so how would it be if we gave consumers something they *don't* want?

You'd think that the proposition of giving consumers things they want, and communicating with them in ways they prefer, wouldn't be problematic in this thing of ours, this marketing circus we all work in. It's so straightforward as to be unarguable. Talk to a small business owner who's been around more than a couple of years, or a juggler busking on the street or, hell, even a fisherman, and you'll get general agreement on the principle that if you're trying to get something, you need to go where that thing is in order to get it.

Except...

In our business, it seems to happen. Marketers will do completely illogical things in order to lure consumers to them, like look for them in the wrong place, or bait their hooks with socks instead of worms.

I'm not sure why.

One marketer I pitched for did a whole bunch of focus groups about his target consumer, which happened to be 13-year-old kids. Needless to say, the focus groups all indicated that this audience was very into social media; it was their primary source of information and communication and entertainment. Other stuff on the web was fine, too, as long as it offered content that they enjoyed and used. One thing that they did not do is watch TV.

Okay, we thought. Let's run with that. We presented some really strategic digital campaigns – they used Facebook as their core, but also branched out into other social media sites, as well as guerilla outdoor. Everything we did was tightly tied into the target audience, what they wanted and how they lived. It was one of the better presentations we've ever done, and the initial reaction was extremely positive – we talked about all the possibilities of the work for another half hour past the scheduled end of the meeting.

This was followed by weeks of unnerving silence.

Turns out another agency went in with a 30 second TV spot.

Guess who won?

Now, their TV campaign didn't fail, exactly. Sales didn't drop; they actually grew some. But to me it was a huge wasted opportunity, and basically inexplicable.

Or there's the marketer I know of who insisted on doing a mobile campaign, even though his target audience was over 50, and was quite likely to have no idea what texting or SMS was. Mobile was so cool, so topical, that to him it was still worth doing.

(If we'd been living in Europe, Japan or Korea, it would've made sense. But for mobile, we're still years behind Europe, and even farther behind Japan and Korea.)

Maybe all this new technology has people screwed up. They can't trust logic, they can't trust what's worked in the past, and everything that's new seems cool – but it's scary as hell. There are no formulas any more, and no one has any answers. But based purely on looking at the respective target audiences, I definitely know two things.

To the first marketer I say, just because it's scary and cool, doesn't mean it's wrong.

To the second marketer I say, just because it's scary and cool, doesn't mean it's right.

"the new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN."

We overestimate people all the time. Not their intelligence necessarily, or their common sense, but their familiarity with what some of us consider to be basic rules and tools for living.

We expect that they won't simultaneously eat, brush their hair and talk on the phone while driving a car, and yet, every few weeks, someone gets pulled over by the cops for doing something pretty much like that.

I know a marketing person who, when first confronted with a mouse for her computer, pointed it at her screen, expecting it to do something. (This was well after the introduction of Windows 3 in our office.)

The Internet is no different, as we all know. People still respond to emails from Nigerian princes looking for a little help moving their riches. Reasonably intelligent people – people who hold down steady jobs, who have post-secondary degrees and who vote – are at this moment typing URLs into Google instead of into the convenient address bar at the top of their browser window.

In marketing we have to remember that these people are usually a big chunk of our target audience. Even when they're sitting at a shiny new Macbook Pro, working in the latest version of Firefox or Safari, they don't necessarily know what we exepct them to know. And I believe as marketers that it's just smart for us to recognize that.

But this is unbelievable.

And yet, it happened.

People will not pay attention to even the most obvious signs that they are not on the site they think they've clicked on. They will try to enter their log-in and password in fields that look nothing like log-ins, in order to make a site that is not Facebook become Facebook and work like Facebook.

Um, let's not make assumptions about things being "obvious" in our work.

good marketing is specific, because our behaviour is specific

(comic by Thad Guy, thadguy.com)I don't just mean good creative. I mean the whole marketing process, when it's good, is specific. Good thinking is specific.

It's tempting for people to generalize, especially about outcomes. If a campaign works, it's great, and everything about it becomes great. If a campaign doesn't work, it's a failure and everything about it gets tossed. Not enough people spend the time to actually examine details, in either agencies or client companies. Senior managers don't want to (or don't have the time to) get down in the weeds. They need to get to the takeaways, or results, or action items, and will blithely skip over the gory details of the PowerPoint deck they're being taken through to get to the last few "recommendations" pages.

Now, I'm all for results; they're a central tenet of direct marketing. But I'm also for learning. I want to do things better in the future, and everything I do now should help me down the line.

The glory of direct marketing – reinforced by the exactitude of digitial – is the discipline to test everything about a campaign, to find out exactly what worked and what didn't. So you can learn. And test again. And learn some more.

Because I want to know what caused X or Y behaviour, not what some group of people sitting in a boardroom thinks caused that behaviour. People's actions aren't caused by generalizations, but by specific triggers. As marketers, we need to know what those triggers are.

Generalizing is something we're all prone to defaulting to, and something we all have to be wary of.

"the fall with probably kill you!"

Spent the day at the Digital Leap Conference, a joint venture of Ted Hart and Stephen Thomas Ltd., along with the Royal Conservatory of Music. Basically, how the hell do you fundraise in a world where everything you know about your donor is wrong, or out of date, or just changing hourly?

No one had a lot of answers, but a few people seemed to have a pretty good map for taking the next steps into the dark.

Scott Stratten from Unmarketing didn't say anything really revolutionary about social capital and social marketing – but hammered home the essential point that you have to actually talk with people to have a relationship with them, in a very funny and impassioned way. His constant mockery of clients who just want to "get on the Facebook" because their current marketing is failing, without having a clue what they're actually going to do, was particularly cutting.

Mark Banbury, CIO of Plan Canada, gave a very straightforward and strong overview about what Plan is doing – starting with integrating all their systems so they can get real-time reporting of everything: donors, sponsored children, revenues, the works. It's a huge accomplishment and a vital first step to a lot of good work.

Finally, Alan Clayton (of The Good Agency and others) in his oddly frenetic Scottish accent and mannerisms (or is that Scottish mannerisms and accent?) talked about marketing in 2020, ending on the point that radical transparency – the total availability of all your organization's data, research, info and numbers to the public – is already here and is only going to get even bigger. This means that consumers will be making decisions based not on your marketing or PR, but on what your leadership team actually knows. They will evaluate whether you are worthy of their donation based purely on whether you deliver the services and impacts that you say you deliver. Any problems, any hiccups, and they're gone and they're pulling a lot of friends with them.

Ultimately technology and marketing are only going to get more closely intertwined in the years ahead. (Gee! What an insight, McKay!) To paraphrase Clayton in his finale, we're all going to have to know everything about everything, be incredibly curious about everything else, and be impassioned about it all.