(Unsuccessfully) Dealing with Conflict

Nick Shackelford, whom I had the pleasure of being interviewed by in LA last October, had a super-interesting post on X on how he’s seeing the market change.  It’s worth a read.  He’s saying that, on a Macro level, advertising clients’ expectations do not match their pocket books.  I agree; there is an observable disconnect around clients - not all!  - saying “I want full slack integration, social media management, fresh content every day, full media management, 12 month forecasting, and CMO integration.  And I’d like to pay $2k.”

It got me thinking along the same lines.  I’d illustrate this with a specific example from a real client.

This client spends six figure monthly budgets, is in high growth mode, and just closed a round of funding.  Their CMO gave instructions along the lines of “any ad, anywhere, that is below 2 ROAS, cut it.”

Now, I don’t believe it’s our job to do what a client asks.

I believe it’s our job to give our best counsel on how to achieve a client’s goals, and then do what they ask.  In this specific case, any/all members of the team I’d assigned to this client’s account had years more experience than anyone on the client’s side by an order of magnitude.  So we said some version of  “I understand the relentless drive to efficiency, and I am happy implementing a rubric where we pause any ad below 2 ROAS.  But, in some cases, we might be OK with ads at a 1 ROAS or a .5 ROAS.  Upper Funnel awareness ads, for example, we might want to hold them to a different standard than ROAS, we might look at other stickiness metric like Time-On-Site, New Users %, pages viewed, whatever.”  And the client’s answer was “no, if it’s below 2 ROAS, cut it.” 

The follow up point from us was, “OK, but what if we have nothing to replace these cut ads with?” To which they responded with some version of “I don’t care, we need be ruthless, cut it.”

And here’s the conflict.  Two months later, they hire a new VP of marketing.  On the ball, tons of experience, a really good hire.  After a week on the job, the VP says “hey, uh, why are there You Tube videos running, and no DPA ads running?”

The answer is “because your boss told us in no uncertain terms to cut any ad that wasn’t “performing” even if we had nothing to replace it with.

But of course I can’t say that, saying that would be creating friction, and one rule that that client should never have a single negative thought in your presence.

And so, a week later, we were fired.  So there’s my micro example of the macro trend that Nick brought up.

Why we want employees in the office. (just a little.)

We have a one-day-a-week-in-the-office policy, and it will eventually go to two-days-a-week.

I don’t ever see it going back to five days. I think those days are over, good riddance.

Here, I’ll try to explain briefly the value we see, in asking people to come to the office.

Brook Shepard exxplaining why the value that we see, in having people in the office.

Diversity and Inclusion

I believe strongly that a workforce should accurately reflect the communities where it’s located.

This takes intentionality, and is important for many, many reasons.

A diverse workforce directly impacts clients. It gives them a more-nuanced, and varied, set of perspectives, and it makes our company a more appealing place to work.

As of today, July 1st 2022, Mason Interactive is:

• Gender Inclusive - we are 59% female

• Generationally diverse - 15% Gen X, 59% Gen Y, 16% Gen Z

• Racially Representative of the communities in which we live - 40% of employees identify as BIPOC

Additionally, 67% of Managers are female. At the senior management level, 60% are female, and 20% identify as black.

How not to raise prices while retaining staff

Client of course do not want to pay more for the same service year over year. At the same time, employees want to make more, year over year.

These are both very reasonable positions. So how do we reconcile them?

How not to raise prices, while at the same time giving employees the raises they deserve.

Would you Like Cheap SEO services?

No, No I would not.

Someone much smarter than me, Dale Leatherwood, once said about leads in the higher education space “I can get you lots of leads. I get can you cheap leads. I can get you good leads. Pick any two.”

Meaning, he can you lots of good leads, but they won’t be cheap. Or he can get you really good, cheap leads, but not a lot of them.

Same deal here. This person cold emailed me asking if I wanted “many cheap but high quality” blogs posts. He could have been talking about leads. Or handbags. Or any produced widget. And he can’t, it doesn’t exist. So no, no I would not.

ROAS First = stagnation

One of my colleagues sent me this tweet by @heyitsalexP.  We agree very strongly with the idea that “#1 way to WRECK your eCom biz {is} ROAS-first media planning.”

Said another way, focusing on today at the exclusion of tomorrow is not a formula for growth.

I could increase my ROAS at my company by firing my sales and marketing staff tomorrow.  And HR too.  And maybe my most expensive employees, managers.  We don’t charge clients for sales, HR doesn’t produce billable hours, and our managers don’t do direct client work.

Here’s what would happen: It would be a total disaster.

With no sales and marketing team, new client acquisition would slow to a crawl.

Without HR, turnover of employees would increase, and I’d have to pay recruiters to get new ones, then train them.  It would take forever.

With Senior management, the Team Leaders would get overworked, client work would suffer, and we’d lose those clients.
In a short time - 2 weeks? Three months? I’d slide backwards and our Gross Revenue would decline.

ROAS should be part of the equation, and different businesses have different financing situations that affect growth trajectories. But ROAS First = Stagnation.