All in the name of marketing

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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I finally got my 200 NFTs all set up. It took several major efforts. By the time I had it sorted it was becoming very easy to me. The next time it will be cake.

Now the marketing of the NFTs. The major efforts have not been panning out.

I approached a close friend in his 80s whose father was a madman on Fifth Avenue in NYC. Bottom line until there are people showing a desire for my NFTs no one will want to buy them. Buyers need a sense that people want them. Buyers want to flip them.

My solution was to start an ad offering Special Savings on 12 of them In groups of three at one price in Eth with the prices incrementally rising from 0.05Eth to 0.3Eth.

I set up the ad and some of the terms. The ad fell flat. I rethought the rules. Younger people are like us. Do not read them the rules.

The next ad was a huge success. I am running ads to wealth people under 35 that might collect NFTs. My market.

This has been running for three days now. But the price of Ethereum in USD has been rocketing. People are saying one minute in their heads I am holding Eth for the rise. My thinking when Eth begins to go more sideways people will think, “I can buy more now with the Eth I have”. This back filling price and buying of NFTs is quite natural. The wealth effect in the stock market underscores a lot of consumption in the US economy.

I also began to use TikTok, TT. The reason is for a couple of posts per day a lot of people will see it for free. The people hearting my posts are running at about 10 to 15% of the viewers. My blurb says, “200 NFTs be first to make a crazy bid”.

The TT audience is not as well heeled necessarily. But low ball bids can be accepted or ignored as steppingstones towards higher bids.

All of this is early. An internet buyer needs to see a work of art six to seven times online to commit. The ads have to be a cumulative affect on the buyers.

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Marketing is hard. Really hard. So is sales. Technical types, like me, often make fun of “marketing”, but I think that’s because in the marketing/sales world it is impossible to “measure” or “simulate” results in advance. In the tech world, you can simulate a circuit, you can run the software, do the chemistry experiment, etc, and you can test it as deeply as you want to (and have time/money for). But in marketing/sales, that’s not always possible, and even when possible, rarely correlates well to the real world (lately software, especially AI software, may be exhibiting some of this fuzziness).

Weren’t the madmen on Madison Ave??? :laughing:

Can the audience at large see the bids as they go up?

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ah Madison ave my bad. I am not from NYC.

Yes the bids are viewable to everyone. That is the game changer as it happens.

Online sales buyers need to have seen the work of art six plus times before buying it. This means the results need to settle in over time. IG the wealthy audience will see the ad at least six times if they individually do things in response to the ad IG will show it to them over and over again. TT wont show it twice to the viewers but being very young some may be triggered into action. I am not paying for the TT posts.

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Thank you for this, as a marketer this means a lot.

I am reaping karma at the moment. When I was in business school, I was heavy on the accounting and finance courses, and I used to make fun of marketing and HR as “creampuff majors”.

What do I do now? I’m a marketer for an HR consultancy.

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I think you were right in your initial assessment. What strikes me about marketing people, with a few exceptions, is their stunning lack of creativity. Seems all they can do is copy what they see someone else doing.

Ever notice how the media overuses certain phrases or words? Everything is “alarming”, or 'shocking". Every thought or device is a “game changer”. The latest one I noticed on the news was overuse of “emotional”. Now I am seeing a TV advert with three young female designers in Miami, and they talk about how “emotional” it is

Auto styling is layer upon layer of cliches. For a while, nearly everything from a Range Rover, to a Chevy Aveo had fake grills in the sides of their front fenders. Now the cliches are huge, fake, front brake air ducts, and fake exhaust pipes.

My take is marketing majors are the people who did not have sufficient command of addition and subtraction for any other b-school major. My marketing class did a soda pop simulation. At the end of the simulation, the team I ran had, by far, the best production scheduling vs sales. In the presentation, I was asked how I did the forecasting. I said “backed out the seasonal adjustment factors to get at the base market activity number, and looked at the change in the rate of change”. Blank looks ensued. I’m terrible at math, but I could out-math probably 80% of the people in that class.

Steve

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One of the few examples of a person who actually does something different was a guy who had an agency in Chicago in the 80s. iirc, his name was something like Suldheimer. While his ads were refreshingly different from most on the air at the time, there was little difference in the approach his ads took. They were always fast paced, and the people in them were deadpan.

This was one of his Wendy’s ads.

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iirc, this FedEx ad was one of his too.

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First off, welcome back to METAR @lazarus7 !!!

Are you enjoying what you are doing? In the end, that’s the main thing.

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Another of his ads for Wendy’s. Again, fast paced, and deadpan actors.

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You did a second derivative, and yet you are terrible at math. :sweat_smile:

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Yes, I am terrible at math. Barely managed Cs in Calculus. I did surprisingly well in Fluid Dynamics, but Static and Dynamic Structural Analysis were horrible. So, I switched from engineering to b-school.

Steve…terrible at math, by college level engineering standards

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I’m going to disagree. Marketing and sales aren’t that hard. They’re just confusing to us more technical oriented folks who like things that work the same way every time.

Marketing, sales, and economics are all related in that they deal with humans. Humans, in general, are an irrational bunch. We do something one time, then do something else the next time, for reasons that we can’t explain fully.

If I’m trying to figure out how to attach this thing to that thing, I try one idea. If that fails, I study things to figure out why it failed. Then I make a change and try something else, repeating this process until I have found a way of attaching this thing to that thing that works and is repeatable.

You can’t do that with sales. You ask someone to buy your stuff. They say no. They can’t explain why, or they lie about why, or give you a good answer. But you can’t really tell which is which. So you ask someone else to buy your stuff and they also say no. They give you different reasons why, but you still can’t tell if they’re telling you the truth, are lying, or simply don’t know but are just saying something. Repeat this over and over, keeping track of the results, and you become a marketer. Marketers are salesmen with questionable data to support why they do what they do. “We gave surveys to 1000 potential buyers of our product and this is what those people said.” But did the people tell you the truth, did they lie, could they not really explain their choice? No one really knows.

So what do the highest producing salesman do? They simply go out over and over every day, asking people to buy their stuff. They might go back to the same people enough that they relent and buy. Or they might take that potential buyer out to dinner often enough that they relent and buy. But at their core, they do the same thing over and over every day expecting different results this time. I have also seen that used as a definition of insanity.

So my conclusion is that salesmen are insane. :rofl:

More seriously, my opinion is that the better your product or service is, the less you need salesmen. So if you’re finding your salesmen aren’t selling a lot, the problem might not be the salesmen, it might be the product or service. And on the other side of the coin, if all of your salesmen are doing very well, maybe you don’t really need that many. Your product might be selling itself.

Most businesses need some salesmen, but most businesses might also be better off paying their salesmen a flat salary for their time and measuring their productivity rather than incent them to do irresponsible things by paying them a commission and bonus based on sales.

–Peter

PS - Having read this again, I see that I used salesman a lot. I do not mean to dismiss women who are in sales and marketing. It’s just that I don’t want demean women in sales by lumping them in with their slimy male counterparts. :laughing:

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How simple is the provable and repeatable, like math, in Marketing? When I switched to b-school, they tried to make me take a “business math” class. I said “I have passed three semesters of Calculus. I think I can add and subtract well enough”. The prerequisite was waived.

In that soda pop game in Marketing, I tried to explain “sales are increasing at a decreasing rate, so we need to decrease the rate of increase in production rate”. The marketing majors went catatonic.

Hence the overuse of hackneyed slogans and ad pitches. They appeared to have worked, for someone, at one time, so everyone piles on. Recently, some local Detroit business was touting it’s “Dads and grads” sale. I heard that “dads and grads” line over 40 years ago. Ever notice how the media overuses alliteration? “Superstorm Sandy”. “Stranger danger”. That device was probably fresh at one time, maybe 150 years ago.

A distinction without difference. The salespeople, as math challenged as they may be, will understand their performance will be ranked, and the bottom cohort will be tossed, regardless of the yardstick used.

Steve…and a tribute to Bernard Woolley @ 1:48

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I know one salesman. And I know him for over 50 years, since he was born. He never was able to handle school, and he managed to graduate high school, and tried college for a semester but just couldn’t do it. I tried to help, but to no avail. In the end he became a salesman. And he is a heck of a good salesman. Really really good. He sells paper goods to places that always want the lowest prices. But he doesn’t always give the lowest prices. He started at the company at the lowest level possible, after 6 months he was selling like crazy. After a year, he was in the top 5 sales people. After 3 years, he was the top salesperson, and not by a small margin.

What’s his secret? He’s what we called a “schmoozer” in New York City. He can talk your ear off. About any topic. And he has an innate sense of what you like to talk about. And he does that naturally, and he does it every time, every conversation. That makes people like him, and trust him, and they buy from him. All the time.

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No, a very significant difference.

If you pay sales critters a salary, you never grossly overpay your sales critters. (Sorry, steve, I gotta think like a JC here.) You might overpay for a poor performer for a while, but only until your numbers-based tracking system catches up and removes them for the poor performance. And you don’t overpay by giving commissions for things that don’t really need a sales critter, but instead need an order taker.

You also don’t give an incentive to sales critters to sell stuff that isn’t good for the customer just to collect the commission. That might be the worst offense, as the customer is likely to be unsatisfied with their purchase and respond by going elsewhere for future purchases. Unhappy customers are also more likely to talk about their bad experience. See, for example, any feedback site just about anywhere on the internet.

–Peter

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so right. I heard an NPR report on CNN spasms currently. That clickbait works and nuanced news not so much. It was a dumb summation of all the bloggers trying to hit it big with a grab you moment.

Meanwhile the truth? The NYT is eating everyone except Google alive in the proper news category.

CNN almost went proper news but the board of directors canned the CEO who was implementing the changes about a month ago. He had been rubbing the star power wrong…why get rid of clickbait when a spoiled brat in the news room wants to be overpaid for trash? CNN again messed up.

Adding you know what is at times funny about clickbait? The little fry trying it are paying to sponsor its distribution and spending time they could have worked for actual money to do it. These guys with clickbait can lose money and time endlessly like fools.

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In my job I have some sales responsibilities currently not fully all the time. That is exactly why sales is not routine at all. I engage different people very well. It can be the weather that day for a few people. Mixed with the weekend is coming up. What are you doing? It is about their experience. Then adding my experience because we are open to each other. Throw in easy fast different jokes and people have a lot of fun.

Here folks there are too many people into supply side econ. Supply side econ we were all told works. It has never worked. The hard believers are upset with me. Very upset at times. I am not selling here. I am telling the truth to the Anglo Saxon Bullet Headed Son as John Lennon called them. It is just as easy as selling but in poli econ people only switch for money. Some are switching. Not because of me. Follow the money.

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I will tell you “the secret”, as I have worked with and managed several. There are no “secrets”, and there are many strategies to being successful in sales.

One is being “the plugger”, just keep knocking on doors - some percentage will open, and some percentage of those will buy. I had a guy who turned a long list of dead accounts into a handsome living. The secret: “more calls = more sales”. This apparently also works with telemarketing, though I don’t claim to understand it.

One is being a service master: finding a couple of heavyweight clients and being at their beck and call, and doing everything right. We had a guy who pestered the traffic department to know exactly when every spot of his clients would run, and he would phone or send them a fax every afternoon for the next day so they could make sure to hear it. He rarely lost a client (attrition in most of broadcasting was well over 30% annually.)

One is being smart. My best friend in the business was the best sales guy I ever saw. He knew how to listen to the client’s first objection, wave it away, and get to the real objection and deal with that. He could close a deal standing at a urinal with the guy. He could chameleon himself into whatever the client wanted to see, even though he was rough around the edges. Huge!

One is being creative, and finding ways to tie clients together for the benefit of both. They both think they’re getting the better end of the stick, and sometimes they both do. On on TV right now is “order your Dominos Pizza using the Dominos App via CarPlay”. I’m not sure what’s going on behind the scenes, but somehow Apple is paying for or lubricating the Domino’s advertising for promotion of their app. And yeah, good for both. I had a Sales Manager who could ride this carousel with our entire roster of clients.

One is … Well, there are lots. “People buy from people they like”. “The Early Bird gets the worm”, blah blah blah. The point is there are hundreds of different ways, and some portion of people find a way to be successful, the path isn’t always the same.

Oh, and as for “salary”, occasionally a good idea, but not usually. There are circumstances where it makes sense, but generally sales people are motivated by money (to a degree far higher than, say, research scientists or university mathematicians). We always liked to encourage our salespeople to upgrade to a new car or better to buy a house. We loved seeing that mortgage payment go up, because we knew that means they would continue to be “motivated” :wink:

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The beauty of SM marketing is if you set it right you do not need to physically and mentally daily be consistent in the efforts. At a lower price that is automated in SM in the clients office or living room.

I changed my IG ad after three days. It was a post boosted. But my animations are really better as reels. It was the verbiage that matters. Even though this is my first NFT project I wrote

“My latest NFT project! Success begets success
To get people involved I am accepting 12 low bids
See my Rarible Marketplace to peruse
all 200 themed 3D animations ~ the
1% Royalty rate is with you in mind!”

If I begin to get activity in the form of bids on these they will all sell. Letting twelve go low in price does not matter there are 200. People need to see each other getting into these. If no one shows any interest then no one else will show any interest.

Fake it till you make it.

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You should do what reportedly many (most?) people do with their NFTs. Cooperate with trusted friends and buy each others NFTs in a chain so you drive up the prices.

Person A buys from person B, person B buys from person C, and person C buys from person A. Then let the chain run with the prices going up each time around. You can vary person A, B, and C, or use different wallets (same difference). Then let the prices run up. Occasionally an external person will jump in and bid, and that’s where the money is made. Every time external money comes in, that is pure profit. When the chain runs, obviously there is no profit because the crypto is just moving from hand to hand repeatedly. And there is some slight cost for each transaction as usual. But if you do it right, you can get enough external people sucked in to make some real money.

Of course, it isn’t moral, and might not even be legal. But by most reports, it isn’t easily tracked, nor is anyone particularly interested in tracking it.

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