Forrester Research: Who still loves ads? (Subscription required)

Amid the increasing consumer disdain for advertising, there is one glimmer of light: 6% of US adults — a group Forrester calls Ad Affirmers — like advertising and are valuable marketer targets. Not only do these consumers trust ads, but they also give and receive product recommendations, pay for convenience, and buy products based on ad content. Smart marketers will: 1) leverage Ad Affirmers to help spread the word about their products, and 2) at last embrace a conversational approach to marketing that involves listening, supporting, and embracing consumers.

My burning question: Is it really worth the effort, time and money to identify, segment, target and capture that specific sliver of the US population that “wants ads”?

Does it matter if they’re “extremely receptive to advertising” if you can’t find them? While the outlook towards ads between Ad Affirmers and Ad Detractors are very different, the demographic, technology usage or behavioral characteristics are not substantially different, other than the simple fact that they pay attention to a lot more ads across all marketing channels.

How are you going to target them? How efficient is it to spend to reach 40-80% of the US population in order to find that 6%?

Isn’t direct marketing dead?

What can you learn from peoples’ stories of startup and entrepreneurial success and failure?

A lot.

But listen carefully.

Encased in anyone’s story, lesson or example of success and failure is the bias created by their own experiences: what they noticed and learned, the choices they made, the insights they gleaned and the conclusions they drew.

But that’s just a part of the story:

• What did they neglect to notice?
• How much of the results can be attributed to their decisions, strategy and tactics and how much is due to just their environment? (i.e. were they lucky or good?)
• What lessons did they not not pick up? What conclusions did they fail to draw?
• What “unknown unknowns” stayed unknown?
• What special insights or attributes did they bring that you won’t be able to match?
• What could you have done better if you were in their shoes?
• How can you separate the strategies they adopted from the tactics they used?

Entrepreneurs, just like everyone else, develop biases based on their experiences. And our biases are an important part of our messages…

Perhaps it’s the viewpoint and knowledge, the sum of the experiences and wisdom that forms the bias, that contains the most valuable part of the message.

… but they have to be used carefully. Our knowledge, education and experiences form how we create solutions. We develop biases and frames of reference to help us understand new situations and solve new questions.

But we tend to use the tools we know. If I’ve got a hammer, I’ll probably use a hammer. But what if I need a wrench? What if the answer is really a flute? What if the solution is really a tool I’ve never heard of?

The point is not to get rid of our biases: our biases can be incredibly valuable if we recognize where they exist, how they were formed and how they shape us.

—

Friends and colleagues have asked me if I could create a repeatable “blueprint” or process for evaluating and executing a startup idea: a strategic framework and decision-making process resulting in a template business plan, financial model and investor pitch deck.

Yes, I could, and I’ve started doing that (download XLS template financial model) but it’s only valuable as a starting point, not as the end result.

There’s a bit of art to the science of creating a business plan and a financial model: the value is created not by the output but through the process.

Creating new ideas depends on people, not the process. The value is in the process of questioning, analyzing, evaluating and breaking down a business into its core: assumptions, variables, drivers, equations, relationships, bets, risks and mysteries. And this process depends on people sharing their ideas, bases of knowledge, biases and frames of reference, not from using a template “fill-in-the-blank” business plan.

The bigger value is in being able to step past our narrow spheres of knowledge and connect to broader ideas and experiences. Instead of adhering to our biases, bring them together to clash and create. A template doesn’t do that: people do.

That’s what I do. But it also takes you.

In the absence of more complete thoughts, unordered links:

• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators:

  In the 21st century, there is nothing more asymmetrical - more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative — than the world-changing power of an ideal.

  Also: Hugh MacLeod: “The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

• Social search product Aardvark: Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — but better. Aardvark is a great way to get access to a large network of real people to get answers from real people in near real-time. With the amount of content and context we create every-day, finding the right filters to find the right answers is getting tougher: and Aardvark is a step in the right direction.
• Great listening and thinking for a Sunday morning: Google’s view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt. A couple points: network effects, increasing rate of change, generational differences in the ability to deal with speed, the rule of power laws, “you better have a head”, “free is a better price than cheap”, porous companies, the need for dissent, innovation comes when you’re not under the gun, the nature of technology is for increased variants, innovation comes from small teams, get teams talking to each other, “the next war is never like the last war.”

  (via Ethan Bauley)

• On another note, Ballmer on his understanding of Google’s Android strategy:
  

  “I don’t really understand their strategy … if I went to my shareholder meetings and my analyst meeting and said, ‘Hey, we just launched a new product that has no revenue model - yeah, cheer for me’ I’m not sure my investors would take that very well, but that’s what Google’s telling their investors about Android.”

  I’m betting Ballmer understands the model, but talking down Android shows a lack of confidence in his own product.

  (via The Bank Channel)

Inspired in part by “How to Fail”, Valeria Maltoni created a personal list of “25 Ways to Fail and Come Out on Top”. Her in-depth personal list of lessons from business and life adds many new points to the conversation about learning from failure, and I wanted to take the time to bring out a couple points that resonated with me.

Don’t let planning stop us down from starting:

1/ Lean into the Project - being a team player is great, but sometimes all the meeting and planning slow you and your team down. By the time you are called to implement, there is no juice left in you or your team.

… Some of the planning and process mania is a placebo for managing risk. The other placebo effect is trying to get everyone on the same page. How about working it, leveraging people’s passion, and pushing through the dip?

Opposition is a positive signal:

15/ Embrace resistance - if everyone agrees and nobody pushes back, it’s not different enough. I’ve also come to believe that opposition is often an indication that you’re onto something. Have you found that to be true?

This is also valid for listening to those who disagree with you. They are going to teach you something you did not know before.

Share:

21/ Share what you know with others - let them build on it, improve it, amend, give you feedback. This is not only valid for social media. It works in many areas of work and life. Success is becoming more and more about social capital and trust, and not about keeping the cards close to the vest.

My own personal problem right now?

22/ Take on only so many projects - yes, this will probably be a problem in organizations where people are expected to be “jacks of all trades”. But you know what they say to complete that sentence you are “master of none”.

When you don’t leverage your strengths, you find yourself off balance and ineffective.

More on producing rather than perfecting:

25/ Stop trying to be perfect - this was the underlying message of The Big Moo and it is our grand finale. When you work hard at being perfect you miss all of the great ways to fail your way to success.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned through failure?

—

How can you read “How to Fail”?

• Read on the web.
• Download the eBook PDF.
• Read (and download) the PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare.

Summit 2008 | Nov 2008 | by Jeremy Yuricek

This weekend I will be in NY for a little relaxing, theorizing and planning with frequent collaborator Jeremy Yuricek at Y-Industries.

Jeremy’s help and encouragement is the reason I first launched a website back in 2002 (the defunct davidson2016.org), only to see it grow into taylordavidson.com over time…