MarkPilip

Low standard deviation is to be desired in medical procedures, launching rockets, and managing pension funds. But in most cases you’re looking for deviations from the norm in order to create breakthrough results. If you want to see what your team or department results might look like next year, don’t look at their resumes or this year’s figures. Instead look at their test results in reverse…

“Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.” A line from Robert De Niro in “Ronin,” one of my favorite movies. When you’re looking at this weekend’s ad performance on Monday morning and you see anything–anything–hinky, there is no doubt. Something’s wrong.Don’t listen to your marketing manager, your ad agency, or anybody else. You know there is no doubt.Now, what will you do?

You’re a damn fool if you rely on the AI in Integral Ad Science or DoubleVerify to protect your ads from running on websites featuring racism, sexism, and far, far worse.See the recent Adalytics report linked below. Caution: There are very NSFW terms in there, but it’s a MUST read. The entire adtech world should be ashamed of itself.But I place the blame for this squarely on lazy and incompetent…

Wednesday mornings in the early 90s were an important day to me. After hours of keying green bar reports into Lotus 1-2-3, I finally had updates on all my direct mail campaigns going back about five full years. Unlike this really incredibly lousy AI generated image, I wrote all of the words in this post without any use of AI. I’d learned direct response by building up campaigns in a granular…

Everybody knows the old engineering adage: Good, Cheap, Fast. Pick any two. Now most of us that answer to bosses understand they actually want all three and, on top of it, want “Cheap” to be “Almost Free” and “Fast” to be “Tomorrow.” Or at least before the next quarterly earnings. Either the air is awfully thin on the executive floors or they have the best stash. Maybe both. But I…

It’s pitch black, 00:16 hours and you’ve just crash-landed near Caen. You’re in hostile territory, lost, and some of your comrades are already dead and wounded. You’re just 20 years old and have never been in combat. So began D-Day 80 years ago. I can’t imagine what it must have been like. Over 180,000 young men jumped, landed, or waded into Europe to remove the evil and tyranny that gripped…

So you’re increasing your advertising investment this year, right? Right? In many companies the bean counters are pushing back on marketing investment decisions, seeing it as wasteful spend by characters who struggle with basic arithmetic. While that’s sadly far too true in our profession, cutting investment heading into this recession is short-sided and it’s easy to explain. I can’t recall…

we manage to get a little work done. In between the endless PowerPoint and Google Slides polishing. Sometimes. Find a way to ban presentations. And win.

Who Pulled the Names?

Every time I get a wacky, mis-targeted email, in-stream ad, or direct mail, one thought goes through my mind.

Who pulled the names?

As an old-school (read that as “properly trained”) direct response marketer, that was one of the first questions we asked when we saw odd performance. That question is just professional shorthand for:

Where was the source of the prospect list?

Who vettedthat…

Creating a Narrative…

…to explain your numbers is a fool’s game. The story will usually suffer from logical holes that you’ll have to gloss over. (How many times have you heard “we’ll get to that later” to question about a story you’re being told?) The ratios over the time series won’t hang together under close examination. And on and on.

Say you survive the meeting. Then you’ll have to remember what you constructed

What are Your Principles?

One of my proudest moments as chair of the Board of Trustees of Utica College was when the entire community adopted our Statement of Principles.

We acknowledged that, as a member of the community, you’ll be exposed to ideas that might make you uncomfortable. But it’s only in the sharing of those ideas, and discourse and research around them, that we advance knowledge.

Here’s the principles…

Know and Value Your Customer: A Forgotten Rule

One of the hardest things to teach marketers is that our customers are everything and that our brands are–in the minds and lives of our customers–tiny, inconsequential things. That level of humility can be hard to achieve, but it’s necessary to be successful.

To start, which is easy if you have a properly-trained marketing team, is knowing who your customers are and the target audience from…

Chumbox Your Users While Taboolaing Your Brand Equity

Avinash Kaushik created a (new to me) term the other day. In his email on Friday, he coined the term Taboolaing to refer to the use of the chumboxes offered by dreadful companies like Taboola to destroy one’s brand equity.

Yeah, you get a short-term–and very small–bump in revenue when you include a chumbox in your content. But what happens to all that carefully-created content above it?…

You’re Probably Laundering Oligarch Bucks

It seems the ad fraud perpetrated by the adtech industry on advertisers (by design) might help some other folks out. Like Russian oligarchs with their stolen loot. It is way easier to setup advertising networks to launder one’s stolen dollars than via buying and selling real estate in Trump gaudy, overpriced buildings.

Check out this article from MarTechSeries to learn how. Now how much of your…

Tom Goodwin’s recent article, “Why making content on the internet free was our biggest mistake… and how to fix it” is required reading for all marketers in publishing. I’ve felt this way for a long time. Mr. Goodwin only wrote it far more eloquently than I could have.

In the late ’90s I was working for a publishing company running a ~$100 million line of business. I got the task of speaking to…

It’s pitch black, 00:16 hours and you’ve just crash-landed near Caen. You’re in hostile territory, lost, and some of your comrades are already dead and wounded. You’re just 20 years old and have never been in combat.

So began D-Day 75 years ago.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like.

Over 180,000 young men jumped, landed, or waded into Europe to remove the evil and tyranny that gripped much…

USPS 3685 and the State of Marketing

Sometimes reading the USPS-required Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (form 3685) can reveal a lot about the state of one’s industry.

As a direct marketing and postal junkie, I find USPS forms fascinating. (I don’t get out much.)

I was looking up something about Net Promoter Score recently, and re-read Byron Sharp’s takedown of Fred Reichheld’s shoddy work behind NPS from the…