Podcast Episode 44: Changing the Relationship Between Sales & Marketing

Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I am your host, Steve Robinson, and with me as always is the perceptive and ever-observant, Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Earin: I am well. How are you, Steve?

Steve Robinson: I am doing pretty well, myself. It is a gloomy day here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but I am doing everything to overcome that with a bright and cheering mood.

Elizabeth Earin: It’s funny because as you know, I am getting ready to go on a little vacation to visit some family in California and I got up early to try and get caught up on a few things because there is that stress before you leave and I haven’t even looked out the window. I don’t know what the weather is like where I am. I have no clue.

Steve Robinson: That’s almost weird.

Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, yeah, it was fun.

Steve Robinson: So what are we talking about today?

Elizabeth Earin: So, today we are talking about advertising and more specifically how consumer’s media consumption habits have changed and how that’s increasing – changing how advertising is impacting us.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. You would have run across a really interesting article that you had posted to our slack feed and suggested maybe as a podcast topic. Do you want to tell us about that article because I think that’s really the instigator for this episode?

Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, definitely. So I was on Marketing Land, I love Marketing Land, reading a couple of different posts and I came across one called “I Love Advertising, Said No One Ever” and it went on to talk about how we don’t like advertising and it got me thinking and we will link to it in the show notes if you want to read it, but I wonder do we really hate advertising or do we just hate advertising that isn’t relevant to us?

Steve Robinson: Yeah. It’s a very good question and I am glad that we are talking about it today. I think there are lots of moving parts to this because it’s not just people’s perception of advertising but I think it’s a game of cat and mouse that advertising is playing with people too. We will get into it. I think there is a lot here.

Elizabeth Earin: So I think it helps if we start out by talking about what we like about advertising both from a consumer and marketer’s perspective and then get into the disparity between these two perspectives because I think that that is one of the things that’s contributing to this dislike towards advertising.

Steve Robinson: And it wouldn’t be the Iterative Marketing podcast if we didn’t come through and talk about how we would plan to address some of this with Iterative Marketing, right?

Elizabeth Earin: Exactly. So what can we do as marketers to ensure that our advertising is actually sought out and not ignored or blocked, and we will get into that by our target market.

Steve Robinson: So let’s start with why do some people or at least people in the past, why have we appreciated advertising as consumers or at least tolerated it?

Elizabeth Earin: Well, I think that when we look at it from the consumer perspective the thing to keep in mind is that we are inherently selfish. I don’t know if you agree with that, but typically with any time we are acting, we are wondering what’s in it for us and it doesn’t make it bad, it’s just this is the only point of view we have ever had to acknowledge and so it’s easy to just always be in our sort of mind when we are thinking about this. And so, one thing we love about it is when advertising tells us about products or services that we don’t know about or that we need and we have had all those commercials, the as seen on TV commercials that come on and you are like, gosh, I had no idea, I could live my life without a keychain that fits sriracha on the go, but you see this advertising and you realize, Oh! my gosh, I need to have this product.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. And I think you see that a lot with legacy magazines, you will get a magazine, you would pay money for a magazine either a subscription or off the news stand and the ads would become part of that magazine experience because they were these full page glossy things that would inform you of products that you weren’t necessarily aware of.

Elizabeth Earin: It’s funny, I actually was just watching a video the other day, popped up in my Facebook feed and it was someone who had taken, I think it was American Vogue and maybe it was Italian Vogue and they had weighted them and then they had removed all the ads and then weighed them again and the difference, the advertising made up so much more than the content made up of that publication, but that’s one of the reason that people buy it. They want to know what the products are that they are advertising.

Steve Robinson: To some extent it becomes a form of education, right?

Elizabeth Earin: Definitely. If you don’t know that something is out there then you don’t know seek it out and so not only does it become an awareness tool but it also becomes a way to educate the consumer and let them know not only what is this product but what can it do and why is it important.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. And makes you worry about all kinds of things you didn’t worry about before you saw the ad that told you that you needed to worry about this, right?

Elizabeth Earin: Exactly, yes, yes.

Steve Robinson: To that extent it’s also a form of entertainment, I think Superbowl ads are the prime example of this, right?

Elizabeth Earin: And these are the ones that I find myself being drawn to the most of those, the entertaining ones, but when we are sitting around the water cooler and we are talking about the latest Geiko ad which we are going to talk about this later but these are personally my favorites, these are the ones that again people may not necessarily be able to recall that first or second time they watch it what the brand is but it’s so compelling that they actually stop fast forwarding through commercials because they love the ads so much, or they run in from doing laundry in the other room because they want to see their favorite ad on TV.

Steve Robinson: And then I think there is a component of this also where we as consumers understand that it’s somewhat of a form of payment, so if you are listening to a podcast and they break for a sponsor that’s how you are paying for that content as you are in theory listening to those sponsorships. If you are watching television, the commercials come as part of how you are paying for the television ad and it’s this, when the value I think is congruent – of the content is congruent with the friction of the advertising meaning if it’s highly entertaining then there is no friction there, if it’s highly informative then there is no friction there, and when it’s mildly entertaining or mildly informative then there is friction. When the friction is equal to the content, then we feel like it’s justified and we are just paying for our experience.

Elizabeth Earin: I think that’s a great point and I think one other area where we help to reduce the friction when we are watching those ads and what’s that point between being annoyed and being entertained or seeking it out, it has to do with making sure that the consumer’s needs are aligned with that message, not only their needs but where they are in that buyer’s journey and when we can reach out to them and really give them a message that they are not only open to but want to hear then it’s welcome and then that way it doesn’t come off this being as this annoying advertising that they hate.

Steve Robinson: I mean the holidays weren’t that long ago, but I know that for me we had some white elephant gift exchangers that we had to plan for, and so those as seen on TV ads are just perfect and I was paying a lot more attention to those and enjoying them a lot more while I was thinking about would this be a good white elephant gift and at the same time, a Geico commercial is entertaining regardless of whether I am in the market for car insurance, so it works out really well.

Elizabeth Earin: And here is the difference between Steve and I, Steve’s white elephant gifts were as seen as on TV products and my entire stocking was as seen on TV products. So, I don’t know what that says about me and my family, I am not sure.

Steve Robinson: So, from the consumer’s perspective we are looking for information informative, we are looking for entertainment value, we are looking for this to be aligned with where we are in our buyers journey which obviously broadcast that’s hard to hit everyone at the right time or all the time but it has to be close, and if those three things are there, then we are largely satisfied, but from a marketer’s perspective what is the marketer trying to get out of this advertising?

Elizabeth Earin: It’s funny because at the end of the day we are trying to accomplish the same thing. The marketer wants to sell the product and the consumer wants to buy the product but the means of getting there are different. When we look at it from the marketer’s perspective it’s all about the marketer, it’s all about the brand and I think that’s where we started to see this breakdown sometimes, but the first thing that the marketer is looking to do is they want to make sure that they are increasing awareness, trust and/or perception of the brand, and so making sure that not only do consumers know about their product and know about their brand but to start to develop that relationship so that they are able to recognize them when they are out and about shopping, it’s the brand that comes top of mind and it’s a brand that they trust and want to choose over everything else that’s on the shelf.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. And once they have accomplished that or in addition to accomplishing that, the marketer wants to drive demand. I mean if you think about it, earliest advertising was really focused on driving this demand, 9 in 10 doctors say that smoking is good for you, that kind of like why you should buy this product type of advertising.

Elizabeth Earin: Either way when we are talking about this it’s not about the consumer so much, it’s about to make money and that’s where I think that dissonance lies, and where we start to see some issues when it comes to whether advertising is being received and is effective.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. If you are getting in my way as a consumer just to splash your logo in front of me, that’s not – that’s serving you and not serving me. If you are just entertaining me but I don’t remember who your brand is either consciously or subconsciously then that’s serving me but that’s not serving you and you see a lot of ads that fall on one of those two areas today.

Elizabeth Earin: And this is where I think so many people have that perception of advertising is bad, that they don’t like advertising is because we haven’t been able to bridge this gap and again it doesn’t necessarily make sense because at the end of the day our end results are aligned. As a marketer, I want to sell a product and as a consumer you want to buy that product, but our steps that we take to get there are very different and our inability to make that connection at that level is I think what comes down to making advertising so hated by consumers.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. We are seeing more and more studies coming out these days that prove that advertising has clearly crossed some sort of threshold and it is hated by our audiences. I think there is a study from Pew that said that the only group that was hated worse than advertisers were online hackers and criminals.

Elizabeth Earin: That makes you feel great as a marketer, I am sure.

Steve Robinson: Right up there with the hackers.

Elizabeth Earin: And I think when you take a look, especially ad blocking is huge and everyone is talking about it right now. Similar study came out and said that 28% of American internet users are actually taking steps to hide specifically from advertisers and so when you start to think about that, you think about the technologies that make it available for them to hide from us. This is a big problem for marketers.

Steve Robinson: There aren’t just studies though that are showing that we are hated as marketers, there are studies showing why, why advertising is hated and what are some of those stats?

Elizabeth Earin: So according to HubSpot’s Ad Block Plus Research Study, 64% of consumers say ads today are annoying or intrusive. I think I would probably agree with that statement.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. But the same study also found out that 68% of people don’t mind seeing ads if they are actually targeted correctly, if they are actually not annoying and they are relevant to that consumer at that time.

Elizabeth Earin: That’s so interesting to me that 68% of people don’t mind seeing ads as long as they are not annoying. What makes an ad annoying?

Steve Robinson: I think there are a number of things. I think it’s getting worse but one of the keys here is it’s become a lot less predictable, right? It’s popping up in our way at times that we don’t necessarily expect.

Elizabeth Earin: And not only is it popping up in a way we don’t know what to expect but we don’t know what the message is going to say and I think that’s where it starts to get little confusing and that’s where something may catch your eye and you start to watch it and then you are like, wait, that’s not what I thought it was going to be or that doesn’t apply to me at all. I just wasted 15, 20, 30 seconds of my time watching this and I think that’s where that annoyance starts to come in.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. It’s not like it used to be where you would open up a magazine and you expect there to be ads there because it’s the magazine, the ads are always in roughly the same places they were at the last magazine you got. You are watching television, you have got 30–second commercial breaks that occur, or 2 minute commercial breaks of 30 second spots that occur at relatively predictable times throughout the show. Today you are browsing the internet, you go to click on what you think is a YouTube video and next thing you know, you are watching some preroll for something that you have no interest in or you are trying to read an article and this overlay comes up and completely prevents you from being able to get to the article until you wait for the countdown to go through and look at something that has nothing to do with the article. It’s not where and when you expect it, and it’s getting in the way of what it is that you want to do and I think that’s – really it comes down to sort of a downward spiral in advertising where consumers are inundated with this messaging and then marketers are trying to compensate by impeding the consumer to get this messaging more in front of them, and so as marketers and publishers do that and they put these pop-ups and these other mechanisms in there, then the data proves, hey, that’s more effective, because you are now actually successfully competing some of the banner blindness and this over inundation with messaging but then the problem is that just turns consumers off even more to the advertising and so it becomes this constant game of cat and mouse and this constant downward spiral where advertising is getting worse and more intrusive, consumers are running away from it more and ignoring more of it and thus to make it effective we have to make it worse and more intrusive.

Steve Robinson: And the thing is you said it gets in your way but it’s actually stopped me from doing what I wanted to do. We were talking about this other day, we were on a website and the ads were just so pervasive that I gave up. I wanted to read the article but it wasn’t worth. The pops up and music playing in the background and all of the different things that were going on, I think it will be interesting to see kind of at what point publishers start sort of listening to this because yes, they are seeing these clicks and they are getting the advertising revenue but if readership starts going down because of these intrusive ads, what’s going to be that tipping point?

Steve Robinson: I am at the point where I almost – I shouldn’t say almost, I am planning to investigate some ad blocking technology, not because I don’t want to see ads, but because I can’t get some websites to load on my browser anymore. When I go to click on a link, all of a sudden, it sits there and ticks and tries to load, and tries to load and tries to load. And I watch Ghostery and it’s got 28 pieces of advertising technology that it’s loaded. Now, I am not blocking any of it yet because I am more or less just interested in what’s out there, but it’s clogging up the pipes.

Elizabeth Earin: It’s a conundrum, it’s funny, because I think this is a good time to transition into why it’s so important for marketers to understand but in our house we are considering getting rid of our expensive direct TV and going to Hulu, really the way that we consume TV, it doesn’t make sense to be paying as much as we are for this satellite TV and so we are talking about going to Hulu. When I am looking at my options and I can pay to not have any advertising at all, and part of me is like, that sounds awesome, but then the marketer in me is like, I feel like I am not being true to my calling. I feel like I am not going to be able to stay up to date if I am not watching any ads at all and it’s funny because I was actually talking to our sales coordinator for Brilliant Metrics the other day and I had asked her, hey, out of curiosity, what’s your favorite commercial? And she is like, oh, I don’t watch commercials. And I am like, what do you mean, and she is like, I don’t watch commercials, I watch Netflix, I watch Amazon, we have Hulu, I don’t watch commercials at all anymore, and I am like what about in the car? What about a radio commercial? Oh! yeah, no, I listen to Pandora and I paid to not have any commercials and this is why I think it so important for marketers to really understand that this is a problem we need to address because if we are not delivering relevant and compelling messaging that resonates with consumers they are going to tune us out. Either mentally tune us out or because of the advent of new technologies physically make it, so that they don’t have to actually come in contact with any of our advertising at any point, and if that happens we lose the opportunity to connect with them. I mean we don’t even get that chance to do it in the first place.

Steve Robinson: And from a technology standpoint it’s particularly bad because we are entering an era where traditional media is dying and being replaced with digital and it’s pretty hard to opt out of an ad in a magazine or a newspaper but guess what, that’s not really where the eyeballs are anymore and then on top of that, the benefits of digital advertising, the ability to target an individual and get that content to be relevant to them, is dependent on that same technology that people are starting to block. So we are taking away our exit from this downward spiral the more and more we don’t take advantage of the capabilities of these platforms to actually do a better job as marketers.

Elizabeth Earin: So, before we head to the charity break, let’s real fast run through some of these technology advancements that are making it easier and easier for consumers to opt out of advertising because I think it’s important to understand kind of where we stand in that landscape and then after the break we will come back and talk about how we can specifically combat that.

Steve Robinson: I think first and foremost at the front of this is, at least on the video side of things is the ability to pay for an ad free experience and we see this with Netflix, with Hulu, with Pandora and even YouTube now, you can pay for this ad free experience because the publishers on those services were not getting the revenue through the advertising anyway, so they are trying to generate revenue through other means and this seems to be a growing trend.

Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, and it’s interesting because American adults are watching more and more TV today than they ever have. They are up to five hours on average per day up from it was only four hours in 2010, so an additional whole hour in a what a six/seven-year time span, but what’s interesting about that is because of this technology it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are seeing more ads, in fact they would probably make the guess that they are seeing less.

Steve Robinson: Yeah, the last bash and I think at this point is live sports as the various MOB and NFL and what not packages have not really been selling in an ad free environment in anyway that has any uptake but that’s just a mater of time for that shoe to drop.

Elizabeth Earin: What about print?

Steve Robinson: So on the print side, print is basically in its slow demise, I think there will always be a niche print industry, but its hay day is long past, and so we are looking at readership numbers that have declined from 62% in 2011 down to 51% in 2016 and that number just continues to drop.

Elizabeth Earin: It’s funny, in our household we get the newspaper but Sunday is really the only day that we sit down and actually read it, and so it’s easier for me to look up and find that breaking news on my iPad than it is to go through the newspaper trying to find a story.

Steve Robinson: I just subscribed to a number of magazines, print-wise because I thought that maybe I would enjoy them more because I do enjoy the print version more, but now they just seem to collect dust because it’s never convenient for me to pull them out and read them, whereas it’s always convenient for me to pull out my phone and read news off of that.

Elizabeth Earin: Well, you always have it with you, that’s the thing, is when I have 10 extra minutes, I am sitting at the DMV, I don’t have my newspaper with me or my magazine with me, and that’s interesting because it’s changed. I used to carry that before I had my phone, but now I just have nice tiny little device, it’s easy to carry. I think radio you talked about it but satellite radio is offering commercial free programming and more and more people are taking advantage of that.

Steve Robinson: That’s if they aren’t connecting their phone as soon as they get in the car and then if they are doing that then they are listening to Spotify, Pandora, the music that’s already loaded on their phone or they are listening to podcasts, there is no reason to go out and people want an experience that’s on demand that is what they want to listen to at that time and if they can get that over having to listen to whatever the station happens to be pumping out, oftentimes they will even if it loses some of that discovery component.

Elizabeth Earin: And then finally digital. We talked about this earlier. It’s such a great way to reach people and reach people at scale but ad blocking technology is through the roof and global use of ad blockers in general has been growing. In fact it’s up by 41%. It’s getting easier and easier to do, I mean you mentioned earlier in the podcast that you are thinking about implementing some ad blocking tech.

Steve Robinson: I know and as an advertising professional that just seems evil, right? As a marketing professional to go through ad blocking technology seems evil but the fact of the matter is that I think we are doing it wrong enough that even we are turning ourselves off.

Elizabeth Earin: So, how do we solve this problem?

Steve Robinson: Well I think it’s coming back to producing advertising that people actually appreciate that serves the audience in addition to serving the marketer.

Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, I think most of us if not all of us have at least one ad out there we love, I know and I mentioned this earlier. It’s the type of ad that when you are out of the room doing laundry or you have popped something in the microwave if you come running back in the room to listen to it, or you actively seek it out. I have one for me, it’s back from, gosh, 2000s, early 2000s probably when I lived in Southern California in Big Bear Mountain and I am going to link to it because seriously I love this commercial so much, every time I listen to it, it makes me laugh. When I was talking to our sales coordinator the other day and I mentioned to her that we were having this advertising conversation I literally sought out this ad and it took me like probably 7 minutes, 10 minutes to find it and made her listen to it. She didn’t think it was funny as I did but I literally was tears were coming down my face laughing at this ad. So you’ll have to listen to this and let me know if you think it’s just funny but there are ads out there that resonate with us, that I am remembering what 10-12 years later because it impacted me so much.

Steve Robinson: Now, I will admit I had a harder time recalling some of these commercials because I am among those people that I don’t really see television commercials. I never listen to the radio anymore. I am always listening to podcasts in the car or children’s music on Pandora, so I am not getting these ads and quite frankly the quality of them has dropped substantially in the last few years, so they are not hooking me, but I will say there are some ads that I do remember that do add value to my world and so in my case it’s some of these sponsorship reads that come up in some of the podcasts I listen to. So, you are going to hear how geeky I am a little bit here, but I listened to a podcast called the Accidental Tech Podcast and one of their sponsors was the card game, Cards Against Humanity and for a whole year, they bought I think biweekly or at least once a month a sponsorship read with this podcast and instead of having them read an ad they simply had one of the podcast’s hosts review a toaster oven and this seems to make no sense but what they did is they totally understood the actual podcast they were advertising on and one of the hosts had another podcast called Hypercritical where he would criticize the heck out of all kinds of stuff, and so they had him review these toaster ovens and it was hilarious to listen to him get all critical about the functionally of a toaster oven and you hear the same thing on some of Gimlet’s podcast sponsors, in particular when they do a MailChimp read, they are often talking about some really screwy newsletter type thing that they sent out using the MailChimp tool and how funny it was and how crazy it was. So, I love those ads where they are taking advantage of the actual environment, they are becoming native almost instead of being blatant just advertising and I remember the sponsors that way.

Elizabeth Earin: For you its native and it really appeals to you, it’s something that is obviously resonating with the audience.

Steve Robinson: Exactly, exactly. It’s the fact that it’s not just an ad read, it’s part of the experience and it becomes enjoyable for that reason.

Elizabeth Earin: I love that “part of the experience” and that is exactly what it is that we want to achieve and when we come back from the charity break we are going to talk about how we do that.

Steve Robinson: Yep, so let’s go help some people.

Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor, and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week we are asking that you make a donation to the ALS Association. The ALS Association is leading the fight to treat and care ALS through global research and nation wide advocacy, while also empowering people with Lou Gehrig’s disease and their families to live fuller lives by providing them with compassionate care and support. Learn more at als.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the share a cause button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.

Steve Robinson: And we are back. So, before the break we talked about this increasing divide between marketers and advertisers and the consumers that we are all trying to reach. We talked about how evil advertising is and how we are getting to the breaking point where even I am attempting to look for some ad blocking technology, and we talked a little bit about what can make an ad good, but let’s dive into that a little bit more and make this actionable. How do we actually create some of this advertising that is part of the experience that is valuable?

Elizabeth Earin: Well, I think first and foremost the advertising has to provide utility that can’t be found elsewhere.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. And along those lines it can’t be competing with the same media experience that’s a part of it, it has to be fluid and part of that media experience and add to it and providing utility I think is the key component of that. I think the greatest, the best counterexample is some of the pop-ups and the pre-roll that gets in the way where I am trying to accomplishing task A and you are throwing advertising B in my way like speed bumps.

Elizabeth Earin: And I think finally when we talk about native and sponsorships those can add value in a way that consumers actually appreciate and lift the brand while achieving our marketing objectives. Again to Steve’s example, if we are providing a relevant experience on the right channel to the right audience then it’s something that they actually find value and they remember and it’s going to give that positive experience that marketers are looking for.

Steve Robinson: I know that even in my Facebook feed sometimes things pop up that are actually valuable and very relevant to me professionally or personally because they have done a really good job at doing their homework and how they are targeting that media.

Elizabeth Earin: And so I think this is kind of where we have our bit tie back into Iterative Marketing and how Iterative Marketing can help us to accomplish this and what you are just talking about right there was I think is the first example and that’s segmentation.

Steve Robinson: Yeah. If can’t personalize things down to an individual which the technology really isn’t there to do yet in advertising, the key is putting people on the right buckets or the right boxes and I think there is two key sort of axes that you can do this and one of them is along that person’s interest or need. So, if you are targeting an advertisement that matches that person’s interest or need then it’s going to provide some value or utility to them and so if it’s B2B it might be relevant to their industry or their market segment. If this is B2C, the particular product category, not advertising diapers to people who don’t have kids, that sort of alignment there.

Elizabeth Earin: And I think the second way that we can do that is through persona targeting and we have talked about this before but again it’s that psychographic profile of the customer and it gives us insight into how they perceive the world and make decisions, and that information allows us to present our message in the right way and so think about it like this, if you are Ford, you have got such a wide range of people that you are trying to reach with your product. Well, you are not going to talk to a 35-year-old mom of two the same way that you are going to talk to a 25-year-old. They are going after different products and the messaging that’s going to resonate with them is going to be different and that’s where persona’s really help us tap into those insights that help us to make sure that the message we are creating is resonating with them.

Steve Robinson: Absolutely, absolutely. In order to do this effectively though you have to do so some data mining, you have to have the data in order to be able to personalize that experience and create that highly relevant advertising and so this means using first party data, it means building rich pools of social IDs or cookies that you can use to find people that match those psychographic profiles, to find people who align with your products and services so that you aren’t marketing diapers to the wrong person, so that you aren’t trying to give that family of six an F150, right? So, it’s a matter of having the data at your disposal.

Elizabeth Earin: And then finally it’s about delivering the content at the right time and at the right place.

Steve Robinson: This gets into that journey state targeting that we ran probably way too many episodes on, but I think its key because you want to be able to do two different things. First, you want to have the opportunity to build affinity and trust and some perception of your brand before you start trying hack or sell something, right? And then second, you want to make sure that you are providing content that’s relevant for each journey states, you want to make the majority of the content to the best of your ability targeted for the journey state that you believe that consumer to be in while giving them some doorways or some bridge content to move them – to allow them to move themselves into another journey state. So coming back to ‘See’, ‘Think’, if somebody you think is in ‘See’, you give them mostly ‘See’ content, you make them laugh, you provide them utility while giving them some doorways to walk into some of that ‘Think’ state content.

Elizabeth Earin: Now journey state targeting helps with that delivering the right message at the right time in the right place but channels also play an important role and one thing to keep in mind that the majority of traditional media is unable to differentiate or personalize, and so when we are talking about some of the traditional media like print and like TV advertising.

Steve Robinson: Outdoor.

Elizabeth Earin: Outdoor, thank you, that’s great for brand and ‘See’ state targeting where you are reaching that broad audience and again the goal is to build an affinity, build an awareness for your brand and then as you kind of move through that journey state, you use channels that allow you to have a higher level of personalization, so you are looking at programmatic, you are looking at social advertising that has the ability to segment that audience based on your personas or based on other factors that you have selected and really target the consumer based on where their interest lies.

Steve Robinson: So to sum up here because we had a pretty long and rambling show here today, people don’t necessarily hate advertising, again that’s 64% that really thinks that advertising is awful, there is 68% that actually thinks it’s okay if it’s highly relevant to them. So, the key is just getting it out people’s way.

Elizabeth Earin: And so, if we create compelling advertising that provides the utility that can’t be found anywhere else, that complements the media experience that they are interacting with at that exact point in time and delivers the right message to the right person at the right time, then we have fulfilled the needs and goals of that 68% who are actually wanting and seeking out advertising that’s compelling and relevant to them.

Steve Robinson: The key is doing your homework, making sure that you have your segmentation strategy, making sure that you have the technology setup to actually be able to direct advertising correctly and then taking advantage of that data and getting people the right content at the right time, and in theory they will be happier with it. So, I want to thank everybody for again making time for us this week. If you haven’t already please pop out to iTunes and give us a quick review, if we see your review out there we will give you a shout-out on the podcast and in the meantime onward and upward.

Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you will also find the Iterative Marketing blog in our community LinkedIn group where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter, our username is @iter8ive or email us at [email protected]. The Iterative Marketing podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by Seastock Audio music production and sound design. You can check them out at Seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week, until then onward and upward.