Cost Per Action: A Logical Progression

Over the last few years, more and more CEO's and CMO's I talk to are pushing us to focus on ROI to justify online spending. Sure sometimes it's frustrating but it's born out of having been burned during the .com bust.

Google's testing of a Cost Per Action pricing model will help marketers in the drive toward ROI. It's really a logical progression. We've moved from cost per impressioin, to cost per click to cost per action.

I'm still trying to get my head around the implications so I'll just point you to some interesting posts you should check out.

• Seth Godin
• John Battelle
• SeekingAlpha
  

From a Distance

A while back, I sat in on a presentation about using blogs as a marketing tool. I was particularly interested in what kind of questions would be asked. The majority of them had to do with the discomfort marketers feel at letting their consumers give them honest feedback through a blog comment system. I kept asking myself, "Why is there so much resistance to this?"

This morning it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. Imagine you see an attractive person across a crowded, smoke-filled bar. You smile, tip your glass and give your best come-hither look. As the object of your desire comes closer you realize what a mistake you've made. What looked beautiful from a distance could not stand up to close inspection.

Often, marketers have little confidence in their clients. Often, clients have little confidence in themselves. They believe their products or service will not stand up to a close look and it's just better to keep them at a distance.

It all comes down to this, if you get a comment on your blog saying you suck, The solution isn't to remove the commenting feature from your blog. The solution is to stop sucking.

Audience: Cargo or Passenger?

For years, actually decades, entertainment creators and marketers viewed our audience not as passengers on a journey we all were taking together, but as cargo. Think about it, cargo doesn’t care what time you leave, doesn’t need to be comfortable. As a matter of fact cargo doesn’t have any opinion at all. We saw ourselves as drivers, dragging our audiences along for the ride. We decided what we would say, when we would say it and how we would say it. The job of the audience like any good cargo was to simply keep quiet and appreciate our willingness to give them a lift.

But now the audience is demanding we no longer treat them as cargo but as passengers. When you deal with passengers you ask questions like; what time do you want to leave? Are you comfortable? Do you want to stop for lunch?

Until we willingly embrace this change we will continue to be frustrated as our audience skips commercials, downloads episodes sans advertisement and generally avoids us. However, if we seek to turn our audience into willing co-conspirators by rising to the challenge of creating better, more engaging brand experiences that repects our passengers then we are well on our way toward a memorable road trip.