Twit, tweet and edgy marketing

I’m enjoying the cautionary tale of the latest ham fisted twitter marketing campaign as reported by the Telegraph here: Twitter users angered by Rio Ferdinand's Snickers 'adverts'. I’ve always found it amusing how quickly common sense goes out of the window for marketers and celebrities when that locus of time and money gets tight enough.
Who in the name of the wee man thought this was a good idea? I'm impressed in this case by the way the campaign simultaneously devalues the brand and limited brand capital the celebrities involved as well which given that it probably cost a couple of quid makes it all the sweeter for the casual observer.

This is of course down to the fact that marketing is currently a grey area of unregulated spend where results and expenditure have no hard linkages and vast pools of budget are subject whimsical control. Simply put no one has any idea how effective a marketing campaign or device will be before it’s authorised. Marketing is measured via soft metrics like buzz or awards so marketers are forced into positions where nothing is daft or nonsensical and decidedly sub optimal or simply ineffective campaigns can be authorised. There is even a third justification for sub optimal campaigns, that of “edgy” which as far as I can tell means simultaneously both ineffective and offensive.

Marketing like this is doomed for mainstream companies*. As marketing moves more and more into the interactive space, following contents march into the interactive world on the web, IP tv, IP radio and digital publishing. Digital marketing won’t have room for ineffective campaigns and the word edgy will become as anathema to the CMO as it already is to the CFO.

So how will this change happen and who will do it?

The change is already happening, as simple web analytics advance to allow the testing of scenarios to maximise results and predictive deep analytics allow the assumption of motive on the part of the user (personalisation is not the whole story, see posts passim), it’s already possible to create profiles of the users as they arrive and adapt them as they interact with your system. If you combine this with appropriately tagged marketing content and a flexible engine to service it, you can adapt your experience to match the users requirements on a day by day and even one off moment.

For example here are a few examples, hypothetical and non sexist I hasten to add, a chap goes to a web site where his partner normally shops, it’s three weeks before Christmas, does he really want to see adverts for power tools, sci-fi books and computer games? No, he’s looking for her Christmas present, so show him things she’s looked at or stuff like it. Those new options should follow him to linked/affiliate sites and be available to him when he comes back. Secondly say our chap goes to a lingerie site and instead of looking for the usual vital-statistics he now also searches for a radically different body range. It’s obvious that he’s probably having an affair so perhaps show him options in widely variant colours and styles and perhaps it’s time to make sure the orders aren’t sent to the same address and prompt for a new delivery address for that new profile. Perhaps it’s time to link back to the original Christmas present selection and up the price range by 100% because he’ll be feeling guilty.  If you want to extend it, perhaps in a month or so start showing him adverts for marriage counselling or divorce lawyers. Perhaps when he starts clicking through to them it’s time to start showing them to his wife**.

Regardless of the deliberately provocative and terrible ethics here in this extreme example, it’s important to market to the user, not to the segment. It’s much more likely to delivery positive measurable returns and much more likely to convert into additional sales. 

As to who is doing this? Where is this platform coming from? Well it isn’t Google. It isn’t Facebook and it’s sure not Twitter. This is infrastructure not presence. Think plumbing not shop front. It’s Adobe and they are doing it very very quietly but their technology is utterly compelling, when it's implemented there is no need for amateur hour twitter theatrics. Watch this space.

* Though no doubt it will still remain a plausible route to market for more guerrilla/shonky organisations. 

** At no point does the marketing engine know how our hero protagonist and his wife are, they are anonymous profiles not tight personalisation’s. They can be more accurately modelled when they are anonymous anyway.