Campaign

The Perils of the Modern Age e-Marketer

So check this out for a well timed, well crafted opening to a direct mail shot:

"Good morning.  Personally I would like to offer you and your business a complimentary session to be held at your place, where together we will run through proven strategies that will enable your business to: 1) Win more Sales (156 ideas);  2) Make more profit.  (126 ideas);  3) Handle more business more efficiently.  (84 ideas)"

Sounds good, doesn't it?  And it was well timed and well targeted.  It had me thinking straight away.  "Personally" had a nice touch.  "Complimentary" made it sound like it was no risk. And it seemed actionable with all those ideas.

Now this came from someone called Ryan Jarvis at a company called ProfitClub.  I had never heard of him but it caught my attention and my PA got in touch with him to arrange that complimentary session.  Then she got in touch with him again.  And again.  And on the third time of not hearing back from this brilliant e-marketer, this man who claimed he knew how to generate and handle more business more efficiently, she came back to me and asked what to do next.

This was my response - quite literally - to the aforementioned Mr. Ryan Jarvis:

"Hello Ryan ... I enjoy the irony of you sending an unsolicited, outbound email telling me you could teach my colleagues how to be better at new business and handle more business more efficiently and then you singularly failed to respond to two attempts to take you up on your offer.
That made me chuckle... At least you gave me some concrete guidance for my team about how to handle new business."

Apart from the chuckling, this made me pause to think about the sort of stuff we always say to our clients - if you are soliciting a response, make sure you can handle it.  Nothing spreads faster than bad experiences.  And in this day and age, that spread, that speed and that power of 'WWWOM' (wicked worldwide word of mouth) can seriously damage business. Why?

Well, it is not only the immediate impact of the shared bad experience but the fact that all this word of mouth - good as well as bad - is archived and will exist for quite a long time.

Take this as a case in point.  Maybe Mr. Jarvis will continue undaunted in his e-mail campaign.  Any recipient of that e-mail will, by definition, have access to the web and a proportion of them who might consider doing business with ProfitClub or Ryan Jarvis might copy and paste his name into a search engine and some may find this story - one person's experience - online.  And my advice to them is do not bother contacting this company.  If his ability to harvest his incoming new business responses is an indication of his ability to teach you anything then I suggest that his teachings will count for nothing.

Interestingly, Mr. Jarvis wrote back to me this morning.  A contrite apology? An automated follow up? A proffered meeting? No.  Just another e-mail this time proudly proclaiming:

"Morning.  I hope this comes as a pleasant surprise to you, having researched your market there are three areas where you can win more business from over 91% of your competitors ..."

Yeah.  And having researched his business, I can tell him there are a couple of areas where he can do the same.  And a couple of them are to follow up on his leads and don't be a pain in the ass by sending more unsolicited, misleading and downright stupid e-mails.

Chariots of the gods

 I have been traveling a lot recently.

A colleague and I have done 9 countries on 4 continents in 31 days. In fact, if we can manage to arrange a workshop somewhere in Antarctica in the next month we will each win a set of kitchen knives and a commendation from The Royal Geographic Society.

One of the interesting side effects of all this travel was that my hair - odd at the best of times - had become unruly and ill mannered and so I found myself in a barber's chair with my hairdresser, Ian.

Now Ian is a skinny Mancunian with an earnest desire to become a photographer, a deft pair of scissors and an interesting line in patter honed on the back streets of Salford.

But on this particular day, he was also sporting a magnificent black eye partially obscured by the liberal application of concealer. Obviously, this shiner became the first point of conversation.

Apparently Ian had been wandering home in Camden after a couple of pints and was accosted by a young gentleman of that environs.

"Gizza f@*king ***" implored said youth. Ian ignored him at his cost as a healthy blow landed just under his eye. No warning, no delay, just wallop.

Now as I said, Ian is a skinny mite of a lad. In fact he makes me look like a rippling mountain of finely tuned man-muscle but I happen to know he is a pro-level kick boxer.

Sure enough, he did make the lad pay for his rudeness, grabbing his hoodie and pulling him forward onto a supremely angled Doctor Marten. Hostilities ended and each went on their way.

But it left a question hanging - why, when Ian is such a fighter and a Man City supporter into the bargain, why did he get caught with a punch?

And here is where the conversation got interesting. Ian had been at a mate's house and they had watched a bootleg dvd of a lecture given by some crazy Swedish bloke about extra terrestrials and the evidence for them living amongst us today.

And he began to reel off examples culminating in a excoriating polemic against a certain hairdressing impressario who fit the Swedish Theory so perfectly that Ian expected Gillian Anderson to be popping round to his house that later evening.

But why did that lead to a punch? Did Ian believe the hoodie came from elsewhere? No, not at all. He had just been so buried in thought remembering the books he had read as a kid, written by Erich von Daniken in the late seventies, that he hadn't been concentrating.

Now if you haven't heard of this bloke and his ideas, Google him and check it out. From the Nazca Lines to Chichen Itza to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, this guy had some interesting hypotheses.

Ian and I discussed them and took them to another dimension. What if they were not extra terrestrial but were from earth but in the future?

Would the same stuff have been created? For example, anyone today knows man can fly, we are all taught basic geometry at school and we all know how to magnify a scale drawing to a 3-d imprint on a grand scale using theodolytes and a protractor (don't we?).

So Ian and I could have gone back in time and made those giant spiders and that chalk man with the enormous willy and we could have done it as a prank.

And that got me thinking: imagine if we could use time travel as marketeers to go and tamper with people's minds, what would we do? I, for one, would go back and change the formative experiences of today's thirty to forty year olds so they were more likely to buy my brands now.

And when you think like that you can see why it is a sensitive topic, advertising to the young, and you can absolutley understand why this government is so set against the use of time travel in marketing campaigns.

Tyranny

So I was talking to a very smart, very funny friend in Denver last night and the discussion turned to the topic of tyranny.

I was anticipating subject matter like social injustice, the inherent problems of ochlochracy, the evil of avarice and the economic downturn to come up.  Maybe even the social pressure to be beautiful or the compulsion to get onto your Facebook page, but no, none of this surfaced.

Instead, the conversatuon turned to PowerPoint.

Tyrannical?  PowerPoint?  In the grand scheme of things?

Maybe not in the grand scheme but in our industry, PowerPoint wields an unhealthy and potentially stunting influence.  Hear this out.

On the one hand, it curbs our creativity because it sets the parameters for what we expect of ourselves to be able to do.  Now this is an old moan - don't just stick to slides, do something more original because it will be more engaging for your audience.  I, for one, have resorted to juggling, unicycling, rapping, fishing and hang-gliding just to appear more interesting on platforms and trust me, doing something different isn't enough on its own.  It has to be different and good.  We do PowerPoint because it is easy and it works really well.  But the point my friend was making was that inside of PowerPoint, our expectations of what we can achieve are bounded by what we think it allows us to do.  Discover a new slide build, get the graphics to explode, insert a clip of yodeling from The Sound of Music and suddenly you think you have created art.  Fair enough inside the confines of that medium but not exactly art.  It is like telling all painters they can only use the colour blue.  They would all be constricted (apart from maybe Picasso).  So thinking beyond the artificial limits of PowerPoint is something we should all attempt once in a while.

Now that was a minor theme.  Interesting but not completely new.  But then she explored a more compelling line of thought, her major theme.

PowerPoint is tyrannical not because of the limits it sets on our imagination but on the limit it imposes on our ability to make things really happen, on our productivity.  Her hypothesis was that in too many industries, the objective of our toil - and the expectation of the fruits of that labour from our customers - is too often seen as the delivery of a presentation.

Too often we see this as the end of our work when in reality it should be the beginning.  Just delivering a great presentation - complete with animated slides, movie clips and the odd magic trick thrown in in memory of Ali Bongo - is not enough.  It is a part of the journey, and an important one, but it is not the destination.  And too often we, in our industry, focus on that as our endpoint and not on what happens afterward. 

So, this artificial goal of delivering the PowerPoint, getting the presentation done, getting the slides made, this gets in the way of seeing the true objective of making something useful happen.

An interesting discussion to have on a Monday evening, I thought.  What do you think?  How can we work through this problem (if indeed it is a problem)?

And this all goes to show that Rory is right.  Everything we do has the ability to make you think better, think different and be more useful.

My conversation with my friend is an example of just such a thing happening.  Blogging is fine, Facebook is OK, text is useful but none of it is as good as talking.  Useful things always come up ...

Mind you, she also pointed out that in every airport you visit, anywhere in the world, in all kinds of weather, there is always a big guy with shorts on pulling a wheelie bag and going red in the face.  

One Day At Lord's

The ISBA conference yesterday was interesting.

Great setting for a conference - Lord's Cricket Ground - and a team of speakers that rattled through their innings like a late order England collapse with most of us not lasting any more than thirty minutes at the crease.

But that kept the excitement up and some pretty good knocks were played out.

The speakers that stuck in my mind were Richard Eyre, Nick Milligan and Justin Billingsley. Richard outlined a digital future where we can all have whatever we want, wherever we want it so long as we find a way of paying for it.

Richard is one of the best public speakers you can find anywhere because he just weaves a huge amount of brilliant stuff into an interesting story. Go see him if you can and see what you can pick up from him.

Nick Milligan talked about Sky's tech development and the impending arrival of 3DTV ... only 2-3 years away. He also mentioned a hugely important advance that is in Beta at the moment - the possibility of using the data collected from the Sky Box and the opt in from households to serve tailored advertising all the way down to an individual household level.

No. 67 sees the Zafira ad, No. 59 gets the Mazda one and I get another ad for a cheap bicycle. This has been a long time coming but it is nearly here.

They just have to beat IPTV to the punch and we could have an incredibly useful tool to get broadcast TV to work harder for us. And finally, Justin Billingsley who put a positive spin on the recession - learn to love it because it increases creativity, makes marketing more important and heightens the role of iconic brands in people's lives. Nice to hear someone looking on the bright side.

And you have to admire Michael Kassan, flown in from New York with his laconic lambasting of a certain big media owner which he delivered as a 'googly to Google'. Nice. An American using cricket terms at Lord's. Now if only Gordon Brown could have pitched a no-hitter to President Obama yesterday ...