Archives for posts with tag: Ad Networks

10 ways to make your customers disappear

February 23, 2012 //

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Let’s be honest here: Customers suck. They always want more, demand things you never thought about and expect too much. And it gets even worse: Those silly customers now have tools to connect with us directly. They expect you to explain flight delays of 2 minutes, share with their friends that the coffee they ordered was 2 degrees hotter than expected or just create sites that bitch about your hard work. Life would be so much better without any customers, wouldn’t it? No complain letters, no legal threats – just doing your job.

Your dream just came true: I’ll show you ways customers will hate you. And leave you for good.

No, it’s not a pipe dream, not some fantasy. Below are ways to make sure you never have to deal with customers again. Let’s get going, I want to make sure your dream comes true as soon as you desire.

1. When you develop communication for your company, make sure to include images like this.

meeting

It communicates clearly that you’re lying. You don’t respect the intelligence of your customers. Listen, we all know meetings like that never happen. But you claim your company is that haven of collaboration, creativity and empathy. Communicating to your customers you are a liar.

Perfect.

A bunch of customers will never come back. Saving you a lot of money for marketing and loyalty efforts.

2. Force people to watch your videos.

Don’t you hate it when you go to sites and you have to sit through 30 seconds of video before you can go to the real content? Your customers feel the same way. To lose customers by the thousands, make sure to increase the length of the video to 60 seconds, add a sign-up form and hide the “close’ button. You are a champ.

3. Upsell. Everywhere. Anywhere. All the time.

So, that silly customer of yours decided to buy your product. They researched, they filled the shopping cart and now they want to check out. Why would you make it easy for them by asking for minimum information to finalize the deal? Let them jump through hoops: Ask them if they want to bundle that product with something unrelated, force them to sign up for newsletters, gift wraps – anything to slow them down. Anything to make sure they’ll never complete the purchasing process. One less customer to deal with.

4. Make sure your keyword buys are not relevant.

Let’s say you’re selling expensive candles. They smell nice, they illuminate the room. You could buy relevant keywords like “emotional candles” or “beautiful candles” or “anniversary gifts”. Why bother? Just buy “cheap candles” and “lights”. Your bounce rate will go through the roof, your effectiveness drop and your sales vanish. Added benefit: You can proclaim “SEM doesn’t work” and fire that pesky SEM/SEO dude.

5. Work with ad networks that allow you to use pop-ups

You get a guaranteed impression that doesn’t work and annoy the customer for sure. Bingo. Oh, added benefit: You can proclaim: “Display advertising doesn’t work” and finally fire your agency. Thank me later.

6. Use your social media platforms as push marketing tools

So, your little Social Media boy worked hard to get you thousands of followers. The fool that he is. He’s all happy and full of himself. Kick him in the knee caps by enforcing the following policy: We will post sales messages every hour on the hour. We don’t answer any questions. We just use these platforms as another megaphone.

See your followers/fans count drop by the hour. Take that, Social Media boy. Added benefit: Well, you know.

7. Make sure to implement animated buttons

They will certainly be the most hated part of your customer experience. And make them pray to be blind. Make sure to use as many animated buttons as possible and you won’t have any customers left.

8. Make sure to force customers to register

To be really efficient in your customer-deletion tactic, make sure to force them to fill out a form before they purchase your product. Even better: before they can go to any content. As you know, customers can’t wait to be part of your CRM system, they want to be contacted based on your agenda. Not based on their desires and needs.

9. Advertise on a site that makes you sit through loading of ads until the real content appears

Some sites have more than 10 display ads. It takes time to call all these ad servers and load the ads. Make sure you’re the last in line because customers were waiting for content and now you made them wait for your silly ad. Perfect. Another customer lost.

10. Ensure that your customers become the slave of your media strategy

Your customers live in the mobile world but you force them to go through your site? Perfect. Make it even better by forcing your customers to have Flash on their mobile device: Awesome, all your iPhone customers will disappear. You’re the man.

When you followed all these steps, you should be left with no customers. You executed the plan flawlessly. Congratulations!

You’re on your own now. Good luck.

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Media buying agencies – The end is near. Or is it?

September 28, 2011 //

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Yahoo!, the last traditional media company, is in deep trouble. Just like AOL, MSN and Forbes.com – dinosaurs founded in a time where media agencies had to manage scarcity. The Yahoo! Homepage used to be part of a digital media plan just like buying commercials during the NFL season for beer brands. Two things changed: ad networks, DSP’s and ad exchanges changed the focus of media agencies from placement buying to audience buying. And, more importantly, people are less interested in reading professional content and pay more attention to content created by their friends.

What is Yahoo’s response to a changed marketplace and customer behavior?

More content, more video, more, more, more. I wonder if Albert Einstein’s “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” has become Yahoo’s mission statement. More is not the answer. Traditional media companies will never be able to compete with the amount of content created on Social Networks, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Blogs, sites, Tumblr, etc. I’m not predicting the death of Yahoo!, nothing ever dies. VCR’s are still flashing “12:00” in millions of households, papers are being delivered to millions of door steps each morning and millions of faxes are being delivered each week. It took decades after the telegraph

was invented until the last telegraph was sent. (January 27, 2006, to be exact.) Yahoo! will be around for a long time to come. More irrelevant and less valuable by the day.

The demise of Yahoo! points to an important development

Online advertising is in the middle of a radical evolution but the majority of agencies/brands are acting as if it was still 2005. During that period, the majority of digital marketers were complaining about silos and the fact that they were cut off from the traditional campaign. Digital advertising had no place at the table and was not more than an afterthought: “Make sure the banner ad looks like the commercial.”

The disconnect is now between display advertising and social media

I see more integration between TV/Print campaigns and Social Media compared to Display Advertising and Social Media. The challenge is that Display Advertising continues to be deeply anchored in the world of Direct Marketing, creating a massive disconnect between that display advertising and Social Media. When your goal is to convert prospects into leads, a Social Media integration seems nothing than a silly distraction. Or, is it?

We’re reliving 2005 in the display advertising space: SEM/SEO is always at the table, Social Media the hot new toy and display advertising was relegated to the basement and algorithms.

What is the remaining value of media buying agencies?

The agency role in this new ecosystem will be re-evaluated by brands. The main challenge for media buying agencies will be their unique value proposition. It used to be access, buying power and custom tools. That competitive advantage is slowly disappearing because content created outside of traditional media properties gains importance and relevance over time.

The secondary challenge is the lack of trusted measurements. Ask 100,000 marketers about trusted and reliable measurements and you will get 150,000 answers. Is it impressions, clicks, conversions, engagement, connections – what the hell is it? It’s a lack of industry leadership but also a lack of confidence by agencies based on the fickle brands. “Oh, you focus on conversions? Sure, we can do that.”

Sorry, I don’t know the answer. I just have a lot of questions.

The marketing landscape continues to evolve rapidly. We’re still trying to answer the questions of 2005, while our clients expect us to answer the questions of 2012. As a industry, we need to find better ways to measure, to attribute and to communicate our value proposition to clients.

The conference season is upon us. I hope we can spend less time talking about case studies and acting as if we knew the answers. Instead, let’s ask more questions.

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10 ways to make your customers disappear

September 26, 2011 //

56bb5a7521e8acd7f1688d9afe8d40e13d8a7c6b_m

Let’s be honest here: Customers suck. They always want more, demand things you never thought about and expect too much. And it gets even worse: Those silly customers now have tools to connect with us directly. They expect you to explain flight delays of 2 minutes, share with their friends that the coffee they ordered was 2 degrees hotter than expected or just create sites that bitch about your hard work. Life would be so much better without any customers, wouldn’t it? No complain letters, no legal threats – just doing your job.

Your dream just came true: I’ll show you ways customers will hate you. And leave you for good.

No, it’s not a pipe dream, not some fantasy. Below are ways to make sure you never have to deal with customers again. Let’s get going, I want to make sure your dream comes true as soon as you desire.

1. When you develop communication for your company, make sure to include images like this.

meeting

It communicates clearly that you’re lying. You don’t respect the intelligence of your customers. Listen, we all know meetings like that never happen. But you claim your company is that haven of collaboration, creativity and empathy. Communicating to your customers you are a liar.

Perfect.

A bunch of customers will never come back. Saving you a lot of money for marketing and loyalty efforts.

2. Force people to watch your videos.

Don’t you hate it when you go to sites and you have to sit through 30 seconds of video before you can go to the real content? Your customers feel the same way. To lose customers by the thousands, make sure to increase the length of the video to 60 seconds, add a sign-up form and hide the “close’ button. You are a champ.

3. Upsell. Everywhere. Anywhere. All the time.

So, that silly customer of yours decided to buy your product. They researched, they filled the shopping cart and now they want to check out. Why would you make it easy for them by asking for minimum information to finalize the deal? Let them jump through hoops: Ask them if they want to bundle that product with something unrelated, force them to sign up for newsletters, gift wraps – anything to slow them down. Anything to make sure they’ll never complete the purchasing process. One less customer to deal with.

4. Make sure your keyword buys are not relevant.

Let’s say you’re selling expensive candles. They smell nice, they illuminate the room. You could buy relevant keywords like “emotional candles” or “beautiful candles” or “anniversary gifts”. Why bother? Just buy “cheap candles” and “lights”. Your bounce rate will go through the roof, your effectiveness drop and your sales vanish. Added benefit: You can proclaim “SEM doesn’t work” and fire that pesky SEM/SEO dude.

5. Work with ad networks that allow you to use pop-ups

You get a guaranteed impression that doesn’t work and annoy the customer for sure. Bingo. Oh, added benefit: You can proclaim: “Display advertising doesn’t work” and finally fire your agency. Thank me later.

6. Use your social media platforms as push marketing tools

So, your little Social Media boy worked hard to get you thousands of followers. The fool that he is. He’s all happy and full of himself. Kick him in the knee caps by enforcing the following policy: We will post sales messages every hour on the hour. We don’t answer any questions. We just use these platforms as another megaphone.

See your followers/fans count drop by the hour. Take that, Social Media boy. Added benefit: Well, you know.

7. Make sure to implement animated buttons

They will certainly be the most hated part of your customer experience. And make them pray to be blind. Make sure to use as many animated buttons as possible and you won’t have any customers left.

8. Make sure to force customers to register

To be really efficient in your customer-deletion tactic, make sure to force them to fill out a form before they purchase your product. Even better: before they can go to any content. As you know, customers can’t wait to be part of your CRM system, they want to be contacted based on your agenda. Not based on their desires and needs.

9. Advertise on a site that makes you sit through loading of ads until the real content appears

Some sites have more than 10 display ads. It takes time to call all these ad servers and load the ads. Make sure you’re the last in line because customers were waiting for content and now you made them wait for your silly ad. Perfect. Another customer lost.

10. Ensure that your customers become the slave of your media strategy

Your customers live in the mobile world but you force them to go through your site? Perfect. Make it even better by forcing your customers to have Flash on their mobile device: Awesome, all your iPhone customers will disappear. You’re the man.

When you followed all these steps, you should be left with no customers. You executed the plan flawlessly. Congratulations!

You’re on your own now. Good luck.


Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized