Harder to Hide
Do I really need a bed made of a material recognized by NASA? Will I really sleep that much better on a mattress on which I can place a glass of red wine and not have spill if I jump on another side? Maybe, but there is a good chance I could get by with something a lot less high-tech and less expensive. Why then would I want it? Why have people convinced themselves they need it in order to have a better night’s sleep or that one brand will outperform another by a margin that justifies the cost differential. While certainly not the only reason, marketing always plays an enormous role in how people sell a product to themselves. Some products need less convincing than others. For better and worse, many of the products in the performance marketing category fall into the need more convincing category. Or, perhaps better said, they fall into the category of "if you think about it too long, you probably would decide against it," i.e. the classic impulse decision. It’s not that such decisions are bad, but like the feeling of post-purchase dissonance, people can not only find themselves questioning their impulse decisions but feeling tricked. The balance between informed consent and tricked is what the performance marketing faces continuously, especially given that many of the wares it promotes do best when not made into a deliberate transaction.
That the performance marketing space promotes products that people might not have chosen to use without some form of marketing doesn’t make the space bad. It does make it an easy target, especially when the marketers enabling these transactions succeed beyond what others might expect or comprehend. This was the case with Snackable Media, formerly NextWebMedia, creators and distributors of one of the most successful mobile subscription services, Predicto. In something that we can’t quite call a trend but have seen happen enough to raise awareness, we had a more mainstream publication writing about the performance marketing space. In this case, it was a TechCrunch piece written by one of the staffers talking about Snackable and not in the most positive light. From this side of the fence, it was more than a little painful. We have a very well-read publication trying to delve into a company and ecosystem about which the author knows very little. It’s part business overview, part fishing expedition to find something wrong because the company has had complaints against it in the past. Trying to make the article more legitimate and the suggestion of impropriety more reasonable, the article uses quotes from an ex-employee and pits it against responses from the company’s CEO.
It might sound counter intuitive to some, but a vast majority of the companies in the performance marketing space prefer to operate in relative anonymity. They don’t feel slighted by lack of coverage or recognition. Until recently, those in the performance marketing space have been somewhat protected from articles such as the one on TechCrunch. They tend to interact with each other, and their actions didn’t fuel any more mainstream activities. Performance marketers monetize Facebook, Google, and countless other places where ads show, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. When done in a manner that others might question, it almost didn’t matter. The activity generally made up so little of the total, or those potentially questioning it underestimated the scale of the activity. And, because those within the industry didn’t benefit by drawing attention to or publicly talking about monetization tactics, companies feeling pressure might pull back in the short term. Once the pressure abated, then, it was back to business as usual. That cycle of boil then simmer became threatened when performance marketing found itself part of an ecosystem continuously being looked at – social gaming. With so much scrutiny and interest, the space couldn’t simply hide. The same happened for the card-on-file post transaction space, where seemingly overnight, companies who had been enjoying their anonymity, despite their high profile placements, found themselves portrayed as villains and were forced to modify their conversion process.
Our space hasn’t come anywhere near the level of transparency that the retail/service sector faces with Yelp. A recent article in Inc., "You’ve Been Yelped," describes the challenge of businesses that could once simply focus on running their business without having to turn themselves into PR shops, checking the site and continually worrying what someone who just left the business might have said. Our space hasn’t had to worry about that yet because no such platform exists, and if it did, people would hesitate to use it. Like the race to the bottom that causes certain marketers to become less compliant, the threat of someone talking about your company would cause you to not post about another. It’s a backwards form of self-policing that has started to see some cracks in the facade. And, if we had to guess, we’re going to feel more and more pressure to open up due to articles like those in TechCrunch. No longer is it just small, individual bloggers complaining about an ad. We can no longer assume that our world will remain completely anonymous. Now is the time for us to start dictating the content rather than merely reacting to it. Will we? Probably not, but it’s worth mentioning because otherwise it might never happen.
