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Be helpful or be gone

August 2, 2017

Last week, we explored the idea that email marketing is about earning the audience’s permission to keep talking. I suggested that there were two equally important elements – intent and content – that had to be in sync if you want to stick around in someone’s in-box. Now it’s time to talk about being helpful.

As I said last week, “Intent is really about respect and a genuine desire to help. When we prepare an email campaign, we need to ask ourselves if we’re truly being respectful of the receiver’s time and attention. Yes, of course we want them to become a customer or if they’re already a customer, we want them to buy more. But we have to trade them something of value in exchange for that consideration.”

The something of value is all about the content.

The concept of content is not new. Smart businesses have long understood the idea that if they were helpful before they asked for a dollar, they could earn the trust of the prospect.

What is new is the wide array of places and ways we have to distribute content. Back in the day, we might have a printed newsletter, an 800 number for customer service or demos in our stores.

Today we have websites, email newsletters, eblasts, podcasts, infographics, forums, guest posts, blogs, digital magazines, and that’s just scratching the surface. Suffice it to say – we have lots of ways to be helpful.

Odds are you’re being inundated with “helpful” content every day and odds are, you ignore most of it. Guess what? Your prospects are behaving in exactly the same way. So how do you break through that clutter and actually help?

Don’t just tell. Lead as well: Content that not only informs but also tells your audience what to do with their new knowledge is incredibly valuable. Most content producers fall short here. We tend to spew facts but rarely offer direction, insights or warnings. Use your knowledge to guide.

Be available if they need to know more: When you create great content, sometimes it leaves your audience wanting more. Their natural inclination is to turn to the original source – you. Be available. Include your email address or phone number and invite comments and further questions.

Eliminate fluff: Time is everyone’s most scarce resource so do not waste it. Tell them what they need to know. I’m not saying eliminate context. Context adds value. But filler and fluff just gets in the way. Be a tough editor of any content you create.

Discriminate: The worst content is content that is intended for everyone. The more you can hone in on your most important audience and only that audience – the better your content will serve them. Your goal is to be irrelevant to the masses and indispensable to the few that you actually want to attract and build a relationship with.

Connect the dots: Odds are that what you sell is complicated and it’s not as simple as walking up to a shelf and selecting the exact right choice. But for content to be effective, it has to be served up in bite-sized pieces with an occasional full meal tossed into the mix.

That means it’s difficult to tell the whole story with any one piece of content. To truly be helpful, you need to help your audience connect the dots between bits of information. With links, “if you enjoyed this” guides and organizing your content in a way that allows people to follow the bigger picture.

I know you care about your customers and prospects. Show them how much by creating content with both the right intentions and genuinely helpful information. It’s the least you can do and they’ll reward you with their attention for a very long time.

Earning Your Spot in their Email In-Box

July 26, 2017

Weird as it sounds, with all of the new technologies, email seems almost old school today. It’s been around for decades and much like other mature mediums, we value and loathe it at the same time.

Part of the loathing comes from the daily experience of being barraged by emails we didn’t ask for, don’t want and that offer no value. We all suffer from email fatigue. What the senders forget is that they’re in the receiver’s in-box because they were invited in and have been granted permission to stay.

Until they’re not. Email us too often, or email us nothing of value and you’re quickly asked to leave, either through the unsubscribe link or simply by being ignored.

And yet for most of us, there are some emails we look forward to receiving and when we get them, we actually go out of our way to read them.

What’s the difference?

I believe it’s both intent and content. When you get those both right, the receiver will not only allow you to stay but actually be open to considering that next action (click on a link, sign up for the webinar, learn more about your product or services, etc.) you want them to take.

Intent is really about respect and a genuine desire to help. When we prepare an email campaign, we need to ask ourselves if we’re truly being respectful of the receiver’s time and attention. Yes, of course we want them to become a customer or if they’re already a customer, we want them to buy more. But we have to trade them something of value in exchange for that consideration.

Are we offering them something of value in terms of insights, information or even a reminder of something important? A realtor sends me an email every month and at the top of the email is a “don’t forget tip” reminding me to do something around my house. It’s usually something simple like “change the furnace filter every 30 days.” Do I already know I need to do that? Sure but the reminder often triggers me to do whatever he’s reminding me to do.

I’m not in the market to buy a house right now but I give him permission to stay in my in-box because he’s actually helpful. He’s also smart enough to know that if he keeps earning the right to email me, then when I finally am in the market for a realtor to help me buy or sell a home or when one of my friends asks for a referral – he’ll be top of mind.

Another aspect of intent is how often are you asking me to pay attention to you? I am happy to get his email once a month. If he started emailing me a couple times a week, I’d unsubscribe in a hurry because the value proposition wouldn’t be there for me. The frequency of your emails shouldn’t be about how frantic you are to sell something but instead; it should be based on how or why you’re being valuable.

I get an email every evening from a company that analyzes the day’s market activities and talks about how the day’s changes will impact what’s going to happen tomorrow. That information would be stale/less helpful if I received it once a month. So again, their timing is about me, not them.

Intent is about putting the audience first and being valuable before you ask for anything in return. That makes it much more appealing to envision hiring you down the road.

Next time, we’ll explore the content side of this equation so you can get them both correct every time.

The reviews aren’t good

July 19, 2017

In the “good old days” when a neighbor or work colleague told you how much they enjoyed a nearby B&B, movie or restaurant, it mattered. Word of mouth has always been one of marketing’s most potent weapons. Today – we have word of mouth marketing on steroids with online reviews.

Interestingly, in a wide range of surveys examining the effectiveness of online reviews, the data is pretty telling. Depending on the research, somewhere between 84-90% of us trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Nearly 9 out of every 10 consumers has used online reviews to influence a purchase and about 40% of us use them on a regular basis as part of our buying process. Most people read between 6-10 reviews and they usually read the most recent reviews first.

Why do we give perfect strangers the same credibility score as our neighbors and friends?

We believe in the aggregate. One bad review suggests a fluke or someone had a grudge but when there’s a pattern, we’re willing to believe the crowd.
We assume that the reviewers are people like us who have no axe to grind but just want to be helpful.
We give more credibility to the “average Joe” than we do to marketing or corporate speak. In other words – I want to hear what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

Given both the number of consumers who rely on online reviews and the level of trust they put in them – it’s not something businesses can ignore. And this isn’t just about restaurants or hotels anymore. Whether you’re a dentist, restaurant, ad agency, professor or an insurance agent – between Angie’s List and all of the specialty lists out there – everyone is being rated.

Interestingly – businesses seem to be adopting the head in the sand approach to bad reviews. Even though almost every rating site will allow the proprietor to respond, very few do.

That is a huge missed opportunity. Every business owner, CMO etc. should be tracking where their business is being rated and monitoring those ratings. While the ideal is that you’d respond to all the reviews (odds are there are not that many), you should at the very least react to the negative ones.

Here are some best practices for responding to negative reviews.

Apologize. Use the words “I am sorry” to acknowledge that they had a bad experience, even if you don’t believe it was your fault.
Refer to them by name if you can.
Identify yourself by name and title so they know who is responding to them.
If there really was a problem – don’t sugar coat it. Admit that you blew it and what you’re doing to make sure the next guest does not experience the same thing.
After your initial response, if they reply – take it offline. While you want everyone reading the reviews to see that you care, you don’t need to play out the entire conversation online.
If you feel like you can win them back – offer to compensate them in some way. And no, this will not encourage a bunch of people to leave bad reviews just to get a coupon or free meal from you.
Talk like a human, not a corporate committee. Use conversational language so they know there’s a human being behind your comments.

No matter what you do – ignoring negative reviews is not an option. They are too influential to your prospects and when they go unanswered, they’re taken as gospel and can chase away potential business. So settle in and try to make some lemonade out of those lemons.

New CMO Council Report: CMOs Struggling to Meet Needs of Local Audiences

July 14, 2017

Marketing leaders and agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with growing demands to localize and adapt their creative strategies when it comes to trying to meet needs of local audiences. Facing a widening range of digital and physical channels that each require rapid adaptation in order to remain relevant to individual geographic, cultural, and customer audiences, too many organizations are failing to take the necessary steps to improve their capacity and agility, according to a new study by the CMO Council.

The new study, entitled “Adaptability in Branded Content Delivery,” reveals that more than two-thirds of marketers rate their organizations and agencies below satisfactory in their capacity to translate and adapt brand marketing content across the markets and channels they serve. This has led to equally lack-luster marks in timeliness as only 30 percent of marketers rate their in-house and agency teams as either “advanced” or “doing well” in their timeliness and capacity to simultaneously support global and local execution.

Marketers admit these failures in addressing rapid adaptation is further challenged by mounting pressure by a variety of forces and factors, led by requirements for geographic localization, proliferation of new digital formats, the need for more visually enriched and engaging content, and operational cost pressures.

“At a time when the customer has higher expectations than ever for the relevance and personalization of content and brand interaction, marketing organizations will need to step up their game when it comes to brand content adaptation to address geographic, cultural, customer and other differences,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “Past research has shown that adaptation of marketing strategy and content can be major enabler of sales and brand success. Yet most companies have a long way to go to get it right.”

The study, developed in partnership with HH Global, is based on an online survey of more than 150 senior marketing executives polled in the second quarter of 2017. Respondents hail from global industries that demand an omnichannel presence including retail, travel, hospitality, technology, consumer goods and telecommunications.

Among the key findings:

Only 32 percent of respondents say their companies are either advanced or doing well in adapting brand content to different markets, partners and geographies. Another 34 percent say they are at least improving.
Just 20 percent are satisfied with their creative delivery process and marketing supply chain effectiveness.
Respondents point to speed of execution as a major challenge; less than half say they are able to deploy localized content across both physical and digital touchpoints within weeks of a campaign launch.
Marketers believe their top five process challenge are shortening turnaround times, ensuring quality and uniformity with brand guidelines, end-to-end workflow management, delivering creative on time, and measurement of the creative appeal and impact of content.

Change Is Too Slow

The study also finds that many organizations are failing to take important steps to improve their capacity to adapt and modify branded content. Just 18 percent have completed a formal assessment of their creative delivery process and marketing supply chain effectiveness, although another 24 percent say they have begun one.

In addition, many companies are utilizing only basic project management and collaboration tools to manage these processes. Just 20 percent use online approval and proofing systems to accelerate modifications. Even more surprising, 49 percent of respondents say the spend less than five percent of their marketing budget for creative adaptation and cross-cultural localization.

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership, and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide range of global industries. The CMO Council’s 12,500-plus members control more than $500 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.cmocouncil.org.

Scarcity versus abundance

July 12, 2017

When I started in the agency business 25+ years ago, there was this odd paranoia that ran through agencies big and small. There was a belief that agency personnel couldn’t be friends with people who worked at other agencies because secrets might leak out. And if you dared to be friends or even associate through a professional network – you’d better not bring the other agency’s employees into your office for fear that they’d walk by something and glean secret details about your accounts. All of this is what I call a total lack of abundance thinking.

I know it sounds crazy – but it was very pervasive through the industry back then. Today, I’m happy to report that with few noted and paranoid exceptions, agencies seem to recognize that it’s actually healthy for agency professionals to mingle together for both the shared learning and camaraderie.

That paranoia was a symptom of scarcity thinking. I don’t think the ad industry is the only one who did/does suffer from having that point of view. I think it’s easy for any of us to get stuck in that rut.

We’ve all seen scarcity marketing and sales in action. It’s the overly attentive sales clerk following you around the store, the car dealer who won’t let you take a test drive without being in the car with you, or the salesperson that knocks the competition at every opportunity.

There’s a scent of desperation in scarcity marketing and sales that puts the buyer firmly in the driver’s seat. It converts the transaction from a potential partnership to an uneasy game of tug o’ war that ultimately puts you at a disadvantage because you want the deal more than your potential buyer does.

It creates the sense that there’s some sales quota that’s not going to be met or some other looming deadline that has everyone scrambling to cut a deal. That rarely works out to the seller’s advantage.

I’m not talking about the idea of creating scarcity around your product or service. Letting someone know there are only four plane tickets left at this price or that you won’t be offering the workshop again until spring can be very effective because it actually is a position of abundance. You’re basically saying, “Hey, just to let you know, I only have five of these left. Let me know if you want one before I sell out.”

That’s the secret of an abundance mentality. It’s very laid back and it gives the impression that while you’re happy to sell your wares, you’re equally okay if the prospect isn’t interested because someone else will be. That confidence in your product or service is contagious.

What does abundance marketing and sales look like?

You share your knowledge freely: You teach and give away your expertise through white papers, ebooks, blog posts, free webinars and other tools.

You are quick to tell someone when what you sell isn’t right for them: You know that an unhappy customer costs you more than what you could possibly make off of them, so you encourage them to find a better fit.

You don’t haggle on your pricing: You know that what you offer is an incredible value at the price you’ve quoted, so there’s no reason to play the game. You set an honest, reasonable price for what you offer and then you stick to it. If the prospect doesn’t want to pay that – it’s okay because someone else will.

You don’t chase potential buyers: You know that you can’t make someone buy before they’re ready so there’s no up side to being a pest. You keep offering value and your expertise and they’ll come around when it’s time.

Review your marketing tools and procedures. Do they suggest you’re desperate to make a sale or do they convey a sense of abundance?

May I ask you a question?

July 5, 2017

One of the biggest issues marketing and sales folks face is just getting on the radar screen of their prospects. Even when you have something of incredible value and you genuinely know the prospect needs what you have to sell – it’s tough to get their attention long enough to ask a question or even be noticed.

That’s even more of a challenge for organizations that don’t have a six-figure marketing budget or exist in a crowded, competitive landscape.

That’s where some psychology can be incredibly helpful.

One thing that is almost universally true about us humans is that we are incredibly flattered when someone thinks we have something of value to offer in the way of experience, knowledge, expertise or hard-earned wisdom.

And that, I believe, is the door we need to open if we want a prospect’s time. For this technique to work, I think the following needs to be true about your business:

You/your organization have a niche/specialty in which you have a great depth of expertise
You have some outlet (website, blog, podcast, newsletter) in which you share that expertise without a sales pitch or being self-serving
You have a genuine interest in the people you serve and a passion for helping them in your unique way with whatever you do/sell
You sell something that is more of a considered purchase and less of a commodity

If that’s you, read on.

Make a list of your ideal prospects and their influencers. Who would you most like to serve and are the people/companies that you know you could delight? Or, who has information/insights that could be incredibly valuable to your target audience?

Once you have compiled the list, call/email them and ask them if you can interview them for your blog, website, newsletter, podcast, etc. I think you’ll be surprised at how many of them say yes and are flattered by the invitation.

Now the hard work begins. Do your homework. The prep for the interview is key to the success of this marketing tactic. You want to ask questions that really get them to go deep and give you some insights into the way they think, work and what they believe about the work they do.

Be smart about the interview itself. I know I don’t have to tell you this but show up on time, look and act professionally, be gracious if things go awry, and don’t sell. If your interviewee asks about your business, give them a quick overview but do not go into selling mode. You’re there to learn and connect. Focus on that.

Send a handwritten thank-you note after the interview, sharing something valuable you learned during your time together. Not an email or a computer generated thank you. Invest the time to actually write the note.

Next, create the content piece and reach back to your interviewee so they can review it. Share with them your publication plans and tell them you’ll send them a link/copy once it’s out there so they can share it with their network as well.

When you hit publish (or print the newsletter if you’re old school), re-connect with your interviewee and invite (not demand, require or nag) them to share it.

Let’s recap your prospect touches. Between the initial invitation and the publishing of the content, you’ve connected five times. That difficult to reach prospect has probably welcomed your communications five times. If you’ve been engaging and sincere, I believe they would be willing to at least learn a little more about the work you do.

Not only that but you are creating content that truly helps your entire customer and prospect base.

That’s marketing that will lead to sales time and time again.

Reducing the stress factor

June 28, 2017

Whether you’re successfully part of an internal marketing team, at an agency or even a business owner – you’ve got a skill that you probably take for granted. You’re a master juggler. You can’t execute successful marketing today without that ability. You’re used to having lots of balls in the air and even if you can’t always see each one, you’ve been doing it long enough that you’re confident that you’ll be able to catch them all. No stress for you. It’s all just part of the day-to-day.

But here’s the part that we often forget. What we take for granted freaks our internal or external clients out. That’s why they’re micromanaging you, asking you for updates all the time and making it harder for you to do your work.

Guess what – that’s on you. Their reaction and concern is natural and fair. It’s our job to keep them in the loop by over communicating so they can take a deep breath and be comfortable. It’s also good for you because when you reduce their stress, they’ll give you a little more breathing room.

Here are some tools you can use to keep everyone in the loop throughout the life of your work.

Project timeline: Marketing often looks simpler than it truly is. It’s a little like the duck swimming on the placid lake. At first glance, the duck looks like he’s serenely floating on the water. But as we all know, under the surface, he’s paddling like crazy.

That’s why an initial project timeline can be a lifesaver. But setting and correcting initial expectations right up front, you save yourself a significant amount of trouble down the road. It’s much easier before a project ever starts to help a client understand that the website will take ten weeks rather than three weeks in, they suddenly share that they need it next week for a trade show.

Real-time budget: On larger projects that are going to stretch out over months, it’s a good idea to establish a preliminary budget with the caveat that it’s based on what we know today. Then, keep that budget updated real-time. It’s a bit of overkill to do it every day, but once a week should help everyone feel very connected to the project and reassured that it’s going according to plan.

The other advantage of this is that it forces you to identify trouble when it’s still small enough to deal with. So it’s a bit of a CYA move as well.

Weekly status reports: This is a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all of the projects you’re working on (if you serve more than one department or client, have a separate document for each audience) and tracks progress.

To make this manageable, keep it simple. Include the project name, the ultimate due date, the stage of progress it’s in right now, next steps and who is responsible for that next step. If you share it with everyone (marketing team, other players in the mix, client, etc.) on Thursday mid afternoon, it gives everyone a chance to wrap some things up on the next day so you start the following week on time and on target.

The bonus feature of this report is that it serves as a gentle nudge. Let’s face it – it’s often the client (internal or external) that is holding something up. But they’re also the client so you can’t get on them like you do your internal team. So this is a bit more client friendly but still gives them a good poke.

None of this is rocket science but I often discover that because we take our ability for granted, we forget that our clients don’t. Implementing these tools will reduce their stress and it helps keep you on track as well which ultimately allows you to do better marketing.

Become a partner, not a vendor

June 21, 2017

I know very few businesses that aren’t looking for additional sales. Ninety-nine percent of the time, those businesses identify potential customers and then woo them until they either buy something, tell them to go away or they get busy enough that they go back to ignoring the prospects. Without a doubt, we need to chase after new clients. But we often overlook the quickest, easiest sale –our existing customer base. Businesses that grow year after year don’t do it by chasing new prospects. They do it by delighting their customers in a way that they can’t get anywhere else – by becoming a partner, not a vendor.

Want to have that kind of permanent impact on your sales to existing customers? Partner them with smarter employees from within your organization. By smarter, I don’t mean someone who knows the most about your business, products or services.

I mean someone who knows the most about your customer’s business and business in general. The more your project managers, customer service team and salespeople understand how business works, the more they can serve their clients in ways beyond just selling them something.

Businesses that are thriving today aren’t selling their clients stuff. They are helping them solve problems. We need to deeply and genuinely understand our client’s business or life (if we sell consumer goods) so that they can be helpful. As we’ve talked about before, helpful is the new entry point of marketing and sales, whether that entry point begins online or in your brick and mortar location.

Your employees don’t magically become more knowledgeable and helpful. It requires a big investment (both time and money) on your part. But it’s an investment that keeps on paying dividends.

There are many reasons why your team needs to understand your clients’ core needs.

It allows them to bring better, more complex solutions to their client’s real problems
It allows them to be a valuable resource to their client, rather than just a vendor
It differentiates them from other companies that are still just selling stuff
It allows you to charge a premium price – because they can document the value they deliver
It typically means they are better at retaining clients
If you’re selling to a business, it gets them to the C-suite table, rather than having to deal with middle management

You have a choice to make – you can either be a trusted advisor or a vendor. In both cases, you can earn referrals from your client. But customers treat partners and vendors very differently when it comes to price, repeat business and expectations.

So you have to decide – how do you want to be referred and what kinds of new client relationships are you trying to earn.

If you want to be your customer’s partner and want to be able to rely on repeat business from them, here’s how you can build a team who is prepared to deliver on that promise:

Broaden their education by taking classes
Join a club, networking group or professional association focused on best business practices in your customer’s field
Ask clients if they can shadow them for a few days and ask a lot of questions
Read leading books on the industry
Visit trade shows and attend their educational workshops
Start their own small business on the side to learn about business in general

For this strategy to work, it has to be a company-wide initiative. Everyone has to adopt the idea that it’s their job to understand and guide your client’s business or life to a very different depth than most organizations would be able to do.

Creating your content machine

June 14, 2017

You’re ready to get your content machine up and running but let’s revisit the information from last week where we covered some of the preliminary steps in creating a successful content strategy. They were:

Identifying the business outcomes/goals for the strategy
Knowing who you are targeting and what would be genuinely helpful to them
Recognizing that the hub of your strategy needs to be a digital presence that you own and control completely (website versus a Facebook page)
Creating a series of spokes (on and offline activity/channels) that will drive prospects to your hub

Once those tasks are complete, you can begin to think about creating your content machine focusing on the kinds of content and the volume/speed of your content creation. The hub and spokes will dictate how much content needs to be created.

Finally, it’s time to think about structure. You need to build a team that will be responsible for concepting/creating content, curating other people’s content, going out into the social space and telling people about available content, etc.

For this to work long-term, you need a few things:

A commitment (not just lip service) from the company owner/leadership
An allocation of time/resources that is as sacred as any client deadline
An editorial calendar that is persona focused
A cross-trained team large enough to meet all of the deadlines
Measurable business goals – that are regularly being measured/reported
An understanding that this is a long-term play and that expectations should be tempered in terms of quarters and years, not days or weeks
A marketing plan for promoting the content and the company

If a company is willing to invest the time and effort into doing it right, the business goals will be achieved if not exceeded over time. Sadly, most organizations are just going through the motions and will never really reap the benefits that content marketing can bring them. Worst – their self-serving efforts are costing them business as prospects check out their efforts and quickly move on to a company who is actually walking their talk.

The personas and editorial calendar should ultimately govern the content. Once you know who you’re talking to, you should build out an editorial calendar with content ideas that you know will be of value to one or more of the personas. Everyone on the team can contribute ideas but once the calendar has been set – it should be honored. Because content and social should be timely – there are going to be exceptions to the rule. It’s much easier to deviate from a plan than it is to plan as you go.

Because content and social should be timely – there are going to be exceptions to the rule. It’s much easier to deviate from a plan than it is to plan as you go.

All content should go through the usual creation process – including internal reviews and proofreading. So in that way, it’s governed by whoever owns that part of the process. Naturally, your company should already have its own graphic standards, branding criteria (both visual and voice) and those boundaries are honored as well.

It’s a little like publishing a monthly magazine. You’re always planning a few issues in advance. You have a defined look, feel and audience. You probably have some regular features or offerings. But what drives the entire process is that editorial calendar and the agreement that deadlines will be honored, no matter how busy you are.

Sadly, this generation of business leaders aren’t all going to get it. Some will dismiss it because they don’t personally participate in social networks. Some are afraid to learn about it. Others will believe it’s only worthwhile if your customer is a <fill in the blank> but not for their clients.

That’s great news for the businesses who do get it. It just means the bounty will be even greater.

Content marketing achieved through a well-oiled content machine can be the great equalizer for organizations. It allows small companies, organizations in secondary markets and those with the tenacity to create a library of useful, smart content to not only compete but to win big.

Consumers pay attention to where your ads live and who their neighbors are!

June 13, 2017

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council came out with a new study that we all need to be aware of as we place our digital ad buys.

Nearly half of all consumers indicate they would rethink purchasing from brands or would boycott products if they encountered brand ads alongside digital content that offends them, reveals a new study on “How Brands Annoy Fans.”

Aimed at assessing the impact of digital advertising experiences on consumer perceptions and purchase intent, the research looked at digital brand safety from the consumer’s perspective and found that consumers are punishing even preferred brands if they don’t use trusted media platforms or take active steps to control the integrity of their ad environments.
Conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council using the Pollfish platform, the survey gathered views from 2,000 adult consumers in North America and the U.K., both regions which have both seen high-profile brand campaigns withdrawn this year for their association with fake, distressing and hateful content. The consumer poll is part of a broader study of digital brand safety being conducted by the CMO Council, in partnership with Dow Jones, entitled “Brand Protection From Digital Content Infection.”

With trust more critical than ever, respondents made it clear that they will no longer give their brands a pass for even inadvertent display of ads near objectionable digital and video content. A full two-thirds of respondents said they would hold a dimmer view of brands that provided negative advertising experiences.

The report also found that social media platforms are still not trusted content spaces. Despite listing social media as the source of the second-highest volume of ad messages they receive—behind only television—consumers ranked social media last among their five most trusted channels. They ranked friends, TV, search engines and newspapers as more trusted sources.

A large majority of consumers said they responded differently to the same ad, depending on its context, with 63 percent saying they responded more positively to ads run in trusted media channels. Consumers are, in fact, turning to trusted content providers and media to escape objectionable content. Some 60 percent said offensive context has already caused them to consume more content from trusted, well-known news sources and established media channels.

“CMOs and brand advertisers are increasingly concerned about various aspects of digital and programmatic advertising, including concerns about their ads showing up next to offensive content,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “This consumer survey demonstrates that those concerns are well founded. Advertising placed next to objectionable content is damaging to a brand while ads that accompany more trusted content and media are more accepted.”

While other brand safety studies have explored adverse brand perceptions, the CMO Council research asked consumers about their response to the experience of finding brand ads in proximity to objectionable content or fake news sites—and their warning to advertisers was brutal. Some 37 percent of consumers said it would change the way they think of a brand when making a decision to buy. Another 11 percent said they would flat-out not do business with that brand. Another 9 percent said they would become vocal critics of the brand.

Another consumer response is the increased use of ad blockers. In another alarming finding for digital marketers, more than 50 percent of respondents said they either already had or planned to install some form of ad-blocking software to their mobile devices or PC browsers.

Negative experiences with digital display advertising are far from a rarity. According to the most recent “Media Quality Report” by Integral Ad Science (AIS), up to 8.6 percent of digital display ads in the U.S. were flagged as posing a moderate or high risk to brand reputation. Maria Pousa, CMO for IAS, told the CMO Council that the most prevalent categories of risk in the U.S. were violent, adult or offensive language content, followed by issues like hate speech and illegal downloads.

Other key insights from the CMO Council survey include:

A surprising 86 percent of consumers are either extremely concerned, very concerned or moderately worried about how easily they are directed or redirected to hateful or offensive content.
The most annoying digital advertising formats, even when appearing on trusted media channels, were intrusive pop-up ads (22 percent) and auto-playing video ads (17 percent).
Attention to digital advertising overall was notably low, with only 14 percent always engaged and 58 percent saying they pay attention only when ads either interest them or are really interesting.
Just over 40 percent of consumers have already installed ad-blocking software on their devices while another 14 percent said they planned to add these features.

Neale-May said the full report, featuring qualitative interviews and vendor insights, would include key details on the steps, tools and strategies adopted by leading advertisers and CMOs who have minimized the threat to their brands. The abbreviated consumer survey findings can be sourced from the CMO Council at https://www.cmocouncil.org/digitalad-consumer-report.

About the CMO Council

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