The No-Shill Zone
As if the IOC’s ban on blogging by Olympic athletes wasn’t silly enough, now Friendster (no link whuffie for you!) has gone and fired one of their engineers. One of their popular engineers. Popular for blogging. Seriously – don’t these guys like free advertising? Or employees and audiences actually paying attention to them? While Friendster and the IOC have been busy losing friends, others in the world of traditional media have been busy trying to make them. Some, like Warner music, are even trying to get cozy with bloggers any way they can, while some bloggers are eagerly taking them up on their offers.
Advertising in the blogosphere is the topic of heated discussion these days. On the one hand, it’s unclear how advertisers will easily leverage the street-cred offered by blogs. After all, how can you launch an ad campaign when the broadcasters of your message choose you and not the other way around? On other hand, bloggers are understandably concerned that pandering to advertisers will undermine the “purity” of blogging.
I don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with advertising in blogs per se, it’s just that advertising in general is so ham-fisted, whether it’s online or not, that it doesn’t seem to matter.
Consider my insurer. Fred McKell at State Farm sold me some car and apartment insurance about six months ago – and he hasn’t stopped spamming me with junkmail ever since. I’ve called State Farm. I’ve called Fred McKell. Have they stopped? Of course not – they just keep on insisting I should think about life insurance. Me – a twenty-nine year old guy who saves obsessively, has no children, and no mortgage. Earth to State Farm – except for the cost of the pine box in which they’re going to have to funnel what remains of my corpse after the organ transplant recipients have had their pick of my goodies, I ain’t leaving behind any kind of financial burden requiring a pre-emptive financial hedge. You don’t know me or what I want as a consumer, so guess what? La-la-la-I-am-not-listening!
This is the reason it’s going to take a couple rounds before people trying to sell things figure out this new landscape. No longer are you, the producer, in charge of the message. We will find you. We will figure out if and why you’re important. We will determine what gets propagated to others. If you’re lying to us, we’ll know – and we’ll tell everyone about it. And if you try to get in our face and interrupt our lives with garbage we don’t care about, we will ignore you, use tools to bypass you, exercise our rights to route around you, and break your Orwellian control mechanisms (either by ourselves, or by presenting a significant enough market to encourage your competitors to do it for us).
The reason corporations don’t like this new landscape for promoting products: it’s hard. You don’t just order up a side of fanatical consumer devotion like a 30-second ad spot, even if it’s during the Super Bowl – money will not buy you friends here. Just look at the current struggles of the RIAA. They’ve just been sitting back and cranking the handle on a hype machine that has enabled them to sell crap and still achieve a decent return. No wonder legitimate artists support the revolution. This new environment will be unforgiving – you’re only going to sell something by building a community of consumers, users, and listeners who love everything you do, track everything you do obsessively, tell everyone they know that cares about what you’re doing, and believe in your product enough to be willing to pay to make sure you keep giving them the good stuff.
I predict the winners in the future of media (and consumer products in general) will only be able to win their consumers through allegiance and word of mouth. The winners will not only build better products and provide better service, but they’ll also find ways to make it easier for their users to tell others about the company and its products in their own voice. Want to know how to do this? Look at Phish and its practice of allowing people to tape their concerts. Look at the Amazon Associates program, which allows web sites to make money by linking to Amazon products (where success requires the web site to drive traffic by providing a value to visitors). Look at Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, and Dan Gillmor, all of whom have built a cult-like following for their blogs and other writings, released their books for free on the Internet, had them translated and propagated around the world by their devotees, and have still made money in the process.
Any company that provides people what they want and provides an easy way to tell others about it will reap the benefit of network effects that will catalyze explosive growth. Now that’s an upside worth advertising.
If State Farm keeps trying to sell you life insurance, the best solution is to take your business elsewhere. Simple. I’m a believer that real business speaks much louder than potential business.
Case in point — JF and I are looking for a mortgage and many banks don’t want to negotiate on rates. Except if we threaten to move assets from said bank to another. That’s when the bank manager’s ears perk up and we see a few points shaved off the offered rate. Hmmm….
The problem with advertising on the net is that it’s almost free and takes little effort. So what if it doesn’t work? Few consumers complain, and fewer still will complain enough to stop doing business with the advertiser altogether. The best way to have a company stop ham-fisted advertising is to take your business away from them, PLUS inform them that their advertising tactics are the primary reason you’re going elsewhere. Unfortunately since it’s so cheap to advertise online, a percentage of people, ambivalent to the harm it does, will do it.
Sure, that’s the answer when I’m already a customer. What about the zillions of other ads that pummel us every day?
Back in B-school, our marketing professors always talked about the importance of measuring the success of any marketing communications campaigns – with the current fire-and-forget, “blast’em from every angle” approach to advertising, I don’t see that happening. I just can’t believe that the cost of advertising is being justified on any quantitative basis.
Example: I watch “Friends” and therefore there’s a statistical likelihood that I’m white, have a certain income, and like certain brands, products, and activities. Sounds scientific, right? Except for the fact that none of those things are especially good predicators of the likelihood that I’m willing to purchase anything you’re advertising. Do I already own one of what you’re selling? Do I have enough money saved to buy one? Did I get burned by this product in the past, or do I know people who have warned me against your product? The fact is that you don’t know.
These things just don’t work. Period.
My point here is that I think blogs and the conversations therein represent a far more effective medium for allowing people to self-select the products and services that matter to them. Companies would be best served spending their effort and money on building a better product and enabling their customers to do the selling for them. Broadcast-style advertising is dead.
‘Back in B-school’…
I think that says it all. Fred McKell is my insurer, too. His staff has always treated me with respect and courtesy. I haven’t gotten one piece of spam from them.
Maybe they didn’t teach you this in ‘B-school’ because it’s common-sense. But you don’t give out your primary e-mail addy for such things. You give them a false one or a throw-away one… or (gasp!) just don’t give them one.