Mediative Blog: The Digital Results People

Many B2B marketers are dealing with a huge variety of SKUs, with a broader distribution of traffic across keywords than is typical in most consumer categories. This makes keyword discovery a monumental task. But more than this, the revenue per managed keyword (assuming you can accurately measure revenue – more on this below) is quite often very small. This creates a cost of campaign management issue.

Recently, I forecast that Facebook would become irrelevant. Some of you disagreed. Ron Stitt called Facebook the “public square” or “crossroads” of social connection. Andre Szykier pointed out a very real challenge with the successful socialization of online: “The problem is connecting the content from my social walled gardens into a virtual cloud point. Google+ is going about it a different way. They keep expanding their walled garden with search, mail, video, chat services along with social and app services that they provide, hoping you eventually will find their garden big and rich enough so everybody will migrate.

Recently a friend boldly asked me the question “how could I work in an industry that so arbitrarily delivers biased ads to broad demographic audiences?” As I thought to myself “not another one of these anti-advertising conversations”, I listened to her pose questions around how seemingly ridiculous the boisterous truck ads that aired during Sunday afternoon football games appear. She asked if there was something in the male psyche that reacted to the bold lettering, the loud voice and the hero imagery of a pickup truck. In strong defense of my chosen profession, I responded by stating that ads are created with deep knowledge into the emotional and cognitive reaction a consumer will have to the showcased product or service (hopefully without a clichéd reference to Mars & Venus).

We humans hate loss. In fact, we seem to value losing something about twice as high as gaining something. For example, imagine I gave you a coffee cup and then offered to buy it back from you. That’s Scenario 1. In Scenario 2, I ask you to buy the same coffee cup from me. The price you assign to the coffee cup in the first scenario will be, on the average, about twice as much as in the second. And yes, there’s research to back this up.