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Why I think privacy software has no future

May 14th, 2002

Privacy software has no future. You read it here first.

I’m on a satellite connection to civiIization. Having read a lot about denial of service (DoS) attacks for my latest book, I was aware that hackers often plant software on unknowing computers on always-on broadband connections, like satellite. Stay with me here; I’ll be back at privacy software soon.

The first thing I did when I got satellite was to download personal firewall software (ZoneAlarm). Within 5 minutes, it stopped an intruder from connecting to my computer. I get chills when I look at the log files and see how many hackers are trying to sign onto my computer (over 100 in the last 24 hours).

Well, I upgraded ZoneAlarm to ZoneAlarm Pro a couple weeks back, when I thought I had a virus (upping general security precautions), and ZoneAlarm Pro comes with privacy software.

My choices were tantalizing: With high cookie control, I could surf in complete anonymity, since no cookies could load; with Medium cookie control, I could allow cookies for personalization, but forbid 3rd party (ad-tracking) cookies; or I could turn cookie control off and allow all cookies. Ha! As if I would ever allow 3rd-party cookies again!

Then I went to Amazon. Even with medium security, I was asked to sign in on every other page and couldn’t use any personalization features. At Hotmail, I couldn’t actually get IN to my inbox, although I could authenticate. At Bluelight.com, nothing would go into my shopping cart. I could go on.

All these sites rely on what my privacy software believes are “3rd-party ad-tracking cookies?” So it seems. Since there are too many major merchants I need to visit out there to get mad at all of them, I simply had to disable the privacy feature.

Bottom line: The only thing you can do with privacy software enabled is read the news. Who is going to settle for that?

Are you violating your privacy policy without meaning to?

May 14th, 2002

Are you violating your privacy policy without meaning to? When you use ASP services to “power” parts of your business, sometimes that means your customer’s email addresses can end up going to places you didn’t intend, or be seen by people you don’t want them to be seen by.

For example, a shopping cart system we’ve evaluated for our own store’s possible use, allows affiliates to get the email addresses of every sale made through their link. Another company owner just told me he was considering online invoicing ASPs to electronically bill his clients, until he realized that every client email address would go through and possibly be harvested by that ASP’s parent company’s systems.

It’s so easy to write “We never share our customers or readers emails with anyone!” in your privacy statement. It’s a lot harder to stick to that promise in real life.

The (near) future of Internet marketing is text

May 13th, 2002

Often a quiet little text link will do better for you than a big blaring rich media ad.

This concept first came to the forefront when researchers found text-information gets noticed by the eye of the average surfer, while they tend to skip over color and graphics. Folks are surfing online for information, after all. It makes sense informative marketing versus interruptive marketing would work better online.

Then last year when search engine optimization and paid listings began to be the hot thing in online marketing, again it pointed out that effective creative is using words (text), not images. Very few marketers tell me anymore about the banners they bought against key search terms. Nearly everybody tells me about their PPC campaign.

Last night while surfing for house blueprints (dream a big dream), I noticed an unusual little text-ad “hidden” at the bottom of a site’s copyright fine print at the end of the page. I don’t remember a single ad from that site, or any other ad from the approximate two hours I was surfing. But that little text ad sure leapt out at me, even though it’s not for anything I’m interested in.

My theory: The (near) future of Internet marketing is text.

Blogs are becoming the next hot marketing communications tool

May 13th, 2002

for the United Way of Greater Toronto (look for a Case Study we’re doing on them in SherpaWeekly this week), emailed in a reaction to my postings about how Blogs are becoming the next hot marketing communications tool:

“Come to think of it: I think that is how Blogger got started in the first place–as a cheapo tool for Evan and Co. to update each other on the ‘real’ software’ project they were building. One day it dawned on them that Blogger was better than the project, and the rest is history. At least, that’s what I heard. It is funny to think people are now proposing that other companies use it (in-house) for what it was originally designed for: interoffice communication and posting project milestones.”

Six ad biz lessons I learned from Mary Wells Lawrence's autobiography

May 13th, 2002

This weekend the weather was stunning, glorious, incredible. I know because I ran outside briefly twice; once to get caffiene and once to stop a cat fight.

The rest of the time I was utterly, completely engrossed in Mary Wells Lawrence’s brand new autobiography A Big Life (in advertising). If you are either working for an ad agency yourself, or a woman heading any sort of company, or anyone interested in the ad biz, I highly recommend it. Some of the lessons I learned:

  • Stop waiting for things to settle down and get less crazy; they never will. Just plow ahead.
  • Grab data to make decisions, but data is never enough because the most powerful ads are often based on creative leaps and instinct (and you rarely have enough data in hand anyway). Just plow ahead.
  • Internal politics on the client side are going to drive you crazy, and sometimes seriously harm you. Just plow ahead.
  • You’ll never, ever be able to find enough truly great stars to hire to run the company so you can relax. Just plow ahead.
  • You will often be lonely, stressed out, and you will have cockroaches in your hotel room. Just plow ahead.
  • It’s about the love, it’s not about the money (but overpay anybody you really depend on anyway… by a whole lot). Oh yeah, and keep on plowing ahead!
  • Online registration forms should include a privacy statement

    May 13th, 2002

    A Sherpa reader who’d like to be known as “KC,” just cc:ed me on a letter he/she emailed to a business vendor he/she was considering using. KC is definitely a highly qualified sales prospect for this vendor, and after surfing the vendor’s site for a while, KC decided to click to see a demo of the vendor’s service in action.

    That’s where the trouble happened, like many B2B marketers, this vendor’s marketing department put a free online registration form up as a barrier between the sales prospect and the juicy stuff so they could collect more data on prospects. Again, like many B2B marketers, the vendor forgot to include a link to their privacy policy next to their request for prospects’ email addresses.

    KC wrote, “I got as far as [the registration page] before I high tailed outta there! I wonder how many other visitors bail out at this page? Have you ever considered posting a privacy policy? Your pitch is good and I would have really liked to take the test drive. But without some assurances that my personally identifiable information is not going to be sold, rented, or given to third parties once I sign up, I am afraid I cannot take the chance.

    I am truly amazed that you have not gotten on board with the other quadzillion websites and positioned your company as one that can be trusted to conduct business forthrightly and treat their visitors with respect.”

    Now, I happen to know folks at the vendor in question personally and I know they are cool about privacy; they would never do anything untoward with an email address they collected from their site. But, their prospects don’t know that. And in this spam-crazed environment, people are getting warier about handing their emails out daily. (I’m picturing a ‘Wariness Chart’ and that arrow is shooting up off the top edge of it.)

    Will Spam Help Trusted Ezine Publishers' CPM?

    May 13th, 2002

    I was just answering a Washington Post reporter’s questions on how the spam epidemic is affecting the way consumers trust email newsletter publishers, and realized that it may, ultimately, help our sponsorship CPM. After all, if consumers are so disgusted with spam that they *only* open email from people they know and trust and have a longstanding there-will-be-value-in-this-email relationship with, then broadcast email newsletters will get higher open rates than other broadcast email. That’s gotta filter down to higher trust and clicks at a lower CPM for sponsors.

    About a year ago I saw a study showing that ezine sponsorships were getting (an average) a 1-2% click rate and cost 1/4-1/2 CPM of whatever banners did at the time. Now I’d love to see some numbers on ezine sponsorship clicks currently, and compare them to broadcasts to rented opt-in lists. Oooh, maybe I’ll have to commission a researcher to look into that for Sherpa!

    Are You Allowed to Send More Stuff to Opt-Ins?

    May 10th, 2002

    Big question: if you already publish an email newsletter (or several) and you launch a new one on a similar topic, can you automatically subscribe all your other readers to the new newsletter too?

    Last week a publisher I know well launched a new daily and started sending it to everyone who got their other letters. There was a note at the top saying words to the effect of “We’re sending you this because you subscribe to our other stuff. If you don’t want it then click here to opt-out.”

    I was annoyed. I didn’t want another daily clogging my overloaded in-box.

    Tis week we launched a new newsletter ourselves. It’s called MarketingSherpa and it was developed specifically in response to our reader survey results. People said they wanted something like it, so here we are serving their voiced need. Potential advertisers emailed us like crazy – can we have your media kit??

    Only problem, we had almost zero circulation. So, yeah I felt the yearning burning to slide some names from our other lists into that new subscriber file. But I got all moral and didn’t.

    Maybe that’s stupid and unbusinesslike. But I’m building relationships with our readers for the long haul. Plus each reader is worth a few bucks a year to us. Why do something that might annoy them? So we’re going to build the list for MarketingSherpa the same slow, painful way we did for everything else. One opt-in at a time.

    When can you get away with doing something your readership might consider spam? If you have a terribly strong relationship with them and you do it in an awfully charming way. Witness the letter F***dCompany Publisher Phil Caplan broadcast to his list today which started:

    Subject: FC Sporadic for Friday, May 10, 2002 Ha ha tricked you! It’s just spam. Well sort of. Anyway, if you could do me a favor and either (a) signup, or (b) forward this to somebody who will, that would rock. It’s a new service I came up called “RUMOR ALERTS” that I think a lot of businesses would
    (should) be interested in…”

    http://www.MarketingSherpa.com (super subtle plug, huh?)

    The dot-dot-dot thing

    May 10th, 2002

    I’ve begun noticing a new Web design trend that I’m calling “the dot-dot-dot thing.” Remember when everybody’s site background was black? Then when everybody got frames? (Then dumped them.) Next, when you couldn’t swing a dead cat without getting stuck in a Flash intro?

    Now it’s the dot-dot-dot thing to give some structure to a logo or navigation bar, without the harshness of actual ruled lines. Check it out on these three sites, and I’ll bet soon you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

    http://www.creative-mail.com/

    http://www.uwgt.org

    Don't Send Your Ezine Issues Prior to 9am

    May 9th, 2002

    Several business newsletters I’ve opted in for send their issue afterhours for the next day. For example, eMarketer Daily seems to always send around 4-5am. I’m sure they’re thinking, hey we’ll be the first thing in your email box when you come in in the morning. I’d urge all publishers who do this to rethink it because of the spam problem.

    I leave work at each night having emptied my email in-box. When I get in the next morning, there’s a whole bunch of mail. As in more than 100 messages. A tiny handful are from insomniac or Australian readers. The rest are spam, spam, spam, spam.

    Then, nestled into the heart of dozens of messages urging me to improve my sex life or buy insurance, is eMarketer. Many’s the time I’ve swept the “delete” button over the whole mess (after plucking forth the Aussies) and canned it.

    I’m betting if late-night mailers changed their send time to say 9:30am when recipients get lots of mail from human beings (vs just mass mailers) they might increase their issue open rate. If anyone’s tested this, lemme know. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

    [BTW: Yeah I’m aware of the incongruence of this note as compared to the time I usually send out this Blog as an ezine to opt-ins on Friday evenings. Bad me.]

    [Note: ContentBlog reader Henrik Torstensson of tradedoubler.com emailed in a response the the Blog above, “With regards to the timing of eMarketer Daily. I, living in Sweden, recieve the eMarketer Daily between 11 and 12 AM (CET). This is an excellent time as there aren’t any/few other newsletters at this time (compared with afternoons and the flow of newsletters from 2 PM to 5.30 PM) and if things aren’t completely messed up the few minutes it takes to read the newsletter are usually worth it. Time zones make timing of newsletters more difficult.”]

    Ok – that’s it. English is the common language – let’s make NYC the common time zone! Or would someplace in China take precedence? 🙂 http://www.tradedoubler.com http://www.emarketer.com (Pls. don’t take it personally, ok?)