Engaging Elegance: Connecting with Luxury Audiences in the Digital Age

The biggest challenge for modern marketing managers is simply getting messaging noticed. And by "noticed," I mean actual human beings viewing ads. LinkedIn is chock-full of stories of programmatic ad fraud, where real people only see a fraction of the ads supposedly served (thank you, Dr. Augustine Fou + cohorts!). Hucksters, fraudsters, 'made for advertising' websites (MFAs), and AdTech vendors who claim to serve ads but never do, steal money from legitimate advertisers in broad daylight ... all driven by the pressure to achieve impossible campaign results.

 

The first goal of any marketing campaign should be to show advertising to actual human beings before we judge the value of the offer, the creative appeal, timing, etc. Placing advertising in front of a target audience could take the form of a billboard on I-95 that millions of drivers pass every day or perhaps the New York Times website, their physical paper, the digital version, and their e-newsletters that an equally impressive number of news-seekers still observe, every day.

 

Now, walled-garden digital properties, such as Amazon, are wonderful. There's no denying their traffic, which makes sense regarding the number of consumers who see their ad placements. But the next challenge after solving for "real human eyeballs" is "real human attention." And if we can agree on one thing in our increasingly divided populace, we have all become experts at ignoring online advertising. Outside of the groundbreaking "You may also be interested in…" feature within Amazon's checkout process - arguably the most significant marketing invention of all time – digital display ads and pop-ups have become so pervasive that they practically insult our sensibilities during whatever task, entertainment, or work that we try to enjoy/conduct.

 

Shifting our focus to the luxury market, it’s mind-boggling that marketers honestly believe the eyeballs necessary to support digital's Holy Grail metrics are reachable. I've been in the data business for over 20 years; it's one of the few things I know. If I'm marketing a $6,000 watch, I devote the lion's share of marketing dollars to blue-blood properties such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Esquire, Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Modern Luxury, and the like. I sure as hell am not going to trust some programmatic long tail showing traffic from Alarm Clock apps because, you know, so many of us utilize such apps outside of what's pre-loaded on our phones. Ludicrous!

 

Direct mailing to subscribers or other response lists used to be our top strategy for advertisers. We acquired subscriber names and addresses to said magazines or newspapers to send mailers to physical mailboxes. This was outside their media – direct to the consumer, 100% 'share of voice' - a stark contrast to advertising within the media, where the content within the publications or websites blurred attention.

 

The prevalence of direct mail lists has waned significantly due to the pervasiveness of online media. But, the consumers of such media are still the same people, regardless of the medium in which they consume content. So, to reach the people who can afford and appreciate luxury products, I still need to connect advertising to where they are via digital content or direct mail for those stalwarts holding on to physical subscriptions.

 

The shift from analog to digital media has tarnished luxury marketing with vanity metrics that digital marketers got fat touting. The dirtiest phrase in digital marketing is "last-click attribution." For the neophytes, that's awarding marketing "credit" for delivering a purchase to whatever channel, media property/website/etc. in which a purchaser last clicked an advertisement. It's an entirely inane concept, causing David Ogilvy to roll over in his grave, as it completely marginalizes the maxim of 8-10 marketing touches needed to deliver a purchase.

 

I've written about how foolhardy it is for brands to rely on performance marketing, especially with last-click attribution as the arbiter of "success." Again, for you neophytes, 'performance marketing' judges campaigns based on the dollar amount spent compared to immediate revenue realized in an extremely short timeframe. It's lazy and conflates marketing with sales - two very different disciplines.

 

It's akin to placing products in the checkout aisle (for those who still go to grocery stores). Judging advertising this way has resulted in schlocky, “shiny new toy” creative attempts to grab attention via dopamine rush. Can brand loyalty be built in this manner? Check out the stock price story of 23andMe; here's the link.

 

Marketing managers take heed, for advertising today is easier than ever before. Imagine trying to market to people in the 1800s when it took 60 days to produce an ad and another six months to get it in front of people!  

 

I posit this: Rather than stress over attribution tables, serve ads where actual human beings are and evaluate campaigns on whether you served advertising to people who bought your product - hard stop. Obsessing over the channel/website/publisher where you last served an ad before purchase is foolish to think THAT, and ONLY that was the driving force for the conversion.

 

And for those who scream, "… how do I know if I'm using too many channels/publishers/websites/influencers?" I offer a simple test: Turn them off one by one for a few weeks and see what happens to your bottom line. If there's no impact, keep them off. And stop devaluing your products by putting them in the checkout aisle.

 

Unless you're selling tabloids...

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The Death of Marketing