Hell freezing, dead bodies and metaphors about fat and slim peppered the comments I received. A minority felt ambivalent about the idea and said it was inevitable.

What prompted this little opinion-feeler was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) a few days ago. According to the Journal, advertising in digital books is inevitable: on the one hand, pressures are constant on publishers to increase revenues; and on the other hand, our constant exposure to marketing and brand messaging in digital content is something we’re becoming more accustomed to.

If you think this too radical a notion, consider the overwhelming product placement in movies, music videos and video games, as the Journal points out. Marketing and brand messaging surrounds us, constantly.

The Journal’s editorial suggests that including advertising in digital books will be hugely disruptive to a publishing industry that’s been knocked sideways by technological changes and the rapid rise of digital content to be consumed on devices like the  Kindle and the  iPad that some argue may kill quality content.

[...] Especially in light of the rush to e-books, the industry faces a troubling future. In the first place, overall sales have been stagnant or decreasing for over a decade, even as more books are published every year. Production costs are higher than ever now that publishers must produce both physical and digital editions. Above all, pricing remains a challenge: No matter what the split between publisher and retailer, at $9.99 a digital book is far less profitable than its hardcover cousin priced at $25.

Note that the Journal’s editorial is about digital books, not traditional printed ones. So-called  e-books, whatever you want to call them. So why the image above, complete with ad, from a very traditional book, you may wonder?

That image – an ad for  Kent cigarettes in a 1972 science-fiction paperback by  A. E. van Vogt – is from Smoke This Book, an essay in the New York Times published in 2007 that looked at tobacco-company advertising in paperback books in America in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

While it’s hardly likely that advertising cigarettes is what you’ll see in the future, I think it’s inevitable that advertising may well appear in traditional printed books as well. After all, it’s not a new concept by any means.

Two simple possibilities spring to mind: printed books that carry advertising and that cost less; and printed books with no advertising that cost more. In fact, that’s a point the Journal makes very clearly.

[...] What would the world look like with ads in books? For consumers, the free samples of digital books now available would surely include ads. Because not every consumer who reads a sample chapter will buy the book, it’s reasonable for the publisher to extract some additional value. Seeing ads in the sample may also convince a reader to pay for a premium, non-ad version of the full-length book. The old market segmentation of paperbacks and hardcovers will be replaced by ad-supported or ad-free books.

Many questions need answers. What kind of ads? How will they appear?  Who will create them? What about audio books – how might advertising work in them?

[...] Advertising in books will introduce a whole new set of relationships into the publishing ecosystem. Ad agencies will be involved in creating a standard form for digital ads. Technology companies will be crucial to implementation. A new set of contracts will have to be created to manage these new costs, revenue sources and control rights.

Just like the mainstream media, the book publishing industry is trying to figure out a viable and sustainable business model that means a continuation of that publishing business. It will evolve, to be sure, but if someone gets it right, advertising, books and readers can surely live together.

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Called ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments), it’s a free tool that measures the impact to changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. The tool has just been rolled out to all U.S. advertisers after a successful 2 month beta trial.

Here is how Google explains the tools use:

With ACE, experimental campaigns run side-by-side with the original campaign in a simultaneous split test. This approach lets you run shorter tests that start and stop whenever you like, with less concern about your results being affected by seasonality or other factors. You get more precise impact estimates and more chances throughout the year to test and improve performance.

Google says that fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and even changes in the weather can complicate things if you are evaluating your campaign yourself.

The video below, provided by Google, explains the tool in more detail.

Advertisers will automatically see the ACE tool under Campaign Settings in their AdWords account. Google advises non-US advertisers to stay tuned as the tool will be rolled out to other countries very soon.

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But that natural passion can easily get buried under layers of indiscernible corporate fiat. So how do you help your team break free of the stultifying grind that makes the average enterprise run? How do you make sure they don’t just feel like a cog in the wheel mindlessly hewing to corporate policy and filling spreadsheets all day?

I sat down with Daniel Burstein, the Editor of MarketingExperiments, for an interview about the role and importance of heart and passion in sales, marketing, social media, and content marketing. And, well, inspiring passion in a sales and marketing team is one of my passions. So read the below interview, which initially appeared on the MarketingExperiments blog, and then let me know how you share that drive with your team, or how your leaders do (or do not) keep you fired up about your mission…

Daniel Burstein: “Passion” and “heart.” Those aren’t words I often hear associated with “job,” at least not “marketing job.” How do you instill passion in a company, in a marketing department?

Brian Carroll: The most important thing is clarity about your values and vision. Clarity trumps persuasion. Do people understand what your company stands for? What difference do they make? And how do they fit into the big picture? How are they integral parts in making that difference?

Unless the people who do your marketing, advertising, sales and public relations are passionate about their roles, it’s nearly impossible for them to acquire and grow customer relationships.

DB: What role does fear play in a passionate company?

BC: Some people are motivated by the things they don’t want to have happen – lack of job, loss of lifestyle, family stress. When that’s the primary thing that drives you, that is a bad thing.

But fear can play an important role. Knowing that revenue is needed when people are invested in your company, for example, certainly helps drive people. As long as there is transparency and clarity around goals and culture, fear can be a positive motivator.

For example, we had someone who was written up and was quickly moving down the path to getting fired. That fear helped send him down a positive path of transformation, and two years later that person won the award for being the most valuable employee in our company.

Of course, prolonged fear is bad. It means something is wrong. And you must balance fear as a motivator with reward.

DB: How do you do that?

BC: It comes down to two things – the organization and the individual.

As individuals, we may have all the potential in the world, but it doesn’t matter if we’re not willing to do the difficult, mundane, repetitive things that are essential to success. Only then can we focus on the fun, enlightening things that we really have a passion for. These things aren’t going to make the impact they could without doing our homework, getting those mundane yet essential tasks done right.

That’s where the heart comes into play. If someone loses heart and only has fear as a motivator, they are going to do just enough to get along at this particular moment.

Every marketer has a huge opportunity in the company they work for. They have the chance to do things differently, look outside themselves and do something that’s never been done to grow and acquire customers. To be that representative presentation to the world about what their company is, what it stands for, and why it matters.

But you need passion for that. And if you don’t have it, you may need to manage up. Seek out your leaders and pull that clarity of purpose out of them. Find out what’s important to them, what their goals are, and figure out how it can mesh with what matters to you.

DB: I imagine that clarity can be easier to obtain in a sales organization if you’re, say, a quota-carrying rep or a sales leader with a specific budget to make. But marketing, advertising, these disciplines can be a little more fuzzy. At MarketingExperiments, one way we advise marketers to confront this challenge is with testing, which offers verifiable proof of impact to the bottom line. What else can marketers do?

BC: Testing is a great example, especially because it often shows improvement, that you’re making things better.

I think the metrics that you use are also important. In B2B, our goal is to help the sales team sell. Marketing can be run like sales to measure leads generated and track our pipeline contribution with lead-to-pipeline conversion rates.

B2C marketers can have an even easier time proving their value. It is often a more transactional sale; there is not a series of steps between the marketer and the purchase. Whether it’s ecommerce, or bar codes at a bricks and mortar retailer, or a service, the buying process is simpler. So you can usually look at metrics beyond just “activity” (like traffic) to key numbers like expense-to-revenue and time-to-revenue ratios.

Now I’m not trying to dismiss brand, but it helps to have more passion for what you do when you get a clear understanding, and provide key business leaders a clear understanding, of the contribution you’re making.

Of course, this isn’t news. It’s a constant struggle in marketing to be seen as a revenue center, not just an expense. But, remember, the onus lies on you to make that happen. Executives now often manage by spreadsheet out of necessity. So make sure you can prove contribution to revenue and sales so they (and you) understand the real value you’re bringing with hard metrics…especially in a down economy.

DB: So part of establishing a culture of passion is having clarity around hard performance targets, but not everything is revenue driven.

BC: That’s true. And there’s more to a job than just the paycheck. At InTouch, we give awards as well. Just the recognition from peers and leaders can make a big difference to feeling appreciated and feeling like you make a difference.

We have awards like Nurturer of the Month, Specialist of the Month, the Executive Mission Award, and awards that employees can give to each other. We identify and highlight what contributions lead to success based on our mission and our promise to our clients.

From an employee standpoint, they get a clear scorecard of what success looks like. When someone’s doing a good job, they need to be recognized. In some companies that have a fear-based culture, managing is almost like a game of Whack-a-Mole – the manager is just trying to catch people doing something wrong.

In addition, employees can give awards to each other, to build up camaraderie and teamwork.

At the heart of this, everybody wants to know “I am making a difference…my contribution matters.” That’s the whole point.

DB: We’ve focused on success, but what about a culture of failure? How do you build a system where failure is OK? As Thomas Edison once said, “Why, I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In marketing, and really any discipline that thrives on motivation, if you’re going to truly drive success you have to stick your neck out there and take a chance.

BC: Absolutely. Everyone should stretch. And when you do that, mistakes will be made.

So you need to balance things. You want everyone asking “What can I do to improve this?” but you can’t abandon the tried and true tactics that work.

I like to use the analogy of a high-quality, well-balanced mutual fund. A good mutual fund seeks to balance high risk with steady performance. Generally speaking, you can stretch and take some risks, but if you put all your eggs in that basket, and then something bad happens, you’re really in trouble.

As marketers, let’s look at our entire portfolio and categorize what is high risk versus what is relatively safe on the path to making things better. Based on that, you’ll know just how much you can let your team take a chance in certain areas, while ensuring you have a reliable base of execution that is always there for you.

Another thing, that you mentioned earlier, is to test. That way, you learn what works and what doesn’t before betting a sizable chunk of your marketing budget on it.

DB: And, of course, we’re not just marketers. We’re people, too. How do you bring, and perhaps channel, personal passions in the workplace? What about cause-related marketing?

BC: People need to know, at the end of the day, that what they’re contributing to does other kinds of good for their community or for society at large. And there are a number of big brands and small companies who get that, where it’s not just about profit.

The workforce has changed, and people under 45 or so need to know that what they’re doing is making an impact. It’s not all about “me.”

So it’s important to connect them with the difference they make. And that isn’t just at a company-wide level, it’s at an individual level as well, allocating funds or time. For example, lawyers who do pro bono work or sponsoring an employee in a cancer walk.

Companies need to welcome that and give permission to that. If you sponsor something as a company, great. But it’s better to have the company as well as employees doing things, so you empower people on a collective and individual basis. I’m all for profit, but the whole point is to make a difference.

DB: Once you have a passionate marketing department and a passionate workforce, social media and content marketing seem like great ways to channel that passion.

BC: And this is a place where small companies often have a huge advantage. They don’t need to have the established rules of a big, publicly traded company has or a company in a heavily regulated industry like health care or telecommunications. In any company, there are some things that people can’t say, but in general smaller groups can be more open and transparent.

But I don’t want to discourage the big companies. In my book, I took a look at Sun Microsystems before it was acquired by Oracle. It had about 2,500 blogs from employees, including Jonathan Schwartz (the President and CEO at the time).

Whether large or small, most companies have a few passionate employee advocates using social media. But, especially in large companies, there is often an important element that is missing. Individuals want to know, “What can I do to make a difference using social media?”

The answer is simple – be yourself. Share your individual passions. Don’t make it just another corporate mouthpiece. Social media should be about who you are as much as about the company or brand you work for. Distinction is everything.

Because, I’ve got news for you, even in a large company “you’re already self employed.” Don’t just take it from me, that is a direct quote from Seth Godin.

DB: How does thinking of myself as self-employed affect how I use social media and content marketing?

BC: My point is, every marketer has a personal brand in addition to your company’s brand. Don’t just look at yourself as some cog in a big company.

Now don’t go too far. We all know the story of someone who lost his job by saying the wrong thing on social media. And your boss and peers are listening…or will be soon. So pretend your boss is standing next to you when you’re typing.

Thanks to the prevalence of the Internet in general and social media in particular, every brand, both personal and corporate is held accountable for all of our actions. So in some ways, reputation has become more important than brand. Customers and employers will find out about you.

So put yourself out there. Share your heart and passion and the greatness of what you have to offer. But be transparent. After all, the World (Wide Web) is watching.

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“Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left.”

Unfortunately there are entire categories of dishonest advertising and marketing today that are actively being unleashed upon consumers and plaguing the industries that they operate within. In many cases, the backlash against reputable companies is in reaction to the efforts of these bad seeds. Here are a few examples:

1. Spam. Top of the list has to be spam of all sorts, which descends on people’s personal and professional email addresses and causes major credibility problems for the entire field of email marketing.
2. Miracle Cures. While the FDA mandates strict rules for reputable pharmaceutical organizations promoting real products that can make an impact in people’s lives, miracle cures like Trigosamine http://www.trigosamine.com/ buy full page ads in the NY Times claiming 100% efficacy in clinical trials (no exaggeration) and promise to reinvent your life … all without needing any approval from anyone at all. It is no wonder the pharma industry has a trust problem.
3. Credit/Financial Offers. From sneaky credit reporting offers signing you up unintentionally for useless “monitoring” to pre-approved credit offers that many blame at least in part for the recent financial crisis, there are no shortage of dishonest tricks when it comes to the unscrupulous within the financial industry.

Though I wish David Ogilvy were right about political advertising being the only dishonest form left,  clearly there are others. If there were a cause the marketing industry would do well to take up, it would be to fight these forms of marketing anywhere they appear. As a marketer, don’t work on them. As a publisher, don’t accept ads from them … and as a consumer, don’t give them any attention. Maybe we can still make Ogilvy right again.

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However, most of the foursquare offers I’ve seen aren’t all that special. Take this offer I just saw from our local Starbucks.

If you’re not a foursquare user, the one thing you need to know is that any location on foursquare can have one (and only one) mayor. The mayor is basically the person who checks in the most. If there’s more to the algorithm than that, foursquare isn’t telling.

This offer provides $1 off a frappuccino (normally $3.50 – $4.50) to the mayor of the Starbucks at 594 Congress St. in Portland, Maine. That’s not a bad deal, but it’s only for the mayor.

Since Starbucks is a popular spot, and has a lot of wired patrons, there’s a big difficulty in unseating the current mayor. In fact, the current mayor may be a daily customer, basically meaning you’ll never get your $1 discount, or you’ll spend a few hundred dollars getting it, and certainly you won’t get it by 6/28 when the offer expires.

What this Starbucks should do instead is offer $1 off to everyone who checks in and shows the barista that they’ve checked in. That way you’ll encourage a whole new group of caffeine-deprived foursquare users to come into your shop. In addition, since foursquare users often sync their foursquare profiles to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, that check in is promoted to all their friends and followers.

In fact, how about tweaking the offer to anyone who checks in and says they’re getting $1 off a frappuccino at the Congress St. Starbucks by checking in on foursquare will receive the discount. Now you’re getting people to do your promoting for you.

If you have a physical retail spot that requires foot traffic, advertising on foursquare can be a powerful tool. However, if you make it too difficult for your customers to earn that reward you’ll just be adding to their frustrations, and getting them to go over to Bard Coffee instead, a much cooler, locally owned coffee shop.

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Analyze Competition allows advertisers to measure how their campaign performs against their competition. It measures your performance over the past two weeks. Then, using categories stemming from your products or services keywords it then gives you perspective on how your competitors are doing in those same categories. For each category, users will see a bar graph highlighting the advertiser’s performance compared to the performance of its competitors.

The video below gives a thorough overview of the new feature.

Google’s Emily Williams explains the depth of the data available:

When you hover over the data in the ‘Competitive Range’ column, you’ll be able to see more details such as the exact size of your competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

Emily has also outlined 3 suggestions on how to use this data to your advantage:

• Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account.

• Consider your advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to you.

• If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.

At this stage, the “Analyze Competition” feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but Google says it will expand availability in the near future.

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This best practice starts when creating your ad groups, I personally prefer to create individual ad groups for each match type i.e. one for exact, one for phrase and one for broad. By doing this you can create ads that match up well with the search queries entered by the searcher.

With the Exact match ad group, you have the ability to get very targeted with your ad text and can utilize the keywords or key phrases within the ad text copy. This will provide the most consistency and match to the searchers query. The phrase match ad group while still quite targeted, you may have to be less granular with your ad text.

The area that most PPC Account Managers or small businesses have problems with is creating relevant text ads that match up with the search queries that Google matches up to broad match keywords. Google has been known to match up some quite irrelevant queries. One of my clients was having their Municipal Bond keyword matched to titles of James Bonds movies.

But with proper negatives in place, you still will have your text ads being matched up to a wide array of search queries. With this in mind, when creating text ads for your broad match ad group, you should create less granular, high level text ads that can be matched up with multiple queries. This will help you keep the QueryàText AdàLand Page Consistency
In place.

By keeping your ad groups smaller, with a smaller variation in keywords, you can still create ads that are relevant to the queries Google broad matches to your ads.

After creating a common message from the search query to the text ad the next is to continue to answer the searchers question on the landing page. Just sending a visitor to your home page and expecting them to find your product or service conversion page will likely result in extremely low conversion rates.

With a tightly structured account you can set your text ads or keywords to land at specific pages that are related and use the same wording as the text ads. If you have your ad groups set up by product type or service this should not be an issue. This consistency will provide the searcher with a feeling of finding a relevant page to their search. You can go about this by creating multiple landing pages that are very targeted to your product or services.

This common message throughout your advertising efforts should help you attract searchers that are ready to convert.

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One of the highlights of my trip was conducting a breakout session with my good friend and client Indra Gardiner (from Bailey Gardiner in San Diego), called “Digital & Dollars: Successfully Adding Social Media & Online Marketing to Your Agency Services Mix”

This session included much of what Indra and her partner Jon Bailey have been able to accomplish in the last two years, moving from a primarily traditional agency to a new media powerhouse. It’s a journey that’s similar to my own when I merged my digital agency (Mighty Interactive) to Off Madison Ave in 2005.

Here are the highlights:

A Colossal Opportunity

According to Forrester research, from 2009 – 2014, the average annual growth rate in digital marketing expenditures in the U.S. will range from 11% (the relatively mature email marketing), to 34% (social media). What other aspects of the marketing services business are likely to grow like that? Billboard? Direct mail? TV? Uhhh, no.

The Digital Ecosystem

There are four key planks to successfully offering online marketing services within your existing agency:

• Search Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Social Media
• Analytics and Reporting

Agencies can deliver real value to clients in each of these areas, and developing competencies is viable and achievable.

Note that I didn’t include Web design. While having some measure of Web design and programming capabilities is almost a requirement, being in the business of constructing Web sites and applications per se, is typically a losing proposition for most agencies that are not involved in that business at scale. The revenue stream is too intermittent, the employees too expensive, and the points of failure too numerous for most small agencies to successfully offer full-blown Web design services.

5 Key Success Factors

There are 5 critical components for agencies to successfully develop and sell online marketing capabilities:

• Broaden Your Horizons. Fundamentally, you need to think bigger about what it means to be an “agency”
• Sell Ingredients, Not Entrees. Digital marketing is not about being “agency of record” and doing everything for a particular client. It’s about building focused competencies that solve common client problems, and offering that specific service to a multitude of clients.
• Get Your Foot in the Door Selling One Service. This focus on specificity rather than generality applies to business development, too. Don’t show up saying “we want to be your agency.” Show up saying “we want to triple the profits you generate from your email program, and track every click and every dime to prove it.”
• Embrace Math. Online marketing success is more about science than art, and whomever keeps score eventually controls the budget. When I ran an agency, I put just as much stock in prospective employees’ Excel abilities as I did in their Word, Powerpoint, or Photoshop skills.
• Adjust Staffing and Timelines. Digital marketing isn’t about campaigns, it’s about waterfalls. You’re ALWAYS marketing. Every search. Every click. Every Tweet. They are all an opportunity to win or lose at the micro-transaction level. That requires a consistency of attention that differs from most traditional agency staffing patterns.

17 Services. Which Are You Providing

I see 17 online marketing services that small and medium agencies (especially PR-focused firms) could credibly offer clients, if they made the effort to build competency:

• Search Taxonomy Analysis
• Search Opportunity Audits
• Search Engine Optimization (not super duper hard core SEO, but intermediate level)
• Blogger Outreach
• Influencer Identification
• Word of Mouth Campaigns
• Online, Socially-Driven Campaigns & Contests
• Mobile Apps & Campaigns (may require a technology partner)
• Content Optimization & Strategy
• Video Content Creation
• Web Analytics & Testing
• Email Effectiveness Audits
• Social Anthropology (using things like Flowtown)
• Email Results Optimization
• Community Management
• Social CRM Plans
• Social Media Crisis Plans

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Rouslan Sabirzianov reported, “Online advertising expenditure has grown by 17% year on year to total $512.5 million in the first quarter of 2010, according to the IAB’s Online Advertising Expenditure Report.”  Which is of course a pretty significant amount.

What’s more, Sabirzianov also wrote there were “year on year increases for Classifieds at 16% growth, Search & Directories advertising up 18% and General Display up 15% on the corresponding period in 2009.”

So the industry didn’t collapse (or at least, if it did, it’s since recovered), and there’s no reason advertisers shouldn’t enjoy about as much job security and compensation as they did before the recession.

Advertisers just need to make sure that they don’t get left behind as everything returns to normal.  If nine out of ten businesses are increasing their advertising budgets, the one that holds back is likely to receive almost no attention from consumers.

According to a post on the Inside AdWords blog, “The new program provides agencies and their employees with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts.”

Then, “Google Certified Partners can opt in to Google Partner Search, an online, searchable directory that helps advertisers identify Certified Partners that meet their criteria.”  Which is in particular supposed to aid small and medium-sized advertisers who aren’t in the habit of employing ad agencies.

Obviously, people on both sides of the advertiser-ad agency divide should familiarize themselves with the new arrangement.  A hint about how you might feel: it’s too early to call these adjustments successful, but people haven’t complained about them much so far, and given the number of people affected, that’s a great start.

What’s more, Google has asked for feedback, so let the company know if you can think of any additional tweaks that might improve matters.