Is buzz no more valuable than an ad?

What if the experts are wrong and ads are just as persuasive as buzz? This can't

be possible, can it? The experts have told us that there is a new breed of human

being out there who no longer wants to be marketed to. She pays no attention

to ads. She is immune to the "interruption model" and we need to get her

"permission" to market to her.

Not so fast, says David Michaelson Co., a New York-based company that

studies measurement of communications effectiveness,and has compared the

effect of publicity with traditional advertising in a controlled experiment. He

and a co-author presented research subjects with a faked ad for an invented

product, and a faked newspaper article about the same product. On a scale of 1

to 10, the article was a 10 "from the standpoint of a publicist's dream article,"

Dr. Michaelson says. Yet their study showed that the article was no more

effective than the ad in building brand awareness. Now here's something to

think about. I have no idea of the validity of this study. But if it's true that

people are not terribly moved by "buzz" in reputable media like newspapers,

how much power do you think buzz has in dopey social media like blogs, and

Twitter and Facebook?

Maybe buzz is exactly what it sounds like -- just a lot of mouths yapping.

On-line research has some major advantages.

It is often less expensive than standard methods and also quicker to yield

#results. However, as currentlypracticed, it is fatally flawed."We're

perpetuating a fraud," is what Simon Chadwick has to say. Mr. Chadwick is

former head of NOP Research in the U.K. and is now principal of Cambiar, a

Phoenix consultancy.

Surveys tend to poll the same people over and over.In fact, a study done by

ComScore Networks indicated that one-quarter of one percent of the

population provides about one-third of all on-line responses. This means that

instead of getting one vote, each of these respondents is getting the equivalent

of 128 votes.We are getting the same people responding over and over again to

earn points so they can win a toaster. Or as Mr. Chadwick calls them,

"professional respondents who go hunting for...dollars. What's so terrible about

professional respondents, you might ask? Pulitzer Prize winning New York

Times science writer Natalie Angier says: Nothing tarnishes the

credibility of a sample like the desire to be sampled.... a good pollster will

hound and re-hound the very people who least want to cooperate. So not

only are these people ridiculously over-represented, they are the wrong

people. "It's like the hole in the ozone layer," said Shari Morwood,

VP-worldwide market research at IBM in an article in Advertising

Age. "Everyone knows it's a growing problem. But they just ignore it and

go on to the next project." Kim Dedeker, VP-consumer and market

knowledge at P&G, describes an example in which online and mail surveys

came up with diametrical results. "If I only had the online result.... I would have

taken a bad decision right to the top management," she said. In another case,

two surveys conducted a week apart by the same online researcher yielded

completely different recommendations. Furthermore, most of these on-line

researchers don't validate their samples. They don't know who is responding. It

could be my daughter using my computer saying she's me. Or saying she's you

for that matter. And if all that weren't enough, many of them don't limit

responses.

I can log in as five different people and respond five different times. Or

fifty. Or a hundred and twenty-eight. Another lovely bit of hokum they

perpetrate is the degree of confidence. They tell us that their results are

accurate with a 95% degree of confidence. However, they never quite tell

us what it is that they're confident about. Is it that, in general, a study with

this many legitimate respondents will be statistically valid 95% of the time? Or

is it that their interpretation of subjective data will be 95% accurate (by the

way, no one's interpretation of subjective data is 95% accurate) Or is it

something else? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt for a minute and

say that their sample is legitimate (which is highly unlikely) and that they

are brilliant people who can interpret data almost flawlessly. Let's take a

look at what 95% degree of confidence means under the best of circumstances.

Once again we'll turn to Ms. Angier from her book The Canon. Here's an

example she gives. You go for an HIV test. You test positive. The test is said

to be 95% accurate. This means you have a 95% chance of having the HIV

virus, right? Not even close. What it means is that 95% of the time people who

have the HIV virus will test positive. But it also means that 5% of the time

people who do not have the HIV virus will test positive. Now let's say

you live in a town with 100,000 people. Fortunately, the HIV virus is very rare

and only appears in 1 person out of 350. So in your town of 100,000 people,

this means that there will be about 285 people with the HIV virus (100,000

divided by 350). But if we tested all the people in your town, we would get

about 5,000 positives (remember, 5% of the time people who do not have the

virus will test positive) and almost all of these 5,000 positives would be

false.,mIn fact when you do the math, after testing positive not only is

there not a 95% chance you have the virus, there is about a 5% chance you have

it. And an almost 95% chance you don't have the virus.* So much for a 95%

level of confidence.We advertising and marketing people are drowning in

opinions and starving for facts. But we have to be very careful about

distinguishing between the two. In the advertising world, research is no

different from creative work. Some of it is very good, some of it is worthless

and dangerous.To figure out the accuracy of the result, you divide the total

number of true positives you'd expect from your sample (95% of 285, or 271)

by the total number of true and false positives (5,257) and you wind up with a

probability of having the HIV virus is actually about 5.2%, not 95%. If you

can't follow the math, and you don't trust me, don't worry. You can trust Ms.

Angier, she has a Pulitzer Prize. All I have interactive marketing

communication.

An article in American Express says, "not so fast".

Senior marketers were asked which components of their current digital

marketing programs"search, email, display advertising, social networking, and

mobile advertising"delivered the best results. Only 11% cited social

networking.

As you know,IMG is highly skeptical of this type of research. The remarkable

thing, however, is that with social media getting so much hype, the tendency of

people who have invested in it would be to exaggerate its effectiveness.

Instead, it was tied for effectiveness with "I don't know." Marketers also said

that social media is significantly less effective than banner ads (display

advertising), and I just don't know how anything can be less effective than that.

Mobile advertising, by the way, didn't even make the chart. As I said 6 months

ago in a previous posting. "IMG predicts that when the frenzy over Facebook,

Twitter, and other social media calms down and the dust clears, email and

search will continue to be the dreariest and most productive forms of online

advertising."!

Discover the surprising benefits of using interactive marketing communication

contact PaulAshby on paulashby40@yahoo.com or (UK Landline) 01934

620047.

　

　

About 2 months ago I wrote a piece called "Social Media's Massive Failure".

It was about the failure of the Pepsi Refresh Project. Most of you disagreed

with my observations that the Refresh effort was a failure. Recently The New

Yorker published an article called "Snacks for a Fat Planet". It isn't specifically

about the Refresh project.

It is about PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi's attempt to transform the

company from the world's largest maker of soda and crappy food into a

company with respectable standards and values. It is actually a very interesting

article and Nooyi comes off as an intelligent, thoughtful but somewhat jargony

leader.The article talks about Refresh as part of Pepsi's desire

to be perceived as a "good" company ...the strategy was to use social media to

promote the image of PepsiCo... to bring the flagship brand more in line with

PepsiCo's "performance with purpose" agenda...Then it goes on to note that

Pepsi's share had dropped 4.8% since the program was introduced.

... the Refresh campaign garnered more than eighty million votes,

got three and a half million likes on Pepsi's Facebook page, and drew some

sixty thousand Twitter followers. But the campaign didn't sell Pepsi.Which to

my ear sounds an awful lot like this paragraph from Social Media's Massive

Failure...

"Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million

"likes" on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only

thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi." The article concludes...

"It appears that hearing about all the good things that PepsiCo is doing to help

make the world a better place does not tempt you to down a

Pepsi". As we know, there are many in the marketing world who

cannot see the limitations of social media, no matter how compelling the

evidence. Consequently, those of us with open minds and functional synapses

need to remain skeptical and vocal about the "magic" of social media.

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to

believe." -- Euripides

Do you think that Advertising has become too parochial, too introspective, too convinced by its on hyperbole?

Two or three thousand, what would be described as, creative people, dominates advertising.
However, a major change is afoot and advertising, long regarded as the ultimate weapon in marketing – particularly the once mighty television commercial – is now seen as complacent and increasingly ineffective.

Consequently, the power of the creative is diminishing. And why is this a good thing for clients and their customers? Because, very often, these creatives have been the ‘barnacles on the bum of progress’.

It is amazing when you consider the many excellent marketing ideas that have been available, however the promoters of such ideas eventually gave up selling to advertising agencies because all advertising agencies wanted was to get their clients onto television.

That it might not be the ideal medium was totally ignored.
Our experience was typical; we developed the most potent, effective and accountable marketing communications programme – ever.
When we started the business we were introduced to Alvin Toffler who, when hearing of what we were doing simply said “Persevere but remember vested interests will be against you”.
Was he ever right!

Do You Understand Why We Need Interactive Communication - urgently?

　


Quite simply it is the human desire for interaction.

All advertising is a form of learning whereby the advertiser is asking people to change their

behaviour after learning the benefits of the products or services on offer. However, we all

tend to filter out information that we do not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness

of conventional advertising in quite a dramatic way.

The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of

anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one. In order to

minimize this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more

notice of their chosen product's marketing communications. Additionally we have created a

media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole communication process has

been de-humanized and depersonalized.

Together with an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional media together

with advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is

disseminated in a passive form. People have this desire to be taken account of. To affect

change, to learn and personalize their relationship with their environment. There are a

phenomenal number of reasons that cause people to interact, going far beyond just giving

them things.

When people agree to participate in truly interactive marketing programmes they are told that

their efforts and feedback are of positive help to the advertisers. Additionally the attraction of

interactive communication is that it is a return to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales!

　

People long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care

about. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be

rather than the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part

of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation

imposed by market forces too large to grasp; to even contemplate.

Commerce is a natural part of human life but is has become increasingly

unnatural over the intervening centuries, gradually divorcing itself from the

very people on whom it depends, whether workers or customers. The result has

been to create a huge chasm between buyers and sellers.

Advertising's failure! Conventional advertising has failed the natural human need for social

interaction. We have created a media society during the last 30 or 40 years

where there is an extraordinary reduction in interaction because of the one-way

and more passive form of information that exists. People desire to be taken

account of, to affect change, learn and personalize their relationships with

their environment. These psychological and sociological factors are part of the

incentive to interact with advertising.

　

　

　

Are you doing anything about Swinging back the web clutter?

Last summer, Starcom released a major study on internet clutter finding that the more ads on a page, the more click-through rates, brand impact and product consideration decline. Jeff Marshall, senior VP-director of the firm's online arm, said since the dot-com bubble burst, many sites have cleaned themselves up. But "not everybody's moved that way. ... We may see that pendulum switch back toward clutter."

And then there's mobile marketing, where perhaps the greatest risk lies for a new avalanche of commercial content. Though hailed as one of the ad business' great growth areas, it hasn't really taken off, partly because the jury's still out on just how receptive consumers are to commercial messaging on their phones. One commenter from New York City gave this no-duh perspective: "The cellphone is way to [sic] personal to be considered another advert medium. If companies start slamming people with messages, people will be turned off."

In the end, permission marketing may be advertisers' best bet for gaining acceptance in emerging media that don't come with social contracts of the kind that's governed, say, the TV business for so long -- that is, viewers' tacit willingness to put up with ads since that revenue's underwriting the programming they enjoy.

"Anytime there's a new destination for people, like YouTube or mobile phones, the assumption is we've got to find a way to put some ads there," Mr. Barocci said. "That's just going to make things worse because there's no social contract. If mobile-phone companies say, 'We'll reduce your bill if you accept ads,' then that's a contract and that's smart."

Why do People need to Interact?

People respond to interactive opportunities because it seems to offer some intangible quality long ‘missing in action’ from modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenised broadcast media, interactive opportunities provide a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and corporate propaganda, interactive communication gives new legitimacy – and free rein – to play.

People long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than the sum of abstract metrics and parameters.

We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp; to even contemplate.

Would you like to discover more about how effective interactive communication is? Then simply contact Paul Ashby @ paulashby40@yahoo.com or (UK) 01934 620047 and please feel free to discuss any aspect of Interactive Communication.

　

　

Do you agree with Mad Ave's 16-car pileup?

Clutter's not the only issue -- things like media multitasking and ad-skipping devices play roles. But it is the elephant in the room. Or maybe a more apt metaphor is a 16-car pileup that Madison Avenue's perfectly happy to rubberneck: pause just enough to recognise its existence without doing anything to fix it.

"We could discuss any topic in media and there would some room for debate," said Debbie Solomon, group research director at WPP Group's MindShare, and the author of the agency's annual study on increased commercial time in TV. "But not with clutter. Every study I've ever seen shows that it's a bad thing."

So if clutter's such a problem, why isn't there a clear, unified way of figuring out how to reduce it? A big reason is that clutter is usually viewed through the lenses of individual media, a way of looking that makes a bit of sense given that clutter affects each medium differently.

Research shows that a magazine reader looks at glossy ad pages rather favorably, as part of the editorial content, while a TV viewer is more likely to see 30-second spots as interruptions. Between those poles of acceptance and revulsion fall internet users, who are simultaneously hit with both scads of generic, untargeted ads and more finely tuned pitches that take into account behavior that gives some semblance of relevance to advertising.

Refocus on consumer, not media
A siloed way of thinking is fine if you're atop a media company or a trade association, but it falls short if managing a massive marketing budget is your bag. That lens effectively needs to be refocused not on media but on the consumer, who's cumulatively bludgeoned by commercial messages as he moves from medium to medium. "We just don't have a holistic approach yet," Mr. Barocci said.

Asked whether a more consumer-centric approach to clutter is needed, Bob Liodice, president-CEO at the Association of National Advertisers, said such an initiative "would have to be like what's going on with engagement," referring to a joint effort by his organization, the 4A's and the ARF to develop a new standard for measuring ad effectiveness. "That's something that seems to have universal support and intrigue. Ad clutter hasn't yet risen to that level. I don't want to dismiss it, though. The consumer is running away from some advertising."

Kate Sirkin, exec VP-global research director at Publicis Groupe's Starcom, said she's not counting on action from media companies, for whom clutter raises complicated questions of economics. "Media companies and associations won't look at it because they don't think in a multimedia way," she said. "It'll be up to advertisers to deal with."

Do you think that The dangers facing advertising and marketing are many and complex?

,

however we have to stop and stand back and re-examine the whole process of commercial

communication for the practitioners have lost sight of what we are supposed to

do. It is true that Marketing inertia is causing so many problems, together with

the fact that they will not face up to the unpalatable truth that the whole

process is just not working these days. The situation is so bad that any attempt

to mount an argument for reform gets buried in the old narrative of "advertising

works"!

Well the fact is that the era of getting rid of big advertising agencies and cutting wasteful

expenditure is upon us. After all we've had years of ever increasing marketing budgets and

throwing huge amounts of money at media has resulted in clutter and unaccountability.

Advertising in its current form must come to an end, not just because the money has run out,

but it is also shown to have failed! Although it must be said that Advertising and Marketing

are not the only scenes of gross wastage and mismanagement.

One can liken the current Advertising scene to an unstable Ponzi scheme.

Advertising and Marketing departments promised higher benefits than were

justified by the money being allocated to pay for them as in the swindle known

as a Ponzi scheme. The fact that advertising doesn't work makes all this

expenditure unsustainable right now!

There is an urgent need, like "Right Now" to overcome the hostility to big

business generally, the normal cosy relationships must not be allowed to resume.

The flawed policy-making in Marketing departments, without a doubt the Saatchi

brothers are responsible for the over rated benefits on spending (wasting?) huge

amounts of money on advertising! They were the most incompetent advertising

people in the history of advertising! The Saatchi Brothers encouraged the

slavish adherence to rational expectations stemming from the Creative Process,

and yet all knew that slavish belief in Creativity alone is fatal!

Where should we go from here? A huge and daunting question. Advertising

Agencies must learn the theory of "communication" they must also try, in all

honesty, to become totally accountable, it can be done.

　

Communication research shows that interaction raises a communication's effectiveness.

During all our research one constant shone through, that is that marketing is

conversations.

Current conventional mass media are weak conductors of knowledge and

comprehension. This is because of a number of factors, however the main reason

is; they are non-interactive communications vehicles, in other words

conversations cannot take place.



The one problem facing interactive advertising is the fact that it has become

a cliche in recent years, without any very clear or consistent definition of

what the word means or how it is supposed to work.

Properly executed it has none of the woolly theorising that lies behind the

arguments about various forms of so-called interactive communication using

direct marketing and electronic media (most of which involves at best the

minimum of true interactivity).

It is also practical, down-to-earth, and uses a readily comprehensible and

verified mechanism to expand the relevance and salience of advertising and

other forms of marketing communications. It can be applied to all major media

and to various other forms of communication, including new media. There is

no theoretical reason why it should not also be applied to packaging designs or

product literature.

The basic elements of interactive communication are very simple, as all

communication should be. The audience or any part of them are provided

with a Game, comprising a Quiz together with multiple choice answers.

This take the reader/viewer through the detail of a commercial or

advertisement and focuses their interest and attention on the products selling

points. The questionnaire is (usually) presented as an exercise

in getting the publics opinions about the products. The effect is to combine

the techniques of programmed learning and game playing to fix the advertising

message in consumers minds.

In the face of growing clutter of advertising messages and the increasing

ability of consumers to screen out unwanted commercials and ads., there is also

a growing problem for advertisers in breaking through the surrounding noise.

By presenting advertisements in the form of a Game it alters the consumers

perception to the content making the communication process far more effective,

by providing an enjoyable mechanism for consumers to become involved with

the brand and its advertising message.

This meets the desire, evident among consumers, to open up a dialogue with

at least some of the manufacturers or service companies whose products they

buy; and also feeds consumers evident wish to be better informed about what it

is they are being asked to buy.

By getting consumers to make a commitment to finding out more about an

advertisers offer, the interactive technique can create the conditions for

positive attitudes towards the advertiser and positive learning about the product

advertised.

In addition to providing this encouragement for consumers to focus on the

brand and to develop for themselves the steps of the argument that should

lead to a purchase the technique can provide the advertiser with valuable

feedback about both the product and its advertising. This is a dialogue that

can benefit both sides, and be seen to be doing so.

By its very nature, the technique is totally accountable, so much so that it

is, without a doubt the most heavily research concept in the history of

marketing communication.

Many of the worlds largest independent research companies have measured the

incremental increases that just one exposure to an interactive programme can

bring.

What do you think is lacking in the advertising world of to-day?

Mainly we appear to lack ideas, strong ideas, competing ideas, confident

philosophies, angry dissent. Advertising people used to have ideas &

policies; they jostled to present their ideas. But what is alarming is

the impassivity of our advertising people & the idleness of advertising

debate, as we wait. There is a sense of vacuum.

Where to-day is the bold advocacy, the impatience to persuade, the urgency of

argument? Where are the shouts of "here's how!"? Where are the leading

actors, the big voices, the great thoughts?

Headlines about "Twitter", the Internet, "Facebook" et al, are these now the

only images we have of a once great advertising industry?

But perhaps the problem is simpler but just as scary, in a headline " Lack of

experience affects business" the Institute of Advertising had this to say, "The

nature of the business is such that in order to be cost efficient process gets

dumbed down and farmed out to more junior people. There is a tendency to

commodity and that can lead to work being de-skilled".

So there you have it technology and a dumbing down are affecting all aspect

of advertising...it is time to change or else advertising will become like the

Zimbabwe bird flying around in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up

its own orifice!

Do you agree that As More Power Shifts to Consumers the Need Grows For 'Renaissance Marketers'?

　

Together with a deeper understanding of Interactive Marketing

Communication.

Interactive marketing communications isn't new, but it's gaining momentum as

power shifts from the marketer to the consumer and as marketers recognize the

power and efficiency of taking a integrated approach to engaging consumers.

Several studies indicate that achieving effective Interactive Marketing

Communication campaigns is marketers' primary concern, one research study

indicated that, properly executed, interactive marketing is considerably more

effective allowing a Client to half his current advertising budget and be, at

least, 50% more effective.

"COST EFFECTIVENESS: Professor E.L. Roberto, PhD, Coca-Cola

Foundation Professor of International Marketing reviewed the £5 million of

independent research conducted on behalf of Interactive communication and

provided this summary as to the techniques cost efficiency:

"The Interactive "Event(s)" participating brands generated recall scores that

are more than 50% productive than normal advertising. The effect on purchase

intention is just as impressive if not much more.

All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive

budget. One Client revealed that for its participating brand, its quarter

television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its interactive budget

of $0.5 million. This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in Interactive experience

in other countries."

However there is considerable uncertainty about how to staff, design, manage

and measure the success of such programs.

For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organized by media

type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with class rewards based

on discipline-specific P&L models. These must be torn down.

On the client-side Marketing and Brand Managers must involve and lead a

team of colleagues who have the responsibility, vision, understanding and

commitment to engage in a media-agnostic planning process. And this team of

enlightened marketers must be willing to let strategic goals -- not historic

patterns -- drive budget allocations.

Achieving strategic integration requires a top-to-bottom reinvention of the

marketing organization. This transformation must be led by holistic

professionals who are system thinkers, customer-centric believers, innovators

and dreamers.

These individuals should be cross-trained to understand the entire marketing

spectrum and learn discipline-specific skill sets. And to specifically

understand the real meaning of the word "communication" Increasingly, these

leaders will need strong quantitative skills -- in order to analyze the

data-rich resources and leverage mathematical tools now available, especially

if they are to drive cross-disciplinary approaches that fuse disparate

consumer-engagement channels. Above all, they need to be superior team

leaders who have the insights, talent and passion to take marketing integration

to new heights.

Engaging in conversations with relevant markets (Interacting) will become an

important source of knowledge and innovation, the quality of this market

intelligence has already (and will do so more in the future) proven to be more

accurate than research and will determine market share.

Without interactive communication your efforts to create new products and

markets will be taking place in a vacuum.

　

　

Do you agree that the function of effective interactive communication is to accurately convey a particular message?

that is clear and comprehended by the receiver. Communication is used to express emotion, transfer information or provide direction. The function of effective interactive communication can be best seen in the business world. If a company is able to effectively communicate with its workers, the workers will feel empowered, informed and appreciated.

Interactive communication is divided into two forms: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal and nonverbal communication must agree or else it can lead to confusion or misunderstanding. For example, if a boss verbally communicates you're doing a good job and then fires you the next day, there's an obvious breakdown in the communication. Nonverbal communication is gestures, vocal tone and facial expressions.

The effects of effective interactive communication are understanding, education, empowerment and respect. Effective communication provides people with information they need to become educated and enlightened.

When people feel like they are in the know, they feel respected and empowered, and are motivated to perform at their best level of productivity and performance. The role that effective communication plays can have a positive or negative affect. For example, in politics if a politician doesn't explain himself or herself clearly, there can be a lot of room The primary misconception about effective interactive communication is that it is simply saying what a person feels.

Simply expressing ideas, thoughts and emotions does not make communication effective. Effective interactive communication can only be considered effective when the listener accurately understands the message the individual is attempting to communicate. The role of effective communication is commonly seen only as the messages being sent, while it is both the sending and receiving that matter.

The benefits of effective interactive communication are successful business, rich relationships and the ability to accurately and comprehensively express thoughts, feelings and ideas. Effective communication is at the foundation of every successful action. A great example of how the role of effective communication benefits people in interpersonal relationship is marriage. A marriage that possesses effective interactive communication fosters love, trust and respect.

Does Marketing Have a Heart of Darkness?

　


The orthodox advertising model takes no account of reality, hopefully the Financial Crisis should bring back some sanity One of the few benign consequences of last years financial crisis was the exposure of modern marketing as an emperor with no clothes. Now it is a fact that modern marketing/advertising has to be urgently reinvented.

This could lead to a flowering of original thinking in a profession whose creativity has been stifled by the intellectual monopoly of orthodox advertising and marketing bodies. The dirty little secret of modern advertising is that the models created by media and advertising agencies said almost nothing about accountability.

The defunct advertising and marketing bodies today are the people who took control of the subject in the 1960s, with theories about the effectiveness of advertising.

These theories, never really tested with reality, had a major flaw, if reality contradicts these theories it was reality that marketing & advertising professionals wanted to change. It is not surprising that the whole marketing edifice has come crashing down. To-days approach prevented marketing professionals from thinking about a world that is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inconsistent.

Why did Marketing fail to predict the crisis. It is said they failed because they all had a flawed view about markets! To gain some genuine understanding of unpredictable communications marketing and advertising people will, first of all, have to understand the real meaning of the word "communications." Perhaps they don't really want to!

The formula of reach and frequency is a thoroughly dishonest formula, based upon the need to rip as much money off Clients with complete disregard to accountability. There have been far more effective methods of marketing, however because these achieved startling results with a substantial reduction in advertising budgets they were dammed by faint praise and shuffled off out of sight before Clients could be woken up to the fact that they were being, simply put, ripped off!

Advertising has encouraged the growth of the sick & degrading culture of celebrity in the quite erroneous understanding that circulation is one of the key elements within the charade called advertising. In an article "Admen to tackle mistrust" the Advertising Association is to urge members to fight back against waning consumer trust in advertising, which is another example of the complete lack of understanding on the part of the Advertising Industry of the communications process and individuals complete lack of interest in advertising.

In a survey it was established that only 15% of adults "generally trust advertising" Frankly I am surprised that it is so high.

Consider this, the strength of newspapers to markedly affect the outcome of elections is severely doubted, if editorial strength support cannot markedly affect political outcome just how can we expect advertising to have any effect! Especially if adults "don't trust advertising", add to that fact that right now they also don't trust politicians and surely we could find a better way to spent the vast sums invested in political advertising!The fact is that in all walks of life the "system", despite the original intention and rules, always becomes corrupted by its users and lazy administrators, advertising has become so corrupted and is in the process of corrupting the New Media as they have corrupted the Old Media!

Of course there is a tacit agreement to keep the current inefficient system going for as long as possible. The vast sums of money spent on advertising go towards making a few people very rich indeed, in the past, Media Barons created media to gain power, nowadays the reason for creating new media, in whatever form, is no longer a route to power, it has become a route to vast riches and never mind the quality of media hence the "dumbing down of all media" in recent years.

Don't agree with what I'm saying? Well then consider this little shard of information. As much as 60% of all tracked advertising expenditure world-wide during 2008 failed to deliver results expected by marketers and can be considered wasted. $70bn alone is spent in the USA on advertising extrapolate that out to world-wide and that becomes a hell of a huge waste of money.

Do you agree that

The public is paying dearly for our cult of the worthless and personality?

It has become clear for many years that what one sees with advertising and media clutter is expressly not what one gets. And the fact of the matter, certainly with the case of Advertising and Marketing, is that generally there is just too much of it out there for anybody's good. We suppose that in our society commercial information (preferably truthful) is essential But since so much of what the advertising and marketing people tell us is only half the truth or, at times, none of the truth, some of us do start to wonder why we bother with it all. Hence the huge and growing waste...of money, after all huge sums of money are spent on totally meaningless advertising/marketing programmes! Waste of Media...so much so that we now live in an over-informed society surrounded by a glut of commercial clutter.

Unaccountable Marketing and Advertising is starting to smell like the banks who have bought us to rack and ruin by deceiving the public. And our countries are hanging on to solvency by their fingernails, and our country-folk, after the epic of deceit that was the Politicians and the Banks, at least they see now through these attempts at manipulation! They are tired of the whole wretched mess that our business people have created - they want simply to have effective corporations without all the unnecessary BS.

The injudiciousness of the Marketing world by still proceeding to produce all this utter banal advertising and marketing programmes at a time of stringency is unbelievable!

None of this utterly useless Advertising and Marketing leads to us to being any better off! It does not promote growth or recovery. It does not educate our children, in fact quite the contrary!

It has been clear for many years that what one sees with Corporations is expressly not what one gets! With their smooth grained advertising people together with their smooth grained spivs, the PR people, they do not help people live with any more dignity in fact they do not add one iota to the improvement of life because this pursuit of the superficial, these cynical acts of waste and charlatanry, nauseates the average customer more than almost anything else imaginable. They most certainly see the shallowness together with the worthlessness of the whole international Marketing and Advertising scene!

With their failure to work as evidenced by the very recent Financial Crisis shows that Marketing has no sense of convection about it at all.

It is time that the Advertising Agencies reinvented themselves, they must stop producing evidence that all they are self-regarding incompetents embarked upon huge and wasteful acts of profligacy - and with no accountability!

Yes, our countries are in a mess, they still are and all this Advertising, Marketing, Spin and Celebrity will not get us out of this mess.

　

Discovering Interactive Television

　

　


This form of interactive communication dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive the commercials, instead of being seen as an interruption the commercials now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be know as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow InteractiveTV to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.

　

Interaction and The Outdated Idea of Mass Marketing

Advertising together with Broadcast Media, finally bite the dust!

Because no longer is the Marketing message, "We want your money". To day the Marketing message has to be "We want your opinions".

Because the moment you put that into real practice you can have everything you've always wanted, sales, customer relationships and also Brand loyalty.

However replacing research with interaction changes all the opportunities to successful marketing. "Yes", you can say," "Interactive Events will create my new products"

However at the moment Big Business is not making the correct decisions regarding interaction. Maybe some people within these organisations know and understand what's happening out there in consumer land. But the dreadful fact is that giving their voice to such statements would, more probably, seriously damage their career growth!

These days I search everywhere for the headline "Interactive Communication is a winning combination for all…The Client…The Media…and last but by no means least…your customer"!

It never appears.

Interactive Communication finally allows the revolution to commence. The revolution against one-size fits all advertising; the bland all-knowing corporate voice, the lack lustre politicians busily furnishing their own nests…from our money.

The fact of the matter is your customers, you, me and everybody else, do not trust business. We find it highly insulting to be treated this way and we mistrust you in numbers far greater than you or your advertising/marketing people allow for.

Dialogue, two-way conversations, would start to change these hostile attitudes. You really do need to commence interactive events - right now. And you can do so in existing media.

Before I go on, I must emphasise that on no account let your Advertising Agency tempt you into spending big bucks on the Web. Already the Advertising-as-Usual crowd is pouring billions into the Web, however be warned, as they said in the "Cluetrain Manifesto", "So you advertise on the Internet…so what"? If you think you are wasting money on Advertising-as-Usual be very careful. The Internet, possibly is a bigger waste of money than Advertising-as-Usual, and, as we all know, right now that is one Mother of a huge waste of money!

"Why?" you may ask "has it all changed from the safe secure way of marketing in the past".

Simply put, Advertising-as-Usual, together with its handmaiden Broadcasting-as-Usual have treated us with too much contempt. According to a recent article in the Times, TV executives commonly think of viewers' phone revenue as "moron tax". And this attitude of utter contempt pervades the executives of advertising and Broadcast-as-Usual, and expresses itself in all the offerings of a rip-off culture, from government to TV companies.

And bear in mind that Advertising-as-Usual and Broadcast-as-Usual hold Clients in great contempt as well. They rejoice in removing large chunks of your Marketing Budgets, to then waste them in rip-off ventures that only worsen the publics' contempt for you…so in effect they are spending your money to get you into a ever worsening situation.

　

　

So Many Clicks, So Few Sales

Pay-per-click advertising seems like a dream. But up to 35% of

all the clicks you pay for may be fraudulent.

It didn't make any sense. Kevin Steele, co-owner of Karaoke Star, a Phoenix

retailer of karaoke equipment, noticed that the number of people clicking on his

paid search-engine ads had shot from 200 to 800 a day. But despite the apparent

jump in traffic, sales hadn't budged. Steele and his partner, Diana Frerick, had

built their business on Internet advertising, and more clicks almost always

meant more revenueâ€"which the pair had invested in a new office, more inventory, and a call center to field technical questions.

Steele thought he had pay-per-click advertising down to a science. Karaoke

Star spent about $2,000 a day on search-engine ads at Google and Overture, a

subsidiary of Yahoo focusing on keywords like "karaoke","karaoke player,"

"karaoke song"to generate about $6,000 a day in sales. Suddenly, it had to

budget the same amount just to get $3,000. With each keyword costing

anywhere between 40 cents and $3 a click, Karaoke Star found itself being

nickel-and-dimed to death. "One day we were doing great, says Steele, "and

the next it was as if someone had turned off the lights."

The problem was click fraud, which occurs when people click on paid search

ads with no intention of buying anything. In some cases, the clicker is a

competitor that wants to force a rival to burn through cash. Other times it's

someone from an affiliate site that hosts search-engine ads and receives a small

commission for every click. It could be a team of users clicking repeatedly on

an ad. Or, most commonly, the fraudulent clicks are automated by "hitbot"

software.

Experts estimate that 20% to 35% of all ad clicks may be bogus. Whatever the

number, it's as if thousands of people are charging you for window-shopping.

Steele says the fraudulent clicking has cost Karaoke Star nearly $400,000 over

the past two and a half years.

The paid search ad market is essentially a grand auction. Advertisers bid on

specific keywords; the terms with the highest demand fetch the highest prices,

and the advertisers that pay the most get the highest placement on the search

engine's webpage. Because affiliate sites earn commissions based on how many

clicks the ads receive, there's a lot of incentive to claim as many clicks as

possible. Paid online search is a nearly $3 billion business and it's easy to

see why. Popular keywords can get very expensive very fast.

The major search engines all acknowledge that click fraud is a problem. In a

recent SEC filing, for example, Google warned investors that "if fraudulent

clicks are not detected, the affected advertisers may experience a reduced

return on their investment which could lead to loss of advertisers and

revenue.

What's an advertiser to do? If you think you've been charged for bogus

clicks, you might be able to convince a search engine to credit your account.

The problem is, getting a search engine to hand over a record of your

advertising activity is no easy feat. Search engines treat such data as

proprietary and are loath to share it. Karaoke Star's Steele and Frerick, for

example, expressed their suspicions to Overture and were given some "token

refunds, Steele says. But Overture steadfastly refused to tell them who was

behind the bogus clicks. Nor would it give Karaoke Star the data it needed to

figure it out itself.

Fortunately, Karaoke Star as well as a number of other online karaoke

stores received an anonymous e-mail tip from someone claiming to be a former

employee of Ace Karaoke, a competitor in City of Industry, Calif. Attached to

the e-mail, according to Steele, was a video that showed an automated click

fraud program employed by Ace Karaoke to target the stores. Frerick and Steele

retained a lawyer who has contacted Ace Karaoke, as well as Google and Overture,

and informed them of his intention to sue. Why target the search engines?

"Because Google and Overture make the most money from click fraud and have

the least amount of incentive for taking simple precautions to prevent the fraud,

says C. Tab Turner, a plaintiffs' attorney in North Little Rock, Ark., who

represents Karaoke Star. Overture and Google declined to comment on the matter.

Ace Karaoke's owner, David Su, denies the charges. "At this stage, there is

no way for advertisers to prevent fraudulent clicks from being billed to their

accounts.

Unlike Karaoke Star, many advertisers are reluctant to complain out of fear

that the search engines, which provide most of their traffic, could blacklist

them. "At this stage, there is no way for advertisers to prevent fraudulent

clicks from being billed to their accounts,says Jessie Stricchiola, president

of Alchemist Media, a click fraud auditing firm in Hollywood.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to taking legal action. There are a

number of click fraud auditing tools available including Click Lab, Click

Defense, and Click Detective that are designed to alert you to suspicious

clicks. The cost can range from $29.95 to several thousand dollars a month,

depending on the amount of traffic your site receives. Or you could hire a

consultant like Stricchiola to analyze your traffic and broker a deal with the

search engines. But Stricchiola, who charges between $250 and $450 an hour,

warns that it often costs more in time and money to identify the problem than is

actually lost to click fraud. There are also alternative search engines, such as

Brooklyn-based BlowSearch, which guarantees that its advertisers will not

receive any automated clicks on their ads or they'll get their money back. Of

course, BlowSearch gets only a tiny fraction of the traffic of the big search

engines and offers less bang for the advertising buck.

In the end, you may have little option but to accept fraudulent clicks as a

cost of doing business and recalculate your expected advertising ROI

accordingly. That's what Karaoke Star is doing. Of course, it's also reserving

the right to sue.

Unequivocal Proof That No One Has Ever Clicked On A Web Ad

We sometimes enjoy role playing. Not the French maid kind of role playing, the business kind. Not that we have anything against French maids...Today, I am going to role play. I am going to pretend I am a web data analyst and use the mathematics and logic of web analysis to prove to you that no one has ever clicked on a web ad intentionally. Sound like fun? Here we go. Recently, several trade publications reported on a study by Webtrends that claims that click-through rates on Facebook ads have dropped to .05%. To those of you who were not math majors, this means that for every 10,000 ads served on Facebook, 5 get clicked on.

This is described by Adweek "abysmal." It is worse than abysmal. It is mind-blowingly, incomprehensibly, abysmally abysmal. But that's not the end of it. According to a Facebook insider, the 5-clicks-in-10,000 number is actually a gross exaggeration. This person says that the true number is actually less than half that -- 2 clicks per 10,000.  You're probably not as unstable as I am, but maybe you've noticed something. Every now and then, as you're wasting your life away on the web, you accidentally click on something that you didn't intend to click on. I call this Unintended Click Syndrome. In my case, at least half the time I find myself facing a display ad, I had no intention of clicking on it. I got there as the result of being a victim of Unintended Click Syndrome.

According to Google,  the number of these invalid clicks" may be as high as 10% of all clicks (they define "invalid" clicks as those that are either unintended or fraudulent.)Let's be generous here and say that only 5% of clicks are unintended. Now let's do a little math.

If the Facebook click-through rate is 5 in 10,000 (let's be generous again and use Webtrend's number) , and the invalid click rate is 5%, then of 500 clicks in 10,000 are invalid. It is, therefore, quite possible that all  the clicks on Facebook ads are invalid and the actual click-through rate for Facebook ads is zero. But this is not just true of Facebook. The  click-through rate for all web ads is 1 in a thousand. If the rate of  unintended clicks is 50 in a thousand (5%) then, once again, it is possible that the rate of intended clicks on all web ads is zero.My conclusion -- no one has ever intentionally clicked on a web ad.