Disqus - Latest Comments for Ben Kunz

Re: OMG! Newsflash! Agency Launches With New Model!

Ben Kunz — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:04:28 -0000

Steve, I'm a fan, but you missed this one by a mile. Crowdsourcing is often a more efficient business model for ad clients -- matching talent with projects at a lower cost. Laughing at it is a bit like laughing at Google in 2001 because it created an efficient auction for tiny text ads (look at those ads! crap!). Or newspaper editors snickering at bad HTML layouts of blogs five years ago (who will read that for news? crap!). Um. Right.

If you step over to CrowdSpring, where V&S is getting bids on its own logo, you'll see scores of design submissions, many bad ... and several quite excellent. If I were a client I'd very interested in an agency model that expanded choice for me, reduced my costs significantly, and yet provided some strategic management to pull it all together.

Sure, V&S launched with PR fanfare (um, it is advertising). But Chris Anderson has a point -- efficiencies online are driving margins out of every business and ad agencies are simply next in line. Billions of people are soon going to be walking around with cell phones and laptops with full production software. There's a lot of talent in those masses. A broker who matches the supply of talent with demand could certainly make some money by offering more choice at a lower cost.

There is a tendency within ad agencies to hold up noses at the thought that masses of people can do work as well as the elites we call us. Rather than scoff at more efficient competition (I think GM did that once back in the 1970s), it's wiser to keep an eye on them. Most businesses don't get tripped up by direct competitors; they get whacked by the market entrants who step in from the side.

Re: Enough With The Guilt, Facebook

Ben Kunz — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:03:45 -0000

Yes. I saw you tweet this a while ago, and I've noticed the same. Facebook just reminded me I haven't written to an uncle recently, and it felt like mom nagging. Ugh!

From a marketing perspective, this is likely a device to get heavy users to proselytize Facebook to light users. And what does that say? Facebook is concerned that within its millions of users, most use it infrequently, the first step to defection. I'd say Facebook is putting a defense up, fearing its cresting millions may move on to the next new thing.

Finally: Alan. You haven't written on my wall recently.

Re: The difference between ad:tech and Blogworld

Ben Kunz — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:20:49 -0000

Morgan, I admire your passion. However, the very truth you present -- that social media creates a new way to "start listening" -- also means that social media pretty much stinks as an ad channel. That's why few advertisers with big dollars are making it a focus. Loyalty, engagement and reaching a passionate community are all lofty goals, but they are fuzzy ideals and don't fit into the hard reality of marketing trying to drive results in the next quarter.

I don't write this to denigrate social media, simply to reflect reality. It's been out, popular, for 3+ years, and no advertisers are making it work. Given the efficiency of the free market to throw dollars at anything that works in marketing, the fact that advertisers are not spending big in social media shows you it doesn't. (The comical essays on social media ROI among blogs reveal that even its advocates are confused about how to turn it into marketing results.) For marketing, it's the wrong shoe for the wrong foot. Social media has power among consumers sharing content; it has potential to build new databases of consumer interests; it is a new listening channel to gauge the sentiment of consumers talking about your brand. But it's a bad fit for marketers driving sales, and that's why AdTech is ignoring it.

In my view, social media is like credit cards -- a useful tool among consumers that is not a push channel for marketing. Experian can pull data from how I use my card (just as Facebook could learn a lot by how I interact with peers) to build wonderful lists to reach me in other media channels. But my credit card, like Facebook, makes a poor ad channel to push offers back at me. Just because consumers use a new medium doesn't mean it's a fit for two-way marketing.

In a way, this is good ... because it will be wonderful if social media remains an unpolluted channel about what users want to share, not what marketers want to push.

Thanks for this post.

Re: Towards A Two-Tier System of Media Consumption

Ben Kunz — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:26:34 -0000

This is a fascinating discussion. It cuts the other way in some instances, too: I'm reading this blog for free on a $2,000 laptop, while low-income consumers without computer access need to pay for newspapers and magazines. In some ways "elites" buy their way into lower-cost or no-cost content by paying up front for the tools (smart phones, PCs) that allow them to access it.

Yet another trend is the aging boomer population, soon to be with much lower incomes, who were trained on television and newsprint and who are still light users of computers. They could end up paying more for those habits (cable costs money, newspapers have subscriptions) than the younger gen who chases free info online.

One point you make that I do agree with is advertising may end up working better on lower-income audiences, who must put up with interruptions to see the traditional media content of yore. Younger generations are buying DVRs and video-streamers that, while may be cost neutral when you do the math, do a good job of pushing advertising aside.

Great post.

Re: The Stubborn Mule-Like Tendencies of Reactionary Thinking

Ben Kunz — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:44:49 -0000

For (1), yes. For instance, the latest Marketing Sherpa B2B benchmarking report showed CTRs of 0.10% for consumer banners vs. 0.08% for B2B banners ... a relatively small difference. We've seen about a 7:1 ratio for our clients, but 0.10% is pretty consistent across categories.

For (2), I believe responses are relatively consistent despite banner offers. Creative can drive ranges in response of course, but usually tied more to clarity of message (do you get what it's about in 0.5 seconds). The rule "Don't Make Me Think" seems to apply best in banner design. If a consumer gets what the product is about and it seems appealing, you'll trigger a click if she is interested. Nuances such as coupons etc. are too complex to be registered in that half-second.

The real swing in results comes after users click on the banner; conversion rates on the landing page are the pinch point we've seen in most campaigns. I'd advise most clients to dig in here, streamline lead forms, add click-to-call, and perform basic split testing of messages or offers on the landing page to jack up conversions, which can have a 20:1 range.

To be fair to your thesis, banner CTRs are down twentyfold in the past 10 years. Consumers are tuning out. And disreputable ad networks, often those that charge on a cost-per-click, use crappy tricks to try to get you to mistakenly click on a banner (think FoxNews banners that expand suddenly in the top right over the news items as you hover your mouse about to click on an article).

The only hope I see for the entire industry is to do less is more, similar to Hulu's approach with limiting ad inventory. If you could run a few highly visible banners and make them relevant with behavioral targeting or contextual targeting, you might build a better mousetrap. Consumers are pretty sharp, and if it is just an interruption, well, 99.9% will continue to look away...

Re: The Stubborn Mule-Like Tendencies of Reactionary Thinking

Ben Kunz — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:06:53 -0000

This is a thoughtful post, but once again I think you're too hard on CTRs as a metric and banners in general as an ad format. I'll explain with a little math.

If you buy a print ad at a $20 CPM and get a $50 cost per call, you're doing OK in many product categories. Think on that. $50 spent = 2,500 impressions = 1 response. A 1/2,500 response rate. And a print advertiser is happy!

If you buy a banner ad, the average response is 0.10% CTR ... a 1/1,000 response rate. That's performing 2.5 times better than print. And this is bad? Now -- follow the math here, Alan -- consider you can buy banners on ad networks at $2 CPMs, 90% less than the cost of $20 CPM print ads. Suddenly the response is 25 times more favorable per dollar spent.

So yes, it is easy to knock banner CTRs as a stupid metric, and to look at the 999 out of 1,000 viewers who did not respond. We can look at history and think back in the days of 1999 banner CTRs were 2.0%, 20 times higher than today. But truth is, apples to apples, banners perform only as badly as many other forms of advertising, and yes, often much better than print. If I had $1,000 to spend and could predict that banners drive 25 times the responses of print, I'll put the money into banners every day of the week.

Rather than looking at anemic response rates as a sign that banners don't work for direct response, we should admit most advertising is never seen by viewers (it has to register on you retina before reaching the mind), and that most seen are not responded to. But if the number of responses makes economic sense, then the campaign can succeed.

Direct response dynamics are certainly an appropriate way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Google is priced solely on clicks (no one counts the vast impressions of Google Adwords that do not receive clicks), and Google receives about half of all online ad dollars. I'd say it's success indicates tracking and improving CTRs is an important metric.

It's not what doesn't work that matters. It's the portion that does, and whether it makes fiscal sense. Advertising has always been problematic ... responses need to be converted to sales, and the process can break down at numerous steps in the funnel. But to slam banners because most people don't see them or don't respond is a bit silly, because that's the nature of advertising in general.

Thoughtful post, but I do feel compelled to defend those pretty colorful boxes ;)

Re: Will Facebook Be The Death of Twitter?

Ben Kunz — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:31:19 -0000

Funny, I have the opposite view, which shows how subjective design is. But I think the real story is Twitter and Facebook will both evolve and survive -- as the mobile replacement to Microsoft and Google. Twitter will become the go-to email app, and Facebook the cluttered (but more usable than Windows) mobile operating system.

First, the rant: Facebook is getting so cluttered it approaches the role of a bloated Windows Vista operating system for social media. Admit it: 1980s high school yearbooks had better layout. Its recent "tabbed" redesign was a simple ploy to add more page views and thus *more inventory* for ad space -- and let's not forget the juvenile communication accoutrements: I now have 31 "requests" waiting for me for green badges, holiday pranks, and some form of kidnapping. Yeah. Again, all subjective, but the retweets jamming up Twitter are no more obtrusive than the silly Facebook pokes.

This is normal, though. Humans love to add complexity to simple designs. The same force that takes religious leaders such as Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, who start as simple individuals with simple messages and converts them to temples and cathedrals and annual calendars of ritual is also at work shifting modern communication tools. Twitter began life as a 140-character text service and now we can embed web links and photos and forward messages and segment users with outside apps, all adding complexity to what was clean. To argue against this spiraling complexity is tempting, but humans seem to need more buttons to push to want to continue to use anything -- whether that be spiritual beliefs, government policy, automotive controls or social media tools.

But this is all OK, because Twitter and Facebook are filling two different roles in the new mobile space. Let's think about the year 2020, when the majority of consumers will use cell phones instead of computers to get online.

- Mobile screens are 90% smaller than laptops or desktops -- creating a huge shift in how operating systems work and how advertisers can squeeze in
- Mobile communication OS must be simpler -- creating a problem for Microsoft, noted for bloated complexity
- The common web browser will no longer be the single platform for getting online -- creating a huge threat to Google

See it? Twitter and Facebook could replace Google and Windows. To date, Windows sucks on mobile. Google is so worried about consumers walking around its browser front door with mobile phones that it jumped into the mobile OS design business. But I don't need either to do what I want on a cell phone -- Twitter lets me email, and Facebook lets me connect more broadly online. Facebook is becoming a nice operating system that lets you manage photos, video, and documents. Add a good spreadsheet program and who needs Office?

So the long view is both Twitter and Facebook have a wonderful opportunity to become the baseline ecosystems for mobile communications. They'll get more complex along the way, but that's to be expected.

Now let me go retweet your blog post ;)

Re: Will Facebook Be The Death of Twitter?

Ben Kunz — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:00:22 -0000

Alan, you raise yet another excellent point. For Facebook to be truly useful as a social media tool it will need network segmentation so we can divide our contacts up into friends vs. family vs. business colleagues.

However, this design aspect is at odds with Facebook wanting to monetize its entire network. Part of the charm, or illusion, of Facebook to marketers is that a message embedding in the network has potential to scale virally. That won't happen if users begin partitioning off their social networks.

So -- Facebook would be more *useful* if we had microbubbles of contacts but this makes it *less appealing* to advertisers trying to run within the entire network. Will be intriguing to see how future FB designs play this out.

Re: Advertising’s Opportunity

Ben Kunz — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:56:44 -0000

Provoking. I would suggest if we seek relevance first, lack of evil and good salaries will follow. And I think relevance is based on authenticity.

I'm just now reading Danah Boyd's doctoral thesis and she has a strong line that social media and new technology create a fundamental attack on *authenticity.* It has become so easy to create content, reproduce it, scale it and manipulate it that recipients have a hard time determining what is real.

There will always be a market for authentic ideas, points of view, and thought leadership. The first step to regaining relevance is to focus on being authentic. You'll become in demand, and a lot of the ad industry pitfalls will fall behind.

Now enough, let's get ready for football, chili, stupid ad jokes and beer!

Re: Shiny Happy Tweeple

Ben Kunz — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:12:10 -0000

Twitter captures real emotions and behaviors and silly updates of what people are doing in everyday life, and truth is everyday life is pretty good for people who can afford cell phones and computers. We're in the top 10% of the world in income, tend to live in developed nations with clean water and good plumbing, and while we fret about 401ks still can't drop 10 pounds because we have too much food all around us. People are starving elsewhere and we get upset if some peanuts end up with a milligram of rodent fuzz.

So maybe Twitter just captures the reality better than we do ourselves, when we try to write too deeply about it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still freakin out ;)

@benkunz

Re: The Times Just Doesn't Get It

Ben Kunz — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:14:15 -0000

Alan, first, I'm glad to see in the comments that you live in Millburn because I was quite stunned at the amazing analysis you did of this local community and couldn't figure out how you researched it so fast. Anyway, nicely done!

This entire NYT launch highlights the problems with large centralized organizations trying to be hyperlocal. NYT has started with only a few communities and has already run into problems of irrelevance or misfires, by not understanding the local nuances.

A few years ago I worked with a large utility that hired McKinsey for one of those future-of-our-business consulting deals and decided to centralize operations -- which previously had been run out of field offices in local communities across 9 states. On paper, the idea was grand, profits would soar ... but when the concept was executed over several years, moving everything to centralized call centers and dispatch offices and sales ops, everything fell apart. It turned out the nuances of sending utility workers into homes required immense knowledge of local markets -- from directions to customer service to just the brand perception that the guy walking into your house lived nearby. Customer churn spiked, and the company eventually (and wisely) returned to a local service model, which rapidly stabilized the ship.

What I learned from that is certain products require extreme local relevance.

People love their local communities. Buying a home is perhaps one of the most personal things you'll ever do, other than getting married. And even in this day when most of us commute miles away to work, we'll immediately pick up if local news is not really local.

I'm wondering if a smart, massive organization like NYT can really pull this off, or if dispersed, chaotic, fragmented, single news sites and blogs are more likely to succeed. It will be interesting to watch this unfold.

Re: Repetition

Ben Kunz — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:15:10 -0000

Yes.

You brilliantly point out the problem with many so-called social media or viral "campaigns" -- there is no repetition after a brief burst of interest, and the buzz falls to zero. Remember Skittles? At the height of its web-Twitter-design stunt, it accounted for 1% of all Tweets. Now, a few weeks later, Twitter mentions of Skittles have fallen to zero.

The challenge for marketers is social media is a round hole that the square peg called Campaign can't be pounded into. Campaigns have start-and-end dates. Conversations require a mutual relationship, a give-and-take that while may have pauses, goes on for a long time.

Building a business model to influence masses (the role of marketing) by creating sustained conversation (the role of social media) is going to take some thinking. Paid posts or one-off viral stunts ain't going to cut it. Proof? Just check the stats one month after any SM campaign launch, and tell me if anything is being repeated.

Repetition is the heart of a relationship. How do you buy that?

Re: Born Digital

Ben Kunz — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:11:29 -0000

We're approaching a world in which multiple demos have different media habits. Why? People take their habits with them as they age. Senior citizens still rely on TV, because they grew up with it. I read recently the average age of video-gamers is about 34, which makes sense since that population was in junior high in the early 1980s when video games took off. And now this young set will grow up multi-consuming media on cell phones with video cameras and GPS while simultaneously watching big flat-screen images fast-forwarded via DVR.

The good news is you can plot how to manage this, by casting today's youth digerati forward in time, and figuring out how your product fits in. In 2039, we'll be stuck with 40- and 50-year-olds playing with social media while the younger set has moved on to telepathy.

Re: Facebook Is Not Twitter. And Why That Should Make Us Happy

Ben Kunz — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:14:11 -0000

I almost agree. Yes, Twitter and Facebook enable very different networks, but if you ask me which group I would want to meet up with in NYC, I'd pick my 20 top Twitter contacts vs. the 20 old friends I know from Facebook. Why? Twitter gives me new things, and Facebook gives me old.

I suggest the distinction is "Facebook is the past" and "Twitter is the future." If you want to connect with current human relationships, Facebook is a modest extension on your friends and family anyway, sort of a glossy version of voicemail. But if you hunger for new ideas and professional networking, Twitter can open doorways much faster.

This is all a function of the network structures. Facebook is slow, cumbersome, cluttered, and fun for posting a menagerie of images at say 3 a day. Twitter is fast, short, disruptive, link-oriented, and built for sharing knowledge and new connections rapidly.

So we agree, almost. Which is why I'm glad I met you on Twitter.

Re: Location, Location, Location

Ben Kunz — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:07:53 -0000

Perhaps. All networks - fax, phone, email, Twitter, and now geo-locations in social media - attract spam.

But markets and human networks also are self-correcting. If marketers push too hard -- pinging your cell phone with offers say -- consumers will pay for filters, as easy as snapping off the GPS location feature in an iPhone. The more likely scenario is that spammy pushes in social networks will piss off consumers and fail (are you listening, Izea?), while aggregating systems that collect the geographic data and use it elsewhere may win. I would imagine there are huge marketing benefits in mapping where consumers travel, how they shop, and the relationships between people during purchase cycles.

The analogy today is credit card transactions. Every card you swipe is tracked, the data is compiled, shipped through Experian and becomes a mailing list for direct mail. But your credit card only inputs the data, doesn't push the marketing message out. Marketers use of geographic data will take the same path, an analytics engine running behind the scenes.

I expect consumers to quickly adopt geographic tagging of each other, but they'll be the locus of control. Like Twitter and Facebook, their new location-based networks will be private conversations among themselves, with little chance for marketers to elbow in.

Re: The Social Network Valuation Equation

Ben Kunz — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:47:36 -0000

I think there are two main levers that drive valuation. Trouble is most analysts miss the second.

The first = number of impressions. This is the classic measure of most media (CPMs in print or online, GRPs in broadcast), and the potential "virality" of social media is what gets so much hype. The hope that a message will go viral and make millions of impressions at almost no incremental cost is what gets people so excited about social networks.

But the second measure = responsiveness of the audience. This is where social media falls down, because on a scale of 1 to 100, responsiveness is probably around a 1 or 2. A good example of responsiveness on the other end of the scale is Google search results, where a consumer is actively seeking a service, say "media planning," sees a text ad offer said service, and so is very likely to respond (or click). The "mode" of that user is active hunting.

In social media, however, people are doing something completely different: being social. Their responsiveness to any ad message is very low, because the message is peripheral to the dynamic at hand. People chatting on Facebook or Tweeting on Twitter are like close friends socializing in a bar. A widget or banner ad offering a service, even if targeted to the demo, is reaching people when they are not in the mode to respond.

This doesn't mean that social media can't have value. It does mean that the valuation of a social network must factor in both impressions (all that hype about virality) *and* the propensity of each impression to create a response.

A simple way to calculate value would be to examine the potential profit derived from ad sales in a social network, calculated as responses times profits. Or:

SNV = [(total users) * (total response rate)] * (close rate) * profit per sale

A social net with 1 million users that had a *total* 2% response rate among *all offers* extended to its customers annually (say, each campaign had a 0.10% response rate and customers were exposed to 20 such campaigns a year) would generate *20,000 total responses*. Then, at a 10% average close rate, and $100 average profit per sale, the net would thus be "worth" $200,000 ... or about 20 cents per user. You could extrapolate this to the lifetime value of users, but given the short trends of social media, that timeline might be just 1-2 years.

But hey. Who knows?

Re: kelpenhagen - DUREX (via kuteev)

Ben Kunz — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:12:09 -0000

I'm speechless.

Re: http://gary.tumblr.com/post/78889856

Ben Kunz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:48:01 -0000

Good words. I think the reason few crack the code on this is that authenticity cannot be faked, and many, many businesses are structured "at odds" with consumers.

For example, many businesses seek to hide pricing, disguise margins, charge different prices, escalate prices when consumers don't notice, create hidden switching costs, etc. The momentum of this dishonesty is built into their business, encouraged by competitors who do the same thing, and frankly, the executives running these programs probably can't escape.

So, you can't be transparent if you can't be honest, and you can't be honest if you're caught in a dysfunctional business-consumer relationship. Which is why real help for users is hard to find. Which is why people like you, Gary, are successful -- because you are so rare.

Re: Email Great Medium For Reaching Old, Stupid People

Ben Kunz — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:11:28 -0000

Sorry, Joshua, I gotta back Miconian here. The original email article is very misleading and positions email marketing as "the best" online media, ahead of search, which is a bit laughable. Who is a better respondent with a higher propensity to convert to lead and sale and then buy more? A user actively looking for the product via Google, or someone responding to an unsolicited email offer?

I'm sure the ROI on email marketing is 4,500% since it costs almost nothing to fill up inboxes with electrons, but that logic is flawed. One could say the ROI on press releases is 1,000,000% given the small cost of a stamp or single email to a major paper vs. the hundreds of thousands of readers who might see it, but I would not hinge most of my marketing on PR either.

Email marketing is a potentially viable campaign component, best used if there is already an existing customer relationship. It is also annoying to non-customers, risks an adverse impact by alienating prospects who do not respond, as a collective whole has a tragedy-of-the-commons effect of spoiling the entire email channel, and has a historic trend of diminishing returns. Which reminds me, it may be time to change my Gmail account again to get away from the stuff. But wait. Just got a great offer from some guy in Nigeria ...

Re: Email Great Medium For Reaching Old, Stupid People

Ben Kunz — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:11:28 -0000

Re: Obama Gets LinkedIn

Ben Kunz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:41:59 -0000

It is damn smart, and also positions him as an accessible man of the people. If he goes the distance, it will be VERY interesting to see if social media tools change how the public communicates with the White House.

Re: Obama Gets LinkedIn

Ben Kunz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:41:59 -0000

Re: Twitter And The Inevitable Cocoon of Advertising

Ben Kunz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:50:44 -0000

You touch on the idea that we are on the edge of a revolution, one that we have asked for. Everyone wants access to unlimited information ... but then we don't want to give it up about ourselves. It's going to happen, though, when mobile web and GPS tracking and video creation and databases all converge. All points in the network will be listed.

In a way, though, this takes us back go our early beginnings. You know those new studies that say humans can all be traced back to a single tribe in Africa of 2,000 people or so, our common ancestors? I bet in that age, everyone knew everything about everyone. We had to share, be honest, and we were recognized but anything we did was also part of the public record.

Maybe our recent 10,000 years of hiding in small clusters and secreting our wants and needs and fighting selfishly with others has been an aberration. Maybe, now, with us all returning to a single clan, we'll have to learn to be open, and to get along.

Re: Twitter And The Inevitable Cocoon of Advertising

Ben Kunz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:50:44 -0000

Re: Apple’s Strange Product Release Cycle

Ben Kunz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:35:43 -0000

Great thought-starter. I personally believe that Apple -- of course -- has a 10-year product pipeline plan and that everything from GUI to design to batteries to new features to price framing is staged to

a. drive current demand
b. and build in product obsolescence
c. to set the stage for future sales.

The new 3G iPhone, for example, has a battery that is so problematic Apple has set up a web page to explain how to extend the battery life -- by turning off all the cool features you got the new 3G model for. Hmm. Upgraded battery in 2009?

And then, there is the camera, still substandard. And the potential addition of video capture. And, of course, since you want to look at whom you're talking to, you'll need a second video camera on the interface side so you could chat with me and we'd both see each other without turning the phone around.

The iPhone may turn into the first true convergence device ... and that will take many years, many carefully staged upgrades, and may additional sales to get there. And along the way, the second growth channel will be the interface updates you mentioned -- to sell the Library of Congress, the world's music, and Lucasfilms.

Hey, it's working. And it is brilliant. You're one year in and already thinking of upgrading to a new phone!

Re: Apple’s Strange Product Release Cycle

Ben Kunz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:35:43 -0000

Re: Aristotle And The Art Of The Banner Ad

Ben Kunz — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:53:29 -0000

Wow. I've never given the design of interactive banners that much thought; instead simplistically viewed them as an escalating tease to try to get a user to click.

Do you think your castle/invest-time-first thesis holds for all types of online offers? Or are there products where a more direct approach makes sense? I would think consumers have different levels of interest for different products, creating multiple strategies for stimulating response.

Re: Aristotle And The Art Of The Banner Ad

Ben Kunz — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:53:29 -0000

Re: vampires and the future of advertising

Ben Kunz — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:58:29 -0000

Whoa. Sounds pretty meta.

:)

Re: vampires and the future of advertising

Ben Kunz — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:58:29 -0000

Whoa. Sounds pretty meta.

:)

Re: The Difference Between Metaphor and Affinity

Ben Kunz — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:42:10 -0000

Logically you are spot on.

I do wonder, though, if most people will make this logic connection. People tend to define themselves by the products they buy, and the fast visual "vibe" of the new PC spots does makes you feel that you want to be hip of this cool, fun, smart crowd. Advertising is designed to get a response, which is often emotional and illogical -- which is why sex and violence work so well in advertising; logically people wouldn't respond to such superficial stimuli, but emotionally we do.

Great analysis... but I bet the PC ads will work because of the simplistic reading, not the deeper logical rationale.

Re: The Difference Between Metaphor and Affinity

Ben Kunz — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:42:10 -0000

Re: Image Theft As Viral Strategy

Ben Kunz — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:32:47 -0000

You know, the lengths people go to to try and game the network continue to astound me. I'm curious as a non-coder sort as to how linking to an image -- which appears on your site anyway but may not be hosted there -- protects a user from an IP theft claim any more than posted the image and linking to one's own server.

Ah, but I digress. The real issue I see is people not being real -- by either presenting ideas that are not their own (see recent pay-per-post debates re Kmart) or presenting linking structures that are not valid (see all the SEO and PPP gambits to try to make a topic look more relevant than it is). Everyone is so hung up on mirrored faces or mirrored links that they are missing the real value of the new social media -- a forum to build and exchange real ideas.

Sorry for the soapbox mate. Hey, at less their manipulation is giving your images a higher page rank.

Re: Image Theft As Viral Strategy

Ben Kunz — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:32:47 -0000

Re: Time Has No Moral Qualities

Ben Kunz — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:42:49 -0000

Provoking post. I suspect your book-loving friends may sometimes be adversarial because it feels like the old industry is under threat ... which really is furthest from the truth.

One thing that book-lovers should celebrate is that people are *writing* again. It's hard to remember today, but back in the 1980s and early 1990s educators were very upset that children, teens and young adults were spending 8 or 12 or 16 hours a day in front of the television. Then video games came ... and the world of reading and writing seemed about to wither and die.

So it's sweet that today there are 100 million blogs and the craze is to create writing, even if on Twitter in 140 characters or less.

The writing on blogs and tweets and text messages may be sometimes sloppy, or ill-reported, or use different spellings ... but language always evolves, which is why we and the Brits speak with different accents after only 250 years of separation.

I love books, and I love blogs, too. My own blog is a bit of a scratch-pad and when I write for "real" publication, I labor much more intensely. But I find the freedom of expression that digital typography has offered has freed my mind.

Here's to more people writing loosely electronically. If they practice hard enough, they may even make it inside a book.

Re: Time Has No Moral Qualities

Ben Kunz — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:42:49 -0000

Re: The New New Journalism

Ben Kunz — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:49:27 -0000

I like this return to raw honesty. At least it is authentic. If you go back to the early days of print, when Jonathan Swift made points about the Irish by suggesting the English eat their babies, the world was a pretty tough place and writers reflected that. Journalism was a fist; in the late 20th century it seemed more like a constipated belly.

Trouble is the new (2000s) journalism and old (late 1900s) journalism are colliding: Adrants just got sued for making a tongue-in-cheek point about a fake Virgin America ad. Will be interesting few years as this blog-as-news thing sorts itself out.

Re: The New New Journalism

Ben Kunz — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:49:27 -0000

Re: Blog Tune Up-Search

Ben Kunz — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:57:28 -0000

Good point. Different people hunt in different ways, and the point of entry should be obvious to each of them. We recently added a highly visible phone number to our agency site, and phone leads tripled ... imagine the logic!

Re: What Were Your First Steps

Ben Kunz — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:00:37 -0000

I recently joined the social media creators after being inspired by Darryl Ohrt over at the Plaid blog www.brandflakesforbreakfast.com. My path was simple:

- first get over fear (of not contributing something good)
- blog every day
- try to be genuinely insightful and helpful about my industry
- comment on others' blogs and ideas
- network with other tools such as Twitter and Facebook

The irony is that after six months, our blog www.thoughtgadgets.com caught the attention of an editor at BusinessWeek, and now I've written a few columns for the BW technology section. So social media led right back to MSM.

I've learned from you, Chris, that chasing traffic stats isn't the real point (although tempting, especially in the early phase). My greatest traffic spike came after posting a bit on the Green Bay Bikini girls, and I realized, dudes chasing chicks isn't really my target reading audience. The real value of social media is connecting with and helping a handful of close friends or clients. I find the process of creating content also helps me -- and our agency -- become smarter and more insightful about trends in the ad industry.

About three months into blogging, I had a biz dev call with a potential client who asked about internet advertising. I rattled off ideas for 15 minutes ... concepts that I never would have understood prior to connecting socially with the leading minds in the industry, via their blogs and my responses.

So I think I've discovered social media is not about scale; it's about intimacy, knowledge, and eventually helping oneself grow.

Re: Laws Rules Norms and Habits

Ben Kunz — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:40:51 -0000

Breaking rules *also* is effective in communication and building consensus. Think of the norms we follow in business meetings, in clean shirts being polite listening to PowerPoint, and how little often gets done. Think of how polite we are in responding to unwanted sales calls or emails. In our heads, we know what we want to say, but we keep it inside. Decorum breeds dishonesty, which stalls progress or constructive decisions.

Sean Howard has a great post about shaking up a board room by giving execs crayons and blank paper. http://www.seanhoward.ca/2008/06/the-role-of-se... He broke a few unwritten laws that day, but moved a team through paralysis to new insights.

So here's to breaking chains. I'm gonna speed on the way home.

Re: I Support the Future of Sponsored Posts

Ben Kunz — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:15:12 -0000

Chris, you are extremely talented and yet you know I strongly disagree with the ethics of paid posts, also known as paid opinions. I'll break it down for your readers.

1. Disclosure is not enough. You or I could disclose to our wives that we slept with a prostitute. Full disclosure. That doesn't change the ethics of what we did. Saying "disclosure" makes paid posts OK is a logical fallacy since the ethics of the *action* have nothing to do with the *description* of what happened. Simple. If you question this, trying going home tonight and disclosing, "Hey, honey, I just slept with a hooker..."

2. Blogs are opinions. See your post above, and every comment that followed. Opinions. This is an important distinction, because paying someone to write an opinion is very different than paying someone to stick a block of ad copy on the page. If you disagree, please point me to a blog with entries of more than 10 words that doesn't contain opinions.

3. "Paid posts" are thus "paid opinions." You are buying the voice of someone's mind.

4. Paying for an opinion creates a conflict of interest. The pay giver is seeking elevation of a topic and influence over a positive review (if not, why would they pay?). The pay recipient is compromised and influenced to write favorably over the product or perk given. If you disagree, please point me to 2 paid posts sharply critical of the product being paid for.

5. Conflicts of interest reduce credibility. This is why marketing executives in charge of million-dollar budgets don't accept gifts more than $20 -- because even the appearance of impropriety opens the door to complaints of favoritism or impropriety in future business dealings.

6. Reduction of credibility is not helpful to anyone's career.

At the end, bloggers have a choice. Paid posts are not "wrong"; they are a PR vehicle that create a conflict of interest that may reduce the blogger's credibility. Bloggers of course are welcome to walk that road if they choose. You can tweet about how much you like a GPS system given to you on loan, and many of us will digest that for the questionable transmission that it is.

But let's be clear -- paid posts are not sticking content on a page, like advertising or even advertorial. They are buying the opinions coming from people's minds.

Take good care of your mind, Chris. You only have one.

Ben Kunz
c 203 506 7269

Re: I Support the Future of Sponsored Posts

Ben Kunz — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:25:40 -0000

Chris, thanks for your eloquent response. Since ethics like politics cannot be solved with one "right" point of view, perhaps the solution for bloggers is to use a simple economic trade-off. (1) How much will they earn this year from writing posts for hire? (2) Will doing so reduce their future value to employers or clients, hurting future fame/income/success?

I've made many mistakes in my career. Last year, I did one thing right: A CEO client called and asked me point blank, "Do you think the next wave of our ad campaign will work?" The campaign had been restructured several times and honestly I questioned it. Before I could think, I said, "No. The focus is wrong," and explained why. So he killed it. We waiting months before the campaign was revised, our agency missed out on a boatload of revenue in the meantime ... but now I have a very loyal client. He now trusts my opinion. He has since relaunched the campaign, and I think I'll be working with that client for many years to come.

Giving up something in the short term to build authenticity in the long-term is a difficult choice. It's one worth thinking about.

PS Yes, I dug your GM car visit.

Re: Don't Be Fooled by the Desperation; Jack is Not a Nice Guy.

Ben Kunz — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:23:58 -0000

Holy crap, that was a long wind-up.

Re: Magic Advertising Words - A Brief Update

Ben Kunz — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:05:51 -0000

Autos show what marketers forget: consumers have pretty good memories. If you encounter a car and realize it's damn good, you tend to come back. And if not, you run away.

About 8 years ago I left Toyota to buy a sporty VW Passat. The VW handled like a dream ... and was in the shop every four months. About six months after I bought it as a commuter car, the right front door handle stopped working ... and my wife had climbed in maybe a dozen times. No amount of advertising in the world will ever get me to go back.

Subaru has a bit of anti-memory problem for me. My dad bought a few back in the early 1980s when the cars were 4 feet tall and colored banana yellow. I know they've improved since then, but I can't quite get over my teenage embarrassment.

The point for agencies dreaming up the next big creative storm is, are you recognizing the brand's history? Because consumers will surely remember their experience 2 or 20 years back.

Re: Do You Need A Contract If You Have Trust?

Ben Kunz — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:20:41 -0000

My grandfather, now deceased, sold his house to a Realtor in his 70s. He shook the Realtor's hand and said "you can have it lock, stock and barrel." His wife gasped, because in Vermont that means "everything." My grandfather realized he had misspoke, but he stood by his word ... and sold the house with all of the belongings in it, including antique weather vanes and old family photos. My mom cried at the auction as she saw her family heirlooms being sold by the Realtor (a dick who didn't retrench) to the public.

Crazy? Perhaps. But I remember the honor behind that action. Those days are long gone.

Unfortunately, in a world where businesses are bought out, and where economic times change dramatically every 18 months, contracts are necessary. A promise today doesn't hold unless it is in writing. My grandfather wouldn't need them, but alas, not everyone in business acts like him.

Re: Should Google Be Scared Of The Mobile Internet?

Ben Kunz — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:39:20 -0000

Tricia,

Thank you for the thoughtful response. In the near term, you could be right, mobile may be an *additive* channel that gives Google and other advertisers a new way to reach users -- on the road, GPS-connected, tiny ads that supplement internet marketing. I, for one, dig the fact that Google listings on my Blackberry tell me the store I want is 0.4 miles north. Very cool!

But in the long term I believe mobile will do to standard web pages what Craigslist is doing to newspaper classified advertising today: Replace it. Today's younger generation doesn't use email; they use text messaging. Today's social media users don't spend much time on standard web pages; they communicate with apps inside Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

In the longest view, there are only 24 hours in a day, and new media channels with which people spend time must supplant the old. 5 hours spent playing with the iPhone is 5 hours not on a PC screen. It takes a while; but read reports on today's radio ratings and newspaper readership, and you'll see what MP3s and web news have done -- it's out with the old, in with the new.

Perhaps the easiest way to think of this is it is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If only 10% of viewers abort PC screens for mobile, ad responses on traditional web pages would fall 10%. This is enough to trigger a cascade of departing advertisers. As proof, witness today's newspaper industry.

The real issue, both today and tomorrow, is for marketers to learn to use *personalization* to reach consumers in a manner to increase response rates. Any marketer who is not now investing 5% of her budget into testing ad networks on the web, and new mobile formats, is taking a risk that she won't be in position when the future comes.

I could be wrong. But what if I'm right?

Thanks again.

Re: French Vogue Paints White Model Black ... and Itself into a Corner

Ben Kunz — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:02:44 -0000

Well said, Robin. If we can learn to see past color, than why can't any of us change our color?

My eyes are blue. Does that matter, too?