About Jim Nichols

The first term I learned when I moved from the traditional side of marketing and media to digital was “Internet time.” Everything I had learned about how long things took and the best processes to get to the desired results went right out the window.

Digital experts were and are required to get to action plans much faster than was the norm in traditional. There were several reasons for this:

1. Because no one really cared: Digital was less thought through, less scrutinized, and generally seemed less important to brand leaders – not worthy of months/weeks of thinking and development.
2. Because we AND OUR DAY TO DAY CLIENTS were rewarded for activity rather than thought. No one really expected thinking from digital. Instead they wanted banners and KWs up tomorrow.
3. Because we could: Many forms of digital creative and media can be executed FAR more quickly than TV or Print.
4. Because we were the bastard step children: 8 times out of 10 we were brought into the campaign process at the last minute, expected to slap together some sort of digital program aligned with the traditional effort that had been built with painstaking steps and dedication.
5. Because we did it well: Digital attracted some of the best, most tenacious “do-ers” in the world. We proved it could be done again and again.

There are inevitably consequences to an approach focused on NOW NOW NOW. And as digital has grown in importance in the whole integrated media and marketing soup, client expectations have evolved significantly. Clients want solutions to problems, not mindless activity.

Have we evolved to address them? Not enough, at least in my view. Our collective orientation is to move from a challenge – sell widgets at $8 per or generate leads or whatever – straight to execution. “What’s the offer?” “What’s the tagline?” “What sizes do we need?”

It was a natural consequence of our old challenges to behave in this manner. But it resulted in tremendous churn. Quickly developing banners that were ultimately off message, or indistinctive, or whatever. The results, if I may be so bold as to suggest, are banner blindness, assessment on click rate, and a bastardization of the word “campaign” to mean three banners with the same piece of stock art and the same background color.

Digital is uniquely positioned to solve real business problems if we apply our heads to creating distinctive messages and executions that connect with consumers instead of bombarding them. If our output is simply blue banners with flashing red buttons, or “just running the TV ad as pre-roll, we denigrate the medium and have no competitive advantage over freelance designers with a Mac in their garages.

Add to that the fact that we none of us got into this to make bad ads, and you have a recipe for – scratch that, you have no recipe at all. You have a steady diet of bad microwave meals that may “do the job” but at a tremendous cost to the “health” of ourselves and our brands.

IBM used to give out little wooden paperweights to employees that said simply, THINK. It was good advice then, and essential direction now if we are to develop powerful digitally-centered marketing concepts and programs in the future.

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Lately there have been a lot of articles pointing to growing brand interest in social media measurement. Like all marketing activity, social is now being more thoroughly scrutinized to determine if it is making a significant business impact.

What is perhaps getting short shrift in that coverage is the massive shift taking place in HOW companies engage in social – where they are active, what they are doing, and how they are representing themselves in these critical environments. Which is definitely a good thing.

In my view, there have been three more or less distinct eras in brand social:

Social 1.0 – Primarily characterized by social media listening, analytics, and customer relations management. The common denominator was RESPONSE – processes through which companies could address issues and opportunities that customers made them aware of.

Social 2.0 – In this phase, companies sought through social to cost effectively reach consumers using social platforms with highly controlled messages. In essence, treating social as a media vehicle like Print or Radio. The theme here was BROADCASTING in different venues.

Social 3.0- This important new phase has brands proactively interacting with consumers, whether through becoming part of conversations or delivering messages designed to drive consumer input and evangelism. The theme here is PARTICIPATION.

In this third phase, the very nature of how a company is presenting itself has begun to change. Part of this is driven by the rise of Twitter as an important social outlet. Since Twitter is ultimately about content and news rather than “static messaging” and offers, brands have had to adapt their voices and stream of commentary to be more human, interesting, and surprising.

Whether on Twitter or in the new Facebook news streams, brand information needs to be at least as interesting as what our friends and colleagues are speaking about. Capturing and maintaining consumer interest requires a greater focus on the consumer and thinking about what THEY want, not what we think they want or “what they don’t know they want yet.”

In my view, the final difference between this social era and the earlier phases is that brands now seem to be more comfortable sharing control of messages with users, even though they are more likely to deviate from whatever is the core brand message. To put their own personal spin on why a brand is great or valuable or worth our time. Accompanying this is a change in the way ad campaigns “work” – a sort of blending between the classic one message/one format/one tagline approach that has always characterized online and the one-off-centric approach that has, for better or for worse, typified digital. Greater variation is essential to capturing and holding consumer attention, and nowhere is this more true than social.

The very nature and character of brand social is changing. And with it a recognition that social is not “media” so much as a marketing approach.

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When I started in the ad biz in 1987, the largest account at our agency was State Farm. For like…forever, State Farm had worked with what is now DDB Chicago to leverage its agents as a point of difference.

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” (Fun fact: Barry Manilow wrote the jingle!)

I didn’t work on State Farm. People down the hall did. But it was such a big account that we were all aware of what they were doing. Theirs was the ultimate “old school” approach. Of course, only hindsight allows me to call it “old school”. It was, at the time, “school,” because we’re talking 25 years ago.

(Cue sound effect of my tennis-balled walker sliding across linoleum. Squeeeeeeak!)

State Farm spent loads o’ cash on this effort. Which in addition to being developed by just one agency, had just one tagline. And one message. And one ad format. And one jingle.

It was an all-English campaign back then, and while the company was rather progressive (no pun intended) in terms of the number of African American agents it featured, the ads were in all other ways the very definition of cookie cutter. I am not saying it was “safe”vertising, but rumor has it that each ad came with a heaping tablespoon of Duke’s Original Mayonnaise.

The ads themselves were less about getting people to switch to State Farm than to convince the 50% or so of America that already had State Farm to stick with it. The ads focused on the agents, those “neighbors” that were available whenever you were in trouble.

They were like tiny whispers from your Mee-Maw. “Choose security.” “Keep making the riskfree choice.” “The quality choice.” That’s what you did in those days of yore. Found a message and spent like a sailor on leave to keep it in people’s consciousness.

How times have changed.

Today they have separate efforts for Hispanic, African American, and Asian targets. And there are several “Anglo” campaigns. The Millennial trial/switching focused campaign uses the tagline as a sort of abracadabra, It’s gotten significant buzz, and they turn what could be a “minus” (I have to call an agent) into a “plus” (I’m a VIP entitled to deal with a real person.)

The campaigns for the rest of us deliver a strong message about value – that good pricing can come WITH great service. Additionally, they do engaging digital marketing that’s as strong as anything in the category. This quirky vid is an example:

I experience several of these campaigns every day. The youth stuff when I get my Sheldon Cooper on via TBS, the mainstreams on sports, a radio campaign on discounts during drive time, and the Hispanic campaign on Univision soccer.

Despite this executional variety, or perhaps BECAUSE of it, these marketing streams cume up to a much stronger brand.

Last week during the Harbaughpalooza game, I saw a vignette ad set to the Cheers theme. Cheers – that venerable 80s show that defined real friendship. By airing this one-off execution as part of its multifaceted marketing effort, State Farm better connected to the vivid idea of being there when you need them.

In the ads of olden times, the State Farm agent sat at his or her small town knotty pine paneled office and spoke to camera. Now a State Farm office looks like a tech start-up. Back then the agent delivered the paraphrased value prop in words. Now many of the ads don’t even need V/O because the pictures are good enough to do the work.

State Farm is also breaking another old school rule – they acknowledge the existence of competitors despite being number one. Why? Because it would be patently absurd to pretend that we had never seen the morose caveman or the uberperky Flo. Today’s consumer values “real and genuine” over “leader branding.”

Of course this change at State Farm is connected to the rise of GEICO and Progressive – sales growth driven by their aggressive marketing efforts. Indeed, GEICO’s model probably helped State Farm be comfortable with all this message variety.

Competition does bear tasty fruit.

But in these times – of media fragmentation, multiculturalism, greater need for value, and stronger consumer “control” – State Farm’s approach appears to be a great example of “what works” today. I for one am glad that they were able to come so far – to recognize that “rules change” and adapt it to their unique brand.

I like Progressive’s Flo. And the Gecko. But using the Cheers song? That was mighty nifty. If it took breaking the old rules to make it happen, I am thrilled that the old advertising conventions lie shattered on the floor in Bloomington, IL.

(BTW I have absolutely nothing to do with State Farm. I just thought the example was strong.)

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There are few brands that fail to recognize the power of social media on their businesses. But it appears that many brand teams choose to outsource social media to minimally empowered internal or external teams instead of making a genuine commitment to listen, participate, and respond to social discussions online.

I’m not suggesting that assigning the role to experts is a bad decision. By identifying and compensating social media experts, it would appear that such brands can make the most of user and prospect discussions. Plus, brand leaders cannot spend their entire days watching twitter feeds or analytics tools. But the decision to “outsource” holds the danger that it will give brand leaders a false sense of confidence – that they have “handled” social without shifting their own thinking about the need for direct consumer involvement and interaction.

As a rule I detest military metaphors because they create both a false sense of us versus them and trivialize the heroic efforts of people being shot at with actual bullets. But consider this. The US felt it had covered off on the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Felt that with its vastly superior numbers and firepower, winning would be easily accomplished. What US policy failed to consider was what was actually happening in the war on the ground.

In social, far too many companies are throwing resources at social as a means of conquering public opinion. But the reality is that until you are a part of the activity you can’t understand what’s happening.

You can’t “cover off” on social. It requires deep, continued commitment to caring about what consumers say, feel, and suggest. Some outsourced resources are excellent at bringing the most salient information and ideas forward. Further, some companies are great at soliciting the input and recommendations delivered by such resources. And acting on them.

This little plea is about the companies that view social as a channel instead of as a marketing style. View social as another form of broadcast media.

Hey, reading occasional aggregated reports of social activity is, I suppose, better than not reading them. But failure to leverage both the richness and real time insight is tantamount to ignoring the consumer. In our new marketing environment, knowing what people are thinking and saying is being “on the ground.” We can’t put consumer interaction on autopilot. There are good reasons to hire experts to help manage the flow of information. But today, playing a role in that information exchange is essential to being a successful leader.

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About five days ago, a dear friend of mine asked my opinion on whether she should entrust digital to her brands’ existing agencies or hire digital specialist agencies. Currently they do both, but are somewhat dissatisfied with the results.

I asked which were her existing agencies, and surprisingly she asked me to answer the question without knowing. She DID SAY none of her traditional agencies had REALLY led the company toward digital, though now that she was expressing serious interest they claimed to have all the requisite capabilities. Similarly, NONE of her digital partners have provided real programs based in brand strategy. She also asked why there was a need for separate digital shops – that intuitively she understood it was complicated, but shouldn’t big agencies be able to deliver the goods?

Never one to shy away from giving a long winded opinion, I sent her the following:

After the dot bomb, some major traditional agencies saw digital as a strategic distraction. They felt it lacked creative options that fostered brand development, added pronounced audience and media complexity, required more staff per dollar to execute, and demanded expertise that their traditional media teams lacked.

All that was true in its way, except perhaps the strategic distraction part. But one could even make a case for that when digital usage was relatively low. Digital was quite limited creatively. And was and is far more complicated, especially as it is structured and managed now:

1. Tens of thousands of media options, versus 100 or so in TV and really only about a dozen given how many properties are owned by the largest media companies
2. Dozens of creative options
3. A buying process that still relies on RFPs/responses/phone calls/meetings
4. A tracking and trafficking process that often leads to remarkable amounts of manual labor
5. High agency turnover and title inflation
6. Clients and agency leaders expecting more for less PLUS innovation

The advent of DSPs and trading desks is slowly reducing the amount of labor per dollar, but most brands still expect a significant portion of spend with specific major pubs and in “breakthrough” programs. Those require lots of labor per dollar.

Until the past couple of years, most of the traditional buying leaders were not terribly troubled to let digital agencies take this high labor/low margin business. Naturally, sister digital agencies were preferred, but losing 3 or 5 or 8% of total spend wasn’t a “crisis.” It represented relatively small dollars and these digital agencies tended to have subordinate, relatively unimportant relationships with clients.

Further, some major traditional agencies discouraged digital spending, because:

1. They didn’t believe in digital
2. They didn’t understand digital
3. They couldn’t execute digital well
4. Clients didn’t care much

Those brand companies that cared about digital generally employed separate digital agencies. Even many of those clients that didn’t care all that much chose separate providers when it was clear that their traditional agencies didn’t “get it.”

As digital grew more important to brands, they began to ask those digital agencies to play a greater role in marketing planning, and to involve them earlier in the process. The problem is that there are many digital people that don’t have the same deep understanding of brands and marketing as do brand or traditional agency people. I’m not suggesting they/we are ignorant of strategy, but that because we have historically been less involved in defining and delivering on major strategic issues, it’s not our core competency. The digital world has historically been more about DR and hype, and about providing “activation” in conjunction with a broader branding initiative. “Activation” meaning moving cases out the door.

Of course, brand marketers have really woken up to digital. As digital spend has increased, traditional agencies have again asked themselves why they are sharing business with an indy digital shop when they could acquire digital business and keep it all. The holding companies in particular have scrambled to build or buy digital expertise. What they haven’t always done is give their various agencies incentive to collaborate.

The key “battle” that will determine the manner in which brands engage in digital is which “side” of this agency conflict will address its weaknesses more thoroughly.

• Traditional or “Integrated” agencies have profound understanding of brands, marketing goals, and ideas. They are generally behind in understanding and having experience with digital technology and vision. They need to find ways to acquire digital expertise and drive competitive advantage by creating value in cross media creative development, planning and buying. A portfolio approach to media built on a digitally centered idea.

• Digital agencies need to enhance their lead in digital knowledge, while really mastering the fundamentals of strategy, branding, and real bona fide marketing. Shifting our thinking from one driven by passion for forms of execution to passion for strategic objectives. Only in this way will we be able to fully leverage our seats at the brand table. Only in this way with digital shops marry passion and expertise to delivering on business objectives. And the key is, our ideas and programs need to work both within and beyond digital, even though we don’t derive revenue from traditional efforts.

Which brings me to the answer to my friend’s question. I told her that agencies are ultimately collections of individuals; applying generalized conclusions to specific companies is misguided. But that it would be a good idea for her to assess the extent to which her traditional alternatives really “get” and are inspired by digital. And the extent to which her digital alternatives “get” strategy and brand business issues.

Ultimately marketing will end up being led by companies that define and deliver highly strategic, digitally centered integrated campaigns. Campaigns that capitalize on the best opportunities in digital, but within a broad brand building context and a larger media view.

The extent to which digital agencies have a future relates to their ability to stay ahead of digital developments AND understand branding, the difference between a digital idea and a digitally centered idea, and the best ways to really partner with other service providers. Otherwise, there’ll be no reason for brands to take on the complexity of having two agencies where one might suffice.

Partnership is a critical consideration because in many cases agencies don’t play well together. That is sometimes even the case when both agencies are divisions within the same company. Brands need to do more than say, “get along.” They need to reward cooperation and punish its absence.

This response dissatisfied my friend. “It was a straightforward question. Just give me a straightforward answer.”

So I giggled a little, and replied, “Yes”.

She was not amused.

It’s after moments like that that I am lucky to still have friends. ;-)

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On Monday a really splashy Mustang ad transformed the home page of Yahoo in a way that I found pretty delightful. And yet it broke so many of the rules that we believe are sacrosanct in an era of consumer control:

• I definitely didn’t ask for it. Didn’t want to hear from Mustang
• It was intrusive, moving page content below the fold as the experience manifested
• It prevented me from doing what I came to do for the duration of the video play
• Its content wasn’t driven by huge amounts of highly personal targeting data

And yet I loved it.

Big. Beautiful. Surprising. Cinematic. Very Mustang.

The lesson here isn’t that it’s great to interrupt the browsing habits of the target. At least not necessarily. No, it’s about the importance of creativity as a means of pleasing consumers. And a refutation of the idea should solicit the rational communication preferences of consumers before we dare put a message into their world.

I’ve always had difficulty with the idea of consumer control. Frankly, I think that if the consumer is entirely in control, than we marketers aren’t doing our jobs. Personally I have no issue with “intrusion” given that marketer messages pay for having access to the entirety of the web for free.

But what HAS changed is the need for us to make outstanding creative consistently. Which brings to mind another topic, and that is the generally dreadful state of digital creative. Not executionally, but conceptually. There are thousands of executionally- cool units running on any given day, but what virtually all lack is an idea on which everything is built. The saddest situation is when a brand has a great offline campaign idea, but the online execution makes little of it – indeed feels stapled on to the rest of the plan.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the growth in digital spend is that it is slowly driving companies to expect more from online ads than red blinking buttons and a good CTR. I know it’s been said a million times, but digital gives us such a remarkable opportunity to develop experiences that help people feel what they can only imagine feeling with a TV ad.

So how do we get great creative to be the norm in digital? I think it is helpful for us to start with five “pre-requisites.”

1. Single-minded message. Most digital ads shoehorn everything possible into the unit. In trying to get people to remember everything, we ensure that they remember nothing.
2. Pictures really really matter. In part because we rely so heavily on stock in digital, not enough attention is paid to ensuring that what we depict in digital creative is incredibly powerful and evocative. In my view we worry too much about the words and not enough about the pictures online.
3. Show them why is matters. We are all inundated with thousands of messages every day. Very few make it past our various filters. The ones that do tend to have reall or special significance to us – at that particular moment or in the manner in which we live our lives.
4. Make the collection of executions cohesive. We use the word “campaign” in digital to mean a bundle of executions launched at the same time. But such a grouping can and often does have no unifying characteristics across messages. Creating a central idea and executional style is important. This unifying approach needn’t be a lockstep set of characteristics that ensures very high executional cohesiveness. Rather, it’s more about ensuring that the viewer recognizes the execution as part of your larger story.
5. Get them interacting. Why go to the trouble of building digital creative if you don’t enable people to futz with the units? While digital can also be a great reach and frequency vehicle, it’s true power is in taking these core media concepts and wrapping them in an interactive whole.

Those five tips aren’t enough to make online ads magically improve. But they are essential to ensuring that delivering great creative is possible.

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Digital has profoundly changed our ability to share and spread the word on things we care about. The democratization of influence is such an important cultural force that its ultimate impact is nigh on unpredictable. We know it will be huge, but as to how huge and how it will alter the human order, we haven’t the foggiest idea.

Progressive brands have been relatively quick to jump on this band wagon. Hundreds of brands have attracted huge numbers of followers by tapping into the human desire to be a part of something they care about.

Yet the interaction and participation rates in most brand social programs are abysmal. Which means we need to ask why there is such a drop-off in consumer excitement between the moment they sign up and how they feel in ensuing weeks and months.

I think one of the big reasons is that in most cases, it’s the brands themselves that are credited with the commentary delivered in service of their businesses. People don’t want to talk with brands, they want to connect with people.

Would you choose to try to have a conversation with your tomato paste? Your PC? Your smart phone? Of course not. Even if these items could speak with us, we probably wouldn’t be much interested in what they have to say.

The appeal of social is rooted in authenticity and personal experience. The idea that a real person is sharing their thoughts and ideas with you. When a brand speaks, its authenticity and motives are naturally suspect. For a half dozen reasons:

1. Brands aren’t people. They are business entities with a single objective: maximizing profit. There is no personality or complexity to such an objective. Only a single minded focus on delivering revenue.
2. Brand speech is and feels vetted and milquetoasted. Since most major brands are owned by multibillion dollar multinational companies, the messages issued on their behalf must be carefully constructed and scrutinized. The operating principle in such a process is to offend no one, and ultimately therefore to say very little that is controversial.
3. Brands have communication objectives. Well, I suppose people do as well. But whereas most person to person speech is centered around opinion and a quest for the truth, brand speech revolves around benefit messaging and copy points. Not exactly a riveting read, at least in general.
4. Brand speech sounds corporate. Whether written by PR agencies, ad agencies, or internal teams, the “sound” of brand speech is generally hollow and formal. Like reading the collected works of Enver Hoxha.
5. Brand speech is anything but candid. When people write about brands, their comments are often laden with immediacy and emotion. But because emotion is slippery territory for brands, most brand social teams fob off emotional commentary with throwaway lines like “Please know that we take your concerns very seriously.”
6. Brand speech is often disconnected from the brand. When companies outsource brand speech, even the tenuous connection between a brand’s “authenticity” and what is said in social venues is suspect. Outsourcers are by their very nature very conservative exponents of a POV. Agencies generally don’t get fired for boring speech – they DO get fired every day for saying interesting things that put a stake in the ground about a topic or issue.

In my view, brands need to rethink the desire to have a brand “speak” on its own behalf. Instead, brand messages should be delivered by real, on the record people. Whether employees, or endorsers, or self identified evangelists, the folks that deliver information about a brand, and at brand expense, need to have the credibility that comes from authenticity, candidness, and passion. Recognizing that brands must be careful about what they say, it’s important that we start promoting real individuals as brand representatives – people who express their own POVs as part of a larger effort to involve users in the strength and future of brands.

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Lemming

I’ve been enjoying a recent issue of Monocle, an unusual magazine that has a lengthy feature on companies around the world that are proving that some of the truths we hold as givens aren’t really true at all. The article highlights newspapers that are growing in circ because of great local investigative journalism, small bookstores that are opening and thriving, CD stores very much in the black, and so on. These businesses are doing well because – what for it – they are focused on meeting real wants and needs.

And it got me to thinking about how much we in the media business tend toward lemmingness, in that we draw conclusions based upon the conclusions that others are drawing instead of thinking – really thinking – about how to meet changing consumer needs and preferences.

I think the US newspaper industry is the poster child for this tendency. It appears that many papers saw the success of TV and free online content and determined that the best way of responding to these trends is to make newspapers more like those kinds of vehicles. Shorter articles, more celebritrash, getting rid of many of the local staff to focus in favor of focusing on cheap content spoon-fed to them by companies and political figures.

The challenge, of course, is that what works in one medium doesn’t work in another. Let me pick on TV for a minute. When a 24-hour news channel displays four Twitter posts as if it is totally attuned to the public will and is as fast with trends as social media, it looks beyond pathetic. The whole idea of Twitter is participation and the cacophony of voices that you can choose (or choose not) to follow. And inasmuch as TV wants to be seen as at least a little more concerned about professional journalism than me and my friends mouthing off from our cell phones as we go to work, covering Tweets like they are the equivalent of the Watergate hearings makes them look beyond silly.

Similarly, when a newspaper tries to become more like TV – more of a headlines service – it fails at both what makes newspapers cool and as a competitor to TV. What makes newspaper journalism so distinctive – and dare I say popular with the people who choose to read it – is that it is both broad and deep. You read a newspaper because you want to get more than a headline and 4 minutes of two yutzes on political extremes throwing metaphorical crème pies at one another.

I get it that newspapers and other media need to do what they have to do in order to make ends meet. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta sing, I get that. But you don’t win by losing. You don’t win by trying to be more like things that are patently different from what you offer.

I don’t believe that Millennials who don’t pick up newspapers wouldn’t be interested in breadth and depth. Rather it simply needs to be delivered to them in ways that are relevant to them. That meet their needs. That give them a role in the discussion. All data seem to indicate that Millennials are more socially conscious than the generations that precede them. Given that, it’s nigh on impossible for me to believe that real investigating reporting, for example, wouldn’t appeal to them. It might not be on broadsheet newsprint. It might not be an entirely professional-reporter-class driven offering that would be appealing to them. But there’s a way to touch them and gain their loyalty.

The meteoric rise of Fox News provides an abundant example of how what newspapers do is actually very relevant to millions and millions of people who may not be picking up issues from their front steps. Fox News took the sensibility and approach of what the UK calls “Red Tops” and reshaped it into something that works on TV. By saying that Fox News is broadcast tabloid is not something I mean as an insult to Fox News. A UK tabloid is rather different from the US’s Weekly World News. It ultimately takes important issues and redefines them in the context of what matters to ordinary people in the street. It serves up news with visceral emotion.

OK, OK, and throws in a lot of pictures of Posh and Becks as well. But Fox News proves that the essence of at least one form of newspaper journalism has loads of legs.

Media challenged by the changing environment and the advent of digital need to think less like lemmings and more like Steve Jobs. To focus on transformation rather than a race to the bottom.

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Oh what a seemingly overblown headline. And yet, if you think about it, it’s not that far from the truth. Because with its broad potential reach, and its likely ability to get people to pay for valuable content, the Fire seems poised to provide a counterbalance for a “free” web, while also giving people the freedom to choose.

Such heresy! The idea that people who make content should get paid directly for what they produce. Hey, I am no enemy of free content. As a fairly prolific blogger, I am well aware that providing free access to content is an incredible force for free expression.

And it appears that Amazon is more than aware of that value. In fact, it has created a browser to help people get and consume the free content of their choice more quickly and easily.

No, I am talking about the other side of the content equation. The one where professionals make great stuff that is rather difficult to properly monetize in the current environment. The situation where professional reporters get laid off in droves because publications cannot pay them on the meager revenues they generate from the online web.

Reversing this decline in professional content is absolutely critical to maintaining a real culture and civilization. Without a way to monetize what pros produce, our culture really does suffer. We need investigative reporters, independent film producers, full time authors, and the like to provide the richness of our society, and the checks against growing government power.

And besides, the free web really isn’t free. What’s happened is that hundreds of billions in investment capital – a synonym for which is our pension and 401K money — have been subsidizing the “free” infrastructure of pipes and pictures and videos and words. Oh, there are also ads to monetize it – something like an average of 14 blinking ads per page – many sold for less than a dime per thousand.

But that arrangement hasn’t favored “good,” it has favored “all,” which is marvelous on some levels, and has made more than a few people millionaires from its democratic largesse. But we also need to ensure that the best and brightest can make their livings producing content.

And that’s also where Amazon Fire fits in. A device that tens of millions more will be able to afford versus iPad. A device created in large part to monetize content through purchases made by those that choose to consume it. A MOBILE device that is sufficiently different from a PC that most expect people to be willing to actually pay for the good stuff.  Paying for the best content out there. So great content producers can make their livings creating great content.

I am very grateful for the “free” web – especially in an era when a handful of companies own virtually all American media. I am grateful as well for an FTC that is trying to promulgate net neutrality. But I am also grateful that Amazon has launched Fire – a device that holds the promise of helping the best content creators make enough to live on. Because they are just as important to the preservation and expansion of “civilization.”

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I had the good fortune this week to co-lead a discussion at the new Digital World Expo in Las Vegas with Lynn Ingham and John Durham. I was grateful for the opportunity because selling things up the ladder internally is something I really used to suck at, but thanks in part to lessons I learned from my co-presenters over the years, I got much better at it.

As is my wont, I got better with a little list of things to remember as I prepared my pitch. I thought I’d share my little list in the chance that it may help someone else improve their win rate for internal selling.

Fit: Naturally any digital solution needs to fit the brand challenges facing the company. But the better you know the immediate issues facing the brand — and the language the brand uses — the more likely you can point out the features of your recommendation that make it an ideal fit for. We complain about internal company silos all the time, but our own success as digital advocates requires that we destroy silos instead of complaining about them. By improving the flow of information we can be of greater service to our brands.

Fear: Our insular way of talking about the industry and the digital divide that separates us from “regular people” – in our companies and in our target audiences – creates discomfiture among final decision makers. When we make an effort to explain things clearly and give decision makers a chance to, for example, try new platforms, we make those around us feel smart. The security of feeling smart helps people feel good about saying yes.

Faith: We need the trust and confidence of others to succeed. There’s a certain “type” of person in our industry that tries so hard to be different than others in organizations. In my experience these people are the least effective at internal selling because in their zeal to appear different they become disconnected from the people and the business. And if people don’t trust you – don’t think you have their backs – they won’t have yours.

Fog: While keeping up with everything in digital is hard, that is often not the responsibility of the final decision maker. That’s YOUR responsibility, as is distilling the oceans of new platforms, ideas, and hype that wash up on shore into coherent strategies and programs. Digital people find this stuff fascinating. Lots of other people don’t. When we can demonstrate the value of things with clarity, and without burying those around us with extraneous information, we clear the fog that makes it harder for people to say yes.

Follow through: In an era of extreme accountability, you need to make the most of every opportunity that reaches you. Match the risk profile of your recommendations with the stage that your company is in the progression toward adopting digital as a central part of its business. And make damned sure that when you get an OK on a project you do everything in your power to make that program successful. Success opens the floodgates of budget and responsibility. Failure slams them shut. There is a lot of discussion in the industry about the need to fail to stay out front of developments. I embrace the spirit of that, but before you fail, make sure you bank some cred with some successes. Usually, the first things a brand should do in digital are not fraught with risk. The risk is in not doing them.

Fun: People get into marketing because it is more interesting than they think finance or accounting or operations would be. Launching a great new product or launching a great marketing campaign is supposed to be thrilling. In digital, we get so buried in our ability to present millions of “metrics” that we forget the emotional side of what we do. Digital efforts are inherently exciting because their capabilities are unprecedented. Help decision makers feel the thrill. Show them how social motivates real people to express their love for the brand. Demonstrate how dynamic video is so compelling. Use the feedback loop of digital to enrich the empathy that is such a central part of marketing.

For me, remembering those six “f-words” as I formulate a pitch makes it far easier to put a tick in the win column. The help people feel smart, empowered and excited about digital. When you pair those emotional wins with a compelling argument for the rational side of your proposal, you’re unstoppable!

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