There was an attention drought for the longest time. Marketers paid a fortune for TV ads (and in fact, network ads sold out months in advance) because it was so difficult to find enough attention. Ads worked, so the more ads you bought, the more money you made, thus marketers took all they could get.
This attention shortage drove our economy.
The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.
When people talk about the problem with free online, they're missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven't gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.
Hint: funny commercials with chimps won't be the answer.
It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it's anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.
Simple example: Ten years ago, there was nowhere for a company like Best Made Axe to advertise. Today, with billions of tiny micromarkets, it's not hard to imagine many audiences of one or two or three or ten that would be delighted to know about their products. Right now, there's no easy way for a marketer to conceptualize that effort, never mind execute it, though it's surely coming.
Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.
August 24, 2009
I want to thank those that have supported my book Tribes.
It's been the #1 bestselling leadership book on Amazon for the last 300
days, mostly because the people who like it, talk about it and spread
the word.
Here's a favorite excerpt:
Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.
The scarcity makes leadership valuable. If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens. It’s discomfort that creates the leverage that makes leadership worthwhile.
In other words, if everyone could do it, they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.
It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.
When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.
If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.
August 23, 2009
A simple quiz for smart marketers:
Let's say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.
And let's say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.
If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:
- Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
- Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)
Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it's more than twice as good a move).
We're not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive. [PS here are some reader-contributed explanations for those still lost: Charlie, and Nariman.]
August 22, 2009
In this era, there are two questions every marketer answers:
- Do I want people to interact with me and my brand in unexpected ways (as opposed to just quietly consume it)?
- When they interact, do I overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?
If you think about dead brands like Tide or United Airlines, the answer to both questions is clearly 'no'.
On the other hand, vibrant growing brands manage to answer both questions with a resounding 'yes.' It's not an accident and it's not easy, but if you do it right, it may be worth it.
August 21, 2009
Multiply the population of the US by three. That’s how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day.
Do it again and now you have the number closer to $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.
What’s that like? What happens to you when you have two dollars a day to live on. It’s almost impossible to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 45 minutes. $2 buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant…
And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.
The key issue is ‘survive’. Subsistence income means that you have the barest possible cushion, that every penny is spent and you are on the edge at all times. It makes life an emergency.
If every single thing goes perfectly, then you and your family will go to sleep tonight healthy, not too hungry and fairly safe. But of course, every single thing almost never goes perfectly. If you are bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, you need to buy medicine and so there’s no money for food. If you need more water, you have to spend two hours walking to and from the nearest half-decent water spot, and those two hours are the two hours you were going to spend harvesting the food your kids need.
From a fundraising point of view, this endless emergency is exactly what a non-profit needs to find and close donors. A dollar donated today will save someone’s life. It will. One dollar, one life. That’s urgent. As urgent as it gets.
The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t save that person's life forever, it saves it for today. Tomorrow, there’s another emergency, and yesterday’s dollar is gone. So you need another dollar. Two billion people, two billion dollars. Every day. Today, tomorrow, the day after that. It’s an endless emergency, and it never gets better.
That’s where patient capital comes in. It starts with this belief:
The difference between being one penny behind and one penny ahead is profound.
If you’re one penny behind, then every day you fall further back. Every day, the emergencies get worse, the stress gets worse, your ability to survive (never mind thrive) gets worse.
If you’re one penny ahead, though, just a penny, then every day you build a reserve, every day you are able to invest in productivity or peace of mind, and soon you are two pennies or a dollar or five dollars a day ahead. And then you can send your daughter to college. And then you can buy something from the merchant next door. And then you can plant a better crop. And then you have a stake in the community, and then the world changes.
So, how to create this micro surplus? How to prime the pump of the system to improve productivity enough that things get better?
Markets.
When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they’re spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself.
When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the device pays for itself (if it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.) So a drip irrigation system, for example, may pay off by creating two or three harvests a year instead of one.
What does that do for the family that buys it? Well, if you have one harvest a year and you’re living at subsistence, it means your income is zero, or probably just a little below. If you can irrigate and get two or three harvests a year, though, your income goes up by infinity. Now, instead of making -1 pennies a day, you’re making 100 or 200 pennies a day. That’s a surplus of $700 a year. That’s enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. Now, the edge is a lot further away.
And what does that do for the family that sells it? When markets arrive, productivity increases and new innovations can be diffused more quickly, because change is brought in by the market.
How does Acumen Fund create these markets? The answer is patient capital. The companies that are selling solar lamps to replace kerosene or water purification systems in tiny villages, or housing projects for peasants in Pakistan or even ambulance services in Mumbai fully intend to make a profit, but the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road aren’t in a hurry to invest in them. The investments are a little too risky, take a little too long or a little too unproven to take a chance on.
So Acumen finds these entrepreneurs on site in the developing world, funds them, teaches them and pushes them to build really big organizations. A to Z has literally thousands of people in their modern factory creating malaria bed nets in Tanzania. And so it grows.
I’m thrilled at the work Acumen has done, and excited about where the fund is going. I’ve got some interesting fundraising ideas to share with you this fall, and I thought it was worth taking you through my reasoning as to why I chose this organization as the recipient.
Any entrepreneur or marketer can learn a lesson from how new systems create new markets, and how an infinite increase in income or productivity can change everything. Everything.
August 20, 2009
I think this is a big idea, but your mileage may vary.
I've been having great success with a hybrid of the yellow legal pad and a printed presentation from Keynote (or Powerpoint). I use it during small meetings where more interactivity is useful, and where the group is too small for a laptop to be the best way to present slides (I think running a presentation says, "I talk, you listen…")
Here's how it works:
- Create a presentation. A good one, not one filled with bullet points. Instead, graphs, images, a few words to anchor a discussion. A page might be nothing but a blank 3 x 3 grid.
- On every page, remove some of the information.
- Print the presentation out (horizontal, not portrait).
- Bring it to Staples and have them spiral bind it with covers. (Not that cheap plastic comb, though.)
- Get a good pen.
Now, when you make your presentation, sit next to the person you're meeting with and go through the booklet page by page, writing directly on each page. As you work your way through the ideas in the booklet, the two of you can talk about what's in front of you and mark it up.
It's not a brochure, it's the outcome of a working session. Leave it behind when you go.
Zig Ziglar taught me about the most powerful way to use a yellow legal pad. He calls it a "talking pad."
When you're in a small meeting (you and one or two other people) it's awkward to use a laptop or Powerpoint, because it destroys the intimacy of the discussion. Basically, it says, "I'm going to talk to the screen and you can watch, okay?"
The alternative is to use a thick pen or marker and a legal pad.
Whenever you mention a number or make an assertion or promise, write it down. The act of writing is a verb, it's the process of putting it on the page that underlines what you've said, that highlights the moment. You're also creating a record of what you said, which emphasizes that you're not a weasel.
Salespeople can use this technique as well. Let's say you're trying to sell energy-efficient windows. They cost $800 each, the person needs 30, so you're trying to make a $24,000 sale. That's a big deal, right?
Start by writing these facts down.
Then, working with the person you're sitting with, identify how much is going to be saved every day. Not your opinion, but their estimate based on their energy bill and comparable homes. Agree on a number. Write it down.
Cut it in half. Now it's truly a realistic, conservative estimate. Write it down.
Multiply it by the number of windows. Write it down. People hate math.
Now, pull out your calculator and figure out the cost of the monthly financing. Oh! The cost is way lower than the amount saved. The windows are free.
The talking pad makes the sale. It builds credibility and helps you run the meeting.
August 19, 2009
(not a typo).
The long tale is the never-ending story you tell your prospects, your customers and your employees.
The hard part is getting a little bit of permission to start telling your tale. The overlooked part, the part that wastes all that permission, is that you forget to keep telling your story.
Are you really the same as you were a year ago? How often do you re-introduce yourself? What's truly new (as opposed to what does the salesforce think is new)? What's the next chapter that matters? Almost all the goodness of marketing comes not from the big announcement, but from the long tale.
When the outside world changes, do you? Does the regulatory or environmental or competitive marketplace have an impact on you or us? That's part of the tale. Share it.
August 18, 2009
Actually, there isn't one, there are three choices that anyone offering higher education is going to have to make.
Should this be scarce or abundant?
MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it's easy for them to share. Abundant education is easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.
Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.
Should this be free or expensive?
Wikipedia offers the world's fact base to everyone, for free. So it spreads.
On the other hand, some bar review courses are so expensive the websites don't even have the guts to list the price.
The newly easy access to the education marketplace (you used to need a big campus and a spot in the guidance office) means that both the free and expensive options are going to be experimented with, because the number of people in the education business is going to explode (then implode).
If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.
Should this be about school or about learning?
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is 'getting it'. It's the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn't care about workbooks or long checklists.
For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.
The combinations…
Imagine a school that's built around free, abundant learning. And compare it to one that's focused on scarce, expensive schooling. Or dream up your own combination. My recent MBA program, for example, was scarce (only 9 people got to do it) and it was free and focused on learning.
Just because something is free doesn't meant there isn't money to be made. Someone could charge, for example, for custom curricula, or focused tutoring, or for a certified (scarce) degree. When a million people are taking your course, you only need 1% to pay you to be happy indeed.
Eight combinations of the three choices are available and my guess is that all eight will be tried. If I were going to wager, I'd say that the free, abundant learning combination is the one that's going to change the world.
August 17, 2009
Here's a surefire way to get and keep the attention of your audience: put on a soap opera.
If there's always a feud, a criminal investigation, secret photos, innuendo, allegations of drug use, partnerships foundering, acquisitions started, delayed or canceled, secret new projects, and possible runs for office, you can bet people will tune in.
I apologize for the lack of drama on this blog (not really).
Michael Jackson, Fidel Castro and Sarah Palin created drama. Paying attention, though, is the not the same as buying or respecting. It's possible to achieve both, but not easy.
August 16, 2009
