That said, it's time for a fair and impartial look at the government's investment of half a million in advertising money to publicise their trial run in Manchester. It can be fair and impartial and still anti ID cards because... well you'll see in a minute.
1300 people have signed up.
For half a million pounds.
Lets pretend loads of them aren't civil servants and journalists and say 1300 people saw the advertising and thought "I've just got to have one of those".
That's a cost per acquisition of £385. Bargain.
At that price, persuading 48 million adults for a national role out will cost £18,480,000,000 (yes, I know that's a silly calculation, I've stopped being fair and impartial now.)
Can we just abandon this monumental waste of money please?
That the Met Office seem to be treating outside chances of bad weather as a PR opportunity? Take tomorrow. There's a weather warning in place for London*. It's not going to snow.
The Met Office know it's not going to snow too, so why the weather warning? Either they're absolutely terrified of not issuing one when there's a blizzard coming (which is possible) or I have a strong suspicion that they use them for PR.
A weather warning generates lots of Met Office coverage. And then whose name is in your head when you need to buy some weather expertise? Never mind that you could always get it for free from wunderground.com (Sshhh, don't tell anybody.)
I'm being very, very cynical but the damn things are issued so often that nobody takes them seriously any more. Rain, fog, snow, a bit of a stiff breeze... Weather warning. I think they like being on the news.
If you want non-sensationalised weather (which has been more accurate than the Met Office since Christmas because they don't worst-case-scenario everything) try meteoblue.
* And a lot of other places, which actually do have lots of snow.
Come on, who at Sky didn't know that Avatar has clever new 3D glasses, rather than the old fashioned blue and red ones?
I went and saw the film last night (cheesy plot, you pretty much know what's going to happen in the finale and it's properly brilliant) and was surprised by the lack of 3D ads. Bit of a missed opportunity there, I thought. Everybody was already sat in their seats during the ads, which never happens, and it was just the same old mobile phone spots as usual.
Then a big sign flashed up. "Put on your 3D glasses now". Here we go...
Hang on, this isn't working. I can see a sky box but it's sort of blue and red and flickery through the 3D specs.
Did some clown in marketing at Sky think they'd just run a 3D ad and not check what technology Avatar was using? Or was I supposed to get some old fashioned blue and red 3D glasses in The Sun or something? If so, I couldn't see one person in the cinema who had them and could hear lots of confused people who didn't.
"As Sky's 3D TV services uses the same underlying technology as that being used in cinemas, it seemed natural to use Avatar as our first marketing platform. We also wanted to give consumers the opportunity to sample first hand the quality of experience we will offer next year."
The updates might be less frequent, but I'll be back for 2010 with some more data-based marketing type thoughts. And probably some musicial musings thrown in along the way too as a whole new work obsession, but we'll have to see.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
So what's brought about the change of heart? Well, it seems marketing hasn't gone away despite me leaving Mindshare and apparently a few people are still reading Wallpapering Fog now and again (thanks Grace!) Actually, I'm perversely disappointed the traffic didn't drop off all that much - it just brought home the fact that I only wrote three vaguely interesting things last year and people are still reading those. Must try harder...
'here's a Facebook strategy and I can give you a bucketload of data to prove while this Facebook strategy is a good thing'.
Steve over at Analytics Arbitrage has been speculating about disjointed planning and ideas for 2010 and mentioned a Facebook Strategy. He's not suggesting that having one would be a good starting point for planning, don't worry.
So what is a good starting point? What's fundamentally wrong with saying 'here's a Facebook strategy'?
It's wrong because it doesn't start with what you've got. It starts with what somebody else has got.
Football managers lose their jobs this way. They compromise their own team by setting it up to counter what the opposition are doing. They've got a good winger? He'll need man-marking. They play a man in the hole behind the striker? We'd better have a holding midfielder this weekend then. And before you know it your team's tactics are negative and all you're really trying to do is not get beaten.
So a here's first thought for 2010, whether you're building media plans, contemplating Facebook or looking for a new job. Before you react, what have you already got? And what can you do with it to give everybody else something to think about?
What to do with a marketing blog when you don't work in marketing any more? To be honest I'm not sure, so Wallpapering Fog is going to take a sabbatical for a bit while I decide what to do with it.
Friday will be my last day at Mindshare. After ten years in various marketing analyst jobs (ish - there's been some fun side projects along the way too) I'm leaving to work for EMI. There'll be things to do that are marketing and things that aren't and to tell the truth, I'm not sure exactly what it will be yet, which is why I'm excited. And it's been too long since work has got me properly excited.
So no more Wallpapering Fog for now. If it turns out to still be useful, I'll start posting again. I can't start a music related blog as I don't know enough about it (yet)!
This has been a brilliant place to put thoughts in order and have a rant and I'd highly recommend blogging to anyone who works in marketing. Just don't put Google Analytics on your site if you've got the kind of obsessive personality that will eagerly track visitor numbers. It's evil. And slightly depressing. Blog for yourself and if other people read it, then that's a bonus.
There's a problem with Holy Grails. In the end they're just trinkets, golden ornaments that shine but are not useful. In Arthurian legend huge, wasteful campaigns were mounted to recover them.
So it is with click path, the Holy Grail of web analytics.
On the web, give or take a blocked cookie or two, we can track an individual's viewing of ads across multiple websites and over time. Then we can see what they did on our own website - did they go on to buy?
Did they see a branded ad, then visit us and a few of our competitors' sites, then see a price offer for our product and then purchase? And if they did, wouldn't it be amazing to know exactly how that worked?
Projects like this have been tried off-line once or twice and resulted in a horrendously expensive waste of time.
But online it's easier, online all the data is at our fingertips...
Which makes it an easier decision to pour money into the pit.
The first 'surprise' of click path analysis is quite how much data it generates. I was talking to a planner the other day who'd requested the full history for a few thousand product purchases as an experiment to see what he could do with it. The nine million rows that came back were somewhat beyond Excel's capabilities to analyse. If you haven't got some serious SQL programmers on your team, forget it.
So now you've got yourself a major IT project - data collection, processing and analytics. Front ends and SQL databases. This is going to be expensive.
But the results will be worth it, no? The results will put us on the cutting edge.
Well actually, no. Not yet.
If you get to the big database without running out of budget or management patience (which is going to take a miracle) then you've got... not a lot. Now you need to analyse it.
There will be a few big wins. Some sites and ads will stick out as converting well and some general paths to sale will emerge. You could have found that out a lot more cheaply with well-designed surveys though and the rest of the database will just be noise. Lots and lots and lots of noise.
The only way to make use of the little bits of gain that exist in the noise is buying systems that can optimise tiny pieces of the schedule automatically - serving bespoke brand ads and price offers based on browser profiles and the ads they've already seen. Have you got one of those? No, me neither.
If you don't believe me, look at the long tail of a search campaign. You've generated clicks from thousands of words, sure, but 90% of your clicks came from the top twenty terms. The only reason it's worth having the long tail is because it's generated automatically.
Automatic click path analysis will get here, eventually, but the wins won't actually be that big. It's not the holy grail. If you're a media agency don't even try to build it, Google will get there, or a startup will get there, and it will be worth it for them because they can sell the solution to everyone. For most of us, it's a money pit and a reason to defer, prevaricate and delay doing the best that you can without it. In the words of Monty Python...
