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I've often tried to explain to marketeers at work that marketing to the wrong people will create negative sentiment and lower sales, but I can never get them to

by tyfon 7y ago

I've often tried to explain to marketeers at work that marketing to the wrong people will create negative sentiment and lower sales, but I can never get them to do any tests of it. It's all about having the maximum number of people to spam. Personally I'm trying to avoid products where the ads manage to penetrate my "firewall" either by breaking the law (DMs even if I am registered not to accept those), public space advertisement or email spam where I didn't sign up for it. Both the email spam and DMs are illegal to do here if you don't sign up for it so I report them all to the local authorities.

LaundroMat 7y ago
I am rooting for someone to find a way of making ad aversion measurable so that marketeers can finally take it into account.
- tyfon 7y ago
  I often get the feeling that they don't want to know this because it invalidates large parts of their work.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Yeah - people look at me like I am crazy when I mention it but the marketing of the /advertiser/ is actually more relevant than the actual conversion rate given fuzzy attribution.
- bertil 7y ago
  Facebook and Google do that and try to limit showing ads to people who will care enough there’s a chance they’ll click it. Both have x-out options on every ad: feel free to use it, it helps training aversion models.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    They never have the reason I want, "I hate ads" ;) Maybe they changed that but I gave up on that strategy quite fast.
lloeki 7y ago
Just the other day, my wife found some enjoyable series of super short story jokes on Facebook. For once this was actually nice, original content, sliced in <2min videos, one per story. The ads were inserted somewhere in the middle of each one, for 30~45s, every single time completely ruining the gag delivery. Eventually we gave up, it was ridiculously obnoxious. Ad platforms are killing content: seems like to generate any revenue you either get very generic stuff at high audience, or a long tail of dark-pattern riddled crap. The middle ground where really good creative stuff happens basically doesn't exist/quickly dies, relies on Patreon and such, or gets so many ads it's unconsumable.
bertil 7y ago
Talk to them about “uplift modelling”. Most of the time, the campaigns will be estimated through some AB-testing. It could be a before and after test, or something even less significant like attribution. All of those have one thing in common: you assume that either you run a campaign, or you don’t. Given week enforcement, being louder wins. If one the other hand you decide to only send that email to people with a high chance of being interested and changing their behaviour, you limit your messages to a much smaller, more relevant subset. There typically is some pushback: “Why not also try people with a less than 0.1% of responding?” In that case, you want to introduce a cost: the fraction of a penny is costs to send an email, chances of being blacklisted, legal process, etc. Even with a conservative estimation of that risk, most of your targets become not worth it.
libertine 7y ago
> I've often tried to explain to marketeers at work that marketing to the wrong people will create negative sentiment and lower sales That's the same thing as a marketer approaching a dev at work trying to explain that shit code will create poor product experience, negative sentiment and lower sales. What most people don't realize is that marketing isn't a input > output solution. That's not how people work. That's not how society works. No one wants to waste budget to reach the wrong people, because, just like on any other job - no one likes to do a bad job. Specially marketing/sales jobs have a direct measurable result. I know that a lot of IT people have a lot of difficulty understanding this, but that's part of some marketing roles, to deal with all stakeholders and try to explain it to them (when/if necessary - else they should just say: "How about you do your job well and don't worry about other's people job?"). When you understand that when Coca-Cola approaches you with a briefing to sell "happiness in a bottle" and that poses a media challenge, then you're one step closer to understand the difficulty of the task. Now, are there bad practices and bad professionals? Just like in any other job. So what's the difference? Well unlike many other jobs, the outcome of a bad advertising is seen by a lot of eye balls, because that's the end goal. A good analogy of a bad engineering job that received a lot of public attention and anger is for example the Boeing 737 Max Q. Or when ever there's a data leak from X company. Yet most poor/bad engineering jobs aren't noticeable to a large audience, aren't up for public scrutiny. To sum up: when people are affected by bad practices, they don't like it.

by tyfon 7y ago

LaundroMat 7y ago

I am rooting for someone to find a way of making ad aversion measurable so that marketeers can finally take it into account.

tyfon 7y ago
I often get the feeling that they don't want to know this because it invalidates large parts of their work.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Yeah - people look at me like I am crazy when I mention it but the marketing of the /advertiser/ is actually more relevant than the actual conversion rate given fuzzy attribution.
bertil 7y ago
Facebook and Google do that and try to limit showing ads to people who will care enough there’s a chance they’ll click it. Both have x-out options on every ad: feel free to use it, it helps training aversion models.
- tyfon 7y ago
  They never have the reason I want, "I hate ads" ;) Maybe they changed that but I gave up on that strategy quite fast.

lloeki 7y ago

Just the other day, my wife found some enjoyable series of super short story jokes on Facebook. For once this was actually nice, original content, sliced in <2min videos, one per story. The ads were inserted somewhere in the middle of each one, for 30~45s, every single time completely ruining the gag delivery. Eventually we gave up, it was ridiculously obnoxious. Ad platforms are killing content: seems like to generate any revenue you either get very generic stuff at high audience, or a long tail of dark-pattern riddled crap. The middle ground where really good creative stuff happens basically doesn't exist/quickly dies, relies on Patreon and such, or gets so many ads it's unconsumable.

bertil 7y ago

Talk to them about “uplift modelling”. Most of the time, the campaigns will be estimated through some AB-testing. It could be a before and after test, or something even less significant like attribution. All of those have one thing in common: you assume that either you run a campaign, or you don’t. Given week enforcement, being louder wins. If one the other hand you decide to only send that email to people with a high chance of being interested and changing their behaviour, you limit your messages to a much smaller, more relevant subset. There typically is some pushback: “Why not also try people with a less than 0.1% of responding?” In that case, you want to introduce a cost: the fraction of a penny is costs to send an email, chances of being blacklisted, legal process, etc. Even with a conservative estimation of that risk, most of your targets become not worth it.

libertine 7y ago

> I've often tried to explain to marketeers at work that marketing to the wrong people will create negative sentiment and lower sales That's the same thing as a marketer approaching a dev at work trying to explain that shit code will create poor product experience, negative sentiment and lower sales. What most people don't realize is that marketing isn't a input > output solution. That's not how people work. That's not how society works. No one wants to waste budget to reach the wrong people, because, just like on any other job - no one likes to do a bad job. Specially marketing/sales jobs have a direct measurable result. I know that a lot of IT people have a lot of difficulty understanding this, but that's part of some marketing roles, to deal with all stakeholders and try to explain it to them (when/if necessary - else they should just say: "How about you do your job well and don't worry about other's people job?"). When you understand that when Coca-Cola approaches you with a briefing to sell "happiness in a bottle" and that poses a media challenge, then you're one step closer to understand the difficulty of the task. Now, are there bad practices and bad professionals? Just like in any other job. So what's the difference? Well unlike many other jobs, the outcome of a bad advertising is seen by a lot of eye balls, because that's the end goal. A good analogy of a bad engineering job that received a lot of public attention and anger is for example the Boeing 737 Max Q. Or when ever there's a data leak from X company. Yet most poor/bad engineering jobs aren't noticeable to a large audience, aren't up for public scrutiny. To sum up: when people are affected by bad practices, they don't like it.