It Isn't Only Government That Moves Slowly!

It will be exciting to see how entrepreneurs and local and state governments will soon make use of the drones, if the timelines stick as outlined in the FAA funding legislation which is expected to be approved this month. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction that the FAA is moving too fast was to be expected.

Drones, a.k.a. UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have been under development since 1915 or so and developed largely with research funded by the US military and Israel.  So everyone's theoretically had plenty of time to make adjustments for this not-so-new technology.

Inertial reactions to new technology are always a bit baffling or some would say amusing as in the resistance here in Durham among some neighborhood associations who fear leaving the one-dimensional listserves to which many have become accustomed since the mid-to-late 1990s for the multi-dimensional platforms now available such as Neighborship, created by Durham entrepreneur.

Of course there was this same resistance to listserves back when they came along.  Thank goodness neighborhood leaders at that time had the faith to move to new ways to communicate rather than staying stuck in something familiar “until there was a guarantee” that no one would stay or be left behind.

This is the same reticence that keeps nearly every contemporary  office holding onto to a seldom used fax machine in the back room just as many still had mimeograph machines and telexes from the 1960s through the 1980s, even though they were rarely, if ever, utilized.

In the same FAA bill that timelines domestic use for drones there is a plan to move airlines to the use of GPS technology for navigation similar to the navigation systems in automobiles and trucks and now even being used by 37% of the half of the population now using smartphones.

The question again is why, nearly two decades after the technology was introduced in production cars and even rental cars, the airlines are claiming that they haven't had enough time to prepare? The fact is they have had plenty of time to prepare but maybe like some of the wary neighborhood associations they had convinced themselves wait.

It isn't only government that moves slowly!

In fact news reports, such as the one Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, indicate that local governments and businesses have been eager to adopt unmanned aircraft technology for things such as “environmental monitoring, fire protection and surveillance of suspected criminals. Other potential roles include industrial jobs such as checking power lines and tracking equipment.”

Some organizations will forge ahead using this innovation but rarely will it be through groupthink!

When Marketing And Reputation Disconnect

Corporate spin-offs are complex so at first I wondered if Time Warner Cable had shed the core value for sustainability held by its former parent company.  But given its “go green” “going greener” and “think green” marketing campaigns, maybe it’s just that the marketing department exempts itself when it comes to hypocritically proliferating huge, stationary and archaic outdoor billboards in my adopted hometown and state.

There is a huge disconnect between the company’s use of outdoor billboards and the commitment in its community impact report where promises are made to “building operational foundation of policies and procedures that are environmentally conscious and can minimize our impact on natural resources.”

More than 80% of North Carolinians including nearly 90% of political Independents like me (half of all voters,) object to letting billboard companies cut down any more trees especially after the industry reneged last year on a compromise agreement made in the year 2000 with environmental interests, NCDOT and Federal Highway Administration that increased the then-125’ foot rectangular selective cutting zone permitted around billboards to a 250"’ triangular zone with no net loss of trees.

Now with the help of allies in the State legislature, the outdoor billboard industry rammed through approval that unbeknownst to many of those who voted for it will now permit outboard billboard companies to clear-cut the size of a Super Bowl football field in each direction along roadsides adjacent to each of the state’s more than 8,000 billboards, all of this over the objections of 80% of North Carolinians.

Billboard advertisers, such as Time Warner Cable, may see this as only a risk to the reputation of the billboard companies but marketing experts have long confirmed that the liabilities of using billboards accrue primarily to the reputations of brands that place messages on them.

Cable companies aren't immune just because they operate much like monopolies.  New research conducted a few months ago reveals that 56% of Americans try to buy from companies that do good things for the environment and that a disconnect between a brand and its actions triggers a negative reaction including conscious decisions not to purchase a particular product or service among 40% of consumers, twice the proportion who continue to buy regardless of the disconnect.

Cable companies such as Time Warner cannot afford to be flip.  They cannot afford to alienate their all ready-dwindling customer base. Deloitte’s sixth edition of its State of the Media Democracy released just last month confirms that cable companies are in the process of losing 35% of their subscribers to cord-cutting in favor of online streaming:

• “9 percent of people have already cut the cord

 

• 11 percent are considering doing so because they can watch almost all of their favorite shows online.

 

• An additional 15 percent of respondents said that they will most likely watch movies, television programs, and videos from online digital sources (via download or streamed over the Internet) in the near future.”

Having watched how quickly tethered telephone infrastructure was left stranded by cell phones, I doubt cable executives are sleeping too soundly at night having lost or in the process of losing more than a third of subscribers during the brief existence of online streaming let alone the risk of losing another 40% just because their marketers are insensitive to their own corporate sustainability vows.

Unfortunately, far too few marketing executives in any sector are being held accountable for the alienation of potential and existing customers resulting from their use of anti-sustainability mediums such as outdoor billboards.  The time is long overdue for the implementation of metrics that hold marketers accountable for the “net” effect of marketing strategies.

This need for accountability also pertains to any community or state destination marketers who continue to use outdoor billboards even when donated, hoping to reach the 1 or 2 people out of every 10 who may use them, while alienating the 8 of 10 they offend.  The same is true of all non-profits.  they must realize that, get there using billboards, they are alienating many times more potential donors or attendees than they are reaching.

Ignoring these facts is not called marketing.  It is called stupid.

Dating back to pioneers from the era of the real “Mad Men,” and marketing giants (including advertising) such as David Ogilvy and Howard Gossage have discouraged use of outdoor billboards and cited their detrimental effects.

This is also not about politics.  Even the “standard-bearer for American conservatism”, the late William F. Buckley, wrote in an article entitled The Politics of Beauty that “billboards are acts of aggression, against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected…the big name libertarian theorists should go to work demolishing the billboarders’ abuse of the argument of private property.”

If you are a mayor or city manager or governor or secretary or DMO chair of a community or state and your destination marketing organization still uses outdoor billboards you need to give them a “Gibbs slap” up the back of the head.

The Negative Turn On-to-Turn-Off Ratio of Super Bowl Ads

Understanding how viewers of the Super Bowl perceive those incredibly expensive television advertisements that run during each game may provide a glimpse into why advertising of any kind has now become counterproductive based on the annual survey by BIGinsight.com.

Three out of four viewers consider Super Bowl ads merely as entertainment which may mean they capture more attention than the 6.5 second average viewers pay to any advertisement. But, based on five year averages, nearly 2 out of every 10 viewers would prefer that advertisers save their money and pass the savings along to consumers; and more than four out of every 10 viewers consider the ads as either a bother, an interruption or something that merely makes the game take too long.


An average of 7.8% viewers say the ads influenced them to buy products from the advertisers.  That's not a bad percentage until you realize that for every viewer the advertisers are motivating to do what the ads are meant to accomplish, they are turning off three others.

The very purpose of any advertising ($3.5 million per 30 second ad during the Super Bowl) is negated when it turns off more people than it turns on.  There are far too many other elements of marketing these day, such as earned media which is sometimes called publicity, that don't run this risk; and this is the premise behind an excellent book entitled The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.

Still, at a 3 to 1 turn off-to-turn-on ratio the television ads during the Super Bowl are much less damaging to a brand than advertising put up on huge stationary outdoor roadside billboards which, in North Carolina, actually turn off eight drivers/passengers for every one person who finds them useful.
When an organization or business goes to the trouble of placing one of the 5,000 ads now viewed by the average person in a day, the objective, at the very minimum, is to motivate consumers without creating enemies for product, service or brand.

Owners of advertising mediums such as television or outdoor billboards are typically not motivated to explain this risk to potential advertisers because the negative ratio of consumers they might motivate to consumers they turn off accrues only to the business or organization placing the advertisement.
With the exception of outdoor advertising, where the message is the only content, most of us rely on advertising to subsidize news, sports and entertainment.  Increasingly, though, there are successful models built on giving consumers the option of paying a small fee to avoid advertising as I just did on Pandora.com.

This raises the question about whatever happened to cable television? When I first learned about it in the mid-1970s it was promoted as a subscription-to-view medium free of the constant ad interruptions on broadcast television, but apparently greed quickly made that unique selling proposition extinct. Now that they are losing several hundred thousand subscribers each quarter to streaming (9% of all subscribers to date with another 11% already considering it,)  it may not be long before both broadcast and cable television are extinct.

Marketers who incorporate advertising into their blend of marketing activities and the agencies which are often paid to both create and place them as well as the mediums that rely on advertising to subsidize content must somehow work together to find a way to reduce ad clutter which long ago made advertising noticeable only by its absence.

A good start would be to retire all roadside billboards in favor of less harmful outdoor substitutes.  If they don't, it won't just be outdoor billboards that become obsolete.

Go Pats!

Portion Distortion

I'm not part of the 68% of adults in the US who are overweight or obese, but in the past, members of my family have struggled with weight.  I probably would have too, by now, except that in my early 20s I learned that I am hypoglycemic (reactive not diabetic) and swore off eating or drinking anything that had more than two or three grams of sugar including refined carbohydrates.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no paragon of fitness, but when it comes to weight I'm only about 11 pounds heavier than I was when I started high school. It just needs to be firmed up and moved around here and there.  My reason for blogging recently about the movement Halfsies was motivated more by my concern about food waste and poverty.

The reinvigorated concern about portion sizes was spurred when I downloaded an iPhone app titled The Eatery by Massive Health, a start up.  I've been following it during the four months since I shattered my wrist and arm in a fall (no, it didn't happen when I was riding my Harley.)


Oh, good news is that yesterday my surgeon cleared me, even though it will be another 8 months before I know just how much ability I will fully recover but the bones are growing nicely around the 14 screws which anchors a long metal plate running from my wrist down my arm and the nerves in my fingers are coming back.

Massive Health intends to help people by giving them access to better data.  If you're interested even during the ramp up there is a blog at this link that is extremely useful.  I was particularly intrigued by one that was posted earlier this month about portion sizes even before I had learned about Halfsies, a philanthropy model that permits patrons of participating restaurants to order a half portion while contributing the remainder of the full price for a full serving to help those in need.

The blog post on “portion distortion” includes a fascinating infographic that illustrates just how portions have increased since the late 1970s to where today's studies show we are actually consuming 30% more.  Also included at the bottom the infographic are some handy references about what constitutes the proper serving in some easy ways to regain control.

If you are not someone who needs this information, please forward it on to the nearly 7 out of 10 Americans who apparently do.

Demagoguery Falls Between Pawn Stars and American Pickers

The adjustment I made a few weeks ago so that my mortgage payment would be sure to reflect a modest increase in local property taxes made me think back to something I read in a book a month or two ago.

I found it interesting that:

“the federal government accounts for about 65 percent of total tax revenues, while state and local governments account for 35 percent.”

“…the United States collects around 18 percent of GDP in tax revenues at the federal level and another 12 percent of GDP at the state and local levels. Washington currently returns around 4 percent of GDP to the states to implement health, education and infrastructure programs at the state and local levels.”

Equally interesting was the data that the book’s author, clinical economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, used to illustrate that “federal tax revenues as a share of GDP were nearly constant from mid-1950s onward at 17 percent to 18 percent of GDP.”

He continued by asserting that “in the United States, there has been essentially no change in the tax-to-GDP ratio since 1965.” The title of Sachs’ book, The Price of Civilization, comes from a quote by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a speech he made in 1904, just a few years after he was made a recess appointee to the court by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

Holmes said that “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”  He had been wounded in combat, fighting for the Union during the American Civil War.  He died two days shy of his 94th birthday in 1935 --  just more than a decade before I was born and only a few years after he retired from the nation's highest court.

To put that in perspective, I was two years old when the 1st Cavalry Division was breaking through Korea's Pusan perimeter and the last time taxes were this low as a share of the nation's economy, according to the Associated Press. 

So I smiled yesterday as I read a weekly opinion column in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen who wrote that “it is entirely appropriate that last week’s GOP debates fell between ‘Pawn Stars’ and ‘American Pickers’ in the 10 most-watched cable television shows.”

I admit to watching two of the three.  I avoided the debate probably because, in the words of another WP columnist Kathleen Parker written a few months ago, I have trouble with “the Palinization of the GOP, in which the least informed earns the loudest applause.”

I agree with Cohen that the GOP appears to have “turned hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English language: It depends.”

As with taxes he continues, “Should they be raised? It depends. It depends on economic and fiscal conditions — and on whose taxes will be raised and by how much.”  It depends!

“The answer cannot be “No, never.” That’s not an economic position; it is an ideological one and exhibits a closed mind.”

By the way, is it just me or is Rick on Pawn Stars a dead ringer for Homer Simpson?