The Danger Of Focusing Expectations On A Single Metric
It's easy to fall into the habit of judging our success upon a single measure, but columnist Kendall Allen cautions that our marketing environment is much too complicated to do so.
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Kendall Allen's latest articles
Brewing Our Own Disenchantment In Agency-Land
Feeling trapped carrying out other people's agendas in your job? Contributor Kendall Allen asks that you consider the alternatives.
In The Marketing Industry’s Machine Age, Who Do You Trust?
Welcome to the new marketing machine age! Columnist Kendall Allen explains how human relationships are more important than ever, despite technology's ascendance.
Interactive Marketers: Let’s Make Case Studies More Valuable
We’re all familiar with the lauded “case study.” As agencies, we pursue them to illustrate our own performance, which can help us win more business. As publishers or ad tech suppliers, the right case study helps us validate our products and services, opening up new doors when properly played. As brands, a brilliant case study on the […]
As A Marketing Exec, What Keeps You Up At Night?
It’s been said that there are two types of people in the world: people who divide the world into two types of people and people who — don’t. As someone who likes to think she rejects all overgeneralization, I tend to think of myself as the latter. But, doing the division is sometimes a fun […]
There’s No “I Didn’t Sign Up For This” In Digital Marketing
We’ve all found ourselves in that familiar place — the one where we find ourselves remarking, “I didn’t sign up for this.” Whether in family situations, relationships and/or business/career scenario, we can often end up feeling duped by the old switcheroo. It feels like falling for the oldest trick in the book. You agreed to […]
Is Our Industry Finally Maturing? Thoughts From Internet Week NY
For many a year at many a major seasonal conference, seasoned attendees would look around and see no end to the hype. While legitimate, long-standing business themes — integrated marketing, leveraging your media mix, standards, attribution and allocation and, of course, ecosystem “complexity” — always get their airtime… we often see sort of a hazy […]
Choosing A Media Agency: Look Inside & Hold Up The Mirror
In our industry, we are constantly evaluating the way we choose our vendors and agencies. Increasingly, we are applying the same scrutiny, inspection and even introspection to how we choose our clients. Matches made in heaven are rare and certainly not static. The landscape around us is constantly changing, so keeping the evaluation ongoing and […]
In Interactive Marketing, The Goalposts Always Move — And That’s Good
You may have heard murmurs about the newly released IBM study, “Stepping up to the challenge: How CMOs can start to close the aspirational gap,” that came out last week. It was conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value and was based on in-person interviews with 500+ CMOs worldwide, delving — as studies of this nature and […]
The Hazards Of Love: Keeping Mindful Within Long-Term Engagement
No matter your side of the business, you’ve been conditioned like the rest of us to strive for long-term engagement. If you’re an agency, you’re bred to eschew the one-off project or single campaign and pitch for Agency of Record status, or at least a retainer-based arrangement. If you’re on the sell side, you know […]
Creating & Iterating Today: The Marriage Of Tech & Imagination
In our industry, we acknowledge the longstanding rub between the quant and the qual. We know that the math and the creative imagination have had their struggles to co-exist. But it’s become a bit of a false or dated construct. It’s a fun debate, sure, but the either/or conclusion cannot be supported any longer. Most […]
Today’s Methods Help Us More Aggressively Compete
It used to be that one of your primary means of competing as a brand was raising the spend and buying more impressions than your competitors — and doing it creatively, in order to stir up more laughter and tears than the other guy. Your budget and creative wherewithal were your arsenal. We carried that […]
Keeping The Holiday Drill In Check: How To Plan Rather Than React
It’s that time of year. Once again, we are awash in holiday projections — and with those projections come seasonally specific recommendations for marketers. This includes everything from capitalizing on mobile’s first true holiday to investing more in programmatic as that trend ramp steepens into 2014. Assuming you are more dexterous than you were this […]
Agencies & Advertising Tech: Beyond The Client/Vendor Relationship
There has been a lot of commentary lately about the relationship between the Agency and Advertising Technology — a liaison just as fraught with potential issues as the familiar one between Agency and Publisher. Thankfully, there’s a lot to learn from the classic buyer/seller struggles of Agency and Publisher. Yes, there are issues — but […]
A Simple Commitment To “Experience” May Just Ease Marketer Distress
This week, I spent some time with Adobe’s recent report, Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night? [PDF]. It was an online study of 1,000 marketers, including both digital marketers and marketing generalists, ranging from marketing staff to high-level decision-makers. As one might anticipate, this report chronicles and quantifies marketers’ anxieties about their profession. The […]
When Media Capabilities & Possibilities Outreach Day-to-Day Reality
Whether you are on the buy, sell or third-party supplier side, we all recognize that we are operating in an elevated state of potential. The infrastructure, media and creative options, tools and available science all mean that we could and should get beyond the transactional state of yesteryear. We now can predict, execute and optimize […]
Tackling The Tablet — A Mainstay For Consumers, A Must-Do For Marketers
Whether you’re an early adopter or still admiring from a distance, there is no doubt that tablets are becoming increasingly prevalent among consumers. Sure, not everyone you know has one, and they have not quite reached the smartphone’s fact of life ubiquity. But, the truth is… it will not be long. Above and beyond glancing around any […]
How To Organize Resources To Unlock The True Power Of Distributed Data
Over the past couple years, it’s become clear that ad marketing and media folks are more readily identifying themselves as data-driven marketers. We are ready to embrace that data is utterly integral to what we do — and we must conduct our work accordingly. But this professed focus on data has real implications for a […]
Forget About Mobile Cannibalization: Its Rise Bodes Well For All
The media business has grown to a certain level of maturity. The ecosystem affords brands, marketers and agencies a vast tableau of options, along with tools to plan, operate and optimize across channels, platforms and screens. Yet, as an integrated digital marketer, I’m always surprised how much we tend to sweat the mix, scrutinize the […]
The Shortcomings We Tolerate
In our business — media, marketing, publishing, ad tech or whichever combination with which you self-identify — on our most effusive days, we marvel at our own progress. It’s a point of pride to have participated in the evolution, regardless of when you dipped in your toe and joined it: 80s, 90s, later or even […]
The Great Exaggeration: Optimization
One of the so-called standard operating procedures we digital marketers espouse most vehemently is “optimization.” We believe we’ve got this practice nailed. Search practitioners coined the term and drove the movement from the earliest days — wielding a love for data, crude original campaign management systems, Excel-based testing matrices and a belief that optimization was […]
The Silos That Dog Us — Putting Them Out To Pasture
Silos, while they might be pleasing to the eye in a pastoral setting, are a known negative in the world of business and marketing. We should not organize, manage workflow or report in silos. Nor should we plan and execute in silos. And, never should analysis and optimization of our efforts be done in silos. […]
Grids Are Great, But What Of The Subtle Undertones Of Creative Testing?
Within all marketing and media, and certainly digital, where there are intricate moving but measurable parts, testing has become a mainstay. Because we all aspire to better testing, it’s a study in progress. Depending on your partners, vendors, systems or tools, much of your testing may be left to your team’s raw imagination, discipline and […]
The Tippy Toes Of Performance Marketing; Boosting Your Efforts To The Next Level
When we gather to talk about search marketing, we don’t just talk about search marketing anymore. In fact, the agenda is broader 100% of the time. Search keeps its cornerstone within the now much broader and more intricate scope of performance media and marketing. It’s a foundational discipline and plays a critical role within the […]
Are You Boring Yourself With Your Search Marketing?
If you count yourself as a performance marketer, chances are search has been in your wheelhouse for a while. It’s a go-to for you, and you are wise enough to know that, along with the rest of your mix — and hopefully you have one — you can employ search for branding as well as […]
What Has Become Of The SEO Guru?
While the term “guru” has been adopted by many an opportunist in a variety of industries, perhaps nowhere did it take such an inflated hold as in the early to middle years of the search segment of our industry. There was a time when the guru strode rampant across stages, board rooms, book tours and […]
Identifying Talent For The New Performance Marketing Culture
On the list of things we discuss in this industry, talent is one of the most persistent. Our expectations for our businesses transcend financial objectives and translate to high and sometimes restless standards for the talent we seek. In today’s performance marketing culture, the ideal talent profile is complicated and ever-changing. It’s not as straightforward […]
Getting Ready For A Post-Search World
Search is no longer just one thing. At minimum, it’s two things: organic and paid. But, as the marketplace that holds it has evolved, search is so much more. It’s a composite of methods; it’s an ingredient; it’s a mechanic; it’s a mindset. While it’s not yet unrecognizable, even marketers who once deemed it a silver […]
Fear, Reverence And Drama: The Enemies Of Integrated Search
In one eye-opening moment recently, I was thinking about Search Marketing in the context of our industry — and the collective programming of all the conferences, roundtables, panels and workshops that take place. Thinking about how search is reflected in these environments, I found myself looking back over the past two years and realized just […]
Holy Consumer: Keeping Demand in Check
Like most fellow zealots, my original love affair with search was all about the glories of being served up “consumer demand” — and being able to market and optimize to that demand. Expressed demand right at your fingertips was a beautiful thing. Following the ghostly spending period of 2001-2002, it made it much more palatable […]
Content Marketing Today: An All-Hands Enterprise
It used to be that adept optimization of your one or two platforms or environments – your .com and perhaps your blog — and the content and assets inhabiting those places — was enough of a day’s work to call yourself a Content Marketer. Properly tending to your SEO made you feel on top of […]
It’s Complicated: The Awkward Socialization Of Search
All hail the vision of truly socialized search — where results and experience are personalized, drawing on social graphs, browsing history and reams of input data to deliver on the concept. Our expectations for absolute interconnectivity of environments and extensive personalization have us drooling over this concept of search at a glance. But, taking the […]