 a.m. – brainstorm 2006 strategy with head of one of our lines of business

1:00 p.m. – great sales call on a Tier I prospect with new sales person; business almost certainly forthcoming!

3:00 p.m. – meet with head of sales and hea of HR to discuss candidate for sales position and potential changes to sales compensation structure

3:30 p.m. – review draft of new (revolutionary!?!?) corporate web site; do deep dive on critical headlines and copy points with team members

4:30 p.m. – status meeting with new head of marketing,including quick stand-up meeting on PR strategy for upcoming trade show with one line of business head and product manager

5:30 p.m. – work/email/planning next Board meeting agenda/blog posting

7:00 p.m. – dinner with CTO

Energizing (frenetic?).  Diverse in terms of functions/departments covered.  Good balance of internal vs. external.  Some items high level, some more detailed.  Mix of brainstorming vs. decisions vs. status checks.  Some social mixed in with hardcore work.  This is why I love my job!