Ignorance is Curable, Indifference is Fatal
In running any business today, it’s almost a moral certainty that you won’t have all of the necessary information that you need in time and in a form and place sufficient to permit you to make all of the critical decisions you’re likely to be confronted with on a daily basis. It’s a given that waiting too long today and the indecision and inaction associated with such reticence are far more costly choices than the downside of any decisions you might make or any actions you might take. If we knew all the answers and how things were gonna turn out, we wouldn’t call our sometimes fruitless attempts “experiments”. There are no guarantees in the startup world except one: standing still will get you run over sooner or later. The way you build a successful business and the way you get better every day is by getting started and improving every day. And every new day gives you more data, more insights and more to work with as you struggle to figure things out.
Intuition, great guesses, pattern recognition, experience, research, homework – all of these things help to fill the data gap, but it’s still the case that you’re going to come up short some of the time and that’s just how it goes. Eventually all the models stall out and all the formulas fall short and then you’ve got to make that leap of faith. That’s why you get paid the big bucks. The good news is that - over time - most ignorance is curable if you make the necessary commitment and do the hard work entailed in getting on top of the situation every time - even as the situation(s) continue to quickly and sometimes radically change. Your job is to steer the ship and keep things on course through a sea of changed conditions and circumstances without ever giving up on the goal. You can trim the sails from time to time, but you can’t lose sight of the shore or water down the vision.
The right attitude and the consistent application of serious effort including a fair amount of false starts and a bunch of trial and error will eventually overcome the initial absence of the facts, figures and results you need. But only if you do the work. Today, far too often, not knowing actually means not looking or not caring enough to look long enough and hard enough to find the necessary answers. We can fix ignorance over time with research and education; but indifference and not caring will eventually kill your company. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/why-whatever-will-sink-your-business.html .
One of the deepest and darkest data holes these days in terms of willful ignorance is the actual value of traditional advertising as compared to the billions of dollars being spent on it. I’m surprised and even a little impressed to see the remarkable amount of creativity and ingenuity that you find in larger companies when it comes to figuring out how to hide their stunning degree of indifference and their continued reluctance to change their old ways of doing things. It’s still a Mad Men world; it’s still “business as usual” with a little less alcohol; and the clients (as compared to the agencies and the MSM networks) are still getting the shaft. There are better tools, there is better data, but no one – even on the client side – really wants to rock the boat and do the hard work of getting better and more accurate answers. Everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to change themselves or be the first one to move things forward.
We need a lot fewer Mad Men and a lot more Math Men today if we’re going to get things right. The most critical attributes of the Internet and the new digital economy are not the speed, immediacy or low cost of the network; it’s the heightened direct access to Individuals, the ability to accurately measure their engagement and their resultant actions, and the remarkable degree of accountability that is enabled as a result. We can discover and measure reach, resonance and reaction in real time in ways that simply were never previously available. But none of this capability matters if no one in charge of spending the money cares. Or worse, they might theoretically care, but they’re not willing to do the extra work of finding out the actual answers.
A few smart people are starting to figure this stuff out – they’re totally focusing on performance-based marketing, not wishful thinking or last year’s news - and they are going to change the competitive game. But the truth is that they’re not gonna spend any time educating the rest of us because they have realized that the people with the deepest pockets don’t really want to hear what they have to say. As a result, what we’re seeing – and what the digital economy now enables and can deliver – are more and more cases where the smartest customers are becoming their own media buyers and building their own tools to get the job done. They’ve figured out that this new competency isn’t just a competitive necessity; it’s a sustainable competitive advantage.
So what can you do for your own business to make sure that you don’t get left behind or foolishly spend your scarce resources with people still using broad gauge, shotgun strategies – “spray and pray” style – which are remnants of the old TV network game instead the new price- and value-based discovery tools which are available today to help you reach the right digital audiences for your message? If no one is listening, it doesn’t really matter what you’re trying to say.
Here’s the bottom line: today only bozos buy eyeballs. It’s not about volume or tonnage anymore; it’s about smart reach. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/to-sell-more-your-marketing-must-embrace-smart-reach.html . Ask your people and your vendors the hard questions. Are you engaging real people or robots? How do those consumers react and respond? Are they clicking through and buying something from you? Can you invest more dollars (in viable and actual inventory) and improve your results based on what’s working for you? And can you do this in real time before the moment passes? Can you be there when the buyer is ready to buy?
To win today, you need to do three things:
(1) Your entire ad spend will need to make economic sense for your business and provide real measurable metrics (and demonstrable results) which are now available if you know where to look and who to ask;
(2) Your agencies and other vendors will need to justify their recommendations and rationalize the dollars they are asking you to commit – not on the come – or based on the distant past - but based on concrete and current data; and
(3) You’ll need to develop or acquire the right tools (or the right partners) to permit you to monitor and adjust your ad and marketing spends in real time so you can be proactive rather than simply reactive – feeding your winning initiatives and shutting down the losers as soon as possible.
Nothing today in the digital economy is “set it and forget it” anymore. We live in a “real time, right now” world and no one has the luxury any longer to ignore these changes, to wish them away, or to sit back and hope that someone else will do the hard work for them that it’s gonna take to get ahead.
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