Cobble Hill Interactive: Digital Sales & Marketing Consulting

I must repeat that line 15 – 20 times per week–generally in the context of analytics, usability testing, focus groups (or limitations thereof) and, of course, messaging and advertising. AMD’s new ad in the Wall Street Journal is an excellent example of how even people who get it still don’t really get it.

Observe as the ad opens- a full page spread, all black, with white text in at least 48-point font:

Saying you’re the ‘World’s Best Processor’ is one thing.

Actually being the ‘World’s Best Processor’ is another.

Then there’s the obligatory creative “hero” shot. Simple, concise and to the point. Great ad, right?

It would have been… had it simply ended right there. If it had, I’d be pointing this out as an excellent example of transparency in messaging, and having enough confidence in the product to simply lay it all out there and trust in the wisdom of crowds.

But alas, it didn’t.

Somehow they felt compelled to say, yup, you guessed it, that they’re the “World’s Best Processor”:

The AMD Opteron processor continues to lead the industry in x86 dual-core performance. Under the newest SPECcpu2006 benchmarks, AMD Opteron processors continue to set the standard in x86 dual-core processor performance, besting our competitor by up to 15%. We credit that to our superior native dual-core design, with its Direct Connect Architecture, DDR2 memory, and industry-leading…

…blah, blah, blah! They can’t seriously believe a single WSJ reader cares about Direct Connect Architecture or DDR2 memory, can they? Remember when you talk the talk, you may want to walk the walk. If you’re looking for a helpful tool to do just that, don’t forget to run your ad copy through our We-We Monitor.

Spending a few hours helping the “Mrs.” set up her new iPod Shuffle this weekend made me realize how slack I’ve been at downloading and listening to all my favorite podcasts (Sorry Jaffe).

Here’s what I’m listening to this week:

1) Harvard Business Review Ideacast: Episode 34 (iTunes link)

Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, co-authors of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning explain how more and more leading companies are building their strategies around data-driven insights.


(Haven’t read their new book, but it’s on the way from Amazon. Anyone who’s read it care to share their thoughts?)

2) iinnovate (2 Standford grad students’ EXCELLENT podcast): Google CEO Eric Schmidt (iTunes link)

Schmidt discusses a wide range of topics, including what advice he’d give to newly minted MBA grads, what he’d do if he were no longer with Google, and how he fills his Tuesdays and Thursdays.

3) Webmasterradio.fm: friend-of-Grok Susan Bratton speaks with David Scott Carlick, Vantage Point Venture Partners (iTunes link)

I have to admit, the description got me… “Not for the timid, you’ll hear some dirty jokes, some off color humor, and some crazy perspectives.” We like crazy perspectives 😉

4) GrokDotCom: Melissa Burdon’s truly excellent post (I’m admittedly biased) (iTunes link)

The ongoing demands of SEO vs. Conversion, in case you missed it .

Got anything worth sharing on your iTunes?

From the files of: When Passive Verbs Happen to Good People.

Recently, the WSJ (subscriber link) served up the ultimate in passive, poor me, whining. When Matt Cutts is getting quoted in the Journal, isn’t it possible we’ve gone just a bit too far? I mean, seriously, it’s a wonder the world managed to have a single entrepreneurial success story before Google debuted on the scene.

Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. “Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us,” he says.

I can’t even talk about the entire article without my blood pressure boiling over, but it reminded me of days long past at Georgia Tech. (And for the record, no, I’m not a GOOG shareholder, but I do preach accountability for a living. It strikes me as pretty convenient that website owners who have trouble monetizing that which Google gladly hand-delivers them would prefer to cry in their milk and bite the hand that feeds them rather than simply say ‘thank you’ for the free traffic and focus on building stronger business models that aren’t so dependent on un-game-able technology.)

Back to Georgia Tech. Atlanta was gearing up for the Olympic games, which were still a few years away. Major construction projects were underway all over campus, blocking access to certain roads for months, sometimes years. My house was just off one of these blocked roadways–the route known as the place to park while heading to hoops games at the Coliseum.

Being the enterprising young engineers we were, it didn’t take us long to smell opportunity. We gave birth to an impromptu parking lot … in our driveway! Through one full hoops season, revenue was good (we spent our profits on “books”). But eventually, even the slowest of construction projects wrapped up, and the need for our overflow parking lot evaporated. Being the more logical, left-brained types we were, we moved on to other new and equally “innovative” ways to make extra cash.

I wonder now why didn’t we just sit around and campaign the campus newspaper to write about the loss of our little cash cow? Why didn’t we call the university president and demand he reinstate the construction? Why didn’t we create an industry designed to divert cars from the streets drivers preferred to travel and send them along the streets that led past our front door?

If all the money spent “optimizing” search engine traffic is any indication, we should be sitting next to Mark Cuban at an owners meeting.

In the wake of Omniture’s acquisition of Touch Clarity, pundits have weighed in on the lofty claims made in the acquisition press release:

Omniture and Touch Clarity have joined forces to enhance online business optimization—bringing together the power of Web analytics and advanced behavioral targeting technology. The combined technology delivers automated revenue and profit uplift to customers derived from Web analytic data.

Consensus has been good deal for Omniture, a great deal for Touch Clarity, and a good deal for the industry at large. But these claims will be tough to make good on.

I mean, c’mon, automated lifts in profits? Actually, this isn’t the part that got me. I tend to think this is a great deal for both Josh James and co. as well as Tim Brown’s crew, and I even buy that Touch plus Omniture will lead to higher conversions in the short term. After all, how could it not?

With the bar being set industry-wide with average Conversion Rates of about 2.4%, doesn’t personalization based on past success have to lead to greater scent, higher relevance to the visitor and, therefore, an increase in conversion, revenue, and profit? Frankly, the bar is set so low, any number of Marketing Optimization toolsets should increase conversion rates above this abysmal benchmark. But if you think these results won’t eventually reach the point of diminishing returns, well, that’s a different story. It’s the difference between measuring success in increments versus multiples.

We’re always looking to ask bigger questions. Here’s a few I’m pondering:

• Does automating “taking action on analytics data” replace planning for success in advance?
• Does Behavioral Targeting atop Analytics provide any real analysis, or generate any true customer insights?
• Is past performance an accurate predictor of success, if the past performance happened by accident?
• If you optimize cowpaths, how do you know how high the ceiling for ROI can go? (How do you know you’re not simply measuring local maximums?)
• What value does targeting bring if you don’t understand the motivations driving the visitor’s search, and the angles of approach they take?
• Who will be taking the time to plan and create intelligently and thoughtfully designed variations.

What we are dealing with here is the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

No amount of automated variations produced by a semi intelligent system will produce the results that are ultimately needed, nor can a device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum reproduce Shakespeare.

It was Sam Walton who said “… a computer can tell you down to the last dime what you’ve sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold.” Selling and selling online is about people first and machines second. Omniture & TouchClarity are two very juicy pieces of pie together, but it isn’t whole. The missing piece remains the people who might otherwise plan in advance the stories of customer/visitor interactions which must be told in order to produce a conversion masterpiece.

Don’t you just love buzzwords? In the 80’s, “synergy” was one of my favs. When Nasdaq was a tad closer to 5,000 than it is today, thinking “outside the box” meant you were someone who “got it”. Yesterday, I was hard pressed to choose between “long tail” and “Web 2.0”. But today, Web 2.0 is the clear winner.

As meaningless as the word is (and as much fun as it is to toss around mockingly), it’s being furthered under the guise of a seemingly simpler word: community. I’m always in favor of true simplification, but this one has been bugging a bunch of us around the office for some time now. I have to ask (in my best Carrie Bradshaw imitation), is a bunch of overweight, balding, 40 year olds, banging away at their keyboards from their mother’s basement a community?

I know that’s an unfair stereotype of fans of America’s third most popular sport (you intentionally clicked the link above, didn’t you?) but, if it were accurate, perhaps it would better fit a textbook definition of community:

com·mu·ni·ty [kuh-myoo-ni-tee] Pronunciation Key: noun, plural -ties.

1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists

Why is it that every major corporation is trying desperately to jump onto the consumer-generated content / social networking bandwagon without stopping to consider if they really have something that facilitates a real community? They’re so focused on trying to build it, they’ve yet to fully consider what it actually is, and where it is actually found.

This little rant is just the tip of the iceberg, and we’ll certainly be weighing in more on the topic in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from any “citizen journalists” out there with stories of communities that aren’t 😉

Seth had a short but impactful post on his blog earlier this week, about cutting through the clutter of every day life. He wrote:

“But if you want the word to spread, if you expect me to take action I’ve never taken before, it seems to me that you need to do something that hasn’t been done before. It might not feel safe, but if you do the safe thing, I guarantee you won’t surprise anyone. And if you don’t surprise anyone, the word isn’t going to spread.”

I’m confident he didn’t know it, but what he just described is called “Surprising Broca.” Roy Williams first wrote about this technique in his 1999 bestseller Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. Broca’s Area refers to the region of the brain involved in processing language and, perhaps more importantly, passing it along to the motor cortex (i.e., getting you to do something).

Leap into Roy’s magical world for a moment:

Although none of the neurologists I’ve consulted can positively confirm or deny it, I am convinced that while a speaker uses Broca’s area to arrange his words into understandable sentences, the listener uses Broca to anticipate and discount the predictable. When your listener hears only what she has heard before, it’s difficult to keep her attention.

When speaking or writing, visualize Broca’s area as a theater stage upon which your play will be performed in the listener’s mind, and think of Broca as the theater critic- the judge who will determine whether or not to walk out on your play. If you will present your play on this mental stage and gain the smiling approval of the judge, you must electrify Broca with the thrill of the unexpected.

I suspect Seth and Roy would enjoy having lunch together.

Last week, I had bad luck getting my emails returned. The switch from PC to Mac hasn’t exactly been as seamless as advertised (to be fair, though, most issues still revolve around, of course, Microsoft). Entourage is branding all my outgoing emails as coming from “An Office for Mac Test Drive User” while I wait for the new licenses to arrive. Thanks, Bill.

As if this weren’t bad enough, now I’m having trouble getting internal messages answered! My account is linked within Salesforce.com for new web-to-lead forms, and my co-workers are down right sick of “my” offers to get them cheap business class flights, “performance” enhancing drugs (think not of the Barry Bonds nature), and replica Rolexes.

I’m not alone in this plight. Rick Klau from Feedburner, and Brad Feld from Mobius VC (should know a thing or two, as an early investor in Postini) both recently weighed in as well–and their comments point to a whole slew of Salesforce.com customers having these kind of issues. Like Rick, we brought this to Salesforce support, and were basically laughed off the internet. Thankfully, it appears they may just be waking up. Yup, after what I’d guess would be a year of customers hounding them, they acknowledge their own culpability. Amazing.

Isn’t it great to be a consumer today? Now, if only MLBAM would wake up to customer centricity, I could go back to watching Sox* games in peace. Relative peace, anyway; I’m still a Sox fan living in the heart of Yankees country 😉

[*Editor’s note: Like most Boston fans, Howard assumes you know he’s talking about his very own Red Sox.]

When I read Walt Mossberg is at an industry event, and asking questions no less, I stop and pay attention. After all, his “new” column on personal technology (16 years, and counting) in my local paper (WSJ) is one I read regularly. The question he asked screamed to me:

When will the online advertising industry actually deliver on its outstanding promise of the last decade to present the right ad to the right person at the right time? When will we finally deliver a consumer experience where the vast majority of ads that we deliver are meaningful, and not junk and clutter on Web pages?

The first part, as you can imagine, had behavioral targeting (BT) junkies abuzz. Dave Morgan, Tacoda Chairman (and also the pundit asked to answer Walt’s question), took the question on it’s merits and wrote a MediaPost piece, answering: soon, perhaps even by year end 2008.

Bold prediction, considering his evidence to support the claim was an increase in competition from marketers, an increase in adoption of the web from advertisers, better creative and, finally, as result of “so much focus now on the customer experience.”

Perhaps he’s right. Only time will tell, but the increase in competition and adoption exists currently, and has for awhile. The better creative line is a nice wish, but hoping for more talent shouldn’t exactly bring comfort to those planning a campaign. As for the “focus on customer experience,” I’d consider “lip-service” to be a more accurate description.

This part of the question isn’t what was so interesting, however. BT is a nice technology, but means nothing without the confidence that you’ve planned the right content, for the right type of customer (buying modality, not demographics), at the right stage of the buying process (content + persona + buying process = scenario). Personalization at the individual level is an unscalable myth. It’s the second part of his question–ads becoming meaningful–that keeps me up at night. That, and cleaning out my inbox.

We know people today have BS meters set to ‘hyper-sensitive.’ We know our customers know more about our products’ real strengths and weaknesses than we do. We know credibility is linked to authenticity. The smart ones out there also know how little control “we” hold over the consumer (or “people” but, please, stop saying users!).

The greater the transparency, the less the ads try to make someone do something and begin focusing on facilitating people doing what they already came to do (or want to do). The more seamless ads become, the more integrated into the experience they become and the more they add value; more value to us (consumers/people) and, for that matter, far more value to advertisers.

Planning integrated, transparent customer experiences gives advertisers more value because it forces them to satisfy the needs of actual humans. More so, that is, than any new technology designed to attract the right sets of eyeballs to self-focused “we-we”-spewing copy, rotating flash animations, or whatever interruption ploy du jour marketers and advertisers use to push messages at the masses.

It was early December when I walked into the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, well past 1 AM, and first heard the buzz. The bar was packed, literally overflowing with loud, raving, belligerent… Search Engine Optimizers. I know the search community is close, and with SES being their Super Bowl, I wasn’t overly surprised. The crisis du jour, Jason Calacanis had called their profession bull@%$#. Imagine the horror.

Ok, ok, all melodrama aside, they were fired up (and rightfully so, I mean, it was a conference for search… engine… strategies… kinda had to wonder who the audience might contain). Since that time, a flame war has ensued that rival Friday nights at an MIT computer lab. This week, things spilled over again with some more choice words from Jason, and the godfather of search Danny Sullivan trying to shred his argument. If this kinda thing gets you excited, go read both posts, make up your own mind and save yourself the trouble of reading the next 1200 posts beating the horse well into submission.

Done? Great, now I have a different question for you: How do you calculate the ROI of your SEO efforts? That’s not a rhetorical question, I really want to know.

I know how Barry Diller calculates it, and for his purposes, SEO is a slam dunk. What about for the retailer with a 10% Conversion Rate? How about the retailer with a 1% CR? What about the B2B enterprise software company–the one whose “sale” is overly complex, requires a large degree of consensus–how do they value acquiring more traffic? Please do share, and we’ll weigh in too (at least on the aspects of return on investment and profitability).

As for the macguffin that is the latest “heavyweight” fight; well, I’m staying out of it (for once 😉

Every time I read a “best practices” guide to optimizing landing pages, I cringe. I know full well the limitations and the biases inherent in what the teacher is about to dispel to the pupil. Even worse, I know full well the pupil is likely to accept the teachings as gospel, and run off to begin implementation. Honestly, I don’t blame them- implementation led by a methodology will inevitably outperform pure talent or intuition. However, the assumption in that last statement is that the methodology is based upon a framework that has been well thought out and proven successful. How many methodologies do you know that live up to that assumption?

Given this, you can imagine my thoughts when I saw “10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics” from Larry Chase arrive in my inbox. In my experience Larry’s stuff is fantastic, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, even with my low expectations given the topic. You know what I discovered? His tactics were really just principles, and in them were some excellent words of wisdom, as always. Experiment with registration forms, and test multiple landing pages (see a theme here?) were just two of his stratagems. To his credit, he also added *sample* tactics (following through on his chosen title), but more as clarification and inspiration than as implementation orders.

It’s not all a love fest here this morning however, Larry did present what I’d consider to be the cardinal sin of Landing Page Optimization- keep them in the funnel. Don’t offer escape routes, as he called it. Hmm, escape routes. I don’t know about you, but I’m hard pressed to think of a positive mental image involving escape routes. Burning building. Bank Robbery. Painful (and long) first date? Why do we assume eliminating the “escape route” is sufficient for visitors continuing the process? Doesn’t the X button at the upper right corner of the browser offer the ultimate escape route?

Larry’s not the first person to suggest this of course, and he won’t be the last. It comes from thinking about where you drop the visitor who clicks through your email or PPC ad as a page, rather than an event within a scenario. You want one principle to improve your landing pages?- Don’t do that. Don’t assume you can stuff your visitors into a linear funnel, and because there’s no way out, gravity will pull them through. Stop waiting for your cat to bark. The online world is one without gravity. In the online world, visitors control their own momentum.