This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

What does attention cost? What is it worth?
Please don’t get distracted by the possibility of free attention, a spotlight
that magically and generously makes you famous through no effort on your
part.
Even “free” publicity costs you in terms of time and effort.
But for now, let’s look at ads, where the equation of cost and attention is
clear.
An ad in a fancy magazine will cost you $80 CPM, which means you get
in front of 1,000 readers (using the term loosely) for eighty dollars. Or a bit
under a dime per person.
An ad on a second-rate website might cost you $80 to be in front of a
million people. But of course, these people are scanning, clicking, ignoring,
and will neither remember your ad nor take action.

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Anyone about to buy an ad needs to ask, “What’s it worth?”
People seeking to make change happen are often in a hurry, and
advertising feels like a shortcut. But without persistence and focus, the
investment is wasted.
Brand marketing makes magic; direct marketing makes the
phone ring
Lester Wunderman was the father of direct marketing. He named it and
used it to build American Express, the Columbia Record Club, and a
hundred other projects.
In 1995, I asked Lester to be on the board of Yoyodyne, the online direct
marketing company I founded before the worldwide web was a thing.
Lester was first in describing the differences between brand and direct
marketing, but his ideas have never been more relevant. Thanks to the rise
of Google and Facebook, there’s now more direct marketing than ever
before in history.
The difference is about what happens after the ad runs:
Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured.
Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured.
If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure
how many of them convert, you’re doing direct marketing.
If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will
remember your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing
brand marketing.
It’s entirely possible that your direct marketing will change the culture
(that’s a nice side effect). It may very well be that the ads you run, the
catalogs you send out, and the visits to your site add up to a shift in the
story that people tell themselves.
And it’s entirely possible that your brand marketing will lead to some
orders (that’s another nice side effect). It may very well be that your
billboard leads to someone getting off at the next exit and handing you
money, or that your sponsorship of a podcast leads to someone hiring your
company.
The danger is in being confused.

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The extraordinary growth of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is due to
only one thing: many of the ads that are run on these services pay for
themselves. A hundred dollars’ worth of online advertising generates $125
in profit for the advertiser. And she knows this, so she buys more. In fact,
she keeps buying ads until they stop paying for themselves.
On the other hand, brand advertising (for products like Ford, Absolut
Vodka, and Palmolive) shaped our culture for generations. But these brands
and countless others can’t possibly build direct marketing campaigns that
work. And so the shift to a measured direct marketing environment online
has been stressful and riddled with failure.
The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct
marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn
attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing
is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.
If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure.
Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and
patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand
marketing ads.
The two paragraphs above ought to have paid for the time and money
you’ve spent on this book. I’m hoping that’s not the only thing that repays
your investment, but even the biggest and most successful organizations are
failing to see how the shift to online interaction is fundamentally changing
their business.
Procter & Gamble spends billions on brand advertising on TV, for Tide
and Crest and other brands. When TV brand ads are replaced with digital
direct ads, their business model falls apart.
The local pizza place was hooked on Yellow Pages advertising. A big ad
paid for itself, and the special phone number hooked up to the ad proved it.
Moving to Yelp, on the other hand, is time consuming and feels risky. No
control, no proven history.
For many smaller businesses, the move from expensive, slow, and
difficult-to-measure brand ads to quick, agile, and measurable direct ads is a
positive shift. But it’s not easy to act like a direct marketer when you’re
trying to reach people who generally don’t click on ads.

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