Category: Advertising

digital advertising tools and strategies

Posted on

Episode 155: AdScam, with Bob Hoffman

AdScam, with Bob Hoffman

My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history’s greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That’s right. It’s actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam.  

It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing. 

He’s not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and led a major international agency’s US operations. He has written numerous books, including “Bad Men” and “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey.” 

Nicknamed the “Ad Contrarian,” his writings under that name caused Business Insider to recognize it as one of the world’s leading blogs about marketing. He has been honored as the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club and served as part of the Advertising and Marketing International Network and the California Academy of Sciences. In short, he knows what he’s talking about when he says there is something  wrong with advertising. 

He and I both agree that there is a war between the privacy-side and the surveillance-side proponents here. And  it’s unclear how this dichotomy we’re in is going to be resolved. I will say that his solution for how to fix this – to eliminate all tracking – is harsher than mine. I’d like to end up with some arrangement where buyers receive advertising that gets close to feeling personalized, but that doesn’t track them without their consent.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Bob’s original AdContrarian blog

Bob’s website

Bob’s LinkedIn profile with details on his company, Type A Group

Association of National Advertisers

Stephane Hamel

Oxford philosopher James Williams

Posted on

Episode 123: PPC Health Check, with Amalia Fowler

My guest, after receiving a degree in psychology, worked as a barista at Starbucks and a local high-end hotel. In a conversation about career paths with the hotel’s HR manager, she heard about the British Columbia Institute of Technology‘s two-year co-op and classroom-based marketing communications programme. She enrolled.  Her first co-op internship was with a start-up automotive marketing company, where she was supposed to shadow their Pay-Per-Click campaign manager. After her first week, the supervisor resigned, and an executive asked her to take over, and right after getting her marcomm certificate she worked there full-time,  growing out their PPC team. That led to working as a PPC expert at an agency, and within three and a half years she rose to a director-level position there.

In 2021 she went on her own, founding Good AF Consulting which focuses on helping find and fix issues within a brand’s PPC and SEO efforts. Wanting to exercise her passion for sharing time and knowledge with new marketers, she has also gone back to BCIT but as an instructor in the very marketing programme she graduated from. In addition to teaching, she mentors new marketers, writes and works hard to leave the industry in a better state than the way she found it. 

Please welcome someone who’s been named to  PPC Hero’s list of the Top 25 people in PPC, Amalia Fowler.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

Posted on

Episode 85: Growing Paid Media to Enterprise-size, with Julia Vyse

We know what our paid media marketing looks like within the walls of organizations of our size. We could be talking about monthly spends of $1,000, $10,000 or maybe $50,000. But what does it look like when it grows to enterprise-size, with budgets of $100,000 or even millions per month? You start seeing media buys that act in concert. Known as omni-channel marketing, the consumer receives messages from all sides. This is only one of the hat techniques that can be used. I have the perfect guest to tell us what it’s like  when you are working with scale.

So about my guest. Around 2014 I stumbled on something the Pay-Per-Click community did on twitter every week. It was a lunchhour discussion called PPCChat and at that time I didn’t know anyone else who worked in PPC. That was when I met Julia Vyse in the Twitter chat, although she’d been airing her views there for 5 years before I came along. In my opinion, she is one of the OG digital marketers on Twitter. 

But that’s not all she’s been up to since growing up in Canada’s Capital Region. She started working for marketing agencies, first in Montreal in la belle province of Quebec. Now she lives in BC with her jazz-playing husband and cat in tow. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

Try making up a rubric for the different objectives you aim to hit with your campaigns.

Posted on

Episode 81: Paid Attention with Faris Yakob

It’s been amazing, what we’ve achieved by connecting up computers world-wide, webbing them together. As its full name suggests, we gave ourselves an Inter-network that provides for our every information need, on command. But there is one change that the Internet made to us, it gave us more stimulus than our biology was made to handle. The demand for our attention suddenly exceeded the supply; and this economic shift is most noticeable in the world of advertising. The digital advertising marketplace has gotten more vast, more confusing, and it’s far less clear what the rules are anymore. 

Thankfully, there’s been a lot of research at the intersection of advertising and human attention. Effective marketers who are aware of the trends can tune their advertising to make their brands heard and win the attention of their target audience.

To get the latest insights into this, we’re talking to the author of the book, Paid Attention which just came out  in 2022 with a revised edition. 

Faris Yakob grew up in the UK and after graduating from Oxford University, led the digital innovation efforts at global ad agencies like McCann Erickson and MDC Partners. Following that, he and his wife Rosie co-founded Genius Steals, an innovation and strategy consultancy. 

He also serves as a juror for marketing awards like the Clios and the London International Awards. He’s also been a member of a non-profit consortium called  the Attention Council that aims to better measure the influence of marketing on people’s  attention. Clearly someone who likes the written word, in addition to his books he puts out a monthly column in Admap and the Marketing Society.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Posted on

Episode 76: Paid Media Automation: It’s About Time, with Ameet Khabra 

There’s no shortage of things to do in paid media marketing.   

There are so many options available for automating what the platforms do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into automation all agree it makes sense, both the logical kind and even literal cents, the currency kind. Yet many still resist automation. Not really resist, but given all the things each ad platform does, and all the third-party tools out there, the problem some have is knowing where to begin. 

Our guest today can help us there. Ameet Khabra has spent the last decade figuring out why people do what they do online, what prompts them to take action, and how to use this insight to make marketing work better. She uses that experience in her agency, Hop Skip Media, to design campaign strategies for clients and teach future generations of PPC pros at the university level. Ameet loves her dogs Luke and Leia & the Dallas Cowboys, and Celine Dion songs.

Listen to her take on where this goes right, and in cases like Google Ads’ optimization-scored recommendations, where this can go wrong. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot. Be scientific in how you evaluate the use of automation