Demand Generation for Dummies
Many years ago I raised a small furor back at The Big M. Sitting through a division presentation by our ad agency (a national agency that you've no doubt heard of), I asked a heretical question. I was working in the developer tools group at the time, and the agency had been running a series of ads for one of our C compilers in magazines that programmers read. Real geeky stuff. When I had first seen the ads, I was appalled. They showed a programmer looking as dorky as possible (lab coat, pocket protector, bad hair, and—believe it or not—goggles) with the headline “Tachyphobia: fear of speed.” The idea was that our product compiled source code really fast so it would save people time.
I didn't have a problem with the headline or the copy, but the image—this Uber Dork in a lab coat with safety goggles—struck me as insulting to our customers. Several months later, here I am in this big room with the ad agency that came up with this campaign showing it off. They stopped on this particular ad and said it had gotten lots of “impressions,” therefore it was a successful ad. In other words, if people notice it, it's a success.
So I stuck up my hand and asked a question. “What if they noticed it because they thought it was stupid?”
The uproar that followed reminded me (in decibels anyway) of the time my Uncle Bayard started throwing his scrap rib bones to the dogs in the dining room. Unlike in The Emperor's New Clothes, when someone points out the obvious, others don't necessarily congratulate you on your insights (not too long thereafter, following an ad from the campaign that showed a human brain, Bill told the agency “No more organ parts” and that was the end of that). I was officially scolded and it was a long time before they let me talk to anybody from an ad agency again (and that's another story).
I was reminded this dark episode from my past recently. Negotiating a campaign with a web portal, they were still quoting ad rates based on impressions (CPM). You open a page, the ad shows up, and bang! you've incurred some cost. Compare this to CPC (cost per click) advertising, where you don't pay until the user clicks on the link to get to your landing page. Once they're in your site, it's your job to make it sticky and derive some value from that visit. Overture, of course, has done a terrific job of making possible through an auction process for search engine strings.
The bigger point is accountability. The old model for advertising was that if someone noticed the ad (an impression), that was enough. But what happens when someone sees your ad? What message are you communicating. My objection to the tachyphobia ad was that it sent a clear message to our customers: we disrespect you; we see you as objects of ridicule. What sane person would pay to broadcast such a message to their customers? “Hey you! Stupid! Come here, I want to sell you something.”
That should work really well.
Whatever you do, don't let your agencies BS you into thinking that an impression is the same thing as a sale. If what they're saying sounds like New Age Weirdness, it probably is. Most agencies are clueless as to what their clients tech products really do, so they fall back on arm waving and tap dancing to explain their crummy creative. Keep in mind that technology is not soda pop or sneakers and the advertising techniques that move those kinds of consumer products probably will just be a big waste of your money.
