OH Marketing Ltd.

23/02/2013

“ It is often easier to fight for a principle than to live up to it. ”
— Adlai Stevenson

07/11/2012

The whiner's room

When my friend Elly taught in a middle school, he never hung out in the teacher's room. He told me he couldn't bear the badmouthing of students, the whining and the blaming.

Of course, not all teachers are like this. In fact, most of them aren't. And of course, trolling isn't reserved to the teacher's room. Just about every organization, every online service, every product and every element of our culture now has chat rooms and forums devoted to a few people looking for something to complain about. Some of them even do it on television.

The fascinating truth is this: the people in these forums aren't doing their best work. They rarely identify useful feedback or pinpoint elements that can be changed productively either. In fact, if you solved whatever problem they're whining about, they wouldn't suddenly become enthusiastic contributors. No, they're just wallowing in the negative ions, enjoying the support of a few others as they dish about what's holding them back.

It pays no dividends to go looking for useful insight from these folks. Go make something great instead.

10/10/2012

Countering someone's negativity with your positivity doesn't work because it's argumentative. People don't like to be emotionally contradicted and if you try to convince them that they shouldn't feel something, they'll only feel it more stubbornly. And if you're a leader trying to be positive, it comes off even worse because you'll appear out of touch and aloof to the reality that people are experiencing.

The other instinctive approach — confronting someone's negativity with your own negativity — doesn't work because it's additive. Your negative reaction to their negative reaction simply adds fuel to the fire. Negativity breeds negativity.

So how can you turn around negativity?

"I'm getting to the end of my patience," Dan,* the head of sales for a financial services firm, told me. "There is so much opportunity here — the business is growing, the work is interesting, and bonuses should be pretty good this year — but all I hear is complaining." When he passed his...

06/10/2012

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." R.I.P Steve Jobs

03/10/2012

From general to specific (or vice versa)

There's no doubt that it's easier to start an organization (or a project) around specific.

The more specific the better. When you have a handful of ideal potential clients and a solution that is customized and perfect for them, it's far easier to get started than when you offer everything to everyone.

Not only that, but the specific makes it easier to be remarkable, to overdeliver and to create conversations, because you know precisely what will delight the user.

Once you master your specific, you can do the work to become general, because you have cash flow and reputation and experience.

The flipside of this is interesting: if you have somehow, against all odds, managed to succeed in the general, the move to specific is almost effortless. If you can change your reflex action that consistently pushes you to mass, the market you've chosen will embrace the fact that you, the general one, are now truly focused on them, the specifics.

10/09/2012

What to obsess over

They use stopwatches at McDonald's. They know, to the second, how long it should take to make a batch of fries. And they use spreadsheets, too, to whittle the price of each fry down by a hundredth of a cent if they can. They're big and it matters.

Small businesspeople often act like direct marketers. They pick a number and they obsess over it. In direct mail, of course, it's the open rate or the conversion rate. For a freelancer or small business person, it might be your bank balance or the growth in weekly sales.

I think for most businesses that want to grow, it's way too soon to act like a direct marketer and pick a single number to obsess about.

The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it's not going to fundamentally change your business.

I'd have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today...

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

05/09/2012

Advertising's bumpy transition (and why it matters to you)

Advertising has been around so long, they measure the prices in Roman numerals.

CPM is a mark of how much it costs to run an ad that appears in front of 1000 people (M is for thousand). Until recently, a full page ad in a national magazine that reached two million people could easily cost $80,000 ($40 cpm times 2000 thousand). (Much of what I say below applies to TV ads as well).

I started my career buying ads for $50,000 a pop and then made the transition to selling expensive online promotions to big brands. The opportunity was clear: find an audience, make a significant profit selling ads.

When the web was young, marketers like Yahoo said to P&G and Ford, "buy our banner ads, they cost about the same as a magazine ad, but people can click on them as a bonus." And so banner ads at the beginning were incredibly lucrative--easy to make, sell them for a lot.

Today, banner ads might sell for a tenth that, or, if we count ads on Facebook and the like, as little as 1% of the cost of a magazine ad on a per person basis. But of course, it's not a fair comparison, for a bunch of reasons:

Magazine ad pricing counts the entire circulation of a magazine, even though very few people read every single page of the magazine. Web ads, on the other hand, measure how many people look at that precise page.
A web ad salesperson can say, "well, even if one in a thousand people click on a web ad, it's still better than how many people click on a magazine ad." The problem with this is that while clicks are proof that something happened, they're rare indeed. Magazines don't offer advertisers clicks, but they do offer them hope, something advertisers love to buy.
Magazines have always embraced mass. Advertisers pay extra for big circulation magazines, even though that means less focus. Even a magazine that's focused on a given topic (surfing, say, or gardening) can't distinguish whether the ad is being seen by a man or a woman, or by someone who just bought a new car. The web offers all that and much more, but advertisers are radically undervaluing this focus, because they grew up in a world of mass. It's fine to have a very fine focus, but if you're selling to people with blurry vision, it doesn't help much.
And lastly, magazine ads were largely sold, not bought. Conde Nast and other big companies happily wined and dined ad executives for years to earn the huge buys (more than 700 pages in the new Vogue) that appeared in their magazines. Web sites, on the other hand, are inherently digital, and would like to be bought, not sold, which gives advertisers an enormous amount of choice and leverage.
The short version is that magazine ads were expensive because they were scarce, they worked (maybe) and they were sold, hard. Web ads have long been dramatically undervalued as measured media by people who don't want to measure, as focused media by people who want mass.

Magazine ads were great, a perfect industry, one that's being replaced by something impossible, something that doesn't work for all parties yet.

The result is that tonnage, huge ad inventories, inventory in the billions of impressions, are at the heart of much of what is currently paying the bills in web advertising. Which pushes advertisers to show you more pages, interrupt you when they can and try to keep you inside their site, clicking around. Most people are never going to click on an ad, even an ad that they will ultimately remember.

Google's Adwords is one exception to the tonnage rule, and, if it's not pushed to scale too much, opens the door for advertisers to start measuring the value of what they get when they buy a direct response web ad. Buy an ad for a dollar a click, and if you make $2 in profit, buy more ads! But this only moves the measurement argument forward, as these ads are only attractive to advertisers who measure their results. Most ads don't work because we click on them, though. They work because we remember them, or because they change our perception or tell us a story.

Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, web users are going to be stuck seeing irrelevant ads on sites that don't respect their time and attention as much as they should. We have salespeople and investors and agencies and buyers that come from a world of mass and scarcity, and the opportunities of focus and connection and abundance are taking a while to sink in.

Since advertising is paying for a big portion of the consumer web, it's being built to please advertisers. Right now, though, what advertisers are used to buying isn't what the web is good at building.

There's huge progress being made in perceptions, but there's a ways to go. Which is why, "we're ad supported" isn't as obvious a strategy as it should be.

04/09/2012

The best way to learn marketing
..is to do marketing.

Do it on the weekends. Volunteer and do it for a non-profit. Fundraise. Run a business online. Market a kid's lemonade stand.

When you put your ideas in the world, then, and only then, do you know if they're real.

Not expensive, merely frightening.

04/08/2012

Unanimous is not an option

When you do important work, work that changes things and work that matters, it's inconceivable that the change you're trying to make will be met with complete approval.

Trying to please everyone will water down your efforts, frustrate your forward motion and ultimately fail.

The balancing act is to work to please precisely the right people, and just enough of them, to get your best work out the door.

Shun the non-believers.

03/08/2012

"But first I'll try to make you feel really badly"

Here's one strategy for handling returns from unhappy customers:

Let them know you don't accept returns. Explain that it must be a user error. Explain that the customer must have lacked care or intelligence or ethics. Explain that you're willing to accept a return, but just this one time. And finally, explain that you're now going to put the person on a list, and you'll never sell to him ever again.

Do all this in one continuous statement, without pausing for a response.

This has happened to me more than once.

What puzzles me is this: if you're going to give the customer a refund, why not make them delighted by the process? Why not create an aura of goodwill? At the very least, both of you will have a better day. Even better, perhaps one day someone will mention your company to this former customer--I wonder what he'll say?

One tip: if you say your meta-goal out loud (or jot it down) before you start an interaction, you're more likely to consistently create the outcome you seek, not the one you hyperventilate yourself into.

03/08/2012

This or that?

Don’t follow, lead.
Don’t copy, create.
Don’t start, finish.

or even,

Don't sit still, move.
Don't fit in, stand out.
Don't sit quietly, speak up.

Not all the time, sure, but more often.

26/07/2012

What do you do when your marketing isn't working?

Most amateurs and citizens believe that marketing is the outer circle. Marketing = advertising, it seems. The job of marketing in this circle is to take what the factory/system/boss gives you and hype it, promote it and yell about it....