The Relatability of Human Achievement

This morning, I completed a 45-minute Tabata ride on my Peloton spinning bike. These rides, designed for twice as much effort time as recovery, have caused many to stop, cry, puke, or not even attempt them.

Minutes later, I learned that Eliud Kipchoge became the first human to run the 26.2 mile marathon distance in under two hours.

Of course, these two events aren’t comparable – I didn’t make history (but I also didn’t throw up) – but there is an important commonality when you consider the power of achievement.

As I wrote in my The Art of Digital Persuasion book, marketers have been wise to tap into moments that at first might seem as unrelated.

In 2017, Nike created Breaking2, an attempt for elite athletes to break the two-hour barrier for running a marathon. The number of people tuning in to the live stream on Twitter was nearly eight times higher than the broadcast audience of the New York, Boston and Chicago marathons. In total, 13.1 million watched the attempt live via Twitter, making it the company’s largest brand-powered, live-streaming event.

“It was cool because you saw all the tweets from the people who are watching on Twitter, “ Stacy Minero, Global Head of Twitter ArtHouse, told me. “And then you have this curated timeline where you had all these journalists and sports broadcasters weighing in minute by minute, weighing in on what was happening on screen.

“Breaking2 created a sense of urgency. I would say also anticipation because there's an outcome -- either the marathon record will be broken or not. You are driving tune in around this anticipation. They also used Twitter Tools. You can ‘heart’ to get a reminder when the race is going live or when key moments were happening.”

While you may never run at record pace or even get on a spinning bike and do what you believe isn’t possible, there is still lots to learn and apply from what occurred this morning.

Personal But Not Too Personal

Sending meatball sandwich offers to known vegetarians is wasted marketing effort at best and offensive to the receiver at worst.

Still, boundaries remain undefined with little hope for clarity.

Expedia’s Aaron Price told me in an interview that there unmistakably is a line not to be crossed.

“Personalization is an overloaded term,” the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing shared in my The Art of Digital Persuasion book. “I think that algorithmically-driven or machine-managed sort of curation is a path that allows businesses to present their best information to any customer as the first thing that they see and you can optimize for both parties at same time. We want to be in the business of putting things in front of people that are more likely to be sold. From that perspective, it is highly critical that that happens.

“The Internet’s creepy view of personalization is something that I would say we all aspire to avoid. That’s trying to get to exceedingly narrow responses to any customer base on highly, highly personal or seemingly personal information. That kind of stuff is not what we would intend to do or want to do.”

Where do you as a marketer see that line drawn? How do you stay on the right side of it?

Five Words To Describe Ineffective Digital Marketers

ESPN, all over your television guide and digital channels, notably uses a yardstick that measures how well as opposed to how many.

“Quality always wins,” Ryan Spoon, ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Digital and Social,  told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion.

“And that pertains to any job. Whether you're creating the content, creating a product, you're distributing the content, marketing it, whatever that might be.”

In the United States, ESPN has eight cable networks and ESPN on ABC. The digital lineup includes ESPN.com; ESPN3; ESPN Fantasy Sports; espnW, ESPNDeportes.com; TheUndefeated.com; plus a group of niche sites. ESPN+ offers thousands of live events, original programs and on-demand content. The company also has a radio network and magazine.

In short, the brand is seemingly everywhere.

ESPN has certainly made mistakes. Who can forget the ill-advised ESPN MVP phone? Then there have been the company’s missteps around digital and too many apps. It has taken until recently for ESPN to hone in on what fans really want – personalized experiences tailored to the digital channel.

Is the strategy working?

ESPN Digital ranked as the No. 1 U.S. digital sports property in February across every key metric. The network reached 88.4 million unique visitors (up +21% YOY) for its best February on record.

The ESPN mobile app was once again ranked as the No. 1 sports app in the U.S., attracting 18.5 million unique visitors and 1.3 billion minutes, up +24% and +33%, respectively YOY. ESPN Digital also was No. 1 in total minutes with 4.3 billion, which was 1.7 billion more than No. 2 Yahoo-NBC Sports (2.6 billion), and with an average minute audience of 106,000, out-delivering No. 2 Yahoo-NBC Sports (64,000).

Still, it’s less about more and more about excellence.

“I don't know the best way to say it other than just a general mantra, and that’s fewer things done better,” Spoon told me.

In other words, failure often comes when you overextend.

There are four additional words gleaned from my interviews to slap on ineffective marketers: 

Unrealistic

Identify a proven innovator and I’ll guarantee that the road to success had more than a few bumps. The smart ones know that is to be expected. We can only make our best judgments, do what we can, and hope for the best.   

“Everyone has to be relatively sober-minded when evaluating the possibility of a what might come in the future and realize that for all of us who are trying to predict what can happen, we're all partially right and partially wrong,” Aaron Price, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, told me. 

Misguided

To those seeking clarity on the question of when they will master digital marketing, Google’s Jason Spero believes that it is all tied to delivering for consumers.

“It's likely the question of when we get to the finish line might be the wrong metaphor,” Spero, Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “But rather how do we recognize consumers’ expectations and how might we be able to serve her needs in a way where she may not see the technology, but she's delighted by the experience?”

Lackadaisical

Maybe next year is a mindset that frankly will get you fired. Think instead of what you can get done today in the area of digital persuasion.

“We don't have 10 years to figure it out, we've got 10 minutes,” global tech marketing strategist Tamara McCleary told me. “We are all wondering where to place our next step. We are all walking on top of quicksand, and we have to be hyper-vigilant about the steps we take. But at the same time, we also can't hold back because we could be completely disrupted if we aren't moving forward.”

Confused

Do not think for a second that gaining an understanding of today’s emerging technologies is the end game. There surely are more changes to come behind it.

So how does one cope with that prospect?

“There's going to be a lot more innovation and disruptors,” Stacy Minero, Head of Content Creation at Twitter, said to me. “I’m not sure how it will play out.  I do think that great stories that are rooted in human insight and strike a cultural chord will be sustainable forever.”

In summary, the 12 leaders interviewed shared beliefs that the task is neither easy nor for the faint of heart. Still, there was a persistent theme that there has been no better time to be a marketer, a notion embraced only by those who choose to ride the winds of change rather than get blown over by them.

Three Ways To Keep On Keeping On Despite Emerging Technology

Many of us have spent years, nearing decades, understanding the digital customer journey and motivations. We’ve done it well. Take a bow.

Then the world was upended. We now know that there are funny-looking objects on people’s nightstands and even on their heads.

Voice. Virtual reality. Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Wearables.

Who asked for all of that?

If you believe that everything has changed for marketers, think again.

During interviews for my The Art of Digital Persuasion book, I learned that in many ways it is imperative to continue doing what you were doing despite the adoption of new technology. 

Be Human

Machines are propelling us to up our marketing games. But they aren’t replacing us. And they never well.

Consider this. In 2017, Nike created “Breaking2”, an attempt for elite athletes to break the two-hour barrier for running a marathon. The number of people tuning in to the live stream on Twitter was nearly eight times higher than the broadcast audience of the New York, Boston and Chicago marathons. In total, 13.1 million watched the attempt live via Twitter, making it the company’s largest brand-powered, live-streaming event.

Of course, most of us won’t attempt to run a two-hour marathon - or any marathon at all. But we can all relate to the effort to maximize human achievement. That’s what Nike bet on and won. 

Be Realistic

Understand that you can’t run a marathon, even in four hours, in flipflops.

“Everyone has to be relatively sober-minded when evaluating the possibility of a what might come in the future and realize that for all of us who are trying to predict what can happen in the future, we're all partially right and partially wrong,” Aaron Price, SVP of Global Marketing, Expedia told me.

In other words, give yourself a chance to succeed. But know that you will never be perfect. No one can be.

Drive Action

Involvement is everything. Regardless of the technology, seek to turn what might be a passive activity into one that your customers and prospects will see is interactive.

How? Interestingly, some brands have built upon the concept of user-generated content to entice customers to take part in user-generated product.

“If you think about Mayochup, which is a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup, Heinz put a Twitter poll out there and said if you get to 500,000 (participants), we're going to put these products on shelves in your local stores,” Stacy Minero, Head of Content Creation for Twitter, told me. “And that created a whole gamification of that campaign. And they got a billion (media) impressions within 48 hours.”

The lesson in all of this? Of course, see emerging technology for what it is – more screens, more interfaces, more complexity for marketers following or leading customers. But don’t think for a second that you should abandon what you know works.

Neiman Marcus Teaches Us To Differentiate Or Else

To believe that Dallas-based Neiman Marcus first discovered innovation in its second century is to make an error approximately the size of Texas.

One can go all the way back to the day it opened in 1907 to see evidence of the retailer’s forward thinking and acting.

It was the first to offer upscale fashion to the state’s wealthy, according to Wikipedia.

In 1927, Neiman Marcus premiered the first weekly retail fashion show in the United States.

Its history of innovation is deep and while nearly everything around it has changed, the retailer has survived in large part by its boldness.

“A company like Neiman Marcus didn't manage to survive one hundred and 10 plus years without being innovative,” Scott Emmons, the longtime head of the company’s innovation lab (or ‘I Lab’), told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Digital-Persuasion-Innovative-Technologies-ebook/dp/B07NPCXMFJ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=art+of+digital+persuasion&qid=1554466174&s=gateway&sr=8-1

“It’s not like innovation just got invented over the last 10 years because there were iPhones.”

Yes, on one hand, you can argue that Neiman Marcus has been there, done that. But these are extraordinary times for the retail industry. Brick and mortar stores by the thousands are shutting down. Businesses are needing to compete based on not just price, but on such factors as the ability to deliver purchases in two days or less and through the use of technology that digitally puts such things as eyeglasses on one’s face, a dining room table in one’s house, and product reviews in the palm of one’s hands.

“What we're seeing is how quickly the new disruptive ideas keep coming at businesses, and their efforts to keep up with that rate of change, be more agile, and be able to bring new ideas to the table faster,” Emmons said.

Those ideas have led to emerging tech such as voice, augmented and other flavors of reality, artificial intelligence, and more.

When I asked Emmons for advice for marketers, he preached a path of managed risk.

“There is a real temptation to go out and try that bright and shiny thing just because it's cool and everybody is talking about it, and there is all kind of buzz around it,” Emmons said.

“But in the end, you go back to the simple question of what kind of projects should we be tackling. Does it solve a real problem? Or let it evolve from being a solution looking for a problem to something that can solve a problem that you've identified that you have. That's how I look at it.”

When it comes to ROI, one size does not fit all.

“I think the type of projects that we work on are varied enough that those metrics tend to be different,” Emmons told me before leaving Neiman Marcus to join TheCurrent Global consultancy. “If you're working on an RFID project, maybe our metric is did we get our level of inventory accuracy to ‘X’ percent and because our inventory accuracy was better, we lifted sales by this much. You can apply actual traditional lift measurement to see how well something is performing.

“Then you have other types of experiences that have never been done before. And the amount of work it takes to actually tie it back into your transactional systems is large. And so it may be worth it just to try that experience and see if the customers like it, and observe how they interact with it, and sort of take a test drive and not necessarily have a defined ROI on it.”

Others I interviewed offered invaluable advice as well:

ESPN, all over your television guide and digital channels, notably uses a yardstick that measures how well as opposed to how many.

“Quality always wins,” Ryan Spoon, ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Digital and Social, told me. “And that pertains to any job. Whether you're creating the content, creating a product, you're distributing the content, marketing it, whatever that might be.”

To those seeking clarity on the question of when they will master digital marketing, Google’s Jason Spero believes that it is all tied to delivering for consumers.

“It's likely the question of when we get to the finish line might be the wrong metaphor,” Spero, Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “But rather how do we recognize consumers’ expectations and how might we be able to serve her needs in a way where she may not see the technology, but she's delighted by the experience?”

What I learned in writing The Art of Digital Persuasion is that successful businesses and marketers innovate to differentiate. The first action for you to take is to place that 2018 marketing playbook in the trash. That was then. The question is what are you going to do now?

How "Out With The Old" Can Leave You Out In The Cold

Artificial. Virtual. Augmented. Machine-driven.

These and other words have entered the marketer’s lexicon.

Out with the old. In with the new.

Or not.

“There's going to be a lot more innovation and disruptors,” Stacy Minero, Head of Content Creation at Twitter, told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion. https://amzn.to/2KmpMz7

“I’m not sure how it will play out.  I do think that great stories that are rooted in human insight and strike a cultural chord will be sustainable forever.”

Of course, human insight has been key for marketers for generations. Minero appreciates the introduction of algorithms but sees them as an element in the modern marketing mix rather than a game-changing end-all.

“You're never going to take humans out of the creative process,” she said. “That’s because ideas come from understanding mindset and motivation and universal human truths. But I think technology will continue to up our game in terms of optimization, everything from understanding what hair color resonates in a video to the type of product and packaging you should showcase in a shot.”

Here are three more lessons learned during my half-year of spending time with a dozen digital marketing pioneers.

Participate Rather Than Only Observe

The decades-old concept of focus groups shouldn’t be dismissed even today. However, one expert strongly told me that we need to not just hear others talk about emerging technology, we should experience it ourselves.

“I've always been someone who likes to ‘live in the future’ and I’ve been fortunate enough to have roles where I’m working with cutting edge technology and then going out and speaking to others about what the impacts are,” explained Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist, Alexa & Echo.

“That means constantly looking at new technology trends, learning how they apply to our lives, and in the end teaching people what that future may look like. It helps generate people’s ideas and then they run with it.  For a marketer, tech adoption is no different than any other topic. Keep on top of the latest buzz and trends, look at what the community is saying, whether through social media or at networking events, and start to use the latest technology in your own life.”

The learnings, Isbitski told me, are invaluable.

“Not being a late adopter can have tremendous benefit here,” he said. “I’ve talked to marketers who have been using Alexa since 2015 and the ideas they have for what conversations are possible are very different than someone who has never used a device at all.

“Using early versions of technology today can give you a vision for what tomorrow may look like.”

Remember History When It Comes To Adoption

“Any transformative technology encounters challenges to mainstream adoption in its early lifetime, such as cost, size, comfort, and technical barriers,” Microsoft’s Lorraine Bardeen, General Manager Studio Manager, Mixed Reality, told me. “We’ve seen this all before with the very first computers, the Internet, and mobile phones.”

Bardeen said that B2B usage commonly precedes B2C acceptance. That is why she is bullish on Microsoft’s HoloLens progress that has come with business growth.

“Just like the evolution of other similar technology, we expect momentum for the technology to begin in the commercial space and then trickle outward to consumers,” she said.

Microsoft’s Bardeen forecasts a place for all flavors of reality, including mixed, augmented and virtual.

“We believe that these are not separate concepts, but rather labels for different points on a mixed reality continuum,” she said. “The reality is that if one succeeds, then the ecosystem succeeds, and we’re interested in further education and adoption of the spectrum as a whole.

“Specific to marketing, this technology allows marketers to engage with their audiences in new interactive and immersive ways. The possibilities truly are limitless.”

Think Experience Rather Than Technology

Google’s Jason Spero has a healthy respect for technology. He, however, sees it more as an enabler than a story in and of itself.

“The consumer doesn't see the technology,” the Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “What the consumer sees is that they should be able to continue their game from a tablet to a mobile phone. That is a logical, rational, human thought.

“And so the better we can do in our research of studying those expectations of consumers, of understanding the moments where they expect things of us, and then drag the technology along with us kicking and screaming, we need to build those experiences.”

 In summary, the digital leaders interviewed rely as much on the lessons of the past than the vision of the future. We would be wise to follow down that path.

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(first appeared on Mobile Marketer - https://bit.ly/2X0AmgG)

Now What?

In 2015, I wrote The Art of Mobile Persuasion, a book about the relationships that people have with their mobile devices.

It’s safe to describe them then and now as intimate, engrossing and integral.

The central questions in The Art of Mobile Persuasion were whether brands have opportunities to get in on that action or is three a crowd?

Since then, some businesses have muffed the chance, taking an approach that has been deemed as invasive, impersonal, and/or offering no value. But others large and small have knocked gently, ingratiated themselves, brought something that was welcomed, and seen resulting increases in awareness, loyalty and sales.

To the former group, what were you thinking?

To the latter, we’re good now, right?

Well, no.

Why? The playing field has changed.

Our nurtured customers and prospects are now being wooed by other means.

Though voice interfaces.

And wearables.

Smart appliances, even toilets.

And OTT (over the top) devices.

Virtual and mixed reality software and hardware.

And the list goes on. There’s every reason to believe that the pulls for attention will grow this year, next year, and every year after that.

Of course, this brings with it all sorts of complications.

·      Where will we find our customers and prospects?

·      Where we do want to lead them and what must they find when they get there?

·      How does all of this innovation affect the customer journey?

·      If personalization is the so-called North Star, how do we deliver this on the screens and interfaces of today – and the ones surely coming behind those?

And how does the relationship that your brand has steadily built with customers via the mobile phone survive, evolve, and thrive when eyes and ears are drawn to even more places?

In my new book The Art of Digital Persuasion, the conversation broadens to today’s interfaces, devices, behaviors and technologies.

I again have had the pleasure and privilege of visiting with some of the sharpest marketers and other business leaders that one can identify. I sought out real-world experience, perspective, and advice to give us the knowledge, skills and confidence that we all need to do our jobs -- and, in many cases, to reimagine our current outdated positions given these upended times.

I share what leaders from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, ESPN, and others are doing and thinking to address the core question of the new book:

Now what?

The book is now available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/2G4CrCu

 I hope that you’ll give it a look and take the time to learn from these experts just as I have.