Or at least, that’s how it used to work.

In-App ads can be a great way to help reach your marketing goals. Like any type of advertising they have their pros and cons, of course. In my opinion, and generally speaking, they’re a great tool for awareness. You have the attention of the users, you can use the full screen of their phones; and since they have to wait a little bit before they can skip your ad there’s a window to feed them a message.

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An awareness campaign measured as a performance one

However, in a world becoming more performance-minded every day, it helps if you can back up your awareness objective with some “results”. The main result in an awareness campaign should be something like: does my ad reach the right audience? Do people understand what I’m trying to tell them? And is this interesting for them so they might consider buying my product or service.

Here worlds collide.

For starters, you’re advertising in a digital reality, probably using tools that allow you to target in some real-time-buying fashion. So while the ad itself screams “awareness”, the practice of booking the ad (and the people booking it) screams “performance”. So no doubt in-app campaigns are funded with performance budgets.

As said, there are some metrics we’d like to measure in an awareness campaign, but these metrics aren’t that easy to measure. But the performance context outlined above requires quick and easy metrics to justify the money spent. So tech does what tech does best: give marketers the numbers they want, not those they need to make the right decisions.

After all it’s easier to tell them: “yes dear marketer, your campaign is performing very well”; than “well actually, you shouldn’t look at it this way“.

Small change.

So what changed?

First a bit of mechanics of how in-app ads are integrated in all kinds of free and freemium apps. If you pass a level, finish a challenge or whatever, and it’s time for an ad break, you will be served a mobile ad. Full screen.

Normally, after a few seconds a close button appears. If you click it, the ad is gone. Sometimes you are served one last frame, that you can close accordingly. But the mechanic is very clear: wait a bit so the advertiser can use some of your attention, then you can close. This also works with power-ups, but then the wait is typically a bit longer: if you watch the ad for at least 30 seconds, you get a reward. If you close sooner, no reward. In the meantime, before closing, you can of course click (or tap) the ad and open a landing page.

This click is important. A click is a performance metric, at least it shows interest.

Or does it?

Because that’s what changed. Up until recently you had to bide your time, wait for the close button which was a clear X before you could close the ad. And since forever there have been bad implementations of this button, accidentally triggering a click. The so called fat-finger clicks. But that’s not the point of this article, because something more fundamental changed: the close button is now preceded by an arrow, and it appears way before the close button. If you click the arrow, you trigger a click

The image above shows the arrow I mentioned. If you click it, the website opens as shown on the image below.

The reason I noticed is that I was ending up on the websites of the advertisers the whole time, while before it was only now and then. To be clear, there is no reason whatsoever to implement the arrow “button”, because the whole ad is a button that leads to the website, except for the close button, that appears after a while, and that looks like this:

Big impact.

A change that is hardly noticeable, but the impact is big nonetheless. Suddenly these in-App ads drive a lot of traffic. Yes, worthless traffic with a very high bounce rate, but that’s for another discussion. Marketers will claim at least people are interested. They will argue the ads work because people click.

In reality they work less, because instead of five seconds undivided attention users end up in a technical mess, with pages opening they would like to close by the time the ad can be skipped.

Five seconds of attention traded for fiddling around with unwanted pages, and less attention for the ad, doesn’t sound like a win to me.

To be honest, I’m not sure what genius came up with this change, but I’m sure their boss is very happy.

Is this an Apple implementation? Is the same going on on Android? Is this done by AdMob from Google? Or is it Meta, that apparently served the ad in my example. I can’t tell. But it doesn’t make a difference really, because they all win while we lose.

If your mobile ads are suddenly on fire, it might not be your merit.

I’m Steven. I write about advertising and technology. I lead AdSomeNoise, a new breed of full-service advertising agency with a digital core, based in Europe and operating globally. I’d love to get in touch.

We used to have a Golden Generation. A squad of Red Devils (as the Belgian national team is called) with central positions in many of the world’s top clubs: Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, .. you name it. However, despite all this talent we never managed to win a FIFA World Cup or even the UEFA European Championship.

Some will argue it was too much talent combined, and it kind of makes sense if you keep Adam Grant’s TED Talk in mind. The majority of people however are just couch coaches: criticizing players and leadership from their own homes. Or from the pub of course.

There’s one player in particular I’d like to focus on: Romelu Lukaku. He’s Belgium’s all-time top goal scorer, with about 90 goals for the national team. Apart from that, he made a career in the Premier League, the world-renowned English competition, playing for Chelsea, Manchester United and the likes.

Lukaku is a tank. 1.91m (about 6 foot 3) and weighing 93 kg (205 lbs). A very strong and big player. He’s what they call a target man in football. His job, get as close as possible to the opponent’s goal, wait for the ball, and put it in the net. Easy does it.

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Performance football

Looking at Lukaku’s numbers, it’s a strategy that pays off. He scores more than any other Belgian player. Yet at the same time he gets quite some criticism (the couch coaches, remember): he’s just standing there waiting. He gets easily tired if he has a lot of running to do. It’s almost as if it’s not fair: the other players do the heavy lifting and Lukaku claims the goal.

Still, he gets the job done. And if he wasn’t there, in that position, all efforts might have been for nothing.

Lukaku, for me, is performance marketing in a funnel. You play the game as well as you can, and when you reach the goal, you score.

The funny thing about marketers is that they seem to think the complete opposite of football fans. While fans see the full play and even question whether it was needed to have a finisher between the action and the goal (especially when no goal is scored, even Lukaku misses most attempts) a marketer looks at the numbers. If the majority of goals are scored by a single player, we simply need more Lukakus!

No build-up, no results

Can you imagine all players on the field having the same task: camp in front of the goal and try to score? Not only would this result in chaos, it simply wouldn’t work. Because you need to get the ball there first. You need to do the heavy lifting. You need to build your play.

That’s no different from marketing.

One difference, however, is this: there are no limitations on the number of players you can put on the field. It can be 11. Or just 1. Or 11,000. Another difference is: your marketing game can’t be televised in 90 minutes. So it’s fair to say it’s less intuitive.

Performance marketing, in the way we know it today, is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s something that emerged in the slipstream of the internet and digital platforms. Marketing, however, is a very old trade that has evolved over centuries. It’s a trade that created results since the very first ad, probably thousands of years ago1. It’s a trade that has made brands famous. But as the famous Wanamaker quote goes: not all efforts are (directly) attributable.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"
- John Wanamaker

Performance marketing gives the false promise that you can identify which half is wasted. Even better, there are models where you only pay for results (for clicks at least, they might or might not result in a sale). Of course this is only a partial truth and there’s a whole industry that has evolved around the technology alone (for more on that read my other article).

Although we were able to build effective campaigns without performance marketing, the idea of allocating more budget to identifiable results is something that resonates with a lot of marketers. And especially, with CFOs.

The holistic view

Lukaku is a valuable player, whatever critics may say. And when used right, performance marketing techniques can absolutely be valuable in a marketing mix. The trouble is when we isolate them from the rest of the game. The most important thing, in football, and in marketing, is the build-up. How do you get the ball in front of the goal? How do you get a consumer to consider you?

In the end, all marketing is a funnel. It starts with getting to know the product or service (attention or awareness): it exists. And it ends with a purchase (action). Marketers should aim to get as many prospects into the funnel as possible, and push as many through as they can. Performance marketing camps at the very bottom to give that final push.

When I was at university, over two decades ago, we learned something in advertising class that not a lot of people seem to mention anymore. The difference between high- and low- involvement products. I think it’s critical in deciding your ideal marketing mix. A low-involvement product is just a shallow buy. A new snack in the supermarket that attracts you with its bright colors. Not expensive and not much brainpower needed to decide whether to buy it or not. Not so with high-involvement buys, like a new car.

On top of that there are low-involvement products that still involve a high perceived effort to buy. This is especially true for commodities: you don’t switch your bank, telco and energy supplier every month. It’s a hassle, or at least that’s what we believe.

The interesting thing is that the permeability of the aforementioned funnel shifts depending on whether the product is high involvement or has a high perceived effort to buy. In low-involvement categories, especially with a low perceived effort to buy, funnels become very liquid. Grabbing the right attention can result in sales. Directly.

This is what Amazon has done extremely well: they’ve created the most performative machine for low-involvement sales in the world. I just bought an infrared thermometer but I have no clue about the brand. It’s not relevant. It fits my needs, that’s enough. We fire our needs into the Amazon platform and are presented with the right products for the right price, delivered to our doorstep the next day. The genius of their platform is that there’s no need for performance marketing, it’s a performance platform. Although even there, there’s an opportunity to make money, as Amazon offers sellers on their platform a way to promote their products. Double win.

For low-involvement products, and products with low perceived effort to buy or switch, performance marketing is a technique that makes perfect sense. Not so for high-involvement products or products that require effort to buy. The funnel becomes rock-solid. Getting people in becomes harder, getting people through becomes a real challenge. The key here is to get them in the middle, in consideration mode. Here they can get to know your offering, compare it with alternatives and ideally start considering you.

The task at hand is to make sure you will be compared. Because that’s what happens anyway. Even if you’re a lifelong BMW driver and up for a new car, you will still at least check what your money can buy from one of the competitors. As soon as the decision is made, the actual purchase will happen following whatever the circumstances: the end of your leasing, a promotion or some kind of planned date.

Nobody will buy a car through a Google ad.

And why you would need that ad when someone Googles you directly remains a mystery to me.

In high-involvement categories it’s all about the brand. For the record, I’m not saying that low-involvement categories don’t profit from a great brand as well, just ask Coca-Cola if you don’t believe me. A great brand helps stand out in the crowd. It helps get “into the comparison pool”. And it helps convince people that it’s worth spending the money. The best place for a brand to be, is the number one in what they call: spontaneous recall. If they ask you to name a car make, what brand do you shout first?

The all-rounder

Lukaku played 124 international matches with the Belgian national team. In these 124 games he scored 89 goals. That’s an impressive 0.72 goals per game.

Cristiano Ronaldo played 226 international matches and scored 115 times, or 0.59 goals per game.

From a performance management lens, Lukaku is the better player.

Except he’s not. And this is not just an opinion, just look at their salaries. Ronaldo, almost 10 years older than Lukaku reportedly makes at least $233 million per year while Lukaku earns a mere $9 million. That’s almost 26x more, and this is salary alone, based on widely cited estimates.

Ronaldo is a more versatile player. He scores, but he does so much more. And he attracts way more eyeballs doing so (hence his higher pay). This is what a great brand does. And this is what creativity does to a brand. Yes it’s expensive, but people will know you, like you and buy you. Ronaldo is brand activation: he scores on the brand and on the goal.

What marketers can learn from football

Let’s try to end this with some conclusions.

1. Know what you have on the field.
   Not every marketing tool plays the same position. Performance marketing is a finisher, not a playmaker. Treat it accordingly.

2. Don’t confuse visibility with impact.
   The last touch before conversion is easy to measure, but it’s rarely the moment that created demand.

3. Build the play before you try to score.
   Brand, consideration, and trust are what move prospects down the field. Without them, performance channels have nothing to convert.

4. Match your tactics to your category.
   Low-involvement products can convert fast. High-involvement ones need nurturing. Strategy should reflect that reality.

5. Optimization isn’t strategy.
   Improving conversion rates is valuable, but optimizing the last step of a weak funnel won’t fix the funnel itself.

6. Balance teams win.
   The strongest marketing systems combine brand building and performance. One creates demand; the other captures it.

7. Measure what matters, not just what’s measurable.
   If you only invest where attribution is easy, you’ll systematically underinvest in what actually drives growth.

Or to end with a quote

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
- William Bruce Cameron

I’m Steven. I write about advertising and technology. I head AdSomeNoise, a new breed of full-service advertising agency with a digital core, based in Europe and operating globally. I’d love to get in touch.

You might know him from his books turned into movies: Moneyball, The Blind Side .. and especially The Big Short. That last one, together with Margin Call, is probably the movie that gives the best insight into the financial crisis of 2008.

Lewis writes about numbers. Sometimes directly about finance, sometimes more from the sidelines. There are two personal wishes I have regarding Michael Lewis:

• To have him speak at an annual marketing conference I organize (but we don’t have the budget, damn).

• To have him write a book about advertising media.

The reason for the second point is simple: there are many analogies between finance and media. The good, the bad and yes, also the ugly.

The media business.

Media can mean many things, from communication channels to the entertainment industry. When I talk about media in this piece, I mean advertising space. If you spend money to have your ad run on TV, on a billboard, on a website or on Instagram, you pay the owner of that space. Typically we call this owner the publisher.

Buying this media is something advertisers can do themselves, either directly with publishers or sales houses, or via an intermediate, called a media agency.

Advertising space is a massive industry, globally estimated at $1.1 - 1.14 trillion annually. Huge, but still tiny compared with the financial industry, which is roughly 200 times bigger. Still, it’s a lot of money. And as we’ve learned from finance (and from Lewis): where there’s money, there’s abuse.

In days gone by ..

Media used to be a fairly simple industry. If you attracted eyeballs with your content, you had ad space to sell. Posters, radio commercials, TV ads, magazines, .. you name it. I recently came across on a picture of a book from the 1950s with a cigarette ad printed right in the middle.

Buying media space and advising advertisers where to spend their money was already a speciality, one that advertising agencies mastered. In the old days this was the entire business model: agencies bought ad space for their clients, and the commission they earned from media buying financed everything else: creative teams, account teams, fancy buildings, .. you name it.

Successful campaigns resulted in more media spend → more commission → profit.

But however complex or opaque the media-buying process might have been, the outcome was always very clear: a controllable ad. A poster or a tv commercial could be checked by anyone. And everyone could judge whether it felt right. Maybe that flower ad in Playboy wasn’t speaking to the right audience?

From stock exchange to ad exchange.

Things changed in the 1990s and 2000s when the internet became a medium that couldn’t be ignored. Initially, websites attracting eyeballs and realized they could sell ads. They operated much like traditional media. Bigger sites worked with sales houses, and technology was invented to place digital ads more easily. But fundamentally, you still bought space on a website for a number of impressions.

Then came ad exchange networks. Instead of buying inventory on a single large website, technology made it possible to buy space across many websites at once (whether or not they were thematically related). These networks worked much like an index fund: an overarching instrument that replaced buying many individual assets.

The next iteration was even more profound. Technology was no longer just used to place ads on websites; it became possible, and eventually preferable, to target the viewer instead of the website.

If you wanted to promote a gardening product, you no longer needed to find gardening websites to run you ad. You could target gardeners directly, wherever they happened to be browsing (within the ad exchange network, of course).

To do so, a lot of data was required. Data that wasn’t always acquired in the most ethical way. But the tools abstracted all of that away. For some reason, they “just knew”.

One of the leading ad tech players of that era was DoubleClick. A Funny name for a company operating on the internet, where everything supposedly happens with a single click. DoubleClick had tools, an ad exchange network and vast amounts of data. Which is why Google paid $3.1 billion in cash for the company in 2007. That acquisition marked the beginning of Google’s advertising hegemony.

Real time bidding.

By the end of the 2000s, a new technology emerged: real-time bidding. Inspired by stock trading platforms, companies like AppNexus built tools to automate media buying across multiple ad exchanges.

You uploaded your creatives, configure your targeting and set your bids. This worked just like a limit order on a stock exchange: you told the netwok your maximum price (expressed as a CPM, cost per thousand impressions). If a website within the exchange had an impression matching your targeting, and was willing to sell it at or below your price, the platform automatically bought that impression and placed your ad in front of whoever’s attention was being auctioned off.

You have to love technology. Media buying had just become a whole lot easier.

Or had it?

Because this approach has a massive downside: it’s extremely hard to control. Not only is the buying process opaque, but the outcome (which used to be tangible and verifiable) becomes murky as well. It’s nearly impossible to whether your ad is truly reaching the right audience.

Advertisers who raised this concern are often dismissed with a simple explanation: “You’re not in the target group”. Hard to argue with that.

Where things are opaque and murky, abuse thrives.

I know for a fact that the full ad-tech stack can be used responsibly to buy the right media at the right price and run effective campaigns. But I also know it’s just as possible to abuse the system, skim off large ampounts of money, and still make the advertiser feel that everything is working perfectly.

This is the part I’d love Michael Lewis to dig into.

To some extent, Bob Hoffman1 touched on this in his book BadMen. Hoffman famously argued that as little as 3% of digital advertising budgets actually achieve their intended goal. The book didn’t make much impact, which is exactly why we need Lewis. Hoffman is too easy to dismiss as the self-proclaimed Ad Contrarian.

Let’s go a bit deeper into this abuse. There are two Michael Lewis books that come to mind.

In Liars Poker (his very first book) Lewis writes about Wall Street investment brokers who put the interests of their firm (and themselves) way above those of their clients. Investors give them money to buy stock or bonds with the idea to get a return. These brokers will do anything to get a big chunk of that money into the firm. And into their bonus.

If the client wins, that’s fine. If he bleeds, that’s equally fine.

To do so, they are willing to sell their own mother, and they invent a lot of instruments to “beat the market” (I’m getting back to this). The way these brokers operate remind me strongly of how some media buyers operate (to be clear: I’m not naming names, and I’m certainly not saying they’re all bad. Most people in the industry I know are hard-working and ethical, genuinely trying to do what’s best for their clients.).

In his other book, Flash Boys, Lewis zooms in on the stock exchanges themselves. He shows how technology is used to gain the upper hand in the trading game. In this book, everything revolves around speed: buying a few microseconds earlier at the not-yet-updated price, only to resell it at the new price in a flash.

What you’re buying on a financial market is regulated. At the very least it doesn’t disappear. You can keep what you bought, or sell it again, at a better or worse price.

This is where the analogy with media buying stops.

Media is a consumer good: if you bought it, you used it, and it’s gone. But just like the financial technology, ad technology is dark water full of sharks: players trying to sell you crappy inventory or mislead you with clicks that are anything but genuinely interested prospects.

What Liars Poker and Flash Boys really show is that complexity doesn’t exist to help the client — it exists to protect the system that extracts value from them.

An extra layer of complexity.

In finance, there’s a proven way to make even more money: make things easy to trade, but hard to understand.

One of the key instruments leading up to the 2008 crisis was the CDO or Collateralized Debt Obligation. Simplified: a single mortgage isn’t very interesting. But bundle 10,000 mortgages together, and suddenly you have a tradable financial product. Such a bundle of X loans (mortgages or others) is a CDO.

Investors loved these bundles because loans generate predictable cash flows.

They in fact loved them so much that they keep looking for more loans to bundle. Until suply ran out. Then someone had an idea: why only use good loans?

If you like beef, you prefer prime cuts. But tougher, lower-quality meat can still be turned into stew. Why not do the same with loans?

That’s how Subprime CDOs came into play.

The reasoning was that not all subprime borrowers would default. After all, these were people’s homes. Surely most would try to keep paying. Even if a few percent failed, the risk seemed acceptable — and was priced in accordingly.

As we all know now, that assumption was catastrophically wrong.

Subprime inventory

Advertising media has its own version of subprime assets.

There are countless websites with no real purpose other than showing ads, to humans mislead by clickbait, or to no humans at all. They generate impressions, and those impressions are eagerly consumed by ad exchanges.

Layer by layer, complexity is added.

Take Google’s Performance Max (PMax). The promise is seductive: “Give us your advertising money, and we’ll handle everything.” And while some of that ambition may be genuine, the lack of transparency is alarming.

You can tell by looking at the use of their search engine marketing in the package. Google positions itself between advertisers and users who were already looking for them. If someone Googles “Liquid Death” and clicks the organic result, that’s organic interest. If, however, the first result is a Google Ad linking to the same site, that visit suddenly counts as “ad-driven performance.”

That’s a false positive.

Buying ads on generic queries like “canned water” makes sense. Buying ads on your own brand name, often without realizing it’s happening, does not.

Now, there’s one thing if a marketer decides to buy their own brand name and claim good results with it. It’s even worse if your ad vendor (Google in this case) is using it without your knowledge as part of an overly complex ad approach that lacks transparency. As an advertiser you’re trading money for vanity metrics.

Creative quality

A side effect of this “we’ll take care of it” package is the lack of creative quality. Maybe AI will help us out here in the future, but in the meantime advertisers lured by PMax are often communicating with assets that wouldn’t survive the slightest brand committee review

Talking about creative quality, this is where packaging comes into play as well. I might be old school (and for the record, I have a lot of experience in digital asset creation), but I remember that back in the day, when we had to make a Homepage Takeover (HPTO), we were genuinely thrilled.

A homepage takeover does exactly what the name suggests: you can tailor it entirely to the advertiser’s brand, by combining background skins with interactive ad formats. I remember spending days crafting something truly outstanding. After all, buying HPTO inventory doesn’t come cheap, so you’d better make sure you squeeze every possible inch of attention and experience out of it.

Enter players like GumGum. They offer HPTOs and other ad formats, and on top of that they create the creatives for you. So far so good. But there are two major downsides to their proposition:

1. They buy the subprime inventory (they rarely operate on what most advertisers would consider premium inventory, which should already tell you something)

2. They deliver subprime creative work.

Just look at this Nintendo HPTO, taken straight from their own gallery. It’s a remarkably uninspiring experience.

As an advertiser, you’re triple screwed:

1. You reach a subprime audience;

2. In a subprime, and potentially not even brand-safe, environment;

3. With subprime creative.

Why would anyone accept this?

First of all, because it’s easy. They do everything for you. And secondly, it might help that the buyers get incentives that can run as high as 35% of the media budget. Something the advertiser paying the bill might not even be aware of.

As Upton Sinclair famously put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

As someone who genuinely loves technology, I’m well aware of its risks. The biggest one is the growing divide between those who understand the system and those who don’t.

Complexity isn’t accidental. Confusion is a feature.

There’s only one defense, in fintech as well as ad tech: education. Stick to your principles. Make sure the tools you use serve your goals, not the other way around.

Technology is a means to an end. Let’s keep treating it that way.

BTW: if someone can send this post to Michael Lewis, I would be totally thrilled. I pitched the idea via his publisher some time ago, but haven’t heard back.

I’m Steven. I write about advertising and technology. I lead AdSomeNoise, a new breed of full-service advertising agency with a digital core, based in Europe and operating globally. I’d love to get in touch.

Privacy is important, but a streak even more so.

My 15 yo son left for summer camp the other day. As any kid he’s rather keen on his privacy. His phone is his private space, and so is his laptop. As these things are an extension of your mere self, I can understand the flashes of a developing teenage brain are not something you like to share with the world. And certainly not with your parents!

Yet, just before he left he handed me the passcode for his iPhone, together with an instruction video. He wants me, he needs me, to keep the streak alive with a dozen or so friends on Snapchat. Something needs to be sent daily, and they have to send something back. The funny thing is, part of this streak group are his friends who are with him on that same summer camp. So what we have is a bunch of parents sending pictures to each other 😃

Because that’s the trick they figured out: if you take a picture with Snapchat you can send it to a bunch of people without the need to go in the specific conversations. This is their way to try to limit the privacy invasion, which I respect, so I don’t see what the other parents are sending. Still, I got the keys, if I would want to, I could do anything in his absence.

The chaotic brain

Funny as it is, I can totally relate. My own life is packed with little habits that drive my wife crazy. For me, these are musts, and that’s what she doesn’t like about them. Yet for me they’re critical, a way to structure my rather chaotic brain.

So maybe this is a thing that especially relates to chaotic-brain people, or maybe it’s more universal. I don’t know, I can only fall back on my own experience of course.

Here’s a list of things I need to do daily to not get anxious:

• 10k steps a day. I’m currently on a 394 day streak. My longest streak before that was 734 days, and I end up failing it one day with just a few steps left. Dramatic. Before that I had another about 2-years streak and it got killed because a technical issue with my watch. I would have paid someone a decent amount of money to fix it. It wasn’t fair!
  So I’m doing this for some 5 years. A crazy amount of steps.

• Duolingo. 2123 days streak (and also ended one before by accident). On top of that a couple of friends streaks from about a year.

• Podcast. I do a daily podcast, at least for this year. Haven’t missed a day.

• The latest, I’m on an 82-days Zip streak on LinkedIn, a little connect the dots game that tells you you’re smarter than 75% of CEO’s if you happen to do it fast ;-)

A habit on steroids

Charles Duhigg’s classic book The Power of Habit (2012) zooms in on habits, how they work, how to make them and break them (by changing them, bad habits like smoking for example). He describes what he calls a habit loop. It starts with a cue, followed by a routine (the execution of the habit) and ends in a reward (typically a feeling). Because the cue and reward get intertwined, you develop a craving resulting in a powerful base for the habit to form.

A streak, to me, is a habit on steroids. A habit with a counter. In a typical habit, it doesn’t matter that much is you skip a beat. If the habit is strong (and not still forming) there won’t be any impact and you just pick up the next time. In a streak this is different. The streak itself, the number, becomes the craving. That’s why a streak becomes more powerful over time: (unintentionally) losing a 10-day streak takes you less than 2 weeks to rebuild, but a 1000-day streak is a different thing. Some kind of loss aversion is kicking in.

This is also the weak point of a steak: if it’s gone, it’s gone. Since the number is the craving, no craving without the number. I literally experienced that myself, in between streaks. When I failed my Duolingo as well as my 10k-steps streaks, I always had a pauze before I started again (kind of an existential crisis even, what’s the point anyway!?). Sometimes just a few days, but sometimes weeks or longer. You need a conscious decision to start again.

Duolingo must have noticed. And that’s why I believe they introduced something called a streak freeze. If your streak is long enough (as in, to long to restart from zero if you fail) you will collect wildcards that will be used as some kind of pauze button when you fail the streak. So you’re not loosing your big number. A powerful concept, especially as you know that I’ve used them, a few times by now, and none was intentionally. LinkedIn has taken over this freeze concept in their casual games as well.

For the 10k-steps a day however, there’s no such thing. At least not in the Garmin ecosystem I’m using. So I’m hyper aware!

If it isn’t measured, it doesn’t count

I have other habits. Things I do daily (like drinking coffee) or regularly (like solving Sudoku’s on my phone). The Sudoku thing is great to dig in a bit deeper. There too you have daily challenges. There too you have rewards, and scores, timings, rankings, .. but there’s no streak counter.

A daily challenge is just a challenge a day. A new puzzle. But there’s no need to do today’s puzzle today. I can just as well make it tomorrow, or in year for what it’s worth. So sometimes it’s a habit, but it just as easily goes to the back burner. The funny thing is, the Sodoku app is my go-to when I have some time to kill, but only if I know my streak list is checked (and/or if I’m in the position to do so).

In a streak there’s no such thing as compensating. If you did 20k steps yesterday, but only managed 8k today, you failed. There is no in-between. All or nothing, or it doesn’t work.

The streak number can become an even bigger motivator if you bring it external. Just as with the friend streaks on my son’s snapchat the number becomes more significant if it’s shared. If you fail your streak, you’re not only failing yourself. And as long as you keep succeeding, you know you have an audience. While for me personally this isn’t the biggest reason, it sure helps you to get an extra motivator.
That’s why it’s a good idea if you want to achieve something, to do it publicly and report on it. A good product has this built-in and does it for you?

Doability

So I think you get the picture of what makes up a good strike: it should be countable, you can’t cheat, you get daily reminders .. and it helps if it’s something you don’t dislike doing. But even there we can argue .. if it’s something you want to do (for example for your health) but don’t particularly enjoy, I believe a streak can be a shortcut into forming it into a habit.

But equally important, it needs to be feasible. You need to have the time for it, the energy, the tools, access, ..

I can try to establish a running streak, and go for a daily 10k jogging session, but you know that’s not gonna last: it takes up too much time and you will need to rest your body from time to time. Not saying that it’s impossible to form running into a streak, if the willpower is there and you can organize yourself, nearly anything is possible. But this is the crux of the matter: the easier the investment, to more likely you will succeed and keep on going.

I’d love to turn this Substack writing into a streak, but first let’s try to turn it into a habit 😉

And now I need to go for a walk, I've only done 3000 steps 😱

I wrote about this product before on LinkedIn. But in the meantime I ended up buying and tasting it, so this post is a bit more elaborate.

It’s cocktail sauce!

A combination of ketchup and mayonaise is something what we call in Belgium and a handfull of other countries: cocktail sauce. When I first wrote this I got some shit from purists, because we tend to make our cocktail sauce with a dash of Whiskey (some even say Cognac). But this is apparently a tradition not followed everywhere. What unites it however is the combination of mayonaise and ketchup, seasoned to the taste of the local market. So as far as we know, Heinz just launched a cocktail sauce is Belgium. A sauce they already had in their portfolio (and not in the Netherlands for example).

No it’s not!

The problem with cocktail sauce is that in the United States, cocktail sauce is a different product. Known from the shrimp cocktail, it’s a mixture of ketchup, horseradish and then some additives. Heinz a version of “our” cocktail sauce (mayo + ketchup) however and call it mayochup. The generic name American gives this combo seems to be: fry sauce.
Sitenote: people in the states don’t like mayonaise. Remember Pulp Fiction? So Heinz pulled their mayonaise out of the market before.

Globalized Marketing.

If you’re in marketing for long enough you see the trends of centralization and decentralization taking turns every 5 to 10 years. Right now I believe we’re in the middle of a centralization wave. In such a wave the local markets have less say and decisions are being taken internationally. Local markets just have to implement.

A centralization wave is noticeable because the market is flooded with 1-size-fits-all commercials, typically lacking local connection with culture or even language. BTW: I was hoping technology would have improved this by now, because a lot is possible nowadays, but we’re not there yet. But now centralization and globalization not only have their effect on the messaging, but also on the products itself. I’m not going to say this is a first, but for me it’s at least a remarkable one.

I guess the Mayochup sauce is selling well in the states, so someone must have thought: let’s push this to Europe! Unaware that the mere existence of that sauce probably once was an American implementation of a local European sauce that seemed to do well at the time. Interesting, no? As if Christopher Nolan made a movie on sauces.
In researching this, I found out the product was launched as a result (or so they say) of a Twitter poll in 2018. A very popular one, pushed by the agency VLM Ignite.

What should they have done?

I believe, at least for the Belgian (and then some) market they should have called it cocktail sauce. Or since that sauce already exists, don’t launch it at all or launch it as a cocktail variation. They have one mayor USP: it’s made with real Heinz Ketchup. This is a very strong brand here, and they are the only cocktail sauce on the market that can claim this.

The proof of the pudding

So how does the Mayomix taste? It took me a lot of effort to actually find the sauce on a shelf, so when I did I of course bought it. We took it for a tasting. Here are the tasting notes from my wife: it’s like cocktail sauce with too much Ketchup added. I think she nailed it :)

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Here’s to new beginnings 🥂

The first step is the hardest. There, that step is done, now push trough.

1. Writing seems inevitable

I’m not new to publishing. I’m not new to sharing thoughts and ideas. I believe it’s the thing I like most. I’ve had 2 decent blogs: one custom build, started some 20 years ago. A marketing blog in English that had quite a following, but I neglected in the end. And then a new one on Tumblr, in Dutch, also on marketing, started some 15 years ago. I liked that platform a lot tbh, it was build for pushing ideas. An idea could be a link to a youtube film, an image as well as a text post you spend a couple of hours on. But when I started my advertising agency (AdSomeNoise) blogging got to the back burner. And when I tried picking things up on Tumblr, it’s lost it’s mojo. (Tumblr’s rise and fall is extreme and worth exploring on it’s own)

After that my writing moved to Facebook, and LinkedIn. Now it’s mostly LinkedIn. I have posts ranging from an audience of a few 10k to over a million. While it’s a good platform to build networks, reach people and share ideas .. I’m still missing something. It’s not a very good publishing platform. I’ve been thinking why this might be, and I believe it’s because it’s not about me. This sounds self-centered, and maybe it is, but I’m missing control. It all seems so random. Stupid shit getting a lot of attention and (in my mind) interesting pieces getting totally ignored. “You have to learn the LinkedIn tricks”, they say, and fair enough, and I know a trick or two, but I don’t like to become too instrumental. Ever wondered why all LinkedIn posts look the same?

I even jumped into podcasting! Since the beginning of the year I pushed out a short episode every day, in Dutch! That’s 202 episodes so far (I misnumbered somewhere). While a great medium it has it’s downsides as well. And of course, I know, an episode per day is too much. I agree. But I’m doing this for myself, building discipline, getting to know the medium. And I also learned if you don’t promote it, like all the time, it won’t get traction. So it’s not getting traction. Next year I’ll do it differently.

And next to all of this I tried more: Twitter, Medium, newsletters from my company and from time to time a publication in a trade magazine. So yes, writing seems inevitable. At least, sharing ideas is. Writing is a means to an end.

2. A paradigm shift

I started working in 2002 and quickly ended up in marketing and advertising. Throughout the nillies the advice I gave to clients was this: don’t build a house on rented ground. Meaning: control your shit. Make sure you have the keys, the contacts, the hosting, the tech, .. But things changed. By the time Facebook hit this position was no longer maintainable. Everyone switched. Carefully curated email list were exchanged for anonymous fans and followers. Link gates (applications in Facebook where you had to like a page to win something) exchanged opt-ins. The best way to get an audience was create one on social media. And you could address this audience for free and super easy, what’s not to like (pun intended). Those were the days.

The “Don’t build on rented ground” mantra was replaced by a new one: “go where your audience is”. This place was social media, more specific: Facebook. And later Instagram. Life was good.

But things changed. Slowly but quickly. To reach the audience you carefull build, you now had to pay. A few euro’s at first, a couple hundreds later and we’re now in the thousands. For some reason we ran with it! Isn’t this ironic? We gave away our audiences and accepted to pay to reach them.

3. Looking for control

Is there a digital circle of life? Will we go back to building on own ground. Or is there something better? Is substack better? I don’t know, let’s find out.

The reason why rented ground has an edge is foremost because of distribution. If you publish on LinkedIn, you will reach people. Maybe not enough, maybe not under you control, but at least there’s something substantial. If I write on an own website, chances are nobody knows. Or I have to promote it on the aforementioned platforms. What exactly do I win?

So maybe Substack is the best of both worlds. A place to write and maintain my own content, and a network to distribute and get traction.

What I really would love is a place to centralize. The blockchain of content so to say. That you can use as a source and publish everywhere, without being penalized (because that’s what platforms do).

4. Hi I’m Steven

As you know by now, I like to write ;-)

I will mostly write about marketing and advertising, because that’s what I like and what I do for a living. I’m currently living in Belgium with my wife and 2 kids. I (co-)founded by own agency AdSomeNoise in 2012, once started as a banner production studio, but now pivoted into what I believe is a blueprint of what a future agency should like like. I love to discuss these topics, so feel free to chip in your thoughts.

They tell me to ask you to subscibe, so I’d like to ask you to subscribe. Or not, whatever you like. You can do so below.

Cheers,
Steven

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