Just say no to print advertising

Print ads can express great ideas.
They’re just hardly ever worth the money.

print advertising sucks

This is a pretty ad.  Unfortunately I have no idea what it’s trying to tell me.  I’m pretty sure dentists won’t know either, since mostly they practice in offices, not fields.

A few months ago I got a call from one of my clients, who was excited.  “I got an email from a business magazine and they want to do a feature on us!  I told them you’d get back to them with all the details.”

Neither of us had ever heard of the magazine, but that didn’t matter. As long as they’re not asking my clients to pose naked or offer opinions on religion, I’m happy to take PR where I can get it.  And we’d had a lot of media exposure in mainstream channels in the previous 12 months, so I wasn’t surprised that we were getting the call.

So I called the ‘editorial assistant’ who’d contacted my client.  We discussed the feature (4 pages!  with photos! and case studies!), and the various angles we could pursue.  I investigated the magazine (something to do with ‘women in business’), which seemed legit, if a little obscure.  Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks, I provided detailed responses to questions, information about the business, and even provided the names of a couple of clients they could contact for ‘commentary’.

But then the sales pitch started:  They wanted a list of my client’s suppliers (with contact information), and I started getting emails from a sales manager type ‘recommending’ that we purchase a half-page ad to accompany our ‘feature’.  

Finally I got a bit annoyed, and called the editorial assistant.  “Look,” I said, “you pitched this to my client as a proper feature article. Now I’m getting the impression that this ‘feature’ is entirely dependent on us or our suppliers spending a lot of money.”

She denied it, of course…but after a couple more emails from the sales manager guy, we didn’t hear anything from them.

It’s all about the opportunity cost.

These days, most of my clients are small businesses who don’t have a single dollar to waste on marketing.  So spending $5000 for a half-page ad in some obscure business publication whose distribution is basically a mailing list they bought in 2006 just doesn’t make sense.

I always think about what else I could do for my client with that $5000:  I could host a networking event with good snacks, create several webinars, do a direct mail campaign, create a mobile version of their website – or my client could take 50 clients for fancy lunches, during any of which I know she could generate more business than she will through an ad in some magazine that no one ever reads.

Sure, print ads sometimes have their place.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that for some brands, print advertising works, especially as part of a larger campaign.  Big luxury brands can get a lot of mileage out of spreads in Vanity Fair or GQ, and from what I see on YouTube (where bedroom walls can often be seen in the background), kids are still cutting out ads from magazines to use as posters.  Heck, I even had this Hermes image as my computer wallpaper for a while.  Ads like these, which look like print ads but mostly live online, can generate a fair amount of brand awareness.

And I also know that even in this digital age, there’s something kind of cool about being able to pull out a printed publication and point to your very own advertisement.  For small business owners, especially, it can confer a sense of credibility, like “Wow, I have a real company, and here’s the proof.”

But ultimately, the goal of advertising – as a part of a larger marketing strategy – is to sell more stuff, and at the end of the day, a single print ad just isn’t going to do it for you.  So the next time someone calls you about advertising in a magazine you’ve never heard of, just say “no, thank you”.  I promise you’ll have made the right decision.

Design: One of my favourite album covers ever

great design

I don’t often talk about design on this blog, mostly because I fall into the “I don’t know much about design, but I know what I like” category.  There are plenty of people who know lots more about design than I do.

However, whenever I think about what my album cover would look like, if I ever had one (I don’t care what you say, you know you’ve thought about this too), this is what comes to mind:  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ ‘Whipped Cream and Other Delights’.  

The numbers – and the ‘gurus’ – may be lying

This guy has 650k video views. But hardly anyone has seen this video.

You don’t have to watch more than 15 seconds of this video to know it’s horrible:

The sound and video quality is terrible, the subject matter is boring, the guy is a bad speaker…and yet somehow he’s had more than 650k views in less than 2 weeks.

But he says he’s a ‘social media expert’, so maybe he’s got this worldwide following or a book or a website or something, and you just didn’t know about him yet, right?  Wrong.  He doesn’t even appear to have a website – there isn’t one listed on his YouTube profile, and my very best Googling has failed to turn up anything about this guy.  I can’t even find him on Twitter, though to be fair there seem to be about 150 ‘Daniel Cohens’ there, and some don’t have pictures or profiles.

What he’s got is some kind of hackery that YouTube hasn’t figured out yet, and here’s how I know:  When you click the ‘insights’ button on the YouTube page for this video (it’s the little bar graph box to the right of the view count), it says:

  • 99.9% of the views happened on the first day the video was posted
  • All of them came from a mobile device
  • The demographics were exclusively ‘male, 35-44 years old’

All of this points to some kind of technical trickery that allowed him to artificially inflate his views.  I do know that videos which are genuinely popular – like this Shaytards video – show a much more varied view source, demographics and timeline.

(NOTE:  As I write this, I see that Daniel Cohen has now turned off the ability to see the insights on his videos. But almost all of his other 37 videos have fewer than 100 views, which tells me that he hasn’t got any kind of ‘following’ or loyal audience.)

Big numbers doesn’t mean anyone is actually paying attention

As far as I’m concerned, the minute someone tells you they’re a social media ‘expert’, ‘guru’, ‘ninja’ or ‘visionary’ because they’ve got big numbers, you should run the other way, for 2 reasons:

  1. Anyone who really knows anything about social media knows that the landscape is changing every minute, so being a ‘guru’ is next to impossible  
  2. Getting a whole lot of followers, friends, views or ‘pins’ isn’t the point of social media.  It’s what you do with those followers, friends, views and pins.

Daniel Cohen may have 650k ‘views’ of his video, but if they’ve all been generated by his army of minions in a room in Bulgaria, no real people are actually seeing the thing.  He’s not selling anything, he’s not driving traffic to a website which is selling anything, he’s not increasing his influence or opportunities for paid speaking engagements or media coverage – which means he can’t sell anything for you, either.